What you need to know
Emily Kaiser continues to open up about her grief journey five months after losing her 3-year-old son Tryg in May.
The Arizona-based influencer told her followers that she recently attended a grief retreat in a video published to her Instagram and TikTok accounts on Monday, Oct. 27.
Kaiser, who attended a similar retreat “immediately” after Trigg’s tragic death, said this latest retreat taught her meditation techniques, new insights from a two-hour counseling session, and a different interpretation of the five stages of grief.
During the meditation, Kaiser explained, she was asked to “face” her grief. Once she entered a meditative state, she was instructed to go to a happy place where she imagined herself with Trigg.
Kaiser was then asked to identify her sadness by talking to it and naming it based on its color. She chose to label her grief as “tough,” adding, “I felt myself saying, ‘I don’t want you here. I don’t want you here, just like I want you gone.'” ”
Emily Kaiser/Instagram
“But through this experience, we were able to understand that we don’t want sadness to be there either. We didn’t ask for sadness to be in our lives,” she continued. The influencer explained that she has to learn to work with her grief. “Because it’s here forever and will be here for the rest of your life.”
The content creator said he has learned that “sadness equals love” and is learning how to look at emotions as a friend.
“Grief is all about the love you have for that person,” she said, adding, “Being friends can be very helpful.”
“I feel like I now understand that grief is not an enemy, but a friend. Grief reminds me of my loved ones every day.”
If sadness disappeared tomorrow, she would be sad. That’s because it means she doesn’t think about Trigg “all the time, every day,” she said.
Emily Keyser/Instagram
During the two-hour counseling session, Kaiser said she learned that it is common for parents who have lost a child to “feel guilty for a lot of the emotions” they have when they are grieving.
“After we lose a loved one, we often find it difficult to live in happy moments because we take a step back or overthink. We wonder, ‘Why am I feeling happy now? How can I feel happy now?'” As we experience happy moments, we begin to feel guilty for being happy. ”
Her counselor said she still deserved to be happy again. “Everything can coexist,” Kaiser recalled her counselor telling her, allowing her to feel happy without drowning out her sadness.
“It’s okay to just feel happy. It’s okay to not feel guilty because you’re happy, and it’s okay to not be sad because you’re happy,” she said. “It’s okay to just feel those emotions and be at peace and at peace with them.”
The final insight she got from her retreat counselor, which she wanted to share with others grieving a loved one, was that “the stages of grief are BS.”
“They are designed for the elderly and people in the final stages of life, they are not designed for the loss of a child, the loss of a parent, the loss of a sibling,” she said. “So anyone who tells you that you’re supposed to feel a certain way at a certain time in your grief journey, or that you’re skipping a stage, or anything like that, that’s literally not true. Don’t listen to them.”
Kaiser explained that her counselor told her that five stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) persist and that she would “continue in waves and emotions with grief for the rest of her life.”
She concluded by stating that the video was “full of all the misconceptions and misconceptions about grief” and said she hoped her video could help someone grieving a loved one.
Trigg died in a water accident at her family’s backyard pool in May.
Kaiser then filed a lawsuit to keep records of her son’s death from public view. Arizona’s Maricopa County Superior Court ruled in favor of the influencer on a separate motion she filed to keep her personal declaration private.
In August, the court ruled in favor of Kaiser’s motion to remove two pages from a Chandler Police Department police report that included a recommendation to charge her husband, Brady, with a fourth-degree felony count of child abuse after the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office announced there was “no likelihood of conviction” against Brady.
Brady was the only person home at the time of the drowning. Although he initially said he lost sight of Trigg for three to five minutes before finding him in the pool, a subsequent CPD report cited video evidence that Trigg was “in the backyard unsupervised for over nine minutes, approximately seven of which were in the water.”
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Kaiser returned to social media on August 28, making her first public statement since her son’s death. “I spent days, weeks and months finding those (the right words), as well as the time necessary to digest the loss of my baby,” she wrote.
In the months since her return to social media, she has opened up about her sadness, candidly admitting in a Sept. 20 post that she was “really nervous” about posting online again. She has since opened up about her personal treatment plan, thanking the help of mental health professionals.
