Lessons Learned from My Grandmothers and Clients About the Human Spirit and Resilience
- 6 days ago
- 9 min read
Written by Julie Farnsworth, Trauma-Informed Grief Coach
Julie Farnsworth has spent her life helping others to live better lives. After 30 years working as a social worker, she founded "One Free Soul Grief Journey, LLC" in honor of her sister, Erica, who lost her life to cancer at the age of 40.
Resilience is rarely taught in theory, it is lived, witnessed, and passed down through the quiet strength of those who endure and keep showing up. This deeply personal reflection traces how generational influence, professional experience, and personal healing converge to reveal the true power of the human spirit.
I am 54 years old, perhaps halfway through life if I live longer than my 102-year-old Grandmom. I have been through, and seen, some things. I would not be where I am today without strong women role models who provided me with lessons on the human spirit and resiliency. My grandmothers were amazing examples of strong women. Before I even knew what my career path in social work was, my grandmother Ruth showed me by example. I was young and loved to go with her to visit her “ladies” at the local nursing home. She was a retired social worker at the time, having previously served as the director of a local foster care and adoption agency. In her retirement, she was still serving others. The “ladies” were three women who had no visitors until my grandmother found them by asking to visit with women who had no one. Going with her on these visits, I will never forget the joy I could feel from just being there and observing. My southern grandmother knew that caring for others by cooking and sharing food can bring happiness.
Especially carved in my memory is June, who would light up when we delivered her requested tuna fish sandwich, which was her favorite. Such a simple gesture made her life in the nursing home a little brighter. I loved sitting and watching them talk while June said kind things to me. It truly planted seeds in my heart that remain to this day. I ended up volunteering through the Red Cross at a county-run nursing home from 6th through 12th grade. Today, I am back as a volunteer at the same nursing home I went to with my grandmother, and it feels amazing. I feel her spirit and presence with me there.
When I was a baby, my other grandmother, Esther, became the caregiver to her husband after he suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. Growing up and seeing her care for my grandfather, and knowing that she was by his side while he learned to walk, talk, and feed himself after being in a coma, was so inspirational to me. I don’t remember her complaining much about this. She just did it, and at the time I did not stop to think about how remarkable this was.
It wasn’t even a choice for me to dedicate my life to helping others. I just somehow knew this was what I was supposed to do. Over the last 30 years, this has been more than a career for me. As a 23-year-old starting as a caseworker for a foster care agency, I felt that this work was a calling, a way of life for me. It has shaped me into the person that I am today and is a huge part of my identity. I have been amazed at the strength of all the people that I have worked with, people who have experienced very traumatic and unimaginable things. My belief in them, in many instances, was motivation for them to want a better life for themselves. Watching the transformation of lives while providing support and guidance along the way is truly an amazing thing to witness.
Fast forward many years later. After working in the field for a while with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, I went back to school to get my master’s degree in human and social services. I continued to work in foster care and adoption, but started supervising others, providing feedback, and imparting my knowledge to them. This eventually led to becoming a home-based mental health clinician and then a therapist in a community mental health practice.
So, here I was moving through life helping so many people over the years through this work. I have heard so many tragic, heartbreaking, horrific stories, things that touched my soul, things that disgusted me, things that amazed me. I was the keeper of everyone’s grief, trauma, and loss. I am continuously humbled by the fact that so many people have entrusted me with their stories and thus their lives. I continued to see people truly change and get better when they really worked hard at it. At some point, I started to think about the fact that there was more going on for this group of clients than just my influence in their lives.
This observation led me to focus more on the connection between trauma and the impact that traumatic experiences have on the brain and body. The question I had was, “Why did some people overcome very negative, traumatic experiences, while others remained stuck?” I already knew that the source of our bodies’ experiences of suffering or happiness, or negative versus positive, starts with our brains. I have always been fascinated by the mechanics of our brains, so my inquisitive mind needed more answers. From a young age, I was constantly asking questions about everything. Maybe something in my genes, having a physics professor as a grandfather. Anyway, my questions had already led me to a degree in psychology, but I decided I needed to do a deeper dive to try to understand how our brains work a little better to answer my new question.
I enrolled in courses that taught me more and ended up becoming a certified Neuro-change, EMDR, and Mind-Body Medicine practitioner. All these experiences have taught me that our brains are literally designed to heal themselves if we have the knowledge and tools to do so.
My story starts to get more personal here. After spending all these years helping others with whatever issues they were struggling with, my mental health started to decline. I was 52 years old and dealing with my own life events. I had lost my baby sister to colon cancer at the age of 40 about six years prior, and in my typical fashion, had helped to take care of everyone else. I had never fully dealt with this loss. I had also gone through a divorce after a 25-year marriage that had many unresolved emotional consequences about four years prior, and both of my daughters were in college. I felt totally and utterly alone. My brain and body began to suffer.
The years of ignoring my own needs and my unresolved loss and grief started to catch up to me. I had heard about vicarious trauma that happens to people who have been in a helping profession for a long time but was actually experiencing it. My body and brain essentially had layers of this vicarious trauma that accumulated and had nowhere to go. I ended up having to quit my job as a therapist and was admitted to the hospital for severe depression and anxiety. My body basically just broke down, and I completely understood how the term “nervous breakdown” was coined. I wasn’t eating or sleeping. I was extremely anxious and depressed and, for the first time in my life, had to rely on help from others. I was in the hospital for a week and in an outpatient treatment program for a month.
So, how does this all get better? I had to take myself back to my knowledge of Neuro-change and the fact that the brain was designed to heal itself. Logically, I knew this but needed to actually do something about it. It was then that I decided to treat myself like one of my clients. I began by playing positive affirmations on loop and recited them over and over again every night for a few months. I kept a gratitude journal and wrote down three things that I was grateful for each day, along with things that made me smile or laugh and ways that I could have made the day better. I practiced self-care, eating healthier, getting physical exercise, taking long, relaxing showers and baths, resting when I felt the need to, and putting my needs first. I joined a pickleball class and a ballet class and made myself go until I started to truly enjoy them. Overall, I treated myself the way I would treat someone that I loved. I talked to myself with care and compassion instead of being critical and negative. This whole process went on for over a year.
After a year, I started to feel better and stronger, and it felt like a different version of myself started to emerge. I felt more comfortable in my own skin. I thought about my own needs, in addition to the needs of others, for the first time ever. I began to feel like the person that I was always meant to be.
I acknowledged all my losses and traumatic events and the fact that I needed to allow myself the opportunity to grieve them, and I let myself do it. I began to see that all this pain, loss, grief, and suffering I had endured eventually led me to claim some true gifts. The gifts of confidence, strength, resiliency, understanding, appreciation for life, nature, and people, gratitude, joy, celebration of small things, and being able to see glimmers throughout the day like a beautiful sunrise or sunset, no matter how hard the day was. I felt and embraced the beauty of slowing down by reading, writing, talking to myself kindly, and even talking to my dogs and strangers with kindness.
I got to a point where I felt healthy enough to venture back into what I have been called to do. I was recently certified as a trauma-informed grief coach and have since started my own grief coaching business. “One Free Soul Grief Journey, LLC” was born from my passion to help others who are suffering and struggling to heal, as well as a desire to honor my sister’s legacy by using “One Free Soul” in the title. My grandmother called her that as she marched to the beat of her own drum. My sister used “One Free Soul” as her jewelry business name before she passed.
I am so excited that the next part of my life’s journey will be focused on helping others find their gifts after grief and loss. Life is too short to be unhappy, every one of us has the power to change no matter what has happened to us. No, it’s not easy, and yes, it takes work. But I am here to tell everyone that all the work is so worth it.
Grief and loss are sad, complicated, messy, and complex, but our bodies were literally designed to endure pain and have healing properties. We have evolved enough now to know that we do not have to merely endure pain. We have a unique opportunity to find a different outcome if we are willing to look at all the ways that we can become truly better and stronger versions of ourselves, despite everything that we have been through. The future is looking brighter, especially with the knowledge that we have survived hard things and gotten to this point. Life can change in an instant, and nothing is certain, but this should serve as motivation to not only endure and survive hard things, but to thrive despite them.
Everything I have done has led me here to bring this message to others. I have walked alongside people who have endured unimaginable pain, grief, and loss and survived it. But not only survived it, they have gone on to do amazing things because of it. I have seen it happen and experienced it firsthand. The ones who have the knowledge, support, and tools and who truly want to live better lives are very capable of it. My goal is to support and guide my clients on their unique grief journeys as a fellow griever. I want to continue to help bring healing, support, guidance, and inspiration to as many people as I can. This is my mission, my calling, my reason for being on this earth, and a huge part of my identity, to help others live better lives. The threads of my life have all intertwined to form “One Free Soul Grief Journey.”
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Read more from Julie Farnsworth
Julie Farnsworth, Trauma-Informed Grief Coach
Julie Farnsworth is a Certified Trauma Informed Grief Coach, Neuro-Change and Mind-Body Medicine Practitioner, Social Worker, and Mental Health Therapist. Since the age of 12 as a volunteer with the Red Cross, Julie has been called to help as many people as she can. She is the founder of "One Free Soul Grief Journey," which provided 1:1 healing journeys for anyone who needs help navigating the intricacies of grief and loss. Julie brings her years of experience walking alongside fellow grievers, as well as her own personal experience with grief and loss to ignite her passion to help others to go from surviving to thriving.
