Hi, my name is Pete Gazzaro, and I want to welcome you today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader

Podcast. The last two weeks we've talked about limits, God's grace in disguise, and today I want to

open up a closely related theme, but very biblical and very large and really needs its own space.

And I'm calling it why great

leaders are great grievers. And today, I suspect, will be a part one of a part two because there

is so much to this. So let me just give you a bit of my story on this issue of grieving and

loss. I didn't for most of my life. I grew up an Italian-American family,

and like in many families, men in particular, we were socialized not to feel, especially

vulnerable feelings like sadness and fear and pain.

So I, you know, I just naturally didn't go down a direction.

And then my family, like perhaps some of yours, had a lot of pain in it and actually some abuse.

And so as a defense mechanism, I shut down even further for simple survival. So I just didn't do feelings of sadness and grief. And then I came to Christ at the age of 19 and no one ever talked about grieving. And so I focused on verses like all things worked together for good, of those who love God, like something

bad would happen. And I'd say, hey, rejoicing the Lord, rejoice in the Lord, always, you know,

Philippians 4-4. And then in leadership, you know, with your help, Lord, I can scale a wall.

And I actually prided myself on the fact that I rarely got depressed, rarely. I mean,

if you had asked me up to the age of 37, uh, do you struggle

with depression? I would probably say something like, not only I'll not struggle with. I don't,

I don't really get depressed. I never up to that point struggled with forgiveness, uh, because I just

wasn't aware of my feelings very much. And, get hurt by things and I just like brush it off.

I was fine and I just thought it was a bad testimony to have those kinds of sad feelings.

I was like a lack of faith. You're a bad Christian. But God over time was using a baseball bat to get my attention.

And it was really by the age of 36, 37, where everything fell apart to a level where I

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