Tamara Smith founded and developed The Grieving Mind in 2012 after sustaining several losses, in just five short months, back to back from December 2009 to April 2010. In the same month that her divorce was final, she lost her mother to her final battle with cancer after caring for her for three years. The winter months were spent closing a Medical Recruiting Business with her then business partner due to fraudulent activity by the franchisor from whom they purchased the franchise. Saturday morning, February 27th she awoke to a pain in her stomach like something she had never felt before. Her gut knew before she did. The night before her unmedicated bi-polar brother had an argument with their father and stole his father’s car. The police were called, as there was a gun in the glove box. This gun was always there, despite her pleading and insisting with their father to lock up his guns to keep her brother safe. With her brother’s hands on the steering wheel as indicated by the forensics report and the bullet wounds on his hands, her brother’s life violently ended with the meeting of one hundred bullets, and a wrongful death case followed. Adding this tragic trauma to her divorce, her mother’s passing, and the closing of the business, this was beyond anything she could imagine surviving.
In April, just six weeks after her brother’s death, she found her mother’s home gutted by her aunt who assumed she would be receiving her mother’s house following her death. She had to hire a lawyer and file a Cease and Desist. After searching for answers on how to cope, she attempted therapy for a short period of time with zero relief from symptoms, and minimal relief from a low dose anti-anxiety medication. There were a hundred items that needed to be handled and each very different in nature.
Tamara was in the crux of complicated grief and was experiencing intense panic attacks regarding some of the details of her brother’s death. Desperate to get back to some semblance of a normal life, she developed a series of healthy coping strategies to heal the trauma, had experienced quite a bit of relief, yet some symptoms remained. In the fall of 2015, she met a Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) Coach through which she was able to break through her limiting identity and beliefs surrounding the losses and finally reclaim her life. Ms. Smith now guides others how to do the same through an NLP process called Mental and Emotional Release ™.
The Grieving Mind was founded on the premise that no one should feel they are alone in their grieving, that we can recover from deep, profound, and even horribly tragic loss through developing healthy coping strategies that work. Our aim is to provide a multitude of services for life transition processes, whether natural death, suicide, empty-nest syndrome, job loss/transition, divorce, murder, accidental death, or a terminal illness. We meet you where you are on your journey. We make the hard calls, have the hard conversations, and walk beside you on your grief journey so you may reclaim and rediscover yourself following major life shifts. Creating a life after any type of loss can be challenging. We at The Grieving Mind ™ are here to guide you through the process so you can move forward and reclaim your own life.