Catherine McNulty

After losing her infant son in 2011, Catherine embarked on a journey to do more than survive grief. The loss forever changed the trajectory of her life and sent her looking for meaning and purpose for the life she was given. She channeled the love for her son into her own healing, self-growth and personal empowerment. Today, she has created a framework to grief that disrupts conventional ways of looking at loss. She challenges her clients to step outside of a victim mindset and regain control of how they navigate grief. She teaches how to grow through grief and encourages speaking openly about grief to break down the walls of silence around grief. Catherine lives in San Diego with her family where she speaks, writes, and offers coaching to those who want to do more than just survive grief. She is a board member of Empty Cradle and volunteers at Miracle Babies and the Ronald McDonald House. Her business, Grief INSPIRED supports those who are grieving and guides them to create a new normal that honors the ones they’ve lost.

Articles:

A Letter to Grieving Mothers

A Letter to Grieving Mothers Why did this have to happen? It is the first question you ask. It is the question you will ask yourself day after day as you grieve the loss of your child. Welcome to the club. It is a club that none of us join freely but once you enter, you are in and cannot escape. You are a mother without a child. You grieve a hurt that knows no boundaries and tears at your heart. At times you feel it is almost impossible to breathe. I share your grief with you. This time of […]

How to Release Guilt After Loss of a Child

Mother’s Guilt is Inevitable After the loss of a child, a mother’s guilt is inevitable. There may be things she wishes she had done. There may also be things she wishes she hadn’t done. She may have made serious mistakes that carried grave consequences. She likely feels guilty. If you feel guilt, too, you know what I mean. In the weeks and months after losing her child, a mother often struggles to be patient with herself. She struggles to forgive herself. She experiences the emotional torture of never knowing if her actions could have changed anything. The uncertainty haunts her […]

Grief Tools to Support You

Grief Tools for Support As I walked down the concrete path away from the hospital that had become my reality, grief came over me like a tidal wave. I wasn’t sure I’d survive. I walked across the street to where I had stayed for 42 days and 42 nights, as tears began streaming down my face. There was no longer a reason to be in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and I was devastated. I needed some grief tools to make it through. That morning, as I left the hospital without my six-week-old son, my whole world came crashing […]

How to Be Grateful in Grief

Gratitude is a buzzword we hear all the time. We hear it so much we often dismiss it. To be honest, it’s a trend I ignored until a mentor told me that a daily gratitude practice would transform my life. Since I trusted her and I wasn’t thrilled with the life I had, I decided to give it a try. Today, a daily gratitude practice has become more than just a buzzword. After a year of trying to figure out what a gratitude practice could do for me and how it could help me grieve, it’s become a way of […]

Why Do I Feel So Guilty?

In my humble opinion, western society drastically underestimates the magnitude of grief. Losing someone you love can be one of the most traumatic events many people will face. Death and grief are challenging in so many ways. If you are here because you are lost in grief, you know what I’m talking about. In my coaching practice, I set up weekly calls with those who are grieving. Feelings of intense guilt comes up for a lot of people. What I do is help them understand the emotion of guilt, where it comes from, and why it makes living with guilt […]

This is Your Life, Your Pain, and Your Story

Hope. When I ask those who are grieving what they need most, they say “hope”. They want confidence that they can get through the process, that they won’t be miserable forever, and they will be able to be happy again, although this can be hard to imagine early in grief. After I lost my son, I went to a support group looking for hope. Losing him had shattered my world, and I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know how to live without him in my life. I needed hope more than anything else. I forced myself out of […]

Getting Pregnant Again After the Loss of a Child

This excerpt is from Catherine McNulty’s book, The Gifts of Grief. “I wanted to give up the struggle and not try again.” Trying to get pregnant again after the loss of Jackson was a difficult decision. After all, why would anyone want to submit themselves to all the pain and trauma that we had just been through? We’d have to be crazy right? I guess I was. My desire to be a mother was stronger than ever. After all, I was still a mother; I just no longer had a son to hold and care for. Because of who I […]

Own Your Grief

An excerpt from Catherine McNulty’s book, The Gifts of Grief. “Grief is not something to survive or a disease to cure. It is a universal human emotion and an opportunity to deepen self-awareness, re-evaluate what’s truly important, and take action to bring meaning into your life.” Although grief is an emotion everyone goes through, each one of us goes through it in a different way. It seems like we all think that grief is something that we can escape; until it happens to us. We’re told by the books that we read and advice that we get from others, that […]

Grief Coaches and Therapist Can Help

An excerpt from Catherine McNulty’s book, The Gifts of Grief. “You are not alone.” The intensity of the grief we experience is a result of the love and connection we have with someone else. Understanding that connection and how it relates to who we are is what matters. This is best done with a personal coach or guide. Whether a death occurred in your life recently, or you’ve been holding on to grief for a long time, I encourage you to go out and hire a Grief Coach. Finding a way to connect to someone who can help you can […]

Don’t Give in To Despair

An excerpt from Catherine McNulty’s book, The Gifts of Grief. I encourage you to be strong. Christina Rasmussen said, “Life after loss is choosing to start over when you would rather not.” I want to encourage you to stop hiding from the grief that has come to you. Hold on to my promise that gifts are coming into your life through this grieving process. Grief is not something you need to fall victim to and you don’t need to tell yourself that there is nothing you can do now. Take the time you need to grieve, but when you are […]

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