Grief is never an easy thing to deal with and for Iyanla Vanzant she reveals that the death of her daughter made her feel like a fraud.
During her appearance on the “Tamron Hall Show,” the life-coach explained, “The deceptive intelligence of the ego always wants you to think you’re not enough, not good enough, not worthy.” She continued, “And for me, who spends all of my life teaching other people, hearing other people, fixing other people- when something happens in my life, the first thing that ego says to me is, ‘You’re a fake, you’re a fraud. You can save other people, but you can’t save your child.”
However, through her grief, she explained that the loss of her other daughter, Gemmia, 20 years ago, helped her deal with her emotions. “When I lost Nisa, I knew how to do it because I had already buried Gemmia,” she said to the talk show host. “See, when I buried Gemmia, I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to be a woman burying a child. So when I lost Nisa—it’s been 115 days—I knew how to do it. That’s grace. I knew how much to do. I knew who to call. I knew not to try to do everything by myself.”
Vanzant added that all children can bring a sense of subconscious to a parent but there is a difference between mothers and daughters. “When you give birth to a daughter, she’s bringing to life those things that you hold inside that you may not even know that are there and she’s gonna show ‘em to you in how she shows up in the world,” she said. “So Nisa showed me who I was and many ways that I didn’t.”
Iyanla Vanzant reassured herself as well as everyone else that although she is grieving she is not broken. “I survived that, and I’ll survive this. There’s a saying in the Caribbean: The bigger the monkey, the bigger the stick they beat him with. So I have a big life. I have a big place in the world. I have a big assignment.”
We will continue to keep the life-coach in our thoughts and prayers.