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The Leftover Pieces: Suicide Loss Conversations
Suicide loss changes everything. The Leftover Pieces® Podcast explores life after suicide through honest conversations with survivors, experts, and grieving parents learning to live forward after unimaginable loss. Parents, partners, siblings, and friends share what it means to keep living when the world has been forever changed.
Hosted by Melissa Bottorff-Arey, whose 21-year-old son Alex died by suicide in 2016, the show blends intimate conversations with survivors, healers, and mental health professionals with short solo reflections you can actually use. Together we explore child loss, trauma and nervous-system care, anniversaries and seasons, stigma, faith and meaning, legacy, and the everyday practices that help make life livable again.
At its heart, this podcast is about learning to live forward after loss. We never move on from the people we love, but we can learn to carry the grief differently. This road can feel incredibly lonely—but you are not alone here.
For supporters, educators, and professionals, these conversations also offer insight into the realities of suicide grief and what genuine, non-fixing support can look like.
If you’d like to share your story or expertise, you can request to be a guest through Melissa’s website.
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Content Note
This podcast speaks candidly about grief and suicide loss and may feel activating for some listeners. We avoid graphic descriptions and discussion of suicide methods. Please care for yourself as needed. Melissa is not a doctor or licensed therapist, and nothing shared here should be considered medical or mental-health advice.
The Leftover Pieces: Suicide Loss Conversations
Your Mind Won’t Let You Move Forward: The Power of Subconscious Healing after Suicide Loss
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Today I’m joined by Emily Dziedzic, a subconscious change practitioner who helps high-achieving women break free from anxiety, fear, and emotional overwhelm using fast, root-level rewiring. And this work, with her, was a game changer in my own healing.
I first worked with Emily back in 2021 during an intensive NLP program — Neuro Linguistic Programming — along with hypnosis and unconscious mind work. It ended up being one of the most transformational pieces of my own healing when I felt completely stuck. That experience with her is a big part of what led me into the work I do today.
In this conversation, Emily and I talk about why the mind can hold us in place long after the early years of grief, and how subconscious work can gently open the next chapter. She breaks down how unconscious patterns form, why traditional “talking it through” doesn’t always create change, and what actually helps fear and overwhelm loosen their grip.
If you’re farther along in your grief and feeling like you’ve hit an internal wall you can’t quite name, this episode will meet you right there.
What We Cover
- Why we get “stuck” even years after loss
- How subconscious patterns form and how they’re rewired
- The difference between understanding your story vs. releasing it
- What unconscious mind work and hypnosis actually do (in simple language)
- How clearing fear at the root supports deeper healing
- Emily’s own turning point with anxiety and burnout
- Practical tools for calming the nervous system and building inner confidence
About Emily
Emily is trained in NLP Master Coaching & Hypnotherapy, NLP & Hypnosis Training, CranioSacral Therapy, Huna, Ho‘oponopono, Coaching the Unconscious Mind, and Integrative Hypnosis. Her work gets to the root of stuck patterns without rehashing trauma or digging for drama.
Connect with Emily
Her Website: https://www.emilydziedzic.com
And Her Instagram Here
Click to Send a Text or Voicemail to Melissa
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The Leftover Pieces is Support for Life After Suicide Loss. Click links below
🎙 Leave me a message: Share a question, your story, or your person’s name for a future episode → theleftoverpieces.com/voicemail
Support After Suicide Loss
If you are grieving after suicide loss, you do not have to carry this alone.
Visit The Leftover Pieces for podcast episodes, grief support, resources, and ways to connect with Melissa’s work: https://theleftoverpieces.com
or Join Melissa’s email list: https://theleftoverpieces.com/join
If you someone you love is in immediate crisis or may be in danger, please call or text 988 in the United States. You can also text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line