Can you "fix" grief?

Turns out, the operative word is “intact.”

I built the Unshackled’s 4 A’s in one of the most high-pressure environments a human being can find themselves in. Inside custody.

That was intentional. I didn’t want a framework that worked in a therapy room or a corporate workshop. I wanted something that worked when your back was against the wall. When the options were limited. When the noise was loud and the stakes were real.

I believed I’d stress-tested it properly.

Then life showed me what stress-testing actually looks like.

In the space of a few months, I lost three men who were pivotal to who I am. One after another. From the other side of the world. Behind a fence. With no ability to be there, to hold anyone, to sit in a room full of the people who loved them too.

I didn’t set out to use the 4 A’s. I wasn’t thinking in frameworks. I was just trying to stay upright.

But when I went back and read what I’d written during those months… three pieces, three men, three losses…. I sure found it there. Not labelled. Not deliberate. Just present.

The framework had held. Not because I’d applied it. Because it had become part of how I move through the world.

Bimbo passed first…

One of those rare people it’s impossible not to like. His laughter filled spaces. His warmth pulled people in. He lived wholehearted and unapologetically himself… the kind of man who runs around a pub in Australia (and everywhere else) with his shirt off and somehow makes the whole room feel like they’ve known him their whole lives.

When the news came, I didn’t collapse into it. I went looking.

I found a podcast. A neuroscientist talking about grief, energy, the science of why we might never truly lose the people we love. I sat with the idea that his energy hadn’t gone anywhere… it had simply changed shape. Into stories. Into smiles. Into the pull we feel to keep remembering him.

That was Awareness. Naming what had happened. Feeling the disruption of it rather than running from it.

That was Agency. Choosing where to put my attention in the middle of pain.

That was Action. Writing. Processing it out loud. Turning grief into something that might reach someone else who needed it.

I didn’t know I was doing any of it. I was just trying to make sense of losing him.

Then my Da.

That one was more complicated. It always is, with fathers.

We weren’t close in the way some sons and fathers are. There were years stretched thin, visits measured in hours. A love that was always there but not always reached for.

I wrote about him simply. An ode. A poem almost. No bitterness. No pretending the gaps weren’t there.

“Love was always there for the taking. Sadly, you just didn’t take enough of it when it was on offer.”

That line took something. To write it and mean it without cruelty. To see it clearly and still choose, at the end, to remember the laughter. The bus rides. The silly debates about Oasis and the Beatles.

“I choose to remember the laughter.”

That word… choose… is the whole framework in one word. That’s Agency in its rawest form. Not pretending the pain isn’t real. Not rewriting history. Just deciding what you carry forward.

And the Accountability was quiet, but it was there too. Seeing the relationship as it actually was. Not performing grief that I didn’t feel. Not withholding grief that I did. Just honest.

Then Billy.

The greatest man I ever knew.

Thirty-seven years. The man who turned up in 1989 with a World Cup magazine and the quiet wisdom to give am eight-year-old boy something to bond over. The man who dressed in a shirt and tie to watch horse racing on the couch because you never know who might show up. The man who came to Vegas for my thirtieth birthday as if there was nowhere else on Earth, he’d rather be.

No matter what I did… success, failure, the fall, prison, rebuilding… his belief never wavered. He told anyone who’d listen. He was there for every word of Unshackled. Every idea. Every step.

And then he was gone too.

I wrote about him with everything I had. I promised to come and read it by his graveside.

That promise… that Action… was the thing that kept me intact. Not the grief. The intention inside it. The decision to carry him forward deliberately, publicly, with the same love he always gave me.

That’s Awareness… knowing what you’ve lost, fully, without minimising it.

That’s Accountability… looking at who you were to each other honestly, including the parts where you fell short.

That’s Agency… choosing how to honour someone when honouring them is the only thing left you can do.

That’s Action…. doing it. Writing the words. Making the promise. Showing up even from the other side of the world, even behind a fence.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know when I built this.

The 4 A’s don’t fix grief. They were never meant to.

What they do is keep you intact while grief does its work. They give you a structure to move inside when everything else has collapsed. Not a script. Not a solution. A spine.

I built the framework in a high-pressure environment. I thought that was the test.

It wasn’t.

The test was three men. Three losses. One after another. From 17,000 kilometres away.

And the framework held.

Not because I’m exceptional. Because the structure works — even when you’re not thinking about it. Especially when you’re not thinking about it.

That’s how you know something is real.

If you’ve lost someone, or you’re sitting with a loss you haven’t fully named yet… the 4 A’s aren’t a cure. But they might just be the thing that keeps you upright while you find your way through.

The three pieces below were written in the middle of the storm, not after it. Long before I realised the 4 A’s were already carrying me through.

If you want to understand these pieces more deeply, start there.

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Stay Unshackled, My Friends

Stephen