BW 143: Widowed & Stuck? The Surprising Truth About Moving Forward | Dr. Kimberly Hubenette

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Kimberly Hubenette—widow, author, and CEO of her dental practice in Sonoma, California. 

She shares her personal journey of navigating grief while managing a business, the strategies she used to move forward, and how she now helps professionals who feel stuck after loss.

🔥 Topics We Discuss: 

•  The emotional weight of grief as a business owner
•  How to find purpose and take action when everything feels stuck
•  Practical steps to rebuild confidence and routine
•  The power of accountability, affirmations, and community support
•  Adventure, survival, and honoring a late spouse’s legacy

Resources & Support for Widows:

Facebook and IG: authordr.kimberlyhubenette 

YouTube: @livelovesurviveTHRIVE 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberly-hubenette-dds-magd-2800a624?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base_contact_details%3BGirxnqGCQuiQk%2FpctP0lGQ%3D%3D
Link For Free Gift Or Offer (If Any): Love How You Look In The Mirror With A Free Virtual Call Livelovesurvivethrive.com (will forward to drkimberlyhubenette.com)
Free Gift/Offer Description (If Any): my book GRID as an audible/physical book/ 30 minute consultation email me at [email protected]
🔹 Join the Brave Widow Membership: Get coaching, workshops, and a community of support → https://bravewidow.com
🔹 Download the Brave Widow Starter Kit: A free guide to help you navigate the first steps of widowhood. → https://bravewidow.com/start

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Chapters:

00:05 Upcoming Grief to Growth Challenge

00:18 Why You Feel Stuck in Grief

00:51 Register for the Challenge

01:01 Introducing Dr. Kimberly Hubenette

01:10 Helping Professionals Move Forward

01:23 Support for Business Owners

01:39 Living Without Forgetting

01:59 Connect with Dr. Kimberly

02:11 Free Gifts and Resources

02:37 Conversation with Dr. Kimberly

✨ If this episode resonated with you, please like, share, and leave a comment. Your story matters. Let’s support one another on this journey.

#BraveWidow #GriefJourney #WidowSupport #LifeAfterLoss #Healing #Motherhood #Resilience

[00:00:00] Emily: Hey, hey, and welcome to episode number 143 of the Brave Widow Show.

Upcoming Grief to Growth Challenge
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[00:00:05] Emily: I have my three day free challenge that's coming up. It's the grief to growth challenge where I'm gonna teach you why you feel stuck in grief and what to actually do about it.

Why You Feel Stuck in Grief
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[00:00:18] Emily: This is like the number one question and the number one challenge widows come to me with is I've tried therapy, I've tried grief groups, I've tried the books, the courses, all of the things.

Why do I still feel stuck? Or I thought I was so much further along than I actually think that I am. Well, in this three day challenge, I'm gonna teach you some of the myths about grief, about why it is that we feel stuck and what to actually do about it.

Register for the Challenge
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[00:00:51] Emily: So to register for this challenge, go to brave widow.com/challenge and I'll be sure to put that in the show notes as well.

I would love to see you there all right.

Introducing Dr. Kimberly Hubenette
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[00:01:01] Emily: Let me introduce Dr. Kimberly, Dr. Kimberly Hubenette, widow, author, and CEO of her dental office in Sonoma, California.

Helping Professionals Move Forward
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[00:01:10] Emily: She helps professional men and women who can't seem to get up in the morning and move on with their lives after the death of their spouse. It may be a week, a month, or even one year after death.

Support for Business Owners
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[00:01:23] Emily: She helps business owners that have employees depending on them for work and who need a paycheck regardless of their circumstances. As harsh as it may seem, people have a choice to live or die, and she helps those that cannot afford to stop living because someone is depending on them.

Living Without Forgetting
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[00:01:39] Emily: She helps her clients move forward with their lives without forgetting about their loved one.

To help those who are struggling with guilt to live a li full happy life, worrying about what their friends and family may think. If they do, she helps people that feel in limbo, half alive, half dead.

Connect with Dr. Kimberly
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[00:01:59] Emily: You can find Dr. Kimberly on Instagram and Facebook at author Dr. Kimberly, also on YouTube at Live. Love, survive, thrive LinkedIn.

Free Gifts and Resources
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[00:02:11] Emily: And she also has a free gift for you. So she offers a love how you look in the mirror with a free virtual call at live love survive thrive.com. And then she also has her book as an audible. Version a 30 minute consult with her and all kinds of good things. So I will have the links to all of her ways that you can reach her in the show notes.

Conversation with Dr. Kimberly
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[00:02:37] Emily: Here is my conversation with Dr. Kimberly. Let's dive in. I. Dr. Kimberly, thank you so much for being willing to come on and to share your story today.

[00:02:48] Dr. Kimberly: Thank you so much. I'm glad that we finally connected. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:54] Emily: You are so welcome. I know our audience is always curious to know like more about you, your background, and then really we can just dive into your story wherever you'd like to start.

[00:03:07] Dr. Kimberly: Okay. I've been a dentist for over 30 years and in 2019, my husband passed away. It was a long drawn out thing. He was a chronically ill person. He had cystic fibrosis and he also had a double lung transplant. But that double lung transplant was a very good successful one. It lasted 21 years before he passed.

So in the journey of what happened to me is that we knew that was going to happen. He passed. But at that point. You never get prepared enough. Even though you know that's happening, it's gonna happen, it's inevitable. Anything and everything just spiraled all at once. I was a busy business owner.

I had so many people depending on me. My patients, my doggies, and my staff members.

[00:04:07] Emily: How did you even wrap your mind around, being a caregiver or having a spouse that went through, a pretty substantial procedure years early on in the years of your marriage? What was that like?

[00:04:23] Dr. Kimberly: Yeah, so when we got together he said, Are you afraid of scars?

And I said, No. And then he shows me his clamshell. And see, I met him after. And as a healthcare provider, I thought I knew everything about it. But he looked normal. Everything about him looked normal. He only carried this tackle box full of medications that allowed him to survive. It was probably, I would say at least 80 grand of.

medicines that kept him alive every month. Wow. And yeah, so early on we developed this how would I say a way of working that he, if he needed something and it was an emergency, He would call the front office and say this is Mark. I need to talk to Kim So I'd run out of my room right away Anything else he knew that if he texted me or anything, it would be a secondary so he knew we knew that I had I was the breadwinner at that point and I had to keep the business going.

He did have things that he was doing, but he couldn't work on a 40 hour work week. He volunteered for Sonoma Rescue and he did things, for the community that he could. On the days that he didn't have to go to his appointments or that he didn't feel good. He said that it was like breathing underwater every single day.

And that was my 20 years with him. So we did develop a way of working that he knew what was what I knew what was important to him. I would drop anything if it was at that level, he knew what he could ask of me and what he couldn't ask of me during those days. And, I actually think that he held back a lot.

And I wish now that I think about it, that he wouldn't have, because maybe I could have helped him more. And maybe I could have been there to support a little bit more, but, we did have 20 good years of our life together.

[00:06:31] Emily: 20 years feels like a lifetime. And yet somehow not enough time on the same hand.

[00:06:36] Dr. Kimberly: Yeah. And you never know until you're at that point. What happened to me was, I still went through all of the grief, that I still went through all of the stages. Like at first I was in denial. Then, of course, my dog keeps waking me up in the mornings, trying to get me to get out of bed, to do, help him, feed him, go take him out, whatever.

And,

I did have to go to my office. I was like a zombie for a while. But I found a way to get out of my stuckness in life. And now I have gone through all this. I help other people like myself that are busy business people that, just how did they do it? I've had people from Facebook reach out to me and say, how did you do that?

My friend, some of my friends too from dental school this recently. Something like this happened to them. One person can't even, hasn't even gotten out of bed for two months. And she's I don't know what I'm going to do with my business. I was like, look, we got to take it one step at a time. Because it's difficult.

We need support. We need interactions. We need to be able to know that we have purpose after our loved ones passed away.

[00:08:00] Emily: What do you tend to tell people who ask you? Like, how did you do it? Or how did you convince yourself to get out of bed when you felt like all you wanted to do was stay there?

[00:08:11] Dr. Kimberly: I had to really take into consideration my team. My team needed me. My dog needed me. I had to get myself up. So I have three things that I normally do. Sleep is very important. And when you just lost a loved one, it's hard to sleep. You just lay in bed and you're like, Oh, thinking about all these things that are happening.

What helped me was that I started writing things down before I went to sleep. I saw, okay, I need to write like what I'm planning to do tomorrow, what needs to happen. And once I cleared my mind, I could sleep a little better I'm not saying that I sleep eight hours a night. anymore, but I still, I sleep more a little better than I had in the beginning.

I, I wrote all these things down so that I cleared my mind and then in the mornings, I have a morning ritual. When I wake up in the morning, I just sit in bed and I stretch for five minutes. I open my eyes. I do my breathing exercises. They say if you hold your breath in for 30 seconds and slowly let it out, you gain better neurons and reconnect with your brain.

So I do that. What you do is you take a deep breath and you hold it in for 30 seconds and then you slowly let it out and even if you think that you've let out and released all your oxygen, you push more five more times. I do. And then after I do that, then I have this mirror that I look at and in the mirror, in front of the mirror, I had a coach tell me, why don't you write with lipstick on your mirror so that it stays for a while?

So I wrote, Kim, you are beautiful. You have purpose. And yeah I look in my mirror and I think, oh, I'm beautiful. I have purpose, Kim. I give myself an affirmation. You might, have an affirmation that you say yourself, but, I say, Kim, you have purpose to help others.

Kim, you will memorialize Mark today. And I find ways to memorialize him, and to help. The way I help people is I help think about something that, they need to create. Or, even my patients. I had a patient the other day that, Can you believe she came in the very next day after her husband passed away?

Wow. She was sitting in the reception room, she didn't tell anybody, she just sat there, waited her turn, she came into the office, into the operatory, and she sat down, and I said, hi, how are you today, and she goes, my husband just died yesterday, last night. And I'm like, what is she doing here?

She just didn't, she wanted to be surrounded by people that she knew and wanted to have a routine. And that's my third thing. You have to surround yourself with people that matter, that are your routine so that, you can have a normalcy of life, and if they're, and if someone asks you how you're doing, don't say, Oh, I'm okay.

If you're really not okay, I would say, tell them how you really feel because in this day and age, everybody's are automatically saying, Oh, I'm okay. Or, Oh, but why don't we tell them the truth? The truth might shock them that maybe we're not doing okay, but at least it's the truth. And so that's what I tell, I'm, I said, I am so glad that you told me this and I hugged her and I said, How can I help you today?

I can't even believe you're sitting here in the dental chair, what do I, I'm not gonna just start working on her. I tried to send her home, but she wouldn't go home. She wanted to be with us because we built this relationship throughout the years that she was comfortable there.

So I shared my story with her. We, we cried a little and then we talked and that was my session with her.

[00:12:30] Emily: What a beautiful way to just. Like really embrace somebody and to help them feel seen and heard in that experience. I love that So what helped motivate you to want to help coach other people that were grieving or?

to Really feel like you're taking this one step forward in your further in your purpose and how you're giving back to other people and working with them.

[00:12:58] Dr. Kimberly: Yeah you know I just wanted to find a way never to forget my husband and to memorialize him and to be able to keep him surrounding me. And for some reason, I have this gift of connection with people.

I've always had this gift of connecting and training and teaching, be it in dentistry or in relationships, or even now with, people that have lost a loved one, they reach out to me. And so I started working with two or three of my friends and I helped them through getting, what they needed to do in their business.

They're both dentists and, we got them to. keep moving forward, keep training, keep, keep themselves busy, surrounding themselves, automating. Actually, my team helped me get through those days. They pushed me into those operatories. So I said, look, we need to make sure that you have set protocols of things that you're doing at your office so that you could, get it automated so that.

Once you get it automated, then it'll be easier for yourself, and then you can work on yourself. And the things that helped me, I just started helping others, and I love it. I love dentistry, but I love helping people get through this. Especially the first year of grief. And then finding ways to help them, find new things to do and hobbies.

I've created a few hiking groups and a few retreats that we've done in the past two years now that are focusing on Checking things off your bucket list because we need a team of people to help us. We need to surround ourselves with people that either have gone through it with us, have gone through it the same, or are professionals that want to help and be a group camaraderie.

And with that, I created a way for myself to check things off my bucket list. That first two years, I decided that I was going to hike Half Dome. I got together with a group of people and we trained and we hit Half Dome. up and down. And that's one of the hardest things I've ever done. And then the next year we did John Muir trail.

I now take people like on I joined this outdoor outdoor lifestyle type of a group where we learned how to fish. We learned how to hike. We learning how to arch, do archery. Anything like extreme, like sports is neat. It gets you going. So I'm helping people find a new hobby in life too.

[00:16:19] Emily: I love that. And you're so spot on about that sense of community and connection and just having other people around you who are forward focused and who understand and then of course, all of the extreme sports and the hiking. It's a great way of even just sinking down into your body or getting out of your mind a little bit and and just having that depth that you have.

Being forced to focus on what's right in front of you. And sometimes our brains need that break. We need to be able to connect, like you said, with our breath, with our body, with the physical world around us, especially when we're caught up a lot of times in all of our ruminating thoughts and all of the, that feeling that life is pointless.

Now it's hopeless. It's never going to get better. Just developing some of those new hobbies is super helpful.

[00:17:11] Dr. Kimberly: Yeah. And then, obviously we know that we can, get on your group or, a leadership group or, social media is great to go on, but, there's. Also, other things, go out and, walk around the block if you can't hike or, go out and look at the flowers outside or look up in the air, talk to your spouse or your loved one.

I look up in the sky and I, say, Hey, good morning, Mark. How are you doing today? Or, I, there's one thing that I did.

I'm not sure if you're supposed to do or not, but I had his ashes and everywhere that I went for the whole year, I sprinkled something out like wherever we went, wherever he went, wherever I went, he was there with me. I don't know if you could do that or not, if you're supposed to, but it wasn't a lot.

I just Oh, we were here before I sprinkled something. The air, and it got me through it. And there's other ways that you can, get through things, but this is the way I did it. It might not be conventional, but it worked for me.

[00:18:24] Emily: I have heard of people do doing, something similar or maybe even their loved one had a favorite place and, things like that.

So I think you're okay, but we'll leave that to the experts.

[00:18:36] Dr. Kimberly: Yeah, I went to Disney World and my niece said, you better not do that. I'm like, Oh, okay. You're like, I'll do

[00:18:44] Emily: a sprint, a pinch, a sprinkle.

All right, so what would you say to the widow who is like in the middle of the storm and is like that person that called you and said, it's been two months. I can't get out of bed. Just feel so pointless. What was the most helpful for you or what would you say to that person?

[00:19:06] Dr. Kimberly: I said, call me. We'll work through it together in the morning.

You get up, open your eyes. Let's call me. And for two days, this person herself, Hey, she woke up at five o'clock in the morning. I said, just call me. Okay. So she called me and I said, okay, open your eyes. Now take a deep breath, stretch your, we went through our ritual. And then I said, now I had to walk her through it.

She did it, but it has, it had to take a while, sometimes it does, sometimes it takes Somebody to hold your hand and be accountable for that. And so that's what we did I'm not saying, you call me all the time But find an accountability partner to with that And make sure that you write it down and just do the things that you're gonna do every single day.

Look in that mirror. Tell yourself you're going to be okay. And I know, it's hard. It's really hard, but you gotta find purpose. I have my dog. My dog is the one that gets me through the day. She's the one that got me through first half of the year. Because if I didn't take her out to the bathroom, or I didn't feed her, she would just be peeing on the floor.

I gotta get I had to get her going. So putting a target on something else instead of yourself really helps a lot.

[00:21:00] Emily: That's great. So for people who really connected with you or resonated with your story, what's the best way for them to reach out to you and just learn more about how you help people and if that's a good fit for them?

[00:21:17] Dr. Kimberly: My email address is livelovesurvivethrive at gmail dot com and that's the best way to reach me and you can also on the website you'll, you can read about me And the website is www. livelovesurvivethrive. com and you can connect with me. I'd be more than happy to talk to you and set up a, 30 minute consult, talk to you about whatever you're going through and help you through your challenge.

And I also have my book, also, I have written, and it's about survival. It is a non fictional book, and fictional at the same time, because it's about a lady that loses her husband in the wildfire. She goes out into the wilderness. And she survives off the land. And so it's about a survival from your spouse as well as survival in the wilderness.

So that's a tribute to him too, because he was a search and rescue guy. And he taught me everything I know about. survival out in the wilderness, so I have these checklists in the back of the book about what happens, if you have a wildfire or emergency and you have a dog or a cat or a pet, what things to do for them, what things to do for you, bug out bag do you need, those kind of things.

So it's a, it's a little bit of a play on survival.

[00:23:10] Emily: Yeah, it seems like a really great tribute to him and, some of the things that he taught you and that he shared, which is really creative idea. So kudos for that. And then I will make sure that I post all the Links and all the ways that you can reach Dr.

Kim in the show notes so that if you're Listening or watching and you can't stop and write things down or remember you can always go back and find that information So Dr. Kimberly, thank you so much again for coming on the show today sharing some of your story and Really leaving encouragement and inspiration for other widows that are out there.

[00:23:53] Dr. Kimberly: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Emily. I really appreciate it and I loved having getting to share my story with you.

[00:24:01] Emily: Absolutely.

If you're newly widowed and aren't sure where to start, you need the brave new widow's starter kit inside brave new widow. You'll find a starter guide to help you through your first few months. A quick start guide. You can share with family and friends so they know how to help you. And a collection of some of the frequent topics that widows want to learn more about. To get the brave new widow series.

Just go to brave widow. Dot com slash start it's free and you'll get instant access. That's brave widow.com/start S T a R T. See you there.