Speaker 1: Here's this stuff that happened, and it sucked, and I
Speaker 1: had to find some companions to sit with me inside
Speaker 1: the suckage for a long long time. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the
Speaker 1: importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.
Speaker 1: And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen
Speaker 1: or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 1: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 1: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 1: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking
Speaker 1: our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 1: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 1: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 1: how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1: Our guest on this episode is Megan Divine, a pioneer
Speaker 1: in the fields of grief support and emotional intelligence. Since
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, through her website, talks, and courses, she's
Speaker 1: been shaking up our culture's ideas around grief and love.
Speaker 1: Her book is It's Okay that You're not okay meeting
Speaker 1: grief and loss in a culture that doesn't understand. Hi, Megan,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Your book
Speaker 1: is called It's Okay that You're not okay meeting grief
Speaker 1: and loss in a culture that doesn't understand. And we're
Speaker 1: going to jump deep into that book in a moment,
Speaker 1: but we'll start like we always do, with the parable.
Speaker 1: There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says,
Speaker 1: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are always at battle. What is a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 1: and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and thinks
Speaker 1: about it for a second and looks up at her
Speaker 1: grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And
Speaker 1: the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like
Speaker 1: to start off by asking you what that parallel means
Speaker 1: to you in your life and in the work that
Speaker 1: you do. I think it's a complicated question, Binaries. I
Speaker 1: think you're tricky. Um, you know, classifying things as good
Speaker 1: and bad, and certainly light and dark can be kind
Speaker 1: of problematic, right. What I do like here is this
Speaker 1: idea that there are ways we can make our own
Speaker 1: suffering worse, and there are ways that we can make
Speaker 1: gentleness or piece of being be the more dominant voice
Speaker 1: in our heads. I like, I like thinking about that
Speaker 1: terrible in that way rather than I think sometimes it
Speaker 1: gets construed as or gets spoken of as like the
Speaker 1: light wolf the dark wolf, and there can be so
Speaker 1: much wrong with that, that idea of light versus dark.
Speaker 1: And I remember actually listening to to an earlier episode,
Speaker 1: an earlier interview that you had done, where somebody was
Speaker 1: talking about when we call a certain feeling state or
Speaker 1: a mind state bad, it can make sort of an
Speaker 1: opposite reaction where parts of ourselves that we call bad,
Speaker 1: it's sort of like we're shunning them and they have
Speaker 1: to speak louder in order to get our attention. So
Speaker 1: anytime we're talking about good, bad, light, dark, my first
Speaker 1: thing is sort of a cultural rabble rouser, is like
Speaker 1: why do we call certain things bad and certain things good,
Speaker 1: and certain things light and certain things dark. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that is certainly a theme in your book that we're
Speaker 1: going to get into. But let's start off with if
Speaker 1: you're open to it, telling us what led you into
Speaker 1: grief work. So I have been a psychotherapist for a
Speaker 1: very long time. I've been in private practice for about
Speaker 1: ten years and was tired. I was feeling burned out
Speaker 1: from sitting and listening to stories, and I was talking
Speaker 1: with my partner about needing to step back and needing
Speaker 1: to take a break and sort of feel into what
Speaker 1: might be next for me. And so we were going
Speaker 1: to rearrange our family so that he could take over
Speaker 1: financial supporter of our family and I could walk away
Speaker 1: from being of service in the in the way that
Speaker 1: I was accustomed to. But before we got a chance
Speaker 1: to do that, Matt died in an accident. And the
Speaker 1: day that he died, I quit my practice. I never
Speaker 1: saw my clients again. I heard from so many people
Speaker 1: that I was going to take his death and turn
Speaker 1: it around and make it into a gift, that I
Speaker 1: should think of all of the people that I could help,
Speaker 1: knowing what I knew in the in the wake of
Speaker 1: his death. And you know, back then that felt really offensive,
Speaker 1: as though Matt's death were a fair trade for me
Speaker 1: being able to be more helpful to others, or that
Speaker 1: I needed something this catastrophic to happen so that I
Speaker 1: could become useful in the world. So I walked away
Speaker 1: from all things therapy for a long time. And then
Speaker 1: I think it was about maybe three years after that's death,
Speaker 1: where I had a small group of other grieving people,
Speaker 1: other people who had been widowed at early ages, folks
Speaker 1: who had lost children, and listening to all of us
Speaker 1: together talk about the encounters we had out in the world,
Speaker 1: the ways that we felt misunderstood or isolated or judged
Speaker 1: inside a grief process. I knew that I could speak
Speaker 1: to it. I knew that I was good at putting
Speaker 1: voice to things that other people either wouldn't think to
Speaker 1: think about or we're uncomfortable thinking about. It's it's something
Speaker 1: that I feel like I've always been good at, or
Speaker 1: a language that I've always had some fluency in, talking
Speaker 1: about the elephants in the room, talking about the things
Speaker 1: that people try not to think about. So I came
Speaker 1: back and I started talking openly about what it's like
Speaker 1: to be in pain in this culture, what it's like
Speaker 1: to be a grieving pert some what it's like to
Speaker 1: be suffering and in pain in a culture that is
Speaker 1: sort of addicted to advice or positive thinking. You know,
Speaker 1: it turns out that there are so many people wrestling
Speaker 1: with not being heard in their pain, and in a way,
Speaker 1: I mean, I actually hate to say this, but what
Speaker 1: I went through in Matt's stuff has made me a
Speaker 1: better finistion, It's made me a better writer, it's made
Speaker 1: me a better friend, it's made me a better educator.
Speaker 1: But that's not to say that it was a fair trade. Right,
Speaker 1: And you say that the way we deal with grief
Speaker 1: and our culture is broken. You touched on it a
Speaker 1: little bit there, but let's let's jump into that. I'd
Speaker 1: like to start off by maybe just talking about how
Speaker 1: we deal with grief in our culture, how it's broken,
Speaker 1: what that maybe says about our larger culture, And then
Speaker 1: i'd like to kind of, as we wrap up, maybe
Speaker 1: give some tips to people who have grieving people in
Speaker 1: their lives. How do we all do this better? Because
Speaker 1: one of the things you say over and over is
Speaker 1: that grief is basically a no win situation for anybody.
Speaker 1: It's impossible, and so how do we do our best
Speaker 1: in in that situation when we encounter grief? So that's
Speaker 1: kind of maybe the ark i'd like to take but
Speaker 1: let's start with what's so wrong about the way we
Speaker 1: deal with grief. Grief is one of those things that
Speaker 1: we don't like to talk about, right. I like to
Speaker 1: point out to people that we haven't had a real
Speaker 1: major shift in the ways that we talk about grief
Speaker 1: or deal with grief since the early seventies. The stages
Speaker 1: of grief are something I think that most people sort
Speaker 1: of rattle off, even without having been trained in psychotherapy
Speaker 1: or any of those things. And the stages of grief,
Speaker 1: which are are maybe what people are most familiar with.
Speaker 1: We're sort of an attempt to put a net over
Speaker 1: a fog bank, right, an attempt to make order out
Speaker 1: of chaos, an attempt to make difficult and painful emotions,
Speaker 1: um get sorted and put behind you really quickly. And well,
Speaker 1: I appreciate approaches like that. That's not the way the
Speaker 1: human heart works, That's not the way that relationship work.
Speaker 1: I remember, Um, you know, Matt and I used to
Speaker 1: read obituaries just for the heck of it in the
Speaker 1: Sunday papers, and you know, we would look at you know,
Speaker 1: there's this obituary of a woman who died in her
Speaker 1: nineties and her family is writing about she always missed
Speaker 1: her infant who died, you know, seventy years ago, and
Speaker 1: part of our culture, especially our clinical culture, would look
Speaker 1: at like somebody who's still thinking about their baby who
Speaker 1: died seventy years ago, there's something wrong with them. And
Speaker 1: the way I look at that is we carry losses
Speaker 1: with us. That doesn't mean that we're pathological or that
Speaker 1: we're doing things wrong. It means that we are connected
Speaker 1: and related to each other, and we carry those relationships
Speaker 1: with us. That's just not the way the culture looks
Speaker 1: at it though, right, Like that, we have such an
Speaker 1: idea in this culture that grief and sadness are wrong.
Speaker 1: They get lumped in with the so called dark emotions, right,
Speaker 1: jealousy and anger and fear, and that anything that's not
Speaker 1: happiness is an oration. Right. We have this idea in
Speaker 1: this culture that happiness is the same as health, and
Speaker 1: that if you aren't happy, you're doing something wrong, which, again,
Speaker 1: that's just not the way that humans work. Had somebody
Speaker 1: pointed out to me the other day that we have
Speaker 1: a diagnostic category for people who are happy all the time.
Speaker 1: We call it mania. Yeah, you say that our culture
Speaker 1: sees grief as a kind of malady, a terrifying, messy
Speaker 1: emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind
Speaker 1: us as soon as possible. And then you also go
Speaker 1: on to say that some things cannot be fixed, they
Speaker 1: can only be carried. Yeah. Again, it's that that piece
Speaker 1: where grief is seen as a disease, where we think
Speaker 1: that a return to happiness is a measure of health.
Speaker 1: And think about the things that we say to somebody
Speaker 1: when we hear that they're having a hard time. We
Speaker 1: tell them to be strong, We tell them lean on
Speaker 1: your happy memories, We tell them they wouldn't want you
Speaker 1: to be sad. All of those things carry a connotation
Speaker 1: of stop feeling the way that you're feeling and get
Speaker 1: back to being your old self, to being happy, to
Speaker 1: not making other people uncomfortable with your emotions. Were so
Speaker 1: unskilled in the reality of grief and what our role is,
Speaker 1: what our job is as support people in grief, that
Speaker 1: I think in our helplessness, we we revert back to like,
Speaker 1: but cheer up, cheer up, you need to be happy
Speaker 1: and smile and um, you know, anything to remove the
Speaker 1: evidence of somebody else's discomfort or pain. And I talk
Speaker 1: a lot of about this in grief related to death.
Speaker 1: But I think we can also see this across a
Speaker 1: lot of other situations in this culture. Um, the chronic
Speaker 1: illness community is big for this one, right, Like UM,
Speaker 1: this idea that any pain or suffering or limitation you're
Speaker 1: experiencing is because you're not trying hard enough, or because
Speaker 1: you're not thinking the right thoughts, or you're not positive,
Speaker 1: or you're not um you know, any any number of
Speaker 1: things that we sort of spit out to each other
Speaker 1: with good intentions, usually trying to make the people we
Speaker 1: care about feel better or not be down. But the
Speaker 1: reality here is that the way that that lands for
Speaker 1: people is corrective. It makes people who are going through
Speaker 1: a hard time feel like they can't tell the truth
Speaker 1: about their experience. I mean, think of it this way.
Speaker 1: If every time I tell you that I'm in pain,
Speaker 1: you tell me it's not that bad. You're not fixing
Speaker 1: my pain, You're just telling me I really shouldn't talk
Speaker 1: to you about it. Yeah, I mean it is so true.
Speaker 1: And this show is a you know, for for lack
Speaker 1: of a better word, a self help show, right, and
Speaker 1: so so much of what we do talks about here's
Speaker 1: ways that you can live a better life, right. I
Speaker 1: mean a couple of things, One that sort of, this
Speaker 1: is happening to you for a reason, peace makes me crazy,
Speaker 1: you know. And its cousin is this idea that whatever
Speaker 1: is happening to you you brought on. When you listen
Speaker 1: to it in the positive sense, you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: well that all seems nice. But when you invert it,
Speaker 1: what that says about people who have terrible things happen
Speaker 1: to them. I mean, it just makes my skin crawl
Speaker 1: because it just seems so wrong. And you go on
Speaker 1: to say, I want to find this line here because
Speaker 1: part of the thing that you talk about is that
Speaker 1: our stories are all about transformation. The only story we
Speaker 1: know is something bad happens and I turned it into
Speaker 1: something great. And you say, we've got a cultural narrative
Speaker 1: that says that bad things happen in order to help
Speaker 1: you grow, and no matter how bleak it seems, the
Speaker 1: end result is always worth the struggle. But this is
Speaker 1: what happens when we only tell stories of how pain
Speaker 1: can be redeemed. Were left with no stories that tell
Speaker 1: us how to live in it. We have no stories
Speaker 1: on how to bear witness. We don't talk about pain
Speaker 1: that can't be fixed. We're not allowed to talk about it.
Speaker 1: And this implication that if we are are struggling, if
Speaker 1: we feel bad, if we if we're sad, if we're depressed,
Speaker 1: if we're in deep grief, that we've somehow failed, is
Speaker 1: really so hurtful. And I can only imagine being in
Speaker 1: a place of deep grief like that and hearing things
Speaker 1: as hurtful as that, And you talk about how hurtful
Speaker 1: it is and how it makes people that are in
Speaker 1: grief so angry, but they don't quite even understand why. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that whole thing with everything happens for a reason.
Speaker 1: You create your own reality, all of that stuff. It's cruel, right.
Speaker 1: We we sort of think on the surface like, well,
Speaker 1: that sounds good, right, And you know, I want to
Speaker 1: back up a little bit here. A lot of the
Speaker 1: tools that we use under that sort of self help umbrella.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that we should wholesale get rid of them.
Speaker 1: Some of them are amazing tools. We think about cognitive
Speaker 1: behavioral therapy, looking at your thoughts, looking at how you
Speaker 1: frame the world and how that influences the way you
Speaker 1: experience the world, and what will happen if I change
Speaker 1: my story about this thing, and maybe that changes how
Speaker 1: I experience it. Those are fantastic tools for the situations
Speaker 1: they apply to, But I think what happens is that
Speaker 1: we have this very limited set of tools around overcoming obstacles,
Speaker 1: transforming difficult things into beautiful things, um, the whole hero's journey.
Speaker 1: I think we look at those tools and decide that
Speaker 1: they apply to every facet of human life, and that
Speaker 1: is where we're wrong, and that's where we're failing ourselves,
Speaker 1: and that's where we're failing each other, and that's where
Speaker 1: we're failing the wider culture. I think we can really
Speaker 1: see this clearly. People people really hold on very tenaciously
Speaker 1: to this idea that everything happens for a reason, Like
Speaker 1: they are fierce about holding onto that stuff. So let's
Speaker 1: take it into a different sphere right now and think about, um,
Speaker 1: how cruel this is. You take someone who was on
Speaker 1: vacation in Indonesia and was killed in the most recent tsunami,
Speaker 1: right and we say, well, everything happens for a reason.
Speaker 1: What reason would that be? Well, maybe they caused it,
Speaker 1: maybe they called it on themselves, maybe they were thinking
Speaker 1: flood energy. Like wow, I mean, we say these things
Speaker 1: the people. We say these things to people, like what
Speaker 1: what were you thinking that caused this? That brought it
Speaker 1: on yourself? As though one no one else in the
Speaker 1: world has any responsibility whatsoever for anything. Right, if I
Speaker 1: crossed the street and a drunk driver plows through the
Speaker 1: intersection and kills me, it is not my thought pattern
Speaker 1: that caused somebody to make those choices. But that's how
Speaker 1: we treat each other, like what did you do to
Speaker 1: bring this on yourself? Victim blaming is so pervasive in
Speaker 1: this culture. Victim blaming has been at the top of
Speaker 1: many conversations over the last couple of years, with the
Speaker 1: me too movements and all of those things. The problem
Speaker 1: with systemic things like that is that they become the
Speaker 1: air we breathe, and we don't realize how pervasive they are.
Speaker 1: Not just in violent crime and sexual assault, it is
Speaker 1: also in the ways we talk to ourselves about our
Speaker 1: own emotions, the way that we assess and judge and
Speaker 1: analyze other people's life experience. I think we do that
Speaker 1: because the alternative, if we think in binaries, the alternative
Speaker 1: is life is chaos. Everything is random, and you have
Speaker 1: no control over anything, which is scary as hell. Oh,
Speaker 1: my gosh, of course it is. If you only have
Speaker 1: two options, one is everything is chaos and we're all
Speaker 1: doomed versus everything that happens because it's your fault. Well,
Speaker 1: of course you're going to choose the one that has
Speaker 1: just a tiny has been more agency in it, which
Speaker 1: is to believe everybody for everything. Like this is why
Speaker 1: binaries don't work for anything except data programming. Like there's
Speaker 1: there is a little ground there, which is to acknowledge that, um,
Speaker 1: not everything is in our control. That things happen even
Speaker 1: when we try really hard to make good choices, right,
Speaker 1: Like we wear our seatbelts and we eat our vegetables,
Speaker 1: and we get our health screenings, and still things happen. Right.
Speaker 1: We can do whatever we can to reduce harm and
Speaker 1: to be safe and to make sure people are safe,
Speaker 1: but we have to let go of this idea that
Speaker 1: we can actually be safe. Right, Like I like to say,
Speaker 1: you're not safe and you're not in danger either. Both
Speaker 1: things are true, right, And you know a lot of
Speaker 1: the victim blaming or just to kind of point this
Speaker 1: a slightly different way, it's the same thing we're saying
Speaker 1: is exactly that. It's like if we could just figure
Speaker 1: out what caused this, then we can do something. You know,
Speaker 1: I think Mark Nepo wrote the forward to your book,
Speaker 1: and you know, he has a phrase. I don't even
Speaker 1: if I know I'm going to get it right, but
Speaker 1: I think he calls it the terrible knowledge. It's in
Speaker 1: a poem is the terrible knowledge is that everything could
Speaker 1: be wiped away like that, And that is really scary.
Speaker 1: It's terrified. You say that even if we stretch to
Speaker 1: allow that things that happen are beyond our control, we
Speaker 1: insist that how we respond is in our control. We
Speaker 1: believe that sadness, anger, and grief are all dark emotions,
Speaker 1: the product of an undeveloped and certainly less skilled mind.
Speaker 1: And boy do I wrestle with this one as someone
Speaker 1: who's dealt with depression, as someone who's had friends who
Speaker 1: deal with addiction, deal with depression, tried to commit suicide,
Speaker 1: friends who are dead. This idea that like, even when
Speaker 1: it comes to our own mental state and mental health,
Speaker 1: the idea that even there we may not have the
Speaker 1: level of control that we like, is very hard. And
Speaker 1: I think the answer that you point to is always
Speaker 1: and it's my favorite of the Buddhist teachings is the
Speaker 1: middle way, you know. No, we don't have complete control,
Speaker 1: nor do we have no control over what happens with
Speaker 1: us in our head. We may have no control over
Speaker 1: what happens in the outside world to a large extent,
Speaker 1: but within our own frame of reference, we do have
Speaker 1: some control, or maybe controls not the right word. There
Speaker 1: are some things that we can do that lesson our suffering.
Speaker 1: We may not be able to make it all go away,
Speaker 1: we may not be able to fully overcome past trauma
Speaker 1: or deep depression problems, but there's there's always something that
Speaker 1: we can do that helps. That's my belief, you know,
Speaker 1: And so staying away from those extremes. But boy, that
Speaker 1: belief that like you could listen to every episode of
Speaker 1: the one you feed, put every principle that every author
Speaker 1: has ever put into place and still be sad, Well,
Speaker 1: damn it. I don't like it, but it's true. It
Speaker 1: is true. And I think this comes down to um
Speaker 1: the ground we stand on. How do we define our
Speaker 1: terms right? If we think that grief is a problem
Speaker 1: to be solved, then all of our tools are going
Speaker 1: to miss. If we think that sadness is a problem
Speaker 1: that needs a solution, all of our tools are going
Speaker 1: to be in this right. There's a section in the
Speaker 1: book where I talk about epidemics of unspoken grief, and
Speaker 1: I love this part where we can sort of zoom
Speaker 1: the lens out that says, given that for you know,
Speaker 1: the last couple years, if we only want to reach
Speaker 1: back that far, the way that we have dealt with
Speaker 1: grief or pain or sadness is to say it's no
Speaker 1: big deal, suck it up, stiff up her lip, focus
Speaker 1: on the positive. Right. Basically, we've ignored it and said
Speaker 1: it's not that bad, put a smile on your face
Speaker 1: and carry on. Well, just speaking as a scientist, that
Speaker 1: approach is not effective. Telling people to suck it up,
Speaker 1: move on, put it behind you, pretend you're happy, has
Speaker 1: created epidemics of addiction and depression and suicidality. I would
Speaker 1: even argue that it has created interpersonal violence, right, because
Speaker 1: if you can't say I'm in pain and have that
Speaker 1: pain heard and honored and validated and acknowledged, it's not
Speaker 1: going to go away. It is going to find some
Speaker 1: other way to speak. And this is why when you
Speaker 1: say wrestling with depression, there's a reason why you can't
Speaker 1: cheer up your depressed friend. There's a reason why you
Speaker 1: can't cheer lead a person who is having suicidal thoughts.
Speaker 1: You can't cheer lead them into being excited to be alive. Right,
Speaker 1: we're trying to solve the problem when somebody is depressed,
Speaker 1: when somebody is sad or struggling with something big, our
Speaker 1: impulse is to fix it. That's not working. A more
Speaker 1: effective approach is to acknowledge that they're in pain, to
Speaker 1: respond with listening and with curiosity. That sounds like a
Speaker 1: really rough place to be. Do you want to tell
Speaker 1: me about it? Right? It seems counterintuitive because, as we
Speaker 1: said a minute ago, like all of our narratives, all
Speaker 1: of our entertainments, all of our movie scripts, and our books,
Speaker 1: they're all about here as our heroine, and she was
Speaker 1: in this really dark place. But then she did this
Speaker 1: one task and then the sun came back out and
Speaker 1: there were rainbows and puppy dogs and doves all around,
Speaker 1: and everything was great. And they sort of look back
Speaker 1: over their hardship with a wistful eye and and say
Speaker 1: everything happened for a reason, and now I'm where I'm
Speaker 1: supposed to be. Like that is garbage, and it does
Speaker 1: damage right, Maybe a much better, a much better cultural
Speaker 1: mythology or narrative that we could use is like, here's
Speaker 1: this stuff that happened, and it sucked, and I had
Speaker 1: to find some companions to sit with me inside the
Speaker 1: suckage for a long long time, and I had to
Speaker 1: find ways to breathe there and to exist there and
Speaker 1: not let it consume me, but not pretend it didn't exist. Right.
Speaker 1: So I think when we when we shift our ground,
Speaker 1: when I think when we shift the place we're standing,
Speaker 1: and instead of looking at grief or sadness as a
Speaker 1: problem to be solved, we look at that as this
Speaker 1: is an experience to be tended. And if we think
Speaker 1: of tended rather than fixed, then we can go back
Speaker 1: and borrow from so many of our amazing tools. What
Speaker 1: do you use these tools in service of what do
Speaker 1: you use like to go back to sort of the
Speaker 1: premise of the show here, right, like which actions and
Speaker 1: thoughts and behaviors make things better and which ones make
Speaker 1: things worse. That's the difference between pain and suffering, right,
Speaker 1: which we talk about often on the show, is that
Speaker 1: pain and suffering. And I think that you do a
Speaker 1: nice job in the book of sort of tying that
Speaker 1: piece together. You actually have a phrase called wellness verse worseness, right,
Speaker 1: and it's a way of looking at these thoughts that
Speaker 1: um So, if grief is a problem that can't be solved,
Speaker 1: if the pain is to be carried and tended, but
Speaker 1: there are some things that help you to carry intend
Speaker 1: that better that don't make things worse. There are things
Speaker 1: that make life worse a lot of times. A lot
Speaker 1: of the tools I've learned and the things I've done
Speaker 1: if just stopped me from making things worse, you know,
Speaker 1: Like I'm not sure this is gonna fix anything, but
Speaker 1: I'm a lot better at not making things worse, you know.
Speaker 1: And and so you know, these activities that you talk
Speaker 1: about that people who are grieving can do, they're not
Speaker 1: to cure the pain. They're just not to make it worse.
Speaker 1: They lead in a direction of wellness, and they lead
Speaker 1: in a direction if you want to use the word
Speaker 1: of healing, they lead in that direction. They can also
Speaker 1: help whatever you are being asked to survive. Feel a
Speaker 1: little bit more gentle on you. Right. There are things
Speaker 1: that we need to endure and live through that we
Speaker 1: can't escape. Right. You have to see your seven year
Speaker 1: old through chemo for their leukemia. Um, I mean you
Speaker 1: could skip that, but I don't know that that's really
Speaker 1: an option. How can we make something that is that
Speaker 1: deeply challenging more gentle on you? How how can we
Speaker 1: structure things so that there are soft places for you
Speaker 1: to land? How can we help educate friends and family
Speaker 1: to know how to be more awkwardly effective in showing
Speaker 1: their love and support for you? Like, how can we
Speaker 1: make this whole process seal companions instead of feeling worse
Speaker 1: and feeling worse like in my in my understanding of this, like,
Speaker 1: suffering inside of grief is not that it hurts, because
Speaker 1: of course it does. Suffering inside of grief is like
Speaker 1: feeling abandoned, feeling misunderstood. Um, a lot of anxiety, flashbacks,
Speaker 1: not being able to sleep, all of that somewhat arbitrary
Speaker 1: stuff that happens is what increases suffering inside of grief.
Speaker 1: You have a phrase that when we look at these things,
Speaker 1: you say, the broad answer is simple, pain gets supported,
Speaker 1: suffering gets adjusted. So the pain, the grief, the loss
Speaker 1: that gets supported, the suffering that maybe creeping up around it,
Speaker 1: that can be adjusted. That's also where we have some power.
Speaker 1: We were talking about earlier about the loss of feeling
Speaker 1: of agency and the loss of control when we really
Speaker 1: have to live in experience. That clearly illustrates how not
Speaker 1: in control we are. So any places where you can
Speaker 1: sort of assert some agency, those are places you can
Speaker 1: reduce suffering. That can sort of sound like psychological gobbledy books.
Speaker 1: So let me be a little bit more clear here. Um,
Speaker 1: that wellness worseness exercise that you're talking about in the
Speaker 1: book is um sort of mapping out for yourself what
Speaker 1: things make me feel worse and what things either make
Speaker 1: me feel better or make things suck a little bit
Speaker 1: less sometimes, I think, especially early in the early time
Speaker 1: of grief, Like, um, you can't look for things to
Speaker 1: feel good, but maybe things can suck less, right, Like
Speaker 1: going for a walk today sucked less than staying home
Speaker 1: did awesome. Right. So wellness worseness is like, Um, I
Speaker 1: noticed that when I have sugar and caffeine for breakfast,
Speaker 1: my anxiety is a lot harder in the afternoon. Okay,
Speaker 1: So that's one place that you could look at reducing
Speaker 1: your suffering. If I know that sugar and caffeine in
Speaker 1: the morning tends to make anxiety worse in the afternoon,
Speaker 1: I can look at exerting some power and control over
Speaker 1: what I put in my body. Can't change the fact
Speaker 1: that this is a stressful situation that I'm in pain.
Speaker 1: But there are definitely actions that I can take that
Speaker 1: make things less bad. Right. But the only way that
Speaker 1: you know which actions to take is by paying attention
Speaker 1: to the cause and effective things, which is why I
Speaker 1: like exercises like the Wellness worseness things. So that's literally
Speaker 1: like mapping things out. These are the things that tend
Speaker 1: to um give me a little bit more pieces being,
Speaker 1: These are the things that tend to um create a
Speaker 1: calmer mind. These are the things that I've done that
Speaker 1: resulted in a more RESTful sleep. Right. And then on
Speaker 1: the other side of the page you're looking at, I
Speaker 1: did this three times this weekend, every single day. Um,
Speaker 1: My emotions just got way out of control and I
Speaker 1: felt flooded by them. Right. So it's an individual process
Speaker 1: for everybody, but really paying attention to what actions external
Speaker 1: or internal in the way that you're thinking make things
Speaker 1: feel a little bit more gentle on you, and which
Speaker 1: things make the worse MM to ask you a question
Speaker 1: to go back to this idea of this narrative that
Speaker 1: I went through this terrible thing, and thus it's going
Speaker 1: to get better and it's going to be redeemed, particularly
Speaker 1: somebody is in the middle of a grief like that
Speaker 1: some sort of trade like, oh, I have to go
Speaker 1: through this, So I get that, and that's really awful,
Speaker 1: you know. And you also talk about hierarchies of of grief,
Speaker 1: and but I think back to what for me was
Speaker 1: probably possibly the hardest moment of my adult life was
Speaker 1: when my wife said that she was leaving for another
Speaker 1: man and my son was two and a half, and
Speaker 1: my world completely crumbled. You know. I was like, I
Speaker 1: don't live with my son anymore and all that. What
Speaker 1: I do remember from that time, though, was that hearing
Speaker 1: that it would get better was helpful. In some ways.
Speaker 1: There were moments where I needed that I needed to
Speaker 1: hear it won't always be like this. Not a minimizing
Speaker 1: of what was happening, but hearing that it would be,
Speaker 1: that it could be different was really important. That is,
Speaker 1: it's such a perfect example for how impossible grief is. Right,
Speaker 1: So a number of things to pick apart from that one.
Speaker 1: Thank you for sharing that story with me. You mentioned
Speaker 1: for a second ago about the hierarchy of grief, and
Speaker 1: I think this is a good time to sort of
Speaker 1: just bring that in for a minute. That because we
Speaker 1: don't talk about grief in this culture, we tend to
Speaker 1: treat compassion as a scarce resource. Which is why, you know,
Speaker 1: if we're talking to a bunch of parents whose children
Speaker 1: have died, and you have somebody to come in and says, um,
Speaker 1: I know exactly how you're feeling. I got divorced. That
Speaker 1: can feel um. That can really enrage people. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: we start coming in and comparing grief, and I think
Speaker 1: one of the challenges here is that because we are
Speaker 1: so intolerant of grief of all kinds, right, we act
Speaker 1: like compassion is a scarce resource, which means we feel
Speaker 1: like we need to compete for the small amount of
Speaker 1: compassion that is around. Whereas if we treat everybody's story
Speaker 1: of pain and hardship with love and respect. Basically, if
Speaker 1: we treat compassion as an abundant resource, which it is,
Speaker 1: if we treat it as though it is abundant, we
Speaker 1: don't have to battle for it. Right If I know
Speaker 1: that me honoring your experience and your loss does not
Speaker 1: mean that there is less to go around for me
Speaker 1: than I can be free with my love and hearing
Speaker 1: of what you've said and know that you're not saying
Speaker 1: that it's the same thing. So I feel like we
Speaker 1: can't talk about different kinds of grief without even just
Speaker 1: like bringing that in for a minute. Let's treat compassion
Speaker 1: like the abundant resource that it is, and the other
Speaker 1: thing here is so the other piece here about giving
Speaker 1: people hope, and hope is a tricky word for me.
Speaker 1: I think that we prescribe hope for others as a
Speaker 1: sort of sneaky, subtle way to make them stop being
Speaker 1: so sad because it makes us uncomfortable. Right. We feel
Speaker 1: helpless and sometimes incompetent in the face of somebody else's
Speaker 1: pain because we haven't been taught how to show up
Speaker 1: in in better and more helpful ways. So we spout
Speaker 1: out things like it's going to get better, which, as
Speaker 1: you mentioned, in some ways can be dismissive. Right. I
Speaker 1: had a client once years ago who was paralyzed in
Speaker 1: an accident, and he was still in the ICU and
Speaker 1: people were telling him what a great athlete he was
Speaker 1: going to be in the Paralympics, Right, I mean, no, wrong,
Speaker 1: timing wrong, timing right. I think I think we have
Speaker 1: to meet somebody where they are right. And I think
Speaker 1: this also sort of also goes back to UM, this
Speaker 1: idea that we need to check in with each other.
Speaker 1: One of my friends, educator and author Kate Kenfield, has
Speaker 1: this great question M when somebody is saying something that's
Speaker 1: painful to them, she comes her question. Her first question is, UM,
Speaker 1: that sounds hard. Do you want empathy or some or
Speaker 1: a solution? Do you want a problem solve right now?
Speaker 1: I loved that line. I thought that was so great
Speaker 1: because even outside of the realm of like deep grief,
Speaker 1: I just you just run into that day to day
Speaker 1: like a conversation. I'm like, I run into it with
Speaker 1: people that I'm close to him, Like I know that
Speaker 1: on one hand, I should just listen and do that,
Speaker 1: And so sometimes they do that, and then what I
Speaker 1: find out is what they wanted was me to help
Speaker 1: them fix it. And then I rush in with something
Speaker 1: to fix and I learned that, oh nope, that wasn't so. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think asking is so is so important, so important, right,
Speaker 1: Consent in all things. Unsolicited advice is discourage of our times. Yes,
Speaker 1: So checking in checking in helps the person you're speaking
Speaker 1: with and trying to be supportive of, and it also
Speaker 1: helps you so that you can actually deliver those quote
Speaker 1: unquote good intentions that you have to be of love
Speaker 1: and service. But if we don't check out what the
Speaker 1: other person needs, we're just guessing. And because we are
Speaker 1: part of a culture that is grief a verse, it's
Speaker 1: a pretty good guess, or it's a pretty good bet
Speaker 1: that the guess you're making is going to be wrong, right,
Speaker 1: because you're guessing within a system that is grief a verse.
Speaker 1: So asking what do you need in this moment is
Speaker 1: is a super good practice to get into. So going
Speaker 1: back to hope, though, I mean, it's tricky. Some people
Speaker 1: do need to feel like it will not always be
Speaker 1: like this some people, And there's no I haven't done
Speaker 1: a scientific data collection on this yet. A lot of
Speaker 1: my audience and students and writers are you know, experiencing
Speaker 1: what I would call out of order death or UM.
Speaker 1: You know, the statistical anomalies baby death accidents, UM illnesses
Speaker 1: that happen at a at an unexpected time of life,
Speaker 1: UM suicides and violent crimes and natural disasters. So this
Speaker 1: satistical anomalies for a lot of those folks um when
Speaker 1: their person just literally disappeared because of the accident or
Speaker 1: the incident, this idea that they won't always feel so
Speaker 1: bad can be sort of offensive and scary, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: I can probably say this in a better way using
Speaker 1: my own experience. When Matt first died, people would tell
Speaker 1: me You're not always going to feel this bad, and
Speaker 1: for me, I was like, that sounds terrible. My partner
Speaker 1: just drowned in front of me on an ordinary, beautiful,
Speaker 1: fine summer day, and you're saying that eventually this won't
Speaker 1: bug me. How weird is that? Right? So, one of
Speaker 1: the things you said in the beginning of our time
Speaker 1: talking together was that grief is an impossibility, and this
Speaker 1: is a really good example of how impossible this is.
Speaker 1: So some people need to hear this is going to
Speaker 1: be okay, and other people need to not hear that
Speaker 1: right now. They need to not hear about some imagined
Speaker 1: future when this is going to feel better, because maybe
Speaker 1: that feels even worse. Again, we go back to let's
Speaker 1: check in with our person. What would feel useful right now?
Speaker 1: Do you wanna do you want to hear stories of
Speaker 1: how this is this is going to be okay, and
Speaker 1: I won't always feel this way and maybe you can
Speaker 1: lean into that vision of hope for yourself. Or do
Speaker 1: we need to just sit right here in the mess
Speaker 1: of it and and find a way to make a
Speaker 1: really cozy blanket pork around this? What would feel helpful
Speaker 1: right now? Right? Nothing feels worse than having someone try
Speaker 1: and talk you out of the emotion that you feel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna work. Right, it's not gonna work. A,
Speaker 1: it's not decent, but B it's not gonna work because
Speaker 1: immediately the defense has come up, like, well, of course
Speaker 1: I have a reason to feel this way, Like you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I've learned that the hard way, um with myself,
Speaker 1: am with with other people around me. When I when
Speaker 1: I'm like, well, you know, it's blah blah blah, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, the defense is right there, absolutely realized,
Speaker 1: all right, well now we're not communicating. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: there's a line I can't remember if it's in the
Speaker 1: book or if it's in one of the animations that
Speaker 1: I have outs. You can't heal someone's pain by trying
Speaker 1: to take it away from them, right, You can't heal
Speaker 1: someone's pain by trying to take it away from them.
Speaker 1: And you're right, we no, whether we know it consciously
Speaker 1: or not. I think we know on a deep level
Speaker 1: that our emotional experience is valid and it's ours, and
Speaker 1: when somebody tries to take that away from us by
Speaker 1: cheering us up, we will hold it more tightly. A
Speaker 1: lot of this, a lot of the ways that I
Speaker 1: think about grief and hardship and pain, um, some of
Speaker 1: them are borrowed from motivational interviewing, which comes from substance
Speaker 1: fiction work. And there's this this um premise in motivational
Speaker 1: interviewing that you can't make somebody do something that they're
Speaker 1: not ready to do. Right, You can't tell somebody that
Speaker 1: they have a problem if they don't identify it as
Speaker 1: a problem, because every time you start talking to them
Speaker 1: about solutions to their problem, they're going to dismiss you
Speaker 1: because they don't see themselves as having a problem. So
Speaker 1: we can borrow that framework and bring it into any
Speaker 1: kind of human pain or suffering. Right, you identify a
Speaker 1: problem for somebody else that they don't own on their own,
Speaker 1: your interventions are not going to be effective. And I
Speaker 1: think also especially in grief, like let's look at the
Speaker 1: hubris involved there. You shouldn't be so sad about that. Um,
Speaker 1: excuse me. You know you you look to somebody whom
Speaker 1: their brother just died, and other people are saying you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be so sad. He wouldn't want to be sad.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be that sad, says the person with a
Speaker 1: completely alive and intact family. Right. The phrase that keeps
Speaker 1: coming to my brain. I have addictions counseling on my
Speaker 1: mind right now, but not taking somebody else inventory for them?
Speaker 1: Do you know that phrase? Oh? I know it. We
Speaker 1: know that phrase. But it's that too right, Let's not
Speaker 1: take each other's emotional inventory either. One of my handy
Speaker 1: tip sheets for grieving people and for support people, there's
Speaker 1: one in there that says something like, um, you might
Speaker 1: have an idea of how you would live this differently
Speaker 1: should this accident or incident have happened to you. We
Speaker 1: hope you never have a chance to find out how
Speaker 1: wrong you are. Yeah, that's that's a great one. So
Speaker 1: we are rapidly running out of time, and I think
Speaker 1: we're gonna need to push our discussion of what are
Speaker 1: some of the things you should do with a grieving
Speaker 1: person to our post show conversation, which listeners you can
Speaker 1: get by going to one you feed dot net slash
Speaker 1: support and becoming a sustaining member. But I also want
Speaker 1: to make sure that that information which is so important
Speaker 1: is available to everyone. So I will have links in
Speaker 1: the show notes to several of your free resources about
Speaker 1: ways to talk to and to work with someone who's grieving,
Speaker 1: because I think it's it's really important and I want
Speaker 1: to make sure it's out there for everyone. I think
Speaker 1: the last thing that um, I'll just say real quick,
Speaker 1: and I think maybe this is a great way to
Speaker 1: end it. And you can, you can put a word
Speaker 1: or two on top of it. But you say, if
Speaker 1: we boiled down everything in this book about how to
Speaker 1: survive intense grief, it would come down to this show
Speaker 1: yourself kindness. Yeah, I mean that's that's something that's always
Speaker 1: in our power. That is something that doesn't rely on
Speaker 1: whether what you're feeling is right or wrong, or whether
Speaker 1: you caused it or didn't cause it. Showing yourself kindness
Speaker 1: is always an option. It might be the only option
Speaker 1: that never changes. I agree that doesn't only apply to grief.
Speaker 1: I'm more and more and more become convinced of how
Speaker 1: important the way we interact with ourselves really is, you know,
Speaker 1: if we take it to making change in general. We
Speaker 1: have this idea that being really hard on ourselves is
Speaker 1: the way that it will work, and by and large
Speaker 1: it just does. And you know, particularly when you are suffering,
Speaker 1: kindness is so important to yourself. I think you can
Speaker 1: be fierce with yourself on certain things that needs to
Speaker 1: change improve, and you can be fierce and kind. That's
Speaker 1: a great way to put it. I love that word fierce,
Speaker 1: by the way. Um but yes, all right, well, Megan,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for taking the time to come on.
Speaker 1: I think your work is really important, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: I really encourage listeners that this is a resource if
Speaker 1: it doesn't make sense in your life now, but if
Speaker 1: you fall into grief or someone you love falls into grief,
Speaker 1: I you know, I'm hoping that this points you towards
Speaker 1: a really useful resource. Remember too, that the time to
Speaker 1: get better at skills for paying attention to your own
Speaker 1: emotional life and to others is before there's an emergency.
Speaker 1: So even if doesn't apply to you now, this is
Speaker 1: a fantastic time to practice. Yep, exactly, all right, Thank
Speaker 1: you so much, Megan, thanks for having me. All right,
Speaker 1: take care bye. If what you just heard was helpful
Speaker 1: to you, please consider making a donation to the One
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