The Special Needs Mom Podcast

The Antidote for Loneliness

• Kara Ryska

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In this episode, I’m diving into the connection between grief and loneliness, picking up where we left off last week. I share a bit about my experience with Levi and how loneliness often shows up for us as special needs moms. The good news? The antidote to loneliness is connection.

I also reference Dr. Vivek Murthy's book Together (an excellent read!) and talk about how loneliness can be as damaging as smoking or obesity. In this episode, I share how we can break the cycle of loneliness by:

  • Questioning those disempowering beliefs like “No one understands me.”
  • Joining communities like my Pathway to Peace coaching program.
  • Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and build connections, even through pain.

Next week, I’ll be doing an interview episode, and I’ll dive deeper into the topic of grief itself.

Resources Mentioned:

If you found this episode helpful, I’d love for you to share it with a friend—maybe it’ll spark a conversation about breaking the cycle of isolation and loneliness.

Connect with Kara, host of The Special Needs Mom Podcast:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespecialneedsmompodcast/
Website: https://www.kararyska.com/

Join the Community:
Pathway to Peace Coaching Community is currently open for enrollment. Instantly get access to authentic community and weekly coaching! Give yourself the gift of growing alongside moms who deeply understand you and will be with you in your joys and sorrows. --------> Learn More HERE

Speaker:

Hi, I'm Kara, life coach, wife and mom to four incredible and unique children. It wasn't all that long ago that my son received a diagnosis that had my world come crashing down. I lacked the ability to see past the circumstances, which felt impossible. And the dreams I once had for my life and family felt destroyed. Fast forward past many years of surviving and not at all thriving, and you'll see a mom who trusts that she can handle anything that comes her way and has access to the power and confidence that once felt so lacking. I created the special needs mom podcast to create connection and community with moms who find themselves feeling trapped and with no one who really understands. My intention is to spark the flair of possibility. In your own life and rekindle your ability to dream. This isn't a podcast about your special needs child. This is a podcast about you. If you are a mom who feels anxious, alone, or stuck, then you are in the right place. Welcome.

Hello, and welcome to the Special Needs Mom Podcast. I'm laughing a little bit at myself right now because I got myself all ready to record this episode and then I pressed record and then I realized I had no microphone. I forgot to put my microphone in place. I thought that was pretty funny. Okay. So like many episodes, I'm going to start this episode off with a little personal check in. It's going to be quite short. And what I'll share is that Levi has been home this week because of something that happened at school. It's another instance where I will withhold the details since they are Levi's story to share. But I couldn't help but thinking about the irony that I am in the midst of creating this episode and here is my life unfolding before me. This particular situation has all of the ingredients to Bake up to be quite the lonely pie, or maybe said in a little less goofy way has all the potential of leaving me feeling quite lonely. So thankfully we have the conversation that we have today. This episode is at the time of this recording called the antidote to loneliness. Again, sometimes I change the title in the final release, but. I kind of like it for now, so we'll see if we keep it. And so I'm thankful, I'm thankful that given that there are so many opportunities for us to experience loneliness, that we have the good news of this conversation today. so this week's episode is going to be picking up where we left off last week. In last week's episode, we looked at the relationship between grief and loneliness, and we understood why this is such a common experience. This episode is okay, but What do we do about it? So that's what we're going to be talking about today. Before we move forward and move on to answer those questions, I want to do a quick review. If perhaps you didn't listen to the episode previously, you can go back and listen to it now, or you can stick with us and go back whenever you want. It will totally work if you listen out of order. So the quick recap is that loneliness is the sadness resulting From being abandoned or emotional desertion, or a feeling of being separate from the life you used to have in the midst of becoming and being a special needs moms, all of our lives have changed. I think that's pretty fair to say. And the life that we knew before fell away maybe quickly, maybe slowly, but ultimately now we're living in a new world where our new reality is drastically different. And so. this is again, the setup, the perfect setup to have grief, to experience grief and loneliness is BFF with grief. Grief is most simply defined as the pain we experience from loss. Or another definition I love is longing for what is unattainable or unreachable. So that's. where we're starting. And now I will unveil the antidote. The antidote to grief and loneliness is connection. It is one of my favorite words, I have to say. Not like favorite word, like because of the word itself, but it is my life purpose. So it's one of those things that's most important to me. All right, I'm going to read you a quote from a book called Together, an excellent read by Dr. Vivek Murthy. And he writes, we are hardwired for connection. And the damage done by loneliness can be more severe than the damage done by smoking or obesity. In last week's episode, we talked about loneliness being as dangerous to our health as not having water, food, or shelter. So. That's why this conversation is so important to me. So what is connection exactly? Connection is people seeing you and you letting yourself be seen. Here's the thing about connection. It's the thing that makes the pain survivable. Support in grief and loneliness is all about connection. It's not about resolving pain. Pain is not the problem. It's the being alone in pain that is unbearable. In this particular point, I think is. So full of hope we innately know, but the diagnosis is that our children have are unchangeable in many ways. some of the times there's not certainty there, but most of the time there is a lot of certainty that this new life we have is not going to go away. And so if we think that we have to resolve the pain of that, like to make the pain of that go away, you can see like the, and accessibility of that it's, it's actually like, so, hopeless, really hopeless. And so that's why I think this particular point is so freeing and opens up so much hope is because if we relate to pain is not a problem. Then we have the opportunity to, well, I'm just going to say it. I know it's so corny, but we have the opportunity not to just survive, but to thrive. Okay. Now. Let's look at a pattern that I want to kind of illustrate for y'all of why we land at the land of lonely. Also, why we become disconnected. So what happens is we experience a loss. This could be somebody dying, like we talked about last week. It could be a diagnosis. It could be the loss of a skill. It could be the awareness that your child won't be learning a particular skill or be progressing in a certain area. It could be a million things. But the point here is that we experience a loss. This loss leads us from the world we knew, to To a new one where we're leaving every buddy behind in that world that we lived in when this thing wasn't true. And often what happens is that we make new conclusions about our new reality. We start thinking things. And feeling things like no one will ever get us. We definitely don't realize that everybody else is having these same thoughts too. We think we're the only one, like we each individually think that we're the only kind of weirdos so we kind of are going down this train of, okay, now we're having. Some, thoughts that are othering ourselves, and from those thoughts, we start to feel maybe embarrassed, ashamed. There could be a lot of different feelings. We're all very unique. But ultimately, from these feelings, we're going to start to do or not do things. That continue the pattern. So we're going to start shutting down, staying quiet, not sharing, putting ourselves in positions where we won't be seen, aka not talk about the things we're struggling with, with our friends, with our family, with anybody. And then we land. Connection and support completely out of reach essentially we're living the experience that nobody gets us. And I just feel the loneliness. Of that space, as I described the experience. So a quick summary of the cycle is loss. Then we move into making conclusions about our new reality, something like nobody understands me and we'd start to have feelings based on this experience and these thoughts we have about ourselves. So maybe some embarrassment or shame and we move into shutting down. So this is the cycle. This is the pattern that probably every one of us has experienced. And it's important to just kind of observe this pattern and recognize this is what's happening so that we can break the pattern. Like if it's invisible, we don't even realize this is happening. It's going to be very hard. to identify the opportunities that we have. So if loneliness is the default and connection is the new result we're playing for, then what are our options? How do we break this pattern and to create an experience of deep connection and support? First, I would say, learn to look at your beliefs. What new conclusions are you making about yourself? based on your new reality. Maybe it's the things like nobody understands me. I think this is so interesting. Many of you would think, well, that's not a belief. That's just what is. It's like, what's true. And these are all the reasons why you would tell me all your evidence for it. what's important to recognize is, is that's not a fact. It's What you believe it's what you're thinking over and over again. And the opportunity here is to let go of that disempowering belief and to move toward something like somebody will understand me as a new belief, or maybe this particular person, Sally will understand me or this group, my Facebook diagnostic community will understand me or understands me. And so you can see how already. That belief has so much more possibility in you being understood and known and having connection. So again, the skill here is to learn to question your thoughts and your beliefs. Something I think is important to mention here is that. It can be very helpful to surround ourselves with people who are going to help weaken our connection or our belief in something like nobody will understand me. So doing this work alongside others. really exponentially increases the, don't want to say the speed, but the ability to break down these thoughts quickly, I guess that is speed. And this is where I'll make a plug for the coaching community that I have cultivated. you know, for years actually have been running a program called Pathway to Peace. I've called it Pathway to Peace group coaching program. And. It's amazing and I love it and it was producing incredible results and the feedback I got from the community members was like Amazing. And I want more community. And so I took that feedback and I thought about it a lot. I contemplated over and over again, how can I create more community and create more accessibility because that was really important to me too. And I created something like an iteration. It's not like a brand new thing. It's an iteration of Pathway to Peace called now Pathway to Peace. So this is a group of women, of moms, just like you, that is committed, that are committed to doing the work of questioning these thoughts and beliefs and practicing it and doing all the work that I'm going to describe in this video. in the rest of this episode, but I just want to have a plug here that there is a place that I have built for you to do this work alongside others. And you just have to reach out and ask about it. There's actually a link on the show notes to apply. I'm doing it a little differently, hopefully a little bit easier of a process, but you can apply, you can learn and see if this is the right fit for you and through no pressure, but just an opportunity I will. Let you know all the details. Okay. Back to the regularly scheduled program. Breaking the pattern. First, look at our beliefs. We've just gone over that. Second, clever title, calling it bubble the bubble or rather unbubble the bubble. It's so tempting and sometimes necessary. I'm going to say to isolate and to bubble our pain. some of it's too big to approach all at once and that's not bad or wrong, but if we keep it bubbled, then we can't do anything with it. It's inaccessible to us and when it's inaccessible to us, we really can't work with it. And so this is a skill that we practice that you can practice. And what I guess I want to encourage you to recognize is that we all have this in us and it's so amazing to watch women. Lean into doing this when you know most of us have been taught to like bubble and avoid all our lives. When you take a step in actually acknowledging the feelings that you have and letting them flow through you and stop resisting them. One, it's just amazing. Women are so good at this. We have the instincts in us. We have the ability in us. It's just learning to give it that space that it needs. And stepping into that discomfort that also it requires. Okay. That's another way to break this pattern. Thirdly, it's becoming an expert griever. Now I know nobody necessarily says, hi, I'm Kara and I am a. Fantabulous griever. I feel like that would be kind of funny actually in a party setting. People would be very confused because of all the wonky things about grief out there. So I probably won't do that, but now you'll remember this becoming an expert griever. So this is going to require doing different things than you have been doing before. So if the default thing That many of us do is that shut down, close off, isolate, and then it's going to require us to, it's not always the opposite of that, but to basically take on actions in service of finding relationships and creating relationships that are supportive, that do connect. In last week's episode, I highlighted two different types of relationships and that second relationship that I described. Was described as a non anxious, non judgmental comforting presence. When I say that, it just feels like salve. It feels like so exactly what we need. And so to become an expert griever, it's taking on these actions, which will also require you to do the above two things I mentioned as well. Part of being an expert griever is also probably reinventing how you have done relationships. Your job in these relationships is going to be helping people deliver the love that they intend. You are going to be responsible to learn what you do and what you don't want. You will have to speak up when their love isn't feeling all that loving a really good question to help you identify these wants and needs of yours is how can I help teach people? What I want and need. And probably the preceding question is, what do I want and need? Now I want to put in a cautionary note here. This is going to be a common place to get stuck. People are going to get stuck at, well, why should I have to teach them? Like they should know they should be able to see what's happening. I want you to picture this as like, maybe your husband's like totally not getting it or your, Parents or your brother or your sister, like they do not understand and where you might be tempted to stop. is in that, what seems logical to you is like, well, how can they miss what's going on here? So that is an easy, easy place to stop. It's a very understandable place to stop and where that will lead you every single time is not getting what you want and need because here's the truth. They don't see it. It's, it's very, very likely that they actually really, really care. They just don't know how. And so this acceptance is accepting that if you don't feel connected, seen, supported, then they don't know. They don't know what you need. They don't know how to hold you. And so you have some choices here. Let it be, you may not choose to lean into those particular relationships, but you also might and it's going to require you to step into that vulnerability of letting them in. Okay. Really, that is about empowered choice and we're not going to dive deep into it today, but. showing up fully responsible for creating the relationships that you want. Now I want to acknowledge this is a tall ask in the midst of grief and you don't have to do this quickly. That's the good news. You can do it in your own time when you're ready. Now the third aspect here in terms of becoming an expert griever is the element of finding support. It's interesting as I was preparing for this episode, the, idea that some of the places where we expect to be supported and to feel supported don't actually end up feeling that way. Like I'm thinking about like most support groups that I've ever been to. I don't necessarily always leave feeling very supported. So I guess I just want to kind of put it out there that just because a place is supposed to be supportive or even designed to be supportive, doesn't mean that it will be for you. And that's okay. Support is feeling like there are people there for you. Like that no matter what's going on, there's companionship. There's a net there to catch you. It's building those soft places to land, having those webs of connection where it's not reliant on any one person or one thing that has you being able to be landing in those soft places. Something to emphasize here is that it's really more of a quality over quantity game. There's another quote from Dr. Vivek Murthy that I want to share and it's the antidote to loneliness isn't just.\ proximity to others, but the depth of our relationship. quote. So really it's just a few connections that are deep and where you allow yourself to be seen that outweigh shallow ones. It's funny as I'm, you know, recording this, I'm like, Oh my gosh, like there is so much more I could say about. All of these topics, I guess what I want to acknowledge is that this is an overview. This is not a deep dive because for each one of these kind of points that I'm bringing, I could probably do a full episode on them themselves. Like just the concept of a few deep connections outweigh shallow ones. We could talk about that for a while, but this is an overview, so we're going to let it be an overview. Okay. i wanna I make a comment here. About the distinction between being alone, but not lonely. There's a very common phrase I hear in, I mean, I hear it a lot of places, but the special needs world, I feel like it's become, you know, just something that is said amongst many women and it's not that I have a problem with it, but there's something for me. This is, you know, just my own experience that it doesn't necessarily leave me feeling. Like more supported than if they didn't say that. And I think perhaps here's why the fact is we are actually alone as in I'm the singular person doing a lot of things. And alone is different than loneliness. So I am the only one picking up the broken items at my house that were thrown during an explosion. Nobody is physically with me. I am the only one in the ER hospital room late in the night with my son. And so distinctly different than being lonely is being alone. So I say this point because I think it's important to acknowledge and to have you acknowledge like I am alone. In this moment, and that does not mean that I am unable to develop connection and to let people into this story. And that brings me to kind of sharing this last idea and that connection is being alone in grief with others. Again, it's the solution for loneliness. It's not. That we need to stop being alone. It's that we need to be Supported and have companionship in all the uniquenesses of our lives. I think the opportunity is to replace People telling us that we're not alone with having them share with us. I will try to understand you And know what it's like to be you. That feels like a dream, right? To have somebody sit with you and actually had a friend tell me this recently. And it really, it's a very tender moment between the two of us. She's a mom that has been with me this whole journey. She's got five typically developing kids. So, I mean, we have a lot of similarities. I've known her since middle school, but this particular conversation, she started by saying she has no idea what it's like to be me or to be in my shoes, but that she wants to be with me and she's here for all of it. And as I mentioned, it was a tender conversation and It was a vulnerable conversation, you know, she's, asking for me to let her in. And for me, the answer is yes. But what I noticed is that it still felt very vulnerable to let somebody in to all the aspects of my life that she couldn't understand unless I shared them with her. And not every one of us is going to be lucky enough to have a friend that sits and says that straight to you. But I share that story to just give an example of what it looks like to let people in that may or may not be in our same shoes, but have the potential of being part of that web or that connection. Or that have the potential of being part of that support network that we want. Okay. Again, I want to keep diving in all the different directions that I could go in this episode. It was actually super hard for me to constrain myself enough to not write a whole book on this episode, but I thought that would be a little bit much for a podcast episode and. One last thing I want to ask, actually. In the spirit of giving the gift of connection, my ask for you is that you share this episode with somebody that you care about. And I found that the best way to do that is actually just texting them, you know, getting that little share button from your phone or wherever you're listening. And just let them know, Hey, I enjoyed this episode and I wanted to share it with you. Let me know what you think. And how amazing would that be as a conversation starter to say, Hey, I'm recognizing that I want to break these patterns of isolation and loneliness and Listen to the episode and let me know what you think and maybe where we could start to break those cycles together. Next week, we're going to have an interview style episode, and then we'll be back with an episode that's going to dive a little bit more into the topic of grief itself. And I need to come up with a very clever title with that episode, I think, because I don't know that everyone's going to be like flocking to. An episode on the topic itself, but I'm an optimist. So let's hope so. All right. We'll see you on the next episode.