Hello, my dear passengers, and welcome aboard the self-grown train, a podcast that combines personal stories, opinions and research in order to better guide you through your self-grown journey. My name is Soledad Esmarii Rivera-Pacheco and I am your tour guide. First, I just want to say thank you for tuning back in for episode 2 of season number 7. I am so excited. As I told y'all last two weeks ago, I am very, very, very excited because this year I turn 29 and I am stepping into my power and I am wearing my crown. I don't have it right now, but hold up, give me one second. Yes, much better.
Speaker 1:
Like I said in the last episode, I am stepping into my power, I am giving you opulence, I am giving you realness, I'm giving you elegança. This is the year where I step into my power and I go back to working on myself. I have been working on myself the whole time, but I'm saying like I'm fully, 100% working on myself. Okay, okay, thank you for joining me on that journey. And today we're going back to an archive episode with Stephanie Sarazen where we talk about hope. Stay tuned.
Speaker 2:
Bye. I actually, by necessity, ended up trying to define hope as it relates to ambiguous grief, and you know, as you know, we've talked about it. Ambiguous grief is grieving the loss of someone who is still living, though not as they once were Right. And there are lots of activating events that might trigger ambiguous grief. And just to give your listeners, you know, an idea right off the bat, that might be something like a diagnosis or an illness addiction, dementia, divorce, familial estrangement, you know, and a whole host of other events that we experience in our lifetimes that activate grief but leaves us with an ambiguous grieving process. We don't know how to grieve it, we don't have societal norms to grieve, we don't have, you know, funerals, we don't give eulogies, yet we still very much grieve the loss of that important relationship, either, you know, in our lives or with ourselves. And so I ended up defining hope as it relates to how we hope when we're going through a grieving period. That's ambiguous.
Speaker 1:
And I honestly I love that, because even through your, I don't know what to call it. Is it like a map? I forgot what it is like. The drawing with like ambiguous hope I mean ambiguous grief, and then with hope it is this whole dance, like you said earlier, and it's so intriguing. And one of the things that I found really, really helpful with that diagram that you have is that you define hope in two very different ways, like you define it between external hope and internal hope, and can you kind of dig a little bit deeper on like what the difference are between the two of them?
Speaker 2:
Yes, and I'm so glad you brought that up, because as I was trying to understand ambiguous grief in my own life, I didn't know what to call it. I didn't know what I was feeling. I had experienced a sudden traumatic discovery and subsequent divorce after 20 years, and the grief I felt after that was just debilitating in so many ways and felt so void of validation. And as I was trying to heal myself, really just trying to find someone who would talk to me and say, oh, this happened to me too, and here's what helped. I couldn't find those people. I found that shame and embarrassment. Ultimately, I found that shame and embarrassment can be internalized if we have one of those experiences and so we don't talk about it, we don't tell people. We don't tell people because we don't want to be talked about, so we keep it quiet and often people who are experiencing ambiguous grief will isolate and breathe alone, maybe sharing with one or two close people, but it's pretty isolating. And what I found was, in trying to understand this, I ended up putting together, working with a former therapist of mine to develop a process model to look to see. We did a survey and an assessment tool and in hundreds of responses that came back, we found what I suspected to be true, what I had observed in others that I had and in myself first, was this notion of hope.
Speaker 2:
And we know in grief that the most kind of common grief model is the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross model, which tells us that as we grieve, we go through different stages of emotion and we experience anger, denial, depression, bargaining, acceptance.
Speaker 2:
Meaning was recently added which is, I think, brilliant and so accurate by David Kessler. And yet in my experience and in the experience I was seeing around me in my therapy groups when I finally did find others, there was this one other feeling we were going through, but I couldn't quite name it. I couldn't, I didn't know what it was, but I could see it in behaviors. And then, in doing the survey and looking at data, there it was, and that is that there are two different kinds of hope. So, in addition to feeling angry and in denial and bargaining and depression except all of this for ambiguous grievers hope presents as well. And, if you think about it, when our loved one dies, we're not hoping that they come back to us as they once were Right. That would be really actually unhealthy and weird If we were hoping that the person we had just buried would bring our doorbell right.
Speaker 2:
We don't hope that, because we know the physical death is final and they are not coming back to us as they once lived, right and so.
Speaker 2:
But when we lose somebody too ambiguous, and when we lose somebody in an ambiguous way and they're still alive, whether the relationship is four miles away or never in proximity again, they're still alive, right and so that hope still presents that they can return, that they will return and the relationship will restore as it once was. And some examples of that might be, as I interviewed people with this experience parents who are grieving the loss of their children to addiction, hoping that they'll find the right treatment facility, hoping that their child will hit rock bottom and want substance abuse help. Or somebody who's grieving the loss of their parents to dementia or Alzheimer's or traumatic brain injury right, hoping that there will be a cure, hoping there will be a breakthrough that will, a treatment that will help their parents or their spouse or whomever, come back as they once were, and that goes on and on in all of the different activating events. We're seeing it right now played out, as Krintary is about to release his book where he this is familial estrangement, you know, and the family is not in relationship as they once were, and there's grief and loss in that.
Speaker 2:
And we can hope that our parent or our child might say I'm so sorry for all of it and can we please reconcile, you know? And yet for all of these reasons, it doesn't happen. But or it does right, maybe any of those things do return. But how we hope shows up in two different ways. And if we're spending the majority of our hope focused on the other person, focused on how can I get my child the help they need, how can I get my mother the treatment she needs, how can I, you know, help my best friend out?
Speaker 2:
of that cult or gang right, whatever is happening that has taken our person and our relationship from us. We focus externally in our hope and we're external. Hope feels really good because we are in action outward right. It's like we're looking at how can I fix that, what can I do?
Speaker 1:
And it's also more visual like it's something you can see the result of, so it's more appealing and also more, I think, more common, because it's something that we've been doing forever Right and it's socially acceptable.
Speaker 2:
because what does it mean if we said nope?
Speaker 2:
not helping my loved one. Goodbye, good luck. You know, if you're that's, you know hard first of all to do and it's not socially, I think, well-recognized or understood that we detached from that. We might need to detach and hope in a different way, right? So what I found was that for people who are going through an ambiguous grieving process, don't know how to grieve, they're not feeling validated and hope keeps coming up. It comes up in this external form and we're hoping outward, but it also comes up in internal hope. It comes up when we get tired of not having our external hope come to fruition and we start thinking about ourselves, right? Or maybe we're working with a therapist who says let's not focus on helping them anymore, let's focus on helping you.
Speaker 2:
And internal hope looks like hope for yourself without that person, Hope for yourself without the return of that relationship as it was. It doesn't mean that that relationship won't return or isn't already still there, it's just taken on a different form, right? And if you're grieving, if you're caretaking for somebody with a traumatic brain injury or dementia or Alzheimer's, that's still your person, but they're not in relationship with you as they once were. And if you can start accessing internal hope and practicing internal hope, then what that looks like is accepting that, Accepting that there may not be a cure, there may not be a treatment that brings your loved one back to you, but you can still work toward accepting that and then giving yourself permission to live your life, in a way, without them. And practicing internal hope isn't easy.
Speaker 1:
I don't know about you, my dear passenger, but I myself have struggled with hope for ever. Really, I didn't know that there was a difference between external hope and internal hope. But, to be quite honest, I much prefer to stay with the external hope. Why? Because it's outside of me, like we were mentioning in this previous episode. It's outside of me. I don't want to think about what can I do to make things better sometimes and it's kind of weird for me to say that as a podcaster of self-growth, but I think that self-growth can be very overwhelming at times and when it comes to hope, it's easier to hold onto hope when it's externally, because you start to feel like, wow, it's not within me, therefore I don't have to put in all this energy and all this time and all this effort into it. But when you don't put that time and effort into your internal hope meaning looking within you and seeing how this hope it's going to lead you forward, especially while dealing with grief you kind of get stuck and it's not fun. It's really not fun. So I hope that today's little nugget of wisdom helps you understand the importance of letting go of that external hope or, if you can't, let go ignoring it enough to pay attention to your internal hope.
Speaker 1:
As always, if you need somebody to talk to, please do not hesitate to reach out to me. You can find me on my social media I'm talking Instagram, facebook, tiktok, youtube and Gmail. At the self-culturing podcast at gmailcom. Please, please, please, reach out whenever you need help, but if you feel that it's something that you need more of a professional help, please reach out to 988. I say this because if you went and saw my life, you know that I have been struggling with suicidal thoughts and ideations lately.
Speaker 1:
This is a new thing for me, so I've been kind of handling it as best as I can. But 988 has definitely been a great resource, especially for those times when I feel that I don't want to burden my family and my friends or my loved ones. So I just want to make sure you know that there are resources out there. At the end of the day, please, please, know that you are so important and that I love you so much and that I care about you and that I want to see you thrive in this world. As always, I cannot wait to see you and hear from you again. Well, until the next step, dear passengers, safe travels, bye, go.