Archives: Celebrating Hope with Stephanie Sarazin

Today's mini-episode looks back into Season 5 Episode 3 with  Stephanie Sarazin where we discuss the concept of  Hope. Listen to the full episode here!

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Transcript

Understanding Hope in Ambiguous Grief

Speaker 1 0:07

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 0:53

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 1:28

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 2:47

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 3:23

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 5:12

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 5:31

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 6:40

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 6:49

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 8:22

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 9:06

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 9:32

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 9:47

because what does it mean if we said nope ?

Speaker 2 9:53

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 11:00

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 12:12

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 13:40

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 .

Struggling With Suicidal Thoughts

Speaker 1 14:04

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 14:12

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 .