Ruff Around The Edges
Ruff Around The Edges
Mindset Episode 024 | What do you do when you have no time to grieve?
Warning: this episode references euthanasia
What do you do when you have been dealt an emotional blow, and need time to process that, but time is the one thing you don't have?
Because you have to get back to work so you can make rent for example?
Or because you're parenting small children and you're happy to get 5 minutes of quiet time on the toilet?
This episode tries to give some practical tips as to what you can do in situations like that using the low-key of example of getting over a dog training set-back as well as the example of not having been able to rescue a dog from behavioral euthanasia as a dog professional.
If you're wondering how to feel less stressed about your career, your dog, your family or all of the above, there are things you can do!
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[00:00:00] Kajsa: Welcome to the Mindset Podcast for guardians of dogs who are just a little rough around the edges. I'm your host, Kajsa van Overbeek, a life coach dedicated to making life with your challenging dog feel less challenging, both by sharing stories of other people's similar experiences and by showing you how you can harness the power of your brain to make it work for you instead of against you.
Hi and welcome! Today I want to talk about something that has been popping up in my coaching with clients a couple of times and then it's been popping up in some of the Facebook groups that I've been visiting lately to the point where it was [00:01:00] basically screaming at me and staring me in the face and going like Maybe you want to address this in a podcast episode, because it's everywhere right now, and it can't just be everywhere without you doing something with it.
This is a hint. This is, you need to do something with this. So I figured, why not? And what I'm talking about is dealing with very intense emotions about things that have happened. When you feel like you have no time to deal with these things, either you don't have enough time to deal with them before you need to be present at work or somewhere else, or you just have No time to feel your big feelings at all because you're already so full and so overwhelmed and there's so much other stuff [00:02:00] going on with your life.
And then what do you do? So a couple of examples that I've come across are people who are involved in animal welfare and animal rescue, for example, and who have had to hand some of the animals. Same thing with the use of the word, Um, Posenco, which really can't be said for the meaning of the word, as it's just hard to find word that sounds like Um, progress, and now a certain incident has happened and it shook them.
They just feel like they can't trust their dog anymore, they've lost some of that optimism that they started with, and they believe that if they let themselves just grieve that incident or be sad about that and just let themselves be upset about what they feel is a perceived setback, that they will [00:03:00] get sucked into the vicious cycle and never be able to get out of it.
That's one thing. And then, for example, there is dealing with a loss of a pet or dealing with a very stressful situation when you're, for example, working full time, raising the kids, trying to juggle all these things together, and you think, well, I simply don't have time to deal with this. I simply don't have time to process this, and you might not even use the word process, right?
It's just that this feeling that I'm having right now and all this sadness or anger or whatever it is that you need to deal with about a certain situation, it's just, it doesn't fit. It's not practical right now to do it. So, Now, what? So let's have a look at the first situation in which a person is just so raw and so upset and so, I want to say the grief is so all [00:04:00] encompassing about not having been able to save these dogs that they don't quite know what to do with themselves.
It's this really intense, Grief slash pain that just leaves no space for anything else and yet you have to get back to work in a week. It's time. Or maybe you've had to deal with like this dog professional that mentioned this situation. They had to be back in the office. After the weekend. And so now what?
Now what do you do with that grief that's there? And how do you even begin? Like, where do you even begin to make sure that on Monday you can be in the office? Because the thought in that instance is, there's no way. I do not know what to do with this, but I have to get rid of it, because I have to work on Monday, and I don't know, feeling the way I'm feeling right now, how I'm going to accomplish that.[00:05:00]
Now, my first advice to anyone always is, when it comes to feelings, is to feel them. And the more we try to repress the feeling, The bigger and heavier and worse it's going to come back and the longer it is going to take for you to actually move through it because the only way through, or the only way out, sorry I should say, is through.
So as soon as you start telling yourself, oh I only have till Monday or I only have till next week to deal with this grief and it needs to be done by then, then you're already putting a lot of extra pressure on yourself. I have to, right? I have to feel stressful. I have to feel pressure, uh, pressureful.
That's not even a word, but I have to pressures you into being done. So now on top of the grief and now on top of all the sadness, you also feel the pressure to deal with it quickly. So you're doubling up on your, I [00:06:00] want to say, bad feelings. The way out of that is to say, okay, grief. Okay, Sadness, I welcome you.
Give me all you got. Let's go. The problem is that your brain doesn't want to go there, because your brain is thinking, I need to work on Monday. And if I invite all of this grief in, then, Where will it go? Where will it stop? I might not be done by Monday. And I can't not be done by Monday because I have to go, you know, put bread on the table.
I have car payments to make. I have a mortgage to pay. All of those things. So you're Brain is fighting you. On the one hand, it might understand, even from me explaining it, and if you've heard some of my episodes before, that, you know, feeling the feelings is the way to deal with them, is the way to process them.
It understands that, but it also understands that on Monday, we've got to be transformed into a [00:07:00] functioning human being again. So how do we mesh the two? How do we make sure they line up? The same thing It's sort of the case for when we're dealing, for example, with a training setback and we feel really upset and a little dejected.
Is that the word I'm looking for? I think that's a word, right? Dejected about it. If we tell ourselves, if I let myself feel that, if I let myself feel all that dejection, I have to look this up now. I'll probably put it in the show notes if it was the right word. I'm pretty sure it is. So if I let myself feel all this dejection.
right now, then it's going to take forever. I'm going to spiral down. I'm not going to get back into training my dog and everything is just going to go from bad to worse, which again, if you've been following me and if you know a little bit [00:08:00] about how mindset work works, it's probably the opposite. The longer you do Don't want to feel the dejection.
The longer you don't want to feel the upset, um, the harder it will be to get back to training. So you actually need to allow for that feeling to be there. But again, your brain is fighting you there because it doesn't believe it. It says, no, no, no, we're not going to do this. We're not going to feel this feeling because if we do, then we're going to go down the rabbit hole.
We're going to spiral and we're never going to get anywhere. So it doesn't feel believable to your brain to say, no, by feeling all of this and by opening the floodgates and by letting it be there, It's the fastest way out. So now what do we do? Now what do, how do we resolve this internal fight that's going on in our brain?
Well, a solution that I often find that works is to give yourself a set amount of time. Not a set amount of time [00:09:00] in which to be done, which is basically what you're trying to do if you tell yourself I need to be done by Monday when I have to get back to work, but a set amount of time in which you allow yourself to feel Everything.
In which you allow yourself to be the person that just can't be out in public, the person that just doesn't want to talk to anyone, the person that just goes through ten tissue boxes, sits on the sofa sobbing, and all of those things. Give yourself a set amount of time to let it all out. Don't force yourself to be done, but give yourself a set amount of time to let it all out.
Because what's happening right now is you're so focused on needing to be done, for example, grieving by Monday, or needing to be done, between air quotes, quickly with getting over the dejection about the doc training having failed in a certain moment. You're so is that you are not [00:10:00] allowing yourself to do or to think in what can I do?
It's like, I cannot do this. Okay, that's one thing, but what I want you to think about or to remember, same as with dog training, right? We don't tell the dog what not to do. We tell them what to do is, okay, what I can do is now use the entire Saturday to bowl my eyes out. Or in the case of, you know, dealing with a setback in training, say, okay, I get to mope about this, like, full on, 300 percent for two weeks.
Two whole weeks. Again, be careful not to add You know, and I need to be done then, but just give yourself permission to go all into the feelings for a certain amount of time. And what that does is take away some of the reticence, take away some of the barriers that you've put up to feeling. And it seems manageable, right?
It seems like a set amount of time is always something that has a beginning and an end. And that's what your brain [00:11:00] likes. It's like, oh, there's, there's not, this is not a never ending thing. There's a set period for this. And within this set period, I get to completely let Go. Your brain loves black and white thinking.
Your brain doesn't love nuance. And normally I always caution against black and white thinking because a lot of the time it works against us. And I say, hey, listen, isn't there another way to look at this? But in this case, you can work with your brain's love for ones and zeros, for blacks and whites. You say, you know what?
We, we can go black. We can put all the money on black, all the money on grief and sadness. for this amount of time, go. So you give your brain permission to do all of that overlapping thinking to catastrophize. And that is so liberating and often, although that is not the goal, be careful to not make it the goal either, that already helps [00:12:00] you so much.
Now, the other situation that I'm, um, refer to in the beginning was one in which you might Be willing to do it. You might be wanting to grieve. You might be wanting to deal with whatever that powerful emotion is that you want to get through, but you feel like you have no time. You feel like your schedule is way too full.
So consider the situation, for example, of someone who's lost their partner recently and who is also trying to take care of their child and their challenging dog at the same time. And so they're trying to figure out how to combine all of that. And you can kind of imagine that if you've lost your partner and you're dealing with all these things at the same time, that when, when do you grieve?
When do you work through that? Even if you're willing to, if you're willing to go there, how do you go about it? That's when I go to [00:13:00] Two of my favorite things, maybe the word favorite sounds a bit odd in this context, but I'm just going to run with it, which is, um, both planning specific moments to do with it, and you're going to say, but wait, didn't I just say that there was no time, so how can I plan time if there is no time?
Yeah, the second part of that is Again, I said two of my favorite things is what is the smallest, simplest, easiest way that I can think of to allow myself to grieve? a little bit or to deal with the anger or sadness or whatever the other emotion is given the constraints that I'm dealing with. Sometimes this could be something as simple as every time that I go to the tap and get myself a glass of water and have a sip of [00:14:00] water I'm going to allow myself to think of my loved one and I'm going to allow a little bit of this grief to come through.
What that does is it, it lowers the threshold, makes it very easy to say, okay, sip of water. I get to think of something so that it doesn't feel like a huge task. It doesn't feel like this mountain to climb. And the other thing it does is it makes you feel a little bit more in control. It's one of the things that we humans have in common.
Whenever we feel in control, we have less stress. The feeling that we can't control something, that's something that, that triggers stress in us. But when we think like, okay, I can do that, I can walk to the tap, I can have a glass of water, and then just, just, I say, right, which again, it's usually not that just, but just think of my loved one then.
That can be my moment in between all of this utter chaos. to think of some of the moments that [00:15:00] we've had and to maybe deal with feeling some of those huge feelings that I have yet to process. And by the way, that's what I also think makes this tip so useful for the other situations. So for example, the situation in which you're You know, dealing with this huge emotional burden of maybe having been the one in the rescue team just to agree to and say, yes, this dog cannot be rescued, this dog unfortunately needs to be euthanized.
And then having to go back to work two days later. What giving yourself permission to feel all of that in the biggest possible way for an entire day does is, again, hand you back a little bit of control. Because what we're afraid of is that if we're going to start feeling things or if we don't get rid of this feeling, right, because that's actually what we're trying to do, we're trying to suppress it so that we can go back to work, that if we allow it to be there that [00:16:00] everything's going to be out of control and that feels terrible.
But when we tell ourselves that Okay, you get to be out of control on purpose, but for a controlled amount of time, for example, for a day, it gives your brain something to hold on to. It gives it a little bit of at least perceived control back, and often that is enough for you to get through feeling all of these.
Big emotions. At least to the point where you can function again. Same thing with the dog training. I'm gonna say glitch, and there's all kinds of other ways to deal with that, right? Change the way you look at a setback and all of these things, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just purely talking about dealing with the emotion, dealing with the feeling.
Giving yourself a set amount of time. Again, puts you in control again, puts you in the driver's seat again. The only thing that I want to caution for, and then I'm gonna let you go, and then [00:17:00] I just, I really hope that this was helpful, is that when you give yourself a set amount of time, like two weeks, or a day, you don't tell yourself that you should already be done with it.
An hour before the 24 hours are up. Or a day before the 14 days are up. The point of a deadline is that everything before the deadline, let's talk black and white, again ones and zeros, is, let's say, on time. So, whatever perfectionism you've got going on that's telling you, oh, if I give myself two weeks and I'm not done, uh, after 13 days, then something's gone wrong.
Whatever perfectionist part of You is there. Do not listen to it. Listen to me. Two weeks is two weeks. The deadline is the deadline. You get to do it all the way up to deadline, up to the deadline, sorry, and you don't arbitrarily move it [00:18:00] forward. That's not what we're doing here, right? Handing in an assignment in college or in high school that was due a certain day at midnight, if you hand it in 11.
59, you're golden. That's how we're looking at this. Now, if you have issues with that and you feel like that is really hard for you, then I definitely want to invite you to get on a consult with me and then we're for sure going to have something to coach on. But for now, I hope that these tips help you a little bit.
So give yourself a set amount of time. Allow yourself to Go all in and into the feeling and then see. And the other one is, again, right, if you feel completely overwhelmed, if you're willing to go into the feeling and you're wanting to feel but you don't see where you have the time, ask yourself, what's the easiest possible way that I could feel this and [00:19:00] what's the minimum amount of time that I can give myself?
And maybe it's 30 seconds, which is fine. Maybe it's two minutes. You know, feeling a feeling all the way through. Take 60 to 90 seconds. Now it might be coming, keep coming back, especially when something like when we're dealing with a big loss. But again, don't start limiting yourself already with, I need an hour or I need five days at least.
You need whatever it is that you decide you need to start with. Your body's going to tell you when you're done for sure. But right now you have to start somewhere. It's better than not starting anywhere. It's better than saying I need to get rid of this now or I need to not feel this so I can function again because I need to not feel this has never ever in the history of men helped.
You need to feel this at some point. [00:20:00] How are we going to go about it? And I hope that some of these examples helped. The one example was maybe a little more extreme than the other. Please also don't email me or rate me to say that how can you compare forced euthanasia of a rescue dog to a training setback.
I'm not comparing. Compare and despair is not my thing. In the sense of wanting to say that one is worse than the other or one is lighter or easier or any of that stuff. Things, but any of those things, sorry, but the mechanism behind it, the mechanism to be able to deal with it can be similar in both situations.
You can find the show notes to this episode and everything coaching on my website, kajsafunoverbaked. com or you can go find us on Instagram at the rust [00:21:00] cattle dog, or maybe even Facebook kajsa fun overbaked coaching. If you like listening to this podcast, might I ask you for a good review on whichever platform you're listening to the podcast to, because it helps us move up in the rating, which helps us be found more easily so that more people can listen to this, more people can benefit from it, more people can feel, as I always say, less alone in where they stand with their dogs.