101: Life Transitions: Grief and Resilience with Kate Nudds

Grief is an emotional journey that is often misunderstood, and it's not just about losing a loved one. 

On this episode of our life transitions series, grief coach Kate Nudds unpacks the layers of grief that stem from various life changes, such as divorce or financial loss. Have you ever felt pressured to "move on" too quickly after a significant life change? Kate talks about the societal expectations that complicate our natural grieving process, how cultural influences shape our perception and management of grief, the importance of community support, and challenge the idea that grief should be a fast-tracked process.

This episode sheds light on how grief affects individuals and those around them. We also explore the necessity of creating spaces for open and honest conversations about grief and discuss how unresolved grief can surface in unexpected ways. The episode broadens the scope of grief beyond bereavement, recognizing that loss also includes experiences like losing a pet or enduring a significant life transition.

Kate Nudds is a grief coach. She helps clients move from grief to growth by using their grief as a catalyst for change. Her passion for grief coaching stems from her own experiences with loss. She understands firsthand the overwhelming impact that grief can have on every aspect of life, from emotional well-being to physical health and relationships. It can feel very isolating, as if you'll never find joy or happiness again. f.

You can reach Kate on her website, Instagram, or via email at: kate@grievethenachieve.co.uk

Go to https://betterhelp.com/resilience or click Notes on Resilience during sign up for 10% off your first month of therapy with my sponsor BetterHelp.

Chapters

• 1:14 Understanding Grief and Building Resilience
• 12:19 Navigating Grief and Societal Expectations
• 19:32 Opening Conversations About Grief and Loss
• 29:57 Promoting Resilience and Compassion After Trauma

Transcript

Kate Nudds: 1:15

Everybody has a bit of a responsibility to give that person time, their own time, whatever grief looks like for that person, and for however long that is. I wish that we still had to wear the black armbands so that people knew that we were grieving, because they would understand. We don't necessarily know what's going on behind someone's eyes, and if you were able to kind of outwardly show, look, I'm grieving, I'll take this off in my own time, whatever that looks like, whenever that is, it would just perhaps take the pressure off others that you did know and would just allow space. And that's what companies and people need to do they need to just allow people to have the space to grieve.

Manya Chylinski: 1:54

Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, manya Chylinski, and today we have another episode in the series on life transitions building resilience in change. My guest is Kate Nudds. She is a grief coach and we talked about grief. What is it? Why do we experience it after loss? What does it mean for ourselves? How does our community support us or not support us? I think you're going to learn a lot in this episode. Hi, kate, I'm so excited that you and I are talking today. Thank you for being here. My pleasure. I am excited too. Well, the first question, before we get into the details of what we're talking about if you could have dinner with any historical figure, who would it be and why?

Kate Nudds: 2:46

You know, I was thinking about this and I thought long and hard, and it's a really difficult question because it's making me choose one. But bearing in mind I'm training to be a therapist at the moment, but bearing in mind, I'm training to be a therapist at the moment if I could speak to Freud and have him come back, I would love to chat to him and see his thoughts on all the modalities of therapy. Now, I just think it would be such a fascinating conversation. Here we are, yeah, I just I just think if I could, if I could sit and have a conversation'd love to talk to him about all his work, and then you know where we're going with therapy, the whole change around mental health, and I just an amazing conversation.

Manya Chylinski: 3:29

it would be an amazing conversation and I like with all my guests, I would want to be a fly on the wall or a guest at the table. As you guys were talking about this, I would be very curious what he thinks of the mental health landscape these days. Speaking about mental health, we are talking about life transitions and building resilience and change, and you and I today are going to be talking about grief and also how, in our grief, we're not feeling resilient at all times, and you know, before we dive into the topic, can you explain what actually is grief?

Kate Nudds: 4:15

So grief is loss. Now, when we talk, talk about grief, I think we almost automatically think about bereavement, but actually the grieving process happens for any type of loss and when you add up how much loss we actually have in our lives, it is incredible. It's divorce, it's loss of partner, it's loss of a business, loss of a business, loss of finances, loss of health, loss of a limb, uh, kids leaving, leaving home, uh, baby loss, pet loss, I mean, there is. There's just so much and I think we don't really give grief enough enough credit?

Kate Nudds: 4:53

we don't we don't realize we're grieving a lot of the time. We have these losses and we kind of, you know, try and carry on with life and we try and be resilient and we do all the you know we use all the tools and the techniques to build that resilience and that's brilliant. But sometimes we need to accept that we actually need to grieve and that's okay and the grieving process is. It's there for a reason and the grief affects every part of you or it can do. You know I'm talking quite generally here, but grief affects the mind and the body and we just don't allow ourselves to to grieve fully because our lives are so busy and I think social expectations and other people's expectations on us and we sort of, you know we go through life at this pace and actually sometimes we just need to take some time out to grieve.

Manya Chylinski: 5:49

Now I appreciate that you are explaining that grief isn't just after the death of someone that we love, so that bereavement period. It can come with all kinds of loss. It can come with all kinds of loss and I'm wondering if grief has a purpose, since you don't feel grief until you've lost the thing that you care about. What good is feeling bad after the fact versus helping us move forward?

Kate Nudds: 6:16

Yeah, and I think it's perhaps only when we're grieving how much that meant to us. So it does highlight, but the trouble with grief is it's not particularly tangible. You, you can't really intellectualize the grieving process because it's such an emotional process. And I think, again, we try to, so we try and put you know, we try and give it this intellectual thought process, but it's not about that. It's an emotional process that we need to go through and it's just not talked about enough. I think that's the thing as well. We don't talk about it, we don't use our communities, we don't necessarily use support, and if we all spoke about it a little bit more and we we accepted that, that we had all these losses, we're going to have all these losses in our lives and we were able to talk about them, it might take less than some of the pain a little bit.

Manya Chylinski: 7:02

Why do you think that is that we don't really talk about grief very much?

Kate Nudds: 7:07

I definitely think it's cultural that there are some cultures that do grief better than others.

Kate Nudds: 7:13

I think I was talking about this the other day with somebody and it's actually the other person that struggles with that person's grief because they also think, you know, I don't want to upset you, or they don't. People aren't very good at understanding how to broach the conversation, therefore they don't. So you can lose a lot of friends and a lot of family through the grieving process because people are worried about upsetting you, but that's them and them not being able to manage how they're feeling, because people are worried about upsetting you, but that's them and them not being able to manage how they're feeling. Because you are grieving.

Kate Nudds: 7:43

And actually, if we, if we spoke a little bit more, perhaps, about emotions and we understood emotions a little bit more and we were more open about how we were feeling, and you know, yes, I might be in tears, but it's not necessarily a bad thing, and we kind of see this sadness and these tears as a real negative. But actually I'm just going through a grieving process and why can't, in the same conversation, I be happy, angry, sad, all you know? Why do I have to be, you know, happy all the time in order for for you to be okay with this conversation? So I think that ebb and flow of our kind of conversations becomes quite difficult because people just aren't very good at managing other people's emotions Absolutely.

Manya Chylinski: 8:26

And I just in the last few days had an experience where I was speaking with someone and they were telling me about something difficult that happened to them Not life altering, just difficult and they were upset about it and it made them angry and they felt hurt. And after we were done with the conversation I realized that my part of the conversation after they shared that was trying to get them to stop being upset, because I was so uncomfortable with the fact that they were sad. I didn't want them to be sad and I knew I couldn't change it and I essentially kind of cut off the conversation because I couldn't deal with it. And as soon as the conversation was over I realized, oh, that was all me and I was not there for this person. And I think that's what you're saying happens often in grief, because it is so difficult to watch someone you know experiencing a loss it is and we have a real fixed culture and we want to fix.

Kate Nudds: 9:38

I want to fix that for you. I want to, and if we're talking about bereavement, unless you can bring that person back, you can't fix this situation. That's okay and it's sort of I'm going to take the pressure off of you because that's okay, you can't fix, you can't bring them back, you don't have a magic wand, so that that kind of. I don't think that fixing helps with things. But yes, it's a really. It is interesting when you, when you understand your own emotions a little bit and you're in that conversation with someone and you can, almost you know, reflect on your own emotions and what was coming up for you whilst that person was, whatever emotional state that they were in, what's coming up for you and can you not fix? Can you just let them be and allow them to go through that process.

Manya Chylinski: 10:21

And it's difficult, really difficult, because we're just not used to it yes, and I thought about it afterwards and I thought, oh, it would have been quite simple to allow them to feel what they were feeling. It was triggering me, so I had to get them to stop talking about it, because I couldn't deal with my own emotions and I I was, let's say, it was a teachable moment for myself afterwards to realize that's what was happening. You know we're we're talking about life transitions and grief is so clearly a part of a lot of transitions. If we're talking about loss, because often change means we're leaving well change always means we're leaving something behind.

Manya Chylinski: 11:08

Often that is, there's sadness and a sense of loss around that, a sense of loss around that. How do you think about grief and loss and making changes and how can we be successful in getting through that change?

Kate Nudds: 11:30

and however we want to define that success, I think, allowing ourselves to go through a grieving process and taking the pressure off ourselves and realising that it's OK, and for somebody that might be one day, one week, one year, 10 years. There is no timescale with this, and don't let society and other people put that pressure on you. What works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another, and I think that's also kind of. The issue with grief is that we all grieve in our own ways and some don't necessarily show outwardly that they're grieving. Some show very outwardly that they're grieving. Some try, and you know, sort of bracket it off and put it in its box, but grief does always tend to come and get you at some point. It's always there waiting for you. Sadly, you can't have run grief as much as we'd like to. Um, so yeah it's.

Kate Nudds: 12:20

I think the reason that I got into what I do is because I was so surprised by grief. It. It literally hit me like a tidal wave and I had no kind of expectations about well, no, I did have expectations about grief. I had the expectations that society had put on me that I would go to the funeral and then this sort of magic wand would happen and I and I would feel better and life would carry on. But what I hadn't realized was I had changed, the world had changed. I, I couldn't do the job that I was doing. I, I was, I was, I was a mess. I mean, grief just absolutely floored me, both, both physically and and mentally.

Kate Nudds: 12:54

Um, and that's why I started this work, because I thought I don't, I don't want anybody else to be so surprised about grief and I want to be able to open up the conversation for people. It's the one thing that every single one of us is going to face losses in general. You know, we're not necessarily talking about bereavement and if you can, if you could not have anybody around you die, then great, let me know how to do it. But, um, you know we're going to face losses and we just don't talk about the fact that there will be a grieving process. And that's that's why I wanted to do this work to allow people to to have that, those spaces. And whether that grief is, like I say, you know, a day old or 10 years old, it doesn't matter. You get to talk about it, you get to, you get to openly grieve, and that is such a privilege.

Manya Chylinski: 13:39

Absolutely. And I think about you said wanting to make space for people to have these feelings and to be in a safe space where they feel they can have, where they can deal with these emotions. And I think about a lot organizations and the way our society is structured, and it feels like, at least in Western society, that there's not a lot of space given to us to grieve. People get three days bereavement leave after somebody dies. There are we expect people a couple months later to like be back at work and not even talking about their person, and so how can we, I guess what role did those, that kind of societal expectation and the way our organizations are structured, what role does that play in how we're able to grieve?

Kate Nudds: 14:36

what role does that play in how we're able to grieve? It's a barrier, it's a big barrier and that three days, normally in a lot of policies is worded something like if it's a close family member, what does that even mean? What about if your best friend goes? What about even pet loss? Pet loss is huge and something that, again, don't really talk about and companies certainly don't really include that in the policy, but it's, it's a huge event in someone's life and I could barely have a shower after three days.

Kate Nudds: 15:03

You know I was, I was so floored by grief just to say that again, that three days wasn't barely enough. You know, we we were just going through all the sad men, as it's called, which I think is a brilliant name we were were just, you know, we were just barely trying to get the death certificate and work out what to do, because until you've got that you can't do that. And then you've got to do that bit, but you can't do that bit until you've got that bit. And it's such a process and three days, you just there was no way that I could go back in and do that same job after three days. And I don't think I'm alone in that and I think companies and HR departments are getting better, that they tend to take each kind of each loss a little bit more independently perhaps, and although there's a policy that it can be a little bit more, you know in the company's discretion about, about how long you get off, but you know at the end of the day that they want you back and they want you to be the same person, doing the same job, as if that loss hasn't happened. And all your colleagues want you to be exactly the same because they know, they know you and you know they. They know what makes you tick and they know how you work. And suddenly you're this changed person trying to do this job and you're trying to go back into a role when you've changed as a, as a person.

Kate Nudds: 16:14

So it is a real barrier because it's it's really difficult. But again, everybody's different. Some people might want to go back to work really quickly because it helps them to um, you know they like the focus and they don't really want to be thinking about it. But, like I say that, the grief often catches up with you eventually and you don't necessarily always know it's grief because it's it's quite some time later when it does actually rear its head, but you won't necessarily equate that to that event. That has happened previously. So you're not necessarily thinking that it's grief, but the book, the Body, keeps the Score. That grief is being stored in the body and it comes out eventually. So yeah, the company policy and the pressure that society puts on us, I think is a barrier.

Manya Chylinski: 16:59

You mentioned that specifically. You were mentioning the workplace, but I think this is true in a lot of contexts that we expect the person is going to be back to normal. They're going to come back and here we're talking bereavement specifically to normal. They're going to come back, and here we're talking bereavement specifically. But I think this is true of many kinds of losses and many kinds of changes that you might experience grief, and it is so difficult for us to deal with somebody else changing and we just want things to go back to normal. Even if the thing happened to us, we just want to go back to normal. That seemed like such a human response of please take me back to where I was two minutes before this thing happened and it seems to me that can be a barrier to our own healing is that we all want to get back to where we were, but we're actually never going to get back to that person.

Kate Nudds: 17:58

Yeah, yeah, and it's understanding that this is a new normal and it's trying to work out what that new normal looks like.

Kate Nudds: 18:04

And grief is really the loss of all the hopes and dreams for the future. So you've not only got the loss here and now, it's all those secondary losses that come that you're never going to then be able to to do and see and have with. You know that, let's talk about or even you know with that person. So you have changed. Your whole life has changed. Everything that you thought was going to happen has changed. There's just there's so many changes that you have to go through and and it really only comes with time that you start to be able to kind of accept it really and realize that I've, that you have changed and and what that now looks like, what does that world look like and what do you want to do next? And you know have you got to make an awful lot of changes. You know people lose partners and financially, their, their financial situation has changed overnight. Isn't just that, the loss of that, it's all those secondary losses that come with it.

Manya Chylinski: 18:57

Absolutely. Why do you think we have such a hard time with this kind of change and dealing with grief after loss? Why is it so hard for us to accept that it's going to be new? I'm going to be a different person. This person that I'm working with, my colleague, my boss, is going to be different. What's that barrier?

Kate Nudds: 19:19

I think, and they say, it's the club that you don't want to join. But when you've got a ticket for it, you're in it for life, and unless you've been through it, you just don't really get it. And the majority of people aren't necessarily talking to each other about grief and loss. So we're all going about our daily lives without, without touching on it, and especially at work, we, and even in our homes and things. We, we aren't very good about approaching the subject before it's happened.

Kate Nudds: 19:52

And actually, if we could have conversations, this is what I would like and this is what needs to happen. If this happens to me, you know, let's preempt those conversations. But we, but we don't, because we shy away from it, because we think we're going to tempt fate. But actually would it not take the pressure off the people that were left behind a little bit if we were able to be a bit more open about the end, whatever that looks like and whenever that might be? Could we not just open up those conversations and not be quite so worried about having them? It's the circle of life. We all know we have an expiration date. Unfortunately we don't know when that is, but shouldn't we kind of talk about what might happen, what we want to happen, when that does happen, that's scary though, I don't want to think about dying.

Kate Nudds: 20:40

I would have been the same before the grief work. But then when I saw my mum, my mum die and I saw, you know, I saw her getting iller and iller, I just thought why are we not talking about this? We, we were in denial of her death until the day she died. I was hoping for some sort of miracle, even you know the day she died, and that miracle never came, funnily enough, and it's really made me focus on, I want all my ducks in a row so that the people around me are not so battered by grief as as I was.

Kate Nudds: 21:10

You know, I need them to know where all the paperwork is. I need them to not worry about what I want or what I don't want. You know, here it is. It's all, it's all written. You don't even need to have the conversation if you don't want to have the conversation, but just think about it yourself. You know what. What do you want? What you know, take the pressure off. What. What music do you want playing? You know why do we struggle so much with, with thinking about, about the end? Because, like I say, it's the one, it's the only thing that every single one of us are gonna.

Manya Chylinski: 21:40

And I don't know the answer right to why. Is it something? I guess because I'm thinking it's the unknown, it means the end. Once I'm gone, then I'm going to miss out on everybody's stories and I don't want to think about that. I don't know. It is interesting thought about my own death much more since my own experience with trauma and view life much more preciously now because of that experience and realizing how close I and so many others were to maybe not being here anymore. And it definitely has changed the way that I look at death and the way that I think about it for myself and think about it for others. And I realized that doesn't mean I'm not going to grieve, it just means I have a little bit more. I'm just I don't know maybe maybe a little bit more understanding of it. Yeah, you're processing it differently, absolutely, and that's what I mean about.

Kate Nudds: 22:45

Once you're in that club, you can't really get out of it. You've got the ticket, for whatever reason, and you just understand it and get it a little bit more. You know, my sort of ideal clients are people that want to make a big change whilst they're grieving. They want to give up that corporate job because they've just seen how short life is. They want to go traveling, they want to start that business, all those things that they've thought about and said that they want to do but just never got around to it.

Kate Nudds: 23:08

Suddenly you realize that time is so, so precious and actually I don't want to be doing this, because if I have only got, you know, six months to live, I want to make sure that I'm doing something that I want to be doing. So it does. It sort of puts a bit of a clock on your own head and you start to think about your own mortality. That's how I thought. What happened with me and my grief? I'd never really thought about it and then, like I say, I went through this whole kind of deep challenge with grief, but it made me start thinking about my own mortality and what you know, am I doing what I want to be doing, and no, I wasn't yeah and now I am.

Manya Chylinski: 23:41

it is very interesting how it is an opportunity to re reevaluate our own life and our own choices that when someone we care for dies, what role do you think the community has or our organizations have in fostering that sense of resilience or creating space for us to deal with our grief and loss?

Kate Nudds: 24:08

I think everybody has a bit of a responsibility to give that person time, their own time, whatever grief looks like for that person, and for however long that is. I wish that we still have to wear the black armbands so that people knew that we were grieving, because they would understand we don't necessarily know what's going on behind someone's eyes, and if you were able to kind of outwardly show, look, I'm grieving, I'll take this off in my own time, whatever that looks like, whenever that is, it would just perhaps take the pressure off others that you did know, and for me it just it kind of it would just allow space. And that's what companies and people need to do. They need to just allow people to have the space to grieve, and our language around grief isn't very helpful. You know we do kind of say you know you're not over it yet, or we just have this expectation that that somebody is going to be okay after six months or, you know, kind of a year and certainly after two years. You know you really should be over it by now.

Kate Nudds: 25:05

Um, and why is that? And I think once you've been through it, you get it and that that's the difference. When you haven't been through it. It does look like that person. You know, okay, they, they they're um, we need to help them get over this. It's that kind of fixing again and you can't. You can't fix and companies can't fix and individuals can't fix.

Kate Nudds: 25:24

So if we could just create that space for conversations, if we could, if managers were a little bit more, had a bit more education around grief and the grief process and what that looks like, they might be able to deal with with their colleagues that are grieving a little bit easier. But again, I, you know, I kind of go back to once you've been through it, you're so much, you've got so much more empathy because you get it, and that's the only way I can describe it. You just get it. You have got that ticket, um, and when you haven't, it is so difficult to understand. But we can do a lot more education around it and we can talk about it more and these types of conversations and in my podcast and other grieving podcasts and books, and if we just created space for people to, if we just created space for people to be able to talk about grief in general, we might not be quite so uneducated about it. Yeah, absolutely.

Manya Chylinski: 26:22

Kate, this has been such a fabulous conversation and we're getting very close to the end of our time. When you think about grief and loss and resiliency, what is giving you hope right now?

Kate Nudds: 26:36

That's the thing about grief and being able to create these spaces and whether that's in communities, whether's at festivals, whether that's in the, in the corporate world, I go into all these different places and get to talk to people about their grief and, honestly, it's I feel so privileged to be able to do it.

Kate Nudds: 26:55

I'm just such an advocate for talking about grief and if you just said to me four years ago, you know you'll be talking about grief all day and you'll be talking about loss with people, I wouldn't have believed you. But having been through that experience myself, um, and the types of conversations that I get to have with people, and and what grief? When you are talking about grief, you're allowing people to talk about something that might have happened years ago and they don't get to talk about that grief anymore because you know friends and family don't want to hear about it anymore and you know society has expected you to move on. But creating that space allows them to be able to talk about that grief again and it's so it. You can see people almost light up. I know they're talking about something that's really really quite difficult, but the very fact that they're able to talk about it again it does. It gives them. There's that hope. It's.

Kate Nudds: 27:45

It's that hope that you know that this person hasn't been forgotten there's a, there's a lot of feelings around, you know, forgetting people, and if I move on with my own life then I can't, you know, I shouldn't be happy because because of whatever's happened and and actually it, that hope is in the is the work is in being able to have your own happy life without feeling guilt or shame or all the other emotions that come around that, and that's what the work is really. That's the grief work you are looking for, hope for the future, that you can be that changed person. But you can still have an amazing life, but you'll just carry grief with you.

Manya Chylinski: 28:25

Yeah, I think that is something we want. We want the grief to be over, we want to get over it, but in fact it stays with us. It just changes form as we process.

Kate Nudds: 28:39

Yeah, yeah, exactly, and it's learning to live with grief, but the pain slightly lessens as you process that grief and as you, as you hopefully, move through the life you want to lead, because you've seen how, how short and how difficult it can be.

Manya Chylinski: 28:57

Yes, absolutely, Kate. Thank you so much for sharing. Before we say goodbye, can you share with our listeners what you do and how they can reach you?

Kate Nudds: 29:08

sure? Yeah, so I'm Kate Nudds. As we said, I'm a grief coach. My podcast and Instagram handle and website is pretty much grieve, then achieve, and you can reach out to me if you would like any help, if you would need any podcast recommendations, any book recommendations. Once you start going down the grief rabbit hole, there is so much out there and so much hope and so much help from others, because everybody's got their own different experience of how they've handled it and there's so many different types of losses as well. So if you would like some help with loss, then just let me know.

Manya Chylinski: 29:42

Wonderful, kate. Thank you so much. We'll put links to that in the show notes for folks to reach you, and thank you so much for talking about this, and I hope our listeners have learned a lot from the way that you think about grief. Thanks very much, and thanks for having me, thank you. Thank you for listening. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I did. So if you'd like to learn more about me, manya Chylinski, I work with organizations to help understand how to create environments where people can thrive after difficult life experiences, and I do this through talks and consulting. I'm a survivor of mass violence and I use my experience to help leaders learn about resiliency, compassion and trauma-sensitive leadership to build strategies to enable teams to thrive and be engaged amidst difficulty and turmoil. If this is something you want to learn more about, visit my website, www. manyachylinski. com, email me at manya@ manyachylinski, or stop by my social media on LinkedIn and Twitter. Thanks so much.