Old Wounds, New Grief

Summary

In this episode of Growth from Grief, host Susan Andersen explores the complex relationship between old wounds and new grief. She shares her personal experiences with grief, particularly following the loss of her son, and discusses how unresolved emotions from past losses can resurface during new periods of grief. Andersen emphasizes the importance of acknowledging these feelings and finding supportive environments to process them. She also highlights insights from experts on grief and introduces somatic therapy as a method for healing. The episode concludes with an invitation for listeners to share their own experiences and reflections on grief.

Takeaways

• Grief can bring up unresolved emotions from the past.
• Writing can be a powerful tool for emotional release.
• It's important to acknowledge and process old grief.
• Grief has no set timeline and can resurface unexpectedly.
• Creating a safe environment is crucial for healing.
• Support from others can aid in the grieving process.
• It's okay to seek help and talk about grief.

Thank you for listening! Visit www.sueandersenyoga.com for Yoga for Grief classes and additional resources.

Transcript

Susan Andersen (00:01.454)
Hi, welcome to this episode of Growth from Grief. I'm your host Sue Andersen. And I wanted to talk with you today about a topic that has really touched me through my grief journey, but specifically right after my son died and then recently, you know, in the last three or four months. And I'm calling this old wounds and new grief.

So, you know, when we experience a loss, a new loss, sometimes before we can actually grieve that new loss, we find ourselves grieving something else that happened a long time ago.  Or we could be holding on to some loss, some trauma, especially from our childhood or from growing up or as a young adult that we didn't really know how to deal with or we weren't taught how to deal with that we kind of just, I don't know, buried inside or just left it in its own compartment and
and then it resurfaces. Something happens and it resurfaces. It's almost like maybe it can't stay where it was anymore. 

And, you know, first of all, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a therapist, and I'm interested really in the grief experience as a person, as a human who has experienced a lot of loss, but also as, you know, a yoga teacher and grief guide working with people who've experienced loss. And, you know, for me, I have this desire to move through these things when they happen my own brief experience and embrace it, which can be challenging, can be scary, can be moving into the unknown, and maybe sometimes you just don't know how to deal with it.

But I want to bring this subject up because I want to normalize it. And we can talk a little bit about specifically my experience, how it showed up, and specifically why it matters. And then also I want to talk about a couple of other people, one a celebrity and the other one a noted psychologist and therapist who wrote a book about his own experience that he finally allowed himself to experience. 

So let me start by just talking about my own experience.  What comes to mind first and foremost is after Ian died, my son who died in 2012, he was 25 and he died by suicide, which was a surprise because I just didn't think even though he was suffering with mental health issues, I really didn't think that he would take his own life.

Susan Andersen (04:07.906)
But, you know, I believe that he really, really couldn't take it anymore. Take these demons in his head, as he said. He called them those, called them that, demons in his head. And after he died, and probably, I don't know, like a month or so later, I don't know the exact timing of it, I realized... that I was feeling emotion, a lot of anger, but it wasn't anger at Ian, it wasn't anger at him, was anger at his dad who had died way before him, 29 years, 28 years before he died. 

But when Ian's dad died, we were, you know, young. were, he was 33. I think I had was just going to turn 30 that year. He was just going to turn 33. And, you know, we hadn't been probably married for six or seven years, maybe or five years. don't remember actually. But certainly together for seven or eight. And we were not getting along. We were having a lot of arguments specifically because of his addiction.

When he died, I was very, very angry. I held a lot of anger, but I never addressed it. And I didn't know that. Didn't know that I was not addressing that anger at that time until my son died. And then it sort of...came out. I could feel it. I could sense it in my body. And as I reflected, I realized that, wow, I have been carrying this anger. And I have been lashing out at people. I have been kind of mean to people, even people close to me over the years. Certainly, in the five or 10 years after his death, certainly taking that out on others and those close to me. But I didn't realize how much it had buried itself in my body until that time it came up. 

And fortunately, I was seeing a therapist, grief therapist, who helped me, you know, notice that, work with me with those emotions and made a suggestion that I write a letter to my husband, former husband, and let him know how I was feeling.
Not meant to send it or anything, but just to get all of these feelings out that I've been holding on to for 25 plus years. And so I did that. I actually went to the cemetery that he is buried in and I sat there and I just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote in my journal and couldn't believe how much better I felt. 

Just that act of writing helped me release these feelings, release this emotion. And what ended up happening was that I could then move on to focus on the grief from the death of my son. Because I had let that other grief go. I certainly thought about it, but I didn't have that emotional, deep emotional attachment. That experience isn't gonna go away, but I was able to release a lot of that gripping that I had. I think gripping is a good word, gripping that I had. So, you know, that was a little bit of my shift after my son died. 

Now recently, have been experiencing a lot of grief and I really didn't know why. So I started going back and thinking about all the people who had died, all the experiences that I had. You know, again, working with the therapist, doing some writing, doing movement, you know, different kinds of modalities that I believed would help me get this emotion out. 

Well, it's a lot of layers that I've been holding on to unwittingly, you know, unwittingly, and now they're coming up. So I'm having to go back to having that heart to heart conversation with myself, and I'm resisting it, resisting it. I don't want to be crying all the time. I don't want to, you know, go through this process. And yet, I know that I have to. I know that it's important. And so I'll tell you about some of the things that I've done to help me work through this most recent you know, experience with this old wounds and new grief. 

But perhaps you might reflect on your own past experiences and, you know, noticing if anything comes up for you, that you're surprised that it comes up. You thought you had taken care of it. And one last little note here is that, you know, we think that we had let that go. 

But in reality, sometimes growing up, we're not given the tools. I certainly wasn't given the tools to deal with grief. And I suspect a lot of people would feel the same way. There's no blaming here. It's just that's the way it was at the time. And I'm...
probably did the same thing with my son, right? So things are changing and hopefully as a culture we keep talking about this, we keep talking about that it's okay to be grieving, it's okay to deal with these things when they come up.

I also want to recount an experience that I had with a student. This is back in, I think it was 2019 when I was transitioning my yoga classes. Kind of my focus was transitioning, I guess is a better word to say, better way to say it, transitioning to focusing on yoga for grief and I had my first community class, it was in person, and there was only a few people there, but one of the participants who came after our final pose, our pose of rest or Shavasana, she told me that even though she had come there for a recent loss of a relative, that what kept coming up for her and she realized she had to deal with was the death of her son some 20 years prior.

Susan Andersen (13:06.146)
He died from a drug addiction. And she really, I guess, didn't deal with it. And it came up for her. And she recognized that, wow, now she needs to work on this. This is something that she needs to take care of for herself, that she kept it buried inside for so long.

So, know, one of the things that we want to find when we are working through, especially these repressed feelings, emotions, traumas, losses, is to find a safe environment to be with a person that you can trust, a person that's going to provide supportive environment for you. And there's a lot of ways to do that. Certainly in yoga, but again, we'll talk a little bit more about that. A little in a couple moments here. 

I mentioned in my opening remarks that about expert, we'll call them experts are just celebrities or people that have are prominent in their field. And recently, in the last three or four months, I listened to two podcasts that specifically talked about this unresolved trauma or grief that are loss that occurred in childhood or young adulthood that each of these gentlemen had kept repressed, right? They kept it down. They kept it compartmentalized and then realized that they couldn't go on anymore. This emotion kept coming up for them. 

And so one of the podcasts, and perhaps you listen to it, is Anderson Cooper's All There Is podcast.

Susan Andersen (15:30.606)
So he had an episode that's called Creating a Companionship with Grief. And he talks about his experience as a young boy and a young man losing his dad and his brother, and then subsequently as an older person, the death of his mother. And...
that he had been suppressing this grief for decades. But he recognized that at 57, age of 57, he couldn't go on anymore because he couldn't do anything without tears coming to his eyes or remembering his dad choking up. It was just all coming to the surface. 

So he reached out to psychotherapist and author Francis Weller to ask for help. And Francis Weller has a beautiful book, just a wonderful book on letting go of grief and grief rituals and the gates of grief. It's called The Wild Edge of Sorrow. And I just started rereading it again. It has so many nuggets in it of information of how to befriend your grief or as he calls it, creating companionship with grief. 

Anderson Cooper talks about the strategies he developed as a child to shield him from grief and they're not working now. They're working against him and he has to deal with this. Francis Weller and he have this discussion about things that Anderson Cooper can do to move the grief through his body with different rituals, with journaling, but that he has to move it out. This 'creating a companionship with grief' means that we are acknowledging the loss and the grief and we're allowing ourselves to find these safe, supportive environments to let go of the grief.

Susan Andersen (17:56.076)
We're we're letting go of the grief emotion so we can live, sort of live with and soften that actual experience so that we can look back at it differently. And that really struck me because again, I started thinking about my growing up as a teenager, as a young adult, and all of these losses that I had that I really didn't, you know, they were just like, you went to the funeral. You went to the wake, you went to the funeral, and then everything was hunky dory. Well, it really wasn't, of course, but that's sort of the way it was, right? 

So that's a really good podcast to listen to if you are...having the same kind of issue. I'm gonna try to figure out what do I do? I can't go on like this. 

The other podcast that I listen to is from One Commune and this is a podcast from 2024. And the person interviewed is Dr. Peter Levine. And Dr. Levine is the father, I guess, if you will, of somatic therapy. And I'll talk about that in a second, but somatic therapy is something that he pioneered. Peter Levine, pioneered. And 50 years later, he actually had one of his students help him with this modality to move his own childhood trauma so he could release it, release the emotion associated with it, the grief associated with it because we feel it in our bodies. 

Susan Andersen (19:59.66)
And one of the things I found interesting about this discussion is that Peter Levine started this because he noticed how animals in the wild often do not, they have a lot of traumatic experience but they are able to deal with it by moving their body. So shaking is one way that they are able to move their bodies and release this emotion associated with the traumatic experience. 

So they talk about this somatic therapy and how the body can store these unresolved, this unresolved pain and again this unresolved pain causes issues in the body right so it's it's the same the same issue that Anderson Cooper talks about. 

So you know why this happens I don't know why scientifically why this happens, for me, there was two different things that happened. One was that I was after the death of my son, that event, that loss, somehow brought up this pain of an anger of losing Ian, of his dad, losing Ian's dad.

Susan Andersen (22:04.76)
This most recent exploration of past grief came about when I've been doing just different kinds of therapies, like meditations, breath work, which I talk about in a previous podcast with Claire O'Brien, this breath work journey (Episode 43) and all of a sudden these things came about. So, you know, I think sometimes it's like our body can't deal with it anymore, can't be repressed anymore. And it's longing to be integrated, longing to be integrated. 

So what we did previously as a child or a young adult, how we repressed these feelings no longer works as an adult. And sooner or later, it's going to come out and we have to deal with it.

Susan Andersen (23:15.714)
So, you we know that this unresolved grief weighs heavily over time, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I felt it. I'm sure you feel it or have felt it as well. And grief really has no timeline. So if there's something that you haven't dealt with, that emotion is still in the body. And just because it happened previously doesn't mean...then you can't heal it. And that's what we want to do. We want to move this grief, we want to heal this grief, and we want to integrate it into our life.

Susan Andersen (24:00.319)
And so it's important for each of us to welcome when these things arise, don't go back to maybe a unresolved or childhood way of dealing with this situation that happened a long time ago, this trauma, this loss, this grief that happened a long time ago, but instead take the step forward, which is painful, which is not easy to move through the grief, to befriend the grief, to allow it to be beside you until it can work out of your body.

And I wanted to just talk about a couple of different things here. One is... I mentioned different therapies and I talked about Dr. Peter Levine and specifically about somatic therapies.

Susan Andersen (25:22.518)
So this research that he did and subsequently wrote books and trained, I believe in the podcast it was mentioned, 60,000 therapists worldwide on this somatic therapy technique. What we're, or what it does, or what the therapist does, or therapist helps us, is release...these pent-up emotions by using various body, mind-body techniques. 

So for example, just body awareness, which you might have done in a yoga class where you do a body scan. So that's one way that you can recognize areas of tension and also areas of ease while you are...thinking or conjuring up calming thoughts. There's something called pendulation, which guides people from a relaxed state to emotions similar to their traumatic experience and then back to a relaxed state. So that's something that you would work with a somatic therapist. And another one is called titration, which guides people through a traumatic memory while noting any accompanying physical sensations and addressing them in real time again working with a therapist.

Susan Andersen (27:00.48)
And then the last one I have here on this list that I'm reading is called Resourcing, which helps people recall resources in their lives that promote feelings of calm and safety, such as special people and places.

Susan Andersen (27:21.678)
So this is the kind of therapy that you could consider using alongside talk therapy, right? So there's certainly all kinds of things that you can do with moving emotions out of the body. As a yoga teacher, I love to work with people to help them release these emotions. know, grief yoga, yoga for grief is a safe space to do that. Writing, exploring writing and ritual perhaps. So ritual could be something like being in a group where you do an exercise together, maybe where you're something down on a piece of paper, you're putting it in a fire or in a glass of water, and everyone, sort of a community.

Everyone is there to support each other. And Francis Weller in his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, has a number of different ritual techniques and resources that one can try.  So along with support groups and individual therapy, there are these different modalities that you can try. And that's what I've been doing and I've been talking about in my other podcast episodes, because healing is not a straight line. It's a zigzag or a spiral or something that's not straight.

Susan Andersen (29:29.006)
So in closing, I just want to remind you that it's okay if old grief rises with new grief or just out of the blue, you have these emotions come to the surface. What's really happening is that your body is inviting you to tend to what is ready to heal. Your body is inviting you to tend what's ready to heal.

Susan Andersen (30:07.074)
I'd love to hear from you if you've had a similar experience or want to share your own story. You can connect with me from the contact page on my website, www.sueandersenyoga.com. Send me an email or comment on this podcast episode.

Also, if you're looking for resources, you can find them on my website, my YouTube channel. Just check it all out on sueandersenyoga.com.

Let's just take a moment in closing here. Bring your feet down onto the floor. If you're listening to this while driving, just relax your shoulders.

If you're anywhere else but in a car, moving car, then just take a nice deep inhale, close your eyes, exhale.

And then inhale, exhale. If you're in your car, just keep the eyes open. Inhale, exhale.

Susan Andersen (31:41.432)
Give yourself the opportunity to what's ready to heal. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.