Season 3, Episode 1 // Does Time Heal Wounds?

In this episode, Dear Psychopomp explores the complex nature of grief, the importance of accepting reality, and how to navigate emotional healing. With personal insights and practical advice, listeners are encouraged to embrace their pain and find balance in life.

grief, acceptance, emotional healing, mental health, self-growth, mindfulness, life balance

Global Grief Network - https://globalgriefnetwork.com
Grief Talk Magazine - https://grieftalkmagazine.com
Tony Lynch on Instagram - https://instagram.com/mensgriefsupport

You can find me online at Linktr.ee/DearPsychopomp

Transcript

Dear Psychopomp (00:01.784)
Hello, beloved listeners. this is Dear Psycho Pomp. Let's talk about death. And this is Da Vinci. If if you're new here, welcome. If you're not welcome back. I have missed our conversations. I've been thinking about them quite often and writing whenever I can and I needed

some time away to process a a very deep grief.

That I've held on to for

like three, four years. you know, even death Doulas get stuck in grief. It's not

Not something you can master. bless you. So thank you for being here. the studio has changed slightly. I have two cats and three birds kicking around here. They're usually pretty quiet when I'm recording. but I'll edit it out if it's too loud. Don't worry, you don't have to worry about the screeches.

Dear Psychopomp (01:20.876)
Life has been lifing hard. I haven't had any episodes for far too long. Yet the podcast keeps on growing, thanks to you. And we're actually at over twelve hundred downloads. I I can't describe how that makes me feel and how thankful I really, really am. And you know, this podcast started as

as an homage to my friend who died and it's just transformed my entire world. I've I've had the opportunity to meet so many wonderful human beings. and my life is is forever changed for the better because of it. And from the the bottom of my morbid little heart, thank you for

Every like, every share, every listen, every laugh, everything. I did receive quite an honor recently. I was featured on the cover of the Grief Talk magazine's tenth edition. Hi Da Vinci. thank you to my very dear friend Tony Lynch.

who is just unstoppable as a force. you can check him out at the Global Global Griefnetwork.com or on Instagram as Men's Grief Support. And he really touches on, you know, the important things that that come with grieving as a man and grieving in general and the the things that he's doing. There's the

Global Grief Network app that he's coming out with has a billion features. It can connect you with approved practitioners, support groups, live events, grief resources, language support, and a global community that understands you.

Dear Psychopomp (03:39.211)
There we go. Okay, he's stuck. Alright, we're just gonna we're just gonna do you wanna sit here? There we go. Okay. We'll see if we can get him in the screen here. Da Vinci's gonna be our buddy.

possibly. Anyways, I wanted to start off with the five stages of grief, which are actually they were mislabeled. it was Elizabeth Kubler Ross who wrote them specifically for people who are terminally ill and facing death and you know who are going to die soon from so it's

It's the five stages of accepting death. And while I do wish accepting death is something that we could just do all the time, 'cause it would change our perspectives, it's accepting grief doesn't come with neatly packaged stages of obvious beginnings and obvious endings and a final goal of

We're back to where we were, as if nothing had ever happened at all. And

That's not how it works. that's where we get stuck, I think, is not being able to accept our current reality. It's it's I know, we we will not let ourselves accept it. This is completely unacceptable. So of course we're not working on healing. That takes a lot of energy, but all of our energy is going into trying to control the narrative and saying things like

Dear Psychopomp (05:32.054)
I just don't understand, or I just can't believe this. And the second fault of our brains is prioritizing needing to understand something fully before accepting it. We listen to our brains more than our bodies, and I think both of them need to have an equal say. We ignore what our bodies are screaming at us for the sake of.

seeking a reason. Like why did this happen? How did this happen? What could I have done differently? And that's our brains just trying to figure out some kind of reason or justification for what happened. We don't always get that. There's not always a reason. There's not always a good reason. There's not always even a bad reason. We're not owed

The reason. And meanwhile, there's the neglected like physical and emotional things going on too. You know, our bodies affect our brains and our brains affect our bodies. There's scientific proof, oodles of it, that I would love to spit out, but I can't because I have a bird on my head right now. but it shows that once you can get

in cahoots with your body, your your life is never gonna be the same again when you can listen to it and work with it instead of trying to make it do things that it it doesn't want to do or it can't do at the moment. And I just

Once I learned to follow my heart, follow that gut.

Dear Psychopomp (07:32.726)
Life changed. anyways, it's not about me. The first fault, if you were wondering, is allowing your brain to be the one to make all the decisions. The brain the brain has no say in affairs of the heart. Your your body will tell you what it wants. to be nourished, to be tended to, to connect with others it can feel safe with and resonate with.

like this teeny tiny dinosaur on my head. the third fault is our brains convincing us that we're somehow disconnected from the collective, that we're having a a singular experience completely separate from all others.

But we we are of nature. We're nature created us. Like is is not a tree capable of standing on its own going through the storms and building that that strong trunk but still having its roots intertwined with others that are sharing the same soil, you know? Or sharing the same seeds. Sorry. anyways.

Once you accept what has happened to you.

Dear Psychopomp (09:03.095)
Then you can start to heal from it. It's it's as easy as saying like, Yes, this happened and you have to say it out loud. I know it's hard to say it or write it or type it because that's what makes it real and it is real.

It is. This is life. This is it's already happening. Grieve Get over here, silly bird.

Grief is

Dear Psychopomp (09:35.917)
Grief is a wound.

Dear Psychopomp (09:39.947)
your heart, your soul, what makes you you. And it's just like a physical wound. Like it will heal. It'll heal heal faster if you tend to it. But also like don't keep taking off the metaphorical bandages to see why it's not healing faster or it's not healing the right way or healing exactly how you think it should be healing. It's

It's true that time heals wounds. It does.

But time time is the tool, time is the gift. It it doesn't stop moving. that's its nature. Time has been, it is, and it still will be. Just like artists is to keep learning and evolving and growing. And we're we're surviving now. Like we're not, you know, worried about predators and things like that. But

Are we surviving mentally?

You're n you're never gonna be who you were before.

Dear Psychopomp (10:57.602)
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, but like what is learned cannot be unlearned. Thank you. If you can accept grief, you can accept that grief changes you. That's the next step. You're still you intrinsically, but you're a a wiser version, a different version who had something terrible happen to them. And

Dear Psychopomp (11:30.732)
you have to be able to give yourself the time to accept it. It's not just gonna be like I love how everything is just

immediate gratification. You can buy this and it's here in a day and you can click this and then you have it on your T V in two seconds. And we've forgotten that

Time is is what we need.

We need to be able to reflect and introspect and connect and disconnect and to be able to have all that time to be able to do those things.

That's where the healing is.

Dear Psychopomp (12:25.974)
you know, and even when you've healed from this terrible, terrible thing, there is something beautiful that comes from it. It's it's not like at least this or at least that or small mercies or whatever uncomfortable people want to say to make themselves feel more comfortable. It's i we learn that we don't have to fear the darkness.

Just as we don't have to fear the light. And

you know, too much darkness we can't see, but it's also the same with too much light. We go blind. We need that that balance. We need to have them together. And the light will show you where it's no longer needed. And there's always shade if you're feeling like there's too much light. And the darkness holds it gently.

Showing us which way the light is.

We need that balance.

Dear Psychopomp (13:41.313)
Anyways, so on top of the grief that you already have on the go, you're also grieving this last version of yourself and and trying to make space for this new one. but remember, like they're all the same. You're evolving, you're growing. like our bodies know what to do. I tell this to my clients all the time. Your body knows exactly how to die. Your body knows exactly how to be born.

how to breathe, how to laugh, how to heal itself, and and we try to control it or ignore it. And because of technological advances in medicine, like we've come to expect these long and healthy lives where we die from old age and we've managed to cure diseases and eradicate plagues and add decades onto our life expectancy. But

At what cost? Like when did when did longevity become more important than the quality of life? And I don't mean that with like people who are terminally ill or chronically ill or anything like that. I mean

I mean mentally we're expecting this. And you know, it all starts with us trying to defy the

trying to defy death in the first place, you know? The longer we live, the worse our health gets. life just keeps trying to

Dear Psychopomp (15:24.408)
Let us know where we stand and things and you know we've been given extra years years yet we still prioritize wealth over well being. We have this extra time and we're like sweet, more money to make. I digress.

Healing from an emotional wound is akin to healing from a physical injury. At first you're in shock. Maybe you feel that pang in your chest and your body knows that something's happened before your brain can really catch up. and then you feel it, you feel the pain, and you can succumb to it or

suppress it and your your heart is racing and your body is telling you to pay attention but your brain just doesn't want to relinquish control. This is fine, this is fine. I've got this, this is fine. And you say you're fine so many times that you actually start believing it.

Dear Psychopomp (16:38.348)
And then you assess, can I take care of this myself? Or should I find someone who can help me? And

Therein lies the issue of trust. Do you trust other people to help you? Do you trust yourself to know when it's time to ask for help?

And just like any wound, it needs cleaning and bandaging and rest and of course time. So mentally that means clearing away any excuses or any blaming of circumstances. Hold yourself accountable for your part in what happened, whether it's good or bad. It means loving yourself even when it's hard, especially when it's hard.

And you forgive yourself and you reflect with self-compassion. And you tell yourself this story. And again, you can write about it, you can read about it, you can listen to all the podcasts you want. But if you don't express it,

It's just gonna need to keep being cleaned and and bandaged until you can accept it. And you have to rest in between. Something that takes even more time, and we think we don't have any time. But we have all the time we have until we don't have any more. It's not the end until it ends. but you need to be able to rest to let your body

Dear Psychopomp (18:19.694)
Do what it needs to do. It's not automatic. It's not an aha moment. Rest is the hardest part because you suddenly have all this time to do the things you've been meaning to do and haven't had time for. And you're like, I could totally do that right now. And then you do it, and then your body's like, Please no.

And so you actually have to listen to your body and let it heal and let it do its thing. And the body will express what it needs. It needs you to process the feelings and integrate them as part of your story. So if you need to do that by telling your story out loud and adding a new sentence every time, then do it. It

Your body needs you to cry. It needs you to feel the pain so that you know what needs your attention.

But we learn to value our brains instead of our bodies, you know. We numb the pain because we don't want to feel it at all when emotions and feelings are part of being human and be like asking the ocean not to float. That's just its nature, you know. I know pain can be scary.

And we try and numb the pain and it makes it feel okay for a little while, but but it keeps coming back because we're not actually tending to it. We're just trying to ignore it. And so then it lingers and it festers and we think we can just ignore it.

Dear Psychopomp (20:13.784)
You know, sometimes we get so good at it we start saying things like, it was a long time ago or Hmm, I'm used to it. This is just how I am now.

And we believe it. And like some people actually, well, some people, tons of people, all of us, begin to identify as your emotions. Because you feel them so deeply. And they just get worse and worse because you're not tending to them. You know, emotions are like clouds. They're gonna come and they're gonna go.

And if you try and freeze them in place so that they stop coming, it's not gonna happen.

You know, it's I don't I don't wanna be the bitter one holding on to resentment or the sad one holding on to the grief of not living the life I thought I would. I don't want

To be the liar holding on to lost trust or an old version of myself, the one who's scared to live 'cause they don't want to be hurt again.

Dear Psychopomp (21:33.186)
We're always gonna be hurt again.

If nothing were going on we'd be dead, right? That's

And it's hard to make peace with pain.

But if you can make peace with pain, you can get through anything.

Still hard and it's still gonna change you. But it happens.

Dear Psychopomp (22:02.232)
You know, find it funny how like we ad admire and applause people who can like get back on that metap metaphorical horse and that's because we know how terrifying it would be. We know how scary it would be to do that again and risk getting hurt again in the same way. And we praise the actors who can showcase emotions that we wish we could express.

And we love hearing the stories of resilience, but only after it's complete, because otherwise all we can see is the struggle, and that reminds us of our own and seeing another human being accomplish something you wish you could do is inspiring. It's starting to rain here and Poe is very excited. So okay.

So while we sit here with our big sexy brains trying to further understand our big sexy brains, don't forget that knowledge comes from living life. Not reading about it or hearing about it. You have to go and do it. You have to go for that walk to be able to see that beauty. And you're not going to be ready until you get out there and say, Yeah, this is what I needed. And so when you're done listening to this or watching this, I want you to go hug a tree. I don't care if it's raining.

Don't care if it's snowing, go hug a tree. Put your phone down for an hour.

Laugh with the birds. Slow down. Slow down. You're not in a rush to die, are you? What's your hurry? Get that screen out of your face, get the noise out of your ears. Go outside and listen to what life wants to tell you. Turn off the noise and listen to your body.

Dear Psychopomp (23:56.536)
Death isn't a secret.

Let's talk about it.

If you Poe thank you. If you dig this episode, I'd be grateful for any feedback, likes, shares, whispers into the void, or even message me on Instagram. I'd love to hear from you.

Life is about gathering guests for your funeral, so make sure they're top-notch company. And I think a lot of us have forgotten that we get to choose our mindset. I'm just meandering more because I can. That's not something that anyone can take away or control, by the way. Like your mindset. So what's your mindset? How do you view your life?