Tips for Rootedness: Grieving our Losses

In this episode of the Uprooted by Unwanted Change podcast, host Kiran Prasad delves into the complex emotions surrounding grief and loss. Drawing from personal experiences and insights from grief expert David Kessler, Kiran explores the definitions of grief, mourning, and bereavement, and discusses the five stages of grief. The conversation emphasizes the importance of feeling emotions, how grief is as unique as our fingerprint, cultural perspectives on grief, and the significance of acceptance and meaning in the healing process. Kiran also highlights what not to say to someone who is grieving, aiming to provide support and understanding during difficult times.

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Transcript

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This podcast may contain sensitive material that may not be suitable for everyone. Information shared is based on personal experiences and not meant to replace medical or other professional help. Hi everyone, welcome to the Uprooted by Unwanted Change podcast. I'm Kiran, your host, and you'll have the opportunity in this episode to get to know me a bit more as a person rather than as an interviewer. You'll gain insights from my own unwanted changes. And if you haven't tuned in before, every other Tuesday we'll have a guest on the show. I had one last Tuesday. In between that, interspersed with that, I have my tips for rootedness series for times when I don't have a guest like now. These tips are ways to help ground ourselves again after it feels like the floor's gone from underneath our feet. When we experience unwanted change, we also face loss and grief. That's why the tips for this episode are for grieving our losses. I'll talk about what grief is, why it's important to feel all our feelings, and what to avoid saying to someone who's grieving. I still remember how I felt when people unknowingly said the most hurtful things. We often worry about saying the wrong things and that's why we say nothing at all or even avoid a bereaved person like the plague! Before we begin, I need to point out that I'm not a medical health professional or a grief expert. I've just learned a lot my own research and through David Kessler, who is a world renowned grief expert. I attended his in-person workshop in Pasadena, California. Also I took his online Grief Instructor training which I didn't quite complete, though I was hoping to become a Grief Instructor. So much of what I'm going to share is based on his work. I've also learned a lot from my own experiences through multiple unwanted changes, including having to move frequently in my life. It's what led me to write my book, A Mindful Move Feel at Home Again, to help newcomers through relocation grief and loss. Now, having found my way out of the wilderness after my most recent loss, I want to help others again. So what is grief? How's it different from mourning? And where does bereavement fit into all that? Grief is usually the internal emotional experience of loss, While mourning is the external expression of it, publicly, like at funerals. And bereavement, that's the time period in which grief and mourning occur. I think few people are aware of this distinction. David Kessler, who's not only a grief expert, but a bereaved parent himself, says that grief is the price we pay for love, and it's a natural normal expression of that love. As long as we feel love, we'll experience grief. We can't avoid it. I want to emphasize that it's not just the loss of a person that can cause grief. That's what we usually think. But any major loss such as a job, home, our health or a relationship, it can cause grief. The word bereaved is an old English term meaning to be robbed or deprived of. I had to throw that one in. It's the English teacher in me! It certainly feels like we've been robbed after facing a loss. We have assumptions about the way life's meant to be. Then when things don't go as we expected, our world is shattered and we suffer. Like when my marriage of 35 years ended in divorce. It felt like a death, the breakup of the family and future I'd envisioned of growing old together, all gone. Something inside me died too. Buddhists would say that suffering is caused by attachment and they encourage an acceptance of the impermanence of all things. But it's not that easy to let go. Especially for some of us more than others! Acceptance is also one of The Five Stages of Grief. You might have heard of these stages identified by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. They are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These were initially applied only to death and dying. Now they're considered to apply to any other kind of loss as well. And these stages are not necessarily linear, which means we can go back and forth between them even multiple times. We just know that we're starting to move forward in our healing when we come to some kind of acceptance. Sadly, not everyone reaches that stage of acceptance. Well, now let's run through these to have a better understanding of them. Denial, first of all. That's the shock and disbelief. I see that as the shock absorber phase, when numbness may be there to protect us from facing the reality of the situation that we find ourselves in and that we're not quite ready to accept. Like when I lost my mum unexpectedly a few years ago. I got the news at about six or seven in the morning when my nephew called from England. And I've come to expect that when I get a call about that time of the morning, it's usually not good news from overseas. When I arrived in England, I remember feeling nothing. Nothing except the usual excitement and happiness of seeing my family after so long. In fact, I was even laughing and joking. I kept thinking, what's wrong with me? My mum just died! Why aren't I feeling the pain? Then I later realised I was in shock and even denial, feeling numb. It was all so surreal. It wasn't until my sister asked me to order the flowers for the funeral, that it hit me, like a ton of bricks! I thought, this is the last time I'm ever going to buy flowers for my mom. Like this? In this way? It was crushing! That's when I broke down in tears and I couldn't stop. It was also very cathartic, this release of emotions. Then there's anger, which can be at oneself, at others, or at a higher power. Beneath that anger, there's usually pain. If the loss is of a person, that anger might come as early as even when funeral arrangements are being made. When family members are at loggerheads with one another. You might relate to that! Or if the loss is due to an injury or health crisis, you might be angry at why it happened to you? Then you start bargaining, which is the next stage. This is when you're trying to negotiate a different outcome, which can be right before the loss or after. All the what ifs that Chris Waker, our previous guest, referred to when he spoke about his spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed."What if I wasn't snowboarding that day? What if I didn't do this? My whole life would be different." And how he turned that kind of thinking around by changing his perspective. He said, "I could look at it as, hey, if I just broke my neck, like two vertebrae down, I would have full function of my arms and my fingers. But if I broke my neck, two vertebrae up, I wouldn't be able to move my arms at all. I may not even be able to breathe. I might have to be on a ventilator for my entire life." When people are unable to change their perspective, they might end up longer in the next phase, which is depression. By depression, I mean extreme sadness and deep despair rather than clinical depression. And the bereaved person, they may need their space to reflect or even isolate. It's a very normal part of grief. Others around us may tell us to just pull ourselves together, get on with our life. Of course, I'm sure they have our best interests at heart, but they may not understand that we need to process this in our own way. Obviously, if the depression is so severe that it's interfering with life in a major way, then maybe some kind of medical intervention might be needed. Then there's acceptance. This isn't uh necessarily, a happy phase or being over the loss. And It doesn't mean we have to like the situation that we found ourselves in. It's about accepting the reality of it. That this happened, and somehow, somehow, we have to find a way to move forward in this new normal and learn to live without what we lost. While Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identified this classic five stage model, David Kessler worked alongside her to refine it. In fact, he wrote a couple of books with her. He's since come up with a sixth stage, Finding Meaning. Which is about finding purpose and meaning in the loss we faced. He came up with this after losing his 21 year old son. And getting to a place of acceptance just wasn't enough for him. Often when people reach acceptance, they find purpose and meaning by helping others going through the same thing. You'll see that with our guests. I'm also at this stage of healing, finding meaning out of the loss and why I created this podcast. I found what helped me heal was to be aware of these stages and allow myself to feel all these feelings. In many Indian cultures, like the one I'm from, grief is both deeply personal as well as a collective experience, and it's considered sacred rather than taboo. We openly grieve together for weeks. Family, friends, neighbors, they visit the home of the bereaved, for what we call Aphsos, to pay their respects, share a meal, support one another with stories and memories of the departed. Both women and men cry openly if they want to. I certainly find it really healing. You might have your own tradition. Our second guest, Chris Waker, shared how it's important to feel all our feelings, also to be okay with not being okay sometimes. Expressing our feelings is not a sign of weakness. In fact, it takes a lot of strength. might we avoid feeling our grief? Perhaps it's because our current, pain can bring up old, unhealed pain. So it's beneficial to do some grief work otherwise we can keep piling up further pain into a pain body that keeps growing. Which is something Eckhart Tolle, my favorite author, he writes about that. This is when a support group or counseling might help if the pain is just too intense or too overwhelming for you to manage on your own. Someone once told me that feelings buried alive never die. And unhealed pain, it can indeed catch up with us at some point. I love this analogy that Kessler uses about a buffalo in a storm. Because when buffaloes are faced with an approaching storm, they actually run directly through it head on, minimizing the time they spend in bad weather. Whereas us humans, we try to avoid the suffering, which only prolongs the pain. Scott McKinley, our first guest on the show, he shared that sometimes we actually have to delay our grief when we have an overwhelming list of things to do, like after the wildfire that burnt down his house, which he likened to a person passing away and you having to do all the funeral arrangements and the other tasks and all these things have to be completed first. So you don't really have much time for yourself to process the grief. In our society, we try to numb our pain to avoid feeling it. I love Jim Carrey's sentiment about grief as not just an emotion, but a space where something once lived and now is gone, a hollow ache where love once resided. It's that hollow or void that we try to fill with food, alcohol, exercise, work, shopping, or something else. We all turn to our comforts during difficult times. But we have to be cautious about it becoming a problem if it's excessive. While most grief experts would agree that it's important to feel our feelings of loss rather than to stuff them. They would also agree that there's no one right way of doing it. To quote David Kessler, "Each person's grief is as unique as their fingerprint." Ultimately, we process it in our own way in our own time. In this episode, I was going to talk about various ways to cope when bereaved, but I decided our guests on this show already have that covered when they share their unique ways. There are also cultural differences in the way we grieve, as I mentioned earlier. Gender differences too. Kessler says that men and women grieve differently. Men tend to be less verbal, more likely to express anger over the situation, more task oriented, wanting to fix the problem or the situation. Although women could be that way too, not to generalize. And then women he says, tend to be more verbal in their grief, likely to feel a sense of failure or guilt. Needing to grieve more openly maybe, with lots of feelings and thoughts about the loss. They might even limit their physical contact. Isolate more. Again, some men might be that way too. Or our grief could be different from others because of our differing circumstances. Our first two guests they were very fortunate, they each had strong support from friends, family and their community. What if you're someone who doesn't have that? Then your experience will vary so much from someone who faced even the same loss. we don't know what other challenges people are facing, it's just best to avoid comparisons. The type of loss we face could be even different from most. It could be complex and tougher to talk about, like suicide, miscarriage, or death of a child. Or we experience accumulative losses. Frank Anderson, MD psychiatrist says that there's such a thing as accumulative losses through years of trauma. Then when another loss comes along, it can seem exaggerated and maybe just too much. I've experienced that after struggling, accumulative losses over the years, including my health, my mom, dad, marriage, jobs, homes and communities that I loved. I felt so overwhelmed by it. No sooner had after one loss, along came another. Sometimes things happening simultaneously. I felt like one of those moles, you know, in the Whack-a-Mole arcade game. Where these colorful moles pop their head out of their hole down with a plastic mallet. Because grief is unique and can be so complex, it's invalidating to say it should take x amount of weeks, months, or even years, or that we should be done grieving completely. Grief has no timeline, no closure is what experts say. Kessler sees it as a natural normal process and that we need to normalize the expression of love. He says it's okay for clinicians to just witness rather than fix it. Only intervening if there's severe disruptions to life. I was shocked to discover that there's something called a Prolonged Grief Disorder. It's a new disorder that's in the DSM, the manual used by therapists to diagnose. It's characterized as intense persistent grief symptoms, usually following the death of a close person. I know it refers to when there are severe disruptions to a person's life. But wouldn't we expect severe disruptions, for example, if someone lost their child? After one year, someone could be given this disorder diagnosis. One year! In that case, most of us would have this diagnosis. This just feeds into the misconception that grief should be over in some point in time. Though I'm relieved to hear that it's highly controversial. And certainly not the language grief experts would use. In our society we can sometimes over pathologize. As Kessler says, we don't get over traumatic losses as though they were colds or flu, rather we learn to live with them. According to Frank Anderson, who was clinical instructor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, grief takes longer than any society, culture, or organization believes it does. And to allow it to take its natural time. While I agree we need to take our time to grieve, it's also important to eventually come to an acceptance, to not stay stuck ruminating in our story and re-traumatizing ourselves by replaying it over and over in our minds. Which, yeah, it's something I've done, I admit to. We may not have much control over death, divorce, breakup, or some other loss, but we do have control over the thinking that follows. As our optimistic guest Chris Waker reminds us, it's about perspective, what you choose to focus on. And he chooses positivity and gratitude. While honoring our losses, it helps if we can start to shift to gratitude for all that still remains in our life. Like I can now finally look at my marriage and appreciate what remains, my children and grandkids. As for the loss of my parents, I appreciate that I got to have them in my life as long as I did. And the legacy of their love that remains that I see in the eyes of my family when I look at them. Acceptance is a high vibrational frequency. There's actually science to back it up. Psychiatrist Dr. David Hawkins managed to measure the vibrations produced by different emotions and states and mapped this into a vibration energy chart. With the lowest energy being that of fear, and then below that is grief, then comes apathy and then guilt at the very bottom. And people literally feel that low energy from us. We certainly feel it ourselves when we feel drained because grief is exhausting. The highest vibrational frequency is of love, then above that is joy, then peace, and at the very top is enlightenment. After I'd done a lot of grief healing work after my multiple losses, a couple of people actually said to me that there was something really different about me around me. A guy I knew, a Rabbi, said that I exuded that energy so much that he wanted some of it! I must say it felt amazing to not only feel it myself but to be able to help uplift others around me. I felt like I was going around shining some kind of light. Let's try and uplift the energy of others who are grieving rather than bringing it down. And one way we can do that is to avoid saying certain things to a bereaved person, such as, I know how you feel. How can anyone possibly, be in their shoes in the exact situation. So that sometimes that can feel insulting. Or starting a sentence with at least you, is invalidating, minimizing their pain. At least you don't have it as bad as someone else. Judging and comparing their loss to ours or to others. That isn't helpful. Or saying everything happens for a reason. Which is something I'm really known to say a lot usually. I mean, that's not something they're ready to hear yet, maybe later. They probably feel what possible reason could there be for them to have to face this loss? Or bright-siding them with with positivity when they're just not ready for that yet. Getting them to be grateful, silver lining them when they're still in the deep depths of despair. I remember it felt like someone shining a flashlight in my eyes when I was in the dark. Hopefully they'll start to be positive when they're ready and they choose to be. Then telling them to get over it. Like grief's a cold, as we've said before. It can make people feel ashamed about their grief when they're told to get over it, like there's something wrong with them. Finally telling them that they've grieved enough. As we know, grief has no timeline. I've had people say all of these to me and I just remember how much it hurt. What can we say instead? If you'd like some guidance on that, there's a great list on grief.com, which is an excellent resource with videos and a podcast. If you're currently grieving, my heart really goes out to you. I hope today's episode has been helpful in your journey towards healing. And I thank you for being a part of mine, of my sixth stage of grief. After facing many losses in a short period of time, creating this podcast and cultivating this community is my way of turning my own pain into purpose, which is something my guests, I see that my guests have done as well. I wish the same for you. Our next guest, Nancy Nelson, is a behavioral health nurse and resilient woman herself who knows all about grief because she's had to face it multiple times. On our next episode Uprooted by Break-up, she shares about her break-up. Why it was worse than her two divorces put together. And how she finally managed to get to a place of healing. As some of you might know, I'm a brand new podcaster and I'd love to keep improving. Here's how you can help. Please share, subscribe, and provide feedback via the Uprooted by Unwanted Change Facebook group. See you next Tuesday! May you find peace and rootedness.