Anxiety, Avoidance & Anticipatory Grief with Claire Bidwell Smith

Grief doesn't always follow the five stages that have become a fixture in cultural conversations about loss. The reality? Grief can show up in a costume...and it doesn't always begin when someone dies.

Claire Bidwell Smith, therapist, author, and grief expert joins Anita and Zara for a conversation about the elements of grief we rarely discuss. It's a perspective-shifting conversation that may help you recognize surprising ways grief has presented in your own life.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Grief and Loss
02:54 The Shift in Grief Conversations
05:45 The Loneliness of Grief
08:34 Grief and Anxiety Connection
11:18 Navigating Grief as a Parent
14:00 Understanding Anticipatory Grief
16:46 The Impact of Grief on Millennials
19:40 Coping Strategies for Grief
22:30 Anticipatory Grief in Daily Life
25:16 Emotional Distance and Grief
28:35 Navigating Anticipatory Grief
31:43 Understanding Grief Beyond Loss
36:09 The Impact of Grief on Relationships
39:46 The Individual Nature of Grief
44:38 Finding Positivity in Grief
50:28 Coping as an Only Child
51:34 Self-Compassion in the Sandwich Generation

Topics covered: Grief, anticipatory grief, losing a parent, grieving as a child, supporting a grieving child, grief community, grief influencers, grief coach, aging parents

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:03

Welcome to the Millennial Sandwich, a space for real conversations about millennials in the middle. Not just of our own minds, but also of a caregiving sandwich. I'm Dr.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Anitha Chandra, a geriatrician and expert in elder care. And I'm Zara Hanowalt, a parenting journalist and expert in American motherhood. And even we don't have all the answers. Join us as we figure out life in the middle.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

Hi everyone. Today we're joined by Claire Bidwell Smith, a therapist grief expert. Claire, would you introduce yourself to our listeners?

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Yeah, and thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here talking with you guys. My name is Claire Bidwell Smith. I'm a therapist. I'm the author of five books about grief and loss, based in California. And I have been doing this work for almost two decades. And I come to it from a lot of my own personal losses that drove me into this field. There has been a major shift. My mom died almost 30 years ago when I was 18. And back then there was very little out there about grief. The internet wasn't really happening just yet. And there were a few books, and even the books themselves didn't have a lot of the content that I was looking for or needed, especially as a young person. Now there's so much in terms of social media, online resources. I think there's a lot more awareness around mental health, grief, anxiety, all these, all these experiences, trauma, loss. So there's so many more resources, so much richer conversation happening. I'm heartened for people who are newly experiencing loss that they have so many places to turn these days. Yeah, I think it can be so lonely. You know, it's lonely at the time. It was lonely at 18 when I went through it for sure, but it's lonely now, 30 years later. You know, I've got kids at home that I'm raising. I'm seeing grandparents at pickup at school, and I'm envious, or my friends are losing parents or going through different experiences with their living parents, and it still feels kind of lonely.

SPEAKER_02 2:35

It's lonely, and also I found that I suddenly became part of a club that I never wanted to join, but it's such a shared experience to lose a parent. Is that something that you see often that it was suddenly like, oh, I feel like I know something that I didn't yesterday?

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Yeah, absolutely. It is a club that none of us wanted to be in, but once we're in it, it feels really good to be around other people who get it. I have been working with the mother loss community for a long time. I lost both of my parents early. I was 14 when they got cancer at the same time, and I'm an only child. My mom died when I was 18, and then my dad died seven years later when I was 25. So I started early adulthood with no family, no immediate family. And I've worked a lot with mother loss specifically because my mother's death was my really big wound. And we were very close. And I've written and spoken a lot about moving through the world without a mom. And I began working with Hope Edelman, who wrote Motherless Daughters that came out in the late 90s. And we've done a lot of work together in the years since and retreats. But I will never forget the first time I walked into a conference she was holding for motherless daughters. This was back in maybe 2013. And I walked into this room and there were 200 women in this room. And I felt like they knew me better than some of my best friends because we all had lost our moms young. And it was such, it's such a singular experience. It comes with such specific impact and identity disruption that, you know, I felt really close to these women, even though I knew nothing about them other than the fact that they had lost their moms. Do you think there's a lot of value in grieving in community like that? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think grieving in general is very isolating and can be very, very lonely. And I think a lot of people doubt their grieving, their grieving process, and they feel vulnerable after a loss. And when you can come together with others and feel seen, um, feel validated, just feel less alone in what you're carrying through a room, it's so healing. It's one of the most healing parts that I think people should and can explore in their grief process.

SPEAKER_02 4:41

Something I find so fascinating about your work is that you don't just talk about grief, but you talk about the ways grief can show up with a costume as anxiety or any other ways. How did you start making that connection in your own life?

SPEAKER_00 4:57

You know, my predominant response to my mother's death at 18 was just pure anxiety. I spiraled into deep anxiety. I was having regular panic attacks, I was experiencing hypochondria, I was coming up with weird phobias, I became afraid of flying, um, I had social anxiety. I mean, it ran across the board for me at 18. And I did not understand it at all. And I couldn't find anything at the time in the literature that connected grief and anxiety. So for a long time I thought there was something else wrong with me. Like I had this anxiety problem. And then I also had my mother's death and my father's impending death. And as I kind of continued to research, I read a lot about trauma. I started to put the pieces together and realized, like, of course, this anxiety is stemming from my losses, from my parents' illnesses, from their deaths. But you know, back then in the early 2000s, late 90s, we weren't even talking about trauma the way we are now. So when I read about PTSD and I saw a lot of the characteristics I was experiencing, I thought, well, that's still not me because I don't have trauma. But of course I had trauma. I had smaller traumas, I had multiple traumas, I had complex trauma. And now I think we have a much deeper understanding of trauma. So that was my initial experience for myself and my grief. And then I've always been a writer, so I've always written a lot about the work I've done. And I began to write about grief and anxiety. And I got flooded with people coming to me saying, Is this a thing? I, you know, I've been having panic attacks since my dad died, or I am suddenly afraid of elevators or whatever since I lost my brother or whatever the story was. And I got to really work with a lot of clients who were experiencing anxiety after a loss and really dive into it in a big way. And that's when I wrote my book, Anxiety, The Missing Stage of Grief. And at the time when it came out, there was nothing that was really talking about the connection of those two experiences. And now I think we know a lot more about it.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

What else can be grief, but not necessarily how we think of what grief looks like?

SPEAKER_00 6:55

You know, I think we have a lot of mixed-up ideas about grief. I think television and movies and, you know, culture has played a part in depicting grief as a very sad experience. Um, that is, you get a small window of time in which to do it. And the reality is that grief looks like a lot of different things. One of the most important things I want to call out is that grief is not just for healthy, loving relationships. We as human beings have very complicated relationships in our lives. And we we get to grieve for those complicated relationships just because we maybe didn't have a loving parent or we had a complicated experience with a sibling or another family member or a spouse, even, or a child. We might be estranged from someone who dies. When that person is gone, we still get to grieve. That grief is more complicated and there's more to sift through, but we get to grieve for that. So I think that's something that's misunderstood. I think grief can also be loss sometimes can come with relief, can come with the ability to change your life in ways that are beneficial, that are transformative or positive. And I think that's something that people don't really think about or recognize or see as well. Um, I see sometimes I think that there's a stage of grief that involves opening up to our more spiritual side or finding religion or re-embracing religion. I think that's really a kind of stage of it because so many of us, when we go through a big loss, we start to really think about like, where's my person? Are they okay? Why did they die? Can they see me? Will I see them again? And we go on a whole journey of really trying to think about and understand, you know, why we're here as human beings. And that's its own aspect of grief as well, that often is a little bit overlooked.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Being that you experienced grief so early on in life, do you have any advice for those of us who are walking our kids through grief or who are preparing our kids to experience grief?

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Yeah, absolutely. I don't work specifically with kids, but I work with a lot of parents who are seeing their kids through grief and loss. And I also work with a lot of adults who went through loss as in childhood and when they were younger. And I think one of the things that we get wrong about it is that first we often try to shield grief from our children. We try to shield loss and grief from our kids. And that's really not the way to do it. They need to be able to experience it. They need role models for it. They need to know that it's okay to talk about it, to feel it, to have different kinds of feelings about it. So often we we want to fix that, you know, especially when we have a child who's grieving, maybe a pet or a grandparent or maybe even a parent or someone even more significant in their lives. And it's so painful anytime to watch our kids go through grief and pain and torment. And so we often try to fix it or we try to make it better, but grief is something that we can't fix, right? So we have to really explore how to sit with our children through it, how to let them feel it, how to let them really process and metabolize their grief and how to open up space for conversations around it. And I think that's hard as parents. I don't want to say it's easy and that we should be good at it necessarily. It's a difficult task for sure. I have my own kids. I hate when they're in any kind of emotional pain or physical pain. But the real task at hand for parents, I think, is creating space to have conversations about it. The other thing that's important to know about kids is that they have a really extended grieving time because as they continue to develop, they meet their loss and their grief in new ways. So you might see an eight-year-old go through a significant loss and they only have a certain amount of developmental capacity with which to process it and understand it. So as they continue to age and mature, they hit 10, 12, 15, they experience that loss over and over again because they suddenly understand it in new ways, or they have the emotional capacity to feel it in a new way. So we might be surprised when we have a child who's suddenly grieving again five, six years after a loss, but that's because they're growing and they're now under able to understand it. So our job as parents, again, is to kind of meet them each time, meet them in that space, be able to talk about it, be able to guide them through it, be able to role model for ourselves too. Often parents who are grieving are or parents who are seeing a child through grief are often grieving themselves. Maybe it's it's a shared loss, it's a spouse that that died, or it's a grandparent, a pet, a beloved family pet. Um, and so the parent is grieving too. And that's a great opportunity for you to really show them like it's okay to cry. It's okay to fall apart and then be okay again. It's okay to use tools to talk to therapists, to find community. These are ways we can help guide kids through grief.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

I've definitely noticed that with my son as he was only four when my dad died. But now that I mean, at that point, it was sort of like explaining to him the body stopped working and it was so concrete. And now that he's a little bit older, he's been bringing it up just like you said, more and asking questions about what happened. And at first it was really hard to kind of reopen that wound for myself and meet him there, but it has been so special to sort of meet him where he is, like you said, and allow myself to continue grieving and not just turn that off. Obviously, your children didn't get to meet your parents. How has being a mother changed your grief or allowed you to experience your grief?

SPEAKER_00 12:04

That's a great question. You know, initially when I first became a mom, it was a moment that was really impactful for me in my grief process. My mom had been gone about 14 years to about 13 years when my daughter was born. And I was still really missing her. I was still really sad that I didn't have a mom, but I was beating myself up about it. And then when I became a mom, it was like just so fast all at once. I was like, oh, this is why I miss my mom so much. I I really understood that relationship in a in a new way. And I was able to have a lot more compassion for myself for losing a mom. So that was like a really big first piece of it. I have three kids now. And and over the years, it's been really hard not to have my parents here. You know, they have grandparents on their father's side. Um, they have they talk about them, they see them, they receive gifts from them, all of those kinds of things. And for me, it's always just felt really sad that my parents aren't here to meet my kids and just be part of their lives. So I try to do a lot to bring my parents into it. I never refer to them as my parents when I'm talking to my kids. I always say, your grandma Sally, your grandpa Jerry, so that they feel ownership and connection to my parents in a way that's not just like, oh, mom's dead parents. It's, you know, oh, my grandma Sally. I have a grandma who's here in real life, and then I have a grandma Sally who's in heaven or wherever. And I think that that's been important. I've also instituted like a lot of rituals around my parents. We just do a lot of different fun things that harken back to who my parents were. My mother loved to cook, so I make a lot of foods that she loved and we talk about her. She was an artist. So anytime we're doing any kind of art or my kids are enjoying art, I'm like, your grandma Sally loved to paint too. You must you must get that from Grandma Sally, just to kind of bring them that awareness to them. And that's felt really good.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

That's yeah, that is beautiful. And you know, we talk about that a lot that caregiving continues after you lose someone because you're taking care of their legacy and you're taking care of their traditions and their rituals. And that is so beautiful. And thank you for sharing that.

SPEAKER_02 14:02

Yeah. One of the concepts that you've really helped bring into the mainstream is anticipatory grief. And we really wanted to talk to you about that because so many of our listeners have not lost somebody, but they might be anticipating grief. For anyone who's listening who's not familiar with that term, can you tell us what that means?

SPEAKER_00 14:24

Yeah, anticipatory grief is when we know there is a loss coming or we're experiencing the loss in small increments leading up to the main event, essentially. So often this happens when we have a parent who's ill or has dementia. It can apply to things even like jobs or our own illness or our own, you know, terminal disease. Um, we really start to grieve things that are changing. And so there is real grief. There's an anticipatory grief where you know you're going to be going through a really big loss and there's going to be a different kind of grief ahead. But then there's also the grief of what's changing now. Um, so even when my parents were both sick, you know, I had an anticipatory grief process and I was, you know, losing my mother as I knew her while she got sicker and sicker. You know, she was suddenly unable to do all of the fun things that she had used to do and pay attention in the ways that she did and look the way she did. So there was a grief just in that, you know, I was losing the version of my mother that I had always known and loved. And I think we go through so much of that. One of the tricky things about anticipatory grief, there's a couple of tricky things, is that one of them is that sometimes we think that if we have enough anticipatory grief, it's going to save us grief later when in reality it that's not quite true. We have a lot of anticipatory grief now and grieving now. And then the loss occurs in its finality and we still have more grief to go. I think there's a way in which we can kind of show up and be conscious to the grief and to the loss that's coming that is helpful to the bigger grief later, but it doesn't take it away altogether. The other thing that's important to know about anticipatory grief is that one of its hallmark experiences and emotions is anxiety because we just don't know exactly when this loss is coming. You know, you may know that you have a sick parent or a parent with dementia, and you know at some point you're going to lose them altogether, but we don't know when exactly. It could be weeks, it could be months, could be years. Um we don't know all the losses that are going to come along the way. And so there's just a lot of anxiety. You're living in this perpetual state of not knowing and of uncertainty. And humans are terrible with uncertainty. We like to know things, we like to plan, we like to have concrete, you know, dates and times. And when we're living in that day in and day out of just not knowing, it's so stressful. It's scary that anxiety can bleed into other places, irritability, anger, stress, physical symptoms. Um, so anticipatory grief has a lot that comes with it, and it's not easy. And so many of us are going through it.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Yeah. Makes me think of our generation as millennials are kind of known for being anxious. And we've been through, we've kind of lived through so many big events, catastrophes, one might say, in the world. And I wonder if some of that anxiety is actually grief or anticipating grief.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Yeah, absolutely. What I found when I was really studying anxious grieving was that we become anxious after a loss or before a loss for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons is because it our lives change irrevocably, right? When we when we go through a significant loss, there's so many things that change in our lives. Our relationship with that person is over on many levels. We may have financial changes in our lives. We may have household changes, career changes, childcare changes. Like there are a lot of things that happen that are impacted by losing someone that can cause a lot of anxiety. We may also have a lot of new existential thoughts or spiritual questions or religious awakenings, like just a lot of big things that are going on. We think we know that death is real, and then you go through a loss and you're suddenly thinking about it in a whole new way. So the world can feel unsafe and unpredictable. So all of those things can cause anxiety. And those are kind of easy to pinpoint. But what I also found when I was researching and studying this and clients was that we get very anxious when we're not processing our grief, when we're not facing it, when we're not metabolizing it, when we're not talking about it, when we're not finding community for it, when we're trying to stuff it down and go about our days and be normal or, you know, be who we used to be, then we often it spills out in anxiety. So what I'm usually working on with people when I'm trying to help them through this anxious grieving is helping them understand a little bit about anxiety in general, which we've gotten so much better at, different tools for it, breath work, meditation, you know, anxious thoughts, working on all of that. But then also I love to ask, you know, what's your grief been like? How have you grieved? How long did you grieve for? Who supported you in your grief? What tools did you use? How do you feel connected to your person? Was there anything complicated about the loss or the relationship that you really need to process and kind of work through in order to let yourself feel some of those emotions? Are you safe to grieve? Some people have a lack of safety in their lives or they don't have time because they're a single mom working hard, you know, to support kids or something. And um, so there's a lot that comes when we don't have time and space to grieve, or we don't allow ourselves to grieve. It can absolutely contribute to anxiety.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

And I think so many millennials are dealing with that right now because so many of us are grieving or we're experiencing anticipatory grief, but then we have to turn around and we have to be on for our kids and we have to, you know, step into that caregiver role in a completely different way. Do you have any advice for people who are trying to figure out how to compartmentalize those roles as parents and also as children who are maybe grieving or getting ready to grieve?

SPEAKER_00 19:40

Yeah, I think people are generally pretty scared of grief. I think that people are scared if they open up to it, they're gonna fall apart. If they let themselves start crying, they're never gonna stop. So they they stuff it away, they think I'll do it later, I'll feel it later. But you can actually schedule time to grief. And I think when you do, I mean, if you're a really busy person and you've got to show up to a lot of things, you can still also schedule time to grieve. Pick a Saturday afternoon, a Sunday morning, some time when you've got some downtime and put it in your calendar if you have to and sit down. And what that looks like is just letting some of that grief out. Maybe you're writing a letter to the person you lost, or maybe you're looking through old photos and playing music and lighting a candle. Maybe you're scheduling time with a therapist, maybe you're going to a support group, you know, anything like that. Maybe you're going to a place of religious or spiritual care that is helpful to kind of let that out. But even just giving yourself little bits of time throughout the month to feel that grief and to let it come up is so helpful. You're not going to fall apart. Um, it's impossible to cry forever. Um, you can really surround yourself with some support if you think that the falling apart is gonna be ugly and messy a little bit in the beginning. You can let a friend know, hey, I'm gonna try to do some grieving time on Sunday. If I need you, will you come over and like pick me up off the bedroom floor? You know, things like that. Like really surround yourself with what you need to get through it. It will inevitably free up the rest of your time and day to just be more present and to be less anxious. Do you recommend that for anticipatory grief too?

SPEAKER_02 21:13

Absolutely. Or do you think that it's would take away from the time we have? It's so, it's so tough, right, to balance. Like, is it okay to grieve when the person is sitting across from you and then you feel guilty for not spending time with them while they're here?

SPEAKER_00 21:28

Yeah, I mean, that's a tricky one. I know we really want to soak up that time, but I do think, you know, we have to take care of ourselves and we have to be able to be present to that time. And if you're all bottled up and anxious and, you know, can't even really sit down and be that present, I think it would be of service to really make some time to let it out and have a really big cry or talk it out with a therapist before you sit and have those present moments. It would make those moments even more special.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

I feel like grief can come on so randomly and so unexpectedly. If you schedule that time to grieve, does that help?

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Yes, that's a great point. It really does. I think a lot of times when we're bottling it up, we're it's still so close right underneath the surface. And so the littlest pinprick of something, a reminder. You see a person that reminds you of something or a song comes on or the change of seasons, even the breeze going by. And suddenly, because your grief is so bottled up right under the surface, it spills out when you're not prepared for it or expecting it. So if you have schedule time, that's less likely to happen.

SPEAKER_02 22:30

What does anticipatory grief look like in everyday life?

SPEAKER_00 22:33

You know, I think it feels like you can just feel it under your skin. You know, you wake up in the morning and you feel that sense of not necessarily dread, but that something is coming, something is off. There's something to worry about, there's a sadness, there's a fear there. And so it's something that you really feel more than anything. And then that feeling translates into behavior, you know. So we may become irritable, we may become anxious, we don't know what to do with that feeling. So we worry about other stuff that's random that we don't need to worry about, or we scroll and we don't need to be scrolling, you know, or we check out in other ways. Um, and so I think when you wake up in the morning and you feel that feeling, sit with it for a minute. Say, okay, you know, like, hey, Claire, you're feeling some anticipatory grief. Let's just sit in it for a minute. Maybe I need to cry for a minute. Maybe I need to journal. Maybe I just need to like think about how this is impacting me and what's coming. Maybe I need to talk to someone. When we do that and really directly address it head on, I think it takes the volume down on that, that kind of feeling under the under the surface and allows us to be more present.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

As someone who's in the anticipatory grief phase right now, I find that it's kind of taken over my life in a way where I am hesitant to make plans or make commitments around anything because I just don't know where things are going to be. Like I don't, I have a hard time planning vacations because I just don't know what the situation will be at that point, or even taking on new commitments. Is that something you see from a lot of people?

SPEAKER_00 24:04

Yeah, and that's a really hard place to be in. And I think that, you know, comes back to that uncertainty place that you're living in. And that's a really hard place to be in. You know, we want to plan, we want to be able to do things in our lives and think ahead. And when you're kind of stuck in that space that is, on some levels, inevitable and unavoidable, right? Like you can't just drop everything and go do whatever you want to do. And you do want that. You're grieving that life, you're grieving that freedom, that ability to do that, yet also wanting to be present and wanting to be in this role and wanting to honor your commitment to this, you know, experience that you're having. So it really is a tough one. I think being really kind and gentle with yourself. I think self-compassion exercises, I think some meditation, breath work, all of those things are helpful. I think also really making a point to find joy in the smallest moments and times, right? If you do have that extra hour that you didn't anticipate having today, do something great with it. You know, call up a friend on a whim or just, you know, go out for a special coffee by yourself, or just do something like grab those little moments that you can and enjoy them and make lists of all the stuff you're gonna do at some point when you have more time and more freedom to do it. Yeah, but that's hard.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

Yeah. And that's something Anitha and I talk about too is when you're in this phase of life, people will tell you it's temporary and you're like, well, for how long? That's not reassuring either, because there's no other way out of this.

SPEAKER_02 25:31

Yeah. I mean, being in the middle of aging parents and young kids is it is hard. We talk about the hard parts all the time, but yeah, if it we know it's temporary and that's the problem. That's the problem. We want to stay in this middle for as long as possible. And I wonder, I I the anxiety piece of it is interesting. This might sound weird, but I maybe it was anticipatory grief, maybe it was just anxiety. But I spent so long worrying that something was gonna happen to one of my parents, that I would get a phone call one day and something horrible would happen, and everything would be that was like the cloud over everything. And then it did. It did happen. And it turns out that all that worrying didn't stop it from happening, and my anxiety actually got way better because I sort of I something opened up that I was like, what am I doing? That didn't I was worried, and yeah, something did happen, and I still had to live through that, and the worrying didn't make it go away. So I don't know if you ever see kind of the opposite swing and say I had a similar experience.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

Yeah. No, it's amazing. I I remember reading a line in a book. It was a it was a fiction book, and the character said something about this was like years ago when I was still really working on my own anxiety and trying to understand it. And the line said something like, I realized that bad things would happen whether or not I worried about them. And I sat there and I read that line over and over, and I thought, wow, I can spend the rest of my time just worrying all the time about terrible things happening. And it's not gonna change if they do or not, you know. So I may as well try not to worry as much because they're still gonna happen. And I think, I think that is a pretty common experience. There's a relief when the bad thing happens because now you can stop worrying about it. On the flip side, we often also get stuck in worry cycles, you know, even when the thing, you don't have to worry about it now, we'll move on to worrying about something else. Worry can become so addictive. It makes us feel like we're doing something, it makes us feel like we're getting ahead of a problem when really we're just keeping ourselves stuck in that anxious worry cycle that is just so exhausting.

SPEAKER_02 27:42

It's like that superstition, right? If I worry about it, then it won't happen. Yeah. Which I guess if nothing has happened, you might think that you're worrying is actually, you know, keeping something away, but yeah, it's not. Do you ever see in anticipatory grief? Can it look like creating emotional distance or kind of irritability or pushing somebody away because you are worried that something is coming?

SPEAKER_00 28:10

Absolutely. That's a defense mechanism. You know, it's a protective mechanism. If we if we're not close to them and if we're not allowing that emotional experience with them, then it won't hurt as much, is what we tell ourselves. Um, it doesn't quite work that way. Um, and it's sad in the moment because you're missing out on time and experience and closeness with people. A lot of people go through loss or go through the anticipation of a loss and push people away. Just and sometimes it feels beyond us, right? Like we can't even let our own wall down because that protective mechanism is just going right up. In those cases, I think it's really helpful to talk with a therapist, even briefly, you know, just doing like a few weeks of therapy around it can be really helpful. Because that's, you know, it's sad. It's a shame when we do that. You know, I've met I've worked with a lot of people who went through a big loss and then were just so afraid to open their hearts again in any capacity to any relationship because of the fear of more loss or of getting hurt.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

Yeah. And I think sometimes you can really miss someone and missing them intensifies when you're with them because the version of them that you want is so far away that it almost feels harder. And I think that can lead you to push them away more.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, everything we're talking about here is are really difficult, painful emotions and experiences. And it's it's hard. And I think the the problem with anticipatory grief is it's just this very extended period of being in that sadness, in that anxiety, in that fear and worry all the time. It's exhausting. It's very depleting. It really does a number on our nervous system, on our physical systems, you know, that impacts other relationships. It impacts work, it impacts your ability to find joy. It's really hard. And so many people are going through this in their lives right now.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Can you be going through anticipatory grief even if there's nothing wrong? Even if there's no real reason to feel the grief.

SPEAKER_00 30:01

You mean if there's like not somebody that you're about to lose, or I think you can, but in that case, I would also think that it's probably more of like an anxiety-worry cycle that you're stuck in and that it's going to hinder you and keep you from being able to experience joy in your current life. And so that would be one that I would really want somebody to work on. You know, if you're caring for a parent who is going, you know, is declining and is going to die, that's one kind of anticipatory grief. If you're just in your life, like worrying and feeling grief about the potential of things being terrible, you know, that's a place where I think we really need to kind of work on some of our mindset and our framing in there. And I would think that it probably also comes from something and somewhere that you could dig back into.

SPEAKER_02 30:47

Yeah. Yeah. We talk a lot about worrying about our parents more as they age and noticing or just noticing changes and watching our kids get older and worrying about them in different ways. What's the difference between worrying and anticipating something happening?

SPEAKER_00 31:04

You know, I think for me, when I think about worry, I think often about how it's kind of our mind tricking us into feeling like we're doing something. And so when we spend a lot of time worrying about a thing or a potential or a person, it makes us kind of feel productive. Um, but I would stop and ask yourself like, is this worry productive? Is it actually doing anything useful besides stressing me out? Is there another way for me to channel this feeling into something that is more productive, like actually spending time with that person or doing something useful for them or with them or with anybody? You know what I mean? A lot of sense.

SPEAKER_01 31:43

I know there's a lot of conversation now about how you can grieve anything. You know, you can grieve a job you lose, you can grieve a friendship that ends. Do you think that's accurate? Do you think we're playing a little fast and loose with the term grief when we do that? Or do you think that that is valid?

SPEAKER_00 32:00

I think it is valid. I think it's hard for some people to hear when you've gone through a really significant loss, losing a parent, losing a family member. I work with a lot of parents who've lost children. When they hear about somebody grieving, you know, a job or a friend, they're like, yeah, no, that's not grief. What I have is grief. And so I understand how it can feel invalidating to some people when they are in a certain place of grief, a certain experience of it. However, I think that that grief is very real and we need to be giving ourselves more permission to feel it, not less. Um, for a long time, grief was only reserved for very specific people or experiences, and we had like very specific timestamps on how long you could grieve and what it could look like. And I think we've done a good job in very recent years of kind of blowing the ceiling off of that and really kind of opening up to what do we grieve and and and how long do we get to do it for? So I think it's okay. I think it's more helpful than not to really expand the definition and ideas of grief. I think the thing that I run up against though is people are like, okay, cool, it's grief. What do I do with it? You know, so I'm grieving my friend or I'm grieving my job, but like what now? What do I do? And and I think people get a little frustrated. And so I think in terms of calling so many different things grief, it is also leading to a little bit of frustration, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 33:18

Yeah, I mean, I I I get it. I I understand that if you're in the throes of really deep grief, it could feel invalidating to hear someone say, you know, I'm grieving, I don't know, a move to a new city and I'm grieving my old life or something like that. Yeah. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:38

Yeah, I think that's one of those things that really puts that that club I was talking about, it's like you suddenly have this wisdom that it puts things into perspective and it's like really a before and after. I know a lot of people say that about grief, but it it feels like suddenly you just n understand things in a different way. It's transformative. Yeah. Yeah. And the time piece of it too is so hard because yes, we've made a lot of progress in the way we talk about grief and how we talk about grief, but I really do think that people kind of expect you to be back to yourself after a certain amount of time. And it's like depending on who you lost, society has these vague time frames like, oh, this person, you shouldn't be grieving this long. And it doesn't help that like in medicine that there's grief and then there's complicated grief, and some of that is a time frame, which I, you know, it's kind of crazy.

SPEAKER_00 34:37

Some people will carry grief their entire lives, you know. And to use my mother again as an example, it it's been almost 30 years since she's been gone. And I'm not actively grieving. It's I'm not grieving in the way I was in the first 10 years after she died, but I carry her loss with me always. And and I think about her not being here all the time. Um, and it impacts me. So that's a loss that will follow me through the rest of my life. But I think what you said earlier about how people expect you to get back to who you used to be, that's, you know, that's kind of a misconception we have. We don't really go back to who we used to be after we go through a big loss. We're we're never who we were again. We're a new version of ourselves. There's elements from that previous version, but we really often have to create a new version of ourselves following a big loss. It's not always a bad thing, you know. I would take my parents back instead, but I'm also really grateful for who I've become in the in their losses. You know, it's made me more compassionate, more open, more present. So many different things that I don't think I would have been had I not gone through that experience. And so the version of us that we become after a loss is not who we used to be. And we may be different. We may not be as social, we may not be as risky or crazy or whatever fun thing we were. We may be a really different temperament than we used to be. And that's okay. But it's hard for some people to understand or to experience.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

How do you navigate that when you're married, say, or you're in a long-term partnership and one of you is fundamentally changed by your grief, and the other one feels like I just want my partner back?

SPEAKER_00 36:09

Yeah, it's hard. I see this a lot. Um, it happens a lot, especially in marriages, happens in friendships too, and family systems as well, actually. But in marriages, it's particularly difficult. I think, I think it's really hard for a partner to understand the other person's experience of grief. So there's that piece of it where the grieving partner feels really unseen and misunderstood by their partner, which is really hard. And then the partner who's supporting the grieving person is usually really good at it for a certain period of time. And then they kind of run out of patience and they're like, I just want you to be back to normal and like be the person you used to be. I want you to be like capable as much as you used to be. I want you to be as fun as you used to be. Just, you know, not going to be. So I think in that case, conversation, communication, maybe therapy are really, really important. Airing it out, talking about it. It's funny, men and women, I think, tend generally speaking, to grieve a little differently. And I run support groups, retreats, a lot of different community things. And I also do one-on-one work. And men will never come to any of the community stuff I do. They won't come to retreats or support groups, but they'll come to see me one-on-one. And they often will talk about how they just don't know how to talk to their wives about their loss or their grief. They don't know how to open up, they don't know how to be vulnerable, they feel scared or they just feel private about it. And I think, you know, I see it both sides, either way. And it's it's a difficult experience. I really think that just talk, being able to talk about it, sitting down and being like, hey, honey, things have been different since your brother died. Like, can we talk about it a little bit? How are you doing? How are you feeling right now? How do you feel like this has impacted our marriage? How do you feel like this has impacted you and your identity? What can we do if you're missing fun or you're missing more collaboration? Just talking about it, bringing it up. It's not that it can't, it's not that it's going to go exactly back to the way it used to be, but there's a new version you can co-create with your partner, I think, after a loss.

SPEAKER_02 38:04

And acknowledging the loss, I think, would go a long way with your partners in or, you know, friends or so many people feel like they can't bring up the loss because it might make them sad again, or they they're just scared and they we we just don't really have good language around death and dying and grief in general. But I feel like everyone I know who has experienced loss would say that they want their people to talk about it more and bring it up more and acknowledge that they're grieving.

SPEAKER_00 38:37

Yeah, people are always afraid to say the wrong thing. Um, and so they often don't say anything at all. And I think that's the most hurtful thing you can do. I think just even saying, I don't know what to say, but I love you, I'm thinking about you, I'm here is is a nice thing to do. Asking, you know, sharing memories of that person if you knew them who died, just asking them how they're doing today. How are you feeling today? What's today like? Not like, how are you doing in general or what can I do for you? Because most of the time someone who's grieving doesn't know the answer to those questions. But just showing up and just being there with them.

SPEAKER_02 39:09

Yeah, I think all the time how I wish I had I wish I had been there differently for people in my life who were grieving. And it's one of those things where you don't really know until you're in it. You don't know how to do how to I I think now I make an effort to try to share what helped me. Everybody grieves differently, and that's such a in society too. We we judge grieving so much to your clients or in your work, how do you share what is helpful and how we are judging how to breed? Is there a right and wrong way to grieve?

SPEAKER_00 39:46

The only wrong way to grieve is to not do it. So, and a lot of people attempt that way. They try not to grieve, they try to stuff it away. We've, you know, we've touched on this. But other than that, grief really does look different for everyone. I know it's frustrating to hear that sometimes because we want there to be a formula, we want there to be a roadmap for how to get through something, but it's truly different for every single person. It depends on your personality, depends on your current place in life, it depends on the relationship you had with the person, it depends on the manner in which they died. All of these things you're processing, right? So each grief is different. And each time you lose someone, the experience of grieving that person is gonna be different. You know, my experience of grieving my dad was different from my mom, et cetera. It's gonna always be like that. And so I think when I work with people and I'm trying to help them understand their grief, I'm always asking them, like, what do you know about your grief? Not what you've heard, not what other people expect you to look like or be like or how long they think you should grieve, but what do you know? How do you feel about your grief? What is your grief like? Because we do get a lot of messages from the outside about how long it should last, how how we should appear. Are we are we having too much fun or being too happy after our loss? Are we crying too much? Are we staying in too much? Are we going back to work too soon? Are we exercising too much? You know, there's a lot of judgment about how we grieve. Um, and so helping people just get true to themselves, you know, what what do you really know? It's really easy for I think any of us to ask ourselves, are we avoiding our grief? Am I on the Peloton every day so I don't feel my feelings? We know the answer to that question, if it's true or not. And so really just kind of asking people to to name like, are do you think you're grieving the way that you need to be grieving? People know the answer.

SPEAKER_02 41:27

Is it okay to do those distraction things? Because I I mean, I make myself so busy and everyone's like, oh, how do you have time? Well, I don't want to be alone with my thoughts because it's really hard to just be grieving all the time. Can can both things be true?

SPEAKER_00 41:41

Yeah, absolutely. We cannot grieve, you know, 24-7. We have to be able to check out, we have to be able to have fun, we have to be able to exercise, go to work, just zone out and watch a bad Netflix show. You know, those those things are appropriate. But you know when you're bleeding into territory where you're doing too much of it. Like we all know when we're doing too much of a thing and we're avoiding feelings. So, and and often if we don't know it, it will come true in the way that you'll start having anxiety, or you'll be getting irritable with everybody around you, or you'll be getting physically sick. So even if you don't know for yourself, it will, it will show you if you are. Physical signs of grief? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of ex exhaustion, is one, just literal physical exhaustion, weakness, um, tiredness. There's anxiety, which can come, you know, with like lots of different physical symptoms. Um, there's brain fog, which is very real. There's a lot of cognitive things that happen in the brain when we go through a loss. When we go through a really significant loss, a parent, a child, a sibling, our brain has to remap the world as we know it with that person's absence. And that takes an enormous amount of effort. And people will talk a lot about the grief brain or brain frog, and they can't remember what they did two minutes ago or where they put the keys or what they were supposed to do for lunch, you know? And that's really real. Your brain is kind of retuning itself in the background, like an operating system on a computer or something. And it's it's it's very intense. Um, some people get actual heartache from grief and from bereavement, and that's real too. I think the anxiety, like the kind of panicky feeling that just anxious, nervousness, jittery, that's very real as well. Sleep problems are and are normal. Sometimes people sleep too much. Sometimes people can hardly sleep at all. Yeah, there's a lot of physical symptoms. There's a great book uh by Mary Frances O'Connor that I highly recommend called The Grieving Body. And she really outlines how grief impacts the body and the brain.

SPEAKER_01 43:37

I know people will say the body knows before the brain does. I mean, what are some signs that that's happening?

SPEAKER_00 43:43

You would feel like a tightness in your chest, or you would feel shortness of breath, you know, you'd feel tingly in your limbs, you just feel that kind of anxious, panicky, or that exhaustion and that heaviness and that kind of like brain fog. Those are all definite signs. Yeah. A lot of times when people Are you approaching say an anniversary, like it's the one year anniversary, or a father's day is coming up and you lost your dad? Sometimes you're not even really thinking about the calendar, and you're not, you know, thinking on a surface level that that date is coming, but your body starts to feel it. You really just kind of wake up in the morning, you're like, Why do I feel so anxious or off? And then maybe a couple days later you're like, Oh my god, the one year anniversary is in a week or something. And the body just blew my mind. Truly.

SPEAKER_02 44:26

I did not know that was a thing until it actually happened. And then other people were like, Oh yeah, your body will remember before I it I had no idea, and it's so real. It's so real.

SPEAKER_00 44:37

Wild, it's intense.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

Can I ask you, uh, I guess on a positive note, what has your grief given you in this new version of yourself?

SPEAKER_00 44:45

Yeah, you know, I think uh that's a great question and it's an important one. And I think there is a lot of positivity and transformation that comes in going through loss and grief. It's really hard to hear if someone is in the new throes of it. If you've just gone through a big loss, you don't want to hear about anything positive or anything transformative or anything hopeful. You want your person back and you want your life back. So I just want to call that out for anyone who's listening who's really in it and they don't want to hear about that. Um, but at the same time, I do want to always have that in the conversation because grief is not a terrible thing. I like to say that loss happens to us, but how we grieve is up to us. Meaning, you know, that the loss happened. We didn't have any choice over it. We didn't invite it, we didn't create it, we didn't ask for it. It happened to us. But how we grieve is up to us. And grief, I think, asks a lot. It asks us to evaluate who we are in the world. It asks us to evaluate what matters to us, it asks us to evaluate our relationships and maybe even our jobs or where we live. It asks a lot. And the answers to those things are a way of getting to know ourselves better, a way of getting more in touch with our humanity, a deeper sense of self. And there's a lot of beauty to be found in that. Most grieving people that I've met, when they come through some deep grieving process, they often find themselves in a new version of themselves that really isn't all that bad. They're usually grateful for kind of the new deeper sense of self they've gained. And I'm no exception, you know, for sure. I was I was a pretty bratty teenager when my mom died. And maybe I would have grown into a bratty adult. I don't know, but um I hope not totally, but I know that my parents' deaths really opened me up in such profound ways that I am grateful for.

SPEAKER_01 46:25

Yeah.

unknown 46:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

I think there's this still this prevailing narrative around grief that it's, you know, the five stages. Do you think that does people who are grieving a disservice?

SPEAKER_00 46:36

You know, I have really just come to be okay with those five stages because people won't let go of them. It's like often the only thing people know about grief is that there are five stages. There are five stages, they can work for you or not. There are lots of other stages as well. I think that the the problem with the five stages is that they give the promise of a formula. We want there to be a formula. Grief is so hard, loss is so hard. Wouldn't it be amazing if there was this fix to it? We had to do these five things or go through these five processes, and then we would be on the other side. And so I think a lot of people really cling to the idea of that. And it was coined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who was one of the first women to really be groundbreaking and pioneering the field of death and dying. And her work was phenomenal. Her five stages got like away from her. They just got swept up by the culture at large and applied to so many things. And so people often get a little mixed up in them. I think they do a disservice when we try to limit our process to those five stages and not allow a more expansive version of grief. And so I really always encourage people to, you know, give yourself permission to explore outside of those stages. Anxiety is not one of them. That was my one of my big stages. So really kind of letting yourself explore what your grief process looks like in addition to whatever else is out there.

SPEAKER_02 47:51

So kind of going back to when you were acutely grieving, there weren't a lot of resources that were available to you. On the other hand, for me, I feel like my algorithm learned that I needed all the grief content like immediately. And so I'm not there right now. Is some of that is very dark humor, which I enjoy. It helps sometimes. And then I'm also seeing that a lot of other people who are within the first year or two of grief are suddenly calling themselves grief coaches. And that seems like not a great idea. I don't, I'm just wondering what you think of that from your standpoint. I don't know. It makes me think not everything needs to be, you don't need to be a coach for everything.

SPEAKER_00 48:37

Yeah. I mean, I think when when people in general go through a big loss, they feel like an expert in loss and grief. And I think sometimes they are avoiding their own grief by beginning to work in that space or offering themselves as a grief coach. Sometimes I think they're just trying to feel agency over their process and feel like a master of it so that they have some control. I think if you're someone who's grieving and looking for support, I think look for someone who's really seasoned, who maybe has clinical training or a degree or a license and has a lot of experience. It's not to say, you know, it's tricky territory. I know a lot of these grief coaches and I know a lot of grief influencers, and a lot of them do have amazing wisdom and things to impart. But I think if you're someone who's grieving, really looking for someone who has a lot of experience, actually working with grieving people is important. When I began this work, I got my master's degree in clinical psychology. And then my first job out of school was in hospice. And I went into that thinking I knew a lot about grief because I had gone through the deaths of my parents. And over the years, I feel like I know less every day. Every person I meet with has something to teach me about grief that I didn't know. There's our experience, and then there's so many other experiences out there. And so over the last two decades, I've learned so much more than I thought I knew at the beginning. And I think it's important to first give ourselves the time and space to heal and really grieve before we do the work with others. But if you're someone who's grieving, definitely look for someone who has experience.

SPEAKER_01 50:06

As an only child myself, I have a little bit of a selfish question. Losing a parent as an only child, have you ever found a way to address how isolating that is? Because even if you meet someone who's lost a parent, nobody else has lost your parent. Is that something you've really struggled with? Or have you found any workarounds for that?

SPEAKER_00 50:28

No workarounds, unfortunately. It is going to be what it is. But I think you're right, it is really lonely and it's hard. And when you lose both parents as an only child, you lose your whole memories and being able to say, you know, where was that place we went that one time with mom or whatever the memories are? And you lose a bit of your like family culture and foundation. It's hard. So I think continuing to create that in different ways as best you can. Finding solace and talking to other only children who've been through it is important. Creating things for the future, if you can. I met with a guy yesterday who was about to lose his dad, and he asked his dad, he recorded all these things, like, what advice do you have for me on my wedding day? And he wasn't even in a relationship at the time he recorded this, just like wanting to have this stuff ahead for him. So if there's things you can do like that that I think can keep them in your life, I think that's helpful. It's not always possible for all of us. I sure didn't do that.

SPEAKER_01 51:22

I wish I had. Do you have a millennial sandwich survival tip, an overarching tip you would share with our audience of people who are in the sandwich generation and who are dealing with all of these things?

SPEAKER_00 51:34

Just self-compassion. Oh my gosh. Like please be kind to yourself. This is not easy. I mean, it really isn't. I think this is one of the hardest places to find yourself in life at this moment. And I think people are stretched thin and they're anxious and they're hard on themselves. I see so many people hard on themselves when they're in this place and when they're grieving and when they're anxious. And I think just be kind to yourself, be gentle with yourself. You didn't ask for this, you didn't create it. You're doing the best you can. You know, tell yourself that over and over every day. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 52:06

Here we are. Yeah. It's so nice talking to you. I wish we could talk to you for three hours.

SPEAKER_00 52:14

Thank you guys so much. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 52:17

Thank you for listening to the Millennial Sandwich. Don't forget to like, subscribe, give us a rating, and connect with us on social media.