Living with Grief
Our podcast is hosted on Spotify and Anchor.
There are different types of grief: the grief that follows the loss of any kind, grief that often precedes the loss, "anticipatory grief" and sometimes grief that materializes many years later from unaddressed issues earlier in life. As a fundamental human process, grief is unavoidable. As such, it pays to lean into grief rather than to run away from it, and that requires patience, time, and lots of support. Mettle Health counselors, Bridget Sumser, LCSW and Ladybird Morgan, RN and MSW co-host an informal and interactive conversation on the many aspects of grief, including anticipatory, and delayed.
We discuss:
0:00 Introductions
2:20 What are you bringing to this discussion of grief? A new loss? An old loss? Who are you grieving in this moment? Naming the thing/person that you are grieving is an important step in making your experience real and seen
6:13 How do we define grief? Grief is a response to loss, that feeling of the floor coming out from under you. It’s a reorientation process, who am I now?
9:48 There are different kinds of grief - immediate, over time, etc. and it’s just a normal expression of loss.
10:42 What is disenfranchised grief? when you have lost something and people don’t understand why you’re grieving and may minimize that experience. all our grief is worthy
11:35 What grief are we not allowed to name? Where is our grief not recognized?
13:02 What to do when you are drowning in grief? Where do you find connection and support? If you feel like you are drowning, support is a good thing.
17:02 We need tethers, because grief can be so encompassing
18:35 There is a preciousness in our grief, because our grief is our connection to this person, or story, or dream that has been important to us
19:50 There is a component of time in grief, you need time to make sense of the new world you live in. Sometimes that might be distraction
21:20 What losses do we grieve? A small thing might feel like drowning, but if grief is a response to loss, then anything that changes, there will be a grief component
22:50 Why do we compare grief? Our life is a series of griefs, nothing is going to remain the same. When we compare, we are not able to fully feel our experience
24:06 There’s no need for the suffering Olympics: we don’t need to know who’s loss is worse. It’s about our individual life and experience.
27:55 How does uncertainty play into this? grief is full of uncertainty - you may feel like you need a plan or way forward. Recognizing that you need to get to a different place, and finding help to get there
28:52 What about people who grieve inwardly? For many it is an inward process and we can’t force them to share, you can only let them know that you are there to listen and there to talk about the person they lost.
32:53 How do we grief? It is as varied as the number of human beings on the earth. There can be interruptions to sleep, to appetite, fluctuations in mood, trouble focusing.
34:22 How to navigate a compounding of losses?
36:12 As family or friends, we have an unhelpful instinct to cheer-lead; to stay positive and maybe you need and deserve a space where you can be sad and name the things that are different, and not necessarily do anything about them
38:30 In our culture, we want to get through the hard stuff and be ok. But it’s important to sit in that threshold, to not rush to “fix” it
40:15 Grief is uncomfortable. and we’re wired to want to change uncomfortable things quickly. The work of grief is generally not fast; we can do hard things, and we’ve done them before.
44:51 There may be grief in the change that we experience due to a loss. When grief is raw, there is a preciousness to that for us, so it’s ok to be close to it. You can even long for the rawness of acute grief
47:34 How do different people who are grieving one person in different ways create conflict? One person is actually many people: grandfather, father, partner, brother
50:27 How does a lack of empathy from the world around us contribute to our grief?
56:17 What helps with grief? Moving your body! there is a chemical shift that happens when you do this. Or some routine: making sure you’re getting food, water, the basic needs of your body
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