Welcome And Setting The Grief Frame

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hi guys, welcome back to Preview Lions Podcast. I am with Whitney, our favorite therapist, and my friend. So I get lucky to call her both. Um, but she's not my therapist. Disclosure, we know ethically she can't do it, but you know, we can all hope and dream. We can all hope and dream that Whitney would be our therapist, but you know, just is what it is.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

But sometimes I might give you some advice as a friend who just also so happens to be a therapist, but not your therapist.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

You know, I always love it when there's some like classmates and and friends who are um of my sons, and then you know, just friends in general that from my husband's uh medical school days, they're like, you know, I'm not your physician, but sounds like to me, and it's like, yeah, tell me what it sounds like. And the same thing can be with Whitney. It's like, okay, I know this is not, you're not, you know, everybody does not medical

The Five Stages And Why They Loop

SPEAKER_00 1:05

legal advice, but give it to us anyways. Right, exactly. Love that. But today, since we're kind of on this grief topic, right, we realize that we have never fully broken down um the stages of grief. And I think everybody who's had a loss, and we're not just talking like uh a death, a loss of a loved one. It could be um situational losses that you grieve, um, you know, loss of identity, loss of job, um, relationship. There are stages, and more likely than not, when we're talking about these and naming these, you're gonna go, wow, I've gone through that. I didn't know it was this stage of grief. Right. Exactly. So start us off, Whitney. What do you think? And we know this isn't go all different, like it's not like this order is the order that Whitney goes through and I go through exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

So when we look at the stages of grief, just realize it's not like you have check boxes and like, okay, I've been through this stage, now I'm gonna go through two, three, four, five. And once we get to the fifth one, which is acceptance, I'm done grieving, I'm all good now. No, no, no, no, no. We bounce around these stages of grief. We will eventually live in acceptance more often than we do the other stages. But that doesn't mean that an anniversary or the holidays or something that looks like your loved one or sounds, or you have a smell, like that doesn't mean that that won't trigger you back into maybe the depression side of it or the anger side of it. Um, but to go into it, the five stages of grief are depression, anger, bargaining, denial, acceptance. And here's the thing you can actually experience multiple stages at the same time. So you see denial of that can't be true, especially if it was a very sudden unexpected death, um, whether it's a car accident or they just passed away in their sleep and they were only in their 40s or something like that, you're gonna see a lot of denial of what do you mean that can't be true, with also the depressive side of it, that shock factor, that sadness, along with bargaining of well, maybe if I just did this, or maybe if I had done this differently, or maybe if I had one more opportunity to tell them that I loved them, that is bargaining. So we could have all three stages right there at one time. And you know what? The next day, anger may join too. Because like they were only in their 40s. What do you mean they're dead? That's not right, that's not fair, that's not who should have died next. Because admittedly, as humans, we do kind of follow like the natural life cycle. And if a baby dies or a child dies, a parent shouldn't have to bury their child. So that's not right. So that anger comes out because this didn't follow the process it's supposed to follow. So just be aware that there are stages of grief, but we're not gonna go one, two, three, four, five and just say, okay, great, I've accepted it. I'm fine. I'll never grieve again. That that's a lie. That that's denial. That's where denial is a little more sneaky.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

And I think denial, I think people go through denial a lot more than not. Um in in the sense of two, of just different types of grief. Uh when they just don't talk about it, it's like their own denial of like if I talk about it, it brings it to life. Or if you check in on that friend, you're like, How are you? It's fine, we're okay, life's moving on. What are you asking? Um that, and it's I think too, sometimes it's almost like our nervous system, because it's such a shock, especially those sudden you you can't process it losses. That you you almost, if you took the impact

Sudden Loss And The Shock Response

SPEAKER_00 5:05

of what happened, right? You may not get off the floor type of level.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

Right. Yeah. Well, that's how it was when my uh dad's dad died in his sleep after my father-in-law had died the month before, and my mom's dad died in October. When I got that phone call, and I told this to my therapist, like, I didn't actually hit my knees on the floor, but every time I remember that phone call, it was that visceral feeling of a gut punch of doubling over, hitting the floor, being in tears, and just the no, what do you mean? That's we just saw him three weeks ago. There's no way. Dad just took him to the cardiologist last week and said that he was doing great for a 90-year-old man. And here's the thing, y'all, he's 90. It's not like we should have been shocked per se, because he was older, but that death was very unexpected. So I had a lot of that shock denial part of it. I bounced around in that bargaining stage for quite some time of I should have done something different. I thought about him that morning. Why didn't I call him? Well, because I thought about him at 5:30 in the morning. Most people don't make a phone call to their grandparent at 5:30 in the morning.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

You know, like logically, I can say that, but back then I was like, I'm responsible for his death because I didn't call him that morning. If I had called him, I could have called 911. We could have avoided this whole thing. Bargaining and denial right there, just overlapping each other. So even as a therapist, I went through the stages of grief. I didn't just say, Oh, well, you know what? He was 90. That's how it should have been. I didn't just automatically accept it and sit in acceptance. It is normal for you to have the five stages of grief and to bounce around. And I I have said it before, and I will die on this hill. That grief is the price that we pay for the love that we have while we're both here on this earth.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Oh, I love that. And I I think that is um sitting back and going, I am feeling this loss because I love this person so much, or I loved this thing so much, or I loved who I was in this moment. Now I'm not that person, right? Like to acknowledging, you know, dark and there's always light, right? Like that you have to have opposites. So to have and then have not is that opposite. And it it um it's still extremely

Anger In Grief And How To Help

SPEAKER_00 7:30

difficult. And I think the harder I think people from the outside watching someone go through these stages of grief. I think the anger stage is uncomfortable for people to watch.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, anger is not a comfortable emotion, okay. Not a lot of people feel comfortable while being angry. Okay, your nervous system is very dysregulated while you're angry. So to observe someone else who is angry, we kind of go into fix-it mode of how can I bring this down? And that's a little bit of our fight or flight kicking and of damage control. How can I make sure I'm safe, even if we know that person's not angry with us? Yeah, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 8:19

And so No, you do, you don't want them to experience it. And you are right, like you react, and you're just like, I don't want to be around someone who's really kind of being so open and honest about their anger, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Well, because it's not comfortable, it's a very uncomfortable feeling. It is a lot of, oh, well, what can I do to decrease this? One, because you care about that person and you don't want them to be in anger, but a little bit of this is self-preservation as well, because we don't want that anger to get turned towards us or projected to us. No, it happens. I was about to say, when we're grieving, it's not unheard of that the grief does or can get projected. Like, yes, it happens. Is it great? No, it's not great, but such is life. Such is life. Um, and so with that, reminding yourself to someone is allowed to be angry, them experiencing anger doesn't lessen their faith or their character, it is not a character flaw, it is not a moral failing. We need to remember those things, especially in the South, where in churches it's like, well, you're too blessed to be stressed. If my grandfather just died and I'm angry about it, just let me have my anger. You don't have to fix it. So if you know someone that is grieving and they have that anger, don't try to fix it, don't try to erase it, make space and say, I know that that has to be hard. I can understand why you're angry. Validate that because you're not enabling them to have a bad behavior, because anger in and of itself is not bad. It's uncomfortable, it's uncomfortable and it is unpleasant, but it is not bad. Now, if that person in their anger is making threats, that's a different story. That's a different story for someone's well-being. But typically, if someone is grieving and we see that, that anger is not typically going to get projected in a violent manner.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

No, it's a hurt anger. It's a hurt anger of you know, you've you just look on you're like, you're hurting so bad. You are that is where it's coming from. But you've you've seen people, you know exactly what it is, but it's just that it's it's there's like a violent anger people know of and see, right? Of just like there's like that rightful anger, but the hurt anger, you you see it. Um, it's almost like you see their heart just being like broken.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

Um it is, it absolutely broken when we look at the scope of grief and death.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

It's it's so much, and again, if it's our loved one or our best friend, or God forbid our child going through this grief, yeah. It's so hard to separate your own feelings versus their feelings and help them work.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Yeah. Well, and part of that is we want to be empathetic to others, we want to feel for others. That is a mark of a good person, that is a mark of someone who is not a narcissist. If you can empathize for someone else, and especially as parents, we want to guard and protect our children from feeling those things, but also it's okay if they feel it. It's painful to watch, and you can be right alongside them while they are feeling it. Yes, you can, but it's also okay if they feel it.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

It really is okay, and I think that comes back from a lot of people with grief, or and it's not just grief, right? It's like I think this generation, we weren't allowed to feel feelings, right? There it is. Up, up, did you step on some toes, Sarah? I mean, we weren't, and we were just to shut up, deal with it. So then we got to people straps, and then we went into this generation that everybody felt the feelings, right? But then we weren't accountable for actions because of our feelings. So we're swinging back around to say, okay, feelings are neutral, it's the actions that are associated with those feelings that we cannot ignore. Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

But it goes back to when we were kids, you know, say if your dog died or whatever, right? Suck it up. It's you know, now they're in a better place, and like you didn't feel it. So you're seeing your best friend now fill it, or you see your child, or you see someone close in your life who feels this. Right. You may be going, okay, so this is why I'm realizing, hey, I didn't know there were stages, B, why do I feel uncomfortable when this person's in the anger

How Long Grief Really Takes

SPEAKER_00 13:05

stage? And C, wow, I need to go to therapy.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

Right. And it's okay if you go to therapy. I've been in therapy for grief, y'all. It's okay. As a therapist, I needed a therapist in my grief.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

Now, talk to us about when people are listening, they're like, okay, so how long would most people grieve with me? Or what progression do they get stuck more in these stages? Or like they're thinking, okay, so is this like forever? Is this like a month? Is this a year? Like, what do we do?

SPEAKER_01 13:39

I do get that question so much of well, how long am I going to grieve? It's been three months, it's been four months. I should be over this by now. So, one thing I would like to say is we don't just get over this like you do a paper cut or stub toe. Okay, those hurt, sure, they hurt. Yeah, you might need a band-aid for it, but in a few days, you really don't know. You don't know that it happened. Okay, it's healed up. Grief, especially when we look at how long that relationship lasted, that is a good predictor of how long you will mourn that loss.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

And so we can't put a timetable on it. As someone, as you all know, like both my grandfathers died almost four years ago now, and my grandmother, my dad's mom, she died 10 and a half years ago. And so I can talk about her 90% of the time without crying, 90% of the time without getting emotional. So I sit in acceptance by and large, most of the time. Do I still cry a little bit when I miss her? Absolutely. Do I still cry a little bit at Christmas when I really expect her just to come in and being that vibrant, boisterous person that she was? Absolutely. I can get a little teary-eyed over it. I can get teary-eyed and emotional talking about my grandfathers. But again, by and large, I sit in acceptance most of the time. We are never fully over the loss of a person that was very influential and important to us. Okay. The goal is not to get over it because that relationship was a lot more meaningful to you than a paper cut. We're not gonna put the two on equal playing grounds because they're not equal. The pain is not the same. So when we think about, well, when should I be over this? We need to reframe that language. It's not about when we're going to be over it. Because think about you would be over that person, which means you would never think about them again. You'd never talk about them again, you'd never read birthday cards they sent you or pictures that y'all had together. Like that's what over it would mean is that it's gone and forgotten. That's not our goal. Our goal is to get to a point where we sit in acceptance more often than not. And unfortunately, there is no timetable for that. Everybody's grief is different because every relationship is different. Okay, I grieved differently for all four of my grandparents being dead because I had a different relationship with each grandparent. My mom's mom died when I was 15, and she had been chronically ill my whole life up until that point. I was nowhere near as close to her as I was my other grandparents. I've been able to talk about her death for decades without getting emotional because it hit me different.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

Literally, I got double the time with all my other grandparents.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

Yeah. That goes a long way. It really does. And I think we think people tend to compare perceived acceptance of grief and other people with their own. And it's not a comparison game of, well, her grief was worse, and you know, she seems to be better than me. There's no like there's no like better-worse scale of grief. Right. Um, or where you should be on your journey. And with everything, I think social media makes that. And I think too, we live in a lack of transparent world of where people do not share really, like, you know, how open and vulnerable we are on this podcast about you know, I still feel this way or that. Right. People are not sharing that on your day-to-day. So you don't know how they're political world.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

Oh, that's the thing with social media. If you put it out there, you are putting it out there for the world to see, which I guess the same could be said for the podcast. Uh-huh. But I think when we put it on social media, when we when you have the commenters, when you have the trolls, you're opening yourself up for quite a bit of criticism. And that's not enjoyable at all. And so, why would someone who is very vulnerable going through grief want to open themselves up to criticism?

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Yeah, they just it's just too much.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

Oh, I'm I couldn't have handled that four years ago, I'll tell you this much. Could not have handled it if I had to.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

For people wondering what acceptance looks

Signs You Are In Acceptance

SPEAKER_00 18:20

like, they think, okay, I think I am that. What's some examples of you and your clients that you would say, okay, they're in the acceptance stage?

SPEAKER_01 18:28

I would say if they're they are more likely in the acceptance stage if your day-to-day routines feel a little bit more normal or baseline. So your eating and your sleeping is more predictable. You don't find yourself emotional over everything in your day-to-day life. Because when grief is fresh, the day-to-day life is hard. Yeah. It's hard to go to the grocery store and pick out food and make those decisions because you're so overwhelmed by that grief fog and that heaviness. When you're in the acceptance stage, you can do your daily functions, you're asleep in your appetite or more baseline. You can think about and talk about your loved one that has died, and you don't automatically or immediately fall into tears. Now it may still pop up, sure, but it maybe is not like that crippling breakdown that it was in the beginning. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

And then do they ever go out of acceptance right back into bargaining or right back into denial? I have. Yeah. I have to do that. So if they're so if they're like, okay, great, I feel like I'm that person who failed the acceptance stage and somehow Bex, you know, like you know, I I was in, I was a senior year here, and then somehow I jumped back to freshman, you know, that whole like mindset.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

As weird as it sounds, you can't regress in your grief. Grief, we deal with new griefs every day. Yeah. Every day can bring a new or different stage. And so just because you've been in acceptance for a couple of weeks, it seems like, and then all of a sudden their birthday pops up, an anniversary, the holidays, um, a Facebook memory of them pops up, and all of a sudden you're crying again and you're thinking, Great, I've lost all that progress in my journey. No, you haven't. You're human.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

You are human. And if we think about it, grief can often be a traumatic loss for us. Think about it from the scope of a trauma where someone can feel like they were doing really good, they're regulating themselves, they're aware of these triggers. They open up Facebook memories, and then boom, there's a trauma trigger in there that they didn't know was going to be there. They didn't expect it. And then, boom, all of a sudden we have a trauma response. As we should, as we should. So think about it from that lens of trauma, where a trigger can pop up, you can experience those emotions, and that's normal and that's appropriate. It is not a regression.

SPEAKER_00 21:05

And I think that's an important statement, especially since we're fixing to go into holidays, where more than likely you will feel grief pop up again. And it is those moments. Um, but I think this is a really timely episode because we've all experienced grief at some sort of level. And if we haven't yet super personal, it's

Triggers, Holidays, And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_00 21:25

one of those inevitable things. Um but I think it does help to kind of name to tame it, as we love to say, the stages. So if you or your loved ones going through it, you kind of understand the mindset and why the anger okay makes sense, or the if only I could have made sense, or the complete denial aspect of I'm not talking about it. Um again, grief is uncomfortable, but knowing stages, I think helps feel a little bit more comfortable. Yeah. So, well, listeners, thank you um for again for tuning in. Um, not always the funnest conversation to have about grief. That's okay. And that's okay, but we're not always here just for fun. We're here for value for you and your lives. So we appreciate you guys as always, and we'll be back next week. That's right. Maternal mental health is as important as physical health. The Preview Alliance podcast was created for and by moms dealing with postpartum depression and all its variables like anxiety, anger, and even apathy. Hosted by CEO, founder Sarah Parkers, and licensed clinical social worker Whitney Gay, each episode focuses on specific issues relevant to pregnancy and postpartum. Join us and hear how other moms have overcome mental health challenges as well as access tips and suggestions on dealing with your own challenges as moms. You can also browse our podcast library and listen to previous episodes at any time. Please know you're not alone on this journey. We're here to help.