Who Has The Right To Grieve?

[00:00:01]Who has the right to grieve?

[00:00:05]The easy answer is that everyone deserves to grieve at any point over anything in their lives, and we deserve to grieve in the way that is the healthiest for us.

[00:00:14]However, as always, there's a small contingent of people who want to have very loud voices spewing opinions on who should be allowed to feel things and how they should be allowed to express those feelings.

[00:00:27]As usual, my response to those types of people consists of two words. They start with F and end with U.

[00:00:34]But my comments today are not directed at those people. My comments, as always, are directed to those in the universe who wish to seek healing and authentic expression of emotion and making the choices that are the most loving for you.

[00:00:49]Choosing myself is a concept that I struggled with for a long time, and I'm not perfect at it, but I have some practice and experience that I believe will be helpful to some people, and so as always, I want to share the experiences that I think will benefit others.

[00:01:05]Now, I'm not a mental health professional. I don't have any sort of licensure. I am just an expert in my own trauma, and I always hope that by sharing my experiences, I'll be able to help other people going through some of the same situations.

[00:01:19]You and I probably have a lot in common.

[00:01:21][music] I'm a mom.

[00:01:23]I work hard to provide for my family. I have goals and dreams, >> [music] >> things I'm good at and things I wish I did better.

[00:01:31]A few years ago, I was on a treadmill.

[00:01:34]I think most of us find ourselves there at one time or another.

[00:01:38]We find ourselves repeating the same old habits and patterns, not really [music] going anywhere.

[00:01:43]And maybe the treadmill we're on isn't even ours. Maybe it's made up [music] of the expectations of other people.

[00:01:50]At a critical time in my life, I had a couple of conversations that made me hit the big red stop button on the treadmill.

[00:01:57]Then, I did something revolutionary.

[00:02:01]I stepped off.

[00:02:03]I looked around at my life and asked myself, is this what I really want?

[00:02:08]Some people would call [music] that a midlife crisis, but I didn't radically change my clothing style or buy a sports car.

[00:02:15]Instead, I started making small changes to my habits and routines.

[00:02:20]What I noticed was that one small change led [music] to another and over time, the difference was revolutionary.

[00:02:28]I think most people define midlife as a certain [music] age, but maybe that's just the time when we take what was given to us in the beginning of our lives and decide to mold [music] it into what we want for us and not for anyone else.

[00:02:43]You can make small [music] changes that are revolutionary, too. Like, maybe listening to [music] a new podcast.

[00:02:51]It's just one small thing, but it also might just be revolutionary.

[00:02:59]Welcome to The Midlife Revolution, where we believe in making small changes that change everything.

[00:03:06]One of the things I had to learn a lot about in the process of healing from PTSD and childhood emotional neglect is how to grieve in a healthy way.

[00:03:16]I think grief is an emotion that is not well understood by most people. I certainly didn't understand it well when I started therapy and I'm still learning how to recognize and process grief in my everyday life, over big things and small things. Grief is a companion to almost every other emotion that I feel, meaning that if I have a strong feeling about a situation, it's likely that I also feel some kind of grief, as well. And I'll give you some examples from my own life to illustrate what I'm talking about.

[00:03:45]One of the markers of having experienced childhood emotional neglect is that you have trouble naming your emotions. I've spoken about this before on the podcast and I'll recommend again the book Running on Empty by Dr. Jonice Webb and her CEN or Child Emotional Neglect Questionnaire which you can review at drjonicewebb.com.

[00:04:06]That's web with two b's. So, throughout my healing journey, I found that when I felt grief, I had trouble identifying that that was what I was feeling and therefore I couldn't really process it or understand it.

[00:04:18]My experience was that when I couldn't process an emotion, there would be a sort of backlog where it would keep building and building and eventually I would have some kind of outburst or meltdown and it would take a long time to recover, sometimes even a few days.

[00:04:33]But as I became more adept at naming my emotions, I got more skilled at identifying why I was feeling grief.

[00:04:40]Almost every time I had strong feelings about a situation.

[00:04:44]The more I practice naming grief, the better I get at understanding why I feel it. And now those emotions pass much more quickly and I'm not debilitated by difficult situations as often.

[00:04:56]It's gotten to the point where if I'm stuck and I feel like I can't move forward, I remember that I need to address why I'm grieving and give myself time to feel and sit with that emotion as often as I need to until I feel better. So, as one example from my own life, when I lost my job, I was angry about the way that I had been treated and disrespected.

[00:05:18]But I also had an underlying grief for the loss of the opportunity, for the loss of the friendship with my former boss, the loss of my friendship with his wife, for the hopes and dreams I had for that career. I was grieving all of those things.

[00:05:32]So, it wasn't just that I was angry about being so unceremoniously dismissed and having my position eliminated.

[00:05:39]It wasn't just that I was angry about the way that I'd been treated. It wasn't just that I was angry that I felt unemployable in my opinion.

[00:05:48]It was the grief over all of those things, over the loss.

[00:05:51]So, I realize this will not be true for everyone, and my hope in sharing my experience is always is just that some people will find something here that resonates with them, and I hope it sparks an understanding of what you know that you need for yourself moving forward because I really do believe that we all inherently know what we need to heal, but sometimes we dismiss it because we think, "Oh, maybe that's not right." or we get opinions from other people. Hopefully, what I'm saying here validates what you're already feeling.

[00:06:21]For me, I began to recognize that every time I experienced loss, there will be some element of grief accompanying that loss.

[00:06:29]Recognizing that really became a turning point in my emotional maturity because that recognition stopped me from holding on to things for too long or getting stuck in a thought loop and not being able to move through my emotions.

[00:06:43]Naming grief and the reasons for it allowed all of those emotions to pass so that I could go on to feel other things.

[00:06:51]Now, whenever I have a strong emotional response to a situation, I ask myself, "What did I lose?"

[00:06:58]Because for me, grief is almost always about something I've lost, and I have to ask myself why I'm sad about that loss.

[00:07:08]Now, I want to move on to the title of this video.

[00:07:11]Part of the reason I wanted to talk about this subject is because I think in the broader public, there's an element of shame and judgment that people foist upon others when they believe that when you're going through a hard time, you should just suck it up and get over it.

[00:07:27]A lot of us grew up in situations where we were not allowed to fully feel and express our emotions in a healthy way.

[00:07:34]This is where the work of Dr. Jonice Webb has been really helpful for me and powerful in my life.

[00:07:40]She talks about the idea that while there may not have been physical harm happening, it was the absence of a safe place to express emotions and to have feelings in the first place that caused us distress and harm. If you're in your 40s or older, it's very likely that you have parents who were unequipped to deal with their own emotions because they were raised by the {quote} {unquote} silent generation, the generation who lived through war and famine and the Great Depression, and they just sucked it up and never complained.

[00:08:12]And that's why they're called the silent generation. And then they raised the next generation of adults, the baby boomers, and many of the baby boomer generation adopted some of those same stoic emotional habits. You're not supposed to cry, you're not supposed to show emotion, you're not supposed to grieve, you're just supposed to stuff it down, suck it up, and move on, and never deal with it, process it, talk about it, or have feelings at all. So, a lot of us grew up in a home environment, or we had teachers or other adult mentors with this unemotional mentality, where we were shamed by our parents or other trusted adults in our lives who would tell us to just get over it, or say, "It's not that big a deal," or "You don't need to cry over every little thing."

[00:08:57]And for many men, they were told not to cry at all because crying is weakness, and men are not allowed to show weakness.

[00:09:05]So, many of us Gen X or later who were raised by baby boomers who were raised by the silent generation have adopted this idea that only certain people are allowed to feel certain emotions under certain circumstances.

[00:09:19]For example, if you lose a child, that's a big deal, and you're allowed to grieve over that.

[00:09:24]If you lose a spouse, that's also a big deal, you're allowed to grieve over that. But anything short of a loss of a child or a spouse or very close family member shouldn't be that big of a deal, even if it's a family member, but someone outside your immediate family, like an uncle or a cousin or close family friend.

[00:09:42]Not only that, but if you didn't know the person at all, you're not allowed to grieve because that's not acceptable.

[00:09:48]It's not a big enough deal that you're allowed to have or show express emotions about it.

[00:09:54]What I think about a lot is that prior to going to therapy and healing from PTSD, I struggled for a long time with SI or ideation that I didn't want to exist anymore.

[00:10:05]And it took me a long time to get to the point where I felt comfortable talking about that with other people and where I felt comfortable sharing how I was feeling and why I was feeling that way.

[00:10:16]I never had an active plan to carry anything out, but I had ideas come to me from time to time, like hanging on to old pain medications just in case I got to a point where I felt I couldn't handle my emotional pain anymore.

[00:10:30]I have an episode from the past podcast season where I talk about the plan that I put in place to get help when I was having those dark thoughts because ultimately, I didn't want to act on those thoughts. I really wanted to live.

[00:10:43]And I'll link that here and in the show notes. I eventually overcame those feelings and I was able to heal from that and move through that struggle, but going through those feelings changed me and it gave me a lot of compassion for others who feel the same way or who are struggling with ideas of hurting themselves.

[00:11:00]So, for me, whenever I hear of someone losing that battle with those thoughts, I get overwhelmed with grief.

[00:11:07]It's grief for that person, for their struggle, for them having to go through that painful experience, for the pain of the family members they've left behind.

[00:11:15]I just have an empathic grief for all of those things.

[00:11:19]And I've had some friends and former students who have taken those thoughts to completion and it always feels devastating to me.

[00:11:27]But at a particularly vulnerable time in my healing journey, was June of 2018, there was an outbreak of these types of events. And I'm being careful with the words that I'm saying here because this platform doesn't like the actual word.

[00:11:43]So, I'm talking around it. But two people who I deeply admire completed within days of each other.

[00:11:51]Kate Spade on June 5th of 2018 and Anthony Bourdain on June 8th of 2018.

[00:11:57]And I [clears throat] had a huge outpouring of grief about those two events. But whenever I would go on social media and read other people's posts where dozens of ordinary people who didn't know the victims commented on how sad it was and how devastated they were, there was an equally large or even larger contingent of loud voices telling them that they had no right to comment or to grieve or to feel these feelings because it was someone they didn't even know. And they were expressing the idea that it's weird for people to grieve for someone they had no personal connection to.

[00:12:36]And that kind of rhetoric is incredibly harmful to the human family because it doesn't matter that you don't personally know the individual. What matters is that you're a human being with compassion and you feel grief because of your humanity and because you have the ability to see the little things that you identify with and you can connect with in the people you observe in the world even if you've never met them.

[00:13:02]When a life is ended or taken, it's like that little piece of human connection dies, too.

[00:13:08]And this is not a phenomenon that can be easily understood by someone who has no compassion. And that's what I want to talk about next because I believe that when a person has a lack of compassion for others, it's a lot of times because they have a lack of compassion for themselves. This type of person would not allow themselves to grieve over someone they didn't know or give themselves space to feel strong emotions in this particular situation.

[00:13:34]So, they find it abhorrent that anyone else should be allowed to have strong feelings of grief for strangers, and they refuse to give anyone else space to grieve over someone they didn't know well.

[00:13:47]Here's where our conversation is going to stray once again into the true crime genre because I feel this aspect of grieving is particularly pertinent to people who consume true crime for entertainment or a sense of community.

[00:14:01]Now, if you've spent any time consuming true crime media, you've probably seen more than once where ordinary people have strong feelings of grief for victims of crime whom they have never met and don't know on any kind of personal level.

[00:14:16]But the stories of the victims tug at our heartstrings, those of us who have a heart, and we feel compassion for the victims both living and dead. Many of us hear these tragic stories, and we see an element of ourselves or someone we love in the victims or the family members.

[00:14:33]Many of us also have unprocessed trauma or unprocessed emotions over being in a similar relationship or a similar situation to one of the victims, and we don't realize that we haven't grieved the loss of ourselves in that relationship or the loss of potential or the dream of that relationship, whether it's romantic or familial or a friendship of the same type.

[00:14:57]At the end of the day, nobody has a right to tell anyone what to feel or how to feel it. But especially around the topic of grief, those who are judgmental of those of us who feel strong emotions for strangers, I would argue have issues with naming and expressing their own emotions.

[00:15:16]The bottom line for me is that if you're a person who feels grief for strangers, I want to validate that you are a compassionate human.

[00:15:23]And your humanity is beautiful, at least to me.

[00:15:26]And I also want to give you permission, although you certainly do not need permission and you definitely don't need it from me, but you have permission to grieve in the way that will help you best to heal.

[00:15:39]And if your healing process involves hosting a 24-hour video marathon every year to commemorate the lives of people you've never met, or any other ritual that makes you feel like you're making a difference in the world or just your world, more power to you. And ignore the people who want to judge you for trying to make a difference.

[00:16:00]As always, I hope you find one small thing that you can change that will make your life better, whether it's recognizing for the first time that grief is a part of what you're feeling, or coming up with a grieving ritual that helps you move through your emotions, or learning to hold space for people who grieve differently from you. I wish you the best in your healing journey, and thank you for being part of the revolution.

[00:16:24]As always, please like the episode if you found it valuable. Please share it with someone who needs to hear it. And take good care of yourself. I'll see you again soon.