IIC 19: Healing from Losses, Healing with Grief

Dr. Peter walks through advice for working through your own grief and also helping others with their grief, using examples from a story.

[00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem, where you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resiliency to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and in the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski, your host and guide with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. Thank you for being here with me. So how do we heal from grief? How do we move through our losses and heal? And how do we help others who are grieving? How do we be with them in their grief in a way that’s helpful to them? We’re getting into all that and more in this episode, episode 19, which is called Healing from Losses, Healing with Grief, released on June 8th, 2020. So let’s start with a story. It’s story time with Dr. Peter. Do you remember the story of Richard and Susan from episode 17? Let’s catch up with Richard and Susan. Let’s catch up with them and see how they’re doing. So now in the present day, Richard and Susan have been married 28 years. Their three sons have grown up and moved out. They’re 27, 25, 23 years old. They’re very busy with their lives. Richard is now 61 years old. He is still emotionally reserved.

[00:01:53] He’s always been introverted, doesn’t talk a lot about his feelings. He’s not that interested in religion. But he usually attends Sunday Mass with Susan. He had risen up in his international engineering firm, eventually leading a team of six in a joint venture in artificial intelligence with a foreign company. Now that joint venture ended abruptly due to the other firm stealing intellectual property. And the coronavirus lockdowns also happened and so Richard was laid off through no fault of his own. With the worsening economic environment, it’s unlikely he’s going to be able to return to that company. He’s also now struggling with identity issues. He’s been so invested in his work for so many years. After the layoff, he initially kept himself busy with home projects. He tinkered with go karts, but lately he’s been more withdrawn. He spent much more time distracting himself on the internet, and he’s also now experimenting with day trading stocks. He’s got an algorithm that he’s developed. He’s good at math, that he’s thinking might actually be able to make him money day trading. So he’s playing around with that. Susan is now 60. Now remember she’s a lot more extroverted. She’s a lot more emotionally expressive. She’s got a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. She’s eagerly awaiting grandchildren, now that her oldest son is married. She had been hoping that with her husband home from work and their sons moved out, they would renew their marriage relationship.

[00:03:22] But there’s actually more distance than ever. Susan has been troubled by that emotional distance in their marriage for the last 25 years, and she doesn’t know what to do about it. For several years, there’s been almost no physical affection. This is more acute for her now that her social activities and connections have been curtailed by the social distancing, by the requirements of the lockdowns and the restrictions because of the coronavirus. Remember that 20 years ago, Susan experienced a real deepening of her faith. She began to practice it more seriously. She had a regular prayer life develop. She attends daily Mass occasionally. Not now with the coronavirus situation, but she had been. She goes to confession regularly. She had a scare with breast cancer five years ago. She recovered fully from that. She continues to be in high demand as a professional translator in Spanish and Italian. She has been deeply worried upon finding out about two weeks ago that the first case of the coronavirus had been confirmed at her mother’s assisted living facility. Now, her 87 year old mother has shortness of breath, a fever, fatigue and a cough. Health is failing rapidly for Mom as they wait for the results of a COVID-19 test. Susan also recently discovered a pornographic pop-up window on her husband’s home office desktop. She asked her husband about it, but he said it was nothing. All right. So that’s the sort of broad outline of the story.

[00:04:52] We’re going to do a quick review from episode 17, where we covered a lot of the conceptual material about grief and loss and mourning. Loss is the deprivation of a real, tangible good. That loss is what happens when some real good is taken from us. It can be an actual good or it can be a potential good, something that we were looking forward to and now won’t happen. Grief is the individual experience of loss. Grief is our personal reaction, our internal reaction to the loss. It’s our experience of the loss. And that can be psychological, physical, behavioral and emotional. Mourning is the public expression of our grief. It’s what we show to others. It’s what we allow others to see of our grief. Mourning is how we show our grief. So let’s review how these three concepts, loss, grief, and mourning, are going for both Richard and for Susan. For Richard, his losses, the loss of his job, the loss of his income, the loss of his identity because so much of Richard’s identity was bound up in his position at work, and the affirmation that he got from doing a good job, the creativity that he was able to express in his position. So there was a lot of loss of identity. Also compounding this is Richard’s confronting his aging. He’s noticing physical decline at 61. He’s feeling it in his body.

[00:06:24] For example, he doesn’t ride around in his go karts anymore because it’s just too hard on him. That’s a loss for Richard as well. Remember that there were six stages of grief in Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s model: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. And then the new one that was added, making meaning. So originally in the story that I shared with you at the beginning, Richard dealt with his grief by avoiding it, essentially denying it. He increased his activity initially. He sought distractions through focusing his attention on other things, working around the house, and then getting heavily into the day trading. He also actually is seeking comfort in pornography. That’s an emotional withdrawal from his wife. Along with that, he’s looking to numb some of his emotional reactions and experience some kind of good feelings, or at least some kind of fleeting, transitory pleasure in order to deal with the pain that he’s not articulating very well. His way of mourning right now is to maintain a facade of being unaffected, and to brush off attempts at connection or consolation. Because if he allowed himself to be cared for, if he allowed himself to be connected with, the grief would bubble up. And he has strong desires for that not to happen. So what’s going on for Susan at this point? What are the losses? Well, she’s facing the anticipatory grief of losing her mother to death.

[00:08:06] She’s also experiencing a loss of trust in her husband. She’s not certain that this was nothing, that a pop-up window came up on his computer. So there’s some questions there. This isn’t sitting well with her. Right. So there’s a loss of certainty or a loss of confidence in that relationship, a loss of trust. There’s also the loss of illusions about her marriage, things that she sort of just papered over, things that she sort of just naively set aside, didn’t address directly. It was always going to be better when her husband was home, not working so much. So there was the loss of some of these hopes or wishes. So the six stages of grief, to review those real quickly again, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and making meaning, depends on what she’s grieving in the moment. She’s in a kind of denial with regard to her husband’s possible pornography use. Right. Initially, very much about like saying, well, it’s just a pop-up. Those kinds of things happen. Or maybe it was, you know, related to some search from one of her sons or somebody else. With her mom, there was more acceptance. The grief was coming in. She was feeling the emotions more. She was already to the point of accepting it. Mom had been sick for a long time. There had been some initial anger about it. There was anger at the nursing home facility for the whole COVID thing entering in there, some possible issues with staff not being checked on a regular basis as to their health conditions and so forth.

[00:09:54] Bargaining was a very brief thing for Susan when she was talking about this with God. Mom was 87 years old. While Mom has some anxiety about death, she’s also done a fair amount of her own work later in life in a number of ways. So at this point, with regard to her Mom, there’s more acceptance. She’s not to the point of making meaning of it yet, because the death actually hasn’t happened. But Susan actually is in a fairly good place when it comes to the reality of her mother’s upcoming death. How does Susan mourn? Well, Susan’s much more open with her friends. She’s sharing with them. The assisted living facility has a grief group for family members because this is something that happens regularly. Three session program. So kind of a brief thing that Susan participated in. That went really well for her. She was also able to write a long letter of everything that she would like to say to her mom and put that into words. Some of it her mom really wasn’t ready to hear, and some of it she was. And so Susan actually was able to go through those things and have some time with her mom before her mother’s condition worsened.

[00:11:21] Susan also wrote poetry, and she prayed. She actually took her feelings about this to God. It was actually an opportunity for her to really become smaller, more childlike, and to work through some of these emotions with God in prayer. All right. So those are just some of the background of the story. Let’s get into some ways to work with grief. Some helpful tips if you are struggling with grief or that might be helpful to other people. We’re going to start with ones for yourself. And the first thing is, and this is a really hard one, I’m going to start with the really hard stuff first. And that is any loss that God permits is a gift. Any loss that God permits is a gift. If a loss is happening in your life, it’s happening at least by God’s permissive will. And the only reason that God would permit something like that to happen, a loss to happen, is for it to provide you a greater good. That is what we believe as Catholics. We might rail against the loss. It’s very human to do that. We might only be able to see it in the most abstract, conceptual, dry theological way. Very natural, very normal. We may not be able to see it at all, right. There are times where we just can’t fathom how this would possibly be good. It just looks like unmitigated disaster.

[00:13:05] But our feelings don’t determine the reality, and our feelings don’t necessarily reflect the reality. God allows losses to happen for our good. “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord,” says Romans 8:28. That is the critical verse for this whole podcast. We’re going to come back to that over and over again. “All things work together for good for those who love the Lord.” And whatever our losses are, they do not invalidate that verse. So with that in mind, we’re going to try to have this mindset and we’re going to try to have this soulset that losses are gifts. Because if we can conceptualize them as gifts, then we can look for, what is the gift there? If we just go with our initial gut reaction, if we just go with our passions, we go with our emotions that say, this is terrible. This is a disaster. There’s no good in this. Then we won’t be inclined to look for the good in it. We won’t be inclined to seek that good and then we won’t find it. That doesn’t again have to be something that you feel in your heart or that you know somehow in your bones. It can be something that is a very conceptual thing, a very intellectual thing at the beginning. But if you stay with it, more of that will come to you in a more integrated way in terms of the knowing.

[00:14:33] Tips. Feel the pain of the grief. Allow yourself to feel it. Accept your emotions, whatever they are. Don’t pack those emotions away. Don’t drive them into the unconscious. If you do that, it’s like they get preserved in amber. I’ve worked with people who have had grief that is 50 years old or more, and it’s just as fresh and just as sharp, just as acute, just as painful as if it was happening right now. Because if we don’t work through our grief, if we don’t stay with it, if we don’t integrate it, it’s not going to resolve. This is not something where time is just going to heal it. That’s what Richard was trying to do at the beginning. He was trying to not feel the pain of his grief. That’s where he went to working with projects around the house. He went into the day trading. He went into pornography in an attempt to not feel the grief. He just wanted to move on with life. He just wanted to have that sense of control. So we want to allow the time for the grief. And this is where Susan made some really good decisions. She actually cut back her work schedule some to be able to have time, time to work with her grief, extra time for prayer, extra time with her friends. She had a sense that she needed that. We also need to allow ourselves to not understand.

[00:16:01] When you’re grieving, you might not understand why it happened, why the loss happened, and that’s okay. Relief is not going to come from understanding and knowing. It’s actually going to come from trusting and having confidence in God. It’s going to come from relational connections. Think about a little kid, right, who’s just experienced some kind of injury, some kind of loss. A little kid is most soothed by the presence of a loving parent. Not by explanations, not by knowledge, not by conceptual understanding, but by relational connection and a restoration of trust and an experience of being in that trusted relationship. That’s what helps a little kid. And when we’re in this grief, we’re like little kids. “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them. For of such is made up the kingdom of God,” our Lord tells us, right. So let’s not necessarily look for understanding. We may not be granted that. “Your ways are not my ways and your thoughts are not my thoughts,” says the Lord. We want to actually go back to trust. We want to go back to that relational connection. Next tip. Share the grief with someone you trust, a friend, a family member, a counselor, a confessor. Talk about your losses. And this is where Susan’s friend Valerie was a tremendous help to her. Valerie listened to Susan. She listened to Susan pour out her heart about the losses around her mom.

[00:17:45] And she waited. And she was there for her. It wasn’t so important to Susan what Valerie did. It wasn’t important so much what Valerie said. It was the position of being with her. It’s going to be really important to share the grief in prayer, to share it with God. And maybe, maybe you’re not in a position to share it with God, because maybe there’s a part of you that sees God as the problem, as seeing God causing the loss or not preventing the loss from happening. Right? So sometimes in grief, it’s easier to go to the Blessed Virgin Mary or to our guardian angels. If you look at angels, there’s a long history of angels being sent to comfort people in distress. Just one quick example, right. In the Garden of Gethsemane, an angel was sent to help our Lord when he was deeply distressed as he contemplated his upcoming passion. But taking that grief to prayer, there’s a lot of times when something, when we experience those losses, that we seal God off from that. And there’s reasons for that. But if we can open up and begin to bring that in humility and in childlike trust and confidence to God and to bring the emotions, sometimes we only want to bring the head to God. We just want to bring the mind to God, not the heart, not the body.

[00:19:18] We want to bring all four, body, mind, heart, and soul to God. If you’re a more private person, and if things are just extremely raw and it’s just hard to reach out to anybody else, then I’m going to recommend that you keep a journal, that you’re going to put your interior experiences into words, because it’s helpful to articulate what you’re experiencing, even to yourself. You can engage your intellect and your will in this whole effort to help yourself. Letters are another way. So we talked about how Susan wrote a letter to her mother while her mother was dying. And in that put in what she wanted to say. And then from that was able to share various things with her mother. But even the things she didn’t say, the letter clarified. She was able to go through and understand her complex reactions toward her mother. We can also write letters to God. We can write letters to Mother Mary. We can write letters to our guardian angel. We can write letters to saints. Sometimes that’s the only way some people can pray when they’re deep in grief. Next tip. Take care of your body. Eat well. Exercise. Sometimes, sometimes it’s really hard to eat when you’re experiencing grief. On the other side, we might eat a lot and we might eat things that aren’t good for us. I tend to fall more on that side than the not eating thing.

[00:20:57] Avoid abusing alcohol. Avoid using drugs. Take advantage of the beautiful things that you do recognize in your life. Take a walk on that sunny day when the weather is just perfect. We want to maintain a sense of gratitude. Focus on appreciation for very little things. This helps ward off anhedonia. In the last episode, we talked about anhedonia. That’s the inability to experience pleasure in things, and it’s more of a characteristic of depression than it is of grief. We want to, in grief, continue to be able to enjoy things. Sometimes people feel guilty about enjoying things when they’re grieving. They have some warped conscience things coming up where if they enjoy something, that means that they don’t value the loss of the person that they loved or something like that. There can be a lot of unusual or distorted moral perceptions that come up in grief. Another tip. Maintain your routines. And you might consider a bereavement group or even therapy. That was something that was helpful to Susan in the story, was even the brief experience of learning about grief that she had at the assisted living facility. Okay, so a few things to avoid. We mentioned this already. Avoid seeking relief through alcohol, drugs, pornography. You know, the kinds of bad habits that people can get into, binge eating, binge shopping, for example. Avoid just cramming all kinds of activity into your day as a way of avoiding grief.

[00:22:40] That was Richard, as we mentioned before. Avoid resenting others’ attempts to help. Sometimes when you’re grieving, others can be really awkward. They can say things, they can do things, that may end badly with us. It’s helpful if we can avoid that resentment, and then we also don’t want to lose that sense of gratitude like we were talking about before. Okay, so how can we be helpful to others who are grieving? Sometimes watching people grieve or experiencing their mourning, that can be kind of destabilizing for us. It can be awkward. We don’t know what to do. We have good intentions. But how do we reach out to somebody who’s just lost a spouse of 42 years? Or how do we reach out to somebody that’s just received a diagnosis of a terminal illness? That kind of thing. That can be daunting for some of us. People in grief, people who are grieving are often isolated. They’re often alone. They often close themselves off. And that’s because they sense that awkwardness in us. They know that we fear doing or saying the wrong thing. All right. Let’s not let that happen. So how can we be helpful? So the first thing is to prepare yourself. If you have a lot of unresolved grief, especially if it’s around the same kind of thing that another person went through, it’s not surprising that your own grief might get activated. It’s not surprising if that were to well up in you, as it resonates with the grief that the other person is experiencing.

[00:24:26] That’s actually kind of a healthy thing, because there’s a pull within us for healing. So there’s an opportunity here, a portal here, for that grief to come up. Now, if that grief is about to overwhelm you, obviously, then it’s not the time to try to be helpful to that other person. So it’s really important that we do our own work. I spend most of the time when I do clinical supervision of new therapists or consultation with therapists, even seasoned therapists, really working with their own internal stuff so that they can be with their clients in a better way. I don’t focus as much on technique because technique can’t make up for the capacity to be with, technique can only support the being with. It can only tune the being with. It can’t replace being with. So we want to be prepared. Pray before if you have the opportunity. I mean, sometimes we don’t have the opportunity. You got to do, you got to go with what you got. Right. But if you have the opportunity, if you know that you’re going to be going to the wake, right, to the calling for a friend’s mother who has died, you know that you’re going to be doing that, then you can spend some time in prayer. You can ask for help.

[00:25:48] You can ask for help from your guardian angel too. You can ask for help from the grieving person’s guardian angel, right? Because that angel is charged with taking care of that person and will help you be an instrument of that as well. Be you, be really you. You don’t have to be perfect. Your willingness goes a long way. Be willing to talk about the loss. You don’t have to say much. You can mostly listen. You don’t have to know what to say. Again, in these situations, what’s helpful is the being with. It’s not some magic combination of words. Sometimes we have that fantasy, right, where if we could only say the right phrase in the right way, with the right tone, then it’ll make everything better. It’s not about that. It’s about the relational connection. Be patient with the grieving person. It takes time. One of the beautiful things in the story was about how Valerie was able to just be with Susan, and Susan was eventually able to open up about her fears about her husband’s pornography use with Valerie, which was really helpful to sort through all of Valerie’s issues around that, including her body image issues, and to deal with a much bigger issue of, did she waste her life? Did she marry the wrong person? Is she undesirable? Is she unlovable, at least in the marriage? There are all kinds of things that we’re able to come out because Valerie was able to spend time with her.

[00:27:26] It was a tremendous opportunity for Susan to get in touch with some of her shame and some of her wounds that she had not dealt with before. And this is why those losses are gifts from God. They’re going to bring up things. They’re going to call things up from our unconscious to be able to be worked through. C. S. Lewis has this pithy statement that pain is God’s megaphone. It’s one of the ways that he speaks to us. And we want to be receptive to listening to those calls that come with pain. Sometimes when people have had repeated loss after repeated loss, and they can’t understand why things have piled on them in the way that they have, it’s because there’s a lesson somewhere in there. There’s a teaching from a kind and loving God, something that really needs to be reached in that person’s core that they’ve been very resistant to getting to. Now, I’m not saying that if bad things are happening to somebody, that they’re just being difficult and resistant. I’m not saying that at all. I don’t know. But always those losses are happening for a reason. They’re always gifts. If we love the Lord, all things work together for good. It’s important not to deny or minimize the loss when you’re working with somebody else.

[00:29:01] Avoid the pat answers. Don’t do the easy cliches. Don’t do the platitudes. Sometimes Catholics are really good at this. We’ll say, keep your chin up, or he’s just in a better place, you know, de facto canonization ceremonies that we do often at funerals and stuff like that, the receptions after funerals. We don’t want to do that. We want to be real. We want to be with people in their grief. A lot of times when we’re saying those kinds of things, it’s because we’re anxious, we’re nervous. We don’t know what to say. We don’t know what to do. And sometimes being real with the other person, we just say, I don’t know what to say. I feel really bad for you. Sometimes that’s just, sometimes that’s enough. So know your limitations. Be available after everybody else gets back to the regular bustle of their lives. The funeral happens, and everybody shows up. But then 48 hours later, boom, people are gone. Be the person that circles back in 72 hours, or in four days, or in five days. It’s a wonderful thing that my wife does, actually, is that she really focuses on bringing meals to women who have just given birth, like four weeks ago and six weeks ago and eight weeks ago, right, when they’re exhausted, they’ve lost a lot of sleep. The help has left. They’re feeling more burned out. That’s when she actually steps in and does it.

[00:30:35] It’s a wonderful thing that she does and people really appreciate it. That’s not an example of grief usually, or loss, but it sort of illustrates that circling around when other people may not be so available. If somebody died, talk about the deceased by name, actually use the name. And also understand that people may have different kinds of reactions that don’t seem to make sense, and telling them that or just telling them to feel some other way, or reassuring them, for example, that they never did anything wrong in their relationship when they’re experiencing something like a guilt feeling, that’s actually not going to be helpful to the person. There was an article on the internet by Lynn Barkley Burnett, where she quotes physicians Rachel Remen and Michael Rabow about like, what helped people and what didn’t help people. They they worked with end of life situations, hospice care and things like that. So this is a quick list of things that helped that they found that helped and a quick list of what didn’t help. So what helped? These are statements from people that, you know, were grieving. And this is, you know, these are the things that they actually found helpful. One, the person helped me talk about it as long as I wanted to. Second, they told me that everything I was feeling was normal. If these are normal grief reactions and you can sense that, you can tell people, that can be helpful.

[00:31:56] Letting people cry. Hugging them when they needed it. Sitting with me and listening. Calling me back. Being physically and emotionally present in the moment. And this is where Richard’s son John, that’s the second son, the 25 year old. He was able to sit with Richard and just be with him when he knew that there were some things going on around the job and so forth, made some efforts to connect with him. Richard didn’t open up a lot, but that connection was really important to Richard. He’s still very early in his stages of grief. Holding my hand. Saying, “I’m sorry for your loss” and really meaning it. Saying, “I’m here for you.” Talking with me the same way after my loss as before, not getting all weird like people sometimes do because of their own stuff, right? And some people actually liked it when a person brought their dog to talk with them, you know, to kind of be with them and be with the dog. What doesn’t help? What are the kinds of things that we might be inclined to that don’t help? Number one. Problem solving, that is trying to solve the person’s problems for them. It doesn’t mean that helping out by bringing meals or taking care of certain things that you can help take care of. We’re certainly not recommending against that, but trying to solve the problems for the person? No.

[00:33:19] Changing the subject away from the grief or loss. Giving advice before you understand the whole story. Talking about yourself instead of being with the other person, assuming that your experience of grief is similar to theirs. Saying, “Call me if you need anything.” That’s kind of dismissive, right? Because a lot of times people grieving are not going to reach out and feel like they’re imposing their grief on everybody else. Not acknowledging the person’s perspective, arguing with them about how they think or feel. Explaining about how the grieving person caused the loss. Not helpful. Usually when the person’s in the grief telling the person that this is a great learning experience before they’re ready to hear that, giving advice that’s unasked for. And then the statement, “Don’t cry.” Those are the types of things that Remon and Rabo found were not helpful. So today was a very practical application type of episode, where we really get into practical applications around grief. That wraps up our three episode series on grief, loss, mourning and resiliency. If you really like these podcasts, I want you to register for the private Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community at soulsandhearts.com. In our community, in this community, we go deeper into the topic for even better resiliency, even more rising up, even more capacity to take on the challenges of these troubled times, even more transformation, even more growth, psychological growth, and spiritual growth in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community.

[00:35:04] I work directly with you in small groups, sometimes large groups. It’s free for the first 30 days. After that, it’s only $25 a month, which is a real deal for the kind of experiential learning that you’re going to get. For example, we’re just going to post the videos and the audio recordings from the two Zoom community meetings we just recently had. One was on working through grief, especially unacknowledged grief. And then the other one, which we just had, was on stress management techniques. We worked through some breathing exercises and some progressive muscle relaxation to help with stress management, all of that grounded in a solidly Catholic worldview. There’s also discussion boards in the community. There’s messaging among community members. It’s the very best place in the whole virtual world, the whole internet world for people like you, people who really want to grow both spiritually and psychologically, to shed psychological barriers to loving God and neighbor better. It’s all happening in the Resilient Catholics Carpe Diem community. Check it out at soulsandhearts.com. Please come join us. We’d love to have you. And if you’re already a part of the community, if you’ve already taken that leap and joined, thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. Let’s go to our patroness. Let’s go to our patron. Let’s ask for their prayers. Our Mother Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.