Your Brain And Body On Grief With Meghan Riordan Jarvis

In this heartfelt episode, we dive into the often uncharted waters of grief with the incredible Meghan Riordan Jarvis. As a trauma-trained psychotherapist and TEDx speaker, Meghan joins us to uncover the hidden layers of grief that many of us don't recognize. Spoiler alert: it’s not just about tears and sadness. We explore how grief can sneakily manifest in our bodies as physical ailments or even mimic depression.

Trigger Warning: This practice may include references to death, dying, and the departed.

Transcript

Hi,

I'm Michelle Chalfant,

Psychotherapist,

Holistic life coach,

And human,

Just like you,

Learning to navigate life's challenges.

With over 25 years experience,

I teach people how to get healthy using the adult chair model.

The adult chair model is where simple psychology meets grounded spirituality,

And it teaches us how to become healthy adults.

From anxiety and depression to codependency and relationship issues,

You can use the adult chair for just about anything.

Each week,

I share practical tips,

Tools,

And advice from myself and a wide range of experts on how to get unstuck,

How to live authentically,

And how to truly love yourself,

All while sitting in your adult chair.

Welcome to the adult chair podcast.

Hello,

Everybody,

And welcome to the adult chair podcast.

I am Michelle Chalfant.

Happy to be here with you today talking about such an important topic,

One that needs to be talked about more and more and more,

Which is grief.

I've talked about it a lot on this podcast,

And I was really excited to have Megan Reardon Jarvis on the show today talking all about grief.

You know,

Here's the thing.

So often,

We experience some sort of loss,

And at a later date,

We have physical symptoms that are linked to that loss,

And we don't link those two together.

So we touch on that a little bit,

But I got to tell you,

We go really deep into grief and what you can do about it and how do you know if you might be experiencing grief.

We got into,

Again,

The brain and body,

Like what happens to the brain and body on grief?

It's a subject that just as humans,

I find,

Because we're a little bit clumsy feeling our emotions,

But really the hard ones like grief,

We don't know how to feel and process,

And Megan got into this today with all of us.

So I think you're really going to enjoy this show.

I just want to give you a little bit more about Megan,

And then we're going to jump right in.

So Megan Reardon Jarvis.

She's a podcast host,

A TEDx speaker,

And trauma-trained psychotherapist specializing in grief and loss.

She has 20 years experience and speaks on the importance of understanding grief and supporting grievers.

You're going to love this woman.

Let me tell you what,

We really got into it,

And she's going to help you.

So I'm excited to hear what you think about the show.

As always,

Let me know,

Hit me up on social,

As well as any platform where you are listening today.

And as always,

Please share the show.

It helps others to find the show so they too can learn how to live in their adult chair.

Here we go with Megan Reardon Jarvis.

So welcome to the adult chair podcast,

Megan Reardon Jarvis.

I am so,

So happy to be here.

I'm so happy to have you here as well.

So today we're talking about your body and brain on grief.

I just absolutely love this topic,

And I love the work that you are doing all around grief.

So thank you.

Thank you for what you're doing in the world around grief.

With all that's going on right now in the world,

I mean,

There are a lot of reasons that people will be in grief if you're looking at,

My gosh,

What's going on in other countries with not just wars and turmoil,

We've got weather even all around the world,

All around the world.

You know,

I'm reading about so much chaos in our world.

So I think you talking about this now and having such a big platform around grief is so like the timing is perfect.

So tell me just a little bit about,

Let's tell the audience a little bit about who you are.

Why are you so passionate about grief and all the things?

Well,

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

I'm excited to talk to your audience.

They are the sweet spot of folks that I feel like,

Oh,

These are people who are searching to know more about how to live authentically in their lives.

And I feel like grief is an undercurrent conversation that exists in all the experiences that we have where there is some sense of loss,

Right?

So when we experience loss,

Grief is the energetic response that's created in our body on account of that loss.

Often we focus a lot on,

Oh,

This is what I lost.

I lost my marriage.

I lost my job.

I lost my health.

I lost my mom.

But in tandem with that loss,

There is also this energy that gets created that now lives inside you that is the grief that needs to sort of be moved through.

And I have been a trauma therapist.

So I specialize in helping people who have either had a single really difficult event,

Like they were in a carjacking or a hurricane,

Or has had a developmental sort of traumatic experience where they grew up in a household that didn't match.

It wasn't attuned to what they needed in order to have a healthy development.

So maybe you grew up with family that was not physically caring and loving,

Or there was abuse or neglect.

So that's the population I've worked with for 20 years.

And so in those conversations,

We're always talking about what was lost,

What do we need to let go of,

And how do we need to move the energy that resides,

Maybe has been there for decades,

Inside our body through so that we can sort of show up to life,

Right?

Because that's what we want to do.

We don't want to spend our lives in trauma or grieving.

We want to actually kind of show up to life.

And life includes all the hard emotions.

Probably where my career took a significant pivot is that in 2017,

My dad died of small cell cancer,

Which was something that we knew was happening.

He was diagnosed with cancer and about a year later he died,

Which is what the doctors predicted.

And my experience with that is what I call kind of like a typical grief experience,

Meaning I was very,

It was very hard.

I feel like I participated in his death because we knew it was happening.

We had hard conversations.

I went to visit him a lot.

But it didn't knock me off my horse.

I was still kind of like on the path of life that I had chosen and I needed to do some grief work.

I did some,

I did some reading,

I worked with a colleague,

But mostly,

You know,

Within kind of a few months I was sleeping and able to,

You know,

Talk without crying.

In 2019,

My mom died suddenly while I was on vacation with her.

And that was the absolute opposite experience.

That was like the world actually cracked open and I could see the molten hot lava center.

And so I treat people with trauma,

The energy that sort of stuck inside the system.

And then I became a person who had trauma and,

You know,

Trauma is a bad event,

But it doesn't mean you're traumatized.

We know that you're traumatized when your life is sort of less than on account of what happened.

And after my mom died,

I wasn't able to sleep or eat.

I went sort of like 20 days without doing either of those things.

And because I'm a trauma therapist and I work with really complicated cases,

I had this sort of meta understanding of,

Oh,

This is not going well.

This is not going to resolve on its own.

There is like my dad's grief that resolves on its own.

So I ended up checking myself into the same inpatient facility where I send my clients.

I was there for just under a month.

I did all of the treatments that I do with my patients and,

You know,

My central nervous system that was otherwise kind of ringing like a gong started to settle.

And when I got out of treatment,

I mostly had this like white hot fury of how much we lie.

And I say lie because we actually know better.

And I think the field of trauma knows better.

I think many therapists know better.

But we do not tell the truth about how impactful the physicality of grief is on your everyday life.

And we don't teach anybody any skills about what they need to be doing in order to help stabilize themselves.

So grief is a totally normal developmental experience.

We'll all go through it.

You know,

When I'm looking at the rest of the world,

I don't know what lap anybody's on.

You might be in your grieving lap,

Maybe not.

But I really feel strongly the soapbox I carry around now is it is just time to tell everyone.

And I work,

You know,

I work at big corporations,

I work in church basements and everywhere in between to teach people,

Hey,

These are the things that are typical.

You feel nuts when they happen to you,

But the reason you feel nuts is because nobody talks about them.

They are not nuts.

They are predictable.

And you know,

Bodies are actually generalizable across cultures and ages.

So that's what my team does is we start with,

We teach about the body,

We teach about the brain,

We give you some neuroscience,

And then we give you a whole bunch of interventions for you to try.

There's not one intervention that's going to work for you and then work for everybody else.

We give a whole menu,

Like when you go to New York City and there's a restaurant menu where it's like you can get Kung Pao chicken and a Reuben all at the same restaurant.

That's what our,

It's called the grief mentor method.

That's what our curriculum is like for people.

And I wrote this book that actually today is the pub day for Can Anyone Tell Me?

And it's all the core truths broken down.

It starts with,

Can anyone tell me why my brain is broken?

And then it takes you through,

Can anyone tell me why my body is out of whack?

And then all the other impacts like,

You know,

Why do I feel a shift in my identity?

Why do I kind of,

Why do I hate everybody?

Like why are my relationships shifting?

And the last chapter of the book is what do I do if I'm really in trouble?

What if this isn't grief like the kind I had with my dad,

Which sort of resolves on its own over months?

You know,

I still grieve my dad,

But it doesn't knock me off my horse in a way.

I was knocked off the path with my horse,

You know,

With my mom's death and I've never really gotten back on that path.

Wow.

Okay.

You just said so many things.

I talked in one long run on sentence.

No,

That was so beautiful.

And I really want to start out by saying thank you for sharing that you went to treatment.

And I remember when I had a private practice,

I don't see clients one-on-one anymore,

But when I did,

You know,

There's a pedestal that our clients put us up on as therapists,

Right?

And that we,

We are perfect and we don't have issues.

And it's like,

No,

No,

No,

We're human.

Yeah.

We came to the work for some reason.

Yeah,

We did.

So I first want to start there and there,

And as you said it,

I'm like,

I love this.

This is so,

I just love vulnerability and sharing the truth and sharing your reality with such groundedness.

You're like,

Oh yeah,

This was me.

It's like,

And I am human,

Right?

There's nothing to have shame over.

Yeah.

I mean,

I don't have any shame over it.

I really genuinely don't.

I may have at the time,

Mostly because I was really concerned about what it was going to mean to leave my kids and not be able to take care of them.

And certainly I wrote a memoir about that time in my life,

End of the hour.

And if you go and read the reviews,

There are certainly some people that have a lot of judgment about the fact that I,

You know,

Couldn't keep myself together in order to take care of my family and my kids,

But I don't have that judgment.

What I have is like the embodied understanding of how powerful profound loss can be.

And it's,

It's bigger than,

It's bigger than our will.

And so therefore we need to be really deeply educated about what to do when it's,

I don't think I control the rash that I get in the winter when it gets cold.

And I need to know how,

What are my treatment options,

Right?

I don't feel weak on that.

I feel like,

Oh,

Well,

That's the way my skin works.

Yeah.

It's interesting how many of us just being human will say,

Well,

Shouldn't I,

I should know better.

I just put together this,

This group program.

I'm taking like 11 people in this group that I'm working with and we're doing interviews and a lot of them were saying things like,

Well,

I know,

You know,

I don't think anyone else suffers like I do,

But shouldn't I know better?

You know,

I'm 40 years old,

I'm 50 years old,

I'm 70 years old.

Shouldn't I know better?

I should know this stuff,

But I don't,

And I think I'm the only one.

It's like,

We're not the only one.

We're human.

It's so hard sometimes to be human.

So even someone like you that is a therapist that specializes in all this,

This is how you're trained.

I just,

I'm so glad to hear you.

So thank you.

Thank you for saying this without shame and owning it.

Because as much as we know,

Even though we have clients,

It's like,

We're still human and we are,

If that's to me,

The ultimate in self-care is you,

You took such great care of yourself.

So thank you for that.

Now,

And I,

The other thing I love that you said was that it's an energy.

I talk a lot about this when we talk about emotions and we talk about even the physical body,

We're energetic beings.

So emotions are energy that are meant to move through.

They're not meant to be stuck.

And when they get stuck,

They create physical manifestations.

They create illness,

All of the things.

So I love that you said that it's an energy.

Grief is an energy that we need to move through the body.

And we're very clumsy moving emotion through the body.

We don't know how,

We weren't trained and it's not,

We shouldn't have shame about it by the way.

How the heck trained us way back when,

Thank God,

I feel like parents in this day and age are somewhat becoming more familiar.

Cause there are a lot of people out in the world,

Like you,

Like me,

Like many of us that are out teaching people how to feel your emotions.

What do you do when you have grief?

So something I want you to talk about though,

Is how do you know if I'm listening,

How the heck do I know that I'm even experiencing grief?

What are some of the symptoms?

Because so many people are sitting here,

They don't know what's wrong.

And that's funny.

I'm having a memory.

The very first client I had 25 years ago,

He was my first client and he was talking to me about,

Oh my God,

I can't believe I'm having this flashback.

It's like divine intervention right here.

He was talking about the depression that he was having.

He's sitting with me.

He goes,

I just don't understand why,

And had this like intuitive download.

He's grieving his grandmother and he's not even linking it with that.

And I,

And I,

And eventually it came out his grandmother that he was very close with had died two years ago.

And I,

And eventually it came out and I said,

So what did you do when your grandmother died?

He goes,

Well,

You know,

My parents,

They don't,

They,

You know how people say,

I don't do emotions.

My parents didn't really do emotions.

And I said,

We need to do emotions right now.

And it helped him so much with his quote.

And I,

And I put air quotes around the depression because it wasn't,

It was looking like depression,

But honestly it was stuck grief.

And once he was able to move that through,

Everything changed.

Talk about that just a little bit.

Oh,

I love that example.

And,

And what you just described really has made up the bulk of my experience as a clinician,

People who would come in,

They had seen every doctor and they still weren't sleeping,

Weren't eating super irritable,

Memory loss,

Confusion,

And really feeling like they were crazy.

And I,

And so I'd have two questions.

When did this start like a year ago?

What else happened a year ago?

Well,

My dad died,

But I don't think it's connected,

Right?

My dad died,

But I don't think that's it.

And here's the thing.

If we do not live in a culture where people are able to talk and there are folks,

Right?

Like how many times did you get the clip of Andrew Garfield talking,

You know,

On Sesame Street or with Stephen Colbert about his experience with his mom,

I was sent that hundreds of times because people are hungry to hear someone say the truth that matches their own experience,

Which is grief does not resolve in the three days that you are given to,

You know,

Be off of work.

It takes years.

And when I say resolve,

I don't mean it goes away.

When,

When we have profound loss,

We live with grief our entire lives.

What I mean is you are able to integrate it into your experience.

So it's not the only thing that you are doing all day long,

Right?

And what we don't do is we do not teach grievers who are in,

They just got this information.

Their world has cracked open.

They don't have a child.

They don't have a partner.

They don't have a marriage.

They don't have the health they expected.

We give them nothing.

We just say,

I'm so sorry.

I'm praying for you.

Here's a lasagna.

I mean,

If you get a lasagna,

You usually get a lasagna when you get divorced and then like,

Okay,

Maybe one or two days off work five,

If you're lucky,

Maybe,

Maybe 30,

If you work at,

At Facebook,

But otherwise like,

Just get back to normal as soon as possible or you are failing.

Instead of,

We have failed culturally to explain that this is a profound experience.

And I said this to you off air,

We're watching menopause,

That whole conversation shift around menopause.

Menopause has always been menopause since women have been,

It has always been as difficult as we said it was.

Now we have these extraordinary doctors who,

When they went through their own experience said,

Holy mother of God,

Hang on a second,

Women need to know these things.

And I consider myself really well-educated in menopause.

And I learned the other day at a seminar that I was at that you,

You can lose teeth and I have lost teeth.

I didn't know the two were connected.

There is so much about grief and loss in terms of what your sense of self looks like,

What your relationships look like,

How you maybe need to shift your priorities after a profound loss.

The,

You know,

The surgeon general just in 2023,

He published a isolation report,

A sense of loneliness.

Talk to me about who are the people that feel the most isolated immediately.

That is a griever.

They are watching everyone else go drop their packages off at UPS and get on the Metro and go to work.

And they have a bubble around them.

Isolation means you are separate from everybody else.

And that is what grief feels like for people.

In that surgeon general's report,

He didn't say anything about grief,

Nothing.

He just said people really need to be connecting with other people or it's really bad for your cardiovascular health,

Et cetera,

Et cetera.

He did not help us understand who are the people that are suffering,

Who are the people who are isolating.

And when you look at our most recent history,

We were literally dropping like flies from a pandemic that we did not know whether who,

How many people it was going to kill,

Whether or not we were safe.

And we didn't even break stride.

We just brought all of our,

You know,

Life,

School,

Everything,

Church,

And everything else onto a computer screen.

And we kept going.

We did not grieve.

We did not pause.

We did not emote.

And so a lot of what I teach people is about,

Hey,

Here are the brain symptoms.

Don't be afraid,

Right?

Think about memory loss.

That's one of the most common.

People immediately can't remember whether it happened on a Tuesday or Thursday.

Think about a 75-year-old woman who's just lost her partner of 50 years.

What's going to happen when she says,

I can't remember if that happened on Tuesday or Thursday?

She is going to be screened for memory care really quickly.

And so now she lost her partner.

There's a threat of her losing her home and her independence.

But if we have people who are educated,

What we would say is skip her a few months.

This is probably just a grief reaction.

It may stabilize on its own.

This may not be a memory thing.

Memory is one of those things.

And if I'm an employer and my accountant just lost his wife,

I might say,

Hey,

Listen,

I've heard that,

Like,

Multi-stepped problems are hard for people who are grieving.

Do you want to do something else?

Do you want to have an intern help?

Should we be double-checking your numbers?

I worked with a nurse who was fired.

She got two days off after her mother died during COVID.

And she ended up making a mistake because her brain could not hold all the information that it typically held because it was a grieving brain that doesn't work in the same way.

And we dig into the neuroscience.

We teach the whole thing about how the amygdala enlarges and the limbic system sends the signals and they don't get to the right mailboxes.

And we do a lot of core education so people are able to go into their workspaces and talk to their brother or their sister or their judgy Aunt Joan and say,

You don't know what you're talking about.

What's happening to my body is typical grief response.

And when people look at you and say,

You really need to be sleeping,

Right?

I mean,

Gosh,

You should figure out a way to sleep.

Being able to respond and say,

Here are all the things that I'm doing so that I can regulate my central nervous system,

But also not sleeping is a totally common symptom of grief.

And if it lasts longer than I'm comfortable with,

I'll go find somebody who can help me do some stronger interventions with it.

I didn't know that not sleeping was a symptom of grief in my brain.

I'm thinking,

Oh yeah,

We want to sleep all the time.

So can you give us the top three to five symptoms that we as humans might be experiencing?

What are the grief symptoms?

So that's so great because you're right.

It could be oversleeping or under sleeping.

So our brain has two different systems.

It has a system that activates us,

Which is the sympathetic nervous system.

And in that are our fight and flight instincts.

And then it has another system which cools us down.

We call it the rest and digest system,

Which is the parasympathetic nervous system.

And all of that information is translated from the body to the brain on a nerve called the vagus nerve.

And it's like a super highway.

So any one of those systems,

Your parasympathetic nervous system or your sympathetic nervous system or your vagus nerve could kind of have some problems.

And so what we have in grief is bad messaging through the brain on account of the amygdala enlarging and cutting off some of the electrical circuitry.

So some of the,

If you think of a mailman who's like trying to deliver mail,

He's trying to deliver the electrical currents to the mailboxes.

The amygdala make the bridge wash out.

And so he's kind of throwing the mail instead.

He's like throwing it to the mailboxes and he's hoping it gets there,

But it's not.

So places like your hypothalamus,

Which regulates your body temperature,

A lot of people talk about being hot and sweaty or being freezing cold when they're grieving.

Well,

Your hypothalamus did not get the right mail.

And so it's not sending the right signals back down into the body.

The hippocampus is responsible for memory that doesn't get the right.

And so these are typical spots in the brain that don't get the currency.

So what we see is people who are sleeping too much or not sleeping at all.

And people look at that and they say,

You're depressed.

Understand that depression is a systemic storm that goes into the body that kind of comes out of nowhere.

Meaning it's not necessarily triggered by something.

Grief has some depressive symptoms.

It can.

But if you were able to restore your loss,

If I was able to bring my mother back from the dead,

All my grief would go away.

If I was depressed,

It wouldn't go away.

So that's how we know we have to sort of treat it differently.

So sleep is an issue.

Digestion is an issue.

So people often can't eat or want to eat all the time.

And again,

It's kind of like going back to eighth grade biology,

But we have 12 cranial nerves that send messages into the body and we have 12 systems in the body.

So things like your skin and your nails and hair are all one system.

It's very common for grievers to come in and say,

My hair is falling out.

And what I say is,

OK,

Well,

Then that's how that's where we know the grief energy is going.

It's going to your argumentary system.

People will say,

You know,

I've lower back pain.

OK,

It's going to your muscular skeletal system.

I haven't been able to eat.

OK,

Well,

The grief is going into your digestive tract or we've been trying to get pregnant for six years and we can't get OK,

It's going into your reproductive tract.

Right.

So and all of that or your my chest tightens and I can't breathe,

It's going into your respiratory tract.

So we look at that,

We look at where it is as your symptoms,

And then we give you interventions like the menu in the restaurant in New York to try things to see if we can help you get back into what we call central nervous system regulation,

Which basically means your brain and your body are kind of like at a neutral at a five.

And we're not expecting with grief that you're going to be at a five all day long and that you get to a five and you stay at a five.

What we'd like you to do,

And this is sort of the word resilient,

What we'd like you to be able to do is recover quickly.

So when you go into the grocery store and you smell your husband's cologne and then you have to cry over by the cantaloupes and it's probably going to take over your whole day.

What we want you to be able to do is sort of come back to your moment in your day,

Finish your grocery shopping.

We don't expect that to happen right away.

Many,

Many of us have lost a whole day because we got triggered by something and back to bed with us.

Oh,

That was all so good.

Thank you.

I love that.

I want to ask you about what are some practices I know you have some really powerful practices that people can do to help them bring themselves back into balance.

What are your,

Give us some of your top favorites.

So the way that we sort of decide what are the best things for you to do have to do with how are we going to balance that energy,

Those emotions that are inside the system,

Right?

So,

And there are some things that just work,

For example,

Taking a walk.

So not going for a run because too much exercise in a system could register as more stress inside your system.

So we like you to take a walk because movement,

Particularly bilateral movement has the benefits of sort of balancing some of that energy and moving it through.

And it's particularly for grievers that are really having a hard time,

Just like a walk around the corner.

And then you get to say like,

Oh,

I did some grief work today,

Really worked on my grief.

Extra credit,

Add a friend to that walk.

So then you've got connection.

You know,

We think about when you're holding a baby and that baby looks up at you and it's crying and then you start to smile and you shush it,

We call that co-regulation.

When people are really in a state of distress,

It's good for us to try to co-regulate,

To sit with someone who can listen and hear.

So if it's too much for you to walk with a friend,

Maybe you can walk with a friend on the phone.

And so you're still working a little bit in co-regulation.

And then the other thing,

So these are like such basic things,

Right?

Like,

So it's movement,

It's connection,

And then it's nourishment.

So we need nourishment in a macronutrient way.

You need carbs,

You need protein,

And you need fats.

So like eat a little bit of avocado with some roast chicken and a tortilla chip.

That what happens for grievers sometimes is they eat pizza for 50 days straight,

Or they eat,

You know,

Whatever their comfort food is.

I don't even want you to take away the pizza,

Keep eating the pizza.

But in order for your body to do what it needs to do to create serotonin and to get back into regulation,

You actually need those micronutrients.

So again,

It's like walking outside.

If you can do that before noon in the sunlight,

It helps the body get the signals that it needs to do things like rest and restore.

So we're really,

It's almost like we're taking care of a baby or we just want like the basic needs met early.

The other thing about nourishment is what nourishes you.

So does art nourish you?

Does that restore you?

Do you have some music?

I have two teenagers right now that are listening to like really depressive music and they say like,

Oh God,

Mom,

It's really just like,

It speaks to me.

So something,

You know,

Being able to attach to something that's outside of you that has historically made you,

For some people that might be prayer or it might be their religious community or it might be,

You know,

Going and watching soccer,

Watching a sport with somebody,

But something that feels like,

Oh,

This feeds me.

And it just,

There's no larger purpose than that.

Other than it brings me some sense of balance and pleasure.

That is where I always start.

Those three things,

They're simple and they're small.

When you're,

When you're ready to take on some other things,

Doing,

You know,

Cross boxing or jumping jacks can be good because it moves both sides of the body,

Which also the yin and yang,

It'll balance.

It'll balance energy.

Good.

It's all good.

Really?

You know,

Your suggestions are so simple.

Yes,

I know.

It's almost so powerful too.

Yeah.

What,

What do you say to somebody that feels guilty for moving on that gets stuck in that grief and they're so afraid that they're going to forget that person or that situate,

You know,

I think about not just when you lose someone right to death,

I'm thinking about we've lost a job.

Our kid goes off to college and they move away.

You know,

I think people forget how,

How grief affects us.

You know,

It's,

It's not just when someone passes away or an animal passes away.

It's so many other things,

But regardless of what it is,

What about the people that are just so stuck,

They can only stay thinking about that thing that they had,

That they've now lost.

What do you say to that person?

How do they move through that?

That's a good question.

And,

And I will say like,

I do,

I'm a,

I'm a 50 year old woman.

I think 50 year old women have all the things you're talking about.

Our health is changing.

You know,

Many are going through menopause.

We're sending kids out into the world and they're not coming back.

You know,

They're going to go live out as grownups.

Our jobs are often shifting.

Sometimes our marriages are shifting and we're often,

We're often burying parents or,

Or caretaking for parents.

So there's a lot of grief,

I think that is not necessarily related to a death.

And your question about sort of like,

How,

How do you manage the guilt around some of this stuff?

What in IFS and internal family systems,

Which is Dick Schwartz's therapy model,

We talk about parts of ourselves that show up to take care of us.

Some of them show up like that,

Like that friend who brought,

You know,

A six pack as a solution to all your problems in college,

Like getting drunk is not always the best solution,

But it can be very effective to avoiding how you feel in the book.

Can anyone tell me?

I get very specific about what,

You know,

This,

The vocabulary,

Because we really have to be careful about our words that we understand what's going on with us.

Guilt actually means I did something bad or wrong,

Right?

So when you're feeling guilty,

It usually comes along with like,

Why didn't I call them for their birthday?

And so when people are struck or why didn't I show up or why did I,

Why didn't I turn left?

And so then we try to finish the sentence because if I had called them for their birthday,

I wouldn't have to feel what bad now,

If I,

You know,

Or I would get to feel and to remind people that grief feels the way it feels.

So even if you had called them for their birthday,

You would feel like crap about something else because grief feels like crap.

And the way that I know this is I didn't want to have any regrets.

Regrets are a little different from guilt.

Regrets are more global.

They're more about how you want to live.

And when my dad was dying,

I didn't want to have any regrets.

So I spent a lot of time with him.

And I said to my husband,

Like,

I just don't want to regret not spending time with him.

When my dad died,

Within three minutes of his death,

The very first thought I had was about this moment when he was in the hospital,

There was a miscommunication between me and the doctor.

He ended up sitting on a gurney when I thought he was already in surgery by himself in a hallway.

And I went and sat outside and ate like a ham sandwich.

The very first thing I thought after my dad died was why wasn't I with him during that hour?

It was by himself.

And then I thought,

Oh,

My God,

You don't get to circumnavigate regret and guilt.

It's part of grief.

That's actually sub parts of grief.

And so instead,

With the IFS model,

I used it the way that I think is more loving to say,

What serves me in feeling guilty?

Feeling guilty make I get to sit here and feel like crap about myself,

Which is simple and easy.

And I've been doing that across my 50 years of life,

As opposed to what I would have to do if the guilt wasn't there,

Which is I'd have to feel really bad about my dad dying.

And I'd have to maybe start wondering,

What is my life going to look like without him?

So I actually think regret and guilt are like the magician being like,

Look over here,

Right?

So the little sleight of hand is you get to do the thing you already know how to do.

It won't add any additional pain because you've always found ways to feel bad about yourself.

Everyone has.

If we go over here without it,

You're going to have to figure out how to be a woman in the world without a dad.

And I don't know how to do that at all.

And that's going to be a much harder task.

So I usually point that out to people that,

Yes,

Every one of us has things that we want to believe would have changed an outcome or changed how we feel right now.

But the reality is the task at hand is what it is.

And it's very overwhelming.

It's very.

I love that.

It's like a distraction.

It is.

If you can sit and focus on how your life is going to be horrible now that your father's gone or that you didn't do this thing with your father when he was sitting on the gurney,

Then you're not facing what's right in front of you,

Which is which are these emotions that feel horrible.

They're going to feel uncomfortable.

I mean,

We've got to sit and feel them.

And so it's easier to think about the gurney.

Yes.

And there I have worked with people who really do have culpability,

Right?

They really did do things or did not do things that added to somebody's hardship,

Pain,

Death and hurt.

So I'm not trying to minimize the fact that there are people that are living with guilt because they feel guilty and are held accountable by,

You know,

Governments and as guilty.

And that piece of work is different.

That piece of work looks more like what does it mean to create a forgiveness practice?

What does it what does it mean to not only hold yourself accountable for the worst thing that you ever did?

And I would also say that that's true in grief,

Which is like when people don't want to move on because they feel like that's betraying their person,

Right?

Like I don't want to be when people laugh for the first time.

They often say,

God,

That felt so awful.

Who am I to laugh when they aren't here anymore?

But the reality is I don't think anyone wants to be remembered as the last moment of their life.

I don't think they want their death to matter more than who they were in their life.

I just don't believe that that's what they want.

So you are not betraying someone by continuing to live and laughing and enjoying your life.

You're not betraying your love for them.

And in fact,

What I have for most grievers is when they're able to do that,

When they're able to start to carry their loss a little bit and live a little bit,

They are able to bring back some of the memories.

And we do it really consciously.

You know,

I have a whole book of prompts that are like,

What was a funny car ride you went on with them?

When did you laugh the hardest with them?

What was the best piece of advice they gave them?

What was the worst outfit you ever saw them in?

So that we can go into our memories and bring them back as who we loved rather than who we lost only.

This was so good.

Yeah,

Really good stuff.

I love that you're really focusing on the brain and the body because it's so much more than just the emotion.

Well,

It is the emotions too,

But gosh,

This was really good.

Really important work you're putting into the world.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for today.

Reviews

So helpful! Thank you.

I need help with long term grief, I can see clearly now….thanks