Episode 132 - Grief

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i don't know if i should do this because i kind of wonder if i start i'll never stop in 2014 i was the mother of two girls ages three and six my home was full of singing laughter and gravely toddler voices in august my youngest sarah was diagnosed with cancer three months later i was standing beside her grave unable to do much more than cry silently grief is the pain i experience in the face of being unable to be with my daughter in the same way it is the catalyst for growth and change it's the ever-present reminder of what was and what could have been now six years later it is all right under the surface it isn't that my pain is really diminished rather it's that my heart has learned to hold even more now i have sorrow and joy pain and peace longing and fulfillment i have both and yes i am um seven weeks out from the loss of my spouse of 41 years my husband died um seven weeks ago very suddenly and i have spent the last few weeks not only trying to recover from the loss but also in isolation because of the covid19 virus so it has been um a time of terrific adjustment for me i'm better now than i was three weeks ago four weeks ago but just this evening i walked into my bedroom and i actually felt um some joy just just rose up in me this joyous feeling and i continued through my bathroom into my closet where i once again realized that his clothes were gone and despair came over me so in this grief i went from a bit of joy to absolute despair in a seven second period that's what grief has been for me so far um everyone tells me it'll get better with time i hope so because it's it's too hard to handle you couldn't handle a lifetime of this thing he passed away in september 2018 and i've thought about him every day since um and i definitely don't know how to grieve right now i live alone and not being able to hug anybody has been the hardest thing in my sadness and my and no one knows how to help each other um except to extend love which i greatly appreciated but i definitely don't feel like i know how to grieve right now beyond just remembering and never forgetting the experience of grief is the experience not just of having like the rug pulled out from under you but having the whole house and the foundations of the house and the roots of the trees around the house all just vanish and to realize that you're going to have to remake your own foundation last year i made the decision to leave my marriage 18 i had an abortion this time last year i lost three friends in three separate incidents in three weeks my teenage brother was killed after her death it felt like life was divided into before and afterwards i remember everything before was normal and everything after felt surreal i feel that i do not have a handle on grief at all it's been hard sleep patterns are different i've had this weird want to talk with people but i'm afraid to kind of open up and people move forward in this grieving process i'm just stuck i feel numb it consumed me drowned me and held me under incredibly painful and scary when it comes to grief and what to do these are the three most important things that i've ever learned one grief takes as long as it takes if we're uncomfortable with how long a person is grieving it may be more about us than about them two it can be uncomfortable to bring it up but people who are grieving are thinking about it all the time you're probably not going to wreck their day by talking about someone they love and if you're worried just ask if they want to talk about it or not three the stages of grief we have all heard about come from research with people who are dying and what it is like to die grief over losing someone else is not a set of stages you can pass through like a checklist we need to stop expecting ourselves and others to pass from one stage to another like something you can cross off a list if you are grieving no matter how long you have been there i am so sorry that someone you love is no longer with you i'm sorry for the ways those of us on the outside haven't always known the best way to walk with you in this please know we don't want your heart to hurt but we also know how much it hurts is connected to your love for them it's okay to be here as long as you are here hey everybody michael gunger here welcome to the liturgist podcast today we're talking about grief and pulling apart some of the stories and ways of looking at grief that make us suffer and while a lot of us think about grief mostly as a sort of response and experience of losing somebody somebody dying it's grief is of course not limited to death grief is all around us right now in this season of losing what the world was um a lot of us have lost people that we love already and i've lost jobs and have lost ways of life and there's just a lot of grief in the world right now so maybe we could start by talking about that idea that you mentioned hillary of the stages of grief that's something that a lot of us were taught that grief is something that we go through in stages maybe that's a good first story to pull apart here there is a story in our social kind of discourse that grief has five stages and that comes from elizabeth kubler-ross's work and the stages as we've been told that they are are denial anger bargaining depression and acceptance and so often when we're talking about grief people will talk about the stages and yes i was in this stage and then i moved to that stage and what almost nobody knows even for people who know those stages is that that research comes from kubler-ross's work with people who themselves were dying that the research around the five stages of death or greece or the five stages of grief actually have nothing to do with what grief is like for the people who survive a person who dies and they're all about a person facing and confronting their own mortality and so what happens when we take this research that's about people who themselves are dying and extrapolate it to those of us who are grieving the loss of somebody who has died or any other kind of loss is that we create this sort of linear model of what processing pain should look like and it creates a sense of kind of maybe this passive or the necessity of an act of moving through specific stages to quote unquote get to the other side and what we see about grief in in research on grieving that is about the people who are living with the face of loss is that it's actually so much messier and so much more inconsistent than that that there's actually no linear process for those of us who are living there aren't five stages that we have to go through in order to be free or release our pain or move on from someone and while that might seem frustrating because if we have something linear and have something sequential and defined it can make us feel like we're accomplishing a task that moves us closer to ease or again to quote-unquote move on and yet the way that i see that the stages are most often used are to to try to help us feel like we have some control in the midst of chaos like okay good there is if i just keep at this then there will be ease coming for me or in the way that we try to move other people along and rush them through their grief process by saying well you should be in this stage by now so actually there isn't really anything therapeutic or helpful about thinking about the stage model for those of us who are living and it tends to be just a way that we keep ourselves stuck or pathologize our pain or pathologize the pain of other people so is there anything helpful about it like i'm thinking the fact that there is a concept of these stages of grief at least gives people a context so if they're you know if they're just if they feel unreasonably angry they'd be like well this is part of grief like connecting some of these other ways of feeling to grief do you think there's anything helpful about that at least to give people some sort of connection between grief and whatever other kind of emotions they may be experiencing yeah i think so but then i would i for it to be helpful i would remove it from a sequential model and say here's this bin of things that might happen for you you might bargain you might feel depressed you might be angry you might feel confused you might feel sleepy you might feel really hungry you might have no appetite at all because grief affects us in this really bodily somatic way so i would say that yes having some words associated with grief like anger or depression might normalize the range of experiences but if we're only using those five steps we're actually missing the complexity of what grief could look like because it's actually bigger than that yeah than those five uh categorical experiences are there any big ones in particular that are missing confusion i would say is a big one guilt is super super big the sense of i i should have done more why didn't i do more and whether that's like i should have called that person one more time or i should have known that they were struggling so much guilt is often huge for people who survive yeah but the the problem again that it seems hard for most of us to grasp is that we associate this model with grief but it's not about grief for those who survive it's about grief for people who are confronting their own death so it's actually a completely different experience and to compare those two kinds of grief misses the phenomenological experience of whatever you are going through in this moment it's super unique super contextual again think about how grief is so different if it's someone who is based on the context has been sick for a long time or someone who is young or someone who we were expecting was struggling and someone who we didn't see it coming with right how much time they had left how much we prized them societally all of those things factor into how much pain there is i had always assumed that grief would be how they portray it in media which in my mind was this the world stops essentially the idea that this big black cloud comes over your life and for an undisclosed amount of time the world just stops and joy is gone but after that moment at the funeral there were as many moments of laughing and overall joy as much as there was tears and pain and it wasn't this consistent thing it was these instances that would come out of nowhere hi my name is joey i'm a funeral director and i've been a funeral director for about five years and i've studied grief i learned about anticipatory grief prolonged grief sudden grief the grief cycles you know the kubler-ross and all the different grief works models um it still surprises me when i have to recognize and realize that i myself am going through my own grief because i have the head knowledge part of the schooling to get a license to be a funeral director i have the head knowledge it still sneaks up on me and it still hurts and it still is hard in my early 30s i've found this really hard to articulate type of grief i've been experiencing this tender brief for that little girl that i was in the childhood that i didn't have to just being without parents at all now without family it's lonely and in the shadow of that grief though i think i see like maybe a little a little light that maybe there's joy not in spite of what's happened but maybe because of it and it reminds me sometimes in that lonely space of the khalil brand quote says the deeper the sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain i think that that's where i'm at now so learning to sit with the grief and face it has also helped me live and embrace the positive moments too i can feel the joy when my five-year-old son brings me a dandelion the same day i experience a sense of grief for longing for more community during this time of isolation or when close relatives send me triggering religious articles and hurtful words i can decide to acknowledge how my body responds and honor her by setting clear boundaries in those relationships to create a safer space so i guess it's a constant learning curve but learning to sit with my feelings and validate them has been pretty pivotal in my life i think that if we step back and we see grief as a relational experience as a relational process in which we have a relationship to someone or something and then all of a sudden that that something that someone on the other side doesn't exist there's all of this attachment and relationship energy that all of a sudden doesn't have a place to go and a place to be received and returned from and so when we think about loss as being inherently relational how we are situating ourselves or turning towards whatever was there or who was there where does all of that relational energy go and how do we move through the loneliness the aloneness that accompanies that loss so to grieve i would say if it if we think of it as a process that can be supported by somebody it's to be relationally seen to be supported to be accompanied through that process but to say that we need to do grief work which was a really popular theory uh from the last century which is we really need to stay with the painful emotions and we need to kind of knead through them and massage them tirelessly until we finally resolve everything that needs to be resolved and then we're free that really neglects the enduring relationship we had with someone and how it can go on over time so there's something right there's this idea of grief work which we now think of as being kind of problematic because it doesn't allow for us to have spaces and feelings that are normal like for people who are grieving often they just need a break they just need to watch some shows that are mindless they need a chance to do something normal and we can feel like we're failing in our process if we just focus on the work but we we need to be accompanied right that's i don't i don't know if there's a single human emotion that isn't either resolved or kind of punctuated or more meaningfully negotiated without the presence of a loving and attentive other and so when we can sit with other people like i love the the jewish tradition of sitting shiva after a death where people just sit on the floor in silence with the person who is grieving kind of most acutely we are doing probably the most important and maybe the only thing we can do which is being in someone's feelings with them i don't know if we know how to do that though like no no one has really taught us how to do it and that it's just not a skill set that any of us are really taught and especially if i mean people are just now finding out about the five stages of grief right and so like there's kind of that lack or that gap between you know um kind of more some of the therapeutic understandings and how they're changing versus popular understanding and in the popular consciousness of what is out and about so how do we like i i believe you i think you're right but that doesn't i feel like we fail at that and yeah honestly every point in my life where i feel like truthfully most of the time when i feel other people have failed me it's probably for this very reason hmm not knowing how to accompany you and the feelings that you have yeah like experiencing something traumatic hurtful and grieving and then everyone trying to interpret my grief everyone trying to control my grieve everyone trying to tell me how to process um and make it go away or how to yeah or how to numb and that inflicts to me almost just as much trauma and pain as maybe the original thing i was grieving absolutely yeah we call those post-traumatic factors right there's the there's the thing that happened that's painful but then there are these secondary losses or the post-traumatic losses like wow i went to my community to tell them about this huge loss i'm facing and they told me i needed to get over it and it shouldn't have mattered so much and now all of a sudden do we have this loss and the experience of feeling totally alone and disconnected from the people who we thought could hold it for us so you're i think you're so right about that william like we if we don't know how to feel if we don't know how to feel together then what grief is doing is it's stirring up all sorts of feelings like we've been talking about anger as it relates to grief well if you haven't been shown what to do with anger and the only idea you have about anger is violence then it would make sense that you'd be like i'm gonna go get that person yeah because you don't know what else to do with that anger but then there's also the complicated piece which is we can all be in different ways of feeling at different times right so we have one person who's really feeling deep sadness and the other person is saying i just i don't know right now all i want to think about is the absurdity of life or how nothing is guaranteed and it's really hard when everybody is feeling pain to to really walk alongside someone in their experience and have your experience mirrored too that's a hugely skillful process that most of us don't don't know how to do and don't you think that part of it is to is our own aversion and inability to know how to deal with pain ourselves because i think we have this natural empathy so you know i i can sit with somebody who's grieving and i feel you know we would feel like oh some degree of pain just from being with them but if we don't know how to do that we don't know how to live with that in ourselves then we just moved to a quick like how can i fix this i don't want to feel this and we're maybe not even conscious of that like i don't want to feel the pain that i'm feeling through you and so what can i do to fix this oh we just kind of move to like pithy sayings or encouragements or trying to get some kind of work done like you're saying so trying to move towards like making them heal so that i don't have to experience this discomfort with you so a lot of i mean i know for me when i've been in the hardest times of my life and when there's been people around that that have the space within themselves to be they don't have to try to fix anything because they're comfortable with that tension they're comfortable with pain within themselves they're comfortable to just feel that with me to whatever degree they feel it that's tremendously healing and it's again it's not like a strategy i don't think it's not something that's like yeah here's a uh here's three really helpful things you can say to somebody who's grieving to help fix it it's like can you open up your own heart and your own body enough to be okay with feeling some discomfort yourself and this like literally just being with them and being like feeling whatever comes your way and if you're sitting there and it's bored and it's quiet it's awkward because you have nothing to say great yeah that can be something we learned to tolerate too the awkward silences those are totally survivable yeah but i'm so glad you said that michael because i think i think that's at the heart of why grief is so painful for so many of us is because grief requires feeling and feeling is an embodied process that we actually often learn in fact we need to learn it through through the experience of having someone model for us what it's like to be in that emotion but because we're wired to connect with each other because and this is really the field of interpersonal neurobiology looking at how what's happening in me and in my body and my mind impacts what's happening in you and your body in your mind we understand now that mirror neurons are likely the neurobiological basis of why we feel empathy because we're connected to each other as much as we like to think we're not if i am really able to feel my feelings and be in my body i'm probably going to feel in my body what you're feeling in your body but if i have disconnected from my body as a way to survive my insurmountable pain or my feelings of total loneliness or overwhelm or isolation then it's gonna make it really uncomfortable for me when you're feeling and i'm gonna try and do probably whatever i can to get away from your feelings or to make your feelings go away which i mean if i could talk for a moment about racial grief i my understanding is that this is a big part of why white folks in north america are have have some pain around listening to the pain of black folks is because if we don't know how to feel pain if we don't know how to feel our own anger if we don't know how to stay with emotion in our body and we see it in somebody else we're gonna try and make their emotion go away and instead of first saying oh of course you feel that yes look at everything that's happened and i feel that with you and for you too we try to shut and silence other people's pain up just because it's uncomfortable for us to feel um that is good yeah i mean that's that's been my whole experience to it to a tea is you people being unable to imagine feel understand my pain so then they try to manage it and honestly like that was a lot of my experience in the church was people trying to manage and control my what they perceive or felt was my pain um and you know at the time i didn't have language like racial trauma right like that was that that was just such a lived reality of feeling like why can't i talk to you about my feelings and they just be valid for a moment it was one thing to to try to accept it for myself to actually allow the space to recognize i mean we all have pain we have trouble shout out bill withers that's actually a lyric from lean on me he just passed last week uh but uh we all have pain we all have sorrow but it has a unique expression on with each of us and has we all have unique experiences to pain and sorrow and so racial trauma is a unique experience that like i said when you try to bring forward and talk about people usually like you know suppress and deny but i i think i think it's because like you said we are unable to accept reality and my experience of the church has often been people inside of the church using religion spirituality the bible to deny reality to deny people's experiences that don't seem to fit in their understanding of the texts that they're reading or holding in their hand and i think it's such a problem this thing like you said being unable to sit with each other unable to deal with our own pain therefore we're you know denying the pain of others and and i i would love us to talk maybe a little bit about how religion is been used to suppress and deny that within ourselves but also in other people so i think we read our world view into the text i think that we have ways of living and moving through the world that have helped us survive and we read those often without knowing that we're reading them into our interpretation of what we're seeing in scripture and so as somebody who has spent a lot of time i mean most of my day almost every day is spent sitting with people in pain i look at our scriptures i look at the bible and i see passages like weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn because that to me reminds me that doing this process of being in the pain with other people is central to my my world view and my faith perspective and and if my way of surviving and going through the world was lock it down just hope for the next best thing always believe that there's a promise of goodness coming right around the corner and that god wants for you to be wealthy i'd probably read that into the text or i'd find passages that support that and and i'd probably really highly prize those and so my question and or my tension as i'm listening to you william is about how we often blame religion but we miss that our world views shape which religions we're drawn to and the religion that we've been in shapes the world view that through which we read the text of that religion and there is this like recursive constantly unfolding um process in which we are being shaped and then looking for data which reinforces our position which continues to shape us and there's we're just kind of going around and around and around and and there are some people i know who have found religion as a place where they could lament where finally they could lament and for other people it has been a place where where there has been so much silencing god won't give you more than you can handle yeah right sort of stuff so maybe we need to look at the complexity of how we read into religion our worldview but then also if we back that up how our worldview is shaped by the religious experiences that we've had yeah it it is a circular thing because like you said we are given something through culture that we intermingle oftentimes with religion like you know this for the slaveholders it was their belief in white supremacy it just a an ideological lie that was created that was then reinforced through the text and then you know and that interplay is is always there so i don't know if it's who's the chicken or the egg there like is it culture is it religion is it you know is it maybe it's just us i guess at the at the end of all of it because it's man that wrote the text so maybe maybe it is us and like you said we're superimposing on to these texts and on to other people's experiences what we want of the world and what we think the world should should be like but you're right in that sense because about the uh the church or or religion often being used as a place for lamenting for comfort and and truthfully i i think that's what the jewish literature was doing so it makes sense to me when you said earlier about the jewish custom of sitting because israel has a whole history or jewish people have a whole history of prophets who were lamenters people who would come shake up the status quo they would point out injustices they would point out how israel was denying reality reality in front of them and they weren't entering into grief and many of the prophets like the prophet joel were calling people into grief like jeremiah was doing it you know you know there's the whole like tears you know sackcloths and ashes like tear your clothes ranger you know render garments like actually enter into a physical thing of grief because there's something happening here that we're not allowing ourselves to see and and so i think if you are reading the text not imposing a world view on it then what you are going to find in the bible is you're going to find people who lament it people who grieved people who mourn people who like women who are without child and god bless them with a child you're going to see you know by faith abraham obtained a promise you know and was able to leave the place that he had known and gone to a new place like there's always this sense of grief and lament of leaving something but also a promise of a of a new world opening or a new beginning happening and so religion is the the wrestle with uh reality grief and hope as as walter brugerman old testament scholar has a book on this where he talks about the prophets are our doorway to reality rather than spiritually bypassing it and trying to you know use you know the text as you said to impose a world view but let the the real reality way on us you know my story about grief is you know i grew up you know very conservative fundamentalist evangelical christian and so i think you know i was taught to not grieve you know i was taught to not mourn when something you know bad happened or a difficult circumstance happened so you know if a loved one died i was taught not to mourn but to be happy that that person is in heaven you know when i was taught when something bad happened in the world there was this major tragedy you know just to trust in god because you know to have faith that you know things will get better when things work out for our good in the end and because i was never really taught how to grieve how to deal with my emotions my feelings i just kind of froze i was paralyzed eleven years ago my dad committed suicide in order to deal with the trauma i basically dove head first into a life in the church it really helped me out in that time but unfortunately when it comes to grief ultimately what the church taught me was that if i was saved by god ultimately there was no reason to grieve it stunted my ability to process what was really happening and deal with the fact that my father was gone i don't think they did it on purpose but the platitudes about death not having a sting they just aren't true there's an element of like the grief that i've experienced from well really kind of from religion and losing and losing some of of the religion that i had as a child losing the security and the some of the comfort that religion can provide you know my early 30s i experienced a lot of pain with that and one of the things that has helped me in the last several years with as we look at the different expressions of religion like this like yeah it certainly seems that some some forms of religion are better at being able to make space for grief and lament and some some aspects of religion seem to be very escapist and very you know sort of let's just ignore this and we're going to get to that sweet by and by some day or in all sorts of other ways but one aspect of like seeing how all of it is an attempt to it's sort of like suffering management pain management right and that i know that's coming from my lens but that's kind of how i see all religion is all religion is pain management it's like uh people that find themselves in this predicament of living in a body that's gonna die and having feelings and desires that they can't figure out how to accomplish and you know it's like it's com it's painful to be a human being and so religion is this universal human experience that helps us it helps us for whatever reason like it uh if it didn't we wouldn't do it so seeing all religion in that framework from that perspective kind of helps me have patience for the some of the ways that people try to cope using religion that i find unhelpful for me at this point you know like word of faith theology let's say i grew up with a lot of that where it is like you know just believe god and you're gonna get all his blessings for you i think not only did it not work i think it's problematic for a number of reasons but it also apparently makes some people feel better so i don't know seeing it in the context of seeing all people's religious whether it's like they're able to make space for lament or they're just using their religion to like look into the future and have some hope about soon you know every tear will be dried and jesus is going to come back and i'm not trying to equalize all the things that's equally healthy but i know as somebody who's experienced suffering myself from hating aspects of other people's religion and by like trying to reject it so thoroughly the problematic natures of some of those things so thoroughly that it actually just causes me more suffering it has been helpful for me to see that everybody is just trying to get by and religion is another way of people like trying to be okay and yeah we can grow and challenge systems that make people not be able to face their own grief and and not have space to lament and we can be like come on we can do better than that but at the same time i don't know i just wanted to mention that seeing it all as as like sort of a grief response anyway seeing all religion as a stage of grief that's interesting yeah just human existential grief just the pain yeah the pain of being human that was going to be my question to you michael you you started to talk about it a little bit but is all of that pain management created equal or do you have a sense of like traditions that say be be in your grief through this this tradition and this ceremony yes that's pain management but does that feel um are there degrees of health within that pain management i love when we framework when health comes up in our conversations then we get to deconstruct that always what are you what is your intended result but i think that is that is kind of the answer to that question for me is like what is your intended result if the intended result is to be be a person who has room in your own heart and in your own body for discomfort that so that you can be a healer for others or a place of of wholeness and healing that like a space for other people to be able to have that other to to be able to heal themselves with then yeah i think that the traditions that make more room for lament are healthier i think they're better in that way i think they're more effective at creating people who can be healers in the world and and places of shalom but on the other hand not everybody is ready to be what about the people that are that are not in a place where they can be a healer for anybody else they really just need to watch that show and and have a moment of respite and rest and like hope in that sweet buy and buy i want to be slow to to judge that that person should be doing something else just because some i know that that was helpful for me at some points like the to tell somebody who just lost their mom i tell a kid that just lost their mom and she's gonna and that kid is like looking forward to at least at least i'll be able to see her in heaven someday to me that's not the time to go like well maybe there is no heaven what you know like why why do i why do i gotta pull apart what's helping you right now at a certain point some of the things become like we could find some more nuance here because it becomes problematic for other people and for giant theologies and giant systems where people aren't able to just sit with grief so no i don't think it's equal but i do think all of them have some sort of value to somebody and so then it becomes more complicated and nuanced to say when we're pulling those things apart and challenging people's worldviews and challenging people's beliefs can we be gentle and can we be slow to to know what we think they need and slow to what we deem healthy because that's part of the that whole five stages of grief thing is like a fruit i think of our western system which is related to christianity by the way some of our inability to sit with grief because we've got the resurrection in the last half of the bible sorry that took me back so so the christians are like yeah well it's a happy ending so we don't have to sit with grief because we've got this future hope that has its it's why we don't celebrate good friday as har as much as we do yeah easter egg and it's got its it's got his deleterious effects in the world but it also has the effect of optimism and you know like the can-do american spirit that that as destructive as it can be also results in some a lot of new uh industrious ways of living that create new things in the world and have a place so i think some of like that ethos of of western like come on pull up you know forget about that we're moving forward has its problems and his pain but it also has a place in what the world is in reality so i don't know i'm just i'm slow to or i want to be slow to judge too harshly where somebody else should be in experiencing the existential grief of being a human being and my guess is that you're probably better able to do that because you have have learned to reflect on and sit with your own experiences uh and impulses as they emerge and might say i want to control this person or i want to jump in and say well that's that's actually about me not about there being something about them and and in this uncomfortable situation all i can take responsibility for is my discomfort and my impulses to to eradicate their pain in some way yeah but we all know vishnu das wasn't always there oh god he was not always there no and i'm still not i mean i i still find you know places times when i'll be like the defense mechanism kicks in because it's i was not ready to handle that level of tension or discomfort or whatever and all of a sudden some sort of mechanism kicks in it's like oh well trying to escape that because i don't have room for that right now so it's i think it's a constant like growing process to be able to start making space for this kind of thing grief fucking hurts you said something earlier about how religion is the coping mechanism for grief and that kind of reminds me of the work of renee girard who's an anthropologist and kind of dabbled in theology in which he kind of theorized that religion wasn't simply something men did what but was part of the evolutionary process that in every world culture you see uh this type of ritualism and religion as a way to soothe collective guilt and whatever is going on in the community and that these these rituals he often said you know sacrifice was a big part of that was a a way to manage the pain of the community and because if the pain if the community is in too much anxiety we have to we have we need a scapegoat to to kill and in order to bring peace to the community and that it makes sense because in my own experience i feel like religion was used as a it's almost like a drug it's almost like the way that we escaped as tanahasi coates writes um you know he's an atheist and grew up an atheist but he said i didn't have the church in its sacred mysteries to shield me or to like hide me from the brute force of police brutality in my community and so in in my experience growing up i saw how religion was used to shield to a level but also to set our eyes on something different from from white supremacy it became the coping mechanism by which all the the brunt that all these this community was experiencing it gets to be let out in the church and even the emotionalism that comes out in the black church experience is very much rooted in its pain it's not simply a joy for this you know just for the sake of beauty of life it's very much rooted in the hell you've been catching all week as malcolm x would say you know and then sunday comes and you get to release it and you get to praise and you dance and you but i think that's that's showing up in ancient world culture too no matter so no matter what the religion is religion has been used and is used as pain management and i'm not so sure that's a bad idea and i think that's kind of what we're saying but like to to have someone endure a surgery without any anesthesia would be unethical it would be inhumane that we say pain pain deserves to be managed yeah in some ways absolutely and that there is this there is this beauty in some of the ways that we try to manage our pain that perhaps allows us to experience the connection that most of us are longing for and move through emotion in a way that it feels like it its potency can diminish and it can become tolerable and then there are other ways of managing our pain that that work temporarily yeah but prolong it and then at some point those strategies the dam breaks yeah right and the the pain that we have been suppressing for a long time emerges and perhaps surprises us but i think like when i when we're having this conversation i'm thinking about defense mechanisms right anything that we do to move away from feeling emotion we numb we scroll our phones we intellectualize we make jokes about things we self harm we use substances we manage control or eating we overeat we over exercise we do all sorts of things to say this situation this experience in my body is intolerable and while those things don't lead us necessarily to the experience of feeling present at rest what richard schwartz calls the self right these i think there are seven or eight c's calm curious confident clear connected courageous creative right that is accessible to all of us but when we have limited our in our ability to stay with the things that emerge we have to get get so good at defending against it that we get further and further away from who we really are but i would never say to anybody and i don't say this to myself that if your defenses are the thing that is most available to you and the only thing that you have in that moment i'm so glad you have them i'm so glad that pain management is available to you because this perhaps would have leveled you this would have killed you in some ways it would have been totally intolerable and yet perhaps one of the markers of health is that we can move towards our experience instead of away from it but we need we need accompaniment to do that if moving towards our pain has been so scary that we haven't done it we might need the confidence and the presence of another who's attuned and isn't overwhelmed to say we can do it together and i think about religion as providing a social context within which when we are in health we say i want to be in this with you not i want to encourage you to silence yourself or move away from it but here is this community framework where we can grieve and sing and lament and express in a way that helps you feel accompanied to help you feel like you can return to this part of yourself that we know is there but has been tucked away i noticed that when people when we know that somebody's grieving it feels like it's easier to have patience with the variety of ways that they can defend themselves or cope or whatever it's like oh they're grieving let them be a little angry right now where do you i mean do you draw lines like when when does something qualify as grief you know like uh if i'm just grieving over my that they didn't have oat milk at the coffee shop does that well you know that's not grief that's what i'm saying what i'm saying i don't know you don't know what i'm saying but that's what i'm saying is we get this like we and we do it for ourselves we do it for ourselves and i think for other people where it's like oh i notice i'm i'm responding this extra emotion and maybe the grief for that oat milk thing was really it's actually about something else yeah it's always about something else but but that's what like i'm just looking at the patience that we have for when it's grief and then when we lose that patience when we perceive it to be about something stupid or uh that the people shouldn't be feeling what they're feeling anyway but yeah maybe there is grief from somewhere else or it's an existential grief or what like i just want to explore that line of like why we have patience for somebody when we believe that it's grief versus when we believe that it's just something foolish i define grief as the presence of absence that there is the felt sense that something is not there that someone is not there and that's based on our relationship and our proximity and the intensity of the attachment to whatever that someone or that something was yeah but perhaps a way of indirectly answering your question i don't think that there's any human i don't think there's any problematic human behavior that isn't the result of pain yeah and we are missing that pretty much everything that people are doing that feels annoying or irritating is at some at some point or is in some way related to something that has been painful for them that i have that they have either tried to get away from or compensate for or protect or manage themselves out of and that i think if we could make the assumption i know we're all me always making assumptions all the time some of them we can control some we can't but if i could offer us an assumption that has been helpful for me it's been to assume that everything that we're seeing is a result of a way a person has dealt or not dealt with the pain in their life and where i think parents are seeing that right now in particular is in their kids challenging behavior right behavior is communication and when kids don't necessarily have the language to say i'm feeling so much pain because i'm missing seeing my friends or i'm seeing my friends play outside and i can't play with them because you said we're not going to do that with people we're not in the same family with that it's really easy for us to be judgmental towards another person's behavior as being problematic instead of seeing that that way that your kid is acting out at the dinner table is actually them trying to move through the sense of lack of control that they have in their lives so we can see it now lots with kids with all of their losses that they don't understand but for i mean all sorts of people i was on the i was on the road this morning and i saw two people run a red light and i i don't know if i've ever maybe once seen that in my maybe once i've seen it but i don't really remember in my recent memory having seen that at all and two people running red lights on the same morning made me think i wonder what's happening in people's attachment systems what's happening in their attention in their capacity if they're feeling saturated in some some way that means they're unable to pay attention to what's happening on the road no that doesn't excuse that behavior like it's dangerous and it's endangering other people's lives but it's so easy for us in traffic to get angry at somebody for cutting us off or about their road rage and we miss of course we miss all the information that we don't see about how much was he beaten by his father when he was growing up and how much did that normalize violence for him and so how is this right a product of everything that person has been through i wish we could make these assumptions that like it's all grief and instead of being angry at the person for budging in line or cutting us off in traffic or dropping or you know not calling us back or saying something hurtful we could assume that it's all just pain trying to make its way out of us yeah can i that's the answer i was looking for trick question i mean i don't know if it's a pushback as much as it is like i mean what you're saying to me can be true but i don't know if that's gonna always be true and i think it it would wouldn't that have to take a lot of discernment to actually really understand or to perceive what is the motivating factors behind people's various behaviors or even you know even children like the child could be throwing a temper tantrum for a completely other reason or it could be a behavior built on something maybe biologically that's happening maybe you know that you know something they're feeling sick so then they're just behaving and it's not really about any attachment issues or even the red light maybe it could be because somebody is changing the radio station and didn't look up you know to see that they were about to run a red light or a stop sign it goes back kind of to the original thing we were talking about like how do we know how do we discern how do we figure out is that grief is it not grief and then how do we as people that are maybe watching this behavior or interacting with people with those types of behavior like how do we know because otherwise like i can i'm not a parent but i can imagine being a parent and thinking that every time my child behaves a certain way it has to do with something maybe i'm doing wrong or that you know or that the kid is manifesting some type of internal pain is that really the case like you actually think it's almost it's always because of pain okay first i think if we have to make assumptions michael you do i'm going to perhaps be a bit more measured in my response than you would say first i think we have to make assumptions about how the world works and if we're going to make an assumption that results in us being more compassionate to other people that would be a healthy assumption to make i'd like to be a compassionate person who if there is pain is acknowledging the pain and is responding to it appropriately and i would much prefer to orient my life around being tender than trying to police other people's behavior or assume that they're just being problematic for the sake of being problematic but if we take your examples of kids like i'm not necessarily saying it is always an attachment issue but i am saying that most of the things that we do that other people or that we label as problematic are us trying to manage something on the inside of us so even if you have a kid who has a stomachache who's acting out they're still experiencing pain it might not be psychic pain it might be physiological pain but why would we respond to their acting out in such a way that added to the stomachache and now they feel shamed and belittled and dismissed and not listened to and i think we we have a choice about how we label those things in ourselves as well like there's i think um a lot of the things that we do to manage our impressions uh manage other people's impressions of us are achieving our performing are trying to be excellent in some ways aren't i wouldn't label them as pathology but i might say those are ways that we have with resilience found a way to get some of our needs met and that there are some ways to get our needs met that are more socially acceptable than others and there are some ways to get our needs met that other people know how to tolerate better than others so for me i can say feeling like i have worth and value has been something that i have been negotiating in my life and there have been ways that i've done that that have hurt me and ways that i've done that that other people have praised but when i look at the root of all of it there is this human question of what is it what does it mean to be loved and what has it felt like for me when i haven't felt that and then how has that spilled out into these other areas of my life so i i would say we are we are more loving more tender people when we make the assumption it's based on pain and it reminds us to return the focus back to ourselves and say how do i regardless of what this person's doing how do i move my attention away from controlling them into attending to my response because likely what happens if someone does something hard for us to manage we feel pain and then because we don't know how to be in our pain we get angry at them which again is just kind of reinforcing my point that it's a pain management issue so i would love to like clarify that when when i said kind of playfully yes i think it's all about that um i think there is a delineation for me that's important between pain and suffering and when i'm saying yes it is all pain i don't mean that in the sense that there are psychopaths that that acts or sociopaths that like hurt somebody just to get some joy out of it and it might not be because somebody else abused them or you know like i'm not trying to say that there is a direct correlation between every asshole that does something destructive and that oh they must have experienced a lot of abuse or pain directly because of that i'm but i do think the buddhist side of me uh suffered life is suffering that's the first noble truth of buddhism and i i think that's true in that suffering is defined in that way as clinging to our attachments to our desires and so even how hillary said that grief was the presence of absence is that how you said it yeah that to me aligns perfectly with buddhism it's like the feeling that something is missing the feeling that something should be other than it is right now and i hope that in saying this anyone will remember early in the conversation where i i do have a tremendous amount of honor and respect for grief and for the human condition of suffering that it's not something i think anyone should be avoiding or could be but that it is related to what we want if you don't perceive there to be a lack of anything then there is no presence of absence if you if there's nothing that you think that should be happening other than what's happening so grief can be about anything i i think even even the insult milk even oatmeal if you if you believe that oat milk you know if you're the you're a prince and you believe that the whole world exists to serve you and now there's no oat milk and now you've just learning that now the earth doesn't exist to serve you you can really suffer over that i'm like what no oat milk for me princess drink oat milk i love this analogy or maybe where we take it out of like the the hyperbolic hypothetical situation yes let's bring it down for a moment although that was so so appropriate and i really got your point i love how you struggle with us sometimes you're just you always do this thing where she goes uh um that's one way of looking at it and i'm like that's a nice way of saying y'all are crazy that there is this um like we were saying it's never about the oat milk right but if what we don't know how to feel is loss and there's been a huge loss in our life that we have tried to move away from to survive it would make sense just based categorically on how our brain processes certain emotions and how those specific emotions and memories of those emotions are stored right we get uh this is really like a an inaccurate metaphor but things associated with anger get stored in the anger bucket and things associated with sadness get stored in the sadness bucket and and not that everything is so clean cut but we actually know that if we're in a state with a particular emotion like we're in a sad state we're more likely and more easily able to remember sad memories so when we're feeling something re-emerge a loss whether it be the oat milk or whatever it is if our brain doesn't know how to be with loss there's probably going to be something about what's happening in the present that activates something in the past like ruthie said on our episode last week or a couple weeks ago whatever is hysterical is likely historical and and when we are noticing our perhaps an inaccurate response or disproportionate reaction that might give us pause to say what is this stirring up in me that i haven't felt before so the a really good example of this is and i can talk about continuing bonds in a moment but one of the theories about grief that was unhelpful for us is that to really be free you need to sever this attachment like i'm not talking about it in a buddhist sense but in a relational sense this this energy that's moving between you and this person that needs to to be over and released fully for you to be free and on the other side of grief and and it kept people stuck because a lot of people don't want to sever an attachment with someone they're like why would i want why would i want to disconnect from my wife why would i want to disconnect from my child who died and so the theory of continuing bonds is that you don't actually need to sever this connection with someone but you can find a way to bring it into your life and integrate it in more fully so i know for some people who have continuing bonds and of ways of processing grief if someone they love who is in their family has died they'll continue to set a place for them at the table as a way of saying we we honor their presence and ongoing impact on our lives although they're with us in a different way we are not without them so i was i was on a family vacation i guess it was a couple years ago now and i was having a conversation with a family friend at a table and someone was asking me about grief they had suffered a loss in their life and i was talking about different approaches to managing grief different theories about what it's like to go through it and talked about continuing bonds and and how we can find ways to create enduring connection with this someone and some examples of that you know having rituals or going to places or having conversations or writing them letters or setting a place at the table and somebody else at the table got furious with me absolutely lost their shit and was yelling at me and one of the things that they kept saying over and over and over again as they were yelling at me was you can't do that you have to get over it at some point you can't do that and this is not someone i have i actually even really know well or have a close relationship with and so the person actually stopped stomped away from the table left and super disregulated really really angry and it was coming out directly at me and asked someone who knew that person like what is there something in their life that may have been activated by what we're talking about and i learned that this person at a very young age had suffered a really horrific loss of someone very very very close to them and the family strategy had been move on and so an example of what we're talking about here with the oat milk is me saying to this other person it's okay for there to be space for this ongoing relationship created an anger response and i could look at that anger response and be like wow that's a really angry person or i could look at that anger response as this activation of unprocessed grief and perhaps the the incongruence or the dissonance between me saying you're allowed to have this ongoing bond and what the family message was growing up which is you are not allowed and the way that we we get through this is to make what happened go away you were you were better than me because i would i would have probably yelled at that woman i'm like what huh this is why you're the doctor and the therapist just to interrupt any illusion of my emotional regulation perfection i i will say that it was super disturbing for me because out of nowhere i'm having this like really intimate conversation with someone and then i get like screamed at ya but what was important for me actually in this memory which no one else would have known except my husband kevin i told him about it after is that i got up from the table too i was so rattled and i felt so shamed like am i did i do something wrong am i should i not be talking about what like i was really confused and i felt really shamed i actually went into the restaurant bathroom and i put my hands on my chest and i just said to myself that was so scary that was so scary you got yelled at and you didn't see it coming and there's a person at that point in my life i didn't have as much of a discipline around speaking to myself compassionately but there's a friend in my life who i'm really close to who is so just just constant in her compassion for me and i actually just imagined that she was there with me and i imagined exactly what she would say and i could hear her voice and see her face and i've told her since that she often comes to me in these moments when i feel scared and i don't know how to manage my my pain but if we think about that as a continuation of this analogy if i don't attend to my pain then yeah maybe i do scream back at this guy then maybe i do take that into something else and my pain is transmitted into how i react to somebody else or maybe it changes the way i practice and i don't again ever talk about continuing bonds so for me it felt like i was trying to be faithful to my pain and i didn't feel safe to do that in a public setting so i did it in a private way and maybe there's some message in there about grief too which is whenever i speak to people who are actively grieving or what we would say like they're bereaved there has been a significant and recent loss i'll say to them pick the people who in your life who are safe and you get to set boundaries with everybody else and you get to shoot the shit and talk really superficial with everybody or not at all and then with the people who are safest to you you get to decide who gets access to your pain and who you feel is equipped to walk through and sit through and sit in your pain with you because not everybody is safe to do that with us and it doesn't mean that our pain is bad it might just mean that the people around us don't know how to do pain in their own life too yeah or that unique type of pain they might be equipped to handle some kind of pain but not other types of pain because i do think there are times where i could just say personally like there's been pain that i've had in my life like i said earlier that i think has overwhelmed people where they might be equipped with some types of pain but other types they don't know what to do with so then it shuts them down so that makes that makes sense and that's also really beautiful that you you kind of conjure up your friend there in that moment to like help you kind of she's your patron saint in that way like her presence and her spirit stays with you in those or comes to you in those moments to help you process and deal and grieve so i have a team they come with me everywhere i go in my head there's a wise person there is a compassionate person there i mean i got a whole group of people you know what i'm so lucky this makes so much sense now there's one little question here in the chat that's interesting about how grief connects us that pain that that sense the presence of an absence it's interesting it can move us towards each other right it can make us when we're we feel lost we feel alone it can move us towards each other and that can have a real bonding nature to it do you have any do you guys have any thoughts about that yeah i think i think grief as i mentioned before is this relational experience we are weird negotiating the change in our relationship to somebody and when we feel equipped to do that with the presence of somebody else then our sense of being connected doesn't have to diminish it just might change the avenue through which we experience it or the person or the place where it feels like that relational energy is returned to us but we i think when we are in in our emotion and we are able to attend to and move through and stay with our own feelings of sadness that when we see sadness in somebody else instead of trying to rush to make their pain go away it actually motivates us to move close to them and when we feel like there is a safe other who is not going to make our pain go away necessarily but is going to accompany us a heart can be opened in a new way to exchanging that relational energy to that person who is there and present and i think i think that when we are doing life really well that's what happens that we move close to each other in pain in a way that seems to be adaptive for our human species and have a unique a unique function related to that emotion unlike things like i mean anger the tenderness of sadness and grief comes with the the possibility of a kind of intimacy and it comes with the possibility of access to our deep longings and the space where we aren't uncertain and we don't know what comes next uh but we feel connected to someone there's just a kind of opening that i think can happen and because of sadness it's meant to do that for us yeah i've said this quote probably a few times on the podcast but maharaja is saying i love suffering it brings me so close to god and i think that opening word that you just said really sticks out and resonates with me as far as the possibilities of what grief and pain and suffering can do it can open up space for deeper connection deeper joy deeper wisdom and that's part of part of the benefits of of learning to accept it as it is and however it's at being present to it we talked going back to the parts of the conversation we're like learning how to lament learning how to be with it learning how to sit with it within yourself and in others it has the effects i think when we do that it it does have the potential of connecting us deeper together connecting us deeper to our own bodies giving us more capacity for life and the ups and downs of life and so it is kind of a an opportunity in a weird you know i don't i that's again you got to say that in a context i'm not going to tell the person who just had their lost their mother to this to covid oh this is an opportunity for you to grow you know what i mean that's insensitive and and silly to say insert in certain contexts but just in the theoretical context of grief being an opportunity for growth i think can be helpful at some points for some people or maybe we say it through a similar but just slightly different language with viktor frankl and his surviving of the holocaust his surviving of uh the concentration camps saying that we always have a choice that in pain is inevitable i mean this is like nietzsche frankel together but suffering is inevitable it's part of life how do we respond to it do we allow it to break us open um do we or do we even have that choice do we do we continue to survive and do what we can to get to the next day because that is all that's available to us but could we choose that fully could we choose the survival as most necessary and sufficient in this moment so i like to think about nothing nothing being able to take our choice from us our ability to say yes to what's what's happening even if it feels like we can't change the circumstances around us i mean frankl in the concentration camp being stripped of everything that he had everything he previously was and deciding when he got up in the morning to with a gun pointed in his face from the guard to say to the guard good morning sir because his way of gay of engaging on a human level with the guard made him feel he had some agency and that was the choice that he could make how do i respond to this i i think one of the most holiest things that we can do is to sit with people and to honor people's process and their pain and honestly it's the most rewarding thing i think each of us get to do as human beings is to bear witness to each other's burdens and each other's pain and and it's funny because like this episode is hard for me because like all the stories that i want to share are just stories i'll never share because they were moments in time with friends with with people sometimes even strangers where for a second for a minute for an hour for a day a week i was allowed to bear witness to somebody else's pain and it was holy and i think that is the ministry that we are all called to is we are all called to bear and carry each other's burdens and just for a moment you can't always bear it 24 7 because we all have our own things but to do that and to also know that whatever that pain in that moment is is not going to always be forever again bill withers who just passed who said sometimes we all have pain we all have struggles but if we are wise we know there's always tomorrow and i also think there's a function of hope that that gets carried in to these holy moments it's not a policing of attitudes or policing of feelings but as as much as a reminder in these moments with folks we get to say hey that thing you're feeling right now you're not gonna always feel and that's okay and so feel it while you feel it right now but as the scripture says um weeping endures for a night and then we know joy comes in the morning we know there's always a tomorrow and i don't know i think there's a place to say that while not trying to manipulate or control how people are processing or feeling but also to remind people to remind ourselves that that thing we're feeling right now that emotion whatever it is we will feel other things too and and to and sometimes for people that have been you know wanting to self-harm or suicidal that has been sometimes the very thing that has gotten them through is like i know i won't always feel this pain right now so let me actually press through and actually try to go to sleep and wake up and try again tomorrow grief is hard but i do think we have a responsibility to be there for each other through it my mom passed away in the summer i don't know if i'll ever find the words to articulate the feelings that have come along with my grief at times they have felt unbearable heavy and unfair others they have felt profound serene and peaceful my journey in grief has been a lot about growing more gentleness inside myself for myself grief can be exhausting and hard on the body and mind so recognizing when i need a cup of tea some chocolate and a good cry has been important also rest without guilt while i sometimes feel big hot rage and resentment i really do believe that grief has been a gift in my life through grief i felt some of the deepest love and reverence for the beauty that is existing i miss my mom and in missing her i feel the love that exists between us across time and space even in this time that she is no longer present the way that i've known her for the last 23 years i think grief is the dance of holding on and letting go and that is a dance that everything in this universe does at one time or another remembering this comforts me in moments that feel hard it also comforts me to say hello to the very moment that my breath is situated in grief is hard being a human is hard but taking a breath is doable my mantra this time has just been to welcome the ebb and the flow and not try so hard to control the healing but trust that the the practices that i have in place will support me and the healing that i've already done i can trust that and just welcome each feeling as they come welcome like the tightness in my chest and my throat and even like the tears that are coming up now and trusting that they're not going to be here forever and that's okay in your tiredness may you give yourself permission to sleep in a soft bed and when you wake up may you feel sunlight on your face in all the isolation and invisibility of your pain may you seek and find the space for your hidden emotions to manifest and materialize and the reality of your free falling may you also taste the terror of freedom and the disconnect of your pre and post self may you acknowledge your broken halves and trust that while the hope for your healing and wholeness may be out of your reach in this moment there is a friend believing in it on your behalf thanks for listening to this episode of the liturgist podcast everybody would like to invite you to join us get deeper into this community all these voices that you're hearing on here telling these stories and sharing the liturgist is not just a podcast it's a rich community of um diverse and absolutely fascinating and beautiful people a good way to get more involved and meet some people if you'd like is to come to the sunday thing we have a sunday gathering on zoom every week and you can join us and talk about the topic of the week there's breakout groups and they're really great so especially those of you going through a lot of pain and need others around you you don't have to be alone you're not alone let us love on you a little bit come on join us the liturgists.com you can find more information this episode was hosted by hillary mcbride william matthews and me michael gunger i produced this episode and edited it with tages layer haydn thanks so much to our patrons for everything they do to make this show possible all the love