Hanna:
Hey you guys, welcome this is episode 56 and I’m pivoting a little bit today, I had another episode recorded already for you but something just happened in my family’s life and I am feeling drawn to talk about that instead today. A little more somber than normal but we’re going to talk about grief and endings today.
So this has been coming up for me personally over the past couple of months I’ve had some experiences with different types of relationship endings or completions as I like to call them, but then most recently my maternal grandmother, Grandy, passed away on Wednesday. Which as I’m saying that I’m having a realization that that’s a significant day of the week for she and I because when I was a kid, for years, we would have midweek dates on Wednesdays together, where we’d go out for ice cream or go to the duck pond. Hm just thinking of that now, how cool. Anyways so last Wednesday Grandy died peacefully in her sleep and she was my last remaining grandparent, we were very close and she was one of the most special women I’ve ever met. But we were talking about how the last two or three years were really difficult. She was not herself, she was having a really hard time, and so were the people who were taking care of her every day like my mom and aunts and dad and it was just a really painful experience of lot’s of lows and just really her becoming someone that I had never experienced in her before. Without getting into too many details I found that in talking to some people about her we were using this thought “it was all downhill” or “it all fell apart” or “it was really bad” to describe her life. And I started to noice what I was doing or how I was showing up as a result of whittling the story of our relationship, her relationship with everyone, her relationship with her life, whittling it down to those types of thoughts. So I’ll get into what I mean by whittling it down here in a moment.
But her passing and speaking with my mom and other family about it, and then these few other instances of loss or completions that I’ve had over the past months I just wanted to talk for a few with you all about endings and some of the things that have shifted for me in how I look at Relationships in my life ending and how, if we want to, we can use the narratives about our past relationships to create more real love in the world, by kind of rewriting the story of our relationships to reflect and generate what we want to carry with us, emotionally, and in our actions.
And today as I’m talking, Grandy will probably be at the forefront of my mind, but I want you to take this and apply it to any relationship that you’ve had, romantic, familial, friendship, or otherwise that is not a part of your life anymore whether that person passed away or you broke up or there was a separation of some kind and see what you can take away from here. Fair warning this might be a little disjointed sounding or a little kinda out there or weird, I’ve been having a lot of downloads lately that I’m still sorting through myself so I’m still sorting through what I am choosing to think about some of this too, so I know if you’re here for this you’re here for the kinda messy mixed up parts of what I share, and today we will probably get some of that. Haha so have patience with me trying to make some of these points and also interpret this in the way that best serves your life and your relationships. K? K!
So firstly, I want to say that any emotions that we feel when someone dies, or leaves, or we leave them, or a relationship is over are completely perfect and normal and great. Nothing I share here is ever meant to shame you for how you feel. You feel angry, great. Despairing, awesome. Heartbreak, resentment, indifference, perfect. Ok.
So just keep that in mind when I start to go off on changing how you feel or creating how you feel on purpose. I don’t like want to perpetuate the idea of positive and negative emotions right like as if there’s a right way and wrong way to feel but for the sake of understanding when I teach about feelings I often use a diagram that is a big circle that represents all emotions and the circle is split directly in half to demonstrate that life is going to be 50 % positive and 50 % negative. I use the words positive and negative because that’s what human language recognizes but I want you to know that a full and complete and perfect life has both.
But, for the sake of today’s episode, I’m going to be talking about changing your future by telling the story of the past in a way that most serves your evolution.
Not always, but I have noticed that a lot of people think they prefer to hold on to resentment, anger, and stress about the relationship because they are chasing empowerment but not exactly getting the empowerment that they wanna feel. What I’ve seen alot of women do is they take what happened and they start to use it as fuel against other people and against themselves. Like have you ever gotten broken up with by a guy who was actually really nice and you had a good time with and then he breaks up and you’re like fuck that dude he sucked anyway and the relationship was doomed from the start…because you’re trying to avoid feeling hurt or disappointed? Yeah, here’s something to consider: the more willing you are to just feel hurt and genuinely sad about something being complete, the faster that feeling will go away and the sooner you’ll get to the love, curiosity, excitement, pleasure, that you ACTUALLY want to feel in your current or next relationships.
Suffering in free pain over a loss of someone does not mean you cannot also feel empowered. In fact, noticing a relationship, thinking about a relationship the way YOU WANT TO THINK about it, so that you can feel good, is exercising empowerment.
It’s almost impossible to get to genuine grief unless we make space in our hearts for what was beautiful. Because grief is SUCH an interesting emotion. Like even how it feels in the body, it’s not like any other feeling because it is like a sacred dance between despair and gratitude. Like despair for what was and gratitude for what was. There is nothing like the duality of grieving. It’s like an intersection where your heart is full up and cracked open the point where those two things meet. I think that all emotions are opportunities but grief is like wow, here I am feeling this big intense emotion in honor of someone that that once was. When you really stop to feel and allow the feeling of grief it’s like a special and private look-in on an occasion of mournful celebration with yourself. Because you created the feelings of love and you created the feelings of loss and you are having this internal emotional sandwich of intense pleasing and painful feelings.
All endings are not bad. They are completions and when we start looking at every relationship ending, unconsciously, as bad, what we start to fear most is things ending. Right? And I think that a lot of us spend so much time in worry and stress already, and we overthink because we had unconsciously conditioned ourselves to believe that when a relationship is over or complete, it’s not just COMPLETE, but it’s a total shit show, falling apart, totally awful and bad. We have this idea that, and hear me out you monogamous lifelong marriage lovers, because this isn’t about doing relationships in a specific way, but we are conditioned, through religious norms and cultural narratives that a good relationship lasts forever. Right the best relationships are lifelong. The fountain of youth where you could live forever, that’s the dream to never die, never end. And so we’ve been unconsciously following this paradigm that says that endings are never good or ok. That if things were alright, good, endings wouldn’t happen.
So we fear the end, and when there is an end we hone our narrative to tell all about WHY it was bad and doomed..now this is mostly pertaining to romantic or friendships right. We do this thing where something ends, we say “oh yea it was bad” and we start to say things like well she was so horrible to me and look for all the reasons why it shouldn’t have been in the first place.
But what a conundrum that puts us in, to disagree with what happened, either feel shameful or angry or both and then go into the next relationship or other relationship living in fear of the end and not being present to the relationship fully or trying to control everything to make sure it’s good.
Making endings horrible is NOT HELPFUL. It’s just not.
Celebrate grief and endings more.
The hurt and pain ugh some of the things that happen are so awful and of course this isn’t to make light of the pain that people are going through when things end.
But sometimes we don’t need to tell the story of our relationships as if the only part that happened was the end.
And if this feels like you, like you know yourself to hyper focus on the end and that meaning something bad about the other person, about the relationship or about you, then you know that your work is in endings. Your work is going to be found in things being complete.
If you’re the person who is like but no Hanna, I listened to this episode because I really did have a relationship that fell apart….why do you want to think that way? How is that thought serving you now? Do you like feeling like a failure? Because I don’t really think that the thought that it fell apart is creating the genuine sadness. It fell apart implies something broke, something stopped working, something went wrong, something fell from perfect. And none of those things are true. Or helpful to you to believe. Relationships end when they are complete, no sooner, no later. You didn’t “stay too long and that’s why it was shit in the end” no, you were around until you go everything you needed, and it took exactly the amount of time it needed for you to learn what that relationship was there to teach you. And no, it didn’t “end too soon” and that’s why the ending felt so horrible, no, it ended just in time for you to have the time you need to make room for what’s coming.
Because here’s what I’m over, what I’m not a proponent of any longer…only hearing stories about relationships that are over being the worst, and such a waste and horrible and a joke and just defining them by the end. Like the ending is the definition of the whole relationship. Right and I am not saying we need to bypass feeling hurt or heartbroken or disappointed at all but its the part where we harbor anger or righteousness or resentment or despising people and living in those emotions and perpetuating the fear of “it happening again” which causes all types of issues for us in our current and future relationships.
If every time a relationship is complete, you make it mean that it fell apart or was bad or a disaster, then you’re going to be living in a lot of fear, because there is no avoiding relationships ending AND maybe worse, you’re going to start living out of alignment because you won’t ever be able to choose consciously to complete a relationship because you have this belief that things need to last forever.
So Learning from a relationship, growing from a relationship, even being more aware or having more informations about what you want more of or less of in the future, it doesn’t have to come with the price of failure and stuff being horrible.
Friendships, Romantic relationships. Sometimes there’s a fight or a growing apart sometimes something really awful happens like someone cheats or whatever, this isn’t about emotional bypassing or trying to make everything that happened into a positive, BUT, the end of things doesn’t have to define the whole of things. And why I think this is a problem is also because it makes you wrong for having had that relationship.
I started thinking about this because of Grandy and how really hard it was at the end. Frankly she wasn’t herself. It was scary at times. But would I ever use that to define the whole of her life? And my life with her? Absolutely not.
Telling the story of how it was a waste of time. Or that was a total bummer. Or like It was a failure. Or that was so awful.
Based on the final or most recent part.
There can be so much love in an ending. If you let it. You have to let it. It’s easier to say that about someone like a grandparent who died right, but the end of a relationship or a career or a life. “The end” doesn’t have to mean all bad.
The end could be full up with love. Imagine that if love was the driver of how you acted.
Love might even be more plentiful in the end, having had alot of time to grow.
So how do we change the narrative? With our thoughts. Right? We can take the facts of what happened, and we can think about what happened in a way that makes us FEEL the genuine feeling of grief or disappointment, and the genuine feeling of LOVE and gratitude.
If I could feel anything, what would I want to feel about this relationship? Some of you are like no I wanna feel mad. Haha. Maybe you do in the moment, right? But for the long term and future evolution of your life what do you need to feel? Appreciation. Contentment. Safety. Do you know how powerful it might be if you could tell the narrative of every relationship story that’s ever ended in a way that made you feel happy and gratuitous and safe and free and LOVED.
That part of my life is complete. And here’s what I’m taking away from that time. That relationship is complete. And something being complete is totally normal. We forget how normal and ok it is for things to complete.
Every night has its dawn. Every day has a sunset. Plants bloom and die. The day didn’t fall apart just because the sun went down. Right, so it’s like if we’re having an amazing day and then the day ends we don’t say wow that was a waste of a day because it ended. It really fell apart when the sun went down. Right? Then we would just go into every day with fear. And to fear the end of a day is to ruin the day.
I remember one of the best nights that I had at Burning Man ever. I was with my ex and my sister and we had been going on like a night time art tour together, climbing on light up butterflies and riding on tea kettles and this DJ called Random Rab was playing a sunrise set that was like so magical and there was this typewriter that was set up on a stilted table like probably 20 feet up and I was up in the chair typing some epic poetry on the typewriter listening to the music and I remember not wanting it to end. Like that was my thought then that ugh it’s going to be awful when this ends. But now I see that night was so complete. That’s what I want to believe—that was such a complete night and the thing is that’s interesting is that like there could’ve been so much more that happened like if I would’ve had more time that night I would’ve done more things that would’ve been super fun and epic and you know all of that but I didn’t that was as much time as like we had before the sun came up and that night was complete and like that’s my thought right like that’s my thought that makes it complete. And makes it live in my mind as so wonderful. Not that it ended and that we went to bed at like 11 am and it got so hot that I couldn’t sleep and was miserable the next day from not being able to sleep haha, no. That’s not the story I tell about that night. I don’t need to. So do you think about people who are gone from your life or you know relationships that have ended like do you think about them in a way that that was complete versus like it all fell apart at the end or that was so sad that it ended? Yes it is sad like we can be sad and disappointed that it ended but that’s not the story of that experience that it’s sad and I feel like I don’t know if you know this is feels important to you but it feels important to me to like be intentional about how we honor things that have happened in our lives, relationships that are complete, because to be able to rewrite the story from love and to express what your life has been up until this point from love— that is such a beautiful and epic use of your emotions.
So just an FYI: Not everyone is going to have the same way of seeing the story of what happened, and what they want to make it mean is up to them.
My advice on this is: let your stories differ. Know that that’s totally okay. The way I choose to feel about what happened is up to me, and it’s totally controlled by how I think. If someone else wants to feel hurt or angry or sad for longer, or forever, that is okay. Let them. I’m sure you’d hope that they would let you feel however you want to feel, so you do the same. Relationship are collections of thoughts about you and another person. Our thoughts are always optional. You have the option to feel about relationships however you want and need to now.
“It fell apart” is probably not the story of your relationship you really wanna tell.
The most important people in my life won’t spend my entire life with me.
That doesn’t make the time they were here any less valuable.
Thanks for listening. I’d love to hear your feedback on the show, or if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned here and apply it to your life, come join my in Private Coaching and we will get started on changing your thoughts to change your life.