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Hey everyone, welcome back to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy podcast. We are so glad that you're here with us today. So as we enter into the holiday season, we are going to be starting off a new mini-series. And this will be specifically about grief. Because as the holidays come up, we know that there is a lot of joy around it. There's lights, there's food, there's always opportunity for a celebration. But we also understand and know that during this time, grief can be really heavy.
And part of the grief process is learning how to hold space for both joy and grief. And so the series that we're going to go into, we're going to break into three different parts. This first episode today, we'll talk about the stages of grief and just grief overall. And the next episode, we'll talk about if you are going through grief during the holiday seasons, just some tips on how to walk through that.
And then the third episode will be if you know someone or you're walking alongside someone who is experiencing grief, just how to support them best and love them during the holidays especially. So as you listen to this podcast, if you know anyone that this could be helpful, please take a minute and just send this over to them so that we can get our message to those who could really benefit from it. All right, let's jump into today's episode.
Now, one of the things to know about grief is that people grieve in many different ways, but there are some general norms to how people grieve. And what we're going to be going into is we're going to talk a little bit about those general norms, but also a little bit about how people might grieve differently in different occasions. Yes, that is so important to know is that everybody does grieve differently.
And so even though you've lost the same person, it's not going to look the same for everybody. So for example, if somebody loses their parent, you may not grieve the same way as your sister or brother, even though you all have lost a parent. So part of this, and it's important to do, is to just accept this is the way I'm grieving or I'm feeling the way that I'm feeling.
And you shouldn't have to feel like you have to justify the experience that you're having with grief because it's not necessarily I'm choosing to feel this way. This is just how I am feeling. And when we embrace the fact that we are struggling or we're feeling in a rough spot, then it allows us to grieve better. But if you try to suppress or to avoid or to run away from it, a lot of times what that ends up doing is it helps to prolong the grieving process and make it more difficult for you.
Right. And I think another example, and we've used this in other podcast episodes, but it is also so pertinent to the grief process.
It's as if you're blowing up a beach ball and you try to push that under because I don't have time right now to breathe or I don't have the bandwidth or I don't want to it's just too much and too overwhelming and you push it under push it under that beach ball is going to pop up somewhere else and it may be at a very inopportune time and so a helpful way to really manage that is to be able to bring the that beach ball and all the
emotions and the thoughts and the experiences that you're going through to the surface and it's easier to manage and you're aware of where it's at rather than pushing it down and popping up on its own at some point because it will come up. And actually, recently I gave somebody this homework assignment where we're going to go through this today.
We're going to talk about the stages of grief, but I had them journal about what they were feeling that day and then trying to identify what stage of grief they were currently experiencing. And as we go through this, I think it would be helpful if you are currently struggling with grieving to go along each day and journaling about what your feelings are that day and then identifying what that stage of grief is. And one of the things that's important to know about the stages of grief.
I always tell people it's a little bit of a misnomer when you call it stages, because it kind of gives you the indication that once you proceed past stage one to stage two, that stage one is over. But that's not really how it works. You kind of bounce around to different stages at different times, maybe even in the same day or in the same week or the same month. And I would even say sometimes minute by minute that you're experiencing all the different stages.
And that's such a good point, because with grief, I wish that it was, okay, we hit this first stage, second, third, fourth. Now we're on the fifth stage of acceptance and we are done. But that is not at all how it works. Yeah, it'd be so nice if it worked that way, whereas very predictable. But unfortunately, how grief and just emotions in general work is that they're not very predictable. They kind of run their own course and they run their own show.
And there's things you can do to help manage it and things you can do to help it move along. But ultimately, you kind of are a little bit at the mercy of just having to go through these stages and experience them in the way that they come to you. And one of our early, early episodes that we did for the podcast was on grief. And so you can always go back and listen to that, but we're going to try and recap that today and talk about these stages of grief.
And there are a lot of different ways to approach the stages of grief. There's lots of different people that have different stages of grief. But today we're going to go through the Kubler-Ross version. And this is a very well-known one. It uses the acronym DABDA, so D-A-B-D-A. But how I really like to introduce the stages of grief is really as grief waves, that they come and go and they hit you. Sometimes those waves are just back to back.
Sometimes they are huge tidal waves and they feel overwhelming. They could make you feel like you're drowning in your emotions and in your grief. And then sometimes you're totally fine and the waters are calm and you're okay and you just happen to be driving by their favorite restaurant and then another grief wave hits you. Then maybe you're okay. And then you hear a song or you smell a smell or you have any of the numerous things that can trigger that grief.
And so rather thinking of it like stages, I really do like to see it more as grief waves. And one of the things I want to add on to this, too, is when you experience these emotions, it doesn't feel pleasant. It doesn't feel good. And so we do have a tendency to want to lean away from it. And especially because the positive result of expressing those emotions oftentimes is separated away a little bit from when you are going through it.
So, for example, if you're feeling really sad and you're feeling a lot of grief in that moment, allowing yourself to experience it isn't immediately afterwards going to make you feel better. But it might alleviate symptoms maybe 6 hours or 24 hours or 48 hours after you originally felt those emotions.
And so a lot of times people just view expressing their emotions and letting them out as a wholly bad experience but oftentimes then they don't realize that later on after if they've taken that time they've let those emotions out that a little bit later that then they feel this sense of alleviation but when you think about that emotional expression right it feels difficult in that moment and then you might feel exhausted after expressing those emotions but
then a little bit time later whether like i said it's like six hours or 48 hours later you might actually go through a state where I feel less emotional now and I feel a little bit better at this point. And so it's hard for people a lot of times to make that connection. But knowing in order to get to the other side, you do have to experience and kind of wade through these uncomfortable emotions.
So the first stage of grief is denial. And I like to add on shock because it's not always true denial where you're like, no, this isn't happening. Sometimes it's just shock, like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe this is happening. And this could be at multiple stages. So if you have someone who passed, say, due to cancer, you're going to be grieving at multiple points. You're not just grieving when they pass, but you're going to be grieving when you first get the diagnosis.
Those waves are going to continue to come and you're going to grieve again when you see a decline in their health. And then you're grieving all throughout that process. And then when they pass, that's another point that you're going to continue to grieve at. And so one big thing to think about when you think about grief is it's not just death, but grief really is any kind of loss that you're experiencing. Granted, the loss due to death feels so big and heavy, but really when we look
at it, we can really minimize this and look at even loss in terms of concept. So The loss of safety, the loss of security. Or even the loss of a dream. Absolutely. The loss of a dream, the loss of where you ideally thought your life would be at at this point. And if you listen to our first episode that we did on grief, we'll talk about in there other examples and other types of losses. But for this one specifically, we want to focus on the loss due to death.
And so that first one with denial or shock can sometimes feel like a dream where you feel like, oh man, I would have never thought this would have happened to us. Maybe you lost someone due to an overdose or a drunk driver. Or maybe it was a loss due to suicide. Maybe it was a sudden loss that you experienced where you did not expect it. Or maybe it was a health issue that happened over a prolonged amount of time.
And so with each one of those examples, you're still experiencing at some point this denial or this shock, just like, oh my gosh, is this really happening? And then as we move on to the next stage, that stage is anger. And I like to add in frustration because sometimes people don't acknowledge that they really feel angry, but they can acknowledge that I'm really frustrated at this.
I'm frustrated that we have to go through this. So this can be anger or frustration at the doctors because you felt like they didn't do enough or they didn't catch it soon enough. This could be being angry at God. This could be maybe being angry at the person who caused this. So maybe it was a drunk driver. You can be angry at them. Or I've even seen people be mad at the person who is deceased. They got cancer and they passed away and it's no fault of their own.
But then you still feel these feelings of anger towards that person. You left me. You're not here anymore. And one of the things too, again, is not about trying to intellectualize that, but just experience that. I'm so upset with you that you left me, even though it's not their fault, but just acknowledging that that is how you feel and being able to express that.
Because again, you're feeling that way for a reason and just trying to ignore that feeling or trying to intellectually justify that you shouldn't feel that way doesn't make those feelings go away. Feelings are just something that you have to experience. That's something we're going to kind of keep saying throughout this process. You just have to experience these feelings. And a part of it too is that the feelings that we feel oftentimes they show the deep connection we had to that person.
And so don't be afraid to feel these things. It means that person mattered to you or means that there is a portion of the relationship that you're grieving that you didn't get to have that you wish that you had had. And so if you're angry, you don't have to justify your anger. You just feel that way and you just got to let that come out and you got to give yourself permission to be able to express that anger.
Now, to be honest, that might make people around you uncomfortable, but that is something that you need to do. When you're in the grieving process, you shouldn't be worried so much about how other people are going to perceive or react to your grieving process. You need to allow yourself to go through it. A couple other examples of being angry. You could be angry at yourself, or you could even just be mad at the situation. I'm just mad that my dad's not here anymore.
Maybe there's some triggers. Maybe you just see people walking along at the mall and you see a mother and daughter laughing. And you're just mad that you don't have that ability to have your mom there with you anymore. So there's a multitude of ways to feel that anger and that frustration. But it does lead into the next one, which is bargaining. And how I like to explain bargaining and how I kind of add on to this is bargaining for kids is exactly that.
If dad can come back or mom and dad get back together, then I will do my best in school and I'll get straight A's, I promise. And they're trying to bargain and make things happen. But I think as adults and even as kids, but definitely as adults, we experience more as what ifs and if onlys. And this is a really hard place to stay because you can't change a lot of this stuff.
So when we experience anger at ourself, it might be, if only I had spent more time with grandma, or what if I had just picked up that last call, or gosh, I felt like calling them, why didn't I just listen to that? What if I had just picked up the phone? Or why didn't we go to a different doctor, get a different opinion, or see if we couldn't have tried some holistic thing to try to help out with their diagnosis?
The what-if stage is so sinister because your brain always tells you, if I would have done this other thing, it would have played out differently. But the truth is, we can't know what that alternate reality would have held. We may have done the absolute best thing that we could have done in this situation, and it still ended up poorly.
And if we made other or alternate decisions it could have actually played out worse but we always have a tendency to want to give this benefit of the doubt to the thing that we didn't do because we want some sense of control if i could have done this that or the other thing then it would have solved this problem or it wouldn't have happened this way or we would have had this better outcome but we just can't know that and so getting stuck in that stage can be
very difficult because then you're seeding a bunch of self-doubt to yourself about your decision making processes or about what the outcomes would have looked like. But unfortunately, we just have no way of really knowing. That's absolutely true. I like that you said that, that we give the benefit of doubt to the thing we didn't do. And we think that that not only could have changed something, but would have changed something. So I like that you pointed that out.
And so the examples I gave were if you are feeling that anger or frustration toward yourself, but if you begin to feel that anger or frustration toward others, there's a lot of what-if scenarios that play out, kind of like the one you mentioned with the doctors. What if we went to a different doctor? And this really is a never-ending list that you can sit down and write out. So when you look at the anger and the frustration that you're experiencing.
A lot of times the bargaining stage will correlate with that and the what ifs there. So if you were angry at the doctors, then your what if sometimes you're experiencing is about what if we would have chosen a different doctor or gotten a second or third opinion. If your anger or frustration is maybe toward the person that passed, it could be things like, if only you had taken care of your diabetes. What if you had just stayed home that night and not gotten in the car? And it goes on and on.
And although this is a scary place to stay because we can't change any of it, It really is a stage that you also need to process through and work through. And so when Tim mentioned earlier about journaling, this is a good thing to just sit down and take an opportunity. And those thoughts are already there in your mind. And so it can feel overwhelming to really sit down and carve out this time to think about all the what ifs. But you're already experiencing it.
So take that time and sit down and write them all out or think them all through and experience them and feel them. And then if you want, you can get rid of that paper. And this is also something, and again, not to say that we're trying to avoid this stage, because you definitely have to go through and experience a stage. But at a certain point, you have to stop yourself and say, but what if nothing? Because...
There is no what ifs anymore because now it's over. The thing I am grieving has happened. I haven't been able to stave it off. And so at this point, it's what if nothing, because there is nothing now that can be done to change that circumstance. And what I mean by what if nothing is what if I did do the best I could? What if this is the best outcome we could have gotten for this situation? As opposed to what if I had done better, I would have gotten something better.
And it's, again, not to be callous to this stage, but at a certain point after you've gone through and you've thought through all of these what ifs, you have to stop and say, but what if this is the best it could have been, even though it is a bad outcome at the end of the day? Oh, I totally agree that we do need to go through this. But if you get stuck in this stage, it can make it harder for you.
And so part of the grieving process really is healing through this and not making yourself pay for all the things you wish you would have done or could have done. But like you're saying, just laying it to rest and saying, okay, I've gotten it all out. I've talked through it. But this is where we're at. And really, that speaks to the last stage. And we'll get there to the stage of acceptance.
But the next stage is depression. And I like to add on sadness, because sometimes people don't necessarily relate fully to feeling depressed. I don't know what depression feels like. But when we think about grief. We tend to think about sadness and we see grief as exactly that. We equate it to grieving as sadness. And so we won't spend too much time here on depression and sadness because I think this is a stage that most people are familiar with.
But this is definitely a stage where you need to reach out for help and you need to sometimes do the opposite of what you're feeling. If you feel like I just need to isolate and I don't want to be around anyone, sometimes that's the answer is just to sit with people, just to be in the presence of people. And we're going to go into this in the next episode more, but just acknowledging that this is a really difficult stage as well.
But you want to be careful in this stage because sometimes you really do need to reach out and get help. And I think this stage can be very uncomfortable. But also for me, like I was thinking about as we're talking through this, this is also a stage that is in part acceptance, right? It's you realize this is happening. You felt anger over the unjust things. And then you've gone through that bargaining, that what-if stage,
and you've come to the realization, well, this is real. There is no what-ifs. My anger isn't going to solve anything. What has happened has happened. And so you're feeling this sadness and depression because now you are in part accepting that this is the reality. You're not fully in that acceptance phase, but you're in that beginning stages of acceptance.
So even if you are feeling depressed, and I know it can feel very uncomfortable, you're actually getting close to that light at the end of the tunnel. Which leads us into that final stage that Kubler-Ross has, and it's acceptance. And I will say acceptance isn't that this is good or bad or that you have let go of all the emotions and you are now accepted and you don't feel any emotions. This truly is just this is where we're at. It's accepting of what the situation is.
It's accepting that mom is no longer here and recognizing that this is real. And so I think in this stage of acceptance, there's a lot of times where people, I think, get mixed up or throw around different things. And as you and I did grief groups for years, we know that people say really stupid things during the grieving process. And a lot of times. From a really good heart. And you can have such good intentions, but there can be a lot of hurtful things that are said.
And acceptance really is just knowing that this is where we're at. And so I think some of these things are, well, everything happens for a reason or they're in a better place. Or one that I've heard is someone lost a son. They said, well, you're still young. You can have more children. Or even another one, only the good die young. And so a lot of these things, I think, are meant to be encouraging and to bring hope and all of that.
But when you're grieving, a lot of these statements can be really hurtful or you can just be tired and exhausted from always hearing that. So really, when we get to the stage of acceptance, we're just looking at accepting that this is where we're at. Not that this is a good thing or that everything happens for a reason or any of the other statements, but just accepting that this is where we are.
And I think, too, a lot of those statements, people are saying those things because they want to try to help. But understanding that there's not necessarily anything you can do to help except for being there to support them. And so if somebody's saying some of these lines to you and it's kind of hurting you, no, they're trying to help. But oftentimes they'll use these kind of cliched or misplaced statements to try to assist you.
They're not trying to be insensitive. They just don't know what to say in those moments. And the other thing is that, as we talked about in the very beginning. Everybody grieves differently. So there may be a statement that is really encouraging and hopeful and helpful for someone that feels to you so insensitive or doesn't make sense. And so even some of the statements that we've mentioned, maybe you've said, and that's okay, because everyone does grieve differently.
But like we mentioned in the beginning, these are not just stages where you go through stages one through five and you're done. Ta-da, you are healed. But whenever I talk about grief and I walk my clients through it, I try to never use the language of this idea of getting over. Because we never want to get over this person, right?
We want to be able to process through our grief and still honor that person and who they were and what they meant to us and the experiences we've had and be able to heal, but still be able to rise up in the morning and live our lives in a way that can reflect and honor their memory. And I think that's an important piece to bring up. I think I've heard from several people that when they've lost somebody that they feel like also enjoying their life.
Or doing things that bring happiness to them, they almost feel like it's not respecting that they had lost somebody. But I always like to challenge that and ask the question, you know, this person loved you. Do you think they would want you to stay sad and isolate yourself and stop doing the things that you love? Or do you think that they would be encouraging you, no, please go be around people. Please move on with your life. Please be able to recover from this.
Don't stay in this state of sadness and depression and grief all this time. They would want you to move on. They wouldn't take offense to you moving on and trying to be happy and trying to enjoy your life. You're not doing their memory a disservice by being able to appropriately grieve and then working past that pain to then still be able to experience happiness.
That's a really good point. And that's something that we definitely want to talk about is being able to hold space for that joy and for that grief. Because when you think about it, grief really does come in cycles. And so there are two main cycles that I talk about with my clients, and that's grieving throughout the year. So when you look at a year, the cycle of a year, there are a lot of things that you'll go through throughout the year that will trigger this feeling of loss.
And it could be birthdays, holidays, the anniversary of their death. Maybe you guys went to the river or to the beach house every summer. So even though there's not a holiday or something celebratory during the summer, that was a memory that always happened. It was a tradition that happened. So throughout the year, you know, Mother's Day, Father's Day.
Memorial Day, and then like where we are at now, the holidays that are approaching, all of this will bring up that grief and be another one of those waves that come. But another cycle that happens is really understanding that you're going to grieve over your lifetime. And that doesn't mean you're always going to be stuck in this grief and feel it so heavy.
Remember, as we look at it with waves, sometimes those waves get further and further apart and smaller and smaller with maybe a huge wave when you're just reminded so heavily of that grief. So when we look at it over a lifetime, say somebody lost their father at a young age, they're going to grieve again when they start driving and they don't have their dad there to teach them. They're going to grieve again when they graduate from high school.
They're going to grieve again when they get married and when they have children. Each of these experiences that really bring so much joy and our accomplishments. Maybe big promotions or a new job, all of these things bring a lot of joy. But you also have to make room for that sadness because, gosh, I wish that I could go home and call my dad and tell him about this new job, right? If that was the case where she lost her father at a young age, she's grieving throughout her lifetime.
And so just really remembering that is important because when you have joy, but you also have to make room for that grief. And I think that's what you were talking about, Tim. After you lose someone, that even laughter feels weird. Sometimes people feel that guilt and that heaviness for having a good time or having the holidays and finding joy in it because they're not there. And well, really, we feel so weird about experiencing this.
And so I love that you brought that up because it really is this dichotomy that you have to kind of hold and balance.
And another thing that I just want to make sure that we reiterate is stages it's not here here here here and you are done right but you can go from being totally shocked to being so sad to be angry and then accepting okay this is where we're at they're gone to bargaining again and saying if only what if to being shocked again and gosh I just cannot believe it to being sad and angry and accepting, right?
You're going to jump around all over the place. And those are the waves that you're experiencing. So know that it is not stage one through five and you're done, but that you will grieve over this year. You're going to grieve again over your lifetime and just making room for both. So hopefully that was helpful for you guys to be able to recognize the stages of grief and how they can show up differently for different people.
And we hope that you stay tuned for the next episode where we'll talk about navigating the holidays while grieving. And then the episode after that, we'll talk about supporting someone who's grieving. All right, you guys have a great day. And remember, your mind is a powerful thing. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend?
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