Megan Devine- On Grief and Loss

what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Megan Divine, a pioneer

in the fields of grief support and emotional intelligence. Since two thousand nine, through her website, talks, and courses, she's been shaking up our culture's ideas around grief and love. Her book is It's Okay that You're not okay meeting grief and loss in a culture that doesn't understand. Hi, Megan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Your book is called It's Okay that You're not okay meeting grief

and loss in a culture that doesn't understand. And we're going to jump deep into that book in a moment, but we'll start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed

and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parallel means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I think it's a complicated question, Binaries. I think you're tricky. Um, you know, classifying things as good and bad, and certainly light and dark can be kind

of problematic, right. What I do like here is this idea that there are ways we can make our own suffering worse, and there are ways that we can make gentleness or piece of being be the more dominant voice in our heads. I like, I like thinking about that terrible in that way rather than I think sometimes it gets construed as or gets spoken of as like the light wolf the dark wolf, and there can be so much wrong with that, that idea of light versus dark.

And I remember actually listening to to an earlier episode, an earlier interview that you had done, where somebody was talking about when we call a certain feeling state or a mind state bad, it can make sort of an opposite reaction where parts of ourselves that we call bad, it's sort of like we're shunning them and they have

to speak louder in order to get our attention. So anytime we're talking about good, bad, light, dark, my first thing is sort of a cultural rabble rouser, is like why do we call certain things bad and certain things good, and certain things light and certain things dark. Yeah, and that is certainly a theme in your book that we're going to get into. But let's start off with if you're open to it, telling us what led you into grief work. So I have been a psychotherapist for a

very long time. I've been in private practice for about ten years and was tired. I was feeling burned out from sitting and listening to stories, and I was talking with my partner about needing to step back and needing to take a break and sort of feel into what might be next for me. And so we were going to rearrange our family so that he could take over financial supporter of our family and I could walk away from being of service in the in the way that

I was accustomed to. But before we got a chance to do that, Matt died in an accident. And the day that he died, I quit my practice. I never saw my clients again. I heard from so many people that I was going to take his death and turn it around and make it into a gift, that I should think of all of the people that I could help, knowing what I knew in the in the wake of

his death. And you know, back then that felt really offensive, as though Matt's death were a fair trade for me being able to be more helpful to others, or that I needed something this catastrophic to happen so that I could become useful in the world. So I walked away

from all things therapy for a long time. And then I think it was about maybe three years after that's death, where I had a small group of other grieving people, other people who had been widowed at early ages, folks who had lost children, and listening to all of us together talk about the encounters we had out in the world, the ways that we felt misunderstood or isolated or judged inside a grief process. I knew that I could speak

to it. I knew that I was good at putting voice to things that other people either wouldn't think to think about or we're uncomfortable thinking about. It's it's something that I feel like I've always been good at, or a language that I've always had some fluency in, talking about the elephants in the room, talking about the things

that people try not to think about. So I came back and I started talking openly about what it's like to be in pain in this culture, what it's like to be a grieving pert some what it's like to be suffering and in pain in a culture that is

sort of addicted to advice or positive thinking. You know, it turns out that there are so many people wrestling with not being heard in their pain, and in a way, I mean, I actually hate to say this, but what I went through in Matt's stuff has made me a better finistion, It's made me a better writer, it's made me a better friend, it's made me a better educator. But that's not to say that it was a fair trade. Right, And you say that the way we deal with grief

and our culture is broken. You touched on it a little bit there, but let's let's jump into that. I'd like to start off by maybe just talking about how we deal with grief in our culture, how it's broken, what that maybe says about our larger culture, And then i'd like to kind of, as we wrap up, maybe give some tips to people who have grieving people in

their lives. How do we all do this better? Because one of the things you say over and over is that grief is basically a no win situation for anybody. It's impossible, and so how do we do our best in in that situation when we encounter grief? So that's kind of maybe the ark i'd like to take but let's start with what's so wrong about the way we deal with grief. Grief is one of those things that

we don't like to talk about, right. I like to point out to people that we haven't had a real major shift in the ways that we talk about grief or deal with grief since the early seventies. The stages of grief are something I think that most people sort of rattle off, even without having been trained in psychotherapy or any of those things. And the stages of grief, which are are maybe what people are most familiar with.

We're sort of an attempt to put a net over a fog bank, right, an attempt to make order out of chaos, an attempt to make difficult and painful emotions, um get sorted and put behind you really quickly. And well, I appreciate approaches like that. That's not the way the human heart works, That's not the way that relationship work.

I remember, Um, you know, Matt and I used to read obituaries just for the heck of it in the Sunday papers, and you know, we would look at you know, there's this obituary of a woman who died in her nineties and her family is writing about she always missed her infant who died, you know, seventy years ago, and part of our culture, especially our clinical culture, would look at like somebody who's still thinking about their baby who

died seventy years ago, there's something wrong with them. And the way I look at that is we carry losses with us. That doesn't mean that we're pathological or that we're doing things wrong. It means that we are connected and related to each other, and we carry those relationships with us. That's just not the way the culture looks at it though, right, Like that, we have such an idea in this culture that grief and sadness are wrong.

They get lumped in with the so called dark emotions, right, jealousy and anger and fear, and that anything that's not happiness is an oration. Right. We have this idea in this culture that happiness is the same as health, and that if you aren't happy, you're doing something wrong, which, again, that's just not the way that humans work. Had somebody pointed out to me the other day that we have a diagnostic category for people who are happy all the time.

We call it mania. Yeah, you say that our culture sees grief as a kind of malady, a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible. And then you also go on to say that some things cannot be fixed, they can only be carried. Yeah. Again, it's that that piece where grief is seen as a disease, where we think that a return to happiness is a measure of health. And think about the things that we say to somebody

when we hear that they're having a hard time. We tell them to be strong, We tell them lean on your happy memories, We tell them they wouldn't want you to be sad. All of those things carry a connotation of stop feeling the way that you're feeling and get back to being your old self, to being happy, to

not making other people uncomfortable with your emotions. Were so unskilled in the reality of grief and what our role is, what our job is as support people in grief, that I think in our helplessness, we we revert back to like, but cheer up, cheer up, you need to be happy and smile and um, you know, anything to remove the evidence of somebody else's discomfort or pain. And I talk a lot of about this in grief related to death. But I think we can also see this across a

lot of other situations in this culture. Um, the chronic illness community is big for this one, right, Like UM, this idea that any pain or suffering or limitation you're experiencing is because you're not trying hard enough, or because you're not thinking the right thoughts, or you're not positive, or you're not um you know, any any number of things that we sort of spit out to each other with good intentions, usually trying to make the people we

care about feel better or not be down. But the reality here is that the way that that lands for people is corrective. It makes people who are going through a hard time feel like they can't tell the truth about their experience. I mean, think of it this way. If every time I tell you that I'm in pain, you tell me it's not that bad. You're not fixing my pain, You're just telling me I really shouldn't talk to you about it. Yeah, I mean it is so true.

And this show is a you know, for for lack of a better word, a self help show, right, and so so much of what we do talks about here's ways that you can live a better life, right. I mean a couple of things, One that sort of, this is happening to you for a reason, peace makes me crazy, you know. And its cousin is this idea that whatever is happening to you you brought on. When you listen to it in the positive sense, you're like, oh, yeah,

well that all seems nice. But when you invert it, what that says about people who have terrible things happen to them. I mean, it just makes my skin crawl because it just seems so wrong. And you go on to say, I want to find this line here because part of the thing that you talk about is that our stories are all about transformation. The only story we know is something bad happens and I turned it into

something great. And you say, we've got a cultural narrative that says that bad things happen in order to help you grow, and no matter how bleak it seems, the end result is always worth the struggle. But this is what happens when we only tell stories of how pain can be redeemed. Were left with no stories that tell us how to live in it. We have no stories on how to bear witness. We don't talk about pain that can't be fixed. We're not allowed to talk about it.

And this implication that if we are are struggling, if we feel bad, if we if we're sad, if we're depressed, if we're in deep grief, that we've somehow failed, is really so hurtful. And I can only imagine being in a place of deep grief like that and hearing things as hurtful as that, And you talk about how hurtful it is and how it makes people that are in grief so angry, but they don't quite even understand why. Yeah, I think that whole thing with everything happens for a reason.

You create your own reality, all of that stuff. It's cruel, right. We we sort of think on the surface like, well, that sounds good, right, And you know, I want to back up a little bit here. A lot of the tools that we use under that sort of self help umbrella. I'm not saying that we should wholesale get rid of them.

Some of them are amazing tools. We think about cognitive behavioral therapy, looking at your thoughts, looking at how you frame the world and how that influences the way you experience the world, and what will happen if I change my story about this thing, and maybe that changes how

I experience it. Those are fantastic tools for the situations they apply to, But I think what happens is that we have this very limited set of tools around overcoming obstacles, transforming difficult things into beautiful things, um, the whole hero's journey. I think we look at those tools and decide that they apply to every facet of human life, and that is where we're wrong, and that's where we're failing ourselves, and that's where we're failing each other, and that's where

we're failing the wider culture. I think we can really see this clearly. People people really hold on very tenaciously to this idea that everything happens for a reason, Like they are fierce about holding onto that stuff. So let's take it into a different sphere right now and think about, um, how cruel this is. You take someone who was on vacation in Indonesia and was killed in the most recent tsunami, right and we say, well, everything happens for a reason.

What reason would that be? Well, maybe they caused it, maybe they called it on themselves, maybe they were thinking flood energy. Like wow, I mean, we say these things the people. We say these things to people, like what what were you thinking that caused this? That brought it on yourself? As though one no one else in the

world has any responsibility whatsoever for anything. Right, if I crossed the street and a drunk driver plows through the intersection and kills me, it is not my thought pattern that caused somebody to make those choices. But that's how we treat each other, like what did you do to bring this on yourself? Victim blaming is so pervasive in this culture. Victim blaming has been at the top of many conversations over the last couple of years, with the

me too movements and all of those things. The problem with systemic things like that is that they become the air we breathe, and we don't realize how pervasive they are. Not just in violent crime and sexual assault, it is also in the ways we talk to ourselves about our own emotions, the way that we assess and judge and analyze other people's life experience. I think we do that because the alternative, if we think in binaries, the alternative is life is chaos. Everything is random, and you have

no control over anything, which is scary as hell. Oh, my gosh, of course it is. If you only have two options, one is everything is chaos and we're all doomed versus everything that happens because it's your fault. Well, of course you're going to choose the one that has just a tiny has been more agency in it, which is to believe everybody for everything. Like this is why

binaries don't work for anything except data programming. Like there's there is a little ground there, which is to acknowledge that, um, not everything is in our control. That things happen even when we try really hard to make good choices, right, Like we wear our seatbelts and we eat our vegetables, and we get our health screenings, and still things happen. Right. We can do whatever we can to reduce harm and to be safe and to make sure people are safe, but we have to let go of this idea that

we can actually be safe. Right, Like I like to say, you're not safe and you're not in danger either. Both things are true, right, And you know a lot of the victim blaming or just to kind of point this a slightly different way, it's the same thing we're saying is exactly that. It's like if we could just figure out what caused this, then we can do something. You know, I think Mark Nepo wrote the forward to your book,

and you know, he has a phrase. I don't even if I know I'm going to get it right, but I think he calls it the terrible knowledge. It's in a poem is the terrible knowledge is that everything could be wiped away like that, And that is really scary. It's terrified. You say that even if we stretch to allow that things that happen are beyond our control, we

insist that how we respond is in our control. We believe that sadness, anger, and grief are all dark emotions, the product of an undeveloped and certainly less skilled mind. And boy do I wrestle with this one as someone who's dealt with depression, as someone who's had friends who deal with addiction, deal with depression, tried to commit suicide, friends who are dead. This idea that like, even when it comes to our own mental state and mental health, the idea that even there we may not have the

level of control that we like, is very hard. And I think the answer that you point to is always and it's my favorite of the Buddhist teachings is the middle way, you know. No, we don't have complete control, nor do we have no control over what happens with us in our head. We may have no control over what happens in the outside world to a large extent, but within our own frame of reference, we do have

some control, or maybe controls not the right word. There are some things that we can do that lesson our suffering. We may not be able to make it all go away, we may not be able to fully overcome past trauma or deep depression problems, but there's there's always something that we can do that helps. That's my belief, you know,

And so staying away from those extremes. But boy, that belief that like you could listen to every episode of the one you feed, put every principle that every author has ever put into place and still be sad, Well, damn it. I don't like it, but it's true. It is true. And I think this comes down to um the ground we stand on. How do we define our terms right? If we think that grief is a problem to be solved, then all of our tools are going

to miss. If we think that sadness is a problem that needs a solution, all of our tools are going to be in this right. There's a section in the book where I talk about epidemics of unspoken grief, and I love this part where we can sort of zoom the lens out that says, given that for you know, the last couple years, if we only want to reach back that far, the way that we have dealt with grief or pain or sadness is to say it's no big deal, suck it up, stiff up her lip, focus

on the positive. Right. Basically, we've ignored it and said it's not that bad, put a smile on your face and carry on. Well, just speaking as a scientist, that approach is not effective. Telling people to suck it up, move on, put it behind you, pretend you're happy, has

created epidemics of addiction and depression and suicidality. I would even argue that it has created interpersonal violence, right, because if you can't say I'm in pain and have that pain heard and honored and validated and acknowledged, it's not going to go away. It is going to find some other way to speak. And this is why when you say wrestling with depression, there's a reason why you can't

cheer up your depressed friend. There's a reason why you can't cheer lead a person who is having suicidal thoughts. You can't cheer lead them into being excited to be alive. Right, we're trying to solve the problem when somebody is depressed, when somebody is sad or struggling with something big, our impulse is to fix it. That's not working. A more effective approach is to acknowledge that they're in pain, to respond with listening and with curiosity. That sounds like a

really rough place to be. Do you want to tell me about it? Right? It seems counterintuitive because, as we said a minute ago, like all of our narratives, all of our entertainments, all of our movie scripts, and our books, they're all about here as our heroine, and she was in this really dark place. But then she did this one task and then the sun came back out and there were rainbows and puppy dogs and doves all around,

and everything was great. And they sort of look back over their hardship with a wistful eye and and say everything happened for a reason, and now I'm where I'm

supposed to be. Like that is garbage, and it does damage right, Maybe a much better, a much better cultural mythology or narrative that we could use is like, here's this stuff that happened, and it sucked, and I had to find some companions to sit with me inside the suckage for a long long time, and I had to find ways to breathe there and to exist there and not let it consume me, but not pretend it didn't exist. Right.

So I think when we when we shift our ground, when I think when we shift the place we're standing, and instead of looking at grief or sadness as a problem to be solved, we look at that as this is an experience to be tended. And if we think of tended rather than fixed, then we can go back

and borrow from so many of our amazing tools. What do you use these tools in service of what do you use like to go back to sort of the premise of the show here, right, like which actions and thoughts and behaviors make things better and which ones make things worse. That's the difference between pain and suffering, right, which we talk about often on the show, is that pain and suffering. And I think that you do a nice job in the book of sort of tying that

piece together. You actually have a phrase called wellness verse worseness, right, and it's a way of looking at these thoughts that um So, if grief is a problem that can't be solved, if the pain is to be carried and tended, but there are some things that help you to carry intend that better that don't make things worse. There are things

that make life worse a lot of times. A lot of the tools I've learned and the things I've done if just stopped me from making things worse, you know, Like I'm not sure this is gonna fix anything, but I'm a lot better at not making things worse, you know. And and so you know, these activities that you talk about that people who are grieving can do, they're not to cure the pain. They're just not to make it worse.

They lead in a direction of wellness, and they lead in a direction if you want to use the word of healing, they lead in that direction. They can also help whatever you are being asked to survive. Feel a little bit more gentle on you. Right. There are things that we need to endure and live through that we can't escape. Right. You have to see your seven year old through chemo for their leukemia. Um, I mean you could skip that, but I don't know that that's really

an option. How can we make something that is that deeply challenging more gentle on you? How how can we structure things so that there are soft places for you to land? How can we help educate friends and family to know how to be more awkwardly effective in showing their love and support for you? Like, how can we make this whole process seal companions instead of feeling worse and feeling worse like in my in my understanding of this, like, suffering inside of grief is not that it hurts, because

of course it does. Suffering inside of grief is like feeling abandoned, feeling misunderstood. Um, a lot of anxiety, flashbacks, not being able to sleep, all of that somewhat arbitrary stuff that happens is what increases suffering inside of grief. You have a phrase that when we look at these things, you say, the broad answer is simple, pain gets supported, suffering gets adjusted. So the pain, the grief, the loss that gets supported, the suffering that maybe creeping up around it,

that can be adjusted. That's also where we have some power. We were talking about earlier about the loss of feeling of agency and the loss of control when we really have to live in experience. That clearly illustrates how not in control we are. So any places where you can sort of assert some agency, those are places you can reduce suffering. That can sort of sound like psychological gobbledy books.

So let me be a little bit more clear here. Um, that wellness worseness exercise that you're talking about in the book is um sort of mapping out for yourself what things make me feel worse and what things either make me feel better or make things suck a little bit less sometimes, I think, especially early in the early time of grief, Like, um, you can't look for things to feel good, but maybe things can suck less, right, Like going for a walk today sucked less than staying home

did awesome. Right. So wellness worseness is like, Um, I noticed that when I have sugar and caffeine for breakfast, my anxiety is a lot harder in the afternoon. Okay, So that's one place that you could look at reducing your suffering. If I know that sugar and caffeine in the morning tends to make anxiety worse in the afternoon, I can look at exerting some power and control over what I put in my body. Can't change the fact that this is a stressful situation that I'm in pain.

But there are definitely actions that I can take that make things less bad. Right. But the only way that you know which actions to take is by paying attention to the cause and effective things, which is why I like exercises like the Wellness worseness things. So that's literally like mapping things out. These are the things that tend to um give me a little bit more pieces being, These are the things that tend to um create a calmer mind. These are the things that I've done that

resulted in a more RESTful sleep. Right. And then on the other side of the page you're looking at, I did this three times this weekend, every single day. Um, My emotions just got way out of control and I

felt flooded by them. Right. So it's an individual process for everybody, but really paying attention to what actions external or internal in the way that you're thinking make things feel a little bit more gentle on you, and which things make the worse MM to ask you a question to go back to this idea of this narrative that I went through this terrible thing, and thus it's going to get better and it's going to be redeemed, particularly somebody is in the middle of a grief like that

some sort of trade like, oh, I have to go through this, So I get that, and that's really awful, you know. And you also talk about hierarchies of of grief, and but I think back to what for me was probably possibly the hardest moment of my adult life was when my wife said that she was leaving for another man and my son was two and a half, and my world completely crumbled. You know. I was like, I

don't live with my son anymore and all that. What I do remember from that time, though, was that hearing that it would get better was helpful. In some ways. There were moments where I needed that I needed to hear it won't always be like this. Not a minimizing of what was happening, but hearing that it would be, that it could be different was really important. That is, it's such a perfect example for how impossible grief is. Right, So a number of things to pick apart from that one.

Thank you for sharing that story with me. You mentioned for a second ago about the hierarchy of grief, and I think this is a good time to sort of just bring that in for a minute. That because we don't talk about grief in this culture, we tend to treat compassion as a scarce resource. Which is why, you know, if we're talking to a bunch of parents whose children have died, and you have somebody to come in and says, um, I know exactly how you're feeling. I got divorced. That

can feel um. That can really enrage people. Right, Like, we start coming in and comparing grief, and I think one of the challenges here is that because we are so intolerant of grief of all kinds, right, we act like compassion is a scarce resource, which means we feel like we need to compete for the small amount of compassion that is around. Whereas if we treat everybody's story

of pain and hardship with love and respect. Basically, if we treat compassion as an abundant resource, which it is, if we treat it as though it is abundant, we don't have to battle for it. Right If I know that me honoring your experience and your loss does not mean that there is less to go around for me than I can be free with my love and hearing of what you've said and know that you're not saying

that it's the same thing. So I feel like we can't talk about different kinds of grief without even just like bringing that in for a minute. Let's treat compassion like the abundant resource that it is, and the other thing here is so the other piece here about giving people hope, and hope is a tricky word for me. I think that we prescribe hope for others as a sort of sneaky, subtle way to make them stop being

so sad because it makes us uncomfortable. Right. We feel helpless and sometimes incompetent in the face of somebody else's pain because we haven't been taught how to show up in in better and more helpful ways. So we spout out things like it's going to get better, which, as

you mentioned, in some ways can be dismissive. Right. I had a client once years ago who was paralyzed in an accident, and he was still in the ICU and people were telling him what a great athlete he was going to be in the Paralympics, Right, I mean, no, wrong, timing wrong, timing right. I think I think we have to meet somebody where they are right. And I think this also sort of also goes back to UM, this idea that we need to check in with each other.

One of my friends, educator and author Kate Kenfield, has this great question M when somebody is saying something that's painful to them, she comes her question. Her first question is, UM, that sounds hard. Do you want empathy or some or a solution? Do you want a problem solve right now? I loved that line. I thought that was so great because even outside of the realm of like deep grief, I just you just run into that day to day

like a conversation. I'm like, I run into it with people that I'm close to him, Like I know that on one hand, I should just listen and do that, And so sometimes they do that, and then what I find out is what they wanted was me to help them fix it. And then I rush in with something to fix and I learned that, oh nope, that wasn't so. Yeah. I think asking is so is so important, so important, right,

Consent in all things. Unsolicited advice is discourage of our times. Yes, So checking in checking in helps the person you're speaking with and trying to be supportive of, and it also helps you so that you can actually deliver those quote unquote good intentions that you have to be of love and service. But if we don't check out what the

other person needs, we're just guessing. And because we are part of a culture that is grief a verse, it's a pretty good guess, or it's a pretty good bet that the guess you're making is going to be wrong, right, because you're guessing within a system that is grief a verse. So asking what do you need in this moment is is a super good practice to get into. So going

back to hope, though, I mean, it's tricky. Some people do need to feel like it will not always be like this some people, And there's no I haven't done a scientific data collection on this yet. A lot of my audience and students and writers are you know, experiencing what I would call out of order death or UM. You know, the statistical anomalies baby death accidents, UM illnesses that happen at a at an unexpected time of life,

UM suicides and violent crimes and natural disasters. So this satistical anomalies for a lot of those folks um when their person just literally disappeared because of the accident or the incident, this idea that they won't always feel so bad can be sort of offensive and scary, right, I mean, I can probably say this in a better way using my own experience. When Matt first died, people would tell me You're not always going to feel this bad, and

for me, I was like, that sounds terrible. My partner just drowned in front of me on an ordinary, beautiful, fine summer day, and you're saying that eventually this won't bug me. How weird is that? Right? So, one of the things you said in the beginning of our time talking together was that grief is an impossibility, and this is a really good example of how impossible this is. So some people need to hear this is going to be okay, and other people need to not hear that

right now. They need to not hear about some imagined future when this is going to feel better, because maybe that feels even worse. Again, we go back to let's check in with our person. What would feel useful right now? Do you wanna do you want to hear stories of how this is this is going to be okay, and I won't always feel this way and maybe you can lean into that vision of hope for yourself. Or do we need to just sit right here in the mess of it and and find a way to make a

really cozy blanket pork around this? What would feel helpful right now? Right? Nothing feels worse than having someone try and talk you out of the emotion that you feel. Yeah, it's not gonna work. Right, it's not gonna work. A, it's not decent, but B it's not gonna work because immediately the defense has come up, like, well, of course I have a reason to feel this way, Like you know, I mean, I've learned that the hard way, um with myself,

am with with other people around me. When I when I'm like, well, you know, it's blah blah blah, and all of a sudden, the defense is right there, absolutely realized, all right, well now we're not communicating. Yeah, there's a there's a line I can't remember if it's in the book or if it's in one of the animations that I have outs. You can't heal someone's pain by trying to take it away from them, right, You can't heal someone's pain by trying to take it away from them.

And you're right, we no, whether we know it consciously or not. I think we know on a deep level that our emotional experience is valid and it's ours, and when somebody tries to take that away from us by cheering us up, we will hold it more tightly. A lot of this, a lot of the ways that I think about grief and hardship and pain, um, some of them are borrowed from motivational interviewing, which comes from substance

fiction work. And there's this this um premise in motivational interviewing that you can't make somebody do something that they're not ready to do. Right, You can't tell somebody that they have a problem if they don't identify it as a problem, because every time you start talking to them about solutions to their problem, they're going to dismiss you because they don't see themselves as having a problem. So we can borrow that framework and bring it into any

kind of human pain or suffering. Right, you identify a problem for somebody else that they don't own on their own, your interventions are not going to be effective. And I think also especially in grief, like let's look at the hubris involved there. You shouldn't be so sad about that. Um, excuse me. You know you you look to somebody whom their brother just died, and other people are saying you shouldn't be so sad. He wouldn't want to be sad. I wouldn't be that sad, says the person with a

completely alive and intact family. Right. The phrase that keeps coming to my brain. I have addictions counseling on my mind right now, but not taking somebody else inventory for them? Do you know that phrase? Oh? I know it. We know that phrase. But it's that too right, Let's not

take each other's emotional inventory either. One of my handy tip sheets for grieving people and for support people, there's one in there that says something like, um, you might have an idea of how you would live this differently should this accident or incident have happened to you. We hope you never have a chance to find out how

wrong you are. Yeah, that's that's a great one. So we are rapidly running out of time, and I think we're gonna need to push our discussion of what are some of the things you should do with a grieving person to our post show conversation, which listeners you can get by going to one you feed dot net slash support and becoming a sustaining member. But I also want to make sure that that information which is so important

is available to everyone. So I will have links in the show notes to several of your free resources about ways to talk to and to work with someone who's grieving, because I think it's it's really important and I want to make sure it's out there for everyone. I think the last thing that um, I'll just say real quick, and I think maybe this is a great way to end it. And you can, you can put a word

or two on top of it. But you say, if we boiled down everything in this book about how to survive intense grief, it would come down to this show yourself kindness. Yeah, I mean that's that's something that's always in our power. That is something that doesn't rely on whether what you're feeling is right or wrong, or whether you caused it or didn't cause it. Showing yourself kindness is always an option. It might be the only option that never changes. I agree that doesn't only apply to grief.

I'm more and more and more become convinced of how important the way we interact with ourselves really is, you know, if we take it to making change in general. We have this idea that being really hard on ourselves is the way that it will work, and by and large it just does. And you know, particularly when you are suffering, kindness is so important to yourself. I think you can be fierce with yourself on certain things that needs to change improve, and you can be fierce and kind. That's

a great way to put it. I love that word fierce, by the way. Um but yes, all right, well, Megan, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. I think your work is really important, and um, you know, I really encourage listeners that this is a resource if it doesn't make sense in your life now, but if you fall into grief or someone you love falls into grief, I you know, I'm hoping that this points you towards

a really useful resource. Remember too, that the time to get better at skills for paying attention to your own emotional life and to others is before there's an emergency. So even if doesn't apply to you now, this is a fantastic time to practice. Yep, exactly, all right, Thank you so much, Megan, thanks for having me. All right, take care bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot

net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.