All There Is with Anderson Cooper - Creating A Companionship With Grief

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

After suppressing grief for decades, Anderson reached out earlier this year to psychotherapist and author Francis Weller to ask for help. In this very personal conversation Anderson reveals some of what he’s learned about the strategies he developed as a child to shield himself from grief and why those strategies are now working against him. Visit the All There Is online grief community at cnn.com/allthereisonline and watch the video version on YouTube. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the person I was born to be, if the life I've lived really is the one I was meant to, or if it's some half-life, a mutation engineered by loss, cobbled together by the will to survive. The day my father died, the child I was disappeared, washed away by the turn of the tide. From time to time I still catch glimpses of that boy swimming through warm water towards his dad in a crystal blue pool. His father smiles as the boy wraps his arms and legs around him and holds him tight. A seashell wind chime gently blows in the breeze. He can hear waves crashing somewhere through the hedges and over the dunes. Many times I've wished I had a mark, a scar, a missing limb, something children could have pointed at, at which adults could tell them not to stare.

At least then I wouldn't have been expected to smile and mingle, meet and greet. They would have seen, they would have known that, like a broken locket, I have only half a heart. I wrote that nearly 20 years ago. I found it recently in notes from my first book, Dispatches from the Edge, a memoir of war, disasters, and survival. When I published it in 2006, I had just started to understand the connection between my past and my present. I was just beginning to connect the dots. I mentioned in the first episode this season that I've been struggling this past year. The grief which I buried as a child and ran from most of my life has risen, and I can't run from it anymore. I need help. I've rarely said those words to anyone, but I wrote them several months ago to my guest on the podcast today, Francis Weller. We've been talking by Zoom once

a week ever since. He's helped me start to turn toward my grief, to try and touch it. And perhaps even more importantly, he's helped me begin to see the strategies I've used since I was a kid to keep it and all kinds of feelings buried. These strategies, which I use still every hour of every day, they help me as a child and as a young adult, but they aren't helping me any longer. They're hurting me, and I need to figure out a new way to live. This is a particularly personal episode of All There Is, so wherever you are in your grief, I'm glad you're here. I'm glad we're together. What's in this McDonald's bag?

The McValue Meal. For $5.79 plus tax, you can get your choice of Junior Chicken, McDouble, or Chicken Snack Wrap, plus small fries and a small fountain drink. So pick up a McValue Meal today at participating McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Prices exclude delivery. This episode is brought to you by RBC Student Banking. Here's an RBC student offer that turns a feel-good moment into a feel-great moment. Students, get $100 when you open a no-monthly-fee RBC Advantage banking account, and we'll give

another $100 to a charity of your choice. This great perk and more, only at RBC. Visit rbc.com slash get 100, give 100. Conditions apply. Ends January 31st, 2025. Complete offer eligibility criteria by March 31st, 2025. Choose one of five eligible charities. Up to $500,000 in total contributions. Francis Weller is a psychotherapist and author. His book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals of Renewal, and the Sacred Work of Grief, was sent to me by a podcast listener named Cynthia. And if you're listening, Cynthia, thank you. It's one of the best books on grief I've ever read.

Francis Weller joins me for the second time on this podcast. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Absolutely. I feel like I'm at a fork in the road, and this sadness resides just below the surface of my skin, and I hear its whispers in every sentence that I speak. And what do I do about that? Trust it.

I mean, there's this insinuation that that's a problem and that it's wrong. And rather than saying something is happening to me, how do I collaborate with this? What is my soul insisting on here? Well, it's insisting on you returning to something that had been abandoned, that had been neglected.

I'm amazed that I'm 57 years old and from the outside, I guess, relatively high functioning. I held the job for a long time. And yet, as soon as I think about my dad, my voice cracks. I mean, I can't even express it without my voice quavering. Shouldn't I be over this? This was 47 years ago. To the boy, to your heart, to your soul, that time doesn't matter at all. It's grief that hasn't really fully been honored. There's a request from soul, from grief, that says we must honor these losses. If we don't, they really become like a sediment that settles on us and weighs us down. I certainly feel that.

I feel that I put it in a box and lived my life, and suddenly now I feel like it is banging on the door, and I cannot get through a day without tearing up at times. Is this a problem? I mean, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's nice in some ways because I'm feeling. Yes. Because I've deadened myself for decades.

Yes, yes. I mean, you've lived strategically. How do I avoid those depths? But at some point, the strategies fail. And then something more genuine is asked to be encountered. Is this a problem? Or is this actually a deepening of you? Drawing you into the depths of where your father still lives,

where that loss still lives, where your brother still lives. They still are there. And when we honor them, we are deepened. We are ripened. That idea that... Take your time. That idea that sitting here, you say those words, and the idea that deep inside me, my dad is still alive,

and my brother is still alive. Yeah, and it's the grief that is the knit between the two of you. So when we refuse to feel the grief, in a sense, we're pushing that relationship far away. People say, I get to keep the love of those who have died. Well, the only way you get to keep that is by honoring the rites of grief. The rites of love involve grief. There's no separation between those two worlds. So to know your father, to know your brother,

to stay in relationship with them is to stay open to the tender melancholy of their absence. And wouldn't it be better if I have evolved to a place where I can think fondly of the memories I have without it, you know, bringing tears to my eyes? I think those tears are holy. And they speak to how much you loved your father and your brother and your mother. Those tears are the current expression of that relationship. They bring you tears.

But it's so infused with sadness and longing and things I don't know about them. I mean, can this go on forever, feeling like I'm hostage to this? I think what happens as we begin to become less avoidant and resistant to it is we begin to develop a companionship with it. A companionship with grief. Yes, this is what I call the apprenticeship with sorrow. We begin to stop fighting it and begin to see that it's actually the way in which my deepest self comes fully present. And the soul does want to move this. Grief was never meant to be carried along in our bodies, stored. It's meant to move so that we can stay current, that we can stay alive and present to the current of life as well.

And yes, it will be uncomfortable because of the strategy of control. Rising above it has been your main theme, right? Yeah, that's one of the things that has come out in my talking to you, the realization how much the little boy that I was back then is still all there. And the strategies that I developed as a little kid to deal with the things I couldn't deal with, which got me through it and were probably beneficial back then and got me into the world and working and able to function, it is the voice in my head. I feel like those strategies are now working against me

and I am trapped with those strategies because... Because it's... because they are what I have relied on my entire life to achieve whatever I've achieved, and they've been helpful, but I feel like they are no longer helpful. They're keeping me very isolated. Right. That's why I trust the grief. Grief is one of the most powerful solvents. It can soften the hardest places in us.

It can loosen and open our hearts again. That's what I see happening to you. So like right now, all the strategies are failing. Right now, what's here is what's present between us in this conversation. The vulnerability of that, the tenderness of that. That's when I can feel you. That's when you're actually in the room. And I like that. I like the human

connection. And there's very few times I actually get that or feel that because I don't allow myself to. Right. That interior world is so tender, so vulnerable. But the boy knew he couldn't show that. And now the man is learning he has to do that that's a very important threshold of time for you the adult man has the opportunity to father this boy to give him that attention and that holding that recognition that understanding

when you can turn to him and say, I see you, and I see all that you've been carrying for all this time. Those are the voices he's waiting to hear. That's the kind of holding he needs to have happen. So the strategies protected him, but they didn't allow the grief to move. It's been held at bay for, as you say, like 40 years. But it's crazy that I'm beholden to strategies that I developed when I was a little kid. I'm constantly ruminating on endless strategies about how to get through the day. Yeah. And grief brings you into the territory where the strategies just don't apply. Until we have some separation from them, and that's one of Jung's ideas, is that we can't heal what we can't separate from.

And so the idea of how do I separate from this boy, from this child state, it's the default mode that whenever circumstances are happening in your world and he senses the possibility of hurt or abandonment, strategy comes in before you even get to think about what do I want to do as a 57-year-old man? The 10-year-old boy is already acting. He's already taken over. And that idea is incredible to me, that I can experience something now as an adult, but the way my brain interprets it is linked directly to the child that I was and strategies that I developed back then. So I am not actually seeing something as it really is in my brain. It is a child experiencing it. Yeah, that's what I was saying about the default. Carl Jung talked about them as complexes. So when you're out talking to somebody and that boy picks up a hint of mistrust, well, he takes over instantly.

He's the default mode, not you. And until there's separation, you are compelled to respond as the child rather than choosing how do I respond in this moment as the adult man. That's really the crux of the work, separation. But I'm not even sure I know who I am if I'm not that voice in my head that I've had. That's okay. I'd rather have you be a very incompetent adult than a very competent child. You get to learn, Anderson, how to be in relationship.

The boy doesn't have a clue. There's nothing about the boy that is relational. It's survival that he's after. He doesn't want to go back into places of so much hurt and pain. People develop these strategies as little kids to protect themselves. Does everybody do this? In various ways. For every wounded child, on the backside of it is an angry adolescent.

And that adolescent's job is to protect the vulnerability of that boy. So yes, there's a part of us that's designed to do that. And we do it different ways. Some people try to be the nicest person on the planet. That was my strategy. I was going to be a good boy and make sure that everyone liked me and no one would abandon me and no one would reject me. That was a to be a good boy and make sure that everyone liked me and no one would abandon me and no one would reject me. That was a strategy you developed as a child. Yes. Yeah.

That strategy worked. I mean, in graduate school, I was called the golden boy. I looked polished like a church statue. I was beautifully posed, but inside it was cold plaster because I didn't let anybody get close. No one knew me. Rage, perfection, withdrawal, isolation, contempt. These strategies all work, but the cost, as you're feeling now, the cost of human connection is so high. Who knows that person, Anderson? Who knows the vulnerability that you're sharing right now? Who knows that place that feels sad and afraid and angry and lonely?

Those places need witnessing and they need holding. How do you start turning to that child? Because I assume getting rid of it is not enough. That would be like saying to the boy, I am not willing to feel what you have been carrying. It would be like slamming the door on him again, which is what he expects, because those feelings weren't welcomed when he was young. They weren't held in an adequate way.

And whatever doesn't get held begins to feel like it has no bottom. So one of the first things we have to do is slowly begin to put a bottom underneath the grief so we can begin to actually have faith in it again. What does that mean, put a bottom under the grief? That means when the boy or the child state feels into the grief, it feels like free fall. It feels if I go into that room, it's over. I'll never return.

I've heard thousands of times in my practice, if I go there, I'm never coming back. And I often say to these people, if you don't go there, you're never coming back. Because so much of our life force is tied up in pushing this energy away. So again, if we don't go there, we're saying to the boy, I'm not willing to feel what it is you've been carrying for me. And so then the wound just persists, and the numbness increases. So it's really about coming into an inner intimacy with what is most vulnerable about our own lives and developing some kind of compassionate friendship

to those parts of us that need to be held and need to be brought back into some tiny semblance of community, even if that's just one or two friends. One of the things you wrote in your book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, which was so influential on me, is grief is not here to take us hostage, but instead to reshape us in some fundamental way, to help us become our mature selves, capable of living in the creative tension between grief and gratitude. In so doing, our hearts are ripened and made available for the great work of loving our lives and this astonishing world. Grief is essential to finding and maintaining a feeling

of emotional intimacy with life, with one another, and with our own soul. This idea that grief is not here to take us hostage, I think that's very much the way it feels to me. I'll be brought down and not able to get back up that if I give in to it, if I wail on the floor, I don't know what will happen. You don't. What you said was accurate. You are being brought down. I've never seen anyone disappear into grief. That's all of our fear, partly because we've been conditioned to approach it privately. We don't have much knowledge in grief, as Rilke would say.

And so consequently, we push back against it, and we don't know how to engage it to write, to dance, to talk, to share, to bring it to ritual. We have very few communal practices that allow us to really drop to the knees and to be held in our grief so that we can return. We are so passive around grief so that when it comes, we are basically caught off guard and unawares of how to respond. So it's how do I get out of this as fast as possible? And we have so many ways to do that. All the distractions, the busyness, the alcohol, the drugs, anything you need is available to get us away from the depth of those places.

We get caught in kind of a suspended animation when we don't process the sorrow. It's a prolonged season of numbness, of dissociation, not full presence. So when you say you're being brought down, yes, you're being brought down below the surface of those strategies into a place where you are undone. And that's the work of grief. Grief has an initiatory quality to it. It undoes us and remakes us if we let it do its work. If we resist it, that's what creates more of a neurotic pattern of living on the surface, being in control, and no friendships, no closeness,

because we can't risk opening the floodgates. We can't risk letting somebody inside that, what James Hillman called their secret inside flesh. There's a loneliness epidemic in this country. Do you think a lot of that is unrecognized grief? Yes, this loneliness is a consequence of us not having permission to confess what is so utterly human, that I feel sad, that my heart is breaking.

My daughter just died. My son just left, and I miss him. And whatever the state is, somehow we have to just buck up and get back to work. But what the soul wants is to stop and just bear witness to what is here. And yes, I think this epidemic of loneliness is very much tied into our refusal to let grief in the door. We'll be right back with my guest with Francis Weller.

In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis suggests a writing exercise that he says can be useful to begin to turn toward our grief and explore its contours. He suggests starting with a few writing prompts to help you explore your feelings of loss. He also recommends reading what you've written to a close friend or a community of people that you trust. The writing practice is an excellent way to step in and step out. I can drop into the writing and I write for ten minutes, keep the hand moving, never stopping if I can possibly do that. And the thread might be something like I remember, or I miss, or now that you are gone, or goodbye, or I long. These are all little partial sentences that actually give you a chance to step in and work with that and then step back out after 10 minutes.

That helps build faith that there's actually a way to touch this sorrow without feeling it's going to take me away. The beauty of doing it with a friend or with a community is that you then read that statement aloud to somebody else. No one's ever allowed to comment on it. All they say is thank you. Thank you is basically saying I heard you, that that's welcome here. One of the things that you recommended for me, which I found helpful, trying to understand the strategies that the boy that I was developed and that I now

realize have been the strategies in my life. Can you just talk about that exercise? Yeah, when I really began to understand my own experience of that, of the power of that boy and how much he dominated territories of my life, I wanted to see if I could work on that question that Jung brought up about separation. How do you do that? It's a nice thing to say. Well, you've got to separate from that child state. Well, how do you do that?

And I realized what I needed to do was write out his worldview. What is the worldview of that child? And you write in third person, his, him, theirs, hers. And the first thing you write about is, what is the child's worldview about love? Well, it's untrustworthy. It's erratic. What about power? Well, it only belongs to angry adults.

The second step is, out of that worldview, what are his basic expectations? So if love is temperamental and unsafe, the expectations are that he's not going to find it in the world. Out of those expectations, what are the core strategies of how that child has survived? Well, for me it was perfectionism and a certain degree of interior hiding so that no one could find me. Then what triggers that child state?

For me, it was anger. Whenever somebody was angry, that boy would immediately get triggered and try to either placate, run away, go numb. He tried to survive. And then you write about how does he show up in your body, in your sensations, in your thoughts because you begin to see how different the boy's thoughts are from the adult's thoughts. And then emotionally, what emotions tend to occupy that boy's world? Fear, shame, mistrust, rage. So you begin to know his emotional geography. The last one you write about,

and I keep it this one for last, was what is this child state protecting? And then, because Jung had this amazing discovery, he said at the core of every complex is a pearl of great price. And when you discharge the complex, it opens up again. And as I worked on this boy for quite a long time, what he was protecting was spontaneity and joy because in my family, to be spontaneous and joyful made you a target. And so he covered that up for me, and now it's available again, which is astonishing, you know, to feel the return of my own aliveness that he was protecting. So that's a beautiful practice to give you some sense of the world that he's occupying, the world that you are living in, and how to migrate the energetic charge from that boy into your body, into the adult body, so you can work with it.

That idea of spontaneity and joy is something I do not allow myself. The boy does not allow. For you, it's important to not say I when you're talking about the strategies of the boy or the girl that you were. That's part of the separation. Part of the separation. So you would say the child can't allow joy, the child can't allow. Right, right.

The idea of separating is so important, but there's many in there. And this child state, this adolescent state, there's multiple states of being, many of what I call the outcast parts of ourselves. If we don't make that separation, we still identify with the strategy. It's you not allowing grief or joy and spontaneity. Well, I don't think so. I think you'd be open to that. You might actually enjoy some of that. But as long as that boy is operational, not such a good idea. It's too exposing.

Keep it under control. His main idea is control. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's how I've lived my entire life. And it's exhausting. Because there's no recharge. There's no recreation. There's no way that you're actually, through the consequence of intimacies and friendships, being replenished, being recharged.

It's interesting having kids because it is the only time really that I feel complete joy and spontaneity with them because they are nothing but joy and spontaneity. And I want to spend all my time with the kids because it's a different me. And it's, to me, a sign of what is possible. Well, that's so beautiful because what you're just saying is that when you're not defended, when the boy's not on duty, what is there is somebody who engages his world, who knows how to play, to be silly, to laugh. There's no frequency being struck by them that would activate the child state.

They're not threatening. They're not judging you. They're not criticizing you. They're not abandoning you. In fact, what they want is more of you. They want to be close to you. They want to touch you. That's a different signal frequency.

And that one invites adult presence. And that's beautiful. And that is what's possible when you're outside the strategy, outside the defense mechanisms. You're actually able to connect. Is there anything else you would recommend for people listening? I think the most important thing is to begin to have some regular time with what's present in you. There's a way in which we operate so mechanically, and so I wrote. I remember one of my teachers saying the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth. So when we're in these patterns, and research has shown too that 80 to 90% of the thoughts we're having today are the same ones you had yesterday and the day before and the day before.

So to come into the present moment, to come into an intimacy with oneself, which is ultimately what this is about, is to be willing to radically accept all the guests at the door, as Rumi would say, in the guest house. Just to let them in. They're not comfortable guests, but they're there nonetheless. And the less we resist them, the less trouble they cause. Because we now begin to develop more of a companionship. I always imagine like I'm walking beside grief all the time, rather than it being a kind of invasive incursion. No, it's an ongoing, tender conversation between the two of us. And he instructs me so much upon compassion,

about connection, about vulnerability, about tenderness. And those are the qualities that are so missing in our collective rhetoric right now. That's what we need. This whole experience of grief has been such a revelation for me. And so much of it was sparked really by reading your book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Because I always thought about grief as just you're sad because you've lost somebody and you miss them and you have to get over that or deal with it. I realize now grief leads you down all these other pathways. It unlocks these other rooms which I had not examined. And this is the grace of this time for you. The strategies are failing. Those tears you have most every single day, those are holy tears. They are bringing you back to the present. They're bringing you back to your own emotional life. And without those, there will be no relational life. So this is really a threshold time for you and for many of us

as we begin to really allow what is here to be here, softening us, opening us, turning the compost of our own grief over and over, letting it warm and soften so we can express it and move it and actually might feel just a tinge of joy once in a while. Wouldn't that be sweet? Francis Weller, thank you. Thank you, Anderson. Good to be with you. You can watch a video version of this interview right now

at cnn.com forward slash allthereisonline. It's our new online grief community. You can also listen to podcast episodes there, hear voicemails from other listeners, and connect with others experiencing loss and grief. And you can leave comments of your own about your experiences. That's at cnn.com forward slash all there is online. Next week on All There Is, I talk to Irene Weiss.

She's 93 years old and experienced grief and loss when she was 13 that is impossible to imagine. How do you live with this? There hasn't been a day that I have not lived with it. It's what that 13 year old experience that can never be rectified, can never, the pain can never go away. People say broken heart. The heart keeps working but the soul never forgets. There is a soul that does not forget any of it. It's imprinted on the soul that keeps the memory, the pain, the grief. It's just always there. All There Is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas.

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