The One You Feed - Megan Devine- On Grief and Loss

Episode Date: January 30, 2019

Megan Devine is a pioneer in the fields of grief support and emotional intelligence. Since 2009, she’s been writing and talking about grief and love, shaking up our culture’s ideas about both all along the way. In this episode we discuss these topics along with her newest book,It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t UnderstandNeed help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Megan Devine and I Discuss…Her book, It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t UnderstandThat the way we deal with grief in our culture is brokenHow grief is a no-win situation for everyoneThe fact that we don’t like to talk about griefHow we carry losses with usThe myth that happiness is the same as health and that if you’re not happy, you’re doing something wrongThat some things cannot be fixed, they can only be carriedHow cruel it is to say everything happens for a reason and that you create your realityOur limited tools for going through difficultyVictim blamingHow we can’t be 100% safeThat we aren’t 100% in control of how we react to thingsIf we think grief is a problem to be solved, all of our tools will fail usSadness isn’t a problem eitherHow you can’t “get over it and put it behind you”The importance of having pain Heard, Honored and ValidatedThe power of listening and curiosityThinking of pain as an experience to be tendedThe things we have to live through and endure, that we can’t escapeMaking these difficult things gentler on usDecreasing suffering inside of griefWellness vs. worsenessPaying attention to the cause and effect of thingsThe hierarchy of griefTreating compassion as the abundant resource that it isHopeMeeting people where they areAsking: Do you want empathy or a problem solved right now?Asking: What do you need in this moment? What would feel useful right now?You can’t heal someone’s pain by trying to take it away from themThe importance of showing yourself kindnessMegan Devine LinksHomepageAnimation on GriefInstagramTwitterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

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. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small, this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy

for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Megan Devine, a pioneer in the fields of grief support and emotional intelligence. Since 2009, 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 a parable. but we'll start like we always do with a 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. One 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, 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 peace of being be the more dominant voice in our heads. be the more dominant voice in our heads. I like thinking about that parable in that way, rather than I think sometimes it gets construed as or gets spoken of as like the light wolf and the dark wolf. And there can be so much wrong with that, that idea of light versus dark. And I remember actually listening 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'd been in private practice for about 10 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 support of our family and I could walk away from being of service 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 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 Matt'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 were uncomfortable thinking about. 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 person, 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 death has made me a better clinician. 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 in our culture is broken. You touched on it a little bit there, but 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? 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 that situation when we encounter grief? So that's kind of maybe the arc 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 70s. The stages of grief are something I think that most people can sort of rattle off, even without having been trained in psychotherapy or any of those things. And the stages of grief, which are maybe what people are most familiar with,

were 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 get sorted and put behind you really quickly. And while I appreciate approaches like that, that's not the way the human heart works. That's not the way that relationships work. I remember, 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 90s and her family is writing about she always missed her infant who died, you know, 70 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 70 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 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 aberration, 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. I 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. 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 piece where grief is seen as a disease, where we think that a return to happiness is a measure of health. Think about the things that we say to somebody when we hear that they're having a hard time. 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. We're 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 revert back to like, but cheer up, cheer up,

you need to be happy and smile and anything to remove the evidence of somebody else's discomfort or pain. And I talk a lot about this in grief related to death, but I think we can also see this across a lot of other situations in this culture. The chronic illness community is big for this one, right? Like 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, you know, 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 piece makes me crazy, you know? And its cousin is this idea that whatever's happening to you,

you brought on. When you listen to it on 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. We're 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 struggling, if we feel bad, 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. We sort of think on the surface like, well, that sounds good, right? And 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. You 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, 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 really hold on very tenaciously to this idea that everything happens for a reason. They are fierce about holding onto that stuff. So let's take it into a different sphere right now and think about how cruel this is. You take

someone who was on vacation in Indonesia and was killed in the most recent tsunami, right? 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 to people. We say these things to people like, 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 cross 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 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 that 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 is because it's your fault. Well, of course you're going to choose the one that has just the tiniest bit more agency in it, which is to blame everybody for everything. Like, this is why binaries don't work for anything except data programming. Like, there is a middle ground there, which is to acknowledge that not everything is in our control,

that things happen, even when we try really hard to make good choices, right? Like, 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 our people are safe but we have to let go of this idea that we can actually be 100% 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 know 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 terrifying. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests

who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were,

how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. It's a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden and together on the really no really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer we talk with the

scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really.

No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 control is not the right word. There are some things that we can do that lessen 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 always something that we can do that helps. That's my belief. And so staying away from those extremes,

but boy, that belief that you could listen to every episode of The One You Feed, put every principle that every author's ever put into place and still be sad. Well, damn it, I don't like it, a 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 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 a miss, 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 hundred 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 upper 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 cheerlead a person who is having suicidal thoughts. You can't cheerlead them into being excited to be alive, right? We're trying to solve the wrong 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 entertainment all of our movie scripts and our books they're all about

here is 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 i think 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 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 this show here, right? Like which actions and thoughts and behaviors make things better and which ones make things worse? That's that 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 versus worseness, right? And it's a way of looking at these thoughts that, 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 and tend 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 have just stopped me from making things worse. You know, like, I'm not sure this is going to fix anything, but I'm a lot better at not making things worse. You know, 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 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. 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 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 feel companioned 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, 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. Yep. 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 may be creeping up around it, that can be adjusted. Yeah.

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 an 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 gobbledygook, so let me be a little bit more clear here. That wellness-worseness exercise that you're talking about in the book is 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 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 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. I 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. But the only way that you know which actions to take is by paying attention to the cause and effect of things, which is why I like exercises like the wellness, worseness thing.

So that's literally like mapping things out. These are the things that tend to give me a little bit more peace of being. These are the things that tend to 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 week and every single day, 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 things worse. Thank you. 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 who's in the middle of grief, like some sort of trade, like, oh, I have to go through this so I get that, and that's really awful. And you also talk about hierarchies of grief. But I think back to what, also talk about hierarchies of grief. 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, 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. Yeah. That'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 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 that come in and says, I know exactly how you're feeling, I got divorced, that can feel, 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, then 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. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls, and I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar.

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How to show up 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 we have to meet somebody where they are, right? And I think this also sort of also goes back to this idea that we need to check in with each other. One of my friends, educator and author Kate Canfield has this great question.

When somebody is saying something that's painful to them, she comes, her question, her first question is, that sounds hard. Do you want empathy or some, or a solution? Do you want a problem solved 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. I'm like, I know that on one hand I should just listen and do that. And so sometimes I 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 important. So important, right? Consent in all things. Unsolicited advice is the scourge 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 averse, 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 averse. So asking what do you need in this moment 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, you know, the statistical anomalies, baby deaths, accidents, illnesses that happen at an unexpected time of life, suicides and violent crimes and natural disasters. So the statistical anomalies for a lot of those folks, 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 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 want to um

you want to hear stories of how this is this is going to be okay and it 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 find a way to make a really cozy blanket fort 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 going to work. Right. It's not going to work. A, it's not decent, but B, it's not going to work because immediately

the defenses 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 with myself and with other people around me when I'm like, well, you know, it's blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden the defense is right there. Absolutely. I realized, all right, well now we're not communicating. Yep. 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 out. It's, um, 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 know, 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, some of them are borrowed from motivational interviewing, which comes from substance addiction work. And there's this 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. Excuse me? You know you you look to somebody who um their brother just died and other people are saying you shouldn't be so sad he wouldn't want you to be sad i wouldn't be that sad says the person with a completely alive and intact family right right the phrase that keeps coming to my brain i have addictions counseling on my mind right now, but not taking somebody else's 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, 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 a great one. Yeah. So we are rapidly running out of time, and I think we're going to 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 oneufeed.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 really important and I want to make sure 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 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 more and more and more become convinced of how important the way we interact with ourself 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 doesn't. And, you know, particularly when you are suffering, kindness is so important to yourself. Yeah. I think you can be fierce with yourself on certain things that need to change and improve, and you can be fierce and kind. That's a great way to put it. I love that word, fierce, by the way. 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 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 you think that stuff 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 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 oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.