The One You Feed - Raising an Aging Parent with Dr. Ken Druck

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

Dr. Ken Druck is a leading mental health expert in the areas of civility, relationships, and aging. Ken writes regularly for the national press and he is the author of several books including the one discussed in this episode, Raising an Aging Parent: Guidelines for Families in the Second Half of Life.In this episode, Eric and Dr. Ken Druck talk about caring for an aging parent, finding meaning after great loss, helping ourselves receive the love that’s offered to us, and how to live through the difficult nature of the difficult situations we will face in our lives. 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, Dr. Ken Druck and I Discuss Raising an Aging Parent, and…His book, Raising an Aging Parent: Guidelines for Families in the Second Half of LifeStanding in the ashes of your “Plan A” in lifeThe tragedy of the death of his daughterThe choice to make your pain the central organizing principle of your life or choosing a life where purpose and meaning are the central organizing principlesOur wholeness coming out of brokenessHow aging is grieving the loss of our younger self and accepting yourself as you are todayLiving in a “both-and” rather than an “either-or” worldThat when we care for an aging parent, we’re giving life back to the parents that gave life to usGiving our parents the good things we have in our hearts to give as they face some of the biggest challenges of their livesThe importance of being a healthy caregiver and not becoming a “slave caregiver”Figuring out what is “enough” as a caregiverAllowing ourselves to receive the love as our parents offer it, rather than waiting for the way we want itFiguring out what stands in the way of us receiving other people’s love, gratitude, and generosityShowing ourselves compassion in moments of difficult decisionsThe work and legacy of an aging parentPutting our house in orderDr. Ken Druck Links:kendruck.comTwitterFacebookInstagramIndeed: Helps you find high impact hires, faster, without any long term contracts and you pay only for what you need. Get started with a free $75 credit to boost your job post and get in front of more quality candidates by going to www.indeed.com/wolfBest Fiends: Engage your brain and play a game of puzzles with Best Fiends. Download for free on the Apple App Store or Google Play.  SimpliSafe: Get comprehensive protection for your entire home with security cameras, alarms, sensors as well as fire, water, and carbon monoxide alerts. Visit simplisafe.com/wolf for a free HD camera.If you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Ken Druck on Raising an Aging Parent, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Alan CastelKamla KapurJohn ZeratskySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, it is that time again for the big shout out to our newest Patreon members. Catherine S, Jan H, Emily R, Shelley M, Andreas M, Karen H, Vicky H, Matthew F, and Letitia L. Thanks so much to all of you and thank you so much for all of our Patreon members. If you would like to experience being a Patreon member and all the benefits that come with it, go to oneufeed.net slash join. We've internalized a lot of self-critical messages, whether we heard them in our childhood

and we've now taken over the full-time job of repeating them to ourselves and holding ourselves to standards that aren't always real and realistic? How do we, at that moment, take our foot off our throat and put our hand on our heart? 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. 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. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Ken Druck, a leading mental health expert focused on the areas of civility, relationships, and aging. Ken writes regularly for the National Press and is the author of several books, including

the one him and Eric discuss here, Raising an Aging Parent, Guidelines for Families in the Second Half of Life. Hi, Ken. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Eric. It's a real pleasure to have you on. We are going to discuss your book, Raising an Aging Parent, Guidelines for Families in the Second Half of Life, which is something I'm right in the midst of and I know a lot of our listeners are in the midst of. So I think this is going to be a great conversation, but we'll start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. 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 grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and 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 parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Eric, it's a parable that's close to my heart and has been a part of my teachings for many, many years. It has evolved in what it means to me. And what it means to me today has very much to do with what I cultivate, what I choose, that I have in my nature,

a small scared part, a part that sometimes wants to react impulsively, angrily, defensively out of insecurities that I have. And then there's a part of me that believes there's higher ground and that lives on higher ground and that gets to choose whether I react to people with understanding and compassion, forgiveness, whether I listen and listen to myself and get to know my own insecurities and defensiveness enough so that it doesn't become part of a conversation that takes us to lower ground. So for me, it's a profound choice on what ground I choose to live on, higher ground or lower ground. And it's also very important as a part of my teaching about self-compassion for us to understand that there's nothing bad in us. There is a wolf in us that can get scared.

As a matter of fact, we need to learn how to harness the fears in us, harness the defensiveness, and transform it into awakeness, into awareness, and hopefully into compassion. Because there's somebody else right across from us that's also having a life and facing their own wolves. Yeah, I love that. I love the idea of higher ground. And I love the idea of transformation, you know, taking these parts of us that are hurt, that are scared, that are struggling, and allowing those to inform our transformation into better, more compassionate people. So let's start with, I don't know if this is what got you into this type of work, but was a big part of what informed the way the rest of your life went, which is that you lost your daughter when she was 21. Can you just tell us a little bit about that and kind of what impact

that had on the trajectory of the rest of your life? You know, everybody is different in going through tragedies. Most of us in a lifetime will be visited by a tragedy, a major setback. We'll be standing in the ashes of our plan A, and our heart will have been ripped out in some way. Our future will have been decimated, and we'll be standing there, and plan B won't look so good, and we'll be trying to summon the strength, the courage, and the faith to somehow go forward and to begin creating out of these ashes, to create a future, to live out the rest of our time,

to reconstruct our plan for how we're going to live meaningfully and purposefully. And for me, at my daughter's 21st birthday, she decided she was a junior in college. She was going to go on the adventure of a lifetime, a trip called Semester at Sea. And everywhere she went across the globe, she would call home and send us information about the coast and went on safari in Kenya. It was truly an amazing departure. She knew that the world was bigger than California and the way she had grown up and she embraced the rest of the world. She thought it was going to be the launching pad for the rest of her life.

And when she got to India, she called and said she was going to see the Taj Mahal. Dad, it's the symbol of eternal love in the world. There's no greater symbol of eternal love. And what we later found out was that the flight that they were due to take was overbooked, had been overbooked for months, and that they stuck 27 kids on a bus on the most treacherous road in the world, the Grand Trunk Road, where 1,600 people die every year.

And about an hour from the Taj Mahal, my daughter's bus flipped over. My daughter, who was sitting with a girl who was crying because she was scared, my daughter died with three other beautiful young women. And so my life as I knew it, my world was demolished. My daughter's truly the light of my life. There's never been anything more important in my life than being a dad, a good dad. And so for me, my heart had been ripped out. And I was at one of those wolf choice points.

I called it my groundhog day where I'd wake up every morning and I'd have a choice. I looked down one path and it was the path of despair. And I could go down that path. Part of me felt like giving up. All the wind had been taken from my sails. Part of me felt like giving up. All the wind had been taken from my sails. And my pain down that path was the central organizing principle of my world.

And then I looked down another path. And at the end of that path, I saw both of my daughters saying, Dad, we're so proud of you. You fought your way back into life. You made the rest of your life meaningful and purposeful. You honored us in the way you went on. And I look down both of those paths every morning because it's not like you make a decision. It's like the wolf parable.

You don't make a decision today. All right, I'm going to be the good wolf forever. That's it. You make that decision every day, sometimes 10 times a day. Yeah. And it's the same with honor and despair. You make that decision 10 times a day to live on honorably or to make your pain the central organizing principle of your life. and I have aspired to feed that part of me that knows what it means to honor my daughter's life and spirit and to honor my own life, the life I've been given, and to continue to be a dad to my earth daughter. People ask me, you know, everybody says, hey, how many kids do you have kids?

You know, I tell people I have an earth daughter and an angel daughter, and to honor both of them. So for me, the devastation, and if you could see up close into my eyes, you would see a brokenness. But you'd also see right next to it a wholeness, a brokenness and a wholeness. Sometimes we try to make it, are you broken or are you whole? Well, I'm broken and I'm whole. My wholeness comes out of my brokenness, comes from honoring the part of me that will forever and a day be sad that my daughter didn't get to live out this life sad that my daughter didn't get to live out this life and that I missed out on the joy of her.

And I have to hold on to the joy that I had in 21 years. You know, I started a nonprofit foundation after she died and I've helped countless tens of thousands of families, and I still do, who are grieving the death of a child. And I speak to them about those choices that we get to make and about something I call the six honorings. And that's how we go on after suffering a tragedy. And that's become kind of a roadmap for me about how we go on after a horrific loss, a life loss, somebody we love dies, or a living loss. Somebody we love gets sick. Somebody we love is getting older. Somebody we love ends up being deployed, going into the service or incarcerated or estranged and joins a cult. A living loss could be a divorce. It could be an illness or an accident.

And the way we grieve our living losses became such an important teaching for me that when I started realizing that aging is grieving the loss of our younger self and the challenge of accepting the guy and the gal that you are right now and holding that part of yourself dear, the older version of you, learning to speak to that older version of you with love and compassion, patience, respect, and courage. That's the segue from what I learned from grieving the worst loss, the loss of a child, to facing into this chapter in my own life as I get older, and I try to summon courage, some encourage, and I try to get through in a healthy way the grieving of the loss of my past and face my future in a way that is going to create some of my best years ever. Yeah. There's so much of your work we could cover. You've got the honorings that you talked about.

You wrote a book called Courageous Aging, which, again, a lot of us need right now. The book of years that we're going to talk about mostly will be Raising an Aging Parent, but I want to go back to something you said, because I think it's so important, and it is the brokenness and the wholeness, that we tend to be, you know, I'm either this or I'm that. Things are either good or they're bad, you know, and very often they're good and they're bad, you know, and very often they're good and they're bad, you know, and that wholeness that can hold everything and the perspective that can be broad enough to hold everything, really, to me, that's a big part of what constitutes wisdom.

Absolutely. For me, if you ask me, Ken, what's one of the most important lessons, me, Ken, what's one of the most important lessons? What's one of the most important elements of sage wisdom that you've gathered in these years? I would tell you it's living in a both and rather than an either or world. It's understanding I'm both broken and whole. My daughter is both gone and right here, always with me, never gone, never separated and separated. And when we can understand things in a both and world, we stop trying to trap ourselves into a certainty that is unattainable and into a limited way of seeing the world and dealing with all the unknowingness that we get to face. My God, we're living in the world of unknowingness now. Everything's going on now.

If we don't learn how to dance with our unknowingness, we're going to be in a lot of trouble because we're going to be looking for certainty everywhere and we're going to be in a lot of trouble because we're going to be looking for certainty everywhere, and we're going to be horribly disappointed. But living in that both and world helps us gain perspective. I couldn't agree more. And it makes me think of the part sutra in Zen, emptiness is form and form is emptiness. You're like, what? Hang on a second. But they're both there at the same time. And learning to see both is insight. Absolutely. So let's start with the good parts of raising an aging parent. You say that giving our time,

attention, and love to an aging parent can be among the most noble and selfless things we ever do. You know, we get to give life back to our mom and dad, or aunt and uncle, for that matter, or older brother and older sister. The people who gave us life literally, we get to give life back to them. We're fortunate, and we have a living parent. Some of us lose our parents early, but if we have an aging parent, we've been given an opportunity. And needless to say, we all have leftover stuff for what our parents did and didn't do and should have done and could have done and what didn't happen and what happened. You know, we could we could spend our lives in drama. And sometimes it's important for those issues to arise and to find and make peace. But it's also an equally, if not more important, to find peace, to find gratitude, to find forgiveness, and to give our parents what we have in our hearts. If they lack patience with

us, to find the patience within ourselves for them. If they had patience with us, to give it right back because they're going to need it. They're going to need our love and support and understanding, patience, encouragement as they face the challenges coming up in their own lives. So we have the opportunity to be that good son and good daughter. Now, I'm not talking about putting a cancel on our entire lives and going overboard, as some people do. Some people become a slave caregiver. Their entire okayness is based on a feeling of not giving enough or being enough for their mom or dad. I'm talking about a healthy giving that has terms, limits, conditions, reciprocity, understanding, communication. That's what we get.

Sometimes there are things available to us in conversation and communication and connection with an aging parent that were never there. Things we couldn't have dreamt. Conversations about who they are, who they've been, how they feel about their lives, what happened back then, or the richness and the wisdom that they have that they've never been asked to share, or the stories they've never been asked to share. So there's a richness and a wealth waiting to be harvested. If we can become good listeners, quiet our own minds enough,

if we can begin to learn how to be with them and draw them out with good open-ended questions, not questions laced with judgment or messages. And here's a tricky one. If we can allow ourselves to be receivers of their love. Because sometimes we don't even know we're doing it. We're disallowing our parents' love. They're trying to love us in the way that they love.

And no, we're waiting for love in a package with a bow. And we're not allowing ourselves to receive the love that's being offered and given. So all those things represent opportunities to harvest these years as some of our best ever. And you referenced briefly in there, and there are the challenges, right? There's the challenges of what they now call the sandwich generation, which is a terrible phrase, but I get it, which is, I guess that's what I am, right? I've got a son who's 21 and I've got parents that need care. My mom is aging and not as well. My dad has Alzheimer's. My partner's mom has Alzheimer's. So we're in the thick of it with all that stuff. And so I wanted to lead with the good parts of it

because there are good parts to it and there are plenty of challenges. And one of the things I wanted to talk about with that is, you know, you mentioned doing the right amount of caregiving. And the question, of course, is what does that mean? What is enough? Because I think every child wrestles with, am I doing enough? You know, every parent wrestles with it. Am I doing enough? Anything that's in our care, it's natural for us to question whether we're doing enough.

And so talk to me a little bit about navigating that. Well, some of us find out that we are pleasers and caregivers. We're accommodators. We're type E people. Everything to everybody else. And we end up giving too much. And it sets a vicious cycle in motion. We give too much.

We don't get back what we had wished for. And we become resentful angry hurt Feel hurt and abandoned and we end up in despair So to break that cycle, what do we need to do? We need to re Calibrate our enough We need to recalibrate what is enough How much is too much? How much are we taking care of ourselves?

And sometimes that's a good look in the mirror. Part of what's in the book is an entire chapter in Raising an Aging Parent about how much is enough and how to recalibrate and how to tell. Now, if you're somebody who's exhausted and singed, your neurotransmitters are singed, you're burning out, you're burning the candle at both ends, you're in that sandwich, and you run from taking care of this side to taking care of that side, and there's nothing left for you or your marriage or your free time. You don't have a life. Then that's a good sign that you need to recalibrate enough. In a perfect world, what 10 things would you do to begin taking better care of yourself? What limits would you put on certain things? For me, one of the stories in the book,

one of the great things I did was when my mom moved into a retirement community, but every time I would go visit her the first year, the last 15 minutes, I'd say, mom, I'm going to be leaving in 15. What? You have to leave? There's something more important. I understand you have more important things to do, or maybe next time, you know? I understand you have more important things to do or maybe next time. So I got my mom's guilt and I leave feeling like I just spent an hour and a half and it was kind of wasted. We both left with a bad taste in our mouth. So what I decide to do in my perfect world, I thought.

My mom and I will come to some agreement about my time. And so I started calling her. I said, mom, from now on, I'm going to call you before I visit to tell you how much time. And if that's not going to be enough time, I don't want us to both feel bad at the end of a visit. Let's wait until I have more time. We'll just wait rather than. And the other thing, mom, if we come to an agreement, then I'm going to be there for an hour and a half. We're going to spend great time. I don't want you giving me

guilt trips at the end of the meeting. I don't want any commentary. And the first time I went after we made this agreement, she was so funny. She looked at me like a little kid and she said, I haven't said anything. Which is the equivalent of saying something. In other words, I'm in control. Thank you for telling me. And I'm not going to do that anymore. And, you know, she'd say, how am I doing?

I said, Mom, it's wonderful. I feel so good. And the other thing I learned from my mom was a couple of months before she passed, I had an amazing experience. And this ties back to what we were talking about before, about receiving their love. And my mom looked at me, we just had lunch, and she looked at me and leaned in. And she said, do you realize how much your love has meant to me all these years since your father died? Do you realize how much it's meant to me to have you at my side, to have you caring for me in all the ways that you do? I love you and I'm so grateful. I'll forever be grateful to you.

And she said that with a tear in her eye. Of course, I had tears in my eyes. And I left about 20, 30 minutes later. And I got in my car and I turned on the radio. And I turned the radio off. And I said to myself, what did I just turn on the radio? What am I trying to tune out? What can I just turn on the radio? What am I trying to tune out? What can I handle here?

Your mother just gave you a lifetime memory moment of telling you that she loves you and how grateful she is to have had a son like you. And you're turning on sports radio? And I realized in that moment that my receiver was broken. The part of us that receives love, that can take in the full measure of somebody's love, who's telling you in their own way that they love and appreciate you, and it made me think, my God, how many other times in my life have people tried to tell me that they love me and I deflected it or I turned on sports radio. I didn't have a way to hold it inside. And I made that my mission for the next year to learn how to hold and accept love. And I even, when I would give us a talk, it was back in

the day when we were all giving talks in front of audiences, when I would give a speech, instead of running off the stage, I would put my hand on my heart and I would take a deep breath and I would absorb the gratitude that my audience was showing me. And I started paying attention to other things, my relationship with my family members and close friends. And it's become a real stretch and an aspiration for me to learn those things. And it's one of the challenges back to, you know, what are some of the challenges of aging and facing and how can we be there for our aging parents? That's one of the ways is to get our receiver fixed so that we're receiving the full measure. And our parents can see it's almost like giving somebody a beautiful necklace. And you look and you see them feeling so adorned by that necklace, wearing it. That's the way it is when somebody receives our love. We see them feeling adorned,

receiving, absorbing, feeling so treasured. That's the gift that we can give our parents by receiving their love 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. Brian 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.

Oh, 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 I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So tell me a little bit about how you learned to fix that receiver, because I think that's a really important point and one that I certainly could learn. You know, you made it a year's mission. I know we're not going to cover that in a three minute soundbite, but give me the high points of fixing that broken receiver. Like anything we bring into the shop, sometimes we find out, oh, it's just a minor thing.

How many of us have gone in and we brought our car in and we thought, oh, my God, this is going to be an $800 bill. And no, it was just something somebody they turned on. That was it. It was fixed. And they said, no, I don't need to charge you. We left. Sometimes it's a minor adjustment. Sometimes we go in and it's a major adjustment. It's parts and service and it's two, $3,000 we didn't plan on spending.

And it's the same with the broken receiver. When our heart is not open, sometimes we have these self-care, self-love saboteurs. self-care, self-love saboteurs. We have deeply embedded feelings that we're not worth it or taking somebody's love would be taking food out of somebody else's mouth, or we're not deserving enough of love and affection unless we're perfect. I wrote a book called The Handbook of Self-Care, and I list all these self-care saboteurs, things that we do or say to ourselves, sometimes without even knowing we're doing it, that disallow any chance of self-care. You're going to say yes to all the wrong things, and you're not going to ever use the word no when you should. So sometimes we have to really work on becoming aware of what it

is that's standing in the way and inhibiting us from allowing love, allowing ourselves to receive appreciation, other people's gratitude, other people's generosity and doing that. When we have a chance of practice and somebody else says, God, thank you so much. It's like we go, whoa, this is a chance to practice trying to learn how to feel loved or appreciated. And what are my lines? What are my lines? Oh, I put my hand on my heart and I say, you're very welcome. You're welcome. Or we tell ourselves, I'm taking that in. It went all the way in. And I'm allowing myself to feel it.

I'm allowing it to enter into my heart and to mean something. And instead of playing the same old tune in my head or allowing that unconscious blocking to take place, I'm teaching myself. I'm learning how to receive love. And sometimes I do it by training myself to take a deep breath. Because when you take a deep breath, you're taking nutrients out of the air. Well, that's what this is. It's taking the nutrients of other people's love, their affection, their care, and it's breathing it in.

So sometimes breathing, sometimes putting our hands on our hearts. My slogan this year has been, take your foot off your throat and put your hand on your heart. Yeah, that's a good one. We're so damn self-critical. We're so good at finding fault and harshly criticizing ourselves. It's like we set up courtroom in our heads where there's only a prosecuting attorney producing evidence why you're not, you haven't done enough, or you're not good enough, or you could have done more and you should have done more. You did too much or, you know, rather than setting up a courtroom with only a

prosecutor, if we're going to set up a courtroom, we have a defense attorney and a judge and a jury and a compassionate one to begin with. And we start changing the conversation so that we are learning how to receive. And we also coach the people that we love. And we say, you know, my goal this year is to become better. When you tell me you love me, when you show me affection, you're trying to show me your appreciation or take care of me, and I'm not noticing it, or I'm too busy, or I'm deflecting attention. Would you please tell me, I'm trying to become more aware of how and when I do that, and to change that so that I can be a more gracious receiver. Yeah.

So I can receive and get the nourishment that comes with receiving love and care and gratitude from other people. Yeah, I love that. There's so much that you said in there that I think is important. That idea of the self-compassion is so important. The more I work with people, the more I do coaching, the more I do group work. And the more I just see how, how important that is and, and how in short supply it often is. The other part, I think that you talked about that I think is really important. It's like the get in the car and turn on the sports radio. We're always just next, next,

next, next, next. And even just the intention to sort of say, stop. All right, let me take that in. You know, the Dr. Rick Hansen, who's written a bunch of books, talks about taking in the good. You know, you've got to stop and take in the good. And it's not a huge process, but it is a process of lingering a little bit longer. I love all those things you said there. I think that's really great. It could be as simple as what we do with our coworkers. It could be as simple as what we do and how we make love to our partner, to our companion. It could be as simple as listening to a child rather than rehearsing what we're going to say in response and really being with them, not being distracted. Those of us, if you're like me and you're very distractible, it's like squirrel, you know, and something happens and your attention is off here and off there.

To learn how to just calm, relax, be still, and be with. My daughter used to say, Daddy, be with. And what she meant was, put down the newspaper, turn off the music, just hang out with me. Because in those moments of undistracted attention with one another. That's where the quality, that's where the gold is. That's where the richness is. That's where the wealth of what we have to give and share with each other is given and received. Beautiful. Let's circle back to this idea of what is enough. You go on to say, and I think this is really really important you say the question of how to balance care for ourselves with care for our parents is not an easy one and there is no perfect answer the unpleasant truth is that some decisions in this life will be uncomfortable no matter what

we do no matter what alternative we choose it's. You know, we can do our best and we can try to figure out everything and make everybody happy and take care of ourselves. And sometimes it doesn't work. So how do we, in those moments of lostness, of feeling like we failed, or we could have or should have done more and we weren't enough. How do we hold ourselves? This is a moment where self-compassion is right up against harsh self-criticism. And if we've internalized a lot of self-critical messages, whether we heard foot off our throat and put our hand on our heart? How do we breathe? How do we show ourselves a moment of kindness, a moment of disappointment, allowing disappointment, allowing sadness, allowing ourselves the despair that something fell short, something we'd hoped for, something we'd wished for didn't come true.

How can we show ourselves compassion in that moment? And that is one of the greatest and most important capacities we can build in ourselves. The ability for self-compassion at a moment where harsh self-criticism wants to charge in and lay blame and dissect and pull things apart and render us never enough, not enough, and less than. I think that's so important. My partner and I reflect often on the fact that in our lives, it is impossible that everybody's going to be happy because we have a mother in one city and a mother in another city.

So by its very definition, one of them wishes we were in the other place. So you can't win. And so accepting that, recognizing that, you know what, can't make everybody happy. And we're also going through it with her mom who is in, you know, increasing late stages of Alzheimer's. And part of that condition is a real agitation. And so you can't make her happy. And if that's the standard that we're judging ourselves on, we fail all the time. And so it's been a learning process in all aspects of this about learning, as you say, to recognize what is enough and to recognize also that we don't know. Like that question of, am I doing enough? It just sort of lives out there.

It's an unresolved question and that's okay. You know, it's kind of back to our earlier conversation about brokenness and wholeness. You know, we can give ourselves self-compassion. We can talk about, we're doing everything we can and we can go, I'm not sure if it's enough. I just think that's part of being human is this doubting and not knowing and things not being resolved and tied up in nice little knots. Absolutely. What are our resources for finding and making peace, especially in those moments where inescapable sorrow and those moments where there's no way to win? there's no way everybody's going to be happy. Some of us spend our lives being conflict avoidant.

We will avoid conflict at any measure because we know that there's just no way to win. So we try to sweep it under the rug and hope that we don't trip over it. the rug and hope that we don't trip over it. And yet there are those times, as you're saying so beautifully, where we just need to reconcile. This is not going to work out the way I had wished. I hand out, I'm going to lighten my language for purposes of your audience, but those damn it coupons, damn, you know, and I call them the ah blank moments where we absolutely need to vent. It's absolutely with, it's healthy for us to say, damn, this sucks.

You know, this sucks. The way this worked out really sucks. And to give ourselves that moment of, and I think it's of humility, of surrender. You know, the arrogant part of us believes, I should figure everything out. There should be an answer to everything. I'm entitled to it. I just have to get smart enough or street smart enough or spiritual smart enough or some smart enough. And we don't realize that the greatest thing that we could do in some moments is to surrender, is to realize that not everything can be figured out. Not everything will work out the way we wish. Life isn't going to be fair. And that sometimes we need to summon the courage to stand in that moment

where things didn't work out and to say, you know, here I am, this really sucks. I'm standing in the ashes of plan A. I'm watching my mom get older or watching my dad get older or my brother or my sister, or I'm watching myself get older or dealing with age related challenges. And it just sucks. It's the part that sucks. And how do I deal with it? You know what? I take a deep breath and I say, this is the part that sucks. Life is a package deal. There are parts to it that, you know, my God, you mean I'm being asked to deal with impermanence? I'm not going to be here forever? Oh, my God.

I get to tackle and challenge that one, and the people I love aren't going to be here? My God, who made up that rule? You know, get me the casting director. When my daughter died, I was spitting in the face of the universe. Get me the casting director. On whose watch did my daughter die? Get me customer service.

This is not fair. Who contrived this? Who let this happen? And it wasn't until I was able to see a tear in the eye of God, and I say that metaphorically and literally, until I could imagine that, that I could feel the universe crying with me. that, you know, God is a puppeteer and should be watching over everything rather than the force of love and goodness in the world, and that sometimes things happen that just don't work out for the best, that are really tough, and we need to find the courage to do our best in getting through them. The poet Mark Nepo talks about the terrible knowledge that anything can happen to any of

us anytime. I mean, and it is. That's the way life goes. And I think it's part of why reflecting on things like impermanence is actually useful, because we are less caught off guard, or we are less, as you said, spitting in the face of the universe. I have two people I do work with, who are both at the same time right now, one just did and another in the next few days going to lose their dog, you know, and, and I've been through that. Uh, I went through that a couple of years ago, two of them in one year, we had to put to sleep. And I bring this story up a lot because I think that for whatever reason, I was able to just say, you know what? Yeah, he was younger than he should have been, you know? Yeah. I lost another one six months ago, but that's life. That's what happens. Living beings get cancer, they get sick, they die. That happened to me. And so I was deeply, deeply heart good motivational poster, but pretty good human advice. If we can not make the sufferings, the normal pain that life brings us, if we can just leave it at that and not make it worse, we have the capacity to bear that pain, sometimes just barely, but we can, but it's the suffering we layer on top of it that often I think breaks us. And my code, my six honorings are exactly about that. They're about standing in that moment, surviving that moment, that inconsolable moment, you know, where spin is useless. As a matter of fact, it's harmful,

where we just need people to be with us and have the faith that out of this brokenness will grow an organic desire to go on and live out the rest of my days in a way that would honor my daughter, myself, both of my daughters. And to do that and to go on and to write new chapters of life. This is what we get to do. And we all get to think about in the time that we're ready to consider it. So the other thing is, you know, part of whether it's aging, the losses we... I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know 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, Not 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. Deal with the challenges of an aging parent or our own lives and our own aging. You know, part of it is really, and part of the self-compassion is taking our foot off our throat. No pressure. You know, just kindness. Understanding, of course,

how could I not be feeling this way? How could I not be feeling scared? How could I be expecting myself to know exactly what to do? Let's talk about it. And this is where one of the wealth and the richness of a good aging parent and adult child conversation is that you can talk about this stuff the conversations i've had with my daughter are are treasured where we talk about you know dad what's it like you know dad you just turned 70 the big 70 you. You look great. Thank you. I would never have guessed, honestly. So I've got my COVID beard on. Is that what's doing it? Yeah. But some of the conversations we've had about, Dad, what do you want? What do you see? What if, what if, what if this happened? What if that happened? what if, what if, what if this happened? What if that happened? And doing things now, all those conversations have sparked things that we do together, things that we plan together,

putting our house in order. And I want to make sure my estate plan, my legal and financial things, I don't want to leave a legacy of chaos and a mess. I want to leave a legacy of love. It's going to be difficult enough when I go for my daughter and my grandkids and her husband and they said, everybody will be grieving. That would be enough. I want to leave things in order. I don't want to leave a mess. Yeah. Fail cabinets and things that were undecided and everybody guessing what would he have wanted? I've spelled all that out. That's my that's the work of an aging parent. It's a responsibility and it's the opportunity to leave that legacy of love and to put our house in order, our spiritual house.

our spiritual house so that we are finding peace rather than, you know, being dragged, kicking and screaming into our 80s and 90s, if we can make it that long. To put our emotional house in order so we're not full of resentment and grudges and remorse and, oh my God, and we've forgiven ourselves, we We found and made peace. And to also put our house in order, you know, in every possible way, legal, financial, relationship-wise. And once you've put your house in order, it's like buying insurance. You don't buy life insurance to die. You buy it because you want people you love to have enough and to be at peace when you do. Because you want people you love to have enough and to be at peace when you do. But it's like if you put your house in order as an aging parent, it clears the path forward.

Now you can go have fun, kick up some dust. What do you want to do? Hey, let's go hang out. Let's, you know, all the business has been handled. Business is taken care of. What do we want to do? Let's fly. Let's soar.

Let's talk. Let's go out. Let's go on an adventure. Let's go hang out. Let's go sit under a tree. Let's go sit on the beach. Let's go for a walk in the park. Let's do a jigsaw puzzle together. Let's watch a stupid funny movie or something on Netflix together. The menu of possibilities for joyfulness and deep connection. Those are the riches of this life that are available to us when we put our house in order, when we slow ourselves down to giving and learning how to give and receive the full measure of love. And we say, you know what, this is what I want my life to be, or this is what I want my life with my, with my mom or dad to be in the time, whatever time we have. Well, that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up, Ken. Thank you so much. You and I are going

to go on and talk in the post-show conversation a little bit. We're going to get a little bit more tactical about, okay, I've got an aging parent and I'm getting resistance in managing things or helping them. And so we're going to get tactical about some of that stuff in the post-show conversation. Listeners, you can get access to that as well as a special episode I do each week called A Teaching Song and a Poem and the joy of supporting the show by going to one you feed.net slash join ken thank you again so much it has been such a such a real pleasure eric it's a joy to be with you If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.