20: Is this grief?

Hello friends, and welcome to Grief Guts and Green Smoothies. I am your host, Melissa Dugalecki, and I am so excited to be here with you all to chat about ways in which we can all get through different adversities, challenges and loss and how getting outside of our comfort zone and maybe having a green smoothie or two can help us do so. We will cover different topics, ranging from interviews to recipes to sharing my own stories of my grief journey and the loss of my daughter Layden. Honored to be able to share her light in hopes of helping you spread yours. Now, let's dive in. Hey everyone. I am so excited that this week I get to dive a lot deeper into grief. And grief is a widely misunderstood topic. And I believe that it's through it being misunderstood, it feels really overwhelming. And so my goal is to use this week to break it down. And each day, Monday through Friday, I will have a short sprint episode hitting a different topic of grief. You can go back and listen to them. Let me know what you think, and I hope that you will learn a lot of new tools that will support you or the people in your lives in managing this inevitable energy. Now, I think universally, nobody welcomes in grief. Nobody wants it. For those of you just tuning in, my grief journey started in 2014 and it was this week, June 19, 2014. I lost my daughter Laden at Boston Children's Hospital. So I'm dedicating this week in honor of her life and in my grief journey to helping disempower the overwhelm of grief and empower each of you to manage and navigate it with a little more clarity and a little more confidence. Let's get started. Today we are talking about what grief is, actually is. And this may seem silly, but I would encourage you to think about, like, what is the very first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word grief? And what experiences do you associate? Because quite often we associate grief only with death. And the truth is, grief is a lot larger than that. Death and loss of life, that's a very intense manifestation of grief. It's, in my opinion, the most intense. But it doesn't negate the reality and the challenge and the struggle around the energy of grief in other areas. So what does that mean? Let's start first with just defining what grief is. There are so many definitions of grief out there. One of my favorites is a definition that states grief is the normal and natural emotional reaction to loss or change of any kind of itself. Grief is neither a pathological condition nor a personality disorder. So Again, grief is a normal and natural emotional reaction. So if you are experiencing grief, if you feel sad, confused, angry, hurt, scared from some loss or change in your life, it is a normal reaction. It's not a condition. It's not going to be a permanent feeling, and it's not a personality disorder. Now, I want to preface that where when I say it's not a permanent feeling, it doesn't mean it goes away. Because grief doesn't actually go away. If by definition it's the reaction to loss or change. Those losses or changes always hold true. What does shift is our ability to manage this energy. And so I want you to think about grief as this ball, like this energy, right? And it's inside of us, and think about it coming up to the surface and what happens. All too often, I coach this a lot. It's like that whack a mole game, right? You know, at the carnivals or, I don't know, it was like fun and games, Chuck E. Cheese, whatever it is, you, like, whack it down, right? That little monster pops up through that hole and you whack it down and it goes away, but then it just pops, pops up somewhere else. And so too often we try to just whack it down and hope it's going to go away and we forget that it's going to just come up somewhere else. So I'm going to dive into this in a later episode this week when I talk about delayed grief and also strategies for managing grief. Right now, I want you to just envision it as this energy that's coming up. Maybe it's that little monster and whack a mole, whatever it is, at the source, at the root of this energy, honestly, it's love. And it's love that's been hurt, it's love that's been threatened, it's love that's been lost. It's love for a situation that no longer exists. It's love for a role or an identity that no longer holds true. So this comes up and it's this love. I believe love is at the source of really everything, but it comes up in so many different ways, and they're not always productive. So here we have no control the pain of how it's going to come up, but we do have control over how we channel it. So what we want to do is really find productive ways to channel it. And that's going to look different for everyone based on their personalities, their experiences, and the types of grief endured. So today we're really going to talk about different types of grief. I get asked this all the time, is this grief or people feeling guilty because they're experiencing grief in a capacity that's not actually loss, it's not death. So guilt is a useless emotion. So let's just take that weight, that layer off feeling guilty, beating ourselves up for the emotions that come up for what holds true is a useless emotion. What we want to do is make space for it, honor it, and then process it. When we process it, that can be transforming it, it can be releasing it or letting it go. But it's not just gonna magically go away. Because as we talk about all the time, energy cannot be created or destroyed. Grief is an energy. So here are some common types of grief that you may experience outside of loss. Obviously the loss of somebody in your life is going to equate to grief. You're going to experience grief in some form. Other types of grief or other places where grief can transpire is in our pets. We love our pets, we form attachment to them when they leave and they're no longer in our world, but we feel that loss. Now. Another definition for grief that I really like is grief is the conflicting feelings caused by end of or change in a familiar pattern of behavior. And I think this is a helpful one as we get into all the different ways that grief, grief can present. So like I said, grief can present in the loss of a pet. So when we have these conflicting feelings that come up by the end of something, or a change in familiar pattern or behavior or relationship, let's not beat ourselves up. Let's recognize this is grief. So then we can show ourselves compassion and employ the tools and the strategies to move forward. Another common form of grief is the grief of somebody sick. So whether it's an aging parent, a child, a friend, a family member, when somebody is battling life threatening illness, they have lost that previous identity and you have lost that relationship with them. Maybe the role has changed. Maybe your parent was always the caretaker and now you're the caretaker. Well, that's a huge change in a familiar pattern of behavior. So you're going to grieve and long for what was familiar, what you did know, what you did experience. This can happen in realms that don't necessarily have to do with health and wellness. It could be a job change, it could be moving. So those are very common ones. I see somebody changes jobs, even if they've chosen that change of job, even if they've chosen to move, grief can still transpire because it's the end of or the Change in a familiar pattern of behavior and familiar experiences. So when you're changing jobs, your identity is changing, the relationships around you are changing, your routine is changing. It's the same thing with moving right? The relationships that you formed may be impacted yourself as you've defined yourself to a certain area has changed. So being really aware of the attachments that we form and in truth, our grief is going to be impacted by the level of attachment to whatever the change is. So for some people leaving a job, if they were strongly attached to that job within their identity, leaving that isn't going to produce so much grief. If somebody strongly identifies in their job, they're going to feel the weight of grief much more heavily. Now, I want to be clear. This isn't right or wrong. This isn't a comparison. This is understanding why grief can look so different for so many people. And one person grieving a job change and another person grieving a job change might look completely different. One person may not even feel that as a sense of grief because they never associated their identity or comfort or safety within that job. Again, we talk a lot about where to place attachments and that is something, when you're creating kind of those boundaries in your self identity that you can position yourself to be less vulnerable to intense or frequent episodes of grief. But there's no escaping it. There's absolutely no escaping it. We're all, all at some point going to encounter grief. So no one wants to talk about it, but we are. You all do. You're here with me, we're talking about it. We're getting gritty, we're talking grief. Another very common manifestation of grief or way that it can present is in the loss of a relationship. And this could be the same as your job or as moving. Even if you chose to change the relationship or if you didn't, you're still grieving what was familiar, what you had felt comfortable with, what was a pattern. But beyond that, you're really grieving the loss of what you envisioned. Because typically when we enter a relationship, we're not entering it, you know, assuming that it's a longer term relationship. We're, we're not entering it with the thought that this won't work out. We believe it will work out and we're doing our best every day now we have to loosen our attachment to this has to work out because that's when we get into forcing things whole other episode. We don't want to force it. We want to be attached to how we feel in the relationship every day. And how we can give in that relationship every day. But if that relationship has run its course, if there's no growing to be done, learning, connecting, if you've moved in opposite directions, even if you know that it's still experiencing a loss not only for what was, but a loss for what you envisioned for what was to be. So as we begin to really dive into grief this week, I want you to think about the different ways grief can present in your life. Now, I don't know anybody who hasn't experienced either the loss of a human in their life, the loss of a pet in their life, a job change, a change in relationship, or loss in relationship dealing with somebody who's ill, whether it's a parent, a child, a family member, maybe grieving, a change in their own identity in the way that they identify and define themselves and their own values. I see that very commonly when individuals may grieve, choose to separate from the values that they grew up in, whether it was in their family or their community, whatever it was, when they choose different values as they move forward, that brings a lot of grief as well. So there are so many ways that grief which broken down is the conflicting feelings caused by end or change in a familiar pattern of behavior or relationship. So I don't know anybody that hasn't had these conflicting feelings caused by the end or the change of something. And these major things are gonna bring grief. And what's so important is that one takeaways from here. That first is that if you've experienced these things or you've wondered why you were feeling sad or angry or hurt and it wasn't over the death of somebody, there's nothing wrong with you. You're experiencing grief. You are experiencing the intense, painful, uncomfortable energy of grief. Welcome to the club. And yet we are all in this club. It's just that no one wants to talk about it. But we are changing that. The second step is in identifying places where grief has presented in your life, where it currently presents, where it has presented in the past, whatever that may be. The third is recognizing the shift in your own capacity. It's not a weakness. Let's put egos down. Our capacities are impacted when we're handling intense energies and emotions. So in order to avoid doing damage control, which is Q, blowing up the worlds of other people, blowing up our own worlds, doing things mindlessly and then having to undo them later, let's recognize the shift in our own capacity. And then the last is employing the tools and strategies manage it. Now. These tools and strategies are going to be different for everybody based on personality types, lifestyles. The way we process these tools and strategies are going to be different. There's no right or wrong way to manage it. But as we'll talk about it, it is so important to process this energy. It can't be created or destroyed. It can be shifted, it can be released, it can be processed. All of these different things. I'm going to help you get deeper and more clear on that all week. This is a big week in my grief journey. This is the week that actually started my grief journey. So I really appreciate you taking the time to share and spreading and building awareness around grief with me so that I can shine Laban's light because nothing means more to me. And as we established so many people are impacted by this and for me in my grief journey I found there were not enough supports. So if this can support somebody, please send them the podcast, share it with them, get in touch with me. And of course if you can take a second to go on to iTunes rate and review that is going to help us share Layden's light that nothing means more. Everyone asks how they can support. I just want to shine Layton's light to help others. So thank you for helping me with that. We'll chat soon.