Confession Tuesday 1-6-15 GRIEVING

The one, the only, the lovely Rebecca. Silence. Inspired results. Coach.com/ Good morning. So it's been a very interesting week.

Yeah.

Here's how it works. Rebecca is a life coach. If you have something going on in your world, you want to have her address confidentially here on the air, you go to cnykiss.com tell us what's going on in your world, and we handle it here on the air. Now, most people listening know that there was a loss in my life over the over the weekend. What is coincidental is the first email is about grieving, but not about her. Okay, so let's see here. Dear Rebecca, my best friend's father died this weekend. He was only 56 and died of cancer. Both of us have been dealing with health problems with our parents as we all get older. But I didn't think we would have to deal with the death of a parent yet. How can I help her with her grief? We've been friends since we were five, so we're more like family. And I'm very worried about how she's doing and coping with the loss of her father.

Thank you for writing in and for Gary and everyone else who knows our. Our friend that passed this weekend. My heart goes out to everyone. And at the same time, I would like everyone to consider the possibility that all life is precious, whether the person is still with us or not. And I think what happens this time of year is incredibly eye opening for a lot of people looking at how they've set up their lives. And I'm gonna tell you, like the.

Holidays, New Year's, that kind of thing.

Absolutely. It's January. It's the very beginning of a new year. And so automatically that's confronting in and of itself, have I got myself to a place where I can really be proud of my life? And Gary, actually, I saw your post from last night, this morning about hindsight always being 2020. And I think the purpose of my job is to help people get out of the mode of hindsight being 2020 and into the mode of designing your life proactively now so that you can be proud and enjoy every single moment now and then the listener that's wanting to help this other person grieve, I want you to get that it's not your job. It's the person's responsibility to get through his or her own grief. And then it doesn't make sense. I got diagnosed with cancer this year. It doesn't make sense. I think I beat it. I'll find out after the baby's born in a couple of weeks. But I can either tackle that like, I'm angry at the cancer and why is this happening and have more stress, which certainly isn't gonna help anything, or I can accept what's happened, be gentle with myself, and do everything I have control over. So for the friend who wants to know how to help her friend GR Grieve, what you have control over is simply offering your support and that's it. And then what your friend wants from you, you gotta let him or her tell you, and then let that be enough. But if you try to swoop in there and do it for them, you almost might be a distraction from the grieving process. And everyone grieves. I have. One of my best friends in Denver called me yesterday to tell me he's getting a divorce after 27 years of marriage.

Oh, wow.

He's gonna go through a grieving process whether he wants to believe that or not. Grief is a naturally occurring emotion that we go through when there's any kind of loss or change or when a goal I had doesn't pan out or relationships end or jobs. There's always grief. And people, I think, get scared of it. And they get scared of their anger when something ends or someone passes. But these emotions, if we don't feel them, they stay stuck in you, and they cause dis ease.

And later on, you know, they come out like a volcano at the worst time. And, you know, that's no good for anybody. Correct.

Well, and what I'm gonna suggest is it isn't actually emotion coming out if you're projecting the emotion onto somebody else. That's a way to avoid feeling your feelings. And that's what happens. People get angry at their circumstance, at a person. They'll, you know, go break things in the house, punch a hole through a door. That's not actually expressing your emotion. It's avoiding feeling your emot by getting aggressive onto something or someone else. It's not actually feeling your feelings. And yes, if you're bottling it all up, it ends up becoming explosive. But don't think that that's emotion. You know, in my office, when I'm dealing with clients and we have anger come up, which everyone on the planet has anger. Every single person. And you just.

Even you.

Absolutely. Me? Absolutely.

I'm laughing because I look at her face. Oh, absolutely.

But see, that used to be something that scared me to death was anger, because I thought anger equaled violence.

Okay.

And it doesn't. Anger is not violence. Just like grief Is not victim. If I'm sitting at home crying, feeling sorry for myself, I'm not expressing emotion either. I'm not gonna heal anything that way. I stay stuck in the pity party. And it's just like that with violence. If I'm violent, I stay stuck in the rage. And so I am so about helping people release their emotion so they can be freed up so they don't have to keep reliving the same experiences. And if you don't fully grieve and divorce, that's a great example of a grieving process. It's not just a piece of paper. And a lot of times the grief doesn't even start until the actual paperwork has gone through.

Right.

If you don't feel all the way through it, you can be divorced on paper, but emotionally still totally attached and in jail.

Okay, let me bring it back to the death and stuff like that. Knowing that, you know, with, you know, with Jen, who touched a lot of people as a volunteer firefighter, she went to schools teaching fire safety and. And whatnot. A lot of people are very sad.

Absolutely.

For people that are grieving. And, you know, we were talking about, like, lashing out and not bellying up. What's. What's a healthy way to grieve? What's it like? People. Some people may not know what to do or how to be, you know, especially when it comes to something like this.

Yeah. And I'm wanting everyone to just take on. It's a process that isn't cookie cutter.

Okay.

And it's gonna look different for everyone. And I can tell you're emotional right now, and it's okay. And taking deep breaths and being willing to sit with the emotion as long as you need to until you felt it and released it.

It.

That's my hot tip. Be with your sadness. Be with your anger. If you're trying to help other people grieve, you're probably avoiding your own grief. You're probably avoiding looking at your own feelings around what's happening and death is confronting and it doesn't make sense. And when someone dies so young, it doesn't make sense. Especially when they're leaving a young child behind. It doesn't make sense. And then who knows what the gift is, why it happened. I think there's a bigger power out there kind of designing life. And I don't know why some of these things happen. But what I know is that when you're grieving, the best thing you can do is be real about it and give yourself as much time as you need to. To feel those feelings so that you're not projecting onto other people or stuffing it and making yourself sick. And I encourage people, if you're going through a grieving process, to please get support. Find a therapist, find a coach, find a mentor. Have your top five people in your life that you can go to and talk about it. When I was first starting counseling, after I got my master's, I had a mentor teach me about the three T's. And it is to take as much time as you need, because again, there is no right or wrong amount of time. Right? People can grieve in a week. People can grieve in five years. It just takes as much time as it takes. The second T is to make sure you're taking really good care of yourself. A lot of people shut down. They won't sleep, they won't eat. They won't take good care of themselves when they're going through grief. And that's one of the worst things you can do. Make sure you're continuing to take good care of yourself. And then finally, the third T is to talk about it. Have people that you can talk to or write, you know, go on a walk in the woods and yell, whatever you gotta do, but talk, communicate. Otherwise you're gonna be stuck in a land of purgatory. And, you know, for Jen and for the listener who wrote in and the Father passed of cancer, I consider these people now to be angels among us. And their lives are complete. And we can look at the gifts that they left us, and we can remember what we learned from them and take on living a legacy for them. Or we can stop our own lives because we're gonna grieve them. And which would they prefer? Do right, like, live the legacy and take what you've learned from them into your own lives. Jen, I swear to God, she was the most unconditionally loving person, maybe one of them, that I've ever met. I mean, she just didn't judge, and she was so open and so forgiving. And I'm gonna take that with me. I'm gonna remember that about her, and I'm gonna take that with me into my life. Consciously this year, she gave me that gift. Just a person that didn't have walls. And I love that about her. And we can take anyone that we've lost and take the best gifts and lessons that we learned from them and live them fully for that person.

I think that this segment helped a lot of people today, and thank you for that.

And I just love you and I hope that you take really good care of yourself during the screening process.

I have. Don't worry about me. I'm good.

See, I'm good. He's, like, gonna bottle it all up. But the truth is I haven't, though.

I haven't.

I get it. But don't dismiss it now. You know, it's okay. It's okay to grieve. I would be worried about you.

Stop trying to make me cry on the radio, Rebecca.

I'm not trying to make you cry. What you're doing, people do. What you're doing, people do. And they dismiss their grief and want it to be done faster. And then it doesn't have to be done faster. You don't need permission to have these feelings. I'd be worried about you if you didn't. Anybody going through the grieving process, if you've lost somebody close to you, I would be really worried about you if you weren't grieving. So give yourself permission to grieve.

Local life coach Rebecca silence inspired results. Coach.com it is a confession Tuesday. What's going on in your world? Go to cnykiss.com another email coming up next year on Kiss FM.