Do We Recover From Grief?

The What's Your Grief Podcast: grief support for those who like to listen.

In this grief podcast, Eleanor Haley, MS and Litsa Williams, MA, LCSW-C, the mental health professionals behind the website and book 'What's Your Grief', leave no stone unturned in demystifying the complicated and messy world of living life after loss. One digestible topic at a time, Haley and Williams distill topics ranging from grief theory to coping. Grief is sad and confusing, but your grief support doesn't have to be. You can listen here by using the player above or listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Below we have provided a transcript of the episode.

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone and welcome back to another episode of the What's Your Grief Podcast. This is Eleanor.

And this is Litsa.

Thank you all for joining us today. And sorry we didn't have an episode last week. We really are actually doing pretty well being more consistent. For those of you who have been subscribed to our feed for a long time, you're probably like, Yeah, yeah. We know. We know about you guys. You're (you're) sporadic. But no. We are committed to being regular. But we just had a very strange convergence of events happen over the last few weeks.

Yes. I had jury duty, which obviously we knew was happening. What we did not know and I could not have guessed is that I got selected for a two-week long jury, which started immediately and there was no time to kind of change, you know, arrange or do anything. So, it definitely ended up being pretty stressful. And I think of all of the two weeks of the year that I could have been  selected, these were pretty close to the, maybe the hardest two weeks.

Yes. Honestly, I (I) don't know what  joke the universe was trying to play on us. Because, as some of you know, the other event that it has occurred over the last couple weeks is our book came out this week on Tuesday. And it's, you know, it's kind of like, I mean all the hard work was done when we wrote the book. But there is a lot of distracting things and work to be done when the book actually comes out into the world. And so, we were really planning on preparing, getting a lot of stuff done in the community, our communities and on our website leading up to this week, so that we would be fully prepared to focus on the book. And then with Litsa out of jury duty, everything kind of got totally turned on its head. So, it's  okay. We are we're getting back on solid ground now. But that's why we didn't have a podcast last week. And as I mentioned, our book came out on Tuesday. We are so excited, nervous, lots of feelings. This is definitely one of those mixed emotions experiences. Mostly, ranging from positive to just anxious. But we are really excited and we hope people will buy the book and we'll provide information about that. But before that, we just really do want to say thank you to everybody who's been really supportive of us. Even before the book came out into the real world, people bought it through pre-sales, which was amazing. But now that the book is out, even before reading it, we had a lot of people message us to say Congratulations. Like, I think it's going to be great. Then, when people started to receive it, people took the time to message us and say, Well, I haven't got a chance to read it yet, but I've received it  and I'm flipping through and it looks great. And I (I) genuinely mean it when I say that these  messages of support mean so much to us because until we hear from other people in the real world, it's literally just Litsa and I like, I don't know. I hope it's good. I have no idea. Like, not, no one else really reviewed it other than our editors. So we truly, we think (we think) it'll be helpful, but we truly don't know. So hearing from people, it's very reassuring to us, I have to say.

Yes, I completely agree. It's nice to hear, and I think, you know obviously, we have had so, in so many ways we've had so much feedback from people over so many years... 

Yeah.

...through the website. And so, it does feel like  we should somehow be more confident about the book. You know, I guess compared to a lot of other people, where you think about people writing a   book and putting it in the world for the first time when you haven't had a long-running website with articles, you know. I imagine, maybe, that could be even harder. But it's interesting because I think maybe on the flip side we also know that as much as our writing over the years has really really resonated with people, we also know that it sometimes really doesn't. And that like grief is unique, and a book is different than a blog or a website or social media posts. So you know, it has been a new and completely different experience. So, it has been nice to hear from people. And it's sort of nice just that it's, like, not hanging over our  heads anymore. So I think that that to me has kind  of been a relief and one of the things that was so hard about the two weeks before and jury duty and all of that was just that there was all of this  anticipation of the book coming out, and then me not being able to, like, work or even have, like, my  devices. Like, just being totally away from all of that was a really really strange and difficult experience. So I am glad the book is in the world and very glad that jury duty is over.

Yeah. Yes. So, if you haven't bought the book and you're interested in buying the book, it is available. If  you're with somebody who was waiting for it to be ready to go, you're an instant gratification type of person, I'm with you on that, you can buy it  now at all the usual spots. I'm not sure about  your local bookstore, you'll have to check with them. But you can buy the hardcover in (in) all the usual places we'll link below. But also we do have it available on Kindle and on Audible. So you can listen to it as well, if that's your preference. And if you like the book, we (we) would be so appreciative if you would write us a review, either on Audible or Amazon or wherever just because we think, you know, for people who don't know us, your  review would help to increase their trust. And I think it would just help for the book to get  to the right people. So if you don't mind we're gonna do a shameless plug there and ask you to   give us a little review, if you have time and if you feel so inclined. No pressure if you don't want to.

I will link below in the show notes for the links to where you can find the book, it's called What's Your Grief? Lists to Help You Through Any Loss. Yes that would be helpful. That's the first time we've said that title in this whole five minutes, so thank you Litsa for remembering. Okay, so with that, we want to talk about a topic today, that for some reason and I don't know why, I feel like it's been coming up a lot for us. From time to time, interestingly, there are just these topics that all of a sudden are (are) just showing up a lot. And it's like a matter of it showing up a lot in our communities, and some of the comments people are leaving, and then in  our conversations, of course it might be a little, like, confirmation bias where we're (where we're) selectively attending to the things that have been on our mind, sure, but whatever it is, we've been talking about this a lot just with each other and with (with) other people. And basically, it is our answer to the question, and our thoughts behind the question of "Do we ever recover from grief?"

Yes. Which is, a you know, a big question in some ways. And I think our answer, you know, if you follow our website, we literally have a article on the site titled "We Don't Recover From Grief and That's Okay". And I think that's kind of what we want to talk a little bit more about today is (is) that, That is our answer. Why is that our answer? How do we understand that? What do we mean by that? Dig in and make sense of it because on the surface, we realized that that could sound a little bit discouraging to some people. We think it's  actually kind of the opposite of discouraging. But I think we want to kind of get into to why that is.

Yeah. Absolutely. And so, like Litsa just alluded to, I want to say off the bat, like, we're not saying that grief stays the same forever. We (we) would never say that. There are many parts of grief that you might feel you have recovered from, or resolved, or found peace with. There are many parts of grief that feel very very intense and overwhelming at one point, and then do become far more manageable. So, we are not referring to that early acute intense excruciating pain and confusion and overwhelm of early grief. The thing that I think often throws people off is when Litsa and I talk about grief like we're defining it in a (in a) broader sense than just those early really difficult days. And I think, defining some of the words that we're using and in the language that we choose is important. Defining what we mean by grief, and all also maybe defining what we mean by recover. So I don't know, at least I was thinking we could start with grief, actually, just so we (we) all know what we're talking about when we talk about grief. And so we've talked about this a lot before and I, at one point, kind of jotted down some of like what I think is  in the definition. So I'm going to share that now. Litsa, you can tell me if you agree or would add or change.

Yeah.

But couple of bullet points that I include and we include, because we've talked about this, ad nauseam. And the definition of grief, it's an ongoing and evolving experience, right. So it's not just, like we said, that (that) early couple months, it's not the first year, it's not the first  two years, it is your relationship with that loss and if it's a person you're grieving, the person who died, in an ongoing and evolving way. It's an experience that involves our cognitive which is our thoughts, emotional sides of ourselves, it can be a very physical experience, and of course going along with all those things behavioral response, right. So, how we feel, think and respond to that loss. So it's not just about, this the emotions, it's not only about this the sadness, or the yearning, or the guilt that we feel over the loss. It's all the different things we think and feel in ways that we respond within the broader context (of) of experiencing that loss and trying to live in life after loss, right. Okay. So, a couple more things. Responses can be related to the (the) loss, also secondary losses. So it's not only about the primary loss but it's about  all those secondary losses, and changes, and stressors. And these can include things like how we feel about our identity, loss of our identity, how we feel about others, how we feel about the world. So, how our fundamental beliefs are changed and altered by (by) these losses. So it, it's a big big thing in the way that we (we) look at it. And it's a big ongoing thing. So that's, like, a lot. I know that that doesn't feel very simplified in any way. 

That's only because you (you) gave a lot of, you know, you paused as you described it. But I think that it is, you know, no one is (no one is) here listening to this because they think that grief is simple and straightforward. Like, if you was lived through a significant loss, you know that it feels like it has absolutely changed you, your sense of self, your world, your Universe, you, all of that has happened. And I think part of, I guess what I would add to the definition that you, that (that) isn't in there, the only thing I would add is that grief in many ways is, are evolving and ongoing, normal and natural response to the loss. Like, this is something that we do as humans. It is something that we expect after devastating losses. And it is physical, and emotional, and cognitive and behavioral, and I would say also existential, and relational, you know. I mean there's, it affects all of these different areas in these ongoing ways. And so when we look at it, I think that (that) for me, one of the things that is so important is to say We're defining something, that though it looks so unique and different for each of us because it does touch all these different individual and unique and evolving and ongoing aspects of our life, it is also something that is a normal and natural part of (of) being human and of losing someone or something that's important to us.

Yeah. Absolutely. That's something that's really I've been thinking through a lot is the fact that grief is such a, it feels like such an atypical experience when we're going through it. But grief is very much ingrained in the human experience. It is very much a human thing. It is very much a part of us as (as) unique individuals after we've experienced that loss, that first major significant loss. And then it is, and always has been, a major part of what it means to be human, since you know, since  we all existed, right, and also, you know, animals, like we hear all the time about how animals grieve as well. And so, it is interesting because it feels so unique in atypical and excruciating and at the same time it is so common.

Yes. And I think  it's hard because when we're going through it, and especially the first time you've gone  through a devastating loss, like it, it's almost so unimaginably devastating that it feels hard to believe that it's not uniquely yours, you know, that, it's, I (I) don't even know how to quite explain it, like, I think it feels so singular. And it is singular in the sense that, like, the thing that has been lost, your relationship with the person who died, or the thing that you've lost, like, that is singular. No one else in the history of human kind has experience that or ever will, right. But at the same time, I (I) think sometimes we become so consumed by the, that pain that just completely blind sometimes, blinds us and devastates us, that we lose sight a little bit of the fact that it is this fundamental shared human experience, like the experience of losing someone, of losing something, the things that are so important to us. And of being kind of absolutely devastated in that way, it is something that is part of our humanity and part of our, you know, human experience. And it's kind of hard to hold those two things at the same time, I think.

Yeah. I know. It is (it is, it's) an interesting paradox. But I think it's really important for a couple of reasons. I think first of all, many people find a lot of perspective and comfort just in the universality of these experiences. Not everybody, but many people do find great perspective in thinking about, you know, other people who are going through and have been  through similar things and (and) survived them. And then I also just think, thinking about it as being a part of your just human experience. I don't know, thinking about it this way, I don't know if this is going to make sense, but it just makes me less wanting to, like, banish pieces of that. Do you know what I mean? Like, eliminate pieces of that. Like, this is just my mix of, you know, it, for me now 15 years later, it is a mix of very positive feelings and negative feelings. And that's all an important part of my human experience. Like, I'm very much somebody who thinks we should feel the whole range of things. And (and) face some of those scarier truths. Though, of course, there are some that I still run from, you know, late at night. But, I do just think that if you can acknowledge that as humans, like, we're meant to experience this wide range of things and that is what grief is, I don't know, for some reason that makes me feel less, like, I need to like bury pieces of it, or  or work through pieces of it till they're gone. Does that make sense?

No, it makes total sense. And I  think, again, it is that idea that like it, it's not,  you know, is something that we need to (to) fix, or a problem that we need to solve, or you know, something that we need to tackle and recover from in the way that we recover from an illness. I think, you know, as I've said to you before, I think that one of the things that's hard about that word "recovery" is to me, it immediately brings up this sense of something's broken, something's sick, you're ill, you know, something. And now we need to (to) fix you and get you back to the way that you  were before. And that that's what the goal of  recovery is. And I think when we think about what grief is as that, you know, normal human response, I do think it does exactly what you said, which is, it reminds us that it's (it's) a human experience. It's not a problem that we're trying to solve. Yes, we want to learn how to cope with our grief and how to manage it and the way that we want it to evolve with time, we want it to change and shift, and we, (we) that's part of it because it is by nature ongoing and evolving. But it (it) doesn't then, you know, I think when we think of it this way, it doesn't become something that I'm fighting  against...

Yeah

...all the time.

Yeah. And I (I) think that  one thing that we have recently been, do I want to use the word accused of? I'm going to use the word accused of, is by (by) using this logic, by having this discussion, we are encouraging people to stay stuck and stay unhappy. And I want to be, like real quick to point out, like, that is not at all  what we're saying. We believe that people can and should, bit by bit, step by step, in (in) their own individual ways, find ways to cope with these impossible experiences. Find ways to put one foot  in front the other. Find, you know, new meaning and purpose in their life. And we have dedicated so much of our work to helping people to find these constructive coping outlets. I don't actually think  us saying that you don't fully recover from grief is (is) doing that. I think what we're saying is that  Hey, we need, like, we all move forward. We find ways to move forward. We bring our loved ones and our experiences with us. We are a representation of the places we've been and the places where we're   going. But it's a lie to say you will never feel  these feelings, like, these sad grief feelings ever again if the thing that you are grieving was very significant to you. that's setting people up A for total failure, because I still, you know, on a, in a moment when I look at my kids and I'm like Oh my gosh, my mom would love the, would love to be here. I feel warmth and I feel great feelings. That's just the way it is. And also I think expecting people to recover beyond their negative grief  feelings does kind of what you've been mentioning a little bit, it's (it's) saying Oh, these (these), there are those bad feelings that we need to move on  from, which isn't (which isn't) what we need to do necessarily. We need to find ways to live  alongside (alongside) our experiences.

Absolutely. And that our grief feeling, you know, that our grief is our connection. Our grief is, you know, our grief is all of that. And our relationship with the person who died, and our, or, of the thing that we lost and  (and) that can be the warmth and the sadness all at the same time. And I think the idea, to me, of (of) banishing the grief is the idea of sort of trying to (to) banish all of it for, it's like throwing the cork out with the champagne or whatever, it's saying like Okay, I want to get rid of all the bad stuff, well we can't get rid of all the bad hard stuff without getting rid of the warmth and the connection, and the memories. Like, those things are always going to co-exist to together. And part of grieving is how we learn to (to) have both of those and appreciate those things about ourselves and about our loss and about, you know, who we are with grief as a part of our human experience. So I think, that's part of it, for me, of why it's always felt so helpful to think of grief as this ongoing and evolving experience. Not something we're trying  to recover from. It's something that's helping us in many ways to still have the connections to  the past whether that's a person that we've lost that we know we will always have that connection to, or being able to see how other losses in our past have shaped we are.

Yeah.

And we might, you know, not feel those losses as acutely as losing a person that we've lost, you know. It might as it gets further away. It might just be we see a little imprint left on, you know. How (how) something affected us. But it's being able to recognize that within ourselves.

I, in my mind that feels less pathologizing than the other way of looking at it. Because I feel like it says, You know what it's normal to still have difficult days, and difficult moments, and difficult thoughts, and difficult emotions, years (years) later, or decades later sometimes. So I (I) feel that it's less pathologizing to say all the range of emotions are still normal. I feel, like, the other way of looking at it kind of makes me think that we're saying, well the negative feelings are wrong, we (we) can't be still  having them. Do you know what I'm saying like?

Oh absolutely. Well, I (I) remember so well, this woman coming in for a group, this was years ago, that, before we had started What's Your Grief at the organization where we worked before, who came in for a group and it was several years after her loss, and she was sort of self, a little bit self-conscious about coming in for the group. And she said that, it was the holiday (it was the holiday) season and she was having a really really hard time with the holidays coming up, and she said I've broken down a few times  already. I'm feeling so emotional. I thought I had dealt with my grief. And now I see I must not have because I like started crying in the store and I, you know, I've had all these hard time. And I was like, this is the problem with the idea that somehow we're working through to the other side and recovering from grief and then it's going to go away and we're never going to cry at the holidays again. That's not how this works. Like, to and having that conversation of saying like, No, no that doesn't mean that you haven't been grieving right, or that you didn't deal with it, or you didn't reach acceptance and move on. It means that grief is always going to be ups and downs. There's always going to be hard days. They (they)   get fewer and further between, but of course when the holidays come around it's going to be hard and you might cry. That doesn't mean that you failed at grieving and that you didn't recover, and now you need to come back, you know, and start finding out how to fix the way you (you) grieved. And I do think that, that I mean I remember in that moment, I think talking with her about that, and (and) there being and the group about that, and they're being sort of a relief in the idea of like, Yes. I can be grieving "Well". I can be, you know, and still be having wonderful days and difficult days, because that's what life after loss is.

I've lately been, and I don't know I'm curious if you would agree with this and if so what you think the reason is, like, I've been trying to wrap my head around why we look at grief as such a distinct experience different from other human experiences that we're willing to acknowledge are a mix of good and bad, happy and sad, positive and painful. Like, any relationship. Like, even somebody that you're very much in love with, like, you have an argument, you have a difficult time, you have a breakup, you know, things happen. Why would like, why was so many other types of human experiences and relationships are we willing to say like, Well you take the good with the bad, you work through it. But with grief, we're very much, like, This is different. We have to get rid of the bad in (in) grief and (and) get to only a positive state.

Yeah. You know, I (I) think that maybe it's our idea that we just don't want to be, I don't, I think it's interesting right, I think it's more other people doing that to us than us ourselves. Because I think, it's maybe in part that other people don't want to see our pain and our suffering and so there is just a feeling of how do I, how do we create a narrative where we get rid of all of the pain and the suffering part. I think when you've been through a loss, oftentimes  it (it) does become intuitive.

Yeah.

That there's  always going to be some (some) sadness with this and that's okay. Like, that's (that's) okay because of exactly what you described. Because this is not some one-dimensional experience, it's complex. And that we (we) can learn how to live with both of (of) the feelings. But I do wonder if some of it is that other people outside of us or those around us sometimes want to rush, you know, rush people  to get beyond the suffering somehow, thinking  that (that) place exists when it when it doesn't. 

Yeah. And you have to consider that we had, like, a century almost worth of grief theory, that whether it was intended by the theorists or not, suggested to people. Because, let's be honest, there was a big  disconnect between the grief theorists and actual people, right. We didn't have a lot of people bridging that gap to explain, like the nuance. But I think a lot of the stage and task models that really tried very hard to understand grief did leave people with the impression that there is this goal of grief and that is to work through all the painful distressing emotional states 'till you've really resolved or accepted and got into a place where it's mostly positive emotional states.

You know, someone asked on social media recently, like why on Instagram that something came up. I can't remember the context but it came up of like, why is there this idea of don't speak ill of the dead. And, I, that (that) is sort of part of, in certain families or certain cultures, or you know, that suddenly when someone is gone, where, we have to act like they were perfect and that there weren't those problems there. And I think, you know, maybe it does come a little bit from that same place of  just, you know, this, we just want to talk about the good stuff, we just want to, like, make everything feel shiny and okay. Obviously, if her relationship was complicated in life it's complicated in death too. And we loved that person, or even if we didn't, you know, or cared about that person in some way when they were here and alive with all of the, you know, warts and all, whatever you want to say, like all of it. And so there's no reason that after a loss, that we can't still talk about all that stuff we still love or care about them and  miss them, even with all of the things that were hard. Because all of our, all of us have wonderful things and hard things about us. And so, I do think sometimes pushing back and saying like, No I want to be able to remember, I want to be able to talk about the stuff that pissed me off and I want to be able to, you know, acknowledge that there were things that were really hard and I want to think about all of the wonderful things. And we can still remember people who've died as the full and complete humans that they were. We don't have to remember them as sort of one-dimensional perfect Saints and write out all the hard parts about them.

Right. I think the key thing there is is that, you said, is that this is kind of about, it's about having a relationship. And I think that there is a misconception that when the loss happens, when a person dies, the relationship ends. And I think that's a major misconception that leads to a lot of misunderstanding because grief is about your attachment, your love. If (if) you feel there was love there, your relationship to that person or that time or that memory. And that is very much a dynamic thing that is a mix of, you know, sad feelings and happy feelings and, you know, everything in between. And so I think, when we think about it as more of a relationship, I think that then we make more allowances for it being complex. Because going back to my initial question, I think because, I think we do acknowledge that with relationships you take the good with the bad, and they're a mix, you know. They're up and down. They take work, right. You know, marriage takes work, people always say. Well so thus having a relationship with someone who died.

Yeah. Absolutely.

So I think that that's for me, maybe where a key misunderstanding evolves. And, you know ,we're really just kind of talking through this in many ways. We've talked about this before but this is a new conversation that we're having. So, we are always interested in hearing what other people have to say. How they think about this? Like, I think that we will stand by our belief that we don't recover from grief. That grief is an expression of love. And it is our connection and in that there's a lot of you know warm, fuzzy feelings, and there's a lot of sadness because the person who you want to see, you know, sitting next to you is not. And so I think that we will stand by that. But we are always interested in having a conversation and hearing from people about how they feel, and how they conceptualize this in  their lives.

Well, and one more thing I just want to say there, because I (I) do think that something, that people, that is important to highlight is I do think we hear a lot of the language of, like, grief is an expression of love, and (and) I think in many ways it is (is) an expression of love, in probably the vast majority of cases. But I think it's also important to acknowledge what people, many people have shared with us as well, which is sometimes grief is an acknowledgment of the the absence of love, or the thing that we always wanted that we didn't have. You know, sometimes it is those relationships with people who were complicated and abusive and didn't show us what we needed or didn't give us, you know, didn't give us those things. And I think sometimes people can feel a little left out of the conversation when they just keep hearing this grief is love, grief is out, you know, over and over again. Sometimes it's much more complex than that. And  that (that) can be part of the ongoing piece of (of) it as well.

Yeah.

And that sometimes in those cases, those are the cases where this isn't a definitive thing to say every person is going to feel like they need and want to have an ongoing relationship with a person who died. There are some people where, you know, they grieve that absence of love and sometimes they need to leave someone behind. Or they need to, you know, change something. So part of this and part of the way that we understand this is, I think to say We believe that grief, absolutely, can be something that is part of us forever, and also we understand that in many cases, in (in) many cases there are specific circumstances that might impact you, what your loss was, who you lost, how big it was, how small it was, what the, what form it took, does it mean that for you that your grief doesn't feel like it's been forever that (that) connection doesn't feel like something you want to maintain, and that, that's absolutely okay too.

Yeah. Absolutely. I think what you said is important, I, like, speaking, when I speak for myself, you  know, I can say my grief very much feels like a loving attachment but I think actually the key word is attachment. It's really about, it's about an attachment and sometimes those attachments are not always healthy and not always beneficial to people. And not always, like you said, once that you want to bring along with you into the future. And in those instances there are of course losses that  you grieve that you say, You know what, I want to learn what I have to learn from this relationship or experience and then I'm actually going to move on and just only take these positive pieces with me and try not to like, you know. And (and) some people very much can move on in a way that they don't continue to think about it or connect with it or grieve. So yeah. I do think it's important, like you said, to allow space for the wide range of experiences related to, if we're going to say that loss can apply to a wide range of things, if you can grieve a wide range of things, we also need to make accommodations for the wide range of types of attachments and connections and experiences people have. So.

Absolutely.

We would love to hear from you about anything. About this topic, about topics you'd like to hear about in the future. We are at What's Your Grief on all social media platforms. And our email is whatsyourgrief@gmail.com. I'm just going to tell you a couple ways you can be connected with us if you want. So, we mentioned the book in the beginning. We have our website which is whatsyourgrief.com. We publish a new article almost every week and we send out a newsletter, if you subscribe almost every week. We also now do have some communities, one for professional, Grief Professionals where the talk is very much about being a grief professional, and one for people who   are grieving losses of all kinds. It's, there's no time frame associated with that, there's no type of loss associated with that, if  you're grieving (it) it's a community that's open to people who are interested. So you can learn  more about that we'll link to that too in the show notes. And then of course subscribe  to the podcast, we will be sharing one a week now that we're more regular after this jury duty,  book fiasco, I don't know, wasn't fiasco. The book was a good thing, jury duty not so much. So.

All right have a good week everyone.