Divorce, Grief Stories, Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Parenting, Pespective |
Tina Ginn | Preparing for the Worst
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
Tina, like many grievers, has found her passion in her pain. What started out as a career as a financial advisor, where she was well-versed in risk management, morphed into helping others prepare for the worst in their lives.
Having lived through a forest fire evacuation order, the quick decline of a dear friend’s health and death due to cancer, a traumatic car accident which later led to losing her job, to a subsequent divorce and estrangement with her children, Tina has learned the importance of connection and preparedness.
She brings her passion for helping people become prepared for the worst. She recognizes that the last thing people want to worry about, when tragedy strikes or when there are moments to make decisions, are the logistics of their lives.
Through her app, Your Backup Plan, she helps individuals get their lives in order so that, when tragedy or nature does strike, your life is in the palm of your hand. This not only makes your family’s lives easier if something happens to you but also your own if it’s you at the center of the unfortunate experience.
Tina says we shouldn’t wait until someone is dying, or we are dying, to prepare; by then, it’s too late. Additionally, the conversations you want to be having in these moments do not include the bills that need to be paid and how they’re paid. Also for example, where social media passwords are, what to do with a beloved collection, or a last will and testament. These issues and logistics can be documented in advance so that anyone close can pick up the pieces with less stress. Also, in turn, this allows for more time for deep connection when it counts.
RESOURCES/CONNECT:
Victoria Volk 00:00
Thank you for tuning in to grieving voices. Today, my guest is Tina Ginn of your backup plan. She helps put your life in one place in preparation of any unpredictable, unpredictable circumstance while taking the painful aftermath out of the tragedy. Thank you so much for being here, Tina.
Tina Ginn 00:22
Well, thank you so much for having me. We’re a little bit apart from each other today.
Victoria Volk 00:29
Yes.
Tina Ginn 00:30
I’m on the west coast in here in the central.
Victoria Volk 00:33
Yeah. And, you know, zoom knows no time or space, right?
Tina Ginn 00:39
It’s good.
Victoria Volk 00:40
Yeah
Tina Ginn 00:41
We can reach all our listeners.
Victoria Volk 00:43
We live in an amazing time. It’s COVID really put a damper on so many aspects of our lives. But I have found some silver linings in COVID. And that I was able to pursue a lot of different learning opportunities and things and I’m sure it’s connected you with many people, and my podcast has connected me with you know, many people, too. And that’s been the beautiful thing out of it. But yeah, so we are going to talk about grief today. Obviously, that’s the podcast grieving voices. And we’ll get to Tina’s passion work later in the episode. So, what brings you to grieving voices today?
Tina Ginn 01:23
Well, you know, Victoria, that it’s been very, I’ve had many different types of grief. And it started off with a very close friend of mine, who went into the hospital for tests, because she had a cough. And she didn’t really have any other symptoms. And her husband had called me, and they had $1 store in a small city, and said, I’m really busy at the store, can you pick her up after her tests? I said, absolutely. So, I waited to hear from him. And he said, she won’t be coming home. She’s staying in for more tests. So, the next day, I get a phone call that she has stage four cancer, lung cancer, and that she’s not coming home. And, and where she would be so I could go visit her. In the days when we could visit people. Never thought we’d ever hear that, ever, that you couldn’t visit someone in the hospital. But yeah, so I would go up in the elevator twice a week, and you know, my stomach would fall to the My, my stomach, I think would end up in my throat, and the doors of the elevator would open. And I would always be so worried and scared of what it was going to look like, how it was going to evolve, how it was going to change, because every day, it just perpetually changed so quickly that in front of me that it was scary. It’s scary to see someone disintegrate in front of you. And so, I, on one of my visits, I always wear some real t instead of hospital T and we sat outside on the patio, and she said you know, Tina, I just want to feel the breeze. I just want to hear the birds; I just want to see the blue sky. And that’s all and I want to be present with the person that I’m with. I don’t want to talk about did the accounting get finished. Did we pay the inventory? Did the bills get paid, I don’t want to talk about where the keys are for the shed, or who’s who bought the pet food, or what kind of pet food or I don’t want to talk about anything I just want to enjoy the moment. And that made a huge impact on me. Because it made me realize that nobody and that time wants to either for the person with the person in recovery or in. In a short-term death sentence sort of speak. We don’t want to be burdened by all the stuff. We don’t want to worry about who has a key and who does. We don’t want to worry about if the electricity bill is paid. We don’t we don’t care. We don’t care. We just want if the person’s in recovery, we want to be able to get that person better. And the only way to get the person better isn’t like stress and frustration and anxiety and where the stuff is and where’s their will and where’s their dog documents and who’s paid the bills. And we don’t want to worry about all that, we want to know that you are there present in the moment and sharing the love, because it’s only love that’s going to make us better. It’s only love that will innately create that recovery process, if at all possible. We had research done in the states of twin girls, who one was very weak, and the other one was stronger. And they had to be they were premature. And they put them in different little different bed caskets, you know, the little hospital beds, and the one was thriving really, really well. And the little one wasn’t. And every day that went on, it wasn’t getting any better. So, the nurse put the two of them together, and they clenched with each other, and they held each other, and the one helped the other one get better. And so that one then flourished. So it shows you that by being there, by holding the person’s hand, by listening to them by holding them by seeing them by and not regretting after the fact, when they’re gone, I should have cut I would have, I should have spoke to them more, I should have called them more, I should have went and brought food to the more I I should have sat with them longer, I should have spent the whole day with them. No, don’t, don’t do that to yourself. Enjoy the moment and be prepared for the unexpected before it happens not after. So that’s kind of where I came from when I created the app, so that people could be better prepared, and it would be easy. You just pick up your phone and put in your doctor’s appointment. And when you come out of the doctor’s office, you put what he said and take a picture of the prescription. So now you’re putting your life all in one place. You were the CEO of your life, you know where the documents are, you know where your medical history is, you know where your insurance documents are, you’ve taken photos of your home in case of a wildfire, which How many times do we have to deal with those every year? wildfires and floods it seems popular these days. So yeah, so that’s kind of brings me up till the last few years of me taking the time after I had a few episodes of grief myself, that it took me into another place as well, because I had to find myself again, and move forward and help other people to whether it’s healing, because this to me, helps you heal, it helps you heal because it doesn’t bring in the angry, you know, family fights, or the depression or the angry ness between family members. When you’re in that tragedy moment. You You don’t have time to think, you know, people react in so many different ways. Some people get mad, some people get sad. And when you get a family together, let’s let’s try and keep that family together and try to experience something that’s already looked after. When it’s all looked after already, then you don’t have those same worries and stress.
Victoria Volk 08:50
Yeah, we often find our passions in life through her personal experiences. Thank you for sharing about your friend. One thing I do want to highlight that you said and one thing I picked up on maybe you didn’t was that when you saw your friend when you were getting out of the elevator and you were talking about that experience, and you were afraid of what it would look like. And you refer to it as it in terms of the cancer, right? And did you feel like you’re trying to distance yourself from that, you know what I mean? Like trying to distance yourself from that, from that diagnosis of? Yeah, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I picked up on that. And so, can you share a little bit more about that what you were feeling?
Tina Ginn 09:46
I think the IT part for me was you know, it changed so quickly from someone sitting on the edge of the bed, to somebody lying in the bed with oxygen and then not hardly being able to speak it, it developed so quickly, that it scared me to think of what the it was going to look like not necessarily the cancer, but the experience. I think it was what I was meaning, you know, the experience that I’m sharing with her, the room, the smells, the whole experience, and I don’t think we we do that we don’t take time; you know from for me, I wasn’t concerned about any of the paperwork or of her life. I was there as a friend and a support and for some sort of healing. And that was my sole purpose. But when she said those things to me, it made me realize you can always expect the unexpected, because life is very, very fragile. We don’t know when we’re going to be here tomorrow. And I think once you’ve gone through something as similar to this, you realize that life is precious. And we don’t have all the time we think we have, you know, we we need to get as much preparation as we can for ourselves as well as those we love. As part of my backup plan app, I’ve created the emerging blueprint, and it’s a membership program to better educate you and your family. those you love around you, too. What things do you need to put together? You know, this is where I kind of started off with, because everybody knows they need a will. That’s about it. Um, some sometimes they say, oh, yeah, Tina, we need a power of attorney. Yes, you do. But what are the other things that you need? What, what is going to make those people you know, if you ended up in the hospital in a coma from COVID, for two months? How would someone get into your home? How would they pay your bills? Where do they where do you have your accounts? Where are your investments? Where’s your key to get in? And do you have pets? Does someone know how to feed them to someone know where the VAT is? All of these things of being prepared for whatever might happen. And I think COVID really woke us all up around the world, that life is precious, and we are not prepared. We truly aren’t.
Victoria Volk 12:44
Yeah, I’ve often found in my own family, you know, or when someone close to my family has passed away. When anyone really passes away that we mutually know, or, you know, then the conversations start happening. Well, you know, what, what would you like, where would you like to be buried? Or what are your wishes. And in that, I mean, oftentimes when we’re faced with a death, that’s we reflect on our own mortality. And so those questions come up during those times. And but what’s funny or not funny is that we don’t act on that. Right? How many people actually have those thoughts? And then they don’t act on it. I’m guilty. I’m totally guilty of this. And I’ve thought about that, too. Like, oh, my gosh, if something happened to me, it would be a nightmare for my family. Like, my husband is not tech savvy at all. He would struggle, he’d be on the struggle bus, in a lot of ways. Like, how would he let my client like, it’s important for me to, I want I would want my clients to know, you know, just all these different little nuances of having a business or just all the stuff I’m involved in, like, what would he do? And I’m not prepared, I’ll be the first to say it. I’m not prepared. He knows what my wishes are. And actually, this just came up the other day, because I’m currently going through an end-of-life doula training program. And one of the topics that came up was how, if if you had the opportunity to know you were dying, right? In the case of lung cancer, terminal illness, a really progressing disease that’s, you know, what do you want your end of days to look like? Do you want your body washed? You want your family to wash your body? How do you want your body honored after you pass? What do you want the end of days to look like? Who do you want there? You know, all these different questions that I really hadn’t given much thought to other other than don’t put a feeding tube in me. Don’t hook me up to you know, have Then a later, that’s not living to me. Right? So beyond that, though, I don’t have that in writing either. You know, and I think I actually I just read up on recently I was I remembered it vaguely, but I looked it up the Terry shearable. Like, it’s how you say her name. She was in a vegetative state for 17 years because her husband wanted the feeding tube removed, and her parents disagreed, and there was nothing in writing. And all he had was a statement she made. And yeah, that’s the case. Yeah. So what is the first thing that you recommend to somebody who, let’s say, has been diagnosed with a terminal illness? Where do you start?
Tina Ginn 15:54
Well, that’s why I created the emerging blueprint, because it starts with what documents that you need to find how to make a folder, how to put them in a safe place, so that if you had a wildfire, you can just grab them. But they’re also in the app. So we go through the process, there’s 12 modules. And then the first one, I mean, literally, you could just do the first one and of knowing what documents to put together and putting them together and getting them put into the app. After that, all of the extras are great to put you one step level better. Any module that you do, you’re going to be better prepared than the last one that you didn’t do. So, I always say to people, you know, one of the modules is just what bills need to get paid. A lot of times and 90% of relationships, partnerships, one pays the bills and the other one doesn’t. So if something happened to one or the other, or both, who pays the bills and how you pay the bills, the person needs to know how to do that in case of an emergency. So that’s like one of the one of the modules the other, there’s a library of videos of recordings from lawyers, notaries, around the world, even, it will get to the point in the program, where I’ll have a UK section, the United States section, a Canada section, so that you can go right to those sections to find out your exact details. But in the meantime, there’s a lot of preparation to get done. And it’s very, very easy to do when you have the papers in front of you. You know, the family conversation module is a worksheet that you can sit down with your family and say, go down and tick off the boxes and write down what that person wants. And you don’t even have to think well Do I have to know that? Do you know what you need until the time comes? Usually not. So, this makes it all nice and clear. You can print them off, you can write on them, you can do them on the computer, whatever is easier for you. So, in the last module is like the most exciting, the most creative part. I’m a Pisces. So, I always invent and create things. But I always have to throw that little bit of extra fun firmness in there. And it’s called the treasure box. And so, it allows you to either do it on a weekly basis, or a monthly basis or an annual basis. Or even just as events unfold. You could add them into your treasure box, whatever suits you. Everyone’s different, but that could be of your five senses. So, smell sight, feel, touch, and see and seeing it hearing it. So, it could be anything that you want to leave as a legacy because not all legacies are money. It could be you know, a special shirt. There’s nothing more special when someone passes away than finding a piece of clothing with their aftershave on it or their perfume on it or their smell. You just want to hold it like a teddy bear and never let it go. So, it’s all of these things that you can add to your treasure box that might be jewelry or artwork collection. I have a client who’s he his hobby is fire trucks Believe it or not, he has a collection of fire trucks. I’m not sure why. But so when you think About how does someone prepare, you know, you don’t just have a collection of fire trucks and then leave your spouse not knowing what it’s worth, what the parts are worth who to contact, if something happened to you, because believe it or not, if you put it out in the newspaper, and you tried to sell it after, there’s lots of takers from from the wife, who’s selling all the collection of collectible items, so you don’t want to go down that road. So yeah, so it’s these kinds of preparations of items where you want to maybe throw in all your grandma’s recipes and pass them down and, or, you know, so every time they make those cookies, it’s gonna smell like grandma’s house, or mom’s house or aunt Sue’s house. So, it’s all of those feelings that I wanted to add in there so that people can make grieving easier. If that’s a thing, because I’m not really sure if it can ever be easy. But I feel like when you have things that you can attach yourself to, maybe it’s music, maybe they sing, maybe they write poetry, maybe they write stories. Maybe it’s a blog or podcast that they’ve been writing, and they would like it passed down to the daughter or the son to continue it. You know what, whatever that looks like. Those are all kinds of things that you want to pass down to your family or friends. So yeah, that’s, that’s the fun part. I think that’s the exciting, like, what can I think of to put in there?
Victoria Volk 21:50
I love that I’m a Pisces too. When’s your birthday?
Tina Ginn 21:55
25th of February.
Victoria Volk 21:56
Okay, March 5th, I just had mine.
Tina Ginn 22:00
Happy birthday!
Victoria Volk 22:01
Thank you happy belated to you. So, you speak a lot of experience in the realm of grief. And I imagine because grief is cumulative, and it’s cumulatively negative. And there’s more than 40 plus different types of losses. What have been your other grieving experiences that have kind of solidified what you’re already doing?
Tina Ginn 22:31
It’s really solidified what I’m doing now. Because when I created the app, it took me a long time, because I’m just one person. So, if I was the inventor, I was the creator, I was the diagram, I was the architect. You know, I was everything. It’s like running a motel, and literally going and rushing the washrooms and signing the people into the room. Like you are everywhere. So, after that, I had a horrific car accident in 2017. And I was hit head on. And I was happy that I was, you know, when I touched myself that I’m like, Okay, I’m still here, I’m, I’m in one piece, and my face is still my face. That was my main concern. But I had a lot of recovery after and I didn’t realize even from broken bones, and physiotherapy on your body parts, that no one is helping your brain. No one’s there for your brain injury, nobody’s there for your concussion. And so, I had to really work on all of those things. And when I realized that after 30 years of marriage, and horrific car accident, I then went on disability after realizing that I just couldn’t seem to even though I was walking around with crutches, and getting driven everywhere, because I had a cast on my foot, I couldn’t drive. I realized that I just couldn’t do my job, which was insurance at the time at a bank. And after four months, I realized after fixing, getting out of my crutches and out of my cast and being able to drive again, that I couldn’t do my job, I couldn’t multitask. I couldn’t, I could do my job with my eyes closed, but I couldn’t do all the multi tasks that there were to do. So, I decided to take go on disability and take some time and get recovered. And so I went back after seven months, and they let me go. And so, then I had a battle with that. And then I realized that I wasn’t getting the support at home. My girls had already been through university, they’ve already left the home. Both are doing their own thing. And it was just myself and my ex-husband. And I just said, you know, this isn’t working for me, I’m not getting the support. And I need something else. And so, I said, It’s time that, you know, I think we aren’t in love with each other. We love each other, but we’re not in love with each other. And I think there’s a difference there. So, we continued on with, we went for counseling, and that didn’t work. It might work for some couples. And we went through with a separation and then a divorce. And then, so after that, I lost contact with my girls. So, they’re in their late 20s. And they decided to go on their merry way. So, I guess I’ve had many different types of losses, many types of grieving. One hurts more than the other, to be honest. But I think they each hurt in a different way. And so, I can feel everybody’s I want to say torture, because it feels like torture. No, I can feel everybody’s feelings of what, how they’re supposed to feel what? I don’t know why with grief; we always think of what we’re supposed to feel. There is no supposed to anything. It’s it’s I think everybody feels different. Because we’ve all had different experiences.
Victoria Volk 26:48
I think at some point, we all feel crazy, though. Like you’re going crazy.
Tina Ginn 26:53
Yeah.
Victoria Volk 26:54
Like, why can I just like, get my crap together? You know that? I mean, that’s how I feel like Why can’t I just get my crap together? I’m sorry, what?
Tina Ginn 27:02
Why can’t I understand this? Why can’t I get my head wrapped around this?
Victoria Volk 27:06
Right? And in your experience of, I mean, there’s ripples, so many ripples in your story of like one loss just leads to another loss and another loss and it compounds it keeps adding rocks to your backpack? And so how, how have you? What has coping look like for you?
Tina Ginn 27:33
Well, I mean, it was definitely tough at first. But I think, by me, telling people stories, and really focusing on healing, helping people heal, with getting better prepared for the inevitable, because we all know, something is gonna happen to each one of us. You know, sometimes, like myself, I had multiple things happen, because obviously, the universe was telling me, hey, Tina, you’re not getting it yet. We’re gonna hit you with another one. And you’re still not getting it yet. So, we’re gonna hit you again. So, I think it brought me to where I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to be doing. And it’s created an outlet for me to if it helps me heal by me helping other people heal. By Me, helping people hear multiple stories of different things of what happens in your life, right can turn your life around, that can turn it upside down. You know, there’s such a little thing of losing your wallet, to losing your husband there on very different ends of emergency. And very different ends of the spectrum in the ways of how someone would actually grieve. But the losing the wallet is also an emergency to a lot of people. Because we we know what will happen, right? It’s but it’s there are different emergencies. And I wanted to cover all of them. Because by me going through these experiences, it must have given me that, that compassion and that empathy for people that also have to go through it. And by me creating something to make it even easier for individuals. You know, what I would like to eventually do with your backup plan is have a TV show where I’m traveling to the Ukraine. I’m traveling to Germany, I’m traveling to China, I’m traveling to United States. I’m traveling to these different places to show people how they get prepared for the unexpected in that place, you know that country, because I think that would be really interesting to see all the different cultures of how they, how they look at not necessarily life, but how they look at looking after their family member, you know, what does that look like for them? What does the cemeteries look like, in that country? What are the funerals look like in that place? You know, all of those types of things, I think it would be really interesting. And it would take people to a different level, to understand that it’s everywhere, it’s, it’s just like COVID, it’s everywhere, it’s touched everybody. And it’s not, we’re not going to die, depending on our age, has nothing to do with age has nothing to do the color of our skin. It has nothing to do with anything. And so, when people say, well, who is your target market, or who should be buying your app, I say anybody and everybody who has stuff. And some people say, well, I don’t need a will, because I don’t have anything. Well, that’s not true, either. So, we need to be better prepared, because there’s even the smallest, the littlest things that are very complicated, like social media, you know, if if you have an Instagram account, it’s very difficult to get your son’s Instagram account, and cancel it. Without him allowing you to do that, after he’s passed, who wants the social media accounts left open like that. They’re a prime target for theft, for identity theft, and because they’re not being used. So, it’s all of these social media things, it’s all of these types of things that makes your life easier, even when you think you don’t have very much, you have lots of things, digital accounts, now, we don’t get mail anymore, we don’t get any bills, hydro bills, all comes digitally now. So we need to have a place where those digital accounts can be found by someone just by looking at the right place, in one place for it to be they’re not trying to look in that drawer in that closet and that cupboard. And you know, who knows where that’s usually the way? It’s like, where would she keep it? Where would it be?
Victoria Volk 32:49
Well, folks, if you are not convinced that you’re not prepared. I’m sure you are now. Because I mean, what better sales pitch and I know it’s not a sales pitch, because I can feel it in your heart and you’re speaking and in the conviction in your voice of how much this means to you and how important it is. And I to understand how important it is it’s it’s the taking the action, it’s, you know, taking that step. And so, it is the app itself is available in App Store, correct?
Tina Ginn 33:27
And the launch will be available in a few weeks. And it will be on the website as well.
Victoria Volk 33:34
Okay, and I’ll be sure to link to that because this episode won’t actually air for a while. And so, you’ll probably find the link in the show notes for that.
Tina Ginn 33:44
It’s a lot to comprehend, isn’t it?
Victoria Volk 33:47
I know there’s more to this. I know we can talk a lot more about just I mean the on the unpreparedness aspect of loss and and the ripples of that because like you said, it creates stress and frustration of those left behind when well what are we doing in the repercussion of that, like let’s say you don’t get that bill paid like you have no idea where to pay that bill. You get overage charges, you get interest charged, you get late fees, and then all of a sudden, a $300 bill becomes an $800 bill because because you simply don’t know it exists or where to pay it right? And I mean, I flooded I when I was in my early 20s, I flooded out of my apartment. My mail was not for whatever reason I had a credit card bill that was not forwarded, or I didn’t receive it. That’s what happened to me all of a sudden, I’m you know 21 years old, and you know making I don’t even know what minimum wage is back then. Maybe five, six bucks an hour. I mean really. Um, but I lived in grout, you know, like I had a walkout patio or a walkout, you know, it was the ground level and flooded and had to move. And yeah, all of a sudden, I think it was like a $400 bill became like over $800. And I, I $800 to me when I was 21, that was a lot of money. Yeah, that was a lot of money. But that was just a consequence of me just not being prepared and, you know, lack of preparedness, I suppose. But, you know, something would have happened to me, then who would have been? What, you know, what would have happened with that build. So, you’re driven the message home to me. And I’m, I definitely will be giving this much more thought after, after today, for sure.
Tina Ginn 35:45
It’s about being educated. Really, you know, because at first, I thought, Oh, you know, everyone can use the app. Well, the app is there. But it really helps. And I suspect it’s a lot for women, mainly, because we like to build our Nast. And we like to be educated. We like to know why we’re doing things. It seems like that anyways, whether it’s true or not, I’m not sure but and so that’s when I made the emerging blueprint, because that way people can go watch a 20 minute video, you know, they can go watch another module to find out about life insurance, or find out more about car insurance or find out more about house insurance or tips on a little video on talking to a house insurance person agent talking about that, or, you know, all of these different little educational parts that we truly don’t really know if we know that makes sense. Is that a thing?
Victoria Volk 36:48
Well, can you speak to that a little bit, just the fact that I want to circle back to the fact that you were married for 30 years, and then found yourself on your own. And so, you know, you don’t have that backup, you don’t have that support, you don’t have that. If he takes care of that I take care of this, all of a sudden, I’m taking care of everything, you’re taking care of everything. And so, can you speak to what that was like, because I don’t know what that’s like?
Tina Ginn 37:19
Well, I’ve never been on my own. So, it was very, very strange. And my girls would go everywhere with me, like we went shopping, grocery shopping, clothes shopping at like literally anything. They played avid softball, they got softball scholarships, they, I wanted to ensure that they were in a great place to get really good education and experience life experience. But for whatever happened to us, I’m not really sure. But maybe one day, they might hear this or see this or realize that, you know, don’t talk to somebody and wait too long. Because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring. You don’t know if that person is going to be there tomorrow. You know, you don’t, as a mom, you worry about your kids, even if you don’t see them every single day. But from a kid’s perspective to a mom, they’re on their own, they’re doing their thing. I’m sure they’re not thinking every day about their parents. You know, remember those days, but it’s like when you’re in your 20s. I don’t know, I think by me sharing my experiences now. It’s given me motivation and inspiration to help others. I’ve had too many clients call me at the edge of a deathbed of their parents usually saying how do I get where their bank accounts are? Tina? Where do I find out where their documents are? Where’s this? Where’s that? And my answer every single time is it’s too late. You don’t wait until they’re dying to find out anything. Because when the person is actually dying, they think that they’re not. There are not going to die. And why are you asking me those questions? So, it’s too late. You have to do these things. When everybody is fine. Everyone’s healthy or somewhat healthy. So even if like you said with your question, if you found out you have cancer, these are all things that you can get better prepared for either for yourself, as well as those that you love and care about around you. Because if something happened to them, you’re in the same boat looking after them. So, you might as well have them prepared to so yeah, it’s it’s So like a little family circle, like I like to call it, what will happen with my kids? Um, I’m not really sure, I hope that it’s not going to be a tragedy that brings them back to their mother. I wouldn’t want to wish that on anybody. I would hope that it would just be something they’ve seen or heard or a movie, that they go, like oh goes on and says, what are we doing? You know, life’s too short. This is ridiculous. So, we’ll see. We’ll see where it goes.
Victoria Volk 40:37
I’m sorry that that’s your experience. Right now. I can’t imagine as a mom; I have two girls and a boy. And I just what I think about now is Gosh, I hope they really love each other and get along when they’re older, that they know they have each other that they really look to each other for support. But it never has crossed my mind. Gee, I hope they want to come home. I hope they want to see me.
Tina Ginn 41:05
Yeah, it puts it right there.
Victoria Volk 41:08
Yeah, so I’m so sorry.
Tina Ginn 41:10
Well, it’s a lesson somewhere in there for all of us involved. Not sure what we’re supposed to learn. But there is a lesson in it somewhere.
Victoria Volk 41:19
I want to mention to something you mentioned about when they’re sitting at their parents’ deathbed, and they are in denial of their loved one dying, that was actually just brought up in my end of life, doula training, and how often that is the case where people deny the inevitable, they deny what’s actually happening. And I can speak from an advanced grief recovery methods specialist point of view, and also someone who watched their parent die, in that it separates you from the experience, when you are unable to acknowledge what is happening and what is inevitable. It keeps you from really embracing what’s possible in that moment. And what I’ve come to learn in the very short start of my training for the end-of-life doula is that it can be a very beautiful experience. And it’s very empowering, to really engage and put yourself in that experience with your whole heart. And you can’t do that if you’re denying what’s happening. So, I just wanted to bring that up.
Tina Ginn 42:34
That’s a good point. Because you also can’t be there like we talked about, if you’re worried about all the other stuff.
Victoria Volk 42:42
Yep. Exactly, exactly.
Tina Ginn 42:46
Fear, and you’re worried and you’re stressed and all of these things and, and it’s like being hit by a car. You know it, I wrote a book, it’s called in the blink of an eye. And it truly is, it’s in the blink of an eye. Even if you’ve been someone’s been suffering with cancer for six months, and then they pass away. At six-month mark, it’s still really in the blink of an eye.
Victoria Volk 43:14
It’s still sudden.
Tina Ginn 43:17
It just happens, even though you think you’re prepared. But are you?
Victoria Volk 43:23
Yeah, I just actually that came up not that long ago, how, even if you have the time, and you’re given that blessing of time to know that that’s what’s going to happen that you know, and doctors don’t get it all right all the time, oh, you have three months to live and then you live two years, you know, they don’t know at all, but I digress. Knowing that there’s an end cap right, to your life that’s coming changes the perspective and how you behave and act and the conversations you want to have and how you engage with life and and it’s just unfortunate, I find that it takes something tragic like that for us to really wake up.
Tina Ginn 44:03
And it does. Not sure why.
Victoria Volk 44:08
Yeah. Part of the life lesson that we each have to walk I suppose. What brings you the most joy nowadays?
Tina Ginn 44:16
ah, talking to the wonderful people like yourself all over the world every single week, hearing their stories and hearing their inspirations and helping people hearing their stories about you know, what’s happened with them and how it’s changed their lives and it’s so breathtaking. It’s it’s just so the experiences I can’t even have words for really, it’s it’s just, it makes you tingle really does. Because, you know, I’ve just taken something that you say well, why People say, well, there’s lots of stuff if you die, there’s lots of things. There’s grief counselors, and there’s all sorts of executor type of things. And there’s booklets, and all of that kind of stuff, but there’s nothing for the whole picture. There’s nothing for a car accident, there’s nothing for just going in for surgery and not really coming out in two or three days. You know, there’s nothing for losing your wallet. There’s nothing for a five-minute evacuation notice for wildfire. There’s all of these hurricanes, tornadoes, you know, there’s all of these types of tragedies, the cancer word, stroke, heart attack, there’s all of these experiences that we’re all going to have in some shape, or form. And I just want to help people make it easier. You know, if it can be easier, let’s do it because COVID has changed you lives.
Victoria Volk 46:01
Just think about the time to I’m just, when I think about, okay, if I had this app, or my loved ones had this app, the time that you spend in conversation, like you mentioned before, wasted, breath on things that really don’t matter, but still do need to be addressed. You could be talking about things that really are matters of the heart, that really do matter in that moment, right?
Tina Ginn 46:31
Or special toy that they played with, or their teddy bear or when did they learn how to ride a bike and all these little stories that you can help that person that is passing? Be there in the moment not say, hey, Mom, you know, did you tell me where those bank accounts are?
Victoria Volk 46:51
Right? Yeah, I mean, that’s yeah, if if only for one reason to be prepared, right? Is to have a quality of conversation when it matters.
Tina Ginn 47:05
Well, I’m make your life easier, even for yourself. If you had a five-minute evacuation, and you’re running around the house. Are you running around taking photos or you write videos? Are you running around not knowing what to grab? Like, what do you grab? photos? Do you grab documents like clothing? What do you grab, and if you don’t have that go to bag, then you know it’s just craziness and I’ve even had the five minute evacuation notice in the Okanagan and BC. And it’s not fun because you can smell it, you know, it’s it’s, it’s like the, the experience that we’ve all had with our cities of being closed down. It’s that eeriness, it’s that smoke where you can’t see the sun, it’s so smoky. And the bits of the fire are floating in the air, like from the trees, which, in fact, go and float somewhere else and start a fire somewhere else. But there’s all of this, you know, you can’t breathe, you can’t see you can’t smell you can smell it. It’s It’s so eerie. And here you are in that moment, trying to figure out what to grab out of your house.
Victoria Volk 48:22
That’s traumatic. It’s traumatic, I’m sure. Well, thank you for the work that you’re doing. I’m passionate about education around grief, obviously, soon around, end of life. I’m going to be speaking a lot more about that, I’m sure. And so, thank you for the work that you do. I would love to include your app as a resource on my website. Yeah, there was another gentleman, he was a guest on my podcast, too. He created an app for memories. Actually, after cloud, it’s called think there’s just beautiful things that can come out of the experience of grief and wonderful creators like yourself. So, thank you for creating this to make lives easier.
Tina Ginn 49:16
It truly is my passion. I feel it from every part of my soul. I think it’s definitely it’s just so exciting every day to think who you’re going to touch today and who you’re going to help.
Victoria Volk 49:35
Is there anything else you would like to share?
Tina Ginn 49:38
just you know, during COVID, it’s given us a very different experience than what we’re used to. This is our new normal and if anybody’s listening any listeners out there and I usually say this in most of my podcasts as well, but there’s someone special in your mind right now. someone that you love it care about on your mind. Reach Out and text them, call them message them today and tell them how much you love them. Because you never know what tomorrow will bring.
Victoria Volk 50:12
We don’t, we don’t. Where can people reach out to you if they would like to get in touch
Tina Ginn 50:19
Well, we have your backupplan.ca is the website and I’m on Instagram, your backup plan. Facebook, I have a Facebook group as well as a page, your backup plan, LinkedIn, Twitter, G, jeez, I’m on everything. I am everywhere.
Victoria Volk 50:42
Well, I will put some links in the show notes where people can find you to the app and also to your website. I will link all of that in the show notes in your book as well. In the blink of an eye, I was even going to ask you kind of I hear a book rumbling in here you came out with you have a book and I thought when you mentioned the TV show, I thought Hmm, maybe you could start with a YouTube channel. Are you on YouTube? You are on YouTube. Okay. And that’s on your pod on your website as well linked on your website as well.
Tina Ginn 51:14
Yeah, YouTube, it’s your backup plan.
Victoria Volk 51:21
Okay. Awesome. Thank you again for being here. Tina, thank you. Thank you for sharing your story and for the work that you’re putting out in the world.
Tina Ginn 51:29
Thank you for the opportunity. I love speaking about it and I love telling people that it can be easier. And this is how.
Victoria Volk 51:39
And remember when you unleash your heart you unleash your life. Much love.
Grief Stories, Grieving Voices Podcast, Takeaways and Reflections |
Takeaways & Reflections | Preparing for Love & Tragedy
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
I share my favorite takeaways and reflections from Ep. 52 with Staci Bartley and Ep. 53 with Tina Ginn, exploring the importance of learning from the past and having the forethought for preparing for the future.
Life is messy, and we can learn from our messes, and we can clean them up, too. If we could learn how to re-frame the challenges of our lives by asking ourselves better questions, I do believe we would spend far less time emotionally suffering. Staci, through early teen pregnancy and three marriages, she’s learned this the hard way. And, perhaps that is the way? The mishaps, hurdles, and pivots that we find ourselves in are a part of the journey. But, I guess the better question is: Why does it take so many of us so long to get the memo?
Just as it takes us a while to realize that messes are a part of life and that we are capable of learning and cleaning them up and preventing future ones, so too, it takes us to learn a little too late how ill-prepared we are for tragedy or disaster.
Whether you want to learn how to prepare for love, tragedy, or disaster, the last two episodes are for you, and this episode includes my highlights.
RESOURCES:
CONNECT:
And this week, I will be reflecting on my conversation with Staci Bartley, which was Episode 52 broken hearts and broken dreams. And Episode 53 with Tina again, preparing for the worst. And I want to start out by saying this is season two. And thank you for your support for sharing. I would absolutely love it if you would take a moment to leave a review, or a five star rating. If you love this podcast, if it’s beneficial if you’ve gotten something out of it, if it’s helped you in any way, it just helps more people find it. And that is the goal to spread the message of hope to share people’s grieving voices. And to let people know that they truly are not alone.
Messes Are Different Than Failures
I want to start out with Staci’s episode. And I got connected with her through actually her brother in law, David Bartley, who was on the podcast a while back, he spoke about his story around planning to attempt suicide and talked a lot about suicide prevention in the two episodes. I was actually one episode and I broke it up into two parts because it was such a much needed good conversation. So I will actually link in the show notes to that episode just because suicide prevention is so important. David connected me with Stacey. And right away, we hit it off. And if you haven’t listened to her episode, I highly recommend it. If you’re in a relationship with someone, lover otherwise, I think there’s something to be learned from what she shares. And I just want to highlight a few of the things that have that stuck out to me. There was one point where she said, How is this situation going to add to my life in the future? Who is it that I am becoming? And when you find yourself 16 and pregnant? That’s a big question to ask yourself. And I’m not sure anymore at what point she asked herself this but I imagine many times over as I have to, like, what is this situation going to add to my life in the future? And who is it that I’m becoming? Because if we you know like to admit it or not every situation or experience that we find ourselves in is an opportunity to learn from I like how she said that messes are different than failures.
Because I think so often we can look at things that we’ve done in our lives or decisions that we’ve made or ambitions or goals or things that we’ve wanted for ourselves that we just don’t see come to fruition and we look at that as a failure and we can feel like a hot mess in the process. But if we are in a situation where we ourselves are just really struck, we’re on the struggle bus right you can be on the struggle bus and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s just a part of learning. And I think that’s the difference in looking it’s really a good reframe, when we think about failures is how about we think of them as just messes and messes. You can get out of messes you can clean up and failures you can learn from too right there. It’s it doesn’t have to be this all or nothing mentality when it comes to taking a risk or taking a chance or trying. The mess of it is in the train. And I just really liked how she kind of talked about that. Then she says like, there is no such thing as failed relationships. They don’t exist. It’s just messy. It’s just messy relationships. And I think that’s a good reframe again, because it’s not pointing blame. It’s looking at it from a bird’s eye view, like, what’s my mess? What’s your mess? And what is this mess that we’ve created together? Right?
Love Is A Permission
In my grief recovery work, there’s a client that is realizing that, you know, we all bring our messes, I brought my mess, she brought her mess. And I can look at that with compassion. And I can look at that, like, well, everything that happened, it wasn’t all my fault. Because it’s really easy to for some people to take on the responsibility to take on all the blame in the relationship to make excuses or minimize the other person’s culpability or responsibility. But it does take two to tango, right? A relationship does take two people. And so when you have two people who have messiness in their lives, and you bring them together, it’s just one big messy pot, right? So she says to a relationship are attracted into our lives, and they help show us the places inside of ourselves, that contrast that work and don’t work that we’re shutting down, putting up with going along with not showing up, constantly nudging us. And I just think that’s so beautiful, that is so true. And she said that relationships are the best personal growth vehicle on the planet. And I would agree that they are definitely a personal growth vehicle. But the best? I don’t know about that. I think, personally, Parenthood.
And I know she’s a parent, too. But parenthood has been a huge personal growth vehicle for me. But again, those are those are relationships too. Right. So I guess at the crux of it, relationships, no matter what kind they are, are the best personal growth vehicle. So yeah, I guess she is right, you know, I do agree. And she says love is also permission. And I think that’s so true permission to, if you really love someone, you will let them be who they are. Let them feel what they feel. And let them share what they need to share, and be open to hearing it. And, you know, my husband and I have been married, it’ll be 18 years, and we make a good team. And good friends first, before anything else. And I think that was the foundation that we’ve built our relationship on, was a strong foundation of friendship, and just that kindness to one another. And, you know, it can get hairy with kids and responsibilities and obligations and moves and job changes and all the things. But at the end of the day, you know, when I climb into bed, and I reach for his hand and he reaches for mine, because we do we hold hands as we fall asleep, that is my piece, at the end of the day, to know that at no matter what life throws at us, no matter what we experience that I have his hand in mine in mine is in his that we’re there for each other as a good friend would be and as a partner would be.
And and it’s that permission along the way to be the to venture and to be the best version of ourselves to be supportive of the other’s growth and be supportive of just that nurturing really, it’s the nurturing and kindness of the other person just like you water of a flower. Or you plant a flower from seed and you have to water it and you nurture it and you pick the weeds and it’s like that in relationships too. You have to be willing to do those things for each other and sacrifice and give and give and take. I say to like we have two hands one forgiving and one for receiving it can be really hard for some people to receive. And it can be really hard for some people to give. I just really enjoyed this conversation, she’s learned the hard way, how to navigate the mess of relationships. And she says emotional. It’s like emotional weightlifting in the gym, you have to learn how to own your emotions, be a demonstration of support, and coming back to supporting the other person’s growth is who are we to tell anyone, they had to be a certain way or do a certain thing. And so, I know, sometimes I’ve seen this happen where one person outgrows or outpaces the other person and, or can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. It’s kind of the same idea. It’s like, you know, if one person’s on this journey of self discovery, and you know, and we each have our own experience that we need to work through, and process.
Lease Option For Love
And I think if we find ourselves in situations that grow us, and we put ourselves in the way of challenge that will grow us. It can happen where you outpaced the other person. And I personally choose to lead by example, in that way. And I can tell you, when it comes to grief, my husband’s learned a lot. He hasn’t had experiences like I have, but he’s learning a lot about grief, through me, and through how we talk to the kids, when it comes to different situations and things. But me doing my work. My personal work has made me a better spouse, and how I communicate because it wasn’t always that way. And so you make a mess, you clean it up. That’s what I tell my kids. That’s what I often have to remind myself when I mess up. And I think to a big thing in my personal relationship with my husband is that we are not afraid to call each other out on our shit. When I’ve messed up, he calls me out on it, and vice versa. And we talk about how, you know how that made me feel or how, what I can work on. And it’s still, after 18 years, it’s still a process, it’s still, that doesn’t end.
I think sometimes people just get tired of the work get tired of the work it takes to clean up messes in relationships. But if you don’t really learn how to do that, you’re just always going to be cleaning up messes. And yeah, she says, take out our emotional trash and leave it there. Right? There was one line to she said, You can’t hurt me. That’s my job. And I think, personally speaking someone who’s their own worst critic. I don’t know that my husband could say anything to me, that would hurt me. If I really think about it as much as I probably hurt myself with what I tell myself. You know, so it is my job. That’s my job to hurt me. And it’s also my job to fix me. You know, we don’t if you’re going into a relationship with someone for them to fix you, you will be sorely disappointed. There was one line to where she said that when it comes to her when it came to her grief. And what she learned was that you stay in motion. Her mom had said the son doesn’t have to shine outside in order to shine inside. And that was when her father had passed away.
Oh, and I want to circle back actually to how she found her way to love again was something she came up with called a lease option contract for love. I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Because for someone who’s not ready to dive into the whole potential of another marriage or relationship again, what’s the next step? Like what’s a stop over to that and she came up with a solution of the lease option for love. I just think it’s brilliant. So much goodness in her episode talking about grief talking about the relationship, messes that she’s endured and and made it through and being a single mom several times, and I just admire Staci so much. And I just really highly recommend listening to her episode.
Preparing For The Worst
My conversation with Tina, again, was equally enlightening and actually quite inspiring as well, because she brought up many examples of why we are so ill prepared for tragedy, whether it be loss of a friend to cancer, which was her experience, a car accident, losing her job, divorce, estrangement with her children. But it’s these things that happen that we often can’t, don’t have a lot of time to prepare for. That we end up having to address at some point, right? These, the logistics of our lives, and how we realize how ill prepared we are for these experiences when they they hit us. And she said, you know, you end up with these should have could have whatevs. And you’re no better off. And you end up having to have the stress and the frustration, especially when it’s a loved one who passes? Or what do you do if their social media accounts? What bills do they have? How did they pay their bills, you’re having to navigate all of that. And when that person is ill, or sick and can’t respond or can’t share that information? It’s really challenging. But even more important than that, instead of having to have those conversations, you could be connecting with them and having really rich conversations that could be a better use of that time that is so fleeting.
Do you really want to be talking about the bills that need to be paid, and what day the garbage man comes. So all of these things Tina shared in her episode in and why she’s so passionate about the work that she’s doing. And in creating the app, your backup plan, she’s also has in the works, it’s called the emerging blueprint, which will be available at the end of July, or in July, some time 2021. If you’re listening to this at a later date, through our conversation, I realized how ill prepared I am, you know, I have my, you know, passwords and all of that in a place that my family knows. But aside from that, they have no clue. When does my podcast go live? How does that all work? Like I have a VA now? What’s her email address? They don’t even know like, I’m not sure what my family would do. If something happened to me, it would be absolutely. really stressful. It’d be incredibly stressful for my family. And so I really have given it some thought, since my conversation with Tina, how can I prepare so that it whenever it does happen, whenever something does happen to me, and I don’t have to die, that’s the thing too, like, I don’t have to die, I can end up in the hospital for three months, you know, you just never know. And so it’s that just never knowing when or what will be that we have an opportunity to have that for thought, like take this opportunity to have the forethought to think about how you can make the lives of your loved ones easier. By simply preparing, preparing for the inevitable, preparing for tragedy, preparing just for the worst. That’s what the episode title is preparing for the worst.
Take The Opportunity To Plan & Prepare
I’ve actually said to my husband to it’ll be an absolute nightmare if something happened to him too, because I have no idea where like, he has stuff written down but like the different accounts and what happens with this or what do you want, like what do you want to happen with your things? like where do you want these things to go like, Special Collections or you know, like these items and things and so I think we always wait for these conversations until it’s too late. And that was really the whole message of Tina’s of our podcast of our recording is that you know, we have the opportunity to plan and prepare. So we best take it, address the logistics before something happens. Because you really lose out on time for connecting and I think that Whereas she really brings a lot of the passion into what she’s doing right now with this app, because, you know, losing that friend to cancer, having a car accident that ended up ultimately, she ended up losing her job because she couldn’t function the way she had due to concussion and just physical limitations that she was having. She realized the importance of time.
And there is no time like the president, we’ve all heard that right. And when things happen, it’s like they happen in the blink of an eye. This is her passion. And this is what she brings to this app. And I look forward to digging into the emerging blueprint once it’s available. And I will come back to the show notes and put those the link in there for that as a resource. And again, don’t wait until the person is dying. At that point. It’s too late to prepare, as Tina had shared, you don’t want to should have could have would have all over yourself.
P.S. If you are enjoying the podcast, please consider leaving a review or a five star rating. If you want to listen more inspiring grieving stories you can visit here. Or you can visit www.theunleashedheart.com for more information. If you have grieving stories that you wanted to share you can message me at [email protected] and you can also find me in Instagram and Facebook. If you find it helpful please share it because Sharing is caring. And until next time, give and share compassion by being a heart with yours. And if you’re hurting know that what you’re feeling is normal and natural. Much love my friend.
Grief Stories, Grieving Voices Podcast, Takeaways and Reflections |
Takeaways & Reflections | Finding Purpose & Turning the Page
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
We often find our purpose through our pain. Or are lead to our purpose through our pain. Either way, there’s often a strong, deep desire to find meaning through the terrible life experiences we’ve gone through.
I’m no exception to that, and many of my guests aren’t either. Darren created AfterCloud, a “life-tech” app for capturing life’s most precious moments and memories to make it both easy to do so, and in the process, create a legacy. It’s also used in music therapy and has a lot of potential for many different types of scenarios. I could even see it being used by someone who wishes to document their rehabilitation process and journey after a tragic accident. They can then share their thoughts, feelings, etc., with whomever they choose.
My other guest, Arielle, has found her work in Hospice care to be enriched and deepened by her life experience with grief and loss.
Both guests, including myself, have found a way to turn the page on our grief. When we stop putting one foot in front of the other, that’s when we get stuck on the page. We find ourselves ruminating in the story of what happened when we avoid digging into how it made us feel at the time. Furthermore, not delivering the communications to those who have hurt us, only further roots our grief more deeply into our hearts.
The beautiful thing about grief recovery is that it enables grievers to turn the page, address all of those emotions, and deliver those communications without ever speaking to the other person. And, if the person has died, it’s still possible! And, to me, that’s the amazing gift of grief recovery – it’s a means, framework, and evidence-based program for turning the page.
RESOURCES:
So today is Episode 51. And it’s takeaways and reflections of Episode 49 with Darren Evans which was lost and legacy and Episode 50 with Arielle Arbushites widowed by suicide at 29, and three times not a mother. So first, let me get into Episode 49 with Deron Evans, we talked a lot about his app called after cloud that he had developed with the inspiration of his son and from their experience of his mother in law and his son’s grandmother. Slowly declining from actually not slowly it was quite, it was a more rapid decline because she had Lewy Body Alzheimer’s. And in preparation for today’s episode, I actually well, and I think it’s very timely because just in the last couple days here on the news, it is now June 8 2021. This episode will air in a few days. But the FDA just recently approved. It’s called aduhelm. And it’s also known as adieu botching this totally ADO Canyon Mab. I don’t know who can pronounce these drugs anyway, half the time. Anyway, they just recently the FDA just recently approved this. And it’s the first of its kind treatment since 2003. And it’s the first therapy that actually targets the fundamental path though physiology of the disease, which affects 6.2 million people in the US which I was really shocked when I read that number because I’m like, that’s a really high number of people with this debilitating disease. It just takes so much from families and individuals. And I’m going to link the article where I found that information in the show notes, so you can check that out if you like.
A Life Enriching App – After Cloud App
But coming back to Darren Darren’s episode and his after cloud app. I mean, it’s really being it’s being used in the music arts like music therapy, he said he had mentioned in his in that episode, if you haven’t listened to it, he mentioned music therapists using this with their patients to capture these moments that wouldn’t be captured otherwise, so the family can see the benefits that this therapy music therapy is the impact it’s having in their loved ones lives. But his story of how this was born, I think in touch all of us, it’s applicable to all of us because we all love and we all lose someone eventually who passes and what a beautiful way to capture memories and letters. You can send messages. You can pre plan messages to be sent on birthdays and anniversaries and you can really help to create a memory bank, a scrapbook for family in essence, a digital scrapbook. You can even capture in the person’s words and in their voice. What do they want to experience at the end of their life, you know, if they’re getting closer to that time, especially, you know, terminal patients. So you have it in their words there. It’s their voice sharing, though, you know if you can have that conversation, but first, you have to be able to have that conversation, right. And I could probably do a whole episode just on having the difficult conversation.
But I just think that this app is applicable to so many aspects of our lives, to capture the joy and the sorrow, right? everything in between, like Darren says, it’s a life tech app. And, you know, a part of his branding in his messaging for it is, it’s her voice I miss the most, I wish I could hear her again, I wish I could hear her one more time. And isn’t that what we often say to ourselves, after we lose someone, like, I wish I could just hear his voice one more time or her voice, I would give anything, right? And like he said, If you capture it, now, it’s there for future generations, we have it for the future. You can leave that legacy for your loved ones. I personally have downloaded the app, I did present it to a family member who, you know, I think there’s some skepticism, I think, for some people with putting information out there on the web, or in an app or anything like that. So I do sympathize, and recognize that for some people, that’s not a very comfortable thing to do. And, you know, perhaps I can bring Darren back in, or what I can do a blog post follow up, and, and he can share some of those things. Those objections or those concerns that people might have about that part, you know, putting all of your stuff, you know, into an app. I can see where that would be a real concern for some people.
But I think just like anything, you have to weigh the benefits with the cost. And, you know, what is someone going to do with someone’s singing happy birthday? You know, what is someone going to do with a picture of you and your loved one? on vacation? You know, you can choose to put in at what you want, it doesn’t have to be, you know, you’re not putting in your social security number or anything like that, you know, so there are different apps for that, actually. I have a guest coming up that shares an app that’s specifically for planning for disasters, and like, if something happened to you so and that is a valid question that I’m hoping to, you know, share with you all as well. But with after cloud, it really is just a life tech app, just like many of the apps that we already use, we always have to put in our information for that. And, you know, for many of the apps that we use, we have to include or date of birth, and some even it’s kind of freakish, right? When you when you’re scrolling on Instagram, or whatever, and all of a sudden, you start seeing ads for something that you like, download it in the App Store. And it’s like, wait, wait a minute, what someone watching me, you know, or even having a conversation with, you know, texting with someone, and all of a sudden you start seeing ads, I really do live in an incredible technology advanced time. I can’t even imagine what it will be like years from now. But it comes with responsibility, right? And I know that there are people wanting to create good quality, safe apps and other things that people can access that benefit their lives and enrich their lives. And Darren, and the after cloud app is no different. It’s a life enriching app, maybe as well, instead of just a life tech app.
Mental Health to Emotional Health
There was another point in the conversation where Darren talked about this idea that you know, when you go around the band, and in the UK where he lives back when growing up and things he would hear this term like going around the band, he said that would be equivalent to going to the psychiatric hospital. And it’s worth mentioning and noting in this episode because I don’t know that the shame or the stigma that existed, then or maybe still does when maybe people still say around the band in the UK, I’m not sure. But I do believe that this shame or stigma still exists today, in the US and all over the world. And I think that’s it’s wonderful that mental health has become a topic of discussion, a huge topic of discussion in light of COVID-19. And this idea of mental health, you know, what if we actually called it emotional health? Because that’s really what it comes down to? Doesn’t it? Like, met like, emotionally, we can have breakdowns and breakthroughs, right? but and all of that the grief and the sorrow and the joy and the pleasure, like all of it exists and in the same time and all of that embodies emotional health. So why do we call it mental health? Because we cannot heal. When we’re stuck in our heads. It is the mental aspect of healing. That is keeping us stuck. That is keeping so many people stuck. You cannot heal the heart with the head.
So why do we continue to call it mental health? How about emotional health? And maybe that’s the next blog post I write or, you know, my next stick I get on my next soapbox, I suppose, which I have been speaking up more about that, you know, let’s call it emotional health. Because I think just the word mental. Is I don’t know, it just carries the shame with it. I think too, like people will use the term mental, like, he’s gone mental or she’s mental. Or I feel mental. Like, I feel like I’ve just, you know, I feel like you’re crazy and grief. You do? You feel like you’re going crazy. And, you know, if someone said to you, how’s your mental health? How are you doing mentally? Like? Doesn’t that feel different than if you were to say? Well, how was your heart? And how are you doing emotionally? It feels different, doesn’t it? When I say the two and compare the two. And it’s going to because one feels supported? And one the person may feel more seen and heard. And the other? If I say how’s your mental health? How was how was your mind? How was your mental state? I would feel judgment. I would feel criticism, I would feel analysis. These are all the things that grievers don’t want to feel.
But this is often how society makes Grievers feel criticized, analyzed and judged. And so this is where words matter. Words matter. I think we should just get rid of mental health. We should hashtag emotional health. That’s my new hashtag. Really, I mean, think about it, right? And I think especially in early dementia, when it’s unknown, what is going on with someone that especially if they’re younger, because you just don’t expect these symptoms, you don’t expect those things you don’t expect Alzheimers in younger people, but it happens. It’s you know, it does, it happens. And you know, to the outside world, it could look like they’re going kind of mental. They’re kind of lose it and it’s a debilitating disease. It’s debilitating. And it robs people of everything. Everything. And the thing is, is they know what’s happening. They’re very aware of what’s happening. Especially early on, right? And so I just think especially in the arena of Alzheimer’s, early onset Alzheimer’s late onset, it doesn’t matter when those early symptoms start to show up. It can be helpful to take a step back and look at the behaviors like what are they doing? Are these repetitive? Is it? Here’s the thing, again, they know what’s happening. So no one’s more frustrated than they are right? So you don’t have to be captain obvious. But because that makes them feel shamed, right? that makes them feel like something is wrong with them, which there is, but there’s a medical reason. And so it’s, I imagine, it probably takes years and years for someone to be diagnosed. Because for so long, we just, oh, it’s part of aging, you’re just getting forgetful. I’m like, in my early 40s, I can tell you that I forget a lot of things.
And it’s often though, when I have so much going on, at the same time, my energy and my attention is diverted in so many different directions. It’s not any wonder that I become forgetful. This is different, you know, this is different. And, yeah, I think if you start putting the cereal in the fridge time and time again and forgetting where you live, there’s maybe something more there to explore, you know, but it’s a wonderful thing that there is this new advancement in this drug that can hopefully bring some hope to people. Because I really think that with such a disease like Alzheimer’s, that is so debilitating and can drag on for years and years and years, to be given a little sliver of hope that me would mean so much to people. So if you are wanting to capture your loved ones moments and your own and create your own legacy in a digital way, check out myaftercloud.com. And I will definitely be putting that in the show notes as well.
Grievers Don’t Need New Terms
Up next, the episode for takeaways and reflections is Episode 50. Again with Arielle, and there’s a phrase that she mentioned several times in her episode, and I want to bring some clarification to it and just maybe describe and explain it a little bit more. But she mentioned disenfranchised grief, which actually was a term that was coined in the 1980s by Professor Dr. Kenneth Boca, or dhoka dhoka. I think it is I can’t read my own writing. But talk in relation to a divorced woman whose ex husband had died. And I think she was a student of his or something. I want to bring up again how the grief recovery Institute defines grief and as the loss of hopes, dreams and expectations, and anything we wish that would have been or could be different, better or more. And so when we talk about disenfranchised grief, it’s usually related to a death that others may not see as emotionally significant or like a breakup of a marriage or relationship or friendship. And it can relate to our emotional response to a change in someone we may have never even met. It might be the loss of a pet, a home or a job. It can even relate to abuse or a personal assault on your body. The list of things we might grieve are endless. And rather than creating a new term to describe these things that can be emotionally impactful. It would be far better if we simply expanded that establish mindset about what grief really is.
Grievers don’t need new terms. They just need to be recognized as people dealing with loss of any kind, plain and simple. New terms don’t help people move through a grieving experience. And if anything trying to apply different terms only adds to the confusion and conflicting feelings a grievers already experiencing and at best, this terminology only provides a label to define the problem, but does nothing to solve it. So when I hear terms like disenfranchised grief, so when I hear terms like disenfranchised grief, I just want to scream. It’s grief. That’s all it is at the end of the day. It’s grief. It doesn’t need any other buzzwords or phrases or terms or anything of the like is like I’ve mentioned it does nothing to solve what’s really going on. And that’s my take on the whole thing actually it’s my the grief recovery Institute take on disenfranchised grief and other terms about actually have a blog post talking about these different terms. And I will link to it in the show notes. Because I really think it’s important that we call it for what it is. And it’s just four letters. It’s all we need. We don’t need anything else. Because it’s all these terms and everything that’s really keeping people stuck, I think too.
The Term “Disenfranchised Grief”
Circling back to my conversation with Arielle disenfranchised grief came up because of her personal experience of losing her spouse at the age of 29 to suicide and she had that experience of feeling it was disenfranchised grief, because, you know, it’s often minimized, especially in the case of suicide. It at one point in the interview with her she mentioned something about, you know, did you people would say, did you notice anything? Like they would say, did you notice anything but what she heard was, what they might as well have said instead was didn’t you notice anything almost like, well, I must have done, you know, to internalize, and I can imagine how that would feel like I must, then I must feel like I did something wrong, right? because I didn’t notice anything, I got, implying that I should have noticed something, right? Like, it’s implying that I was wrong in some way, like, I did something wrong in not noticing. So I totally heard that loud and clear. And I think that can be the experience for many people.
And when it comes to suicide, unfortunately for her, she worked in the space of hospice and end of life and things like that. And so the people that work in that space, have that level of compassion, because they, you know, they see death and work around death on a regular basis. And she did say that was a very good environment for her to be in as she was navigating that loss. But also, later, when she ended up having three miscarriages, all very different miscarriages, too, I highly recommend listening to the episode because she really does explain how different each loss of those babies were, and the different impact they had. And we talked a lot to also about how women who are experiencing and even couples, even even the significant other who are going through that type of loss, how there needs to be more compassion brought to that experience. You know, like she mentioned in the episode, you go to pay your copay, and you just had to, you know, deliver a baby that was not going to be going home with you, right? And, but then you got to go to the front desk and pay your copay, and there’s all these women with their big bellies, and happy and you know, there just needs to be more compassion and maybe a different method of care for someone who is just experienced a loss, maybe for the second, third, fourth time. Because grief is cumulative and it’s cumulatively negative, and every single loss stacks up on each other.
Blogging and Writing
And what really, she talked about what really got her through, was starting to write in when she lost her husband. That’s what she started a blog a week later, and she blogged for every day for 365 days. And she still continues to write. And it’s really been a therapeutic way for her to work through what she had been feeling. And also, more importantly to I think, are equally important is to communicate to her family and loved ones, what she was going through and what she needed, and what how others could support her. And because if you think about it, it’s a lot easier to write that out on a blog and say, Hey, read this. And you’ll know where I’m at, rather than having to repeat yourself over and over and over. Just one place that you can point people to. Yeah, that’s where you pour your heart out. And I’m not saying y’all have to start a blog. I’m a writer too. And so that resonates with me, that’s kind of what I did too. And, but it is very therapeutic. And maybe it’s not writing a blog, maybe it’s, you know, that’s why you see a lot of people too that turn to Facebook, and different groups like that to share and open up and all of those things. And that can be great.
But what’s different about social media and that dynamic is just like in when you’re at the grocery store, just like when you go into the post office, you’re gonna run into people who aren’t prepared to hear what you have to say, who maybe don’t want to hear what you have to say, who maybe hear what you have to say, but then say the wrong thing or don’t know what to say. And so they say something hurtful or harmful. Ultimately, you have to find what works for you, what feels good to you. And you know, when there are harmful things that can make you feel better, but aren’t very good for you either. And that’s those are sterbs short term energy relieving behaviors, which I’ve mentioned, in an episode. I have a whole episode devoted sterbs. But blogging and writing was a healthy outlet for her.
There’s Privilege in Finding Things – Find That Resources
And I want to bring up to and this is the point that she brought up and I want to highlight also because there are people listening who may not have access, he may not have internet, he may not have access to resources and poor people, or organizations, or certain books or whatever it may be. I mean, there’s privilege in finding things. And in being able to find things that help you heal. And obviously, as a master social worker, Arielle had the tools and the access and the education for things that would help her emotionally and feel supported when she was going through those losses. And for those that don’t have that education backing, you have to look for it, you have to find it elsewhere. And I know I did. I had hired a life coach at one point. And again, there’s privilege and even saying that, right? So I think there is an especially to coming back to emotional health. It’s trying to create access, and means for people to learn, and grow and educate themselves. This is, I mean, even just this podcast is my way of sharing and giving back for free. I give it freely. I bring people on the podcast who have, you know, some terrible experiences in their lives who have turned their lives around to bring hope to other people.
I don’t take sponsorships. This podcast doesn’t pay me in monetary but I get so much back from it emotionally and just feeling fulfilled. And I just really enjoy it. And I like connecting with people one on one and hearing their stories and sharing their stories, and creating the graphics and writing, you know, the show notes and I do all of that. I pour my heart and soul into this because I really feel the message is important. And many people have a cellphone, most people have a cellphone. That’s the one thing a lot of people have. And so if you have a cellphone, you have access to podcasts, right? And there are so many podcasts out there, there’s so much free education out there, it’s blows my mind. And that’s another incredible thing of the time we live in. And if you don’t have internet at home, you can go to your public library, you can access blog posts, you can listen to podcasts, I think probably to even at the library, there’s so many points of access, I think that people don’t consider as a way to educate and learn and grow and learn from others. So I think that, yes, access to emotional health resources is a problem. I do feel like maybe it just takes a little out of the box thinking to find those resources.
Or in maybe it’s a part of it is just educating people on where they can find those resources. So check out your local library. And I’m going to bring a podcast again because I know you’re listening to this but I didn’t start listening to podcast probably until within the past year and a half. And I’m kind of hooked although I do love crime. True Crime podcast crime junkie is one of my favorites. And but yes, there’s so much I mean you can look up any so many different topics, YouTube, I mean, yeah, the library of internet resources is abundant. So, and yes, not all resources are good, not all resources are probably helpful. But find something that resonates with you and find more of it. I think the information out there, sometimes we just need to get a little creative on on where we’re looking. That’s my rant on that.
When We Are Stuck On The Page
I do just want to share one thing that if you haven’t listened to our rails podcast episode yet, I’m just going to read this one portion of what she had said, we only see the moment that we’re in the page that we’re on. And I was really stuck there on those particular pages of grief for a long time, not understanding that the pages would flip. And at some point, I would be feeling differently. And this is what happens to so many grievers. We get stuck on the page, we can’t see a future ahead. It’s unknown. So it’s scary. We don’t know how we’re going to go on without that person. Or if it’s an less than loving relationship, we don’t know how to move on with that person. That can be grief, too. And we get stuck there. And actually, just this week, I had a client of mine share a talk about a group that they’re in and how, especially for men, it’s not particularly acceptable to share your emotions and share how you’re feeling and express yourself and talk about grief. And I just had to say, Well, those aren’t your people, you got to find your people, you got to find those that support you. But also to a shared, you know, we do get to a point, when we don’t feel like we have to share all of that stuff, like we used to, we get to a point where the emotion has been addressed.
So therefore we’re not, we don’t have that same emotional response, when we start talking and telling the story. That’s what healing is. That’s when you know, you’re healing, when you can talk about it. And you don’t end up a pile of mess on the floor. You can talk about it, and you don’t get pulled into the past and start crying and you know, getting emotional and feeling those same old familiar feelings that you were so used to feeling because you felt them day in and day out for so long. That’s what healing is, when you get to the point where that’s not the same reaction. That’s not the same pattern of behavior. That’s when you know you’ve been doing the work. And the only way you get past that the only way you can get through that. The only way that you can have a conversation in the future and not be pulled back into those same responses is by doing the work. That’s it, that’s you have to do the work. And that’s what grief recovery is grief recovery is addressing the grief, the four letter word that is given all kinds of labels, that is only thought to be just about death. But there’s so much more as long as we are treating people like they are in a mental health crisis. Or as long as we’re treating the mental health crisis, like a mental problem, like a logical problem, like a brain problem. We’re not going to see solutions. We’re not going to see progress.
And we’re not going to see people getting emotionally well. If this message today resonates with you, I don’t want you to lose hope. Don’t lose hope. Look to your community for resources, people that you know, for the support, find your people. Find what works for you, that help that can help you heal because your future depends on it. Even if you don’t have a master’s degree, or have developed a really amazing app, your life has purpose. And we often find our purpose in our pain, such as keep putting one foot in front of the other. Just keep Moving forward every day, little by little. Because just like grief is cumulative, and it’s cumulatively negative. So is healing. So everything that you’re doing, to move yourself forward, that’s cumulative, too, but in a good positive way. So keep doing those things. And remember, you always have this podcast to come back to.
P.S. There’s tons of other grief podcasts out there to inspire and to help you feel like you’re part of a community. Because grievers are everywhere. We’re everywhere because grief is everywhere. You just never know what the person walking by you on the street is going through. If you want to listen to more episode of grieving voices click here. Thank you for listening. And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
Divorce, Grief Stories, Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Parenting |
Staci Bartley | Broken Hearts & Broken Dreams
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
From the age of 16, Staci Bartley was in the Relationship School of Hard Knox. She found herself pregnant at the age of 16. And, to do the “responsible” thing, she and her then-boyfriend (21 at the time) decided they would get married. A year later, she would end up a divorced single mother. However, at 21, she would expect a second child with a new man in her life, and, together, they decided to get married.
It would take a lot of heartbreak and breaking down to recognize that the effort to attain the perfect family and life contained within the constraints of a white picket fence was too much for her 13-year marriage to take. She would find herself, by this time, a single mom of 5. And, this time, she decided she would enter into any future relationships on her terms and that she would never marry again.
But life had other plans for her, and although Staci did ultimately find her happily ever after, it wasn’t without a lot of relationship road-rash along the way.
Listen in on my conversation with Staci, Relationship Expert, and Mediator, to learn why and how the relationships we choose to enter into can be the most beautiful, trying, and teachable experiences of our lives. And, you can bet that grief has a whole lot to do with what we’re talking about today. There is something for everyone to relate to in this episode.
RESOURCES/CONNECT WITH STACI:
Victoria Volk 00:00
Thank you for tuning in to grieving voices. Today my guest is Staci Bartley. She is an international relationship expert and mediator. She comes from a generation of messy, hard, and treacherous relationships. She’s versed in old paradigm agreements, unrealistic expectations, and shame for not being able to create long lasting relationships. Essentially, she truly understands failing at love. After 30 plus years and lots of learning and adventures, Staci’s was brought to the realization that there is no such thing as failing at relationships, because each and every one you’ve been in, or will ever be in contributes to who you are, and who you are becoming. Thank you so much, Staci for being here.
Staci Bartley 00:45
Oh, it’s such a pleasure to be here with you. Anytime I get to co create with you, Victoria, I’m in.
Victoria Volk 00:51
Awesome. Today we’re going to talk about broken dreams, broken hearts, divorce, pregnancy, out of wedlock, failing at life and love or feeling as if you do. So, lots to get to. So, let’s jump in. I want to start because I’m familiar with your backstory. But I want to start from the front porch when you were 14.
Staci Bartley 01:14
There was my sister’s wedding. And it was a beautiful sunny day, and my sister was starting to get the jitters that you get on your wedding day, you know, panicking a little bit like oh, I hope this is gonna go well. My mom was starting to try and calm her down and I just needed to seek some refuge on the porch. I was thinking I’m out of here. I don’t know what to do with all of us. I found myself a nice, warm, comfortable place. And I remember feeling the warm cement on my legs and looking up and feeling brace on the trees. And just about the time I was like completely settled in. My soon to be brother-in-law came running around the back of our house. Oh my gosh, you guys made it and I glanced up. And there was a car full of four guys across the street parked and they were attending the wedding and had come from the east coast where my students be brother-in-law had grown up in Maryland. And as all four doors opened down, the back one on the passenger side there popped out this adorable, beautiful smile, fluffy, curly hair, big grin. And I was I was awestruck as this 14-year-old girl of like, Oh my gosh, like I’ve never been in a relationship. I grew up in a very strict household with you know, religious paradigms that had kind of run the show I’d never really even contemplated except for a crush on white boys and my my Sunday school class, what that could be like, but in this moment, it was like, oh, wow, I want a guy like that someday. Right? And I discovered through the day that his name was Tom. And right from that moment on every time my brother and sister-in-law would say you don’t know my friend Tom, let’s go California. My insurance would go up. Right? Like, oh, yeah, totally. I remember following him around a wedding, you know, just trying to get any Intel that you possibly can. Because I would just sit and watch like this beautiful smile and his hair bouncing around in the wind. It was a magical, magical moment for me. And I didn’t know that later in my life. When I was looking at almost 40, I was going to come back to that very significant moment.
Victoria Volk 03:24
So, what happened then?
Staci Bartley 03:29
Wow, as the story goes, three years later, I found myself pregnant by my high school boyfriend that was kind of blew up my whole fancy paradigm, right? In that moment on the steps, I remember thinking I’m going to be really good at this love thing. Oh, I got this one in the bag. Right? I’ve been given all the rules and structure according to my family and my my religious paradigm. I’m gonna kill it. I’m gonna I’m not gonna stay out of the park, only to find myself devastatingly pregnant at 17 and grappling with that. I think the hard part about that piece wasn’t so much about being pregnant. Of course, that was kind of earth shattering as you, you know, just literally being a teenage child. I very young adult with no life experience was the impact that it had on my family. That that’s, that’s always that’s always been a kicker, right? It’s one thing to go through an experience. But then when you start to see that it starts to shatter the lives of the people around you what you have done, the choices that you’ve made, impact the people that you love the most. That’s the one that always gets me in the heart. And if I could go back and change it, that would be for my mom, who didn’t really know how to support me through it and who had just newly married herself. And so, I had a stepfather that it stepped into the picture at the age of 16, which was kind of the I don’t want to say it blame is the piece it was just it was motivating to not be at home. And so I found another place to be unfortunately at my boyfriend’s house where his parents and family was was much more liberal than my saving so it gave us lots of room to explore and expand and I became familiar with things I didn’t have any any knowledge of right in my environment where I came from. And the stepfather You know, he loved my mom I know but he didn’t necessarily want me to be a part of the picture and I’m sure thinking right as we’ve had conversations later in life he was basically interested in just kind of getting me moved out and on my way so that he could have that relationship with my mom that he so wanted but didn’t want to deal with me there was never a lot of love lost there so you know, that was the part that was the killer as the as the parents then then became what are we going to do with this right what are we going to what are we going to do with this I just broken up I’ve just gone to confession you know, I was just going to turn my life around get back on and then oh, oh my gosh, we’re gonna have a baby No, this can’t be and so then as best I could my mom stepped in and the first thing that she wanted to do was was kind of cover it up you know, okay, let’s send you to my aunt’s house and have you have the baby there and come back like everything’s fine. I’m thinking is that what you do? Like you know, you start to see a whole new side of things and people that you thought you knew you know, for example, not that she was trying to be dishonest but she was trying to make it look normal she was trying to look like everything was fine. And I think sometimes as human beings we we attempt to do that we want it to look according to the picture that we’ve been taught it’s supposed to look like instead of like being honest and open about the realities of life and I so wish we could do that right in our lives I so wish that we could share stories about our messes just as easily as we do about cold remedies. And you know, fixing the washer and preparing the right the cleaning the house, you know, what are your cleaning techniques, and how can I get it done have more efficient, more effective, and unfortunately, just like so many, we went to trying to cover it up, which makes you kind of even feel more shameful and guilty, you know. And I thought, oh, I don’t want to do that I’m gonna have to live with the aftermath of that. And I and for whatever reason I’m so thankful I became very, very heightened and aware that whatever decision happens in this moment is going to change the rest of my life. Right? I was very aware of that. Like, I’m going to be the one and only person that’s going to live with whatever choices are made here personally and then of course there will be the ripple out, but everybody will get past that I won’t This is going to be a lifelong decision. And so, I explored all the abortion I explored adoption and ironically an older brother of mine had just lost a stillborn just had a stillborn baby, he and his wife. And that was really sad. And I, I think that they saw this as an opportunity to kind of replace that loss. Because sometimes we think about that as far as loss to right, we think we can just kind of take the loss that we’ve experienced, and replace it with somebody else, or something else. And we attempt to do that as well. I did too. And I remember thinking No, that’s that’s not right, either. You know, they may they laid out this glorious plan about how it was going to be great. And I could still be involved in this baby’s life and then take charge of that. And then there was my cute little 19-year-old boyfriend, thank goodness he was two years older and had a job and my truck and kind of had some adulting behind him. And he wanted to get married and he wanted to save the baby wanted to have and through a lot of cry, sleepless nights and tears and conversations with myself and my sister and my mom. I decided I was going to get married. And so we had a shotgun wedding at my house do you have to make this look good. We can’t be too far along in this pregnancy. Have two families together and I wrote off and had to figure out what it was like to be a wife. And I assumed to be mom, when that little person came into my life It changed my life. And that beautiful soul is still very close to me to this day. Her and I Her name is bro we’ve grown up together. We literally grown up together and weathered many, many storms and wonderful good times. And I loved being a mom and thank goodness that was the case. You know, it’s not always the case and there’s no right or wrong there. But in my particular story in situation thank goodness for me. I really loved being a mom I was satisfied there. And so once I kind of got my bearings, I was able to go back to school and kind of start putting the wheels on again and of course as you could probably already predict the relationship wasn’t gonna last you fell apart within the first 12 months. And then I found myself 19 years old, and on my own and doing college and work in a lumber store, and just trying to be a good person again, right, just trying to go back to where I came from the roots that I felt like we’re intrinsic to me and who I want to be. And you just start, you start growing, you start learning, and you start looking for how to do that, right. And so then, as I’m working it out, I decided I’m going to start dating again and Michael stone really good about how this was going and wham bam, I found myself pregnant a second time at 20. So that was a whole we just kind of like a repeat, you know, so you know that saying that they have about lessons in life. But then the lesson will continue to be presented until it’s learned. Yeah, that’s really a true thing come to find out, right? Yeah, that’s, that’s real. So um, gosh, I got pregnant, it’s like, are pregnant a second time married a second time. And this time, I was gonna do it right. And it was going to be my penance for all the things that I had done wrong, I was going to, you know, make some, some reparations. And I was going to do it right. And well, this time, and thankfully, the, this person I had made it up, this was going to be the person because it was my come from my religion, we come from a very similar background, we were very in alignment, and he was trying to put his life back together too. And so we were going to tag team this and hold hands and we were going to follow rules. This time, we were going to do it by the book. And so this idea of the perfect life and the perfect family and the perfect children, and the perfect scenario took on some ferocity. And in the end, that’s really what killed her marriage was I there wasn’t any flexibility for navigating the messes and the ups and downs of life that had to be by the book. And more and more as the constraints of that kind of started to crush in on us. His mental health challenge that being a bipolar struggled to rage out of control. And at the time, I didn’t see that it had something to do with me in the way that I was showing up in my relationship to that’s the interesting thing about relationships is there’s always a cause and effect to it, right, as much as we can point fingers and, and blame the other person for how they’re showing up. There’s a cause and effect to that. And there’s probably a piece of something that I might be doing to cause them to want to show up like that. So in this particular case, my husband would just go missing, right, and they’re finding himself in office several miles away from our family home, and we just go missing and was battling his own challenges with addiction. And you know, he wasn’t perfect, and he knew it wasn’t perfect, but there was no room to have that conversation in our relationship. Certainly not with me. As I was doing I remember him like grabbing my my shoulders one day and saying Why can’t you just be less perfect? Why can’t you just make more of a mess because then I think I’d feel better. I didn’t understand I thought that was the plan. I thought we were supposed to do this right? Right, I mean, and so it was just pull it together for you pull it together, pull it together, and there was not really a lot of emotional support for him. So that relationship of course come crashing down 13 years later, and by then we had adopted a family daughter being the oldest and we had had four more so I was leaving the house with five babies in tow. And once again, kind of trying to piece it together and put it back together. And that’s really where my my journey and the work that I did now started to come into play. I started learning everything I could get my hands on personal development thanks thankfully, my husband couldn’t stay in that box couldn’t stay perfect couldn’t stay with inside of the lines not I told him since is the greatest gift he ever gave me. Because if I would have continued to stay in that paradigm I would have never had the opportunity to become who I am today and do the work that I do and and be suffering for that right and we forget about that especially when it’s difficult Don’t you think we forget about that how is this situation going to add to my life in the future who it is that I’m becoming? And that’s what I love to say there’s there’s no failing there’s no wasted experience in life. There’s, there’s there’s things that we make messes, right? But mistakes are different than failure failure implies at least for me that you can’t get up and you can’t go again when that’s really all that needs to be done. is okay. Well, gosh, what did we learn there and that kind of hurt. Gosh, that that knocked me I don’t see that coming. Okay, let’s go again and try again. Anything would be better than not doing anything. So, moving forward became the only way I knew how to get up. Just, you know, go again, just try your best to put one foot in front of the other and see where it leads you It’s better than staying here in this hellhole, right? Let’s go. And little by little I just I, I was immersed in personal development became a facilitator that stepped into becoming a CH t certified hypnotherapist but took me on to becoming as I was involved in my own recovery and counseling process, I was able to extend and teach what it is I had learned and the principles that I was learning in my own life. I think that really helped me to develop some confidence and some self esteem. And then that just kind of continued to go on, it took me into studying the body and health that took me into quantum physics and neuroscience that took me into studying psychology and and what was so interesting is regardless of the realm that I was in whether I was trying to be that counselor or I was trying to be that digestive health support coach, or where I was learning those herbal tinctures or that raw food, I was teaching that raw food class, you know, at the community college, I’d always find myself in the back of the room talking to somebody about their relationships, whether that was the relationship with ourselves relationship with a lover or relationship with their children or parents, right, I consistently all of a sudden became aware that I was always in these conversations of navigating relationships. So there I am, right little by little. That’s how I arrived at the work that I do today, the passionate place that I have, there’s not too many things that you could throw at me that I haven’t probably personally lift. And I say that with all the grace and humble emotions of that it’s just experiences on my heart. And please don’t try and blow me out because that would just be a tragedy. So, you know, that’s always the biggie, when people come in with their relationship challenges is, you know, is Am I safe here? Can I really share you the real deal with you can we really get raw and it’s like, I’m with you there, I probably walked a mile in your shoes, which I think really lends to my passion of teaching through experiences, not only the knowledge that I learned that the experiences that I have. So, I spent 15 years, raising my family and I flipped into instead of wanting to be this people pleaser, or do it right perfectionistic I kind of flipped to the way for our side of the scale of like, I’m an independent woman now baby, and I’m doing life on my own terms. And I’m not proud of this but men kind of became a thing for me to kind of became like a byproduct that I was trying to come from men more to be used on my terms. And according to my rules and my structure, I’m going to tell you how this is going to go and why and when. And then when I’m done, go ahead and be gone with you. I’m not proud of that at all. And I say this because if there’s ever any of my wonderful people who contributed to who I became on my journey, I just want them to know that I see that. And then I’m sorry, right? I’m sorry for those things. I’m trying to find myself and you have to understand the know that as human beings that’s what we do. We don’t do it because we’re trying to be mean or unkind or thoughtful. We’re doing it because we’re trying to heal ourselves. And it’s messy. It’s really really messy and that doesn’t make it okay, and it doesn’t make it any less egregious. But if I’m a hot mess trying to figure myself out, I really don’t have anything to contribute to those around me. But even if they are extending love to me sometimes, I can’t let it in. So, all of this to bring us back to that moment where you had me start in this conversation Victoria right the woman on the porch there for 35 years my brother and sister-in-law continued to say to me Hey Stacy, you don’t know my friend Tom or Tom that lives in California but he’s you know, fill in the blank. He started a business he’s got married he’s I was little kids. Um, and I have done quite a bit of work, but the Economic Development Office for the state of Utah, and it’s pretty tapped in network wise. And I got a call from the same brother-in-law one day and saying hey stays, but you know, my friend Donna loves California, but hey, he’s trying to extend this business into you, Tom. I’d love to give him your phone number set. Okay. I was like that, like, Eric Yeah, bring it on. I don’t know. I just I was curious to just have a conversation with him because for 35 years I’ve never even like engaged with him since that wedding or were heard his voice or even knew this person, Tom, but through years of my own journey relationally the ups and downs, I would have literal journal entries of Gosh, I just wish I could meet a tall man like Tom some days I’m tears on the page, right? And then I get I remember throwing it dice like that I don’t even know Tom, what am I saying? That’s the craziest thought ever. Why would you write something so stupid She goes, we can get so critical with ourselves to journal across the room right? In my fitting rage of trying to figure out this relationship journey thing that was kicked in my tracks the one that I was supposed to be so good at, remember the one that I was going to knock out of the park and get so right. And it had just been one epic failure for me after another as I grapple and try and understand and go again, right? And so I was like, heck yeah, happened, give me a call. That’s just crazy mind blowing. The rest of history, as they say, if we got on the phone and started talking, we didn’t talk about persons for very long. And we started to get to know each other. And there was this aha moment where all of a sudden, I went, oh, wow, there’s going to be an opportunity to explore a relationship with this person. But remember, I was that independent woman who didn’t need a man, I was never going to get married, I was never gonna commit again, done through over that, you know, I’ve done two and done, films, put it away, let’s be done. But I didn’t want to have kids, I had plenty of those. And so, then I was left with this understanding and knowledge about relationships that they’re either growing, or you’re either kind of reaching forward motion, or they’re kind of starting to slough off of it. And I found myself in a huge quandary of like, what am I gonna do here? What? I’m not getting married back, I told him conversation to with exploring our relationship, I just need you to know that I am never going to get married again. Are you good with that? If not, it’s deal killer. That’s how like committed I was. Like, no, no. So as you’re nine months into our exploring relationship back and forth, 600 miles apart, what do you do? When it comes to the place where you know that conversation of kind of going steady, so what are we conversation is coming, and you have so much commitment phobia? It’s, um, believable, like, can’t go there? No, no, nope. No. It was in the throes of this conversation. Literally, in the middle of the night, I was down in my basement because I didn’t want to wake my kids. Tom would call me late at night, we would talk through the night. It just kind of worked for us. He was in California; I was in Utah. We’d go back and forth and had some great times. And again, this relationship was just trying to take on some ferocity and eight, nine months, and I knew it was coming. I just could feel it was coming. And we’re having a great conversation. And you can just feel the energies, like snap, and I’m like, oh, here it goes. He’s gonna say so what are we what are we doing here? Like, are we gonna make a thing out of this or not? And I remember panicking in my panic. I just wanted to bring some humor into it, right? I just Oh, here we go. And he says, So Stacy, what are we? And I I just this litany of my mouth racing was like, I don’t know, I don’t know. How about a lease option, contract or love? I mean, I that’s all I could give. I don’t know that. That’s funny, huh? What if that’s a real thing. And it was actually his genius where he goes, he knows days. Tell me about what that would be. I mean, like this kind of ingenious idea. I was like, really? Like, like, we could do that. And he’s like, why couldn’t wait, right? Why couldn’t we blow up the paradigm and make it our own its own relationship? Would you want to go steady with me? Yeah, yeah, I think I do. So I set about literally taking everything I’d known and everything I’d studied, and all of the places where I felt like I was afraid and needed support. And I wrote up a first lease option contract for love. And I only made it 30 days, you know, we don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves here. But I thought I can get all in for 30 days, right? I can make this work for 30 days. And then if it doesn’t go well, it’s just Hey, then fun. I’m capping out, you can go your way I’ll go mine, no problem. And so we signed it. And it became this place where every week we would do evaluations better relationship and if I was meeting your needs and if you were meeting mine and that became this literally coaching idea where I would say if you could do it more like this, or if you could hold me more like that and and he would do the same and we were literally teaching each other how to love each other best. The conversations that we never have in relationships, the places where we feel like we can never go and saying this is where I’m really at and this is why I’m hurting. Could you just give me this and it was a game changer? We did 30 days and of course I wanted to do 90 days we did 90 days and then I want to lock him up for five years and the thing that was interesting about that whole experience is I realized that it wasn’t commitment that I was afraid that’s what we say right? I’m commitment phobic but wasn’t committed. It meant that I was afraid of it was navigating the inevitable change that my experience had taught me was sure to come. That’s what I didn’t know how to navigate. And if I promise, if I get married, then it becomes this finite stuck in stone experience that I don’t know how to navigate with, even though I know I’m going to change, you’re going to change the relationship, and our circumstances and our lives are going to change. How do you do that? Because I’m not gonna stay the person that I am when I marry you. And when I say to I do it, when we move in together, this whole thing is going to flux. And so that that really was a huge aha moment for me. I was a divorce mediator at the time. And I started using that in my practice, and it worked like a gym, where people could actually get all in and give one last good try at their relationship before they called it quits, knowing and feeling and sensing that they had really done all that they could do. And the wonderful thing about a lease option contract is it tells you why it’s not going to go forward. If you’re not you understand. And you’ve also shared and said all the things that you’ve wanted to say for so long. And you’ve known that they’re hurt, because you’re signing off on that they’re hurt, right. And so, there’s this incredible piece of validation, as well as working with the parts and pieces that truly affect our lives emotionally. And that was that was a game changer for me, that I love to teach and highlight on the work that I do for couples coming together. Right? It’s a new relationship, they want it to go different. They are trying to get over commitment phobia like me, or they’re trying to give it one last run before they decide what they’re going to do next. It works in all those places very, very beautifully.
Victoria Volk 26:47
Wow. Thank you for sharing all of that. Thank you, a lot to digest and go back to and highlight. There’s a couple things that came up for me as I listened to your stories. And I do have a quick question. And actually, I’m going to write a note here. So, I don’t forget one note, I want to come back to when I ask I’m gonna ask you a question. I want to get your thoughts because it’s come up in the circles that I’ve, I’m in? And I just want to hear what your responses. What does it mean to you to be in a relationship with yourself? What does that mean to you?
Staci Bartley 27:31
It’s everything. And I’m going to be so bold as to take this a step further. At the end of the day, the creation that we have all been given this life that we live, right, I draw it on the board for my students as an I am circle, this is me. And every moment of every day, amongst everything that’s possible in the world in the universe, I am re identify who I am in this moment. It happens through a principle called contrast. Contrast is simply the experiences I have is a living human being that says this works for me, this doesn’t work for me, this is me, this is not me. This used to work for me, but this doesn’t work anymore. And whether we realize that or not this ever evolving, unfolding person that we all are and have the beauty and the privilege of being on this planet has number one, the seeds of your creation. It’s your DNA, it knows what you’ve come here to be to do to become to express and it tells us all the time, what that is. And at the end of the day, when it comes to the relationship with myself, it is everything. It is life itself. And at the end of the day, it really doesn’t give two shits about anybody else because it is dedicated to you becoming who you have the capacity to be. That’s it. Relationships are attracted into our lives. And they help show us the places inside of ourselves. Right? And that contrast that work and that don’t work, that we’re shutting down that we’re putting up with it. We’re going along with that we’re right not showing up and it’s constantly nudging us, right? It’s constantly speaking to us, just like our physical body say, I’m tired. I need a drink of water. I gotta poop right? Now figure it out. It says this, isn’t you. Why are you lying? Why are you letting go? or why aren’t you letting go? Why are crumbling, it’s time to go. It’s time to move. Come on. Let’s go. You can do this, right? It’s talking to us all the time. But instead of listening to that, we listen to the exterior around us thinking that they know better than us as our individual selves. I would say the relationship with yourself is life itself. And when you violate that, you violate the being that you are. That’s what I have to say about that.
Victoria Volk 29:57
goosebumps. goosebumps. Because that really speaks to intuition, it speaks to living in integrity with yourself, what you value, honoring your own values, identifying when your values are being dishonored, all of that. That’s brilliant. I love how you just so eloquently set it to.
Staci Bartley 30:19
Well, thank you I think the the thing about relationships that really trips us up is that we’re trying to do them in a manner of pleasing someone else. And that if I sacrifice myself right, love is sacrifice, we say it’s a choice, we have all these little stories I would say about what love is, and love is permission. And I really want your listeners to hear that permission is what love is unconditional love is not sacrifice of self or obligation, it’s not sacrificing myself to please you. And when you’re happy than I can be. Those are all the places of manipulation where we get hung up in personalization, etc. And those are the places where we, we hear all the mental health challenges that come as a byproduct of our relationships, right? The gaslighting the gnarly, you know, all the common labels that we have in the mental health world, around my relationship with so and so the real problem is, is that it’s it’s a form of manipulation. And you think that by making them happy or finding a person that you can make happy is going to make you happy, know, what’s going to make you happy, is you aligning with who you are and who you have the capacity to be, and learning how to listen to that creation that you are. Because that’s new life for the person for each of us individually. relationships, I love to say they are the best personal growth vehicle on the planet. If you want to do some personal growth, you want to put it on steroids. Just get it into a relationship, it’ll take care of everything. It’ll bring up all your insecurities, all your fears, your shortcomings, all the things that you want to pull your hair out about. Right, it gives you more, it gives you more everything, more problems to solve more challenges to face. Yes, more love has the potential to give you more acceptance, more more comfort, like there’s a lot of more in there on the good side, too. It’s not just that, but we think that it’s going to solve our life’s problems and not realize what the what it is, is the vehicle that it truly is in our lives, right? The gifts and why we attract it into our lives is just to help us grow. It’s to help us to become who we are. And like I already said, our soul, our self, the person you have the capacity to be really doesn’t care about anybody else. It’s dedicated to you becoming who you have the capacity to be in this very short window, you have to live. Right? Are you going to do it? Are you going to go for it? Are you gonna be it? Are you going to sacrifice and give it to somebody else? And I tell you what it will kick your fanny. If that’s your choice, you can try that it will continue to kick your fanny until the day leave this planet.
Victoria Volk 33:00
Do you think it’s possible then? If relationships aren’t like this self growth vehicle that we sign up for? Do you think it’s possible that you can do that in partnership with someone else? And stay together? I mean, obviously, there’s people that are married 50-60 years, right? Are they married 50-60 years because they have this secret sauce or secret secret that no one else knows? Like? Can you speak to that?
Staci Bartley 33:33
Yes, I love that question. So just for the record, I’m married, and I’ve been with my partner for 10 years, Tom, but same guys on the porch. Yes, absolutely. You can do it in partnership. And you can do it for lifelong partnership. And love. Remember what I said just a moment ago is permission. It’s permission for me to be me. And to feel the way I feel by nature that I need to get that permission to you too. It’s not a one-way street here. You get to have the permission to if I really love you to feel the way you feel, and to be where you are to have the needs and the struggles that you have to. My only job in partnership with you is it would be as a friend, as a lover, as a as a daughter as a business partner, right? My only my only position I can take is somebody of support. It’s not my job to fix you. It’s not my job to figure that out for you. What’s going on. My only place with inside of working with myself is to support you. And you becoming all that you can be to as I do the work of doing what I can be. And then this whole relationship experience takes on a totally different trajectory. It’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s not about right, who which way we should go when we fight and argue about that. It becomes everybody has a peace of mind. attribute into the relationship, it becomes a conversation that sounds like this. So, what do you got? This is what I got. Where are you? This is where I’m at what’s possible now? Oh, wow, okay, well hold on that one. What now? What do you got it? Where are you? It’s Hawaii, you look like you’re struggling? How can I support you today? What do you need? Is there anything I can do to make your life better? And sometimes it’s just leave me alone. I can’t, I can’t ship that to you right now. I’m sorry. The biggest problem that I see in relationships is there’s no permission to say no, there’s no permission to be where you are. And there’s no permission to meet what you need when you need it. It’s run-on manipulation and leverage, nine times out of 10. And it’s not our fault. It’s what we’ve been taught in our society. manipulation is the systems that we have been raised in. And I want to create a little clarity, if I may, there, Victoria. But the end of the day manipulation is really simple. It seems complicated, it seems scary. We’ll grab our chest and go, oh, I don’t do that. Yes, you do. You’re a human being. That’s what we do. Because we don’t know how to ask for our needs to be met, we manipulate, we drop a hint, we write we kind of try and coerce we, we spend a great story so that you’ll finally give me what it is I say I want but at the end of the day manipulation is just one price. If you’ll do what I say, you’ll get what you want. And we’re all vying for the same position, because that’s the power position where I get to call the shots. And this is what escalates our conversations, and we dangle what it is you want, so that I can enroll you in doing what I need you to do, it’s gonna make me feel better. And that plays out in our, you know, our work system. You’ve got to work good paycheck; I’ll give you what you want. Just what you want, you want money, right? Okay, do this job you don’t like, and I’ll give you some money. What about our legal system, you’ll obey the rules, you’ll have your freedom, we won’t lock you up in our classrooms, right? You do the course curriculum, you get good grades, and I’m giving you your diploma. There’s always this kind of tit for tat, that we play in our society. And we even raise our families, that way, I have raised my kids that way. And to get chores done, you can take the car, and go to your friend’s house, I’ll give you your allowance, right? There’s, there’s all of this, do what I say, and you’ll get what you want, even in love. If you do what I say, I’ll accept you, I love you, I’ll be there for you. I’ll hold you, we can have sex tonight, there’s always leverage points, where I’m leveraging my relationship with my mother. And we don’t even realize we’re doing it because it is so taught in our society.
Victoria Volk 37:40
So, what do you do about it?
Staci Bartley 37:43
You start the permission of, hey, this is where I’m at where you told me about that? Let’s learn, it becomes more of a conversation for understanding instead of who’s right and who’s wrong. Who’s got it all figured out? Or whose way is best? Everybody’s ways best. And if we could hear and understand those parts and pieces, there would be a whole new way that would birth to get us through it. Just like the lease option contract for love. Let’s go back to that as an example. What was the pressure? Tom could have just as easily leveraged you into a place where you want me, then you’d better get in? Because this door leaving. That’s manipulation. Instead of saying, hey, you’re panicking, you’re freaking out right now. Like you have a lot of commitment phobia here. Now, he could have also said, You’re a hot mess girlfriend. I don’t want anything to do with that still killer. Next, you could have done that, too. Right? Could have leveraged on either side of that. But that’s not what happened. Let me share. And I could tell him how afraid I was, I could share with him that this was a terrifying moment for me. And I didn’t know how to navigate it, which was the truth. Right? And then I could say, Oh, no, no. What about this idea? Anyway, that’s a really great idea. Let’s see where it takes us. Let’s go I’m in. And we created something that was completely different than any of the paradigms out there, which could happen in our human experiences more often, just like we do in tech, just like we do with new software. Relationships really aren’t a different container in our lives. The principles that apply everywhere else in our lives approach applies here in relationships as well. We just don’t use them. We think it has to go a certain way according to the story and the narrative that we’ve been taught. And we force ourselves into being people that were not in the hopes that we’ll be loved. Which to me is the greatest tragedy of all right? I’ve lived that. I’ve tried to push myself into being something that I was not so that I could, you know, help my family recover. Repair from the grief that I created for them the ripples that went out and shops, right then the extended family. I tried to do my best to be something that I wasn’t in it didn’t work it actually created More health challenges and break down for me as it does for all of us. Right? So there has to be permission, we have to take these paradigms of, you know, person meets person, we get married, we have babies, right? And if we, do it right, and if you’re right, and I’m right, we’re going to live happily ever after. That is a story. But that story is a lie. It’s like the Santa Claus story. It’s not reality, as we all try and force ourselves into these paradigms that we know we’re not what we think, what’s the other way? What else are we supposed to do? How do you create a committed relationship and partnership, if you don’t do x? There’s lots of ways, but we don’t entertain those kinds of conversations. There’s no permission at all.
Victoria Volk 40:48
It sounds like to me like this contract for love is very much moldable to each individual, what they contribute and what they want to bring to the relationship or what they do bring to the relationship. Is that accurate in saying that it can work for anybody? Like it’s not like this prescription? of do this, do that, do this, do that? And you’ll end up with why you know, x plus, you know, z equals y, whatever it is? I don’t remember that. But I mean, is that accurate? insane?
Staci Bartley 41:22
100% accurate? We use it for multicultural couples, we use it for interracial couples, we use it for couples who have different religious backgrounds, cultural backgrounds. Because it is it all it is is you discovering and uncovering what you need and want out of this relationship emotionally. Right? It’s, and then you let the other person reveal that that’s the process. So, whatever is in that lease option, contract is a byproduct of who you see yourself as in this moment. And then it will constantly evolve and grow with you through time. Because that’s all going to change. All of its going to change. That’s why you, you want to do evaluations, but you also want to do evaluation. So, you can say, hey, I really, really want to get good at this. I mean, that’s the thing is when we step into relationships, and release, let’s say we we stepped to the altar, and we’re trying to live that story of marriage, and I’m not anti marriage, I’m married. When we step to say, hey, I do, I want to give my life to you. As human beings, we’re really stepping forward and saying, I really want to give us my best shot. I really want this to go well. We’re not saying hey, I’m gonna really screw you over the day, I step up to that altar. I’m not saying that, saying, I really want to do my best here, right? And if we could be honest, we would say I’m, I’m terrified, right? I don’t know how this is gonna go. But I’m willing to take a gamble on it, right. And that’s where the lease option contract for me gave me so much comfort, because I knew I could come back. And we can talk about what worked and what didn’t work for me. And you could do the same. And I would teach you, which is our responsibility as a human being. It’s our responsibility to teach each other how to love ourselves best, we’re the only ones that know what anyone wants to know what we need. And what are we taught instead, to make a checklist, check all the boxes, right? And it’s usually the physical aspects, or they gotta have money, and they got to be sexy, they got to be a hunk, or right, they got to come from a good family, they got to be a certain religion, none of those things are going to do anything for you, at the end of the day, when you start talking about the emotional experience you’re going to have in your relationship. What about all of that, because if that goes haywire, you’re really not going to care about the money, I have lost the couples who come home to empty houses, and yet the wives have given everything on the planet. I’m not going to make it to church because I can’t get my Fanny out of the bed. It’s not going to matter, right? I’m not going to be able to, you know, see some of these co creations called our kids through because we’re a hot mess. We can’t be there for him. So, you don’t have anything to contribute. And yet we use those benchmarks circumstantially as, oh, this is good person. reality is we’re all good people. We are all doing the very best, we know how. And until we know how to do better, we will do what we know. And when our backs get pressed against the wall emotionally, what most of us know is some form of manipulation, leverage, defense, attack, personalization. Those are the things that have been modeled to us. Not permission. Not a place where I say, hey, you’re really struggling, what do you need? How can I support you? You don’t know how, okay, well, I’m right here and you let me know and I’ll be ready. And then I if I’m on a support person, or role, I’m going to go, go be happy, I better go be happy because there’s going to be an emotional drain from a loved one that’s going to be required of me if I want to truly support them, I better keep my own wills together, right? If only I can do that. There’s only going to be me that knows how I want you to hold Me for touch me for comfort me. For those specific words, I need you to say to me when I’m hurting, I’ve literally taught Tom to come up from behind me, when I’m turning into a hot mess, doesn’t matter if it’s fine or I’m having a bad day, kiss me on the back of my neck, and whisper in my ear state, we got this, because that’s what I need to hear, regardless of what’s breaking down inside of me, right? And every single time even though I’ve taught it to him, and it’s as unromantic, as unromantic can be, it works every single time. And he has one for me, too. And as it changes and evolves, we can play around with it. I don’t like that, oh, yeah, it’s kind of like getting somebody to finally scratch your itch, you know, like, oh, that is the best. And there’s only one person in the whole wide world who knows what that is. And that’s us, individually. So that relationship with ourselves becomes so, so so important.
Victoria Volk 45:54
The one thing and the one word that really came up, and is kind of like the crux of everything is change, right? And that’s a grief is a change in a familiar pattern of behavior, right? Its grief is inevitable in our lives. And based on what you’ve shared in relationships, as well. And so, when we’re not feeling like those needs are being met, or not feeling like we’re, we personally feel like we have shame or guilt because we’re not meeting the needs of the person that we said, we would love for the rest of our lives. There’s guilt and shame in that there’s grief there. So, it’s just one big hot mess. Grief pot, right? Until we can become emotionally honest.
Staci Bartley 46:41
Yes
Victoria Volk 46:42
That’s really what it’s about is becoming emotionally honest.
Staci Bartley 46:45
Oh, I love that you said that word. You are so brilliant. Yes, it’s absolutely becoming emotionally honest. And I have a process in my work called emotional weightlifting. Because most of us are so so very weak when it comes to our emotional bodies. In fact, a lot of us don’t even realize we have emotional bodies, we have a physical body, we have an emotional body, the one is invisible, right, and we feel it, we know it’s there. And then we have this physical body that we give a lot of time and attention to typically. And that’s our navigation system. And we don’t know how to create strengthen our emotional bodies, like we would go for a physical workout. And so, we have an emotional weightlifting gym, where it’s, it’s, of course, emotional, but it’s it’s learning how to show up. It’s learning how to own your emotions. state where you are, give yourself that permission to just look and see inside what those are. Because when it comes to relationships, the hardest thing for us to do for ourselves, the relationship with ourselves or others, is to just simply amass the courage to show up and tell the truth, right, like you said that emotional honesty is the thing that’s going to hunt us down. It’s the thing that’s going to kick our Fannie’s again and again and again. Man, I’ve had my Fanny kicked over that one so many times. the whole pregnancy and such right.
Victoria Volk 48:14
I have a follow up question of that. And that, what if you’re doing the work, you’re personally showing up in that way and working on yourself and trying to understand yourself and working through that stuff. But your partner is kind of stagnant? They’re not really jiving on the whole personal development work on myself. Let’s figure this out. You know, they’re not on the same page, what do you do, then?
Staci Bartley 48:44
I won’t either think about the only thing you can do is that support where we talked about, right? And be a demonstration and the demonstration is far better than the words that are going to come out of your mouth. And one or two things is going to happen. Because believe me, if in partnerships, if somebody is starting to grow and outpace the partner, everybody knows. And oftentimes that’s what shuts the other person down. Because they’re afraid to go there. And they’re hoping that they can enroll you in not going where it is you need to go. I had a I had a beautiful relationship that taught me this front and center. I was I was I was at the height of understanding a lot of things about myself and my own personal growth journey. And he was terrified to go there. He did not want to go there because why? Why would that happen? Because they don’t want to confront themselves. It really doesn’t have anything to do with loving you and not loving because they’ve got their own process to sort out with inside of themselves. Remember that relationship with self. Well, that one’s a hot mess. And they know that in order to grow just like you are growing, they’re going to have to confront look at some things with inside of themselves. And I just Need, I just need you to ponder the question for a minute, who are we to tell anybody what time and when to do that work? That my job is their job. It’s their relationship with themselves. It’s their connection to whatever we call the divine universe, God spirit. It’s not my job to enroll them, coerce them, convince them, but I can invite them. And I can be a demonstration of what that looks like. And then yes, the truth is the part that we never talked about is there may come a point in time where that relationship will not be able to write survive, it will separate. But here’s the mind Bender, who’s to say that’s a bad thing. Those are off times that catalytic events in our lives that then go, Oh, I can’t tell you how many partners all of a sudden, once they say, I’m not going to stay in this relationship, this is over. Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’m going to go there. And that’s what it took for them to finally be willing to raise their hand and say, Okay, I’m going to come to the table, I was so scared. I’m so scared. That’s what’s written on the show. I am so terrified to look at myself and to go there into those places that I need. I know I need to go in order to be where you are and showing me what you’re accomplishing. And maybe sometimes take something like that right? You think I think that’s the upside of grief, don’t you? Don’t you think that’s the upside of grief is that those grief moments are the catalytic moments that causes us to see things or be willing to do things that maybe we were never willing to do before. I was too afraid to confront others too afraid to say that I was too afraid to go there. And it finally gets so painful you go Screw it, okay, whatever. Come and claim I’m going to tell you the truth, right? If we didn’t have that pain as the characteristic like push us sometimes like those little edges, we know we need to jump off but we’re just too afraid to do so, we wouldn’t do it we even do it.
Victoria Volk 52:01
We even resist that for, we can resist that for decades though too
Staci Bartley 52:09
Yeah, long as possible, long as possible we’re going to try and get over it under it around it right out skirted lie about it, pretend it doesn’t exist, I mean you know we have our little things and finally, when something like that that’s important to us, we’re gonna see a lot of catalytic events now just because of the post COVID thing you know, historically these are moments where people are going to finally jump in and get married or jump into have that baby or in their relationship enough because we’ve come front to front with our mortality, right we come face to face with crap, I can’t take the pain anymore. Screw it. It’s there’s no a lot to think about there but but everything transforms jobs let get let go of that aren’t a good fit. Once I get into them, I they were a good fit for a while and now they’re not right businesses that I start some of them startups some of them I need to let go of some family members I was really close to I let go write some letters I am close to I let go up. And when you think about it, that’s just as normal and natural as other things in this world.
Victoria Volk 53:18
I had this picture come into my mind that’s like when you’re, when you’re in the mess within the thick of it, it’s really hard to see the start line. And I don’t say the finish line, I say the start line because that’s really when your life starts. When you decide that you’re ready to just clean up the mess. It’s like I was telling my kids, you make a mess, you clean it up. And that was such a as you’re speaking to it’s like that as an analogy for life. You make a mess; you clean it up. Whether it’s within yourself in your relationships, you know, you need to apologize, apologize, you made a mess, apologize. Often oftentimes if you know if we think we need forgiveness, oftentimes we need to apologize for something,
Staci Bartley 54:01
Even with inside of ourselves, you know, sometimes when I when I feel like I’ve hurt somebody’s feelings, or I realized I want to I want to do over I call them do overs. I want to want to take another crack at that that didn’t go the way I wanted it to go or what I intended to communicate came out wrong, right? We don’t realize that in cleaning up those emotional messages because we don’t talk about them. We don’t talk about how to clean up emotional messes. Where do you go to learn that? We don’t realize that we can create a deal over and so in real time call up a friend and say hey, I just really want to apologize about what just happened or what was said and, and inevitably nine times out of 10 they’ll get Oh no, no, no, it’s really no problem. You know, he didn’t do that at all. They’re trying to comfort me. And then I’ll say please just just hear me. I appreciate that. That didn’t come across the way I feel like it did. I’m actually cleaning this up for me. I need to tell you, I’m sorry that did not go the way I want in a bit to go. And thank you for letting me do that we don’t realize sometimes that’s a gift for the person who’s wanting to clean up a mess for themselves. Remember, it all goes back to that relationship with ourselves. So, like, I need to do this for me. And I need you to be able to do this for me. And we don’t realize what a gift that is that we give to others. Love In addition to being permission is really the ability to give and receive. And if we get stuck on either side of that equation, it’s going to be rough with Lima. I never give her Gover Gover, Gover and don’t ever allow myself to receive, that’s going to be a problem if I’m a receiver, receiver receiver. And I never allow myself to learn how to give, that’s going to be a problem. But you want to be able to adapt and have the ability to do both and learn in practice when and how to do both. And we want to be able to learn how to clean up our messes because they’re inevitable. They are so inevitable it’s going to love is the grandest journey and it is the messiest journey on the planet. And we’ve got to learn to be okay with that. But there is not anything perfect about it. Right. And yet, that’s the pursuit of trying to be perfect. I have a perfect partner a perfect this perfect that it doesn’t exist. It’s just a story. It’s a great story. I like the story. But it’s just a story the end of the day.
Victoria Volk 56:17
Let’s talk about story as well, like stemming in childhood because we’re like really getting long on time. So, it’s okay to go here real quick. But just talking about the stories that we are born into and raised around about grief about what, what it’s like to love and be loved. And how ingrained in our DNA that that kind of becomes, and how we kind of live into that. Because I know for you personally as well. You didn’t have your father in your formidable years. And so, and then when you had a stepfather, it was like, Nope, just go along, get on your way. So, do you feel like how you approached relationships with the opposite sex was greatly shaped by that childhood experience?
Staci Bartley 57:17
Yeah, absolutely. Losing a person as a child, set me on the path to realizing how important and precious relationships really were. I remember this moment where the casket of my, or the lid of my dad’s casket was closing. And I thought that wasn’t my blankie that I saw love that always gave me comfort I wanted, right, it wasn’t my favorite toys, my favorite dolls, my doll house wasn’t my stuffed animals on the bed, it was just my dad. And you realize, man, that’s the most precious thing I have as a kid, and it kind of sets us off. And I set me off on a path initially of just being a pleaser, all I have to do is please make people happy. And then I’m gonna always have people that I love in my life. Until that didn’t work. And so, then I swung obviously to the other side saying, okay, what’s going to be done at my terms and a crack the whip, you know, the my rules, my way or the highway, like didn’t work either. Right? It doesn’t, and absolutely shapes you and I think you crave that attention from from a male person, right? You want that love and that acceptance and appreciation, and we make it up. But it has to come from that without realizing what I really needed was me. I even remember being a single person after my first divorce. And I really, really believed with all my kids that all I needed to do was insert a man here and then it was all gonna work out it was all gonna be okay. Looking back, you know, my kids didn’t need a man in their life. That’s not what they needed. They needed me. You didn’t need to be there for them to be whole and happy and joyful, so that I had something to pour into them. Fine, frantically running around a hot mess, trying to find mount insert here thinking that’s gonna make my family perfect. They needed me, wasn’t it? Right? It was that simple. And so we make up these things that we think we need that are going to be a life changing moment. And you have to realize there isn’t a life changing moment. Life that’s going to march on day in and day out. Thank goodness with the renewal process. That is to give us another chance to get up to go to try again. It’s going to be messy, and we got to get good with that we’ve got to let go of this idea of perfect getting it all right. Love to say there’s nothing wrong with you. We are not broken as human beings. We are amazing and resilient and capable and strong. We are so courageous so much more than we even realize. What we don’t have is the ability to understand how to navigate when it hurts and to talk about that and to share without that, and to realize that it’s part of the journey, we heard emotionally, we think we’ve done something wrong. Well, he wouldn’t think like, if you cut your finger, you’d done something wrong. I mean, it was unfortunate, but you wouldn’t think you were a bad person because you accidentally were chopping a tomato and cut your finger, you would address the pain, you would look at it, you would remedy it, and you would take care of it and move on. And so, it must become with our emotional pain to write. We sweep it up, we make amends, We, we say what we need to say, we get the comfort that we need. And we sweep it up, and we put it in the trash can and we leave it in the trash can unfortunately, with our emotions, sometimes we have a tendency to dig back through, I think, miss something, right?
Victoria Volk 1:00:46
Or I gotta keep it just in case, I might need this emotion later.
Staci Bartley 1:00:53
Exactly. And instead of realizing, look, if it’s a problem, it’s gonna show up again, down the future, just I might cut my finger again, might happen, but I worry about it, I’m probably more likely to cut it again. And again, and again, right there were noticed that get really nervous about cut it again and again and again until you realize to find some use with it, right? So, I say we got to take out our emotional trash, we have to leave it in the can leave it there. And that’s hard for us. We think we understand we’re missing, sift through it one more time. No, just if it’s a problem, it’ll show up down the road, just go. Right, and then we’ll address it then and not one second before because unfortunately, we spend a lot of time worrying about things that are going to happen again. And then we missed the rest period. And then when that happens again, right? It happens again, I’m like, so I’m always living in this place where it’s happened. And it’s happened again and again and again, that realizing it’s because of the way I’m holding it. I won’t take the trash out, let it be. And that’s a conversation that we talk a lot about in the work that I do with affairs, you know, infidelity and betrayal. Right, that’s a huge part of broken hearts. We’re afraid that if we let go of it, that we’re going to be in pain without telling the truth that actually you’re in pain right now. Like, right? You’re so worried that’s going to happen again, you’re in pain, you’re not allowing yourself to enjoy what’s like refreshing. What’s happening, that’s different. Now enjoy it, get it all over. You love it. And if it happens down the road, we’ll address it again then. But you’re not going to stop it from happening. You’re just going to live as though it’s happened again already right now.
Victoria Volk 1:02:32
Yeah, it doesn’t matter if it does again, because you’re already feeling it in your mind in your heart.
Staci Bartley 1:02:37
And your body’s already paying the price for it.
Victoria Volk 1:02:40
Unnecessary suffering that we inflict on ourselves, right?
Staci Bartley 1:02:44
Yeah, I think well, who was it that said, there’s a there’s a wonderful woman who said, I wish I could remember her name. I can’t right now it’s not coming to me. You can’t hurt me. That’s my job. I take care of that perfectly fine. Good luck. I got Intel info you are you don’t even have access too.
Victoria Volk 1:03:07
So, what would you say? All of these lessons in grief? Because really, it’s a lot of grief and your stories threaded through them all? What have they taught you the most?
Staci Bartley 1:03:21
The thing that comes to mind is an experience a gift that my mom gave me as a really young girl. So, if I may, I’m gonna answer your question by just sharing this one last thought was the day after my dad’s funeral. And my brothers and sister and I were sitting around in our living room, wondering what happens next. Right? funerals over everybody’s gone home. The dishes have been washed. And it was just this quiet, eerie moment after the funeral where we were all sitting together wondering if Christmas was gonna happen or vacations. birthdays, I mean, how does life go on for a parent, we need to know. When we were in the throes of this conversation. My mom was to hurt us in her bedroom, which is right next door living. We have this big, beautiful window and this bright orange carpet. That was kind of a thing back in the 70s. And she came out of her bedroom, walked into the living room, and I’ll never forget her opening up the curtains on that big, beautiful window. And she said, I’ve heard what you’re saying. I reassure you, the sun will shine in this house, whether it is shining outside or not. She will go on and we live, and we will find happiness again. And I remember that just seems so comforting. Like Okay, I guess you just go again. I guess you just pick up and find the sunshine, the sunshine, whatever little bright spot you can claim to in the moment to just put one foot in front of the other and go again. And I think I think that’s what I’d like to leave with is it’s about that, right? Just like it’s difficult for us to show up in our really ships and say, well, we need to say sometimes it’s difficult for us to show up for ourselves. But if we just have a teeny tiny bit of courage to just get up and try again, the rest of it will ironically take care of itself. Right? The sun will shine. Yes, there will be storms and thunderstorms and cloudy days, we think, gosh, well, this time of year shine again, remember, it always does, we can just hang in there long enough, right. And I find it much easier for myself to move to keep going right to learn to grow, to have conversations to connect to just stay in motion. That for me has created the momentum that I’ve needed in order to just keep putting that one foot in front of the other so that I can find that ray of sunshine again. It doesn’t have to be shining outside in order to shine.
Victoria Volk 1:05:55
That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Is there anything else? I mean, there’s so many questions I would have loved to have gotten to I think we’ll just have to do this again.
Staci Bartley 1:06:07
Yeah, let’s come back and do it again. I want your listeners to know that they are hackable human beings. They’re beautiful, they’re brilliant. It’s nothing wrong. Just that your staff, your hearts been broken. And our hearts are so resilient. It’s our minds that won’t allow us to go on our emotional bodies, they can heal from anything they are selling. They’re strong, they’re courageous, they have the capacity and the know how to heal. It’s our minds that say oh, that’s not possible. Can’t go there can’t do that. That’s not gonna happen. Don’t let your mind convince you. What your heart already knows to be true. You got this you can do the best you can overcome anything and when I say anything, I mean anything. Because you’re a human being as being a human being. You are amazing. You are bold, amazing and so capable of so much more than you think you are. So go for it. Get up and go again. And I’m sure you’re going to be surprised at what you learn to discover by yourself. Just as we all are when we’re going through hell right you look back and go I really am kind of grateful for that experience. Wouldn’t want to admit I wouldn’t want to do it again but I wouldn’t want to miss it. And by the way I got pregnant three times out of wedlock like three times it took me three rounds to learn this lesson. Right after that, you are enough you can do enough you can be enough and it’s not about getting a perfect it’s about getting up and going again and loving with all your heart is primarily yourself. yourself first.
Victoria Volk 1:08:04
Perfectly said it needs nothing else added. Thank you so much.
Staci Bartley 1:08:10
My pleasure.
Victoria Volk 1:08:11
Where can people reach you or find you, they’d like to connect with you?
Staci Bartley 1:08:17
Yeah, there’s several places were all over social media. But I think if you enjoyed this conversation you want to learn more. The best place for you to go would be to look my podcast up the air on kk and w 1150. Every Thursday at 1pm PST. And I’m on all the way anywhere you find your podcast, you can look and search for Love Shack live. It’s a place where we come back, and we talk about the realities of relationships. We talk about the conversations that really impact our lives when it comes to love. And also, you can go to my website at stacibartley.com and Stacy’s only thing I got a style right stacibartley.com, love shack live, you can Google my name on our website.
Victoria Volk 1:09:02
And you’ll find those resources also in the show notes. Thank you again, Stacy.
Staci Bartley 1:09:10
My pleasure.
Victoria Volk 1:09:11
And remember when you unleash your life, you unleash your heart. Much love.
Death/Dying, Grief Stories, Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Miscarriage, Pregnancy & Infant Loss, Widowhood |
Arielle Arbushites | Widowed By Suicide at 29 & 3x Not a Mother
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
Arielle wasn’t a newcomer to grief and loss by the time her husband decided to take his own life when she was only 29.
She shares the highs, lows, and fears of navigating all of the unknowns and changes that came with losing her beloved, Rick. She wondered if she would ever love again, and because she and Rick couldn’t have children together, she then had to face the possibility that she would never become a mother. Would she meet someone who would want to have children? Would she meet someone while she’s still young enough to begin the chapter of parenthood? So many unknowns and the loss of hopes, dreams, and expectations.
Spoiler alert! Arielle does eventually remarry but wedded bliss doesn’t last long. After three miscarriages, she and her new love wondered if their mutual dreams and desires to be parents would ever come true.
Every miscarriage was different, and she shares exactly how different they were in this episode and how she found her way to wellness. She also shares the one thing that helped her soothe her own soul, not to mention how she found her own way to share with others how she was feeling without the pressure of needing to have what are often uncomfortable conversations.
RESOURCES:
CONNECT WITH ARIELLE:
Victoria Volk 00:01
Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of grieving voices. Today my lovely guest is Arielle Arbrushites, and she is a licensed master social worker specializing in the field of grief and loss. She’s also experienced her own grief and loss. And we will dig into all of that. Thank you for being here.
Arielle Arbrushites 00:25
Thanks for having me.
Victoria Volk 00:27
So, let’s start with how we connected and and the losses that bring you to the podcast.
Arielle Arbrushites 00:35
Sure, sure. Well, we connected on on Instagram, I was checking out your account and I, I believe you are checking out mine and I have started, I guess running with more circles of the grief and loss crowd on Instagram in the last couple of months. Um, I am a widow. And I’ve been widowed for almost seven years, it’ll be seven years this coming May. And I, I’m widowed because of suicide, my husband took his own life. And in addition to that, I’ve also experienced three miscarriages. And then I had that lovely diagnosis of recurrent pregnancy loss or multiple miscarriages, and you know, very grateful to have a baby son now, but it took quite some time for me to have a living child. So, between those two things, I sort of joke around that I’m a good poster child for disenfranchised grief because suicide loss and miscarriage are just types of losses that people don’t talk about, or at least they don’t talk about, in the same way as other losses are talked about. And I just feel as a social worker, that it’s very important to give voice to those losses because it normalizes it for people, it validates their grief and their feelings. And those things are very, very important to me. So, I’m a writer, I think first and foremost. And then second, I’m a social worker. And those two things, they just they melt together pretty well.
Victoria Volk 02:09
Yeah. And actually, I think I reached out to you. In fact, on Instagram, I think there was this immediate connection for both of us. And also, to like you work in the hospice arena.
Arielle Arbrushites 02:21
I do, I do. I started out as a hospice social worker, you know, as we say, in hospice in the field, meaning traveling from home to home, and taking care of hospice patients in their homes, whatever their home might be. So, whether it’s a house, an apartment, whether it’s a skilled nursing facility, and assisted living facility, whatever they would call their residents. I was doing that kind of work in hospice, and then just a little over two years ago, actually became a manager in hospice. So, my title now is manager of support services, which means I oversee all of the hospice, social workers in our hospice agency, all of the spiritual counselors, all of the bereavement counselors and the volunteer coordinator in that program. So that is really cool. And the way I explain it to people who aren’t familiar with Hospice is I’m basically in managing everything non nursing related. So, anything that’s that’s not nursing, it kind of falls under me, which is cool. And I don’t really like to consider myself a boss. I like the term leader a lot more. So, you know, in leadership, and in my job, we talk about that a lot. I really want to be a leader, not a boss, and I don’t micromanage, and I like to work with people not above them. And, you know, the the hierarchy is not important to me at all. And, of course, first and foremost by profession. I’m still a social worker, and I do still see patients in hospice. I just also happen to manage 25 people at the same time, so I don’t see as many patients as I used to.
Victoria Volk 03:49
So how did you get into this work? Was it those losses that you experience?
Arielle Arbrushites 03:55
It’s an interesting question, because I think people ask me that all the time. If they find out about the losses that I’ve had, and I actually my husband died before I was doing hospice work. However, I had interned for hospice, when I was getting my master’s in social work. One of my field placements was in hospice. And that’s how I knew that I was called to do that work, and I really wanted to my husband was still living at that point. And then, you know, of course, my husband dying by suicide, that has has nothing to do with hospice, you know, for the most part, but a loss is a loss and grief is grief and widowhood is widowhood. And, you know, what you experience in the aftermath, there’s so many similarities no matter what the loss or how someone died, so after my husband died, I worked at my previous job for about a year a little over a year before I made the jump, to go to hospice as a full time employee because I felt like in my first year of grief, it pretty probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do just for my own self care, I didn’t want to dive right into helping other people with death and dying and their grief and their losses when I really needed to take care of myself. But as more time went on, I thought, Okay, you know what, I’m still grieving, because I think you grieve forever. That’s, that’s, you know, my belief. I thought, well, I’m still grieving. But I know I really think that I’m healthy and well enough and healed enough that I could help other people. And I think my personal experience was really going to benefit what I could give to a job like that. So, I hopped back into hospice at that point. And I hadn’t had any miscarriages, I hadn’t had any baby losses. At that point, I wasn’t able to have children with my late husband. And that was always a personal struggle to where I really wanted to become a parent, but I couldn’t, and I couldn’t and years passed and I couldn’t and you know, all the trying anybody who’s been through this, you know, you know, you try and you try and years past, and it’s just it becomes so heavy. So then losing my husband, of course, was losing all that, too. So, if I really wanted to be a mom, now I have to find somebody who wants to also be a parent, and how am I ever going to find this perfect person, I have to start all over and you know, wasting more time. And that’s kind of the wheels in my head, were turning with that kind of a thing. But I am remarried, and I’ve been married for, it’ll be four years this summer. So about three and a half years right now that I’ve been married to my current husband, Jeff. And all of the losses that I’ve experienced with the babies were with him. So, we had a lot of struggles trying to become parents as well. And it was just loss after loss after loss with him. And those were really, really difficult in a completely different way. And as far as the hospice work, it was always really cool seems like the wrong word when I’m talking about loss like that. But it was always really cool to be working for a hospice agency, when I was going through those losses, because you can imagine, if you work in the field of death, and dying, and grief and loss, you’re going to be, I think, more compassionate to your colleagues that are going through something like that, even when it’s disenfranchised grief. And if I needed to, you know, obviously be off from work for a few days to recover, and, you know, go through a surgery and recover from that, I felt like everyone was very thoughtful and caring, and it was a really great place to be working when I had to go through something like that. And I know so many people don’t have that privilege. So that was always, you know, a blessing. I don’t think people were apt to talk about it with me so much, because it’s still like that hush hush kind of grief, even in the field of grief and loss, believe it or not, but I did feel a lot of compassion when I worked with with hospice during those time.
Victoria Volk 07:53
I can’t imagine the whispers it’s like, I heard she had a miscarriage. And you know, it’s like the people that feel so uncomfortable with what don’t know what to say, and don’t know how to behave around someone who has had a loss like that. And, you know, I just want for our listeners who may not be really as familiar with the term disenfranchised. It was actually coined by a professor in the 80s, when he had a student that talked about the death of her ex-husband, and how it wasn’t her loss wasn’t even really recognized. And even though they had been together for many, many years, and when in grief recovery, the label doesn’t help us. It doesn’t tell us how to move beyond loss. But I just wanted to explain the definition a little bit. So, when that happened with your first husband, what were some of the things that you experienced and went through in respect to feeling that it was disenfranchised? Like what can you elaborate more on that?
Arielle Arbrushites 09:01
Yeah, absolutely. And again, to your point, I guess I was lucky that I was actually truly married to him, so I was a recognized a widow by society versus if we had been in a partnership for a while or he was just my fiance, or you know, people just they like the society likes the labels, right? You know, it doesn’t help us grieve. But society recognizes that because this disenfranchised grief is grief that’s not recognized or acknowledged by society in the same way as other grief. So, um, you know, things that I experienced, by way of this disenfranchised grief terminology. I think, um, you know, my husband dying by suicide, it makes people uncomfortable, you know, and rightly so, because it is a trauma, you know, it was a traumatic experience for me, but, um, they, they rope you in to the story. So, the way I explain this is You know, people will say things like, you know, did you notice anything? Or what’s what’s the worst version of that question I always say is Didn’t you notice anything and, you know, like, that just kind of gets you. It kind of takes you into the story as though you were the bystander there. And you were you somehow have some responsibility to retell that story for people. People don’t tend to ask those questions when someone is dying of a medical event, a heart attack cancer, even, you know, if somebody is a soldier in the military, it we know, as society, it comes with that, you know, expectation that you might be on a dangerous assignment, you know, or war might be part of the equation, it doesn’t make the loss any easier for anyone who would lose a spouse or a person that way. And that’s not what I’m saying. It’s just that, you know, if you said, you know, my husband died in war, okay, you know, my husband died of cancer, or my husband had a heart attack, nobody asks you to that retail, how the heart attack went? Or what happened, or what was noticed, or what wasn’t noticed. And, you know, I think people sometimes they come from a place of like, morbid curiosity, where they actually want to know what happened with my husband. But for the most part, that’s not even why those questions are asked, people are just so caught up in that story that they pull the, you know, the breathed into it. And I think that was often really hard. And, you know, just the not talking about it, people will talk about folks who have had long battles with cancer, for example, and, you know, have have died in that way. Equally as awful, you know, there’s no hierarchy, again, with the grief, but people don’t necessarily want to talk about the fact that my husband took his own life and killed himself in our house. And I don’t necessarily always want to keep retelling that story over and over either, but it’s all very quiet, you know, not to mention his name, not to say, oh, you know, he was such a great person, or he was this or he was that or let me tell you a funny story. And, you know, that was that was kind of difficult too.
Victoria Volk 12:16
It’s a different honoring, in a way that the people who maybe not even you know, even if you don’t necessarily have a close relationship with someone, you can definitely find something that had some interaction, you can share something a memory, or an interaction or something with that person. But like you said, that’s a very good point you bring across is that maybe the griever just wants to hear something positive the impact that they had on you as a person while they were alive, right?
Arielle Arbrushites 12:50
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, I, I feel like when we’re talking about disenfranchised grief, I have to bring up the point that there are some people thankfully, nobody I was very close to, because I like to think I choose by my friends, well, but there are people out there who will say things, for example, like, Well, you know, he obviously went to hell, or, you know, God will never forgive him. It’s like, that’s that disenfranchised grief, right? Like, the way he quote unquote, chose to die was something that’s that some people will deem totally unacceptable. And then they’re not telling him that because he’s dead, they’re telling me, which then puts so much more sadness and heaviness and anger on me. And, you know, I think I think people who have lost anyone to suicide, it doesn’t matter if it was a spouse, you know, they probably have experienced some element of that.
Victoria Volk 13:46
That’s very isolating.
Arielle Arbrushites 13:48
Absolutely, and being a widow at 29, which is how old I was when it happened was isolating enough so to put that, on top of it was, was tough.
Victoria Volk 13:59
Which brings to mind things those unhelpful things that people can say, too, is like you’re only 29 there, you know, you have so much more opportunity to meet somebody. Did you hear things like that, too?
Arielle Arbrushites 14:11
Oh, my gosh, so my favorite story about this is I’m at Rick’s funeral I in the front of the funeral home, with the urn of ashes standing there and like the receiving line, you know, everyone comes through and gives you a hug or tells you, their story. And someone actually came up to me on the day of his funeral and said, you know, well, you’re still young, you’re cute, you’ll get married again, like he had been dead for three days. And I just thought that was absolutely horrific. Like the worst thing you could say as I’m standing there with tears streaming down my face grieving my husband, that someone could say that it seemed odd and I’ve always thought to myself, you know, even if people are thinking that and that makes them feel better, like she’ll be okay because you know, she’ll find someone again, if they need to think that there’s no need to say it out loud to me, especially that soon in the grieving process. So it makes me laugh. Now you can tell that I’m like chuckling over it. But you know, at the time, I was just kind of it, I was taken aback. And I, I didn’t really have a response that I can recall.
Victoria Volk 15:18
But all of these things that those comments like that they kind of stack up. And it’s like, and that’s why we isolate as Grievers because we’d rather just stay home then go out in public and hear these things, right?
Arielle Arbrushites 15:30
Absolutely, I couldn’t find really anybody at that point to understand exactly how I was feeling or close enough. I mean, I was 29, some of my friends were still, you know, planning their weddings and getting married. And I had had three weddings to go to my first year of widowhood, which was really, really hard as well. And, you know, no fault of anyone they were, they were celebrating a part of their life. And, you know, one, one part of my life had ended, but it was a, it was a very transitionary time. And it was, it was tough for me, because I felt like to find another 29-year-old widow, I would be hard pressed to find that person. And then even if I did to find someone who had been bereaved by suicide and had to grapple with the the trauma and the guilt, and the, you know, circumstances of that, that would be even more rare. And, you know, that was, that was really something.
Victoria Volk 16:24
So where did you find support?
Arielle Arbrushites 16:26
I think I found support, you know, through writing, because I’ve always turned to writing my entire life to help me process. And then my writing kind of became my outward grieving, it was like my morning. And what I did was I had a daily widow blog, where I would write every single night, and I would publish it every single night. And it really gained, you know, quite a readership. And so, this was back in 2014, I started the blog six days after Rick died, and I just one night decided, you know, I think I have something new to write about, and this will help me and if people read it, and it helps them really great, awesome, but it’s, I’m really gonna write it for me. And when I started out doing it, I was writing, not so much to help other people who had been bereaved, but to help everybody in my life and beyond know, what I might need at any given moment, or how to understand me, or how to see what I was going through. So, it was kind of my way of reaching out, like, you don’t even have to reach out to me, but if you read this blog nightly, you know, you’ll know where I’m at. Because I was all over the place for that whole first year plus, and I did write every single day, for over a year, Chronicle my whole grieving process in real time. And what ended up happening was my friends, my family, my acquaintances, my colleagues, everybody was reading this. And in turn, they knew how to support me, which was awesome, because I was asking for what I needed, or I was telling what I, what I needed. And it got bigger than that. And a lot of people that I didn’t even know were ended up reading it. And, you know, I think it’s still fairly widely read, because I do get messages from time to time, even though that blog has kind of stopped in time. And then I’ve started a new blog, where I’m not labeling myself as a widow so much anymore, but it’s, you know, it’s, it’s still there. And I think people find that they’re not as isolated because they have something to go to, and they see, okay, somebody went through something like this, and it’s there. And I know that I’m not I’m not crazy, I’m normal, because I can read these words. And, you know, that’s always been important to me,
Victoria Volk 18:38
You thought about turning that into a book?
Arielle Arbrushites 18:41
I have, I would really like to and it’s definitely, you know, the next thing on my list of things to publish it, um, it needs a little bit of editing because my, what I really dream of doing is kind of taking that blog, turning it into a book. But now you know, almost seven years later and later in retrospect, I can I have insight into all these little pieces and chapters that I can put in there now that wouldn’t have been there before. So I’d like to have you know, all the stuff from that first year, plus the me now giving her insights into things and I think that would be pretty cool. The good news is, you know, it’s basically all written, and it just needs to be tweaked and edited. So, it’s just a matter of getting it out there. But that’s, it’s actually one of my goals for 2021 to have it, have it be out there published.
Victoria Volk 19:36
I would love to support you in that I started my blog in 2014, my first blog to where I was blogging about personal development and growth spirituality when I felt like I was starting my personal growth journey, after loss and grief and all of that and ended up writing a book to self publishing it so I would love to see that come to fruition for you and went from We can definitely have side chats about that my future.
Arielle Arbrushites 20:03
It’s awesome. yeah, I mean, I applaud you for for your book as well. I mean, it’s just an awesome thing giving voice to this kind of grief, it’s so important, I can’t, I really can’t emphasize it enough. It’s not a self-serving thing. You know, and I’m sure you understand that too. You’re not you’re not publishing a book as this self-serving practice. And that’s not why I would choose to do either it’s just, you want to be a voice for these things.
Victoria Volk 20:26
Well, and it was very therapeutic. I mean, that was the one thing I didn’t expect from the experience was that it was very therapeutic.
Arielle Arbrushites 20:33
Absolutely.
Victoria Volk 20:34
So, I want to give you the opportunity, though, to share about Rick in a way that you maybe didn’t get the opportunity to to others during that time, and maybe in your blog, I’m sure you expressed it through your blog, but tell us about Rick.
Arielle Arbrushites 20:49
Rick was a complicated individual, for sure. As you can imagine, for somebody who did take his own life, but he loved the beach he loved to he he loved to look up at the sun and you know, you could find him on a 55 degree day laying out on a towel in the backyard just to catch the rays of the sun even though it would seem to me too cold to be laying in the sun. It was something that he would do and you know that I think about him the most when I see the ocean or the sea and the sun shining on it because I think that’s where he felt most at peace when he was so conflicted and you know, in emotional pain, I guess I would is how I would say it and you know, I really I believe in being real about people you know, so there are a lot of things that I can say that are really wonderful about him and that would be perfectly truthful but you know, I don’t want to talk him up either because you know, he obviously did have some struggles. And you know, I think it’s important for people to know you know, we can still grieve someone who was complicated and complicated grief is the thing to write so, um, you know, but but Rick was very thoughtful, he was a very thoughtful person, he would write me notes all the time I have stacks piles of handwritten notes from him still, it was a kind of a regular thing where I would come home from when I was I was married when I was in grad school, I’m getting my master’s in social work and I was working full time so I would go to school at night from like 630 to 930 I’d be getting home around 10pm and oftentimes he would be asleep already and he would leave me a note on the kitchen table or note on the counter and you know, that was kind of a regular thing and they were very sweet and sometimes they’re very funny. And most of the time he was funny without meaning to be funny. So um, that was very cute. I know that in his mind, he felt like he was doing me a favor by committing suicide because he wanted me to have a better life than what he thought that he could give me and he felt like he was giving me a gift which is just to me so sad and I know this because of a suicide note that he left for me not because I’m you know, creating some kind of story around it but based on what he wrote to me I know that that’s how he felt and I find that very heavy and sad but he also was thanking me in the note so I always like to think that you know, maybe the last emotions he was feeling before he died were of gratitude instead of despair and that’s kind of the story I tell myself so that it doesn’t become too traumatic and too heavy.
Victoria Volk 23:50
for a lot of conflicting feelings in that yeah, here that’s a lot of grief that’s what grief is it’s conflicting feelings.
Arielle Arbrushites 23:58
Yeah.
Victoria Volk 23:59
Thank you for sharing.
Arielle Arbrushites 24:00
Sure.
Victoria Volk 24:01
Moving on to losses you’ve experienced well, and you fall in love again.
Arielle Arbrushites 24:08
I did you did. I was not ready people always say How did you feel that you were finally ready? I was not ready. I did not say let’s go out and date again. No, Jeff just happened as most things in life do just like everything else that’s ever happened to me. He just happened and we became friends and then we became more than friends and now we are married, and you know, we have a beautiful family together. But um, it takes the right person to I think marry someone who has been widowed, especially someone who’s been widowed by suicide. And he happened to be that person and I am so so lucky to have found him early enough in life that I get to have a lot of years with him hopefully.
Victoria Volk 24:49
Beautiful. So, what is one thing that you would share with others who may have experienced a similar loss as you are maybe not either with Rick or the miscarriages?
Arielle Arbrushites 25:02
I think you know it’s important to find your army of support and you know I have to say that as a social worker and especially in the profession I mean you know, support is huge support doesn’t have to look like you know 400 people reading a blog every night it can be just your best friend just your mom or your dad you know, it could be your neighbor that you have a cup of tea with you know it, it can really be anybody that makes you feel a little bit lighter, a little bit less alone and you know, By the same token even though grief can feel so isolating and sometimes be so isolating you’re not alone. I felt alone so much of the time but but really I wasn’t you know, there’s so many other people that sadly have experienced a loss like mine and I feel that way especially when we talk about like the multiple miscarriages you know, it’s it’s not talked about it’s it’s we’re getting better at that I think but it’s not talked about to the level it should be in could be but it’s it’s so prevalent and nobody says anything and if you’re feeling some kind of way, somebody else out there hundreds of other somebodies 1000s of other somebodies are feeling that exact same way so it’s either just a matter of knowing that to make yourself feel supported or finding those people to make yourself feel supported and you know, thankfully we live in the age of technology where you can google things and you can find Facebook groups and Instagram groups and blogs and there’s just so many ways to do things virtually if you are isolated physically that you’re not able to go find things and of course you know we’re in a pandemic so we’re not doing these large group gatherings and clubs and things anyway but there’s so much out there there’s there’s tons of things out there.
Victoria Volk 26:57
Like this podcast.
Arielle Arbrushites 26:58
Exactly like this podcast perfect example.
Victoria Volk 27:03
Would you like to share about the losses of those babies?
Arielle Arbrushites 27:09
I’m sure sure. Um, I I felt a strong connection with all of them. And I think it was shocking to me how little support was given to me by the health system every time I had a loss and you know, that’s one of the things that professionally I’m trying to work on quite a bit in the field of grief and loss and I had some perinatal death and grief training recently so that I can try to help folks in the situation that I was in no matter what gestation and you know, there’s really again there’s no hierarchy with this grief but it was just so hard for people to know what to say or do in the health system in my own life. And you know, my husband Jeff was very very supportive and I used to write little notes to myself because I always go to writing and I used to write little notes to myself during those different losses just saying you know, whenever Jeff is annoying or you’re frustrated with him just remember this moment and how amazing he has been today doing this and this and this and this and I would lift every way that he was able to support me through those because especially when we got to the you know, the third miscarriage um, I was a mess. I mean, it was just so so traumatic. And it was just this roller coaster of happiness and devastation over and over again because unfortunately for us with the last two losses, you know, we had gone in and we had ultrasounds, everything was fine and perfect and healthy. We saw the heartbeat we started the baby moving. And, you know, so you kind of you breathe a sigh of relief, thinking Everything is fine, and then for weeks to pass and then to go in and for them to say that the baby had died, you know, shocking, awful. And then the third time around, you know, you think okay, well it’s, it’s finally it’s finally my tie, like it’s really going to happen this time. You know, this could not possibly happen again, and you hold your breath and you’re just so traumatized and you go in and you go to ultrasound after ultrasound, and they’re all fine, everything’s great, everybody gives you the thumbs up and you just keep breathing a little bit more a little bit more and then to go back and have them tell you you know, the heartbeat slowing down and we think the baby is going to die for the for the the last baby loss that I had. I actually left the doctor’s office knowing that the baby was still alive but going to die and I had to go home and essentially wait for the baby to die which it was totally different from my first miscarriage. Was miscarrying at home very painfully, and very different from my second miscarriage, which was finding out that the heartbeat had stopped, and the baby had already died, and then getting a DNC surgery to remove the baby that had died. So, this third time, it was like, Okay, well, it’s going to die. But we can’t do a surgery yet because it’s still alive. And there’s really nothing we can do. So go home and wait for it to die. So that was gut wrenching. And I think Jeff, and I just didn’t really know what to do or how to react and like, you know, what do you do? Do you go to work and just, like, know that the baby’s in there dying, and you can’t do anything as its mother. And it was, so all my losses were so incredibly different to, which is why I feel like, I can relate to different miscarriage stories, because, you know, they weren’t all the same. So, somebody had the first kind of loss that I had, I get that they had the second kind of loss, I get that the third kind, I get that, um, you know, did they all make me stronger, probably more resilient. Absolutely. But it was a really, really hard time for me and for us, and I really began to think that I was just not going to be a parent. Um, and I, I pretty much did not want to try to become a parent anymore, because the thought of having a fourth loss was almost worse than anything. Um, but like I said, at the beginning of this, you know, I do have a son, he’s 16 months old, and he is amazing. Um, but I was terrified for my entire pregnancy, that something was going to go horribly wrong, as you can understand, and I know, many moms have been in that in that place, too. So, you know, there. There, there is a story unfolding. And you know, we always only see the moment that we’re in, like the page that we’re on, and I was really stuck there on those particular pages of grief for a long time, not really understanding that, you know, the pages would continue to flip. And at some point, I’d be feeling differently, even if it meant that I didn’t have a beautiful son out of it. Because you know, what, let’s face it, you know, that won’t happen for everybody. And that’s really, really tough, too.
Victoria Volk 32:15
If I could hug you. I would give you a hug right now, I just got teary eyed because I can’t imagine what that felt like for you just can’t. So, my mom, my heart goes out to you. I had a conversation too, with another griever about miscarriage early on in my podcast, and she was talking about, you know, you go into the doctor’s office and see all these women with the big bellies and, you know, join on their faces, and it’s like you’re in the same waiting room, and how tortures that must feel your heart and something needs to be done about that.
Arielle Arbrushites 32:55
Absolutely. Oh, that was a bit it was very difficult. I almost think though what was worse was leaving not once, but twice for two of my miscarriages, leaving that room where I had had an ultrasound knowing my baby was either dead or for the other time that you know, was going to die and you leave and they say like, okay, your copay will be $30, like, nobody’s been briefed to that I just had a horrible, devastating conversation, they are making me essentially pay for the bad news that I just received, like, there was just no sense of decorum. And that’s always been, you know, a sticking point, there’s somewhere in a folder in my home office where I have all these notes of what I would like to do to educate people in those professions just because I have this unique background of the grief and loss piece. And, and it’s just it’s not in fertility clinics, and it’s not in, you know, ob gyn offices, to the level that it should be. And I’m sure there are practices that are really building that and boosting that up and are really great at it. The ones that I was part of, we’re not really great at it. And I think it was just a deficit, you know, nobody meant any harm, you know, certainly, but they just hadn’t been ever given education or training or anything like that. And not once was I ever given even a flyer for a support group or anything, even loss after loss after loss. So, I still find that incredibly shocking. It’s incredibly sad. It really is. And I’ve often said to Jeff, that I am the kind of person especially because of my profession where I know how to find resources and I know how to get what I need, if someone’s not giving it to me, and I could do that and I could take it upon myself. But there are so many other women out there who are not able to do that who are not going to do that who are not going to know to do that. And what a disservice we’re doing to those people. So well.
Victoria Volk 35:02
and because grief is cumulative, and as cumulatively negative, it’s very likely, highly likely that someone coming into that situation and having to leave knowing that their baby will die or has already passed. They’ve had grief before that. And so, it’s just more grief on to their lives. And it’s almost like, what can’t they just, like, create this separate unit of the facility that’s specially for holding the hearts of people, mothers, you know, like the families because it’s your husband to like, he, like how did he navigate that, too.
Arielle Arbrushites 35:52
We just we navigated it together as a team for each other, because you didn’t have anybody, you know, to talk to to support him, you know, they don’t support the dads, it just it’s not a thing. And, you know, to your point about, you know, can’t we have a separate unit or waiting room or area or something, you know, I work in healthcare, if that’s not possible, because I know, that’s not always possible. That’s a beautiful dream. And it involves, you know, money and space and all sorts of things. If that’s not possible, at least you let the people who’ve just received bad news said, sit in that room, as long as they need take the time that you need, I’m here for you when you’re ready to go. And then you assign someone to walk them out, you know, whether it’s an arm around them, or you walk them down a different hallway, so they can leave outside of a different door, you don’t have them just check out like everybody else, where everybody’s waiting with their big belly and they get charged a copay by a chipper, cheerful person, and they’re out in the elevator before they know it with no support, you know, there, there are ways to do it, I think, you know, there’s an ideal way, like what you were saying that would be the ideal, but they’re all there’s always ways to think outside of the box. And I think people are either just unwilling to go there, or they have not experienced a loss like that. So they don’t even know that that would feel good or different, or would be important. And I think that’s just where the education and training comes in.
Victoria Volk 37:15
I also seem to believe this is my own belief is that because it’s so common, like miscarriages become so common. That it’s just like, we’ve become desensitized to it. And, you know, when you work in that environment, I imagine, you’re like, probably number 13 that came in that day. And I’m wondering, too, like, who’s supporting the health care workers who are in those positions? And it’s like, almost like, are they just separating themselves? Are they disassociating from the situation? Because if they didn’t, to bring that home with them, and it kind of speaks to the work that you do in hospice, like, how do you separate yourself from that, so you don’t bring it home with you. So, I think, along with education, it’s also to recognizing that there is a problem. But then when you recognize there’s a problem, you have to do something about it.
Arielle Arbrushites 38:19
You’re so right, you’re so right, um, you know, who is supporting those health care workers? And how desensitized are they? And, you know, what do they know and not know about what that feels like? Or, you know, perhaps they’ve experienced their own losses, and then you’re faced with that every day. So they have to compartmentalize they can’t even go there, you know, and, you know, we can assume and, you know, we’ll never completely know everybody’s individual stories, but yeah, I mean, absolutely, there has to be a way to support the people in those professions and positions and your your right to I we tried to do that in, in hospice, because, you know, I have, I’ve sat with many people who have died, I’ve watched people die many, many, many times, there have been weeks where I’ve had multiple patients die. And, you know, it’s, it’s to be expected because I work in hospice and, you know, that’s, we know that’s what’s going to happen. And oftentimes, it’s really very beautiful and positive and as an experience, you know, much like birth it there, there can be a celebration for death, you know, it’s not always that way. But, you know, I really like to de stigmatize the death and dying stuff to because it’s not always this this awful, terrible experience, but um, it can be really heavy, it can be really tough. And certainly, you know, I come home and I think about patients that I’ve had, who have died, you know, and I still do you know, if I have had patients that have died five years ago, I still think about them from time to time and, you know, that’s part of the work to it, it touches you It teaches you things and I’ve learned so much from the people that I’ve met and from their family members. I think you know, it’s gonna sound kind of trite. But self care is really important. And I don’t mean like, you know, so you go home and you take a hot bath and you light the candles, you know, that’s not exactly what I mean. But you kind of have to know when you’re you like reached your, your point of being a little bit too filled with grief to know, okay, maybe I need a day off today. Or maybe I just need to take a weekend to go for a hike to clear my mind or, you know, whatever it is that would really speak to you and be helpful to you, I think we have to be good about tuning into that. And healthcare is the kind of profession where we tend to just go go go, and it’s about the patient and not about us. And it’s about the people that we’re serving and not about us. Because you know, that’s why we are called to those professions, but you’re not any good to anybody else. If you’re not taking care of yourself first, it’s like the whole oxygen mask analogy, you know, you got to put it on yourself, and then you take care of everybody else that you’re supposed to take care of, it’s a lot like being a parent, you know, got to take care of yourself first, to be a good parent, to your child or your children. I feel that way about my patients to feel that way about my team of employees. And, you know, we, we try to encourage things that will fill our cup, so that we have things to give to other people. And whether that’s resilience training, or retreats from time to time, or just, we do like a morning inspiration on our morning conference call every morning in hospice. And sometimes it’s a joke, and it’s funny, and sometimes it’s more inspiring, and reflective. And we try to do things here and there. It’s hard because, you know, again, we’re in a pandemic, and healthcare. very tricky right now and even heavier than usual, especially especially at hospice. But we try and I think the effort speaks volumes to people see that you’re trying to care for them and make sure that they have what they need. So, I think that’s important, too, that the effort.
Victoria Volk 42:02
wonderful points, I mean, this this podcast episode very much be for healthcare community, too.
Arielle Arbrushites 42:08
I’m very worried you have to tell me like, Okay, you’ve, you’ve said enough?
Victoria Volk 42:12
Oh, no, it’s all good. It’s all good. So, what has your grief taught you?
Arielle Arbrushites 42:17
So much, um, I, it’s really been a journey to learn myself, if I’m being honest, um, you know, I will never be the same. Because of Rick dying, I will also never be the same because of all the miscarriages that I’ve had. But they’ve shaped me, and they’ve molded me in ways that are allowing me to be the best version of myself, and I think, offer bits and pieces of that better self to others. And you know, I’m still a work in progress, you know, I would hope that I’m not the best that I can ever be. I want to keep improving until the day that I die. But I’ve just learned so much about myself as a person and what I really need and what I really want and about fear. When I lost Rick, I was very, very afraid. I was afraid of so many things, what life would hold I was afraid of the unknown. I was afraid of moving, I was afraid of staying, I was afraid of not finding somebody again. You know, as afraid of people not understanding I was afraid of financial burden. I mean, I could write you a list of 150 things. And I was afraid of so many other things that had nothing to do with the loss of Rick. But I think it made me so much braver because I thought, well, if the worst thing that could ever happen to me has happened to me, nothing could possibly be as bad as that day. So just live every day. Like it’s the best day that you’re going to have and do whatever it is you want to do. And you know, tell that person exactly what you want to say don’t keep it inside and you know, share this moment with this person because you’re you have that fleeting thought Don’t let it be just a passing thought go ahead and do it and kind of like actions speak louder than words. So, I just started doing all the things that scared me. And that was a very eye-opening experience. And I think it was very positive and it kind of added to my resiliency and I don’t know, you’re probably familiar with like the post traumatic growth. So, I feel like you know, I, I could be a poster child for that too. You have so many bad things happen to you, but I have a really a very happy person. And I think that that makes that weirds people out sometimes but um, it’s because I have learned so much about myself and I’ve tapped into so much resilience over the course of time that it has just served me so well in so many beautiful ways that can’t possibly be ignored. So, it’s really less of like a happy, cheerful, Sunny overly positive personality and more of like, I’ve learned from this, and now I can use it. And it’s made life so much better. And kind of like the, I guess it’s a famous quote, like, you know, shared joy is double joy and shared sorrow is half sorrow. So, you know, that’s, that’s kind of how I think of things, you know, that’s why I write so that I could double the joy and I can have the sorrow too.
Victoria Volk 45:30
I love that. So, I can relate to the post traumatic growth. And I can also relate to, well, let me get your take on this. Because when you’ve experience when you feel like you’ve lived three lifetimes, and you look back on your life, and you’ve recognized where, where you’ve grown, and how far you’ve come and things like that, I have found it really challenging to look at others and see them suffer. And knowing that they don’t have to, like, there, there is more to life than what you’re feeling right now in this moment. But it’s such a challenge for people to get out of that headspace. And, you know, we have to be in it for a time, it’s whatever time that is. But do you agree or disagree? Or what are what is your thoughts on this? Maybe like this idea of, in addicted to the suffering itself?
Arielle Arbrushites 46:35
you’re talking about other people, not you and I right? When you say that, right?
Victoria Volk 46:39
Right, because, you know, like, when you when you’ve come so far, it’s like you, you just want to pull everybody with you, you know, it’s like, Just come with me, just let’s come, you know, not so bad over it’s this, this is amazing over here. And yeah, it doesn’t feel good in the process. But no one ever said I had a post the other day. Healing feels amazing said no one ever. You know, the process sucks, it does. But it’s like getting on the other side of that.
Arielle Arbrushites 47:15
You have to feel everything to feel the good and the joy. And I think that is very hard for some people harder than for you and me. And, you know, we have most likely either been given the tools by others, or we have built and created our own tools and kind of adapted, whether it’s because of privilege, or whether it’s because, you know, we’ve had experiences earlier in life than some other people and that has taught us how to build resilience and, you know, use history as a as an educator. You know, not everybody is as lucky as we are where they feel that they have those tools and that strength and those experiences to build from. So that’s why my thinking is, you know, for you and for me, we have a greater responsibility then to do things like this podcast and be that voice so that we can share the narrative. And we can give guidance, really, I mean, I think really, that’s what this is, it’s your giving voice, but you’re also guiding other people, it can be different, it doesn’t have to be the way it is right now. And like I said earlier, I think we grieve forever, but our grief changes, you know, it morphs, and it changes, and you don’t get over grief, it will always be part of you. But certainly, you can heal and you know, certainly you can be joyful again. And everything can exist in the same space. So, you can feel pain, but you can also feel joy. It’s not one or the other. It isn’t black and white. And that’s something that I talk to people about all the time because there’s so much all or nothing black and white thinking out there. Just because it’s like in our culture, that’s just the way people are taught and they just they grow to believe it’s like well if I feel sad, then I’m just gonna feel sad Well, you can feel sad and you should feel sad because things sad things have happened to you and you have every right to feel sad, but you can also feel joy at the same time. And you know, you can feel other things to anger and comfort and contentment and worry and confusion, you know that everything can all exist in the same space, and we learn to navigate it. So, you know, those are my thoughts. We, you know, you and me we have we have a greater responsibility because we have learned things and we have found things that that work and help. And that’s why we’re doing what we do. That’s why you do what you do. And that’s why I do what I do. And it takes all kinds of people to make this beautiful world work. There are many jobs I would never want to do. Just like people would never want to do my job and they tell me all the time. But there are lots of things they do that I wouldn’t want to do either and that’s why it takes All kinds of people to make the world work, which is great.
Victoria Volk 50:03
Yes. 100% I agree. I just had a post come to me yesterday Actually, I haven’t written about this yet. But someone had reached out to me and asked me to questions along these lines. And, you know, like, someone doesn’t identify themselves as a griever. But I can see that it’s grief and notes past relationship that they haven’t, they’re not recognizing, like, I’m over that, like, I dealt with that. I don’t need to dig that up, right. And my, what came to my mind was that, if you can talk about it today, like you and I, like you talked about your experience, and you’re not laying on the floor, a pile of mess, right. And I can talk about my experiences, and I’m not on the floor, like a pile of mess, that’s when you know, you’ve done a lot of work when you can talk about it. Hear Your experience, when you can help others through story. And, and not like a ruminating in the story. But in a this is what helped me this is what’s possible. I don’t know about you, but for me, I found my potential when I shed all of that when I shed all the stories when I shed the anger when I shed all the resentment, the grief that had kept weighing on me the grief has not gone away I still grieve my father certain relationships that change because of that experience and the trauma that happened to me after those things still happen and that doesn’t change that experience but I can talk about it and it not take me back to that little girl that is scared and fearful and you know all those emotions that you talked about.
Arielle Arbrushites 51:52
You’re absolutely right and you know for we can also be those people that are okay now and thriving and and share that with others, but also say, no, we were on the floor a pile of mess, at one point, and now we’re not and you know, that’s possible for other people too, because we can be we can keep it real. We used to be a mess. And now we’re okay.
Victoria Volk 52:14
Oh, I was a train wreck. I was a train wreck. Yeah. And you know, I could laugh about it. My life was a mess. I was, you know, used alcohol and got myself in some really scary situations.
Arielle Arbrushites 52:29
And look at you now.
Victoria Volk 52:31
Greed was the root of it. And that’s where people don’t connect the dots of what is happening in their lives, these repetitive behaviors, these things that we’re seeking to feel better, don’t connect it to the grief in their lives. And I want to ask you something, because I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that that loss of Rick wasn’t your first grieving experience?
Arielle Arbrushites 52:55
No, it was not my first grieving experience. No, I lost my great aunt when I was a teenager. And she was much closer than a grandmother to me. She was my best friend, truly. We used to sleep over together, and she was very, very special to me. So, when I was 16, she died. I experienced that loss. And I had experienced the loss of both of my grandfather’s two. So, in I would say early adulthood, my very early 20s. So, I am lucky to have a 92 year old grandmother and an 85 year old grandmother still living but I had lost both of my grandfather’s as well. So, it was not my first rodeo with grief. But it was a very different grief and a very traumatic grief when when Rick died.
Victoria Volk 53:41
And that’s why I say grief is cumulative. And it’s cumulatively negative it stacks up, right? Yeah. Well, you kind of talked about ways that others supported you and how writing kind of became your way to express what you needed and how you want it to be supported. What would you suggest to people who aren’t writers? Need? Yeah, what? Oh, my God, I need to, like spit it out Victoria. So writing was a huge outlet for you and expressing on what you needed and how you needed to be supported. And it was for me too, but I don’t know if anybody read it, but I wasn’t very good about vocalizing either. And so I journaled I internalized a lot which was not healthy. It was good for me, but it wasn’t a healthy way to approach I was an isolated grater I that’s I mean I was in a pit me of an isolated graver I don’t need your help. I can do this, you know, because, and here’s the thing, it kind of ties back to when you said resiliency. You know, when you lose a parent, as a child, you don’t choose resiliency, you have to get resilient. So, I hate when people say that children are resilient and bounce back, eat that. Don’t say that people. Please don’t say that. If a child If you recognize a child as resilient, it’s not because they chose to even have a choice. Yeah. Anyway, I digress. What would you suggest to someone who isn’t a writer to how to communicate what they need and how to be supported?
Arielle Arbrushites 55:16
Maybe the easiest thing to do would be to take the pressure off and not think about grief and think about how to explain their huge grief to someone because that is you know, that’s a tall order trying to put that into words for yourself, let alone to other people to tell them what you need. Instead, I would encourage someone to think about what brings them comfort, you know, is it a special warm coffee drink? Is it watching funny movies with a person that you really care about and can laugh with because you feel safe with them? And you know, is it going for a walk in nature whatever the case might be, you know, but think about the things that will really make you feel comfort like is there a special comfort food like do you just love when you feel like crap you want to eat you know homemade macaroni and cheese you know, whatever it is for these these folks? Think about those things take the grief out of it just like what would make you feel better be really literal and then tell those people that that would be something that would be awesome like you know, could you make that mac and cheese that I love so much that we had last year at this picnic and like ask them for that? Or say you know I I’m feeling kind of low today I really want to watch friends on a marathon of friends you know Do you want to come over and hang out with me for a little while now it puts it on them to ask rather than someone offering it to them but you know to answer your questions that’s what I would suggest because that’s not really making them talk about the grief Enos it’s just you know, having them tap into like what do I need what’s going to make me feel better like it won’t cancel my grief out but it’s going to make me feel loved and warm and comforted and some people can give it to themselves like you know, I tend to do that and especially like in the pandemic you know, we’re very handicapped with what we can do but you know, I’ll think about you know, I just really need a cup of coffee and to sit with a blanket over me for 20 minutes by myself and I’ll feel better and rejuvenated like I can do that I don’t need to call a friend to give me that and some people you know, some people might and that’s perfectly fine but there are lots of things you can give to yourself too so I think recognizing what’s going to make you feel better and sometimes I tell people you know if they do journal or they don’t journal it doesn’t matter but maybe just get out a piece of paper and write down all the things that really make you feel good and comforted and happy and like really really small like the cup of coffee like the warm blanket like your mom’s macaroni and cheese whatever um for very random examples here but I think you know that’s that’s what I would encourage people to do, I think it works.
Victoria Volk 57:54
Radical self-love. My newsletter my newsletter, as right now we’re recording it’s February and this probably won’t go live until like may April I’m not sure exactly when but at this time I my monthly series for my newsletter is self love as well it’s February you know, Valentine’s love whatever, the greatest love we can give is to ourselves. so kindly percent highlighting that yeah, it’s like, we don’t necessarily need to get anything from anybody. And really, honestly, that was a message that took me well into my 30s to understand late like probably in the last five years to be honest, like I can give to myself I don’t need to get from other people, and I should give to myself first. I should Fill my cup first I should understand what I need first. Because that’s been an integrity it’s living in integrity with yourselves, and I think we sabotage and and minimize the importance of that in grief and when we tend to be people pleasers or we have no boundaries I mean there’s grief brings up everything that you need to heal within yourself.
Arielle Arbrushites 59:15
That’s what I was saying before lead by example you know, like you know, you’ve learned all these things with the self love and everything else like so there you go, you’re leading by example and I can lead by example if this is what we can do to make ourselves feel better and we’re teaching other people It seems very simple, but you know, we’re, we’re teaching other people we’re really doing it.
Victoria Volk 59:36
And on that note, is there anything else you would like to share?
Arielle Arbrushites 59:40
I don’t know the you know, I always joke with people that I am a an overshare You know, I’m not just to share I’m an oversharer and one of my physician friends once said to me, You know, there’s no such such thing as being an overshare as long as you are only sharing your own stories, you know, if you’re not sharing things about other people There’s really no such thing as over sharing. It’s just sharing. And I always think of that, um, but I’m an overshare. So, there will always be things that I have left to share. But today, I think we had an awesome conversation. And I feel like we shoved a lot into one hour, which was pretty cool. You can tell we’re both writers, like, I get the vibe, you know? So, But no, it’s it’s been a pleasure. I’m just very grateful that you know, you had invited me to be on the podcast, I think you’re doing amazing work. And I’m just so happy to be part of it.
Victoria Volk 1:00:35
Thank you, thank you so much for being here. And there is one final question. I didn’t ask directly that I like to end every podcast episode with sometimes I forget. But so, what brings you the most joy these days?
Arielle Arbrushites 1:00:50
I have to say, you know, besides the, the examples of my family, you know, my husband, my son, my beautiful bonus daughters, Jeff’s two daughters, my animals. Besides those things, it’s really still writing, it’s still writing with the intent to help other people. Because I feel like that is what gives me purpose. And having a purpose is very, very important to me. So, you know, my family, of course, gives me purpose, but writing to share to help to guide is so so very meaningful to me. So that gives me so much joy. You know, something as simple as being on Instagram and sharing different things with people that brings me joy. Blogging still brings me joy. Being on the podcast today, you know, brings me joy, writing books brings me joy. It’s kind of like breathing to me. It’s it’s self soothing. And it helps me connect with other people. You know, I’m a social worker. So, I like to connect with other people. And human connection is very important to me, and writing is how I do that first and foremost.
Victoria Volk 1:01:57
That’s beautiful, I can relate to much of that, I’m sure. Well, thank you so so much for being here. This was a jam-packed conversation. I absolutely loved it. So, thank you.
Arielle Arbrushites 1:02:12
Thank you.
Victoria Volk 1:02:13
All right. When you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
Grief Stories, Grieving Voices Podcast, Takeaways and Reflections |
Takeaways & Reflections | Intuition & Pulling the Weeds
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
We come into this world knowing how to grieve. We naturally know how to express ourselves to get our needs met. Then life happens, along with generational teaching that creates the perfect storm for adult issues.
So much of what is wrong in our lives, as adults, can be traced back to our childhoods. That goes for possible health concerns, as well as our mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
Adulthood is a childhood re-enactment. And, considering that research suggests that our brains develop in response to the environment in which we are raised or in as children, it makes sense that we find ourselves resorting to those points of reference in adulthood. And often, they’re not very healthy points of reference.
I look forward to digging into this topic more deeply and, explore this further with future experts. In the meantime, listen to this week’s episode and see if you can connect some dots of your adult life experience to your childhood.
As long as we are medicalizing mental health, we’ll continue to see the same issues repeated in our society. We must pull the weeds. And the roots, I believe, are in our childhoods. And, I don’t care if you had the most idyllic upbringing. Because no parent is perfect, and every last parent resorts to what they know. And, in my experience, when it comes to grief, there’s a lot of misinformation and myths playing out in the world.
RESOURCES:
This is Episode 48 takeaways and reflections from Episode 46, with Rachel Pozzesi the grief and impact of chronic illness, and Episode 47, with Crystal Partney, finding hope after the loss of her sister by suicide. And I’d like to start out with Episode 46 with Rachel, I have actually happened to know some people who deal with chronic illness who well, even at one time myself, I had felt like something was wrong. I had physical symptoms. This was probably the start of 2014, hindsight, I know what the problem was then. But at the time, I felt like what is happening with my body. It felt like my body was retaliating against me. I had hair loss, fatigue, body aches that were really unexplained. Yeah, and I was doctoring and trying to figure out what the world was going on. I had weight loss. In one month, I had lost like nine pounds, I was dealing with bloating and constipation and just so many different things. And when I look back on that time now, I can tell you that it was grief. It was just all grief for me. I had my youngest was starting kindergarten. And I had come to the decision that I was going to close the business that I had poured all of my blood, sweat, tears and money into for the past.
That time, it was probably close to seven or eight years of just MMA actually closer to eight, eight years, nine years, eight to nine years of just learning and education and then just kind of establishing the foundations of what I would need to run a business or photography, business. And any anyone who endeavors to be an entrepreneur, recognize the work and the effort it takes, and the stamina, and the ambition, all of those things. And it can take a lot out of you. If you don’t have the support and mindset for it right? And early on, in the beginning of my business, I didn’t have a lot of support in terms of a guide or mentor or anything like that this was you know, Facebook was just kind of becoming a thing and even years into my business, I didn’t even have a Facebook page until one of my wedding clients was you know, prompted me to start a page. And anyway, it just takes a lot out of you and I loved what I was doing. I felt really energized working with my clients. And I learned so much and in those years, things that I use today that I’ve that really helped me become the entrepreneur I am today truthfully, nothing is wasted. That’s what I say nothing is wasted and but in hindsight, coming to that decision.
Dealing With Chronic Illness
From the time I made the decision to when I actually implemented the decision was another year. It really was not an easy decision for me to make. I mean the decision itself was but the person process of actually letting go and and doing that. It was a grieving process. It was a grieving process. It’s like you that was my baby that my business was my fourth baby. And you know, Rachel has a business herself she coaches, women, particularly I believe in helping them really live their best lives and her education and knowledge, of course comes from her personal experience, which often does often people in business, create businesses out of their own personal experience. And she dealt with chronic illness for much of her later teen life into adulthood still currently, obviously, with chronic Lyme disease. I mean, there’s a bunch of different things mentioned, I mean, I just couldn’t even listening to her. I’m just like, that’s a lot, you hashimotos it’s like one thing led to the next thing to the next thing, mold, toxic toxicity, all these things, and it took her years to, like, really pick apart what was really happening. And the grief that she experienced during that time of people in her life and, in her circles, and who didn’t believe that, you know, who didn’t validate really, what, what was happening and what she was experiencing.
And, you know, at the time when I was going through my bout of what I call midlife crisis, which is what I boil it down to is that what was happening with me physically, I’m sure there were people who were like, Oh, my gosh, here we go again, there’s, you know, another issue another doctor appointment or whatever, and, there were validating things that were found. In fact, I had colon polyps that were removed. So maybe the midlife crisis kind of saved me too, you know, because my dad passed away of colon cancer when he was 44. So, and it’s very prevalent in my family, although it’s not genetically tied to the family, so that’s good. But anyway, I also found that I had epstein barr, reactive I was epstein barr reactive. And my research led me to understand that it’s like mondo, epstein barr is mano in its mano in your body, that’s reactivated but it’s not mano itself. So it’s like your body thinks you have mono. So honestly, there isn’t a whole lot of information on that, that I could find and, and what to do about it and how to manage those symptoms or, really what it is. I think it’s still one of these things that is not an anomaly, but just really not really researched. So that’s kind of where that stands. I really don’t know anything else about that. other than that, I related to parts of Rachel story in that I felt like I was going crazy, and she did too.
Listen To Your Intuition
And then you feel invalidated. And when you feel invalidated and when you feel like you know what you’re not getting, you know, you know, in your gut when the doctor you know, they don’t know everything, right? And you know, when your gut like, No, I think I need another opinion or that just doesn’t sound right to me. I just encourage you to listen to that Rachel does too. It’s if she would not have listened to her intuition. She would have her appendix would have ruptured and she would have been much more in a in a much more dire situation than what she found herself in which was emergency surgery. But just listen to your intuition. When it comes to your body, your health only, you know best. I don’t care if the doctor has 18 years of education and experience or 28 years or whatever. They don’t know you like you know you. And so I would just encourage you and I think Rachel would to to listen to your intuition. If something doesn’t feel right. investigate it. Get another opinion. And I actually there was an episode I did with. And she’s 17 years out with metastatic breast cancer, and she’s shared the same message, you know, she’s listened to her intuition and really helped her like going through living with cancer really has helped her to really tune into her intuition, and do the best thing that she can for herself and do her research and find the best option for her. One thing I’ve learned, through conversations with good friends who are more on the natural path train, and through Rachel and just my own personal experience, my own life, is that the one thing that the medical field doesn’t really address when it comes to like women and women’s health is this, the whole picture is the whole picture. And, you know, when it comes to the hormones, like hormones are huge for women, of course, men too, but they’re an essential part of our bodies, like they’re so much a part of every system of our body, that it pays to investigate what’s happening with our hormones.
And, you know, with women, we have all these different options for you have the birth control pill, which actually a friend just recently shared with me as she was reading the book, beyond the pill. And the information that she’s gleaned from that is, wow, the changes that it creates in your body and the things that it does to your body. And what I’ve personally learned in that regard, too, is, you know, how do we really know what’s happening with our body? If we’re taking this artificial thing, right? this thing that’s supposed to be part of our reproductive health, but yet, how healthy is it? And so anyway, I think it just comes back to doing your research and finding the best viable option for you. And that goes for women’s health that goes for just health in general health and wellness, mental health, everything, all of it, it’s a human being, you got to see the whole picture. And one thing I know that a good another good friend recommended is to have your levels checked by a naturopath, who, I mean, they’ll check everything, the stuff that the regular doctors will not check for, but again, plays such a vital role in what could be happening because of those levels being low, such as magnesium or calcium. Well, they check your calcium, but there’s just so much more, there’s just so much more that they can look into like just by checking your spit, you know. So, anyway, listen to your intuition. That’s the main message I got from Rachel.
And really, you just never know what people are dealing with. When you walk when you pass by people on the street people in your family who seem like they’re not like they’re struggling, you know, it’s, it could be their health and health. If we don’t have our health, nothing else matters. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, it doesn’t matter your zip code or your address, or your yeah, it doesn’t matter your economic status, your skin color or anything it if we do not have our health, nothing else matters. And I think it’s very important to look at the whole picture of our health, mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, all of it the whole picture. So that is my takeaway that I would love to that I wanted to share from Rachel’s episode so much more. Check her out at rachelpozzesi.com. That’s r a c h e l p o zz e s i.com for more information on everything that she can help you with, and that she is working through herself and coaching women. I will also put in the show notes, a link to her previous episode. And more you can see all the links in the show notes from her episode, because there were several Especially if you have Lyme disease, if you’re dealing with any other issues that she may have shared in that episode, a lot of good resources that came out of that episode. So check that out.
Losing A Sister By Suicide
So next up, I’d like to share some insights from Crystal’s episode where she shared about the loss of her sister by suicide. And if you don’t recall, or if you haven’t listened to it, back in November, there are two as a two part series, two part podcast episode with David Woods Bartley, episodes, 21 and 22, which I’ll also link in the show notes. But he specifically talked about his experience with attempting suicide, and talked about suicide prevention. And it was a really good conversation, it was quite lengthy. So that’s why I split it up into two podcast episodes, but highly recommended as well. In addition to Crystal’s episode, she shared her personal experience again, like, as, you know, losing her sister and but there was more of lost than just her sister, she had also lost her father and a nephew who was stillborn, I believe. And so a lot of loss in a short period of time for her, which I often find, not necessarily in a short period of time. But in doing these interviews over the past year, almost now, I’m approaching Episode 50, and my one year anniversary of this podcast, so again, thank you for listening.
But what I’ve learned to be true with most guests is that it’s not just one loss they’ve experienced several or many losses. And, you know, if you think about your lifetime, and you think of all the different ways that loss happens in our life, whether it’s moving, or your parents get divorced, or you get divorced, or let’s say both, let’s say, as a child, your parents got a divorce, and then you had to move and do all those things that what happens when your parents get divorced. And then you get married, and you get a divorce. You know, like all of these life events, create grief in our lives. And this is why I’m so passionate about grief education, because people don’t see their life experiences causing grief they don’t see the the patterns in their lives of what they’re doing to feel better, as being caused by grief has been motivated by grief motivated to feel better but because of the grief right? And I see this, I’m really looking forward to having some conversations coming up. One in particular with he’s a retired lieutenant colonel and greenbrae. And he’s a TEDx speaker. And he’s been on all kinds of TV programs and everything, but I really look forward to talking to him about mental health in the VA community, the veteran community, because there’s all this talk about mental health, mental health, mental health, and in 2019, I’d gone to a VA mental health summit, and had a booth there and listen to the speakers and I was in rooms full of social workers. And not a once was the word grief, even spoken. Everything was about suicide prevention.
The Truth About Suicide
Let’s talk about suicide. But what is the truth about suicide is that when there’s suicidal ideation, there is more likely to be grief in that person’s life. And so if we can address the grief we take care of the suicidal ideation if it’s because of grief. Now, granted, there are chemical things that happen within the brain, and I’m not a neuroscientist. I’m not a PhD, whatever. And I haven’t like done all those research or whatever. But what I know about grief is that when we pull the weed, and we get to the root of the problem, all of these other things in our lives seem to fall into place. And in fact, I mean, I just think of one client I had, who lost her father, all through COVID. And she could not even before grief recovery work. She could not even get within a block of his house. Not even within a block without breaking down crying And being emotionally upset for hours, maybe even days at a time. And it wasn’t until after grief recovery, that she has been able to go into the house. And she’s actually going through, and cleaning and going through his personal belongings and things and, you know, organizing and doing all those things that the children are left to do when the parents pass, right?
So those are things that she really struggled with before grief recovery. And as long as we attempt to medicalize, and drug grief, we will have these issues, we will have the issues of mental health, we will have the needle not moving forward. And we will continue to see these problems that we’re seeing. And because this trickles into addiction and all sorts of other things. Granted, like I said, there are medical conditions, and mental illnesses that, you know, obviously need and require medication. That’s not what I’m talking about here. What I’m talking about, is what so many millions of Americans are dealing with that is normal and natural. That is causing anxiety that is causing heart problems that is causing heart disease and strokes. And these it’s this extended long period of grief that is unaddressed that is debilitating people in their lives. And so that’s why I’m so passionate about this stuff. Because I see grief everywhere. It is everywhere. It is everywhere. And it impacts every area of our lives.
And so when I see stories or hear stories of suicidal ideation, I want to ask, What happened to you? What have you experienced in your life? What has gotten you to this point? And is there a way we can get beyond this that doesn’t include medication? like can we address get to the heart of the problem? Can we get to the root of the issue and pull out the weed. If we think of our heart as a garden, let’s tend our gardens. Let’s pull the weeds. That’s what I’m saying here. Let’s pull the weeds. One aspect to of our conversation is that I want to highlight and bring up is she mentioned her three year old daughter because this was you know, her aunt that passed away and before that it was her grandpa and and so she has children I just want to share this reflection is that as children, we come into this world knowing how to grieve. We do we cry when we’re hungry, we cry when we’re sad, we cry when we’re in pain. We know how to share our feelings, like it’s natural to share what we’re experiencing in the moment we’re experiencing it. And it’s life itself. The evolution of getting older and growing up and being in our environment and learning from our caretakers how to respond to the world around us.
Adulthood Is Childhood Reenactments
And what I have learned about the brain is that the brain actually responds to its environment. The brain actually develops as when we’re children, the brain develops around what is in our environment. The environment shapes our brain, like literally like wires, our brain as a result of the environment we are in. And I’ll have to look for the book that References This. And there was a podcast episode I listened to with this doctor who has been doing this research. And I just found it fascinating, but it makes total sense. And this is why I believe adulthood is childhood reenactments. Because all of these experiences in childhood are wired in our brains. And our brains are us, right? Our brains are a part of us all our lives. And so it makes sense to me that adulthood would be a reflection of what our brain experienced as a child. And it’s a file Bank of resources and mental references and things that we fall back on the belief systems the everything that we take in the information that we take in shapes, our beliefs, and our patterns of thought and our experiences shape our thoughts and all of these things right? and so it’s all stored in there and as children and that’s what we fall back on as adults.
And so, before life gets a hold of us as children, we naturally know how to grieve. It’s just that we lose that instinct, we lose that ability because we, our brains get reshaped, we get formed. Well, I guess this is how it’s done. I guess this is how we talk about grief. I guess this is how we deal with it. We don’t talk about it. We stuff it down. And we get angry and all but anger isn’t okay, so we can’t get angry. So I’m going to stuff anger down, you know. And so the this is, how like our childhoods. Our childhood is where we need to start when we’re thinking about the problems we are experiencing in adulthood. And so that’s my riff on that. But it is a great episode. She’s very much about suicide prevention and helping families after loss by suicide. And additionally, we got connected because she was putting together a panel of speakers to discuss mental health. And I believe she was going to get me a link for that if, because this was held back in March. But I think it’s all wonderful information. So I’m going to see about getting a link for that again, and I’ll put that in the show notes of Episode 47 of Crystal’s episode, and then also in this episode, as well. So that is my episode today.
P.S. Thank you for listening again, as I approach Episode 50. It’s very exciting. It’s so exciting. Definitely a labor of love. And I’ve learned I’ve greatly greatly enjoyed this. So thank you so much for tuning in. And if you loved these episodes, love grieving voices, I hope that you would take two minutes to review and rate. I would greatly appreciate it. So remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
