Grief, Grieving Voices Podcast, Podcast, season 5, solo episode |
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
In a world increasingly defined by division and isolation, radical belonging offers a powerful antidote to the epidemic of loneliness. Joe Primo’s article, “Radical Belonging in an Age of Othering,” featured on Grateful Living, delves into this pressing issue with profound insights that resonate deeply amidst our post-pandemic reality.
In this week’s episode, I read his article out loud because, although I tried, I couldn’t have written it better myself. This article (and episode) hits on individual responsibility, which couldn’t be more important as we face an election year in the United States, which goes right into the holidays when we will gather with friends and families, many with opposing views, beliefs, and diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, and preferences.
The Loneliness Epidemic
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has sounded alarms about a growing crisis—loneliness. This isn’t just about feeling alone; it’s a public health concern with wide-ranging societal implications. As social structures were disrupted during COVID-19, many isolated themselves from their communities and support systems. Now more than ever, rebuilding connections is vital to societal well-being.
Understanding ‘Othering’
Primo introduces us to the concept of ‘othering,’ where differences are highlighted not as strengths but as reasons for exclusion. This binary thinking creates barriers between people based on race, religion, culture, or politics—a misguided attempt to find belonging through conformity rather than embracing diversity. The danger here lies in mistaking fitting in for true belonging.
The Power of Belonging
Belonging is akin to love—it’s unconditional and rooted in internal and external acceptance. To belong means being comfortable with oneself while honoring others’ dignity despite differences. It’s recognizing that everyone holds inherent value simply by existing.
RESOURCES:
_______
NEED HELP?
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
- Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor
If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.
CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Embracing Radical Belonging in an Age of Othering
In a world where change is constant and uncertainty looms large, the notion of belonging becomes more significant than ever. This theme resonates profoundly in Joe Primo’s article “Radical Belonging in an Age of Othering,” featured on Grateful Living. As we navigate the societal shifts post-COVID-19, particularly within our relationships, Primo’s insights offer a beacon of hope and guidance.
The Loneliness Epidemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has left us grappling with not only physical health challenges but also emotional ones. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy highlights a critical issue—the epidemic of loneliness sweeping across the United States. With isolation becoming a norm during lockdowns, many have experienced disconnection from their communities and loved ones. The consequences are dire if we fail to rebuild these vital connections.
Understanding ‘Othering’
Primo delves into the concept of ‘othering,’ which he describes as segregating individuals based on perceived differences—a misguided attempt at achieving belonging through exclusion rather than inclusion. This binary thinking pits people against each other based on race, religion, culture, or politics, undermining their inherent dignity.
Fitting In vs. True Belonging
A key distinction Primo makes is between ‘fitting in’ and true belonging. While fitting in demands conformity and adherence to gatekeepers’ standards—often leading to self-betrayal—belonging celebrates individuality while valuing diversity among people.
True belonging parallels love; it requires being comfortable with oneself first before extending respect towards others’ uniquenesses without judgment or prejudice.
Practicing Grateful Living
To combat ‘otherness,’ Joe advocates for practicing grateful living—a mindset that views life as precious gift worth cherishing every day despite flaws present within ourselves or others around us alike! It encourages deeper exploration into what makes each person valuable beyond surface-level appearances alone!
By acknowledging interconnectedness amongst all beings through gratitude practices such mindfulness meditation exercises (or simply taking time appreciate small moments), radical sense community can emerge naturally over time even amidst chaotic environments like upcoming U.S election year holidays fast approaching soon after this writing date too perhaps?
Episode Transcription:
Victoria Volk: Hello. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, whatever time it is, you’re listening to this week’s episode. Thank you for being here. I appreciate you. And today, I want to share something that somebody else wrote. It’s an article I came across that really is fitting for our times right now, especially if you live here in the US, a lot of change and uncertainty, and I think just astrologically. There’s so much happening in the in the galaxy, in the universe with the stars, and the moons, and moons, moon, all of that. If you follow any of that, there’s been a lot of stuff coming to the forefront. Probably in your life, it has in mind, particularly as it relates to relationships. I think relationships have been a huge focus in what I’ve been reading and what I’ve learned from friends who follow that stuff more so than myself, but I think there’s a lot to be learned from the stars and there’s cultures that knew this, that whose lives depended on the stars, right, and the sun and the moon, and they set their lives to the universe, to what was happening in the skies. And so anyway, I digress all of that. The point of me sharing this article though is what I just said, is all the change and uncertainty that has been happening, particularly since COVID, what we learned from COVID, individually, collectively. And what’s to come? All that uncertainty as it unfolds. And what it means to each of us and our relationships and for ourselves, our relationship with in with ourselves. And I couldn’t have articulated this any better I wouldn’t I didn’t even wanna I tried, but I just this is just perfectly written, and so let me get to it. It is an article written by Joe Porrimo. I hope I’m saying his name correctly. It’s an essay and he titles it radical belonging in an age of other ring. And I found this on a website called Grateful Living and I will link to it in the show notes if you care to read any of his other work. So I’m actually going to read this word for word because I feel it is the perfect share for what is happening again. Here it goes. There is an epidemic of loneliness. The US surgeon general, Vivek Murphy, says, if we fail to build more connected lives, we will continue to splinter and divide until we can no longer stand as a community or a country. As we try to understand the societal illness, I think we need to ask whether we are sick from loneliness, or from not belonging to each other and ourselves. In the depths of our isolation, we quickly encounter a darkness. It is our world closing in on itself. Our entanglement with each other becomes disentangled. We are no longer woven. We are a single thread under tension pulled taut. We’re at risk of far more than fraying. John a Powell, director of the other ring and belonging institute, says that we create other ring to create belonging. Think about this for a moment. In order to feel at home in ourselves and with others, we rally around contempt, prejudice, oppression, and exclusion. If we want to understand this epidemic, it seems that this may be a source of sickness. Could it be that our need to belong, took a misguided route and fueled a pandemic of othering? This pandemic of othering is sustained by binary thinking, which dismantles the inherent dignity of those different from us, religiously, radically, racially, culturally, politically, intellectually, etcetera. Rather than thriving in relationship with each other, many groups find themselves in profound opposition. What is the point of this opposition? What are groups and people trying to protect? For some, it may be the comfort they find in their structure, order and perspective. For some, it may be a desire to feel the nurturing and supportive sense of belonging, but the desire has become confused with fitting in. It’s important to distinguish fitting in from belonging. They are two very different experiences. One has a gatekeeper and requirements. The other is innate. Fitting in asks us to mold ourselves to things like ideologies, appearances, and dogmas. You can fit in if you subscribe to the group’s prescriptions. Belonging on the other hand is not about being affirmed for your likeness others or your methodical virtue keeping. Belonging is not interested in group think and mutual paths on the back. Belonging is where dignity, the sacred, and redemption meet. It is where you can be wally you while also being in relationship with those wildly different from you. Belonging is a both and. The paradox of belonging is much like the paradox of love. Father David Steingle Rast says that to live means to be in relationship and that requires love and action. In order to put love into action and experience belonging, you also have to be at home in yourself. When you belong to yourself, you are better equipped to see, appreciate and respect someone else’s dignity. This is because you can imagine, remember, or acknowledge the pain you’ve endured and how it shaped your perspective and behavior. The unkind and hateful words that are only one grievance away from being spoken. The wars you might be tempted to fight if the opposition was on your stoop. The destruction you might cause if all the power was yours, the food you would steal for a child, the walls you might build at fear was your guidepost, the sicknesses that could fill your mind if you believed your fears, When you can imagine being uttered, then you can see the only path is understanding. A grateful orientation to life is in opposition to other ring rather than unifying around exclusions a practice of grateful living challenges us to seek, observe, and understand. The many ways in which we are never fully alone, never independent or separate from others. The practice of grateful living helps us address the origin of our societal ailments, because it illuminates our interconnectedness by focusing on and acknowledging the details of every lived moment and the network of people required to sustain our lives. This perspective understands that when we lose sight of our inner relationality. We can trust that everything will go sideways, making us sick with fear, greed, violence, exploitation, loneliness, despair, and war. These and other detriments who are well-being fill the enormous cavern where belonging should live and thrive. To avoid falling into the trap of the rage machine or binary thinking, The practice of grateful living asks us to ground ourselves in the root belief that life is a gift. From this root, we grow a perspective that all people have inherent value. Rather than anyone being dispensable and disposable, We know that to be alive means to be in possession of something sacred. And when the sacred is not easily discoverable in another, gratefulness invites you to look more deeply for it like a hatchling in the grass. Stop. Look. Keep looking. When you’re tempted to quit, stop once again and look more. This is what it means to be alive, to be in relation and always on the lookout for all the opportunities put love into action. This perspective challenges you to observe someone’s worth or worthiness even when it is far from sight. Worthing of what you may ask. Well, what are you worthy of in your life? Love, acceptance, safety, nourishment, shelter, redemption, and connection are a few things your dignity bestows on you. When we individually or collectively other, we strip people of this worthiness. We categorize people into good and bad, worthy, and unworthy. We need to ask ourselves how anyone can survive these dichotomies. The response to loneliness and othering must be radical belonging. This is the challenge. This is the work of grateful living. If loneliness is a malady born from a plague that is unraveling or interconnectivity, then gratefulness is the only remedy large enough to treat an illness that is pulling us apart when life requires us to put love into action and remain in relation. There are some reflection questions at the end of this article, and those are, what does it feel like to be otherwise by a person or group that does not understand you? How do you process that pain? If you catch yourself othering, what is coming up for you? What is the fear behind those thoughts? And finally, where do you have an opportunity to invite someone in? To a conversation gathering a meal instead of excluding based on differences. I know this episode was a little bit different than my typical format, but I was really inspired to share this and I just followed the inspired nudge. And I hope this article that you heard me speak to you today has sparked something within you to really look at especially as we’re coming into if you live in the US, it’s an election year. We’re gonna have the holidays soon after. You’re gonna be getting together with families, people, friends, maybe many of those who have opposing views and opinions. I want you to think back to this episode. Listen to it again if you have to. Read the transcription if it’s easier for you to take in information that way. Really, it it is up to each of us individually to sweep our own doorstep. Personally speaking, I’ve had some unraveling of personal friendships and relationships in my life. And I could have just kept pulling that thread and just letting it just come all apart. Right? I could have. But it mattered too much to me. And if a relationship matters to you, you will look at yourself, You will find what do you own in that relationship. What is yours? What do you need to apologize for? What do you need to forgive within yourself? Or others, which just side note forgiveness is not for the other person. It is for you, by the way. So it’s not something that I recommend that you do in person to somebody else you know, I forgive you because, what if they don’t feel like they did anything wrong? Right? You know, they could you don’t you have no idea sometimes what the response would be if you say to someone, I forgive you. Well, what are you forgiving me for? You know? So forgiveness is for you. It’s not for the other person. But this article just really inspired me and brought up what I’ve personally experienced as of late.
And I chose to put love into action. Because that those relationships mattered to me. I know that those relationships are what sustain me. They’re grounding for me, but not only just for me, for us as a collective, for us as a whole, for our group as a whole. And again, like, this article just beautifully shared what’s been on my heart lately, and And it’s an invitation for us all to really look into ourselves. And, you know, do we want to fit in or do we want to belong? And sometimes when you know that you have this knowing and of belonging. It’s sacred. It feels sacred. And There’s a quote here it says realizing that I am from the very beginning. Embedded in a network of relationships makes me ready for an important insight. The innermost essence of the word I is relationship. And that is my brother David Stindel Rast. He must have written a book called you are here. I will do a search for that and see if I can find the book the link and put that in the show notes as well. But again, if you wanna check out this article, read more of Joe Primo’s work on Grateful Living. I will link it in the show notes, so check it out there. And I hope this episode gave you some food for thought as we’re getting closer and closer to an election and following. After that, the holidays. Yay. I’m sure many of you are feeling quite anxious already about that. So if you have any questions, you want to continue this conversation. I encourage you to reach out to me, Victoria at the unleashtruck dot com, my website, the unleashtruck dot com, You can see there’s a contact form there. If, you know, you have a question that you would like me to answer on the podcast. I love doing those episodes too. I haven’t done one of those in quite some time. But until next time, remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life, much love.
Grief, Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Podcast, Spirituality |
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
In today’s episode, Rev. Christine Davies, a hospital chaplaincy leader, shares the path that led her into spiritual care and offers invaluable insights on navigating grief. A deep church involvement from childhood shaped her life path, a calling toward medicine influenced by her nurse mother, and personal health crises that highlighted the importance of compassionate bedside manners.
Christine emphasizes chaplains’ unique role in healthcare—focusing on emotional and spiritual support rather than just logistical aspects like social workers. She underscores the necessity of open conversations about end-of-life issues, informed by her own experiences with pregnancy loss and grief. These discussions are crucial for making advanced care plans that respect patients’ wishes.
Key takeaways from Christine’s insights include:
- Personalized Spiritual Support:
- Individualized guidance is essential during times of grief.
- Chaplains fill critical gaps in patient care through collaboration with medical teams.
- Navigating Grief:
- Intrapsychic loss involves not only mourning what was lost but also shattered plans.
- Acknowledging each person’s unique experience is vital for healing.
- End-of-Life Conversations:
- Open dialogue about death prepares families emotionally.
- Advanced care planning ensures patients’ wishes are respected.
- Holistic Healing Practices:
- Integrative modalities like Reiki can complement traditional counseling to address energetic aspects of grief.
- Caregiver Self-Care:
- Setting boundaries and seeking personal wellness resources is crucial for caregivers’ well-being.
- Advocacy for Holistic Healthcare:
- There’s a need to integrate holistic practices within the healthcare system despite systemic challenges.
Christine’s work highlights how embracing emotional expression and physical activities can aid in grieving processes while advocating for more comprehensive patient-centered care approaches within healthcare settings.
Her story inspires us to live meaningfully, engage openly in conversations about mortality, seek supportive communities during grief journeys, and advocate relentlessly for holistic patient care that honors every aspect of the human experience—emotional, spiritual, and physical.
RESOURCES:
- SDI.org
- Do Grief Differently
- Enneagram
- Reiki
- Biofield Tuning
- Book, The Four Things That Matter Most
CONNECT:
- Substack
- Website
- IG
- FB
- LinkedIn
_______
NEED HELP?
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
- Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor
If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.
CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Embracing Grief and Spirituality in Healthcare
In the latest episode of “Grieving Voices,” we delve into a profound conversation with Reverend Christine Von Davies, a beacon of hope and spiritual guidance at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. As an ordained Presbyterian minister, seminary professor, and trained spiritual director, Christine offers invaluable insights into normalizing grief while encouraging individuals to live more fully.
A Journey Into Chaplaincy
Christine’s path to chaplaincy is deeply rooted in her upbringing within the church. Initially drawn towards medicine due to her mother’s influence as a nurse, she discovered her true calling through volunteering as an emergency medical technician. Her passion for providing emotional support was solidified by personal experiences with healthcare providers’ bedside manners and an associate pastor’s comforting presence during health crises. This journey led her toward pastoral care—a vocation that fills essential gaps in patient care by focusing on the emotional and spiritual aspects often overlooked in clinical settings.
The Importance of Advanced Care Planning
One of the crucial roles Christine plays involves facilitating advanced care planning discussions—conversations that are often avoided but necessary for ensuring patients’ end-of-life wishes are respected. Through these dialogues, families can navigate complex decisions together, fostering peace amidst uncertainty.
Navigating Grief: Personal Experiences Shape Professional Insights
Christine’s own encounters with loss have deepened her understanding of grief’s multifaceted nature. She introduces us to concepts like intrapsychic loss—the shattering not just from losing someone but also from losing envisioned futures—and emphasizes acknowledging each individual’s unique grieving process without judgment or expectation.
Her work highlights how vital it is for healthcare systems today shift towards patient-centered approaches where empathy reigns supreme over mere logistics management; recognizing people holistically rather than purely clinically enhances both healing journeys & overall well-being significantly!
Addressing Spiritual Crises Amidst Painful Times
Many patients experience spiritual crises when faced with illness or death—a reality exacerbated by well-meaning yet harmful religious platitudes offered too readily sometimes! Herein lies another integral aspect tackled expertly under Rev.Von Davies’ guidance: allowing genuine expressions ranging anywhere between anger/sadness/relief etc., thereby validating authentic emotions instead suppressing them needlessly…
By embracing such authenticity wholeheartedly herself (drawing inspiration even from mystical notions like “dark night soul”), she encourages others similarly find solace transformative potential residing therein… Ultimately though? It all boils down living meaningfully whilst helping those around do likewise navigating respective paths gracefully despite inevitable challenges encountered along way…
Practical Tips For Those Grappling With Loss:
- Give Yourself Space: Allow yourself ample time process feelings involved seeking community support wherever possible—whether via bereavement groups/spiritual direction sessions/faith-based organizations alike…
- Don’t Isolate: Engaging supportive networks (both offline online) proves immensely beneficial throughout entire ordeal
Episode Transcription:
Victoria Volk: Hello. Hello. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of grieving voices. Today, my guest is Reverend Christine Vaughan Davies. She runs the hospital chappellancy department at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. She is an ordained presbyterian minister, seminary professor and trained spiritual director. Christine shares stories from her chaplency work to normalize grief and help people live more fully in the moment while educating about grief, loss, and advanced care planning. She lives to their family on a small farm in New Jersey, spending her time chasing chickens and show furring her children to their activities. Thank you so much for your time and being my guest today, and And for the work that you’re doing because it’s not easy working in end of life and in the grief space too. And so I have questions around, well, let’s start there. And we kinda spoke briefly before we started recording, but for a lot of helpers, often it’s their own experience that bring them into the professions of helping others. And so what has been your experience that led to you becoming ordained? And doing this work in grief and loss in advanced care planning.
Christine Davies: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me and for creating this space for us to make this a part of everyday conversation. I began as a my journey to become a hospital chaplain and maybe I should have backtracked because not everyone knows what that is, but I work in a hospital and essentially I’m an extra layer of emotional and spiritual support for patients families, as well as the staff that work within the hospital. But how I got into this was I grew up in the church, my family, and I went to the local Presbyterian Church. I really took to it. I was very much in it. And did youth group and bell choir and all of that and was a pretty precocious kid and was convinced from a young age of god’s presence in my life as well as the fact that god wanted me to help the most people possible. Sometimes in religious circles we talk about calling, and that was my sense of calling her vocation. And I thought the best way to do that would be through medicine. My mother was a nurse, so I think she maybe egged that dream on a little bit. And I had actually volunteered and worked for a number of years as an emergency medical technician, so riding in the backs of ambulances with people when they were going through major medical crises. And it was in that work where I recognized as as much as I could do minor repair of wounds and administering oxygen and ensuring safe transport to the hospital, what really spoke to me was being able to hold people’s hands while they were scared. You know, and trying to provide just a little bit of comfort to them when they didn’t know what was going on and they were oftentimes questioning. Right? Why is this happening to me? And so it was through that and then my own experiences of being a patient. I was in and out of hospitals for quite some time, including one that I used to work in later on, trying to figure out what was going on with me medically. And eventually, I was diagnosed with generalized epilepsy. Which I’m fortunate is under control now, but I was having a lot of seizures and also had a lot of frustration at the bedside manner of some of the healthcare providers who were caring for me. And no one seemed to get how this was impacting me from a holistic perspective. And I was around the same time that the church, my family, was attending, had a new associate pastor, who just took me out in between my hospitalizations, took me out for dinner, and talked to me about what it was like and cared for me in that way. And I found more renewal through that conversation than I did in any of the medications.
Victoria Volk: Now don’t get me wrong.
Christine Davies: I still take all my medications. I’m a big fan of medication, but It was recognizing that there’s multiple ways to go about healing, and that was really the first time I encountered past oral care or spiritual care, which is what I now provide to patients and also teach Clarity how to provide.
Victoria Volk: A lot of people might think that, well, are you a licensed social worker? Because often that is kind of left to the social worker in a hospital setting. And so, like, what is your scope of practice in that way versus a social worker?
Christine Davies: So I’m unique in that I was also a licensed social worker who took me a little while to figure out my exact journey. And I also went to social work school and got my MSW. But where I, you know, as a chaplain, chaplains are really looking at you know, more of the spiritual bent. So for instance, when I worked as a cognitive behavioral therapist before this, we would talk about all sorts of things as now as a chaplain and spiritual director. I’m really focused on that, particularly In the hospital, oftentimes, we’ll fill kind of a larger role just because the social workers are having to do a lot more of the logistical work. So things like you know, discharge planning, dealing with insurances, things of that nature. It’s funny I was walking behind a surgeon a couple weeks ago and he was with a resident and he was passing the chapel and I was a few steps behind them. So he didn’t see me and he says, oh, yeah, the chaplains are great here. They’re like the closest thing we have to a therapist. So make sure you call them for all your patients. And so there is an element of that where we are trying to fill the gap for patients in that way, but we also work very closely with social workers. We work closely with the medical team to really provide that interdisciplinary care.
Victoria Volk: What were the lessons that you received growing up about end of life and death and dying and the beliefs that you had and how have those changed or shifted as you found your path in this work.
Christine Davies: Yeah. So I didn’t grow up hearing a lot about end of life. Or death and dying apart from, you know, when we had relatives that I wasn’t particularly close to die. And I think that’s part of what got me into this because why aren’t we talking about this more? This should be something that we’re really looking at even from a young age. Like my kids know much more about death than I ever did at that age growing up. And even though I was in the church, It was something where there was a funeral, it was sad, but then the expectation was, okay, we keep moving. Whereas when I was going through some of my own experiences, particularly around pregnancy loss, I recognized no one is talking about this in the way that I think that they could. And when I’ve been working with bereavement groups, a lot of what I’m hearing from that bereaved individuals is society wants me to move on and there’s no moving on or I’m not ready, you know, I I can’t just I like to say we move through it, we don’t move on from it. So I think trying to dispel some of the myths that are out there about grief has been important to me. And then I do a lot of advanced care planning in my job as a job on at the hospital. So helping people to think about their death, to name a healthcare Oxy for someone in case you can’t provide what you’d want medically for your treatment. If you can’t give voice to it, how do you tell someone else what it is that you’d want in advance of that? But people don’t like to have those conversations be and I’ve been accused by many people, including my own family of being morbid for this reason because we just, you know, push death to the wayside and we don’t like to think about it.
Victoria Volk: What were some of the things that you experienced as a patient and as a child during that time that you could give some parents insight into in how to support their child who might be in the medical system and have that be having that experience that you had? Like, what would be some advice that you would give?
Christine Davies: Yeah. So one of the things that I see and I just talked about this in the hospital where I had been a patient for a number of years was recognizing the individual, not just coming in and saying, you know, especially in a teaching hospital where there’s lots of doctors coming in at any one time and saying, oh, in this bed, we have and reading off the medical record number, or the diagnosis rather than saying, oh, this is Christine. You know, Christine, what’s going on for you today? And just ignoring me completely or talking to and I was a I was a teenager when I was going through a lot of that you know, so I was sometimes there by myself. My parents couldn’t be there all the time, and not engaging me at all. And I think we’re shifting away from that in healthcare majorly to patient centered care and family centered care. Where we are giving voice to the patient’s experience, to the family’s experience. One of the things I tell a lot of patients that I work with and people that I work with in my spiritual direction practice is that you know your body better than anyone. Because part of my experience was, you know, nobody was seeing my seizures. I was just coming out of it postdictal, which is kind of the period after a seizure where you’re not really making sense and I’d be on the floor and I didn’t know why. But nobody had seen them. And so it took a while to figure out what was going on. But I knew this isn’t right. Thankfully, my mother also realized that wasn’t right, but I had a lot of people say, no, no, no, you need a therapist. It’s in your head. You know, it’s a lot of dismissing what was going on for me, which I think is especially true of women as well as people of color, that their pain or their symptoms aren’t taken seriously by our healthcare field. And I work in healthcare and still I see this. And sort of really encouraging people to, you know, know themselves, know their body, and advocate for what they’re needing.
Victoria Volk: You had mentioned seven ectopic pregnancies?
Christine Davies: Oh, I had one ectopic pregnancy and then overall I’ve had about seven miscarriages.
Victoria Volk: How has that shifted your perspective of grief and how have you navigated that?
Christine Davies: Mhmm. Yeah. It was really difficult for me in in each one of them in different ways. I had some before I had my children and then in between pregnancies. I think it shifted by first what I would call intrapsychic loss, which is what I talk a lot about, which is not just the loss of the baby or the pregnancy, but it’s also this idea that this is not how I was planning for my life to go or even for some people, they encounter that when there’s been a major trauma in their life And it’s almost like the piercing of the veil of I didn’t even know that this could happen to me. Now, I did have a a semblance of this could happen to me having worked in healthcare. But really, a lot of it had to be an internal experience. And that’s something that I hold up to other people to recognize, like, you know, plenty of women go through this, you know, to so many, and it’s not talked about nearly enough. It’s talked about more now that when I was going through and I didn’t even know what ectopic pregnancy was and this was before Google was as, you know, prolific as it is now. But really trying to normalize it for individuals and talk about it so that women as well as, you know, their partners don’t have to grieve in isolation around it. A lot of what I do now in the hospital is provide comfort to parents who are going through the same thing, who the technical term is a fetal demise, but someone who has given birth to a baby who may not have taken a breath in this world or may have taken a breath that was their first breath and their last breath in the same day. And it is completely devastating, of course, for the family, but having gone through similar scenarios myself I try to actually do them when the calls come into my office. We do have a staff of people, so others often do them, but if I’m able to just because I know what it is to go through that. And sometimes, people who have not grieved in certain ways can meanwhile, but not realize the impact of their words or their presence. So for instance, when I was going through that period, I had very well meeting friends say things to me like, well, at least you know you can get pregnant or everything. Christine, you should know you’re a minister. Everything happens for a reason. Mhmm. And I get us on a soapbox about some of these religious platitudes. That we kind of throw out there, but we don’t always understand the spiritual harm that they can do. And so, you know, part of my mission and how I have found purpose through my pain is helping others to to not have to endure that. And it can spin people into a whole spiritual cycle of distress. I mean, grief alone can do that, but then when you have other people trying to care from you. But not not being as supportive as they can. So that’s a little bit of how my story has impacted me. It certainly made the work harder. In a lot of ways, I think about times I was with patients before, I had my losses and times after. Much harder now, but I think I’m more effective as a result of it.
Victoria Volk: Yeah, to share, piggyback what you had said, I feel like those platitudes can be spiritually stunning for us. Mhmm. And then it’s like, well, God need another angel, you know, that kind of remark and it’s like, no. They should be here with me. And, well, I guess I need to blame God then because you know, I that’s I had a lot of trauma and grief in my childhood and I blame God for a very long time.
Christine Davies: Yeah. If you’re following that, you know, logic of and I like to call it toxic spirituality. Right? Always putting a positive spin on things. If you’re following that logic to that end point that God did this to you in some sort of cosmic test or whatever, of course, I’m gonna think that God is a real jerk.
And that’s gonna impact my relationship with God. One of the things I see a lot of in the hospital is anger at God. Oftentimes, with good reason, if this is the logic or the theology that people are following, and then a lot of our religious institutions don’t allow a space for that anger. A lot of patients that say to me, like, I’m really angry at God for, you know, doing this, but they are worried that even voicing it aloud is blasphemy. And so they’re like, I can’t talk to my clergy about it, which I think is why we sometimes get it as this anonymous spiritual person within the hospital.
Victoria Volk: Alright? Because you have no skin in their game.
Christine Davies: Mhmm. Mhmm.
Victoria Volk: What is the advice then that you give to people if they find themselves in that situation? And how have you how did you personally navigate those relationships with those people? That would say those types of things.
Christine Davies: Yeah. I think I was fortunate and I had other people that weren’t saying those things to me. And so I just knew, okay, I have to lean on them a little bit more. And then I had people who actually, after the fact, it when they endured their own loss later on, came back to me and said, I realized that I set this in the moments. Mhmm. And it wouldn’t be helpful now. And so that’s why I like to tell people about it. So they don’t have to go through the experience of it to know the implications of it. But what I do encourage people to do is to really lean into their emotions, whatever they happen to be, Whether that’s anger, sometimes it’s relief. I see a lot of families that have relief when a loved one dies and or pregnancies lost or other things and people feel guilty about that. So I think it needs to be all all sad all the time. But lifting that up is a valid emotional experience. And I would say find people who will be supportive of you, whether that are those are grief groups, whether that is working with a therapist or a spiritual director or if you have friends or family that have been through it in similar ways. Sometimes it’s a little too hard if people have been through it for them to be able to be with you, but there’s a fantastic quote that I use a lot to inform my work, which is the cry of the soul can only be heard by one whose soul has already cried.
Victoria Volk: That’s good.
Christine Davies: And I think that speaks a lot to you know, how we can be tender with others when we know that tender place of grief for ourselves.
Victoria Volk: That speaks to what I say in my podcast quite often is that someone can someone can only sit with you in the depths of your grief to the depths that they’ve, like, allowed themselves to feel their own. That’s Mhmm. Way more eloquently beautiful.
Christine Davies: I don’t know who said it, actually. Maybe your listeners can find it out. I have tried to, you know, big I heard it somewhere. I’ve tried, but I’m I’m not the most technologically savvy person, but I’ve not been able to figure it out. But yeah, and that’s a lot of how our educational system in chapel and see actually works is people come in having, you know, gone to seminary and, you know, know all of these weighty theological understandings. But a lot of what we have to do in our training is around the emotional pieces, particularly as it relates to that counter transparency. Empathy. Mhmm.
Victoria Volk: Absolutely. Come naturally to everything.
Christine Davies: Now it’s hard one.
Victoria Volk: Yeah. What has your grief taught you?
Christine Davies: Yeah. So there’s this concept in Christianity, although other spirituality sometimes draw from it as well, called the dark night of the soul, And it is this concept in kind of mysticism where there is great darkness is really referring to. It’s not so much the night, but the obscurity. The not knowing why things are happening. If people believe in God, they may feel abandoned by God or that they can’t feel God’s presence. And it’s really when everything we thought we knew kind of changes. And feels like the rug has been pulled out of us from a spiritual perspective. And the amazing thing about these dark nights of the soul is that often they result in transformation, in a new dawn of a new understanding of ourselves, of our sense of spirituality, or how we connect with universe, or others. And most people said, you know, it was terrible to go through. I don’t want to go through that ever again. And yet, I have a changed meaning perspective as a result. Now that takes a lot of time. Right? You know, just wake up one morning and it’s like, oh, everything’s hunky dory now. But I do believe that a lot of my own grief and loss, a lot of the grief and loss that I’ve sat with for other people, it also helps me to not take things for granted, knowing that this life is not, you know, tomorrow is not promised. There’s lots of, you know, meditations around, you know, engaging our liminality. As a spiritual practice. And, you know, using that as a framework for how do I live into my life, you know, knowing we’re here for just, you know, a speck of time when looking at the entirety. Of the world. So again, some people that wouldn’t be as a positive spin on it, but to me, it really does motivate me in how to live my daily life.
Victoria Volk: And that brings up a question of how you live your daily life. Now, But as you were going through it, you’re having to not only manage your own emotions, but also the emotions of your existing children as you were experiencing child loss yourself, the motions of your spouse? Yes?
Christine Davies: Mhmm.
Victoria Volk: Can you speak to that a little bit? Like her Mhmm. How how it is to hold your own grief, but then also have a family that’s gonna be there, you
Christine Davies: know, too. Well, and to be clear, when a lot of my losses were before I had my first child, and then the other losses came before my first child was even aware, like, he was maybe two or three. So he didn’t really know anything that was going on. But I will speak to it from the perspective of, you know, and I and many people I talked to that go through pregnancy loss have this experience where it is such a painful experience physically And so in addition to emotionally and spiritually, but so I remember, like, you know, lying on the couch and not being able to to do much. You know, with my two year old who wanted to jump all over me because I was in such pain. And, you know, so that’s certainly a piece where I was trying to balance all of it. And then I think with my spouse, I would probably handle it differently today than I did then. You know, for me, I don’t think I saw the impact that it was having on him and his own helplessness. And so that’s, you know, that informs my work today because I am always checking, you know, with the partners, whether it’s husband, whether it’s a wife, whether it’s the the grandparents that are there, Now, sometimes I’ll take them outside of the room and say, you know, how are you doing? Knowing that, you know, a lot of the focus is going to be on the mother with good reason.
But that there’s grief that’s not really talked about there for others. Howard Bauchner: What
Victoria Volk: do you recommend to people who So let’s say, I’m, you know, in the hospital and I have this experience and a terrible experience and I you come to me and I’m a very appreciative of you and your time and your gifts that you’re sharing, and then but then I have to go home. Uh-huh. So how how does that how do you what do you have to say to people who First of all, may not even have the experience that you provide Mhmm. In their local hospital
Christine Davies: Right.
Victoria Volk: But then also moving forward resources tools or what do you recommend or how can people begin healing on their own. Mhmm. And can they on their own?
Christine Davies: Mhmm. I think that’s one of the things that makes grief so difficult for us to have these huge conversations around because everyone’s experience is gonna be different. Right? So my first miscarriage, so much different than my last. At that, you know, on my seventh, I was like, okay, this is old hat. Like, I know I know what we’re doing here. But for some people, all seven are going to be difficult. Or for some people, you know, that might be, you know, I was with a woman the other day, and I said, oh, you have a cancer diagnosis, you know. How are you coping with that? Is it a new cancer diagnosis? She goes, oh, honey. She’s like, I lost I lost my son. I lost my husband. This is nothing. Right? So so much of how we are approaching grief and loss in our life stems from all that we have experienced up until that point. You know, you mentioned childhood trauma and abuse earlier. In some ways, I think that has a huge impact onto how we grieve and to the resilience that we’re bringing into this work. So all that to say it is gonna look a little different for everyone in terms of recommendations that I would give. And a lot of times when I’m dealing with people in the hospital, they are more in kind of crisis mode even if they’re saying goodbye to someone in the ICU, and they know that their loved one was going to die, you know, for a period of weeks. It’s still right when it happens. So many of my families are saying, like, it just feels like a bad dream. You know? And certainly, people that are dying due to a car accident or very sudden, violent death is people can’t even, you know, I have to walk them to the door. Like, they don’t even know where they are because it is so overwhelming in that time.
So The first piece of advice I would give is give yourself space to know that this is going to be difficult. Right? I was talking with someone who said, yeah, I really shouldn’t have gone back to work three days after this happened. Because they just felt like that was the message that they were getting was if they had to move on. I would recommend community in some form or fashion. You know, I mentioned I used to run bereavement groups. One of the benefits of COVID is now there’s so many of these groups meeting online. Many that didn’t go back to in person. I mean, I like in person groups as well, but I think that helps people who, you know, may not have a local group or maybe too hard, you know, to get out to a group in person. And even, you know, people speak ill of social media on lots of different levels, but it there has been such community building around that. I know there’s there’s Facebook groups for everything under the sun and that helps people to have a sense of community and really normalizing. What they’re going through in a powerful way. And for people that are wanting to explore more of the spiritual themes of what’s going on for them, you know, if they have a faith background or religion that they have a community that they can be a part of. Certainly, that would be a place where I would encourage them to reach out or even if they’re thinking about joining one. Most people don’t. I see a lot of people that are more, you know, spiritual, not religious. And that’s where I would say engaging someone who can walk that path with you might be helpful like a spiritual director. So that’s a training that I wound up doing because I missed people stories when they left the hospital. I was there for that crisis, but I wanted to walk with people longer. And so, spiritual directors international or s d I dot org has a whole directory of spiritual directors that you can Some are online only, some are in person. You can filter by any religious denomination or meet with people that are of had not a religious affiliation whatsoever. And that is usually a helpful resource for people because it’s so individualized. As much as I love faith communities and congregations. Sometimes it can be hard to really sit with what is going on for your own particular spiritual self in this moment, especially in the mid of grief or like I talked about before that dark night of the soul. So this can really give you that individualized focus.
Victoria Volk: What does your healing look like? You know, when we say you have to do the work? Mhmm. And the for me, the word was the grief recovery method, which I walk people through in my program do grief differently, which is a twelve week one to one program, and then I also do groups as well. Mhmm. What did it look like for you?
Christine Davies: Oh, what it’s still going on? It’s always We’re always in it. Right.
Speaker 2: And sometimes, you know, I sent to my therapist not so long.
Christine Davies: I was like, I thought I was over this by now. Like, how many years has this been? And I’m like, no. No. No. Like, Our stuff is always our stuff, and it’s always gonna move with us and and shape us. A couple of things that stood out for me. I mean, one was getting to lament to god and and engage in that anger. You know, I remember it was during that time I discovered the there’s a lot of cursing songs in the bible, so those were very helpful to me at that particular juncture. I I engaged some therapists, some that were fantastic, some that were not so good. Same thing with support groups. And so that’s the other piece of advice I give to people, like, you know, reach out to others, and if it’s not a fit, it’s not a fit, just keep reaching out, which can be hard to do when you’re in the throes of grief. But, yes, talking to people who understood it. For me, some of it was also writing about it, and so I do write a lot. I have a newsletter on my website and I’ve written about in detail about some of my pregnancy loss as well as more general stories from the hospital. So for me that was helpful to really articulate it for myself and the blessings of it. It took me a while. I couldn’t write it about it for a while at first, but I went back to it later. And then the other piece of advice that I get people that helped me as well and I’m continuing to see how this unfolds my own life is that there’s a physicality to grief and loss. It does reside. In our body. And, you know, I I love all the research that’s out there now about trauma in the body and just how true I’m finding that. And so for me, it’s about how do I engage with that for myself. So whether it’s you know, through massage or I I know you’re a rate key practitioner. That’s something I picked up a little while ago and loved or, you know, using yoga or just being in my body and healing from that perspective. It can’t just all be, you know, this talk therapy. That has been true in my own life, and I suspect it may be the case for others as well.
Victoria Volk: I’m a certified bio field tuning practitioner, which is using tuning forks. And field extends file.
Christine Davies: No. I’ve not done that yet. Oh.
Speaker 2: We’ll talk after this.
Christine Davies: I
Victoria Volk: actually prefer that to rate you. Actually, I I incorporate elements of both in my Okay. In my practice with clients, but it, you know, our energy field extends five to six feet out and our energy field informs the body and our body informs our energy field. And so it really is what you’re feeling in here is what you are putting out energetically. It really is a reflection of what you’re feeling in here. And so it’s like, when I see people, like, just in church, for example, I can always tell who is got a lot of maybe anxious energy, tense, stress because people will do this. Mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm. Was just putting their arms up here shouldn’t change their shoulder dropping, but it’s still just just like this.
Christine Davies: I think that’s all of us in some ways. Like, we’re all whole Yeah. So much. And just not even breathing, you know, fully with our diaphragm. So it’s just Mhmm.
Victoria Volk: You know, bringing attention to that. Right? And why am I why am I feeling in holding this here? And so that’s what I help people work through and what’s beautiful about biofuel tuning is that you don’t have to talk about it. The work happens as I’m working through your energy field, but it’s just been a beautiful thing to be able to add that into my grief work with clients and then also it’s often how people come into grief work because they realize they have a lot of stuff they are holding on to and feeling
Christine Davies: like mhmm. Oh, I think that’s a beautiful practice and such a gift to give people.
Victoria Volk: Is it becoming more common to do you find in the hospital that you’re working in that they are starting to offer more of these other modalities while people maybe are in intensive care or, you know, because you have you can’t just offer someone energy healing without their permission.
Christine Davies: So Mhmm.
Victoria Volk: Not that caveat, but
Christine Davies: I wish. Not that I’ve seen I wish it would impact some hospitals maybe, but I’m always writing alouds for. We need a whole integrated, you know, spirituality department that is, you know, bringing in other things And actually, I wind up getting my my rate key achievements because during COVID, we were using oh, we our oncology floors would use volunteers for to come in and do rate key. But then during COVID, the volunteers couldn’t come in. And one day, I had a nurse on the phone calling our office. Do you know anyone that can do this? Like, one of my one of my patients is desperate for it. Oh, okay. No, I have to go, you know, get that, at least for an emergency basis. I don’t do it ongoing for for patients, but now I think that is something that, you know, again, I work in healthcare.
It pays my bills, but I do think that we sometimes miss out on the opportunities for holistic healing. Again, there are some hospitals out there doing a great job of it. And some of the realities within our healthcare system in the United States anyway is the ways in which it becomes about what a billable practice is and not, and insurance. And even Chaplin’s, we’re not a billable practice. So there’s some hospitals that don’t have chaplains, even though one could argue that they are required to buy different commissions that accredit hospitals, but it’s really up to interpretation. You know, sometimes people are just calling local ministers to come in and do something versus individuals who are trained and have a department for that. So I think we have a long way to go, but my hope is that we will go more in that direction.
Victoria Volk: What did your rate key attunement in your training open up for you in terms of understanding that But, yeah, there might be a little bit of a blurred line between spirituality and energetics of grief and and all of that because, you know, some people might, especially who are in certain, maybe religious affiliations might look at it, like, it’s some sort of voodoo
Christine Davies: Mhmm. Witcher. So, yes. Yeah. And I don’t talk a whole lot about it just because I know that that is the case. And and I am pretty if if your listeners have been told been able to tell thus far, I’m pretty progressive as far as the president ministers go, and that is something that has been such a helpful practice for for myself. And so I don’t I don’t widely offer it to others. But the way that I understand it from that perspective is, you know, this is about and sometimes I’ll do some interpretation. But, like, for me, this is about the holy spirit. Or this is about me getting more in touch with, you know, godsend dwelling inside me is how I I like to envision it. And it’s funny because a lot of what Ricky had helped me to do was to become a better meditator. You know, I try doing meditation for so long, and then Ricky as well as learning more about some of the Christian meditation practices that are out there. And so that helped me. I’m like, even if I get no physical benefits from it whatsoever, I knew I was getting that emotional and spiritual benefit just because I was caring for myself. I was, you know, slowing myself down and being more attuned to god’s presence in my life. But I will say, yes, there are a lot of people out there. I get accused of, you know, witchcraft or pulling in things like the enneagram to my teaching and and I understand. Otheragram too. And other modalities. Because to me, I’m like, why are we not using these tools that are out here? And it’s it’s a better intention. What is our intention in using them? Is it to for me, it’s to become more attuned. To god in my life and and how I’m caring for others. So I don’t know that I answered your question. I got a little bit of a a a a sidetrack with it, but
Victoria Volk: no. It it did. Because that I’d asked how did what did it unlock for you?
Christine Davies: Mhmm. We
Victoria Volk: just helped you more of self acceptance of Absolutely. Mhmm. Yeah. Of my son, he was he’s been pretty skeptical for he was for quite a while about what I do and with the tuning forks and just he didn’t quite understand it. And I said, Jim, you know what, though? I have a prayer.
Christine Davies: I don’t have I
Victoria Volk: do it’s it’s like a prayer Mhmm. For me. I don’t know. Yeah. They have a different way they do it, but I said, I have a specific prayer, you know, because he his concern was, well, who knows what you’re inviting in? Mhmm. Oh, I know what I’m inviting in because I’m bringing that intention and I’m calling it out. I’m calling it in, you know, with my intention and with my prayer. And so I had to make that clarification. And then he was like, oh, okay. That makes sense.
Christine Davies: Mhmm. Yeah. I use that prayer as well. And one of the one of my teachers for Ricky actually learned years ago from a Catholic nun in a church because that used to be I know I was shocked when she told me that because it used to be, I think a little bit more acceptance in in certain circles.
Victoria Volk: Yeah, I would say. And I think it is becoming more I think as we’re moving towards more holistic, it’s becoming more common and more understanding about it, really. You know, people more curiosity. You know Mhmm. People following their curiosity and just learning being open. That’s what I would just encourage people to do is don’t poo poo it or naysayer just because you have a lack of understanding about it or maybe question your understanding. Is this? Mhmm. Correct, you know, because we can have these beliefs that were passed down to us as children. That’s maybe not true, you know.
Christine Davies: Right. And it’s another area, and this is a lot of what I work with with my spiritual directives. There’s all sorts of spiritual practices out there. You know, for some people, journaling is something that really helps to connect with, you know, God for them. For others, it may be meditating. Right? Maybe walking in nature. You know, everyone has different ways that they’re approaching this. And, you know, sometimes I like to say, like, we almost need a smorgasbord. I mean, like, okay. What works for one person may not work for another one? Or for seasons in life as well. There may be a season where something, you know, that works for you for so long is no longer, you know, helping you in that way. And so being, as you said, being open to other practices or or trying things on and seeing if they can help you connect with yourself, with others into the divine.
Victoria Volk: One of the questions I ask is on my form and is what gives you hope for the future? And doing the work that you do and your personal experience, what does give you hope for the future? Oh, I would love to know what I said
Christine Davies: a while ago. But today, we did. No. No. No. No. You can tell me later. We’ll see if it matches up. But what gives me hope today for the future is really, you know, and and and part of what keeps me in the work that I do is seeing people’s resilience. In the face of deep suffering, you know, seeing people continue to move move through life. And sometimes with that changed meaning perspective that I talked about before, and just the depth of caring that people can then do for others. That’s a lot of what gives me hope. It’s close.
Speaker 2: Look, I can’t remember what I had for practice up. Yeah. I don’t know how you can answer a question
Christine Davies: a little while ago, but Mhmm. How
Victoria Volk: is your past experiences and and just in the in the work that you do? What you see? How is it maybe changed how you how is it influenced? How you parent? And maybe what you give more attention to in your parenting? And how you maybe talk about deaf and dying and you know, I’m I imagine that you’re open and transparent. Like, you talk about death and dying in your house maybe regularly or maybe not. I don’t know. Like, how has that informed? You’re working informed, how your parents, and all of that?
Christine Davies: Yeah. I would say, even from, like, an emotional containment part, trying to emphasize, you know, what are you feeling and that feelings are are valid. And I think that’s different than the way a lot of us grew up. You know, being told, oh, you know, I’m allowed to cry or, you know, just a a different generation. Like, my kids learn about feelings in the health class now. I’m like, oh, that’s fantastic and minor in elementary school. And so even learning to say, and I have two ways, so even learning to say, you know, it’s okay to be angry. It’s not okay to slam the door or it’s not okay to, you know, throw things all over the house when you’re angry. But what are some practices we can do? When you’re angry.
The other day I was teaching my eight year old how to do some angry yoga moves to to help him kind of settle back into himself when he was feeling out of sorts because he was mad, probably something that his brother did. So, trying to really help them to self soothe and to nurture that for themselves. And, yes, we do talk about death. I also live on a farm, so that helps because we had a lot of chickens that have been, you know, attacked by box and hawks and and things like that. And, you know, from an early age, my kids understood.
You know, this is just a part of life. This is part of the life cycle. I do remember when my older son first found out about death, I think probably due to one of our jigs dying early beyond. You know, I was explaining this happens for, you know, for everyone. And he says, you mean, you’re gonna die one day. And I said, you know, yes. I am. I hope it’s not gonna be for a while, but I am gonna die. And if it when I do, like, you’re gonna have other people around. And then he’s and then and he’s like he seemed okay with that. And then he said, wait, do you mean, I’m gonna die one day? And I said, yes. And that’s when, you know, he, you know, went into this, you know, really a new understanding and that where, like, the crying began, not when something was gonna happen to me, but recognizing his own mortality. Mhmm. And those are hard moments to endure, and I do this professionally. So I can understand my parents don’t wanna talk about it ever. Then I think we’re not preparing our kids enough to have this as part of a reality. You know, I’ve worked with people and clergy who have a lot of denial. About death even though that’s their profession. And to me, that just makes the grieving even harder when it does come because not not just are you grieving that person, but you’re grieving the fact that you never thought this would happen. Versus being open and talking about it more, I do think helps prepare us a little bit more for when it does happen.
Victoria Volk: We bring up a good point and that I can’t even tell you. I couldn’t even tell you what experience or pinpoint a time when my kids learned of their own mortality. I could not even tell you because I wasn’t doing this work then, you know, but I wouldn’t I wouldn’t even know. I wouldn’t even know when that is and that makes me sad because, you know, that’s an opportunity that’s a teachable moment, that is an opportunity. And so that’s a very good point in how how it can really shift a perspective for a child when you are have that awareness of what they’re saying and really and what they’re feeling and then how to talk through it. But if that child is having that experience and they’re not vocalizing it or asking And it’s all an inner process. You have no idea. Like Mhmm. And they come up with their own beliefs about
Christine Davies: Right. They feel like that. Wow. Absolutely. Yeah. And and and look, especially for your listeners, it is so hard. We’re all doing the best that we can. In in the present moment. And and as I said, it’s hard for me and I do this work. Right? And so there’s times where and my kids will say, like, mom, when I die, are you gonna cry?
Speaker 2: Or and what what are they gonna say
Christine Davies: in my funeral? Like, they will sometimes I
Speaker 2: really don’t wanna be having this conversation, especially as we’re driving to soccer practice,
Christine Davies: you know. And I’ve had a rough day. But to me, the importance is that we, you know, we are talking about it, and they and to them, they’re asking things that are going to be deeply emotional for me to answer, but they don’t have the same emotions attached to it. To them, it’s just like a matter of fact and how they’re thinking through things, which is, you know, developmentally appropriate. And so it is giving them space. The other recommendation that I usually give to people when they’re asking, how do you talk to kids about this? Is is to answer their questions, see what questions they have because sometimes the questions that they have are not the things that we would think, you know, to answer. So for instance, a friend of mine had their mother died and their dot and their daughter asked, they said, well, you know, what’s gonna happen to and she thought she was gonna say, like, the body or something like that. It was like this one tea cup that was in, you know, the grandmother’s China cabinet that she wanted. Like, that was it was so specific, you know, and things that people don’t even think that their kids are focused on, but that’s what they’re focused on. And so, yeah, to answer their questions. And then also, don’t give them more information than they need sometimes. And you know your children best or your grandchildren or, you know, the children in your life wherever your listeners find themselves. And so some kids are going to be able to handle things that others aren’t. I get asked a lot in the hospital, should I bring, you know, my child in to, you know, say goodbye to their loved one who’s in the ICU. Again, it’s gonna different for every kid based on developmentally what you think that they could handle. My kids tend to be a little bit immature in some ways, and so I might not do that for them in some ways, but others, you know, that may be completely appropriate And then to avoid using euphemisms, I think, is also really important because, you know, people tell me that they remember hearing when they’re a kid that you go to sleep and you don’t wake up. And then they’re afraid to go to sleep because they think that’s going to happen to them. And so really trying to say death, not lost, like we didn’t, you know, we lost something like we lost a mitten. It’s not the same thing. And so trying to be both clear, but also appropriate to their age level.
Victoria Volk: But also, I think it’s important to not make an assumption that you know their understanding, their level of understanding.
Christine Davies: Right. Mhmm.
Victoria Volk: That could be very easy to Yep.
Christine Davies: Yeah. That’s why it’s good to ask them first. You know, what do you you know, do you think about this? And and they may surprise you with their answers and and how profoundly they can be? You
Victoria Volk: know, it’s like when my dad died, I even heard people say, I I hear it. It’s like clear as day, someone said, well, she’s too little. She doesn’t understand what’s going on anyway, and it’s like, I’m eight years old. If you can’t hear her eight years old, you can’t Uh-huh. Wouldn’t have known if your dad died. Mhmm. You know what I mean? So, like, just the nigh don’t be naive as an adult to think that just because you have all this life behind you that this child does not understand simply even what death is, you know.
Christine Davies: Yeah. And I think that’s what makes it doubly hard for parents because we’re holding our own grief Yes. About the death. And then trying to comfort our children in it as well. So it is an impossible task.
Victoria Volk: And that’s why I asked like Mhmm. How what that was for you and what that looked like because I think that is something but a lot of people don’t talk about either. Mhmm. Holding holding it in Nasdaq’s, generally, that does the emotional stuff does fall on us, you know, so we’re Mhmm. Carrying our stuff and then we’re caring everybody’s stuff.
Christine Davies: Right. Yeah. In just a in a day to day, even when there’s not a crisis or not a, you know, a fresh loss going on, you know, encouraging, you know, people to care for themselves is especially when they’re in a caregiving role either professionally and or personally in their lives because many of us that goes to the wayside and really trying to, you know, emphasize how much that’s needed.
Victoria Volk: So how do you decompress and care for yourself, you know, at the end of the day, and just in the work that you’re doing, and being a mom, and spouse, and, like, what does that look like for you? And overall, just to help her.
Christine Davies: Mhmm. Well, I’ll say I keep a number of people on my payroll, so that is very helpful to me. From my own therapist, my own spiritual director, my own massage therapist, all of my, you know, doctors as well. And I am people in my office are funny because they’re like, oh, you always do all of your medical appointments. I said, absolutely, I do. Like, I am there all the time because I wanna make sure I am taking care of my health. To me, that is important because of so much of what I see. But then I have people that I can turn to who know this work. And so a lot of chaplains will have or chaplains educators will have kind of a peer group that they meet with, both for consultation about difficult cases and scenarios, but then also for that support. So I have that for for chaplains. I have another one for other spiritual directors, and those have been a lifeline for me. And then I have friends who don’t do anything related to the whatsoever. And we could talk about, you know, various other things. So I think having that balance. For me, one of the things that’s important is spending time in nature. So, you know, I live on this thirty four acre, hobby farm, and there’s always something to be done. It’s mostly weeding or, you know, you know, repairing fences and things of this nature. But I find something when I’m just doing it with my hands and complete completely takes me out of my element. And I have to drive a way to a ways to get to where I live. I live a little further out from the hospital. But I actually really appreciate that time because that’s kind of my buffer. So sometimes I’m listening to a podcast like this, sometimes I’m listening to books, sometimes music, and sometimes nothing, sometimes I’m just quiet. In those moments depending on the day that I’m about to have or the day that I’ve had that helps me to transition. And then the other piece of advice that I have for others that I’ve tried to do for my own life is to be fully off you know, to go off duty so to speak. Sometimes I’ll even say that to my kids. I’ll say mom’s off duty ask dad, you know, he’s in charge for a little while. I need a little bit of time. But especially people who are working as caregivers, there can be this or just have an inclination of a caregiving mentality. You know, there can be these times where it seeps into other aspects of our life. You know, we’re at the grocery store and all of a sudden, like, helping someone there, you know, out to groceries and hearing their life story, you know, if you’re the type of person where people share things all the time, you know, like you’re at church and you you can sense people’s energies and what do you do with that? And so really trying to be purposeful about like, okay, I am not on duty here. I am not on payroll, trusting that someone else will, you know, come along and help that individual. And and sometimes I will be the one to step forward and and help, but recognizing I only have a limited amount of energy sometimes my family doesn’t get the fullness of my energy because I, you know, let it go so much at at work. So really trying to create boundaries around that for myself and keep my own my own well filled.
Victoria Volk: Well, thank you for sharing all of that because it sounds like that was a great advice for how to fill your own cup, especially as a helper, is, yeah, go off duty.
Christine Davies: Much easier said than done.
Victoria Volk: Yeah. That’s very true. Is there is there anything that you would like to share that you feel like you didn’t get a chance to? And I feel like I could we didn’t even really get into the end of life stuff. Okay. Let me just ask this. What would be the what would you like people to take away from your work and what you’ve seen about end of life. Mhmm.
Christine Davies: I think the acknowledging of the reality of it to me is is one of the major takeaways. And my guess is your audience doesn’t need to be reminded because they know this already. But, you know, just knowing, as I said before, we’re not promised tomorrow, and so living today in a way that is going to honor really the the precious gravity of our time and what you would want to say to those, you know, that you love or how you would like to act knowing that they may not always be there and you won’t always be here and letting that be a guiding force.
Victoria Volk: What I’ve learned in my training and through this work and conversations is that I think we lose a lot of time giving energy to the denial of what is happening Mhmm. In reality, what is happening because and even as a caregiver too, you can get just sucked into, you know, especially if you’re in charge of the bills and the estate stuff, and you’re you’re the one that’s appointed to be responsible for all of that. It really doesn’t give you an opportunity to process really with that.
Christine Davies: Oh my goodness. The the burden of all the logistical nature. I’m brief. Mhmm.
Victoria Volk: Yeah. And then you don’t really it doesn’t really hit you until after it’s all said and done. And then here, you look back and it’s like all this time that you didn’t use to have those conversations and say what you need to say and, you know, just honor the loved one that you are caring for. Right? Because it’s all every conversation surround often surrounds the logistics of things rather than Mhmm. You know, what are you what are you things that, you know, you wish you would have done in your lifetime? Like, those really thoughtful questions that would give the person who is dying an opportunity to really share what has mattered to them in the meantime.
Christine Davies: Howard Bauchner: Yeah, in Chaplinci, we have an intervention that’s called life review. And I often get to engage that with other people who know, you know, that their their death is more imminent. Getting to say, you know, what what are your major choice? What what do you regret? You know, what do you wish had had been different? And sometimes when the family is present, they’re getting to hear that as well, or sometimes if the patient is unconscious and we’re, you know, maybe in the ICU, that is where an encouraging family. Again, if they want, there’s no right or wrong way to do it. To say goodbye to their loved one and they say, oh, they might not be able to hear me. So we don’t know. And, you know, surrounding their bed and talking about what they’ve meant to them. I always go back to, do you know doctor Ira Biak? He’s a palliative care physician. He wrote a book called the fourth, who’s written lots of books, but one of them is called the fourth things that matter most. And he talks about the conversations that the dying need to have. With their loved ones, but I think it’s also vice versa. And I think these conversations are the four phrases rather to say are things that we could say every day. And we often we don’t. And they’re in a certain order. I’ll say them because they’re brief. They are Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you, and I love you. And there’s all sorts of ways we can say those phrases. But certainly wanting to encourage people to save them at end of life, but then looking at my life and saying, okay, where can I be saying this more fully today in my own life?
Victoria Volk: Sounds like
Christine Davies: You know what I’m talking about? Mhmm.
Victoria Volk: Yeah. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. And you I’m sorry. Please forgive me.
There’s yeah. There’s a few more in there.
Christine Davies: Yep.
Victoria Volk: Yeah. Pono. Pono. Pono. Really long word.
Yeah. That’s beautiful. I’m glad we got that in there because I think it’s an important aspect of what the work that you do. And also, for me, as an end of life too, I feel like I don’t talk about that piece as much as I talk about the you know, the grief that people are left with after the fact. Right. You know, my dad had cancer and he was sick for I think they gave him I I think it was like four months or something. He lived sixteen months Stage four, and he died in a nursing home. And I don’t know that that’s how he would have chosen
Christine Davies: to
Victoria Volk: spend his end of days. I think that’s really what’s fueled my desire for end of life education. And Mhmm. Because I didn’t even realize that, you know, what was possible at end of life. Like, you can choose who you want to see you and who you don’t, and you can choose how you want your environment to be. And I think I would have, like, essential essential oils going and candles and, you know, my favorite music and Mhmm. Yeah. Just you can set the mood. I was like, yeah. Yeah. That’s possible. Like, you can make it what you want it to be. I just didn’t know that that was possible. And so, yeah, it’s kinda hard in a hospital, but You know what? I’m sure accommodations can be made.
Christine Davies: Yeah. Maybe not the candles, but we have battery operated candles.
Victoria Volk: Now guys, yikes, the green ones
Christine Davies: now. Exactly. I have I have one over here. And yeah. And I think families are becoming more tuned to this, you know, what is going to help us honor our loved one.
But yet, when there’s times that we can speak to that beforehand, when everyone is hale and healthy, before there’s a crisis, that I think is the most important piece.
Victoria Volk: And you can even wash your loved one.
Christine Davies: Mhmm. You
Victoria Volk: know, and some people might no way. I want no part of it.
Christine Davies: And in some religions, that’s, you know, that’s part of the the practice. Absolutely.
Victoria Volk: Mhmm. I think it’s like Western society. We’ve so we’ve gotten so far detached and removed from the dying process. We put it in somebody else’s hands.
Christine Davies: It’s technologicalized it. Absolutely. Mhmm. Mhmm. Versus when it used to be in the home.
Victoria Volk: Yes. I mean, they would take pictures as a family with the disease. Mhmm. Like, family portraits. Yeah. Wear black for, you know, for morning. And, yeah, I think we’ve we’ve just we’ve yeah, far removed ourselves from that experience. And I think and that stents are healing too, I think.
Christine Davies: Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. I I think it it can be a beautiful process when the family is there. And, you know, I’ve watched as, you know, a spousal crawling to bed, you know, with the patient, you know, in in their last few moments, or, you know, I’ve been there when they’ve had, you know, Leonard Skintered Place. Yeah. That was the, you know, that would be my choice, but, you know, really trying to even though we’re in a medical eye setting and, you know, people that are home hospitals, that’s going to look a lot different, but we try to make it, you know, as peaceful of a place that represents that person as possible.
Victoria Volk: Well, where can people find you if they’d like to read some of your writings and learn connect with you online? Where can people find you?
Christine Davies: Sure. So I do write a newsletter about twice a month long form newsletter on Substack, and that’s journeying alongside. They can also find me on my website, which is my name, christine, then v davies, d a v I e s dot com. And on there, there’s a link to my newsletter, all my social media, as well as more information if people wanted to do an individual spiritual direction session. Amazing.
Victoria Volk: I will put links to all of that in the show notes. And Thank you so much for sharing your personal story today and also the work that you do, which is so needed. And I appreciate appreciate you and your time today.
Christine Davies: Well, thank you so much for having me. My luck talking with you today.
Victoria Volk: And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life, much love.
Grief, Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Healing, Podcast, season 5 |
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
Amidst the challenges of her daughter Dahlia’s rare condition, MERRF Syndrome, this week’s guest, Jessica Fein, also faced the crushing blows of losing her father and both sisters during the same trying period. Her story is a tapestry of sorrow and strength, woven with threads of love and loss that resonate deeply with the human experience.
The uncertainties surrounding her daughter’s diagnosis added layers of complexity to Dahlia’s health, making it a daunting task to predict her future. Jessica’s unwavering determination to advocate for her daughter, alongside the weight of her losses, paints a poignant picture of courage in the face of adversity.
As Dahlia’s health declined, necessitating intensive care and tough decisions, Jessica grappled with the harsh reality that not everything could be fixed. Her transition from seeking a cure to enhancing Dahlia’s quality of life reflects a mother’s boundless love and commitment to her child’s well-being.
Throughout the episode, Jessica’s reflections on witnessing her loved ones’ pain and her journey through grief and healing resonate with a profound sense of vulnerability and resilience. Her ability to find glimmers of joy and connection (with herself, friends, and spouse) amidst the darkness speaks volumes about the human spirit’s capacity for hope and strength amid hardship.
Jessica’s story reminds us of the intricate dance between love and loss, woven together with threads of grace and fortitude. Her journey embodies the transformative power of facing life’s most challenging trials with unwavering love, compassion, and a resilient spirit that shines through even in the darkest times.
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CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Embracing Joy Amidst Grief – Lessons from Dahlia’s Story
In our fast-paced world, the juxtaposition of joy and sorrow often leaves many bewildered. We tend to compartmentalize emotions, believing that happiness and sadness are mutually exclusive. However, life’s complexities defy such simplistic categorization. This profound realization came to light through a remarkable individual named Dahlia.
The Essence of Dahlia
Dahlia was an embodiment of joy despite her battles with MERRF Syndrome (Myoclonic Epilepsy with Ragged Red Fibers), a rare degenerative mitochondrial disease affecting about 2 in 1,000,000 people. Diagnosed at five years old after showing early developmental delays, she lived until seventeen radiating spunkiness and charm even as her condition worsened over time.
Her mother Jessica Fein shares how Dahlia taught her invaluable lessons on navigating life’s dichotomies—how it is possible to feel immense pain yet still find moments filled with laughter and love.
Balancing Joy And Sorrow
Jessica observed how seamlessly Dahlia managed to intertwine joy amidst suffering—a lesson reshaping our understanding of emotional coexistence:
“She was able to feel honestly everything there was—to feel like sadness or anger or jealousy—and still be joyful.”
This revelation underscores that embracing all facets—fearful anguish alongside fun-filled meaning—is essential for holistic living rather than viewing them as opposing forces.
Compartmentalization As A Coping Mechanism
One effective strategy shared by Jessica involves ‘compartmentalizing’ overwhelming situations into manageable parts akin to pointillism art technique focusing on specifics without getting daunted by the bigger picture:
“I consider myself proficient at compartmentalization which I view essential functioning amid overwhelming circumstances.”
Such mindfulness helps navigate daily challenges while preserving mental sanity during trying times like caregiving responsibilities coupled with work commitments simultaneously balancing personal aspirations too!
Episode Transcription:
Victoria Volk: Thank you for tuning in to this week’s episode of grieving voices. I’m excited to share with you today my guest, Jessica Fein. She is the author of breathtaking, a memoir of family, dreams, and broken jeans. And hosts of the podcast. I don’t know how you do it, which features people whose lives seem unimaginable and who triumph over seemingly impossible challenges. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Psychology Today, The Boston Globe, Huffpost, scary mommy, zippy zippy Maeg, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler,
Jessica Fein: kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler, kebler,
Victoria Volk: kebler, kebler, kiabler, and and, and more. And, more. And more. And more. Jessicaiahiah, and to a rare disease in twenty twenty two. Her work encompasses hope and humor, grit and grace, the tools that make up her personal survival kit. And thank you so much for your time today and sharing your story with my listeners and myself.
Jessica Fein: Thank you for having me.
Victoria Volk: And so I actually would like to start out by taking us back in time to how this rare disease came about? How you learned about it? What your daughter’s name is? First of all,
Jessica Fein: My daughter’s name is Dahlia.
Victoria Volk: Oh, what a beautiful name?
Jessica Fein: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So I have a mama three, three children. My husband and I adopted from Guatemala. So we had had kind of a long and twisty road to parenthood and ultimately landed in Guatemala. And we adopted three babies, not all at the same time. Two years apart, and then two years apart. And Dahlia was our middle child. And what happened was in terms of your question regarding the rare disease diagnosis, she, from a very young age, seemed to be developing a little bit differently and a little bit slower than I thought was probably developmentally appropriate. Let’s put it that way. So her speech was garbled. She was having balance issues. You know? I had that mother’s instinct and tried to get people to pay attention, doctors, early intervention. But, you know, I was told just give a time, she’ll catch up. And it wasn’t until she was four years old that I finally got the attention of a doctor who said let’s do a hearing test. And at that time, she was diagnosed with mild to moderate hearing loss. And that was a condition that would be able to be corrected by hearing aids. But there was a question which was why? Why did she have the hearing loss? Did something happen in utero? Did she have a virus early on? We brought her back to the Boston area from Guatemala at six months. So there were a lot of question marks. And we were sent for genetic testing, which really is a blessing because so many families have to fight for a really long time to get genetic testing. In this case, we got it very quickly, and that genetic testing led to a very clear diagnosis. Another thing that doesn’t always happen. And she was diagnosed at that time with a rare degenerative mitochondrial disease called MIRF syndrome, which stands for myochronic epilepsy, ragged red fibers. Again, she was five years old, and that diagnosis seemed like crazy to us. We couldn’t understand it, couldn’t wrap our heads around it. She, you know, while I had been concerned, never my wildest dreams? Did my concerns lead me to the possibility even of something that grave? And she was the same person she had been, you know, before the diagnosis. So it was very hard to understand. And and even technically, Nobody had heard of this illness. We didn’t know what mitochondria were. We didn’t understand what a degenerative disease meant. And so then we took off on a very lengthy journey that lasted until she was seventeen. Daria died one week after her seventeenth birthday.
Victoria Volk: Wow. And do children typically I mean, what is the life expectancy generally of this
Jessica Fein: Yeah, well, so to begin with MURF syndrome is extremely rare, it’s two in a million, so there’s not really much data to go on. Also, Dahlia had a secondary diagnosis later on, which made her one of six in the world. So the thing with a rare disease is you just don’t know. Now, when we look at MIRF syndrome, what we understand is that people can be impacted even within the same family in really different ways. So, for example, when I googled it that night, there was this long list of possible ways it could manifest. And it went everywhere from short stature all the way to death. So, you know, I did what any mom does, which is two things. Number one, I read the list and I decided it was a menu and I would choose, okay, she could be short. You know, I’ll take that one. I’ll take the hearing loss that I could deal with. But when it got to things like dementia and obviously truncated lifespan, those I wasn’t I wasn’t go anywhere near that. And I felt like, you know, look, I’m the mom. I’ll solve it. I’ll fix it. Right? Because that’s what we do. We think we can fix things. And that was a big transformation for me. One of the ones I cover my book, which is understanding that there are things we can’t in fact fix. What what do we do with a world that seems so wildly out of control? And how do we create any kind of meaning in that in that situation?
Victoria Volk: How did you do that?
Jessica Fein: Yeah. Well, it was a long it was a long journey because like I said, I decided I was gonna it. And remember, I didn’t even know what mitochondria were. So, I mean, the idea that I would fix it was totally fantastical, but and I really did try to do everything I could and I became a big advocate and I looked for every study, and I wanted to, like, travel the world and look for some kind of, you know, miracle. But ultimately, what happened was Dahlia’s disease being degenerative, was getting more and more serious. When she was nine, we were in the hospital for three months. And at that point, she had a tracheotomy which meant she had a hole in her neck with a tube that she began to that she could breathe out of because she had lost the strength in her lungs to breathe and she was ventilator dependent and she had lost her ability to speak and to eat and to move it walk it all. Ultimately, she lost her ability to move it all. But at that point, she was just in a wheelchair, she could move her arms, and she could shake her head in point and things like that. So she became too weak to participate in any studies. And I had a choice at that point because here was Dahlia, who just wanted to be a kid. Like, she wanted to have fun and snuggle and read and bake even though she couldn’t need and live a life and have a childhood. And as the mom, it was my job to facilitate that. And I learned from her in that respect, and I decided that I could not cure this disease. I would do everything possible to try to make the symptoms less to try to understand the nuances of how she could feel better with everything she was dealing with, but also to understand that I had three kids who wanted to be kids?
Victoria Volk: I’m sitting here and I’m just thinking putting myself, trying attempting to put myself in your shoes. And as a mother parent, it’s so difficult to watch your children like you said, the grief of wanting to give them their childhood, them wanting to feel like a child.
Jessica Fein: Yeah.
Victoria Volk: What were some of the things that I mean, I know you did your own research and what did that look like? How did you do that? And what were some of the things that helped you advice that people gave? I mean, did you connect with other parents who Yeah. Paid full time caregivers and you know, of
Jessica Fein: Right. So and first of all, yes. We seeing your child suffer is unbearable. And let look. Yeah.
I have a seventeen year old. And yesterday, I got a text a very healthy mainstream seventeen year old. Okay? And so he was at school yesterday and something happened in one of the classes and a couple of the kids were mean to him. And he texted me. I mean, he was not even that upset about it, but I was, like, wait, are they being mean to you? And and he was, like, kind of. And I was, like, you know, totally devastated if my stuff occurred. And I was, like, you know, wanted to, like, run into the high school and be, like, stuff. You know? So so that’s how we are as parents. Right? So what do you do when you have, you know, this this very serious, serious, as serious as it gets situation? And, you know, I did not at the time connect with too many other people. I did become part of my do action, which is the mitochondrial disease advocacy and research education group. And I’m actually on the board of that, but I didn’t at the time connect with too many other parents. I have since my daughter died connected with way more people in the community, partly because of my own podcast, partly because of my writing, So I now know so many people and I do know what a lifeline other people going through it can be. And it doesn’t need to be people go, you know, it’s not going to be in my case, other people whose kids have MRF syndrome. It’s too rare. But it’s other people whose kids are medically complex or have rare diseases, who are child loss, who, you know, have intense special needs, all those things, parents whose lives look so dramatically different than what they had envisioned. But at the time I didn’t, and there were a few reasons. Number one, I didn’t have time. I was working full time. My daughter was an eyes on patient from age nine to seventeen, which meant she was home but our home was an ICU of sorts and myself or my husband or a nurse trained specifically in her care had to have our eyes on her twenty four seven. He was very intense and I became a highly skilled medical provider of her medical needs. I mean, it was intense. And so between working full time and then being a full time caregiver and then trying to create this childhood and this environment for my three kids and also writing a book at that time, I didn’t really have time to connect with many people in the community. So to your question of, what did I do? I first of all, so, so, so lucky to have a great partner and my husband. And that’s not always the case. I mean, you have single parents going through something like this, or you have parents who aren’t on the same page. And we know that more than fifty percent of couples who have a kid with special needs, let alone living on the precipitously, split up. So that that was a real blessing, you know. And for us, that we had each other. And I have some other, you know, really close friends. I couldn’t I didn’t see people very much, but people that I knew were there were my corner. And also my husband and I try to give each other some space to have some time to ourselves because that can so easily get lost in this situation. And I will say, because I know we’re talking about grief in general, that a couple of things along this journey, I did lose all of my family members in terms of my family of origin. And that is part of my story in my book, which is losing two sisters and three parents, which happened a lot in the way. And so I’m very reluctantly familiar with all kinds of grief. And it’s not just the grief of losing somebody, but it is other kinds of grief, what I call non hallmark kinds non hallmark card kinds of grief. Right? So ambiguous grief, for example, was something that I became very familiar with. I’m not sure if that’s something that you’ve talked about much on your show, but, you know, there there are so much loss that can even precede or surround or be separate from loss that comes from a death. Howard Bauchner:
Victoria Volk: Yeah, I I just talk about grief. Whether it’s I the labels might be helpful, you know, to understand it, but Yeah. As far as, like, healing and stuff like that, I don’t know that I yeah. It’s just all grief to me. Yeah.
Jessica Fein: But for me, it was a real eye opener because I didn’t under stamp that there were other kinds of grief. And I didn’t feel like it was appropriate at the time to be grieving when my daughter was here. It was in front of me. It was alive. And I really, for me, it was such an important thing to understand that there are other kinds of grief. And it is okay. And we can grieve a life we had imagined. And we can grieve a voice we’ll never hear again. And, you know, all of these other kinds of things. We can grieve for somebody who’s still alive. And for me, That was very helpful because once I understood that this was valid and that this was real and that this had a name, it took away some of the power and it allowed me to integrate that grief and to move forward more effectively.
Victoria Volk: So you lost three parents and your two sisters during that eight year span that you it was twenty four seven.
Jessica Fein: Well, my I lost I mean, my my first sister actually had died when she was thirty. So that and I was twenty seven. So that was the first major major loss. And then my mother and my father and my father-in-law died during that time as well as my older sister. That’s a lot. It’s a lot. And, you know, it wasn’t like they were all together. It wasn’t like everybody you know, sometimes when you think about a whole family dying, it’s like, though, they were all in a car. Mhmm. I’ll take that. It’s not like a hierarchy. It’s not better or worse
Victoria Volk: than ever.
Jessica Fein: But this was like one one offs. And it was also not like there was something that was running in the family. This was like just, you know, all all different kinds of things. So it it’s it’s pretty inconceivable. And yet, that’s what happened.
Victoria Volk: And yet, here you said,
Jessica Fein: And yet here I sit and it’s interesting because I know it sounds, it’s like when I’m telling my story to somebody who I’m just meeting, it it’s like I now I have written about it. I can speak about it. And it’s so much to take in. And I have two friends who are therapists who said to me, my goodness, if you were to come and just be telling me all this, I’d be like, oh, she’s I don’t even know there were some like a diagnosis of like that can’t possibly be true, that can’t possibly be with that because it seems so crazy and yet when you’re in something like this and underlying all of it is this intense care and intense situation and this life on the precipice, you you integrate it and and move forward. Like, there’s no time to be to lay in the fetal position. Like, there’s no time to be on the bathroom floor crying. Twenty four seven. You can’t. You cannot.
Victoria Volk: One of the things that tends to go to the wayside when the life life, like, just throws, you know, the shit our way, basically, is our self care and just caring for the self. And so how what did that look like for you amidst all of that?
Jessica Fein: Was I’m really glad you asked that because and I actually talked about this in the book. Working outside of the home was important to me, and I did get judged for it because there were people, even medical caregivers in our home, who felt that it wasn’t appropriate for me to continue working. And to be clear, I was the primary breadwinner and this life was expensive that we were living and nobody questioned my husband working. But I will say that when we talk about self care, Part of that to me was getting out of the house and working in a job that I knew how to do that I had been doing before I became a mother. That was very helpful for my identity. And that was also I think an important break during the day. Mhmm. And I think it was able to make me more present when I was home. So that was one thing. Another thing for self care for me was I’m I’m not like a big exerciser, but I did start to do pilates and just having this like twice a week that I would get out of the house and do this thing. Was also a nice break. And then also when we talk about self care, I think that the writing was important for me. You know, I wrote the book while at my daughter’s bedside. And I think that that was a really important outlet. And it allowed me to tell my story my way, which meant I was able to make some order out of the chaos. So I think those were things, oh, the other thing for self care is that my husband and I as much as we could did a date night until COVID hit, we really kept that up. And it was complicated because in order for us to go out together, we needed to have two people at home, a nurse and a babysitter because we have these two other kids and also the nurse was not a babysitter. She does not be hired to entertain. So we would need a team of two. Which first of all is an expensive proposition. But second of all, we needed to make sure that they got a lot. I mean, I remember we had this one nurse and babysitter and the babysitter was like part of our family. And afterwards, she was like, I was really uncomfortable with that nurse. You know what I mean? So that’s like a whole other dynamic. So it was complicated, but getting out of the house for about two hours on a Saturday night was such a sense of normalcy for us because our lives were so abnormal. So to be able to do that. And every night, every Saturday, we’d get in the car, and we’d look at each other, and we’d say, we’ve never needed a date more. And every Saturday night, it would be true, even more so than the week before, you know? And so So there were those things. I think it was having I think what all of these things did, whether it was the writing or the Pilates or the date night or whatever is my work. It gave me an identity separate from being the mom slash caregiver. And I think that’s important, you know, for anybody in any situation.
Victoria Volk: When you were describing you and your husband getting into the car and recognizing that you never needed to date night more, I physically, like,
Jessica Fein: I just had this That is what we would do. Literally, it was that huge exhale and the looking at each other. And I always you know, it didn’t even matter, like, if we were engaging on that date night or if we were just sitting there in if we had the one restaurant, it was close by, so we knew we weren’t, you know, we do what we were gonna do. We would go there. We still go there pretty much once a week. And, yeah, just to have that that ability to be outside of all the other roles that had become such an integrated part of our lives.
Victoria Volk: I think that’s a key point what you said is to put yourself in a different role. And in that moment, you too could be husband and wife.
Jessica Fein: Yeah.
Victoria Volk: And connect.
Jessica Fein: Mhmm. Exactly.
Victoria Volk: And one thing too, like, people may be listening and something that comes up for me as I’m hearing you share is many people who experience a child that is a lot of care or what have you. They have that support system around them as in the parents. Sometimes even the grandparents move in to help support and care and you didn’t have that either.
Jessica Fein: We didn’t have that either. And I will say that That was another thing I was dealing with. So my eldest sister had lung cancer, and she was diagnosed in the middle of all this. And I was kind of her primary person, and it was insane. It was so out of the blue and that was a whole other ride. So I was really torn. I mean, we talk about the sandwich generation caring for our children and our elderly parents at the same time. This was like triple decker sandwich or something because I had the sibling thing too. And it was really hard and I did I did, you know, I think that what I was going through may just compounded, was compounded by the other losses and those became so much more present for me because I so wanted to be able to just like you know, cry to my mom and and, you know, be be parented. Right? And and when for a while, I was taking care of my parents. And then when they weren’t here, it was incredibly lonely.
Victoria Volk: And that brings me to the topic of friendships. I mean, you probably didn’t even have time for friendships, and maybe the friendships you had fell away because you know what happens too.
Jessica Fein: I will say, I’m very lucky that I have a circle of friends, people I’ve been friends with since I was a kid. And the reason I feel so fortunate about that is because I feel like meeting new friends when you’re going through such intense things. Is so hard. Right? Unless it’s people who are also going through intense things. But it’s too much to catch somebody up on. You know what I mean? It’s just like it’s a lot. So what we were going through was so unrelatable that people who knew me before, that became very, very important for me. Even knowing they were there, they weren’t in Boston, you know, they’re all over the place, but knowing that I had these people was important to me. And I think that we see in grief, right, how hard it is to maintain friendships because people are so awkward and they’re so uncomfortable, and they don’t know what to say. And God forbid, they bring up your kid’s name, which is all you really want to talk about. You know? But they just don’t know what to do, and this is such a problem is that we’re just, as a society, so uncomfortable. And it always blows my mind because I feel like grief is the single most universal thing.
Like, every single person is going to be a grieffer. And yet, we’re so awkward. We’re so weird about it, where it should be the great unifier.
Victoria Volk: That’s what I talk about. On the podcast, like, that’s what I talk about. It is the one thing that unites us all that none of us differ on. Like, we all like, we are all creepers.
Jessica Fein: We are all creepers. Every single week of us
Victoria Volk: at a
Jessica Fein: hundred percent, like, And and with all other life cycle events, we understand how to be there, how to show up, how to sit with somebody in all other life cycle things, and yet when it comes to the thing that is the loneliness. And the thing that is the most universal, we don’t know how to do it. We don’t know how to show up. We don’t know how to sit in the silence. Right?
Victoria Volk: And that brings me to the question of how were you taught as a child to grieve and express grief, and how was it what beliefs were passed down to you about grief in your household growing up?
Jessica Fein: You know, I don’t really remember too much from growing up. What I remember with every cell of my being is the sudden death of my sister when I was twenty seven and she was thirty. And she was my best friend and we had been on the phone this morning, that morning, excuse me, and she died suddenly that afternoon. And that changed my worldview, more than any other loss. Even more, I will say, than the loss of my child because by the time that I lost Dahlia, which everybody will say, the worst thing that can happen is losing a child. And I’m not saying what’s worse and not worse. I’m just saying that that first loss changed my worldview. Because before that, I saw the world through a bubble. Right? I was looking at a bubble every, you know? And that loss punctured the bubble. Then I saw the world through the clarity of the puncture, not through the hazy sheen of the bubble. Right? It changed everything for me. And I think that I probably then I was not living with my parents at the time, but I had them as models of how it is possible to carry on, which they both did. After losing their child. Right? And so it was forever altering for them. And they were absolutely different people on the other side of it and they carried on and they engaged in the world and they had lives, you know. And and I think that probably that somehow sunk in that it was possible to have an other side, to have, you know, life on the other side of what seems like, how can you continue on?
Victoria Volk: Is do you what’s your sister’s name? Both sisters.
Jessica Fein: Yes, my first sister and thank you for asking. Her name is Noomi and my other sister who died of lung cancer more recently is Rachel.
Victoria Volk: Do you speak about them in your book too?
Jessica Fein: Yes. Yes. I mean, you know, the book opens with the with the sudden death of my sister, Noomi. It’s not a big piece of it, but I couldn’t tell the story without starting with that because it was a life changing for me. And then Rachel’s a character in the book because that happened much more recently and so out of the blue. I mean, they were both out of the blue, but one was like totally out of the blue sudden and then of course lung cancer we know can happen you know, when you’re diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, often that means that you don’t have a boatload of time.
Victoria Volk: What were the lessons that you learned from the loss? Of the grief of your sister your first sister. Know me since that was the one that kinda cracked you open. Yeah. What are what are the things that Dahlia taught you about grief then too?
Jessica Fein: Oh, two very different answers and so important both of them. With know me, what I learned was I never would nor would I want to get over the loss of my sister. This is not something I was trying to put behind me. It was something I was trying to figure out how to bring forward in a healthy way with me because she is such a core part of who I am and it was very important that I mean, I I would never want to not be grieving for her. Like, I can’t even imagine that. So it was not how are you gonna get over it. It was how are you going to move along with it? And And that was, you know, a learning because I didn’t know much personally about grief before that. Dahlia, I learned everything. I mean, here was a kid who lost everything that a kid has. She couldn’t move at all. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t run. She couldn’t, you know, she couldn’t do all of these things.
And she did not become bitter, angry. You know, all the things that I think I would become. She wanted to continue to have have joy. And and not in a, like, kind of denial kind of way, but in a like, this is my life. Like, I want to be out there. I want to be experiencing it. So so watching her do that made me realize that joy and sorrow can live side by side. They can hold hands. You can have grief and you can have beauty. And all of these things that I would have thought were mutually exclusive, fear and anguish and anxiety and, you know, moving or all the things. And then on the other side, you know, joy and fun and meaning and all these things like they can all be intertwined. And in fact, I think they become stronger in the presence of the other.
Victoria Volk: I’m just trying to imagine how, like, did you compartmentalize, like, when you would come into the room and, like, just I mean, because you essentially have to, in some respect, like, set your your stuff aside, right, to fully be present with her
Jessica Fein: Okay. I think I’m the queen of compartmentalization. I think I’m like, I don’t even know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing or whatever, but I do think it’s key to for me to being able to function because, you know, here, the the situation was too big to take it all in at any time. It would have blown us down. We couldn’t do that. I compare it to a pointalism, you know, the the kind of art where when you’re standing up close, you just see the the dots. And you have to back up to be able to tell that it’s, you know, a canoe or a field or whatever it is in the picture. We couldn’t back up. We couldn’t take in the big picture. It was too big. We had to be real up close and understand what each point was and and be attending to each point. And it wasn’t until after Dahlia passed away that I felt that I could back up and begin to take in the enormity.
Victoria Volk: One of the things that I had a previous guest on, she is the author of always a sibling.
Jessica Fein: Yes. Andy Orangestein.
Victoria Volk: Yes. Have you read the book?
Jessica Fein: No. But I have it, and I’m about to speak, I I have an upcoming thing where we’re gonna be together,
Victoria Volk: and she’s coming on my show. So Awesome. Yeah. She is wonderful. And one thing that I didn’t really think about until reading her book was that and she came on my podcast, was that our siblings are the people that know us the best who they’re the longest relationships that we have. And so for you when you shared about Nomi and how that grief was harder, in some respect.
Jessica Fein: That’s right because I have never been a day on this earth without her. Mhmm. Twenty seven years she was by myself. For, you know, the second that I came into the world, she was, like, celebrating me. And we, you know, they’re they’re that connection.
There’s nothing like it. And I remember at the time and I will say, she had been married for five years when she died and she had been with her husband three years before that. K? So I remember so vividly thinking even right then, his goal will be ultimately to move on. Right?
His goal is going to be you know, here’s a young guy and they had a baby. And ultimately, I mean, he’d always remember her, but this would end up being an eight year chapter of his life. And his goal would be to move on. And I say that with all the love in the world for him, but that that was the situation. Whereas my goal was to hold on, I’d never wanted to let her go. And, yeah, I mean, a sibling relationship, I think it’s interesting that that, you know, Annie said that and and I understand it because you it is the longest relationship that they know you in a way nobody else will ever know. When you have a good, healthy, great, and in my case, when you have a sibling who’s your best friend. And also like she shared too, they fill the gaps of your childhood. Like, totally. There’s they know your childhood, like, nobody else. And that’s why, you know, earlier when we were talking about my friendship circle, I’ve got some friends that I’ve had since, like, eight years old. And so I think they now have stepped into that role, and they know all the players you know, and they’ll remind me. Remember when your mom, you know, because we all grew up together. And that’s why those friendships are so important. I mean, you know, for other reasons too, but but right?
They are the the safekeepers of your history.
Victoria Volk: That’s so true. Like, I have friendships since I was in five kindergarten. Like, we’re still close and I cherish those. Yeah. For sure. What is the one thing that you would say to parents who and I know we kind of alluded to it or kinda started this podcast talking about how you have three children. But so many parents I know we’re jumping around here a lot because you’ve had, you know, such a variety of losses, but when parents seem to struggle with the question who have lost a child, how many children do you have? And, you know, I
Jessica Fein: was like, well, do I say, do I even get into it if I had a child lost? Like, you know, if I have my kids with me and there’s there’s four, but I actually have five. And do I say I have five? Or where’s the fifth one? You know? Like, how how do you navigate that? Yeah. So what I would say is to every parent, It is entirely up to you at any given moment. How you want to answer that question? If you are in a place where you don’t feel that the person asking it is a safe place or if you’re with other people or if you just don’t want to get into it, say what you want. Say to if you’ve lost your third. That’s fine. You don’t have to feel guilty about that. This is up to you and it is how you are going to feel best and safest. I will say I am the mother of three. I believe I will always be the mother of three. I often think about it with somebody who had one child and lost one child, but But the inevitable next question always is how old are they? And then what happens is you find yourself apologizing to the person, listen, I’m sorry, this is gonna be really hard for you. Right? But I got because you know you’re about to make them so uncomfortable, So it is a total minefield as is so much else.
The question, how are you? Is a total minefield? Right? Like, what am I supposed to If I’m feeling okay in that moment and I say, oh, you know, things are good, then you feel totally guilty. Like, how could I answer the question that way? Mhmm. Right? And I mean, there’s so much we just there’s so much we make ourselves feel bad about, and we don’t need to do that. We need to do what’s gonna be in that moment. And you can run into two people in the grocery store and feel like you wanna answer that question two different ways.
It’s okay. It’s up to you. You know? I will find myself I I I for me, I just can’t imagine saying, I’m a mom of two. I can’t. Dahlia is such a huge part of who I am, you know? Just like it’s very, very hard for me when people say, oh, do you have siblings?
Victoria Volk: Yeah. Exactly. I was just I was thinking that too. It’s it’s kinda nice sort of thing.
Jessica Fein: Yeah. I always will have to I mean, I’m always I’m the youngest of three.
Victoria Volk: Yeah. Well, that actually brings up another question because I didn’t assume you had more siblings, but I thought maybe there was a chance you had more siblings and I didn’t ask. And now you’re in now it’s I
Jessica Fein: am orphaned. Yes. Yes. I know. And when my eldest sister was diagnosed, we had lost our parents and our other sister. And she said to me, I’m gonna be okay because no god would ever do that to you. And that’s what she believed. It would be There’s no way that reality that is my reality now that that could happen. And I suppose as I get older, it will be less shocking because it’ll be more in the natural order of things. But I’m nowhere near the age yet when one would expect that, you know,
Victoria Volk: That just made me well up. Yeah. I know on your website, you talk about you mentioned the personal survival kit, and you’ve talked about I think you have alluded to Grace the grace you give yourself, the grace you give others. But what does hope and humor and grit look like for you in your healing?
Jessica Fein: Yeah. Well, hope, I’m I’m a big believer in hope. And I think what we hope for changes all the time, for a while I hoped for a cure, and then that wasn’t going to happen. Then I hoped she wasn’t in pain, or I hoped we’d be able to have a successful outing that afternoon or I hope, you know, but but the idea of living without hope is not compelling to me. And I think that we get to choose if we want to be hopeful about things.
And we get to choose what we want to be hopeful about. As for humor, I think you can always find humor. I mean, as long as you’re willing to open yourself up to dark humor, there’s there’s humor. I mean, life is ridiculously humorous and, you know, ridiculously punishing and all the other things. But but I I feel like humor is important too. And and in my writing, I mean, that is probably one of the things I hear most often is, oh my god, I did not expect your book to be funny. You know, people will say, I expected to cry, I didn’t expect to laugh this much. So, you know, fair, fair, you know, warning or promise to anybody who’s gonna pick it up, hopefully, you will feel an array of things when you read the book. You gotta have grit to carry through. I mean, you have to be able to pull on the the the rain boots and get on, put yourself in the muck every day. And that to me was the grit. It was getting up and doing it again day after day after day.
Victoria Volk: And I would also want to ask because I I did think of another question. I’ll circle back to that. But were there any books that you because you had books on your thing too and you’re a avid reader and you’re a writer. So are there any books that you would recommend that you found most supportive to you as you were going through all of this?
Jessica Fein: Yeah. Well, I’m a huge reader and I would say that for me. And, you know, when you talked about self care earlier on, I didn’t mention, but reading for me. And and at the time, in particular, I just wanted to read fiction. Anything that’s gonna take me out of my situation. So I would say that for me. And then in the book, I do talk about three other books. One is or or three other authors who meant a lot to me. One was James Baldwin, who whose life situation couldn’t have been more different from mine, but wrote so much about people meeting tragedy and standing up to tragedy rather than letting it blow them down, and that was very important to me. Also Mary Oliver is an amazing poet, and her work just really, really was was very important to me. And then my father was a writer in reading his his words and understanding what he had to say about loss, having he had written a book about the loss of my sister. So that was very important to me as well. Yeah. It was and and I quote him quite a bit in my book.
Victoria Volk: That’s beautiful. You also have on their cores cores corners of beauty? What is that? Yeah.
Jessica Fein: And that’s a big part of my book as well, which is this idea that I’m talking about a letter that I received from my father. I he had left me some letters to read after he died. And we talk about creating a world of beauty and where that’s like a really tall order. And none of us really can do that effectively. We’re not that powerful, but we can create corners of beauty. That’s something that’s within each of our control. And that can be how you respond to somebody you see out in the world who maybe needs a hand. That can be how you make something out of a lousy situation, a horrible situation that can be having a candle light dinner in your daughter’s room next to the beeping monitors. You’ve created a little corner of beauty. So corners of beauty is something that I think is in all of our control.
Victoria Volk: That that’s juicy. That is really juicy. I think there’s something there for you to really dig into and elaborate on if you haven’t already. I’ve I’m not assuming you haven’t, but if you haven’t, like that that’s very intriguing to me. That’s I love that.
Thank you for
Jessica Fein: Thank you. Alright. So maybe that’s book maybe that’s the follow-up.
Victoria Volk: And also writing it down. And of course, because you had that on your website as well, writing it down, and writing was very much therapeutic for you. It sounds like at the bedside of your daughter. And Yeah. And having that emulated for you too by your father, I bet that was such a gift.
Jessica Fein: It really it really was. And, you know, one of the things that I learned from it was that his book was not a book about my sister, but he handed me the manuscript. He said he wrote a book about Noomi and I read it, and I said, this isn’t a book about Noomi. This is about your know me. If I were to write a book about know me, it would be a totally different book. And that was really important to me. I’m sure if my husband were to write a book about what we went through, it would be a totally different book. Right? I mean, people are so different for each of us. And even the very same loss or the same situation, you know, two parents of the same kid or two siblings of the third sibling. It’s a different loss.
Victoria Volk: Because all relationships are unique. Exactly. And so how can I ask this is my last question and because I you brought it up and I I actually wrote it down? Husband grief. Like, how Yeah.
Jessica Fein: He it’s totally different. I mean, he would never in a thousand a million years have a conversation like we’re having. Right? I find it I would talk about this all day long because for me, it’s an opportunity to bring my family, my losses forward, to have them be present, to tell their stories, to allow people to get to know them, So it’s very, very important for me. And I am so grateful for the opportunity to to do that. My husband is much more private, so he’s very supportive of me doing what I want to need to do, but think he doesn’t even like to come to my book reading. He still likes it in the background and maybe, you know, so he can sneak out if he needs to because he’s a much more internal private person. And I think that that’s, you know, we need to be able to respect that we’re all gonna go through it in our own way. And there’s no wrong way. And there’s no timeline. That’s a big thing. I see a lot of people. I see a lot of people out there who say, well, jeez, it’s been x number of to, you know, why isn’t that a person over it yet? And it’s like, no. No. That’s really why
Victoria Volk: I started this podcast was to, you know, banish the misinformation and the myths of grief and all these things that were taught like time heels and grief alone and replace the loss and, you know, these behaviors that we find ourselves doing to bypass our feelings and not feel them. Right? And to feel better in that period of time. And so, you know, what may have destroyed another couple sounds like it really just brought you two together and allowed you each to honor each other the losses and the way that you found helpful for you as individuals, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. Is there anything that you would like to share that you don’t feel you’ve got too that you feel is important?
Jessica Fein: No. I think that this this covered it. And you know, I love, as I’ve mentioned, connecting with people on these topics, and I invite people to connect me on social or well, first, please check out the book. You know, wherever you get your books. Whether that’s Amazon or BookShop dot org, Barnes and Noble, breathtaking. And, you know, I’m having some really interesting conversations with book groups who are reading it together, and I’ll go to any book group I’ll zoom in or whatever if if people choose to read it with with some friends. And then, you know, yeah, my website is where I keep up to date on everything in terms of, you know, other writing I’m doing, events that are happening. So, yeah, you can check that out at jessica find stories dot com and that’s fine at the EIN because post people hear it and think it’s the other way. So just the fine stories dot com.
Victoria Volk: Yeah. And we say fine and grief recovery. We say fine as feelings inside not expressed and that is not you.
Jessica Fein: So That is that’s alright. That’s very funny.
Victoria Volk: I look forward to checking out myself. I love me some dark humor. So thank you so much for being my guest. I will put all of the links in the show notes and thank you for sharing your warrior story. Really? It’s a warrior through grief. And, you know, we all don’t have to do some grand things with our grief and share it with the world. But if you can connect with other people, like, and create those corners of beauty like you shared, That’s healing. So thank you for sharing your story because storytelling is healing too. Storytelling is healing.
Jessica Fein: And I also, you know, I didn’t mention I do a column in psychology today called grace and grief. You can find that online. I write a lot about not only our own individual grief, but how you can support others in their grief. So if people wanna check that out. Thank you so much. And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life, much love.
Grief, Grieving Voices Podcast, Podcast, Q&A, season 5 |
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
Let me support you in this week’s episode by guiding you through a journey of understanding grief—especially when someone close doesn’t seem to be handling a family death well. This isn’t just another conversation but an invitation for introspection and growth.
Key Highlights:
The episode is thoughtfully structured around three pivotal areas:
- Coping Perspectives: It challenges us to question societal grieving norms and consider what constitutes healthy coping.
- Relationship Dynamics: Every bond with the departed is unique.
- Energy & Focus Direction: Looking inward at our own healing rather than outward in judgment.
Open dialogue about grief within families can lead to personal healing and generational change. This isn’t easy, but it’s necessary for healthy healing to continue within family dynamics —and ultimately transform generational trauma and beliefs that are not in anyone’s highest good.
I invite you to engage further, ask probing questions about your own experiences with grief, and explore resources for guidance on this tender path.
This episode goes beyond mere discussion—it offers deep insights that may help you unlock something deep within that, perhaps, you’ve never realized before hearing this episode. If you find it helpful, please share this episode with someone you know and love, for it may unlock something for them, too. And who knows…it may be a catalyst for conversation as well. 💛
RESOURCES:
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NEED HELP?
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
- Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor
If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.
CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
The Reflective Journey Through Grief
Grief is a labyrinthine journey, one that often feels isolating and incomprehensible. In the latest solo episode of Grieving Voices, this offers a lantern in the dark – not by showing you the way out but by illuminating the path within.
Coping Well or Not at All?
In society’s silent classrooms, we learn that grief should be quieted, endured stoically behind closed doors. I challegethese norms through self-reflection questions about our personal beliefs surrounding grief and coping mechanisms inherited from family dialogues—or lack thereof.
The Personal Tapestry of Relationships
Every relationship paints its unique hues onto the canvas of loss—no two connections are identical. Understanding this tapestry means acknowledging varied responses to death based on past dynamics or individual closeness with the deceased.
For instance, parental grieving can manifest diversely even under one roof; it’s essential to peer beneath surface assumptions into underlying relational complexities before forming judgments about someone’s process.
Where Does Your Energy Flow?
It’s easy to spiral into resentment when fixated on another’s way of handling loss—but what if we redirected that energy? Instead of outward critique, this is I advocate for inward reflection upon our own methods for navigating sorrow.
Constructive coping isn’t inherent—it must be cultivated like any skill set. To aid in this growth, “Do Grief Differently,” is a course designed to equip individuals with healthy tools for processing their pain.
Opening Dialogues for Healing
The closing message resonates deeply: healing starts when dialogue opens—not just externally but within ourselves as well—and education is key in transforming generational approaches toward bereavement.
With heartfelt gratitude towards her audience’s willingness to embark on such vulnerable reflections alongside her show’s mission—to change perceptions around grieving—I urge everyone towards introspective consideration and openness regarding their experiences with loss.
Listeners are left contemplating not only how they grieve but also how they can evolve those practices moving forward—for themselves and future generations alike.
Episode Transcription:
Victoria Volk: Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week’s episode of Greeting Voices. I am your host Victoria V. And it’s a solo episode, which I haven’t recorded one in quite some time, so I felt it was about time. But I wasn’t sure up until today, actually, as I’m recording this, what I was going to talk about.But there’s been some themes popping up la tely, and we’ve there’s been some losses in my community, really tragic deaths in my community. Friends dealing with certain things and conversations I’ve been having with guests on my podcast and in particular, if you haven’t listened to episode two zero seven with Tiff Carson from last week, that’s a great episode. She went very deep and it was just a really rich conversation. She was very vulnerable and it we were both crying. Just a really good episode to highlight the depths of grief and the effect of the the impact of generational stuff that gets passed down to us, which kinda ties into today’s episode as well.
Victoria Volk: So anyway, the question I want to pose an answer today is what to do when a loved one is not coping well with death in the family. And so this episode is though not going to be a tell you what to do when this happens. So the title of the podcast is kind of a a hook, if you will, to get you to listen to this because what I’m going to do instead is to package this episode as a lot of questions. And I think when we ask ourselves diaper questions? No. I don’t think I know. I know that when we ask ourselves deeper questions, we get deeper answers. And we often don’t wanna get those deeper answers because when we know it, We know it and we can’t unknow it. And we often have to face things within ourselves when we ask those deeper questions. You know, learning about my human design, which has nothing to do, with grief in this episode, but I’m just I’m going to share though what has what I’ve learned about myself is that my superpower is asking questions, is being the questioner, I have the gate of doubt as my son, conscious son. And I am the natural skeptic, and I am the questioner. And I also have connectedness as one of my top five strengths in my u mab. And if you’re unfamiliar with human design or Youmap, just check out my website, theunleashedheart.com, go under services, and you’ll see Youmap. You’ll see the grief work and you won’t see human design on there, but that’s just a kind of a side thing I’m into. But anyway, my point in this episode is to bring to you questions for self reflection. And I’m gonna start with this idea, number one. I mean, there’s three points I’m gonna cover today, but number one, is this idea of not coping well versus coping well.
Victoria Volk: The second is looking at the relationship with that person who you deem is not coping well, quotation marks, coping well. And third, where our focus goes, our energy flows. So Number one, not coping well versus coping well. I just want you to reflect on yourself. Here and your own beliefs about grief. What were you raised to believe about grief? Was healthy coping, emulated for you as you were growing up? Did your parents And in your household, did you openly talk about grief? Did you openly talk about death and loss? I’ve recognized there are I mean, just in the podcast, four plus years of podcasting, there’s been very few guests who have shared that they openly talked about grief and loss. Usually, it was because the parent had worked in the death and dying industry. And, you know, as a mortician or something like that where grief was just at the forefront of their lives. And that’s not very common.
Victoria Volk: What’s more common is that grief is kinda swept under the rug. We don’t talk about it. It that’s It’s why we have these societal issues around grief the way we do today. I think back when, way back when, we mourned differently than we do now. We mourned openly. Women wore black for, I don’t know, how many days or weeks. As long as they needed to, perhaps, they took pictures with their deceased loved ones. They kept them in the home. Most people died in the home. The services were not left to a third party, you know, to handle all of the you know, the body and the logistics and all of that. Like, it was more of a community family involvement. Way back when. We’ve kind of removed ourselves from that death and dying process and being participants in that. And move towards stuffing down our grief, stuffing down our emotions, not talking about it, sweeping it out of the rug, giving all the power and agency to other people. Not having open conversations and dialogue about what we want, when we die, what our desires are. If we are encompensated. Like, we just don’t have these conversations. Right?
Victoria Volk: And so I just wanna want you to ask yourself, Are you coping well? Because, you know, listening to the first ten episodes or so of this podcast If you haven’t, that’d be a great place to start too. I talk a lot about what we talk about when I work with Grievers and Grief Recovery We tend to grieve alone. We tend to try and be strong for everyone else around us and for ourselves. We tend to keep busy, bury ourselves and work. Maybe we’re resorting to behaviors that make us feel better for a short period of time such as what we call them sturbs. Short term energy relieving behaviors where we might drink or exercise can be a STERBS, shopping, gambling, things like that. Are you coping well? Are you doing those behaviors? Because if you are news flash, you may not be coping very well yourself. So then we project these ideas onto our loved ones who are not responding to death in the same way that we are. We’re thinking we might have our shit together and I’ve got this and we’re being strong for everybody else, but that’s not coping well. That’s surviving. That’s not thriving. So the flip side of that, what does that look like? It means open dialogue. It means open communication. It means sharing your feelings in a wrong authentic way. It means not apologizing for how you’re feeling. It means crying when you need to cry, not caring who sees it, openly grieving. And yes, we all do grief differently. We do grief differently, but in as a society, I think we all grieve similarly, and that’s in these ways I was describing.
Victoria Volk: Not trying not to feel bad. You know, we tell people, don’t feel bad. Here’s the tissue. Stop you’re crying. Right? We get uncomfortable when other people are crying around us or showing their emotions and so we want to shut them down like as it makes me uncomfortable. We replace the loss. You know, death of a friendship or a relationship or someone passes. We, you know, I I can get a new wife or a new husband or a new spouse or a new dog or a new cat or whatever it is, we replace the loss or maybe we’re replacing that loss with a disturb. Either way, we often replace the loss. Pour ourselves in our energy into something else to distract ourselves. And if things aren’t working well, well, we grieve alone because no one wants to hear about our loss a year from now, because we should be over it. Right? You should be over it by now. So the people saying that, you should be over it by now. How are they coping? And so I think there’s this false sense or idea that Internally, we believe we are coping well and these other people around us are not. But who defines what’s coking well? Who defines that? Do you define that as a retriever, as a fellow retriever in your family? And you maybe feel like you’re responding better than somebody else because why? Because your behaviors are not the same? Because you’re not pouring your heart out and talking about it because you’re, you know, being stoic and maybe you have that German heritage, like I see so often in my area, and like I do in my family, where, you know, we’re strong. We don’t talk about it. Like, it’s, you know, pick yourself up by your bootstraps and carry on. You can’t change it. Death comes, it happens to everybody. Minimizing it. Is that you? I don’t know how well you’re coping then either.
Victoria Volk: So I just want to highlight that who’s defining coping well versus not coping well. And just reflect on how you’re responding. And just because someone else in your family is responding differently doesn’t mean that they are not coping well in quotations. We can’t force people to grieve like we do. I have a tendency to I need space. I need to process my emotions first before I talk about them. To some people that may seem cold, that might come off as cold or detached. I just need time to process internally first before I can articulate what it is I’m feeling. And that takes time. And who’s to tell me how much time that should take? Right? Another aspect of this is that every relationship is unique. So because someone is responding differently than you, consider that their relationship is different than yours to the person who passed. You might think that you were the closest person to that person who passed. But we never really know. We never really know. Okay.
Victoria Volk: So secondly, coming back to the relationship with that person. Kind of piggypacking how relationships are unique. So Who is not coping well in quotations or choosing to respond to grief differently? The dynamics of the relationship can matter here. Right? So let’s say it’s a grandparent that’s dying. And a parent isn’t responding. You’re the grandchild and your parent isn’t responding how you would have expected or you would have thought or how you feel they should be. Right? And that can make you feel angry. That can make you feel sad. But we often don’t know the dynamics in the close relationship that, obviously, generations before us shared. Because, again, as society often is, we don’t talk about the good, the bad, and ugly. We talk about mostly the good and we sweep the bad and the ugly under the rug. We don’t talk about the painful stuff. We don’t talk about the, you know, maybe it was codependency in our relationship. Maybe we don’t talk about how, you know, maybe maybe that parent felt smothered by their by their parent, by your grandparent, or maybe they felt so loved and so close that the thought of that person dying, the thought of their parent dying is too painful, and so they completely detach. And that’s not a response you would expect. You know, we can have painful responses to grief when it hits us, when we realize, when we accept this is what’s happening. I can’t control it. I can’t do anything about it.
Victoria Volk: And so we can run Like often many people do, we choose to run from our emotions, resort to what we know from growing up, behaviors that we resorted to, to cope, when things got hard, or we can embrace the grief as a family, as a unit, and talk about these things, but we often don’t. Where there could be compassion and understanding, instead there’s resentment and anger and frustration and sadness, Sadness will be there regardless, but all these are the things wrapped in there. And this is why grief is so messy because relationships are unique. And we often don’t understand the depths of those relationships of the others in our lives. Of others in our lives. You know, if it’s a sibling that passes, you know, the parent had a different relationship with that sibling than you did, obviously. And maybe you were so close with that sibling, you detached. And your parent might think, well, maybe you don’t care. And maybe you have anger and resentment towards that sibling. And you just kind of bug out and not really around and not part of the family grieving process. And often that person might be it might be the thought would be, like, they’re not coping well. But if we don’t, we don’t have these skills. We aren’t taught these skills of how to cope well. That’s my point in this episode too is like we are not taught these skills of how to cope well with grief. We just aren’t. And so it’s like calling the kettle black. Right?
That’s my point in this episode too. It’s like, it’s easy to say at someone else isn’t coping well, but yet if you have not received the coping skills, for grief and pain and suffering in your life. It’s very possible and very likely that the person that you’re feeling this way towards hasn’t either.
Victoria Volk: And so the only way to get to the other side of this is to have the hard conversations with the people we love. We can’t force people to have these conversations, of course. And you can’t build from a place if there wasn’t you can’t have these conversations, if there wasn’t a a foundation of trust and safety either. And so maybe that’s where you can start. How do you cultivate trust and safety within yourself? And those closest to you. And that’s where Tiff Carson, I want you to listen to that episode because, you know, she chose to love her brother through his addiction. But she shares how she got to that point. It’s a really great episode that illustrates that. And the third point, energy flows where the focus goes. So again, if your focus is on this anger and this resentment towards someone else and how they’re responding to grief in in your family. And you’re ruminating on that. That is doing nothing. That is not helping. It’s unnecessary suffering for you because really the all you have say in is how you respond. That’s all you have control over is how you choose to respond to the grief in the family. Your own grief, your personal grief. And then how can you be a light? In the darkness that is family grief. Number one, you can learn these healthy coping skills. You can learn new tools to help you, thereby helping your loved ones.
Victoria Volk: And you learn those new skills and those new tools and that new knowledge through great recovery. Through my through the program, do grief differently. It’s twelve weeks. And I do have two openings right now. If you are interested, go to my website to learn more. And we meet once weekly for twelve weeks. And it is very much it’s not therapy, but it’s very much therapeutic. Very therapeutic. And you will learn more about yourself than you ever thought possible about your grief, about drawing connections between your childhood and adulthood. Because, look, these things, these patterns of behavior, these belief patterns, these thoughts that we have around grief, these This is where we get generational things continuing on, these beliefs continuing through generations.
Victoria Volk: And the only way to break that cycle and to learn new now is to learn new knowledge and new tools. Because if you are prone to sweeping your grief under the rug to not talking about it, to, you know, so easily pointing the finger at other people that they’re not responding this way and they’re not responding that way instead of looking at what it’s bringing up for you. What connections can you draw from what you’re feeling about the person who’s not coping as you think they should, what is that bringing up for you in particular? Why does that feel so painful for you? There’s something there.
Victoria Volk: And so, again, this episode wasn’t to tell you what to do. Although new knowledge is what I would suggest. Learn new knowledge. Educate yourself around grief so you better understand it. And then opening a dialogue and conversation amongst those you you love. To be the light. Ponder these questions. Start this episode, come back to it, share it. If you have further questions for me on this episode, please put them. There’s a on Spotify, you can actually respond to this episode. Put a question there if you want. Email me [email protected]. Share your thoughts on this episode or have or share your questions if you have them. I’ll privately answer them or I can, you know, with permission, I can share my the question and spots on this podcast for others so we can all learn. There’s always more to learn. And we learn within the context of our relationships too. And their mirrors for us, reflecting back what we need to look at within ourselves. So thank you so much for listening. My throat is getting dry. I’ve been talking a little too much already. And so that’s my cue to end it here and to thank you. And with gratitude in my heart, thank you for listening, and I hope you listen to future episodes. And remember, When you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
Grief, Grieving Voices Guest, Grieving Voices Podcast, Podcast, season 5 |
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
We encounter moments that shape our journey in profound ways. Ann Hince’s story is a testament to such transformation—a narrative woven with threads of grief, self-awareness, and, ultimately, healing.
In this week’s episode, I had the privilege of hearing from Ann Hince, an inspiring author, speaker, and spiritual guide. She opened up about her path to healing after enduring profound trauma and grief.
Key Points Discussed:
- Ann’s Transformation: After releasing deep-seated grief from childhood traumas—including finding her mother dead—Ann experienced physical changes in her body.
- Childhood Trauma: Ann opens up about the multiple layers of grief stemming from being born with a physical condition, given up for adoption into a family already dealing with loss, experiencing a house fire, attending boarding school under challenging circumstances, dealing with alcoholic parents, and ultimately losing her mother at age 19.
- Discovery Journey: The pivotal moment came when Ann realized that past traumas were affecting her present life. This epiphany occurred during an altercation, leaving her mind spinning uncontrollably for three days.
- Healing Techniques:
- Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT): Introduced by a holistic physician who helped reduce stress associated with traumatic memories.
- Feeling Your Feelings: A method where Ann learned to focus on physical sensations related to emotions until they released.
- Spirituality & Self-Awareness:
- Developing self-awareness through healing practices contributed to exploring spirituality.
- The realization that we are not our bodies and that there is a distinction between body and soul/spirit sparked further interest in spiritual texts.
The connection between inner tranquility and physical health couldn’t be more evident in Ann’s experience: releasing emotional tension nurtured mental well-being. It led to astonishing physical changes—including growing taller!
Her story underscores how self-awareness can catalyze healing across all dimensions—emotional freedom isn’t just about feeling better mentally; it can manifest physically, too.
RESOURCES:
CONNECT:
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NEED HELP?
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
- Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor
If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.
CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
The Healing Power of Emotional Freedom: Ann Hince Journey from Trauma to Transformation
The Unseen Scars: When we speak of scars, it’s often the visible ones that come to mind. But what about the scars on our psyche? The emotional wounds that shape our lives in ways we can scarcely imagine? Ann Hince, an author and spiritual teacher, knows these all too well. Her life began with a physical deformity and continued through a maze of grief, instability, and trauma.
A Pivotal Discovery: It wasn’t until she faced intense emotions triggered by a business altercation that Anne realized her reactions were rooted in childhood events. This epiphany set her on a path toward healing—a journey she recently shared with Grieving Voices.
Emotional Release Through EFT: One powerful tool in her arsenal was the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). By dedicating just an hour daily to this practice, Ann started addressing deeply buried emotional memories. Imagine facing your fears head-on every day for sixty minutes—daunting but transformative.
From Reactive to Peaceful: Through consistent use of EFT, something remarkable happened; not only did Anne’s emotional state improve significantly—she became less reactive and more peaceful—but this tranquility rippled outwards into her family life as well.
Growing… Literally!: What’s fascinating is how inner peace translated into physical changes for Anne. She reported growing three-quarters of an inch taller as she released tension held within her body!
Applications for You:
- Start Small: If you’re looking to address past traumas or simply want better control over your emotions, consider starting small with practices like EFT.
- Consistency is Key: Just as it did for Anne, dedicating time each day can lead to profound improvements.
- Mind-Body Connection: Remember that our mental states have tangible effects on our bodies—seeking peace within might be reflected outwardly!
Ann Hince shows us that while trauma may begin early in life—and its impact may seem insurmountable—with dedication and self-awareness tools like EFT at hand, transformation isn’t just possible; it’s achievable.
Episode Transcription:
Victoria Volk: Hello. Hello. Welcome to Grieving Voices. Today, my guest is Ann Hince, she is an author, a public speaker, and a spiritual teacher. She shares the story of how she has shifted her skull bones and grown three quarters of an inch as a result of her search for inner peace. And she wants you to know that if she has done it, you can too. Thank you so much for being here. I’m definitely intrigued about your bio, and I’m sure anyone listening is kinda tilted their head to the side and probably as curious themselves. So let’s dig right into the meat and potatoes of what brings you to grieving voices.
Ann Hince: Okay. Thanks for having me, Victoria. It’s great to be here. Yes, I think I would be surprised if I heard that too, like, twenty years ago because I didn’t know what I could do now was possible. But it started by releasing the trauma and releasing the grief from all my childhood traumas, including finding my mother dead on the bathroom floor when I was nineteen. So that’s where it started, but I just my my self awareness deepened as I went through the process of releasing all that trauma all that burden that I’ve been carrying and I just kept going deeper and deeper to a place where now I can put my awareness inside the connective tissue, inside my goal and I can release tension stored in there and I can actually hear and feel the release, you know, sounds It’s like a chiropractor making adjustments or it sounds like old fabric ripping that I’m releasing the tension in the connective tissue. So it’s allowed me to kind of adjust my body or realign my body. I just didn’t know this was something that was possible. And it all started with the grief.
Victoria Volk: Let’s rewind the clock to your childhood before you found your mother what were the grief experiences that kind of made that loss of your mother the pinnacle?
Ann Hince: Well, there were multiple. I mean, it started off with actually my birth because I was born with my right foot up against my right chin. So I had Oh. Kind of physical therapy for the first six weeks of my life and after to that, after my foot was back to normal, somewhat, I was handed over for adoption. And I was handed over for adoption into a family that had already suffered a loss because they had well multiple losses actually. But they had adopted a little boy, so they had, you know, my adopted brother who was two years older than me. But then they adopted another little girl. And they had her for quite a while. I don’t know how long, but in back in England at that point, the birth mother could change her mind up to six months. And the birth mother did change her mind.
So they had to hand that little girl back to her mother, and I was the replacement in the family for that loss. So Like
Victoria Volk: like, we often replace puppies. Right? When we lose when, you know, a dog dies, well, we’ll just go get get a new one. Right? So you were the Right placement.
Ann Hince: Yeah. And I think, you know, after a loss like that, you know, as a mother, I think you don’t tend to get as connected to the replacement child just in case the birth mother does that again. Right? So again after six months, my birth mother did not change her mind, so they kept me. And then we started traveling around the world because my dad worked for an international company.
So we moved to Barbados and then to Sierra Leone in West Africa. And while we were there, we had a house fire. And I was the one who woke up and found the flames coming through my veteran Law, so I was one alerted everyone. And as part of the process, I actually went to the top of the stairs. I was about three or four maybe.
Victoria Volk: Oh my gosh.
Ann Hince: To the top of the stairs and called down to my dad who was in the kitchen and I said there’s a fire in my bedroom. And my dad said, no, I don’t believe you or there can’t be. No, there can’t be. You know, which which as a child, you know, as an adult, it sounds like, well, that’s kind of a reasonable thing to say. But as a child, that starts you not believing yourself. Right? Something I said which was clearly true. Right? No child would make something like that up. Was disbelieved by someone who’s supposed to be the person who protects you. So, you know, that started its whole. You know, roll a case for it its own. But then, you know, life carried on. So we moved from there. We moved to Hong Kong. And when I was in Hong Kong, at the age of nine, I was sent to boarding school in England. And I was sent to my brother’s boarding school, which was a boys boarding school. So for my first year, I was the only girlboarder at this boys boarding school.
Victoria Volk: And they allowed it? Like, that was allowed?
Ann Hince: They did. They had Day Girls who would come, you know, for lessons during the day and then go home. And my bedroom was in Stick Bay. That was my my bedroom. And I was teased mercilessly by those boys.
It was it was horrific. It was so so so bad. So, you know, that was that was a big part of that trauma. And then in my teenage years, both my parents became alcoholics. So life at home was hell in my mind.
That’s what I call it. It’s like it’s just hell. And then my mother got cancer. We didn’t talk about it. We talked about it one time.
When we found out she had cancer, we found out it was too late to do anything. So we never talked about it again, which is looking back, it’s very odd, but that is the way my family behaved. We just didn’t talk about anything deep at all. And then I woke up one morning when I was nineteen and found her dead on the bathroom floor. So at that point, I was the only one in the house, my brother, who was two years old at twenty one was at his girlfriend’s house, and my dad was working in Saudi Arabia, and we were back in England.
So I was the only one in the house and I had to tell everyone else what had happened and it was, yeah, it was pretty bad.
Victoria Volk: You know, in all the years, I’ve been doing this podcast and all of the examples of grief that I’ve had. There have been house fires mentioned, and But it’s like, let this be a reminder to you listening of The grief that people experience is so vast and you just never know what people have experienced in their lives at first glance. And it just sounds like your entire childhood was just a cesspool of grief and trauma. And so I’m so sorry for you that that was your experience. And I don’t say that to, like, poor you pity as pity, but it’s, like, I firmly believe because my childhood wasn’t the best either, but, you know, I’m not comparing and we don’t wanna compare. But I think those experience are what create who we who we become. And we have a lot of say and choice in that. And so I commend you for sitting here and having this conversation with me to getting to this place. That you have despite all of those experiences of
Ann Hince: Yeah. I mean, the only thing right? If people hear my like, the outside of my childhood, oh, I lived in Barbados, and my staff worker, and Hong Kong, and it sounds exciting, it sounds it sounds amazing. But once you, you know, you open the lid and you go underneath, it’s like, yeah, there’s a lot of things that really weren’t that great. So, absolutely, it made me who I am today, but I didn’t realize until I was in my late thirties. That it was affecting me, right, until I had two young boys. Mhmm. And the boys who were growing up right, and they were coming towards that age that those boys at my boarding school were. I was scared of boys at the age of nine three thirty seen because of what they had done to me, and I didn’t want to be afraid of my sons. So I knew I knew I had to change because it was getting too close.
Victoria Volk: Well, until our children have a way of kind of opening up our wounds and insecurities and all of those things that we’ve suppressed.
Ann Hince: Absolutely. Yes. That’s part of the benefits of parenthood for sure. Yes, they they trigger us in so many ways.
Victoria Volk: What was your experience? Because I’m curious of because I imagine growing up, did you how did you know that you were adopted from a very young age?
Ann Hince: I didn’t know until I was thirteen.
Victoria Volk: Oh my gosh. At boarding school.
Ann Hince: And I met my mother when I was seventeen. My birth mother, she’s still alive actually in New Zealand, and my adopted mother died when I was nineteen. So, yes, it was kind of like this two year overlap where I had two mothers and then kind of reverted back to my birth month. It was a very strange story.
Victoria Volk: Okay. So can you share a little bit about how that experience went of finding out that you were adopted?
Ann Hince: It was pretty wild. My mind my mind just started to play with all these different possibilities. You know, what could have life be like? Because it was not very much fun in that moment, Mario, as hell. And I just just imagining all these different possibilities. It it was yeah. It was it was difficult because I wanted to know more. And and thankfully, I didn’t have to wait that long. I only had to wait four years to find out that actually my birth mother was pretty normal, which is really nice to know. So, yeah, it was tricky. It was tricky for both of us because my brother didn’t know either, and he was fifteen at the time.
Victoria Volk: How did you find out? Like, I’m curious, like, did you ask questions?
Ann Hince: No. We were moving back to the same place that we had lived like a little tiny village that we had lived when we’d been adopted, and my mother was afraid that someone would say something. Mhmm. So, yeah, it makes you wonder if that hadn’t happened when or whether they would have told us at all because, you know, we didn’t didn’t look that like, but we didn’t look that different. We all had kind of the same color here, you know.
So it wasn’t it wasn’t totally obvious.
Victoria Volk: That wasn’t something you had questioned, you know, like
Ann Hince: I had
Victoria Volk: Did you
Ann Hince: get a little bit only because I was pretty nosy and it looked through a lot of my mother’s papers. And I thought I had found something that said my brother was adopted. So then I thought, okay. Well, he’s adopted, but I’m not. So did he count? I think he had seen the same paper, so he had questioned it. Yes. And we were so I mean, physically, we didn’t look that different, but, you know, emotionally, intellectually, we were very different.
Victoria Volk: And knowing then at such a influential age. Right? Thirteen. It’s preteen. And having been at boarding school and all of your wife experience up to that point, which I imagine and moving so much. Right? Like, it’s really difficult to create connections with people. And then to find out you’re adopted and it’s like, does that make you question your connection with your parents, and then you’re half, you know, your brother. And so what role did connection play as you went into your young adulthood and eventually meeting someone and having your own children, I’m just curious how that path kind of evolved.
Ann Hince: Yeah. There wasn’t a lot of collect connection, and you’re right, when you move so much, especially back in those days without cell phones and social media, Right? You’d make friends in one place and then you’d move to another place and and they were gone and you had to start all over again. So I I did not have much connection with my parents. My dad is now what she’d call a narcissist. I mean, it was all about him. He was always right. She couldn’t question him. And then he was an alcoholic. He would just drink all the time. So there was no connection there and and not really with my mother either. So yeah, there wasn’t really much connection with anyone. For some reason, I kinda lucked on my husband, I it was some connection that just happened. I kind of knew that he was for me and and That’s when I was eighteen, he actually met my mother before she died, so and we’re still together. So, yeah, I’m not quite sure how that connection happened and how it stayed? I think it was kind of meant to be.
Victoria Volk: What was your spiritual life like at that point?
Ann Hince: It wasn’t any. There there was nothing. I mean, I questioned things. You know, I’d been brought up in the church. She’d been like, I hate it. It was part of the boarding school life. Right? You had to go to church on the weekends. So religion was out. I actually I hated it. And you know, I I questioned spirituality. I I thought about things possibly deeper than some other people that I know, but it was just it was not really a part of my life. I was a software engineer, you know. I wear a look at ballet. Yes. But I was an also also an artist. I kind of had more of a balance, I think, than a lot of people. But Yeah. Nothing really hit home until my late thirties. I think I was just supposed to go through all that and and just be scared all the time and have PTSD and and just had to go through that until I had this experience that kind of woke me up. Do you remember the moment? Yeah. It was kind of a three day moment. It was it was what I call a business altercation with two other mothers at my boys and these mothers were not like me, but I was the scared mother on the inside always and they were self confident, self assured authority type women in my mind So in some senses a little bit like my dad, but they told me I’d done something wrong, and I could not stop my mind spinning. It just went over and over and over. Like, everything I’d said, everything I’d done, everything Ned said, all the things I could have done differently, just all these different permutations and I couldn’t sleep for three days. And it was the end of that period of time that I realized, okay, first of all, this is not normal. Most people would not react of this intensely to something that really wasn’t a big deal. I also realized it felt a little bit like how I would react in childhood when my dad would tell me I’d done something wrong. So that was the first little opening, little inkling that maybe something for my childhood was still affecting me. And so that that was the beginning. That’s what made me start looking.
Victoria Volk: What was the first thing you uncovered for yourself?
Ann Hince: Well, I didn’t really know what to do. Right? I knew I had to do something, but I didn’t know what. So I happened to go to a doctor’s appointment in that time frame. I don’t remember why I went to him. It was nothing to do with emotions or memories or anything like that. But he recognized I was more stressed than I should. Have been. And he was a holistic physician. Right? So he had more tools in his toolbox than most doctors do. And he recognized it was mine. I was more stressed, so he asked me on a scale of zero three what my stress level was. Right? Thinking it shouldn’t be that high because I was a stay at home mother with two healthy young boys. You know? Parenthood, it’s difficult but it shouldn’t have been that stressful. And I said it was an eight out of ten, and then he asked me why. And it was that question that made me realize oh, it was finally my mother dead on the bathroom floor when I was nineteen because the tears from that event were still just under the surface all these years later because I had not dealt with it. So he happened to know this technique that’s called EFT. Short for emotional freedom technique. It’s also called tapping. Are you familiar with it?
Victoria Volk: I am.
Ann Hince: Okay. So he tapped with me. In that office there for about fifteen minutes talking through finding my mother on the bathroom floor and and not having talked about the cancer and all those different aspects. And I walked away from that appointment being able to tell the story in her in my mind for the first time ever. Without the emotions there, And that’s when I realized, oh, we just hold those emotions and those memories physically in our body. And we can let them go and that was that was eye opening for me and that was that was the first step on my journey. So
Victoria Volk: What was the next step?
Ann Hince: Well, I went home that day and I went online and I learned everything I could about EFT. Because as I said, I was a software engineer, I like to know things worked before I spent a lot of time invested in it. And it was really nice to know the guy who developed it, Gary Craig. He was a chemical engineer, so that gave me more confidence. And and he gave it away for free. So anyone could go online and learn about it, and that was that was just amazing to me. So I learned everything I could about it, but I wanted to try it out. I didn’t necessarily believe that that fifteen minutes with this doctor was really, you know, maybe it was a fluke. I wanted to know for sure that it worked. So at the time, I had a seventeen year old cat at home. His kidneys were starting to fail. And we’ve been told we had to give them a daily saline shot, like an injection of saline solution, and our hated needles. I’d had so many from living all over the world. I just was petrified of them. So the first time I gave them that shot, my hand was shaking so badly. I didn’t wanna have to do it every day. It’s just it it wasn’t happen. So I thought, okay. Well, let me try out this technique. I’ve learned about it. Let me actually put in an action. So I did. I tapped about every aspect of it, which is something you do with the f t. So I tapped about my hand shaking. I tapped about my fear of hurting the cat. And I talked about all the memories from all the injections I’d had in different places around the world, you know, ones in boarding school in the different countries. And the next day, when I gave him the shot, the needle just slid right in. All that fear that it’d be living inside of me the day before had totally disappeared. And that’s when I realized, that’s the freedom I want. I I wanna get beyond all of those emotions and I wanna just feel that piece that I felt at that moment. Mhmm. So that’s when I started using EFT every day. I started noticing when I was emotional during the day. And then I would tap and bring myself back to peace. And, you know, the days went by and I started to notice that I was feeling more peaceful. But I wanted it to go faster. I wanted it more and I wanted it faster. So what I did is I wrote down every emotional memory I could think of from my childhood. Like, so all the traumas, the big traumas, the little traumas, the stings, my dad would say, you know, like, you know, the the one we they used back in those days, you know, stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.
Victoria Volk: Mhmm.
Ann Hince: Or
Victoria Volk: my aunt still used that.
Ann Hince: Oh, shame. My aunt used to say shame on you. You know, that was one of her favorite sayings. And so I would I tap through all of those one each night for about an hour to an hour and a half each night, so because I was determined to change. And just things started changing more rapidly.
I was just becoming less reactionary, which was really nice. So I was more peaceful And when I was more peaceful, my household was more peaceful, which was really, really nice. So that that’s kind of the first step on my journey.
Victoria Volk: I can see that there was ripples in what you were learning and uncovering for yourself and just how you were changing, your environment was changing, how did that evolve over time then?
Ann Hince: Well, we hear that phrasing, you know, you gotta change yourself and when yourself when you change yourself, your world changes. So, I mean, that is absolutely true. So as as time went by, my boys became more peaceful than they hadn’t been totally not peaceful before, but But because I was so reactionary, right, I would react to them, and then they would react to me reacting. Right? So if I’m peaceful, and I don’t react to something that happens, then they don’t have to react to that. So they can feel free to be their true selves. And it it just changes the whole dynamic of the family and it’s really nice to experience. But, you know, talk to people sometimes, they don’t believe that that’s the case. So you actually have to walk down that path somewhat. Right? So you have to realize, you have to be able to look back and see where you came from. To see where you are now. So you have some perspective. And then you could realize that it’s true, that it’s really the case So if you haven’t done any inner work before, you might not believe that things change. You actually have to do some of the work to to really believe that it does work.
Victoria Volk: How did that experience and learning EFT change your spirituality then? Because where you had none and you didn’t really have a faith practice and things like that, what how did that start to change?
Ann Hince: That kind of grew over time. As I what I realized the Feet is doing is opening up the subconscious mind, which is really our body. It’s stored in our body. And as our subconscious mind opens, it’s kind of one in the same thing. Our self awareness deepens. So when I started this journey, I had so many barriers around me like emotional barriers, protective barriers, shields, that I really didn’t know how I felt. I didn’t have any self awareness. And as I did more, more tapping, more, more eFT, I became aware of my emotions, right, because I’d been checking on myself multiple times a day. And underneath that, the next layer of self awareness is the physical sensations underneath the emotions. So for example, if we’re feeling frustration, right, that’s just the words. But what we’re really describing is tension that we’re holding in our body in a certain place. That we give the name frustration to. Right? So this is kind of reversing that process. So when I’m feeling frustrated rated, I can feel tension in in the bottom of my ribcades in the in the solar plexus area. So I became aware at that level And then I started to use a different technique. I call it feeling your feelings, but I could only do it because I was aware of those sensations. And I had honed my ability to focus so I could focus on those sensations and just keep my focus there until it released. And so this is kind of the word I talk about as the second step on my journey. It’s it’s just a deeper level of self awareness. And and I will get back to the spirituality as this is a this is a process. As I said, I had I have this engineering mind, so you know, I had to experience it myself myself first in order to put words to it and really understand what was happening. So I would do that more and more instead of doing EFT. If I felt myself feeling some kind of emotion, I would just stop and feel those emotions. Feel those sensations and allow them to release. It felt actually really good. And so I would lay on the sofa and I would bring, at this point, collective from us to mine because I’d worked through my childhood. So I’d bring things like nine eleven to my right. We all had our own individual experience of that collective trauma. So I would feel all those sensations and allow them to release. And at some point, I became able to put my awareness inside my body after the tension had released. So imagine if you have a toothache or stomachache. Right? You can feel where that coming from. Right? You can tell where the pain is coming from. Well, once the pain has released, right, once the toothache or the stomachache gets gone, you can’t put your awareness back on it. Because there’s nothing calling your attention to it anymore. I could. I could feel inside my body. And what I realized I was doing eventually was, how do I put it? Well, it’s what I think of it is the original meaning of the term insight. Right? It’s inward sight or inside sight. And It was not me. Right? There were two parts of me at that point. There was my body and there was part of me that was looking inside. So I couldn’t be my body if I could also be focusing at one particular place inside my body. Right? So that’s when I realized we are two separate entities with the body and the soul. And there’s something we tune into as well, which I believe is you know, spirit. It’s whatever we want to call it, but we’re tuning into something using our instrument of the body. So that’s when I really started to become more interested in, you know, the spirituality aspect of it because I knew without a doubt that I was not my body, you know, which is something you hear a lot. But when you actually know it, you know, you really know it because it can’t be anything else, then, you know, becomes more interesting. So I started, you know, I started reading more spiritual texts, trying to relate my experience with what some of those spiritual texts to talk about. And I found that I could relate to some of it. So, yeah, it’s been an interesting journey.
Victoria Volk: And what that brings to my mind is the thought of consciousness and the controversy or the not controversy. I don’t even know how to say it. But, like, there’s
Ann Hince: I think they call it heart problem?
Victoria Volk: Well, there’s people that believe that, you know, either you believe that consciousness continues after you die, after you are no longer. In the body. Right? Like your soul is not in the body. And that’s what it comes that’s what comes to mind when you when I hear you talking is that it’s you’re connecting with your higher consciousness. It’s a connection of yeah. It it’s being an observer a neutral observer of the body. Right.
Ann Hince: So let me go a little further into this third step. The third step is when I was put my put my awareness inside my body. And it it was really wild when it started happening because I I knew it felt different. I knew it was different from what I was doing before, but I’d also never heard anyone talk about it. So it was just an louratory investigation for me. It was kind of fun, actually. And so I would put my focus inside my body and I would feel I would move my awareness around and I would find a place with tension, which I could tell was different from a place with no tension. So I find a place with tension I’d focus on it and allow it to release, which is exactly the same thing I was doing with the feeling the feelings. Right? I was feeling the sensation and allowing them to release. And even with EFT, we’re feeling what the words bring up as we tap. And we’re focusing on it and we’re allowing to release. So I’m just working at a deeper level of self awareness. So I would do this in my torso and it took me many, many months and then I was able to put my awareness inside my head, which for me was eye opening because the pain and the tension inside my left cheek was almost unbearable. I could only focus on it for like a second at a time because it was just so intense. And what I realized, it had been there my whole life. And it was attached through the connective tissue to my right foot, which had been up against my chin when I was born. Right? So the fascia or the connective tissue had not been released. The tension in it had not been released, and it was still tense all the way up through my right leg, over to the left side of my body, into my left cheek. And through tension in my the right of my neck. So I realized at that point how everything is so connected. Our body is so connected.
Victoria Volk: And for and for people listening because they might be confused now because you talked about your left foot, but then or your right foot, but then it was the left side. So Just explain that a little bit. I know what it means, but can you just elaborate for people who who may be hearing that and be like, well, how does that? You would think it’d be on the same side. So can you just explain that a little bit.
Ann Hince: Right. Well, the the connective tissue, you know, if you look online, the connective tissue just is connected throughout a whole body and kind of through sheets. If you think of pulling the skin off a piece of chicken breast. It’s that that kind of watery slimy tissue between that holds the two together. We have that tissue throughout our bodies. It’s all connected. That’s why it’s called connected tissue. So it’s connected throughout our body. So from my left cheek, it’s connected all the way across my body, down through my right leg. But it but it could potentially also be my left leg all the way up through my my left cheek.
It it just depends where that tension has been held in the body and how it’s been held. So so it’s really I mean, it was really interesting, right, to know that, okay, if I’m working on my right foot, I don’t actually necessarily have to work on my right foot. Right? Working on this pain in my left cheek is also working on my right foot because it’s releasing the tension all the way through the body. So I started doing that. I started focusing on that pain in my left cheek. Just longer and longer periods of time, just holding my awareness on it, allowing it to release over and over again, and that’s why one day I actually heard and felt this this release of the the connective tissue. It was actually kinda scary at the time because it it felt like something ripping. And that she’s thought what I was doing because I was afraid I was hurting myself. I had to do some research and realize, okay, it’s just a connection in the and it’s an adhesion in the connected tissue, and it’s okay.
So I kept doing that and over and over again. I feel releases in different places and and actually actually felt my skull bones relaxed at some point. Now I hadn’t known they weren’t relaxed. Until they relax. Right? Then I could feel, okay, they clearly had been tense before, and they needed to relax. And that’s when I had x rays taken two years ago, and I should see the changes that had happened, that my eye sockets had aligned, my jaw had aligned, my neck was straighter than it had ever been in my life. But I also at that point, because I was working in my head, I worked out, well, if I’m looking at somewhere inside my head, where am I looking from? Right? Because I could tell I was looking from somewhere to somewhere else.
Like, I try to work it out. Like, you know, my eyes above or below where I’m looking from, you know, where that doesn’t feel like it’s in the middle of my head. So I I kinda worked out the general area and it’s kind of between my eyes. Right? If you’re looking from the front, it’s between my eyes kind of in the between the eyebrows, maybe a little bit lower than that.
Victoria Volk: Third eye chakra?
Ann Hince: Maybe the crown chakra, maybe a little bit lower. It’s not it’s not the pineal gland. It’s not that far back. So what I think it is, and this is based on looking at a lot of symbology in different places. But I believe it is the sphenoid bone, the body of the sphenoid bone. That I’m looking from and that I can relate that to many different things that I’ve read in in different spiritual texts. And and so that’s why I believe the soul resides So that’s when I think, like, during your deaf experiences and such when you go through a dark tunnel, I think you’re coming out of the the sphenoid sinus effect in effect through the through the nose and out through, you know, through the body. But I haven’t been able to really determine that. I’ve I’ve talked to some people who’ve had near death experiences and some people who’ve been on Ayahuasca and such things to try and relate that ex my belief with their experience and some kind of relate to that and some don’t necessarily. So, yeah, it’s it’s interesting.
Victoria Volk: Well, I would say it is what you believe it is.
Ann Hince: Well, maybe, but I I’m not you know, that’s another part of this journey. It’s like some people I’m gonna talk to some people. They they think I’m going into my imagination to experience this. I’m not I’m out of my thinking mind. I’m in my feeling right. So I’m actually feeling things inside I’m feeling inside my bones. I’m feeling inside, you know, my palate, inside my neck, bones, inside my tooth roots. I can actually feel them move. Right? So I’m not it’s not what I believe it is.
It’s it’s what it actually is. Right? That’s and that’s hard for me to say because I know people don’t necessarily believe that, but it’s a very different experience to actually know versus believe.
Victoria Volk: Versus Our beliefs create a reality.
Ann Hince: Right. But I’m not sure I ever believed, you know, in in my
Victoria Volk: Oh, I get what you’re saying. Six years. I get what you’re saying.
Ann Hince: Believe where it’s coming from.
Victoria Volk: True. I get what you’re saying. It sounds like, too, what you’re experiencing is something that people could experience. I’ve I’ve experience really deep, profound meditations, visualizations, meditations, and I think we can have that a similar experience if we allow ourselves to completely relax to that place of where we connect to our higher consciousness and let our higher consciousness give us whatever it is that we are needing to receive messages or visions or insights. Right? To allow our third eye to really open and receive. And how I’ve personally seen my third eye in visualizations or meditations. It’s almost like I’m, like, in a UFO, in a way where it’s And I’m seeing my life and seeing me on, like, a TV screen, except it’s like, it it’s an all white in glass front. And it’s almost like, I’m just like on this observation deck or, you know, like, as, you know, you can see, like, air traffic controllers, you know, kind of like that, you know, where you’re just observing yourself in that our minds can take us to incredible places and are very powerful. And I think as as our minds and brains change with trauma.
Right? We can create those new connections and new experiences within the mind that can transform and transcend the experiences we feel within our bodies. And that really sounds like that’s it’s almost like you’ve little by little have incrementally leveled up on a cellular level.
Ann Hince: Yeah. Well, Kundalini with energy was part of that journey too. So, yeah, definitely think myself’s changed. So what you’re talking about there is is kind of it is kind of in the mind. Right? You’re talking about going into deep. Meditational visualizations where you’re kind of seeing things in the minds. Yeah. It’s really hard to put these things in word. Right? I don’t do that anymore. I go into the body. So I’m not creating things. In my thinking mind or even another part of the mind that does visualization. I’m actually going into the body and sensing tension.
Victoria Volk: No. But we can do that. That’s what I’m saying. Like, we can we can become so relaxed that we can almost and I think that experience would be different in need for every individual, but how I would feel how I would see myself or how how I’ve done that myself is like, seeing myself as like this miniature version of myself going into the body. Right? Like, that’s what I mean. It’s like you’re And then it’s like you’re seeing with your third eye in this visualization, you’re seeing what the body wants to communicate to I I think there’s so many ways we can do this. You know what I mean?
Ann Hince: I’m saying that this is different from that. Yeah. Right? Because I I’ve experienced that before. You’re still creating an image.
This is sensing. Right? If you put your awareness on your right knee right now. Right? And just feel how does your right knee feel. When you do that and the moment you do that, you’re sensing. You’re not putting a picture to it, so you might put words to it eventually, but before you do that, there’s a moment where you’re just feeling it. Yeah.
Victoria Volk: And that’s why I’m saying I think I’m fast forwarding this the the real a little bit because I think it’s how you get there. Right? It’s like how you can get to that deep sensing. And if you have to use visualization to get you can use visualization or deep meditation to get to that deep sensing. If there’s, you know, like, He broke his back.
Ann Hince: Joe Despenza.
Victoria Volk: Yes. Thank you. Joe Despenza. You know, I’ve I’ve used his meditations and is deep sensing, but there’s also visualization that’s incorporated into that. And that’s what I’m saying. Like, to get the a lot of people need help getting to deep to get to the point where they’re deeply relaxed. I still don’t
Ann Hince: do it until I had released a lot of the outer layers of trauma, right, the outer emotions.
Victoria Volk: And that’s where you’re saying EFT was a huge
Ann Hince: Right. That was the first part. It took all those big layers away, all those emotions that allowed me to sense deeper. And then feeling the feelings just allowed me to sense deeper. So I think what Joe Despensa, your your focusing on one particular place and not necessarily clearing everything else out around it.
Right? It’s kind of a different way. I mean, if I don’t know if this is the right thing to say, but, you know, I’ve met him before And if you experience him, he doesn’t feel like he’s a particularly happy, light person. He still kind of feels heavy. So I would say that is because he’s he’s definitely done a lot of inner work.
Right? He’s focused deeply in certain areas, but I don’t think the the whole of it’s been cleared out. Just I can only say that, you know, because I’ve experienced it, you know, I used to feel really heavy I used to feel, you know, just so burdened all the time. And I’ve experienced the different. Right? I’m not I’m not like that anymore. I I feel to me, I feel lighter, I feel happier, more peace. Right? And I’ve cleared out you know, many layers all the way through my body, not just in in certain specific places. Right? So I would say that’s that’s the difference that’s allowed me to get inside and move around it will rather than just go into one particular place. Yeah.
Victoria Volk: You mentioned the Cundalini too. Uh-huh. And I I had a session with a Cundalini practitioner, Kunduehne yoga, and she walked me through this breath work experience. And it’s like, I have never experienced anything like it. Like, where every cell in my entire body just felt like it was vibrating. It’s anyone listening? You wanna feel alive? Like, whoa. That was it was quite an experience.
Ann Hince: Yeah. It’s a massive energy. I mean, in my experience, it was just a massive energy. It felt like other people around me should no. Why why aren’t they? Feeling it too because it was just so big. Mhmm. But for me, it happens just as part of the process. Right? I’d released enough energy myself it kind of it took over almost what I feel is it took over to allow the rest of my body to catch up.
With the parts that had released enough tension. So it went on for months on and off. I could kind of move it up and down my body at will. I could stop it whenever I want it. I just have to relax sufficiently and then it would start up again. And I would relax more up into my spine and it would move up it it was kind of fun actually. But at some point, it got to the place where, you know, I had released enough or it had burnt through enough of remaining tension. That it it just kind of faded away. And it was actually at that point that I was able to put my awareness inside my body, so I think that was part of the process.
Victoria Volk: Did you get to the third part?
Ann Hince: Yeah. That third part was putting my awareness inside my body.
Victoria Volk: So how it has your life changed since.
Ann Hince: Oh, it’s lovely. I’m really very peaceful. You know, when I started this journey, I used to love seeing peaceful parents at school. It was so nice, you know. I wanted to be one of them. And one day, a few years into this process, I had another mother come up to me and say, I want to be as peaceful as you are. You know? And for me, that was a big moment that I had shifted enough that other people could notice that that I myself was peaceful. So it’s really nice. I actually go out of my way now to find things that I react to. So for many years, I didn’t watch the news because it was too much. Now I want to watch the news because I want to feel what’s going on inside. I want to find deeper healing still. So that’s really nice. There’s also a huge depth to life that I had no idea existed when I started this journey. I didn’t know that you could actually hear things in your body not just through your ears. You could feel music. Just just throughout your body. I mean, it makes the experience of listening to music so much nicer. But it also means like when you’re listening to a conversation, you’re able to pick up more than just the sound of their voice. Right? You’re picking up nuances in them. In their facial expressions, in their body movements. Because if you can recognize it within yourself, if you can feel it, if you have that depth of self awareness in yourself, you can see it in other people as well, right, which makes having conversations much more enjoyable, satisfying, Also, I’ve really so much tension in my skull now, which is our echo chamber for our voice. So my voice has changed. I can actually sing a note that I could not sing before because I’ve released that tension holding my skull in a particular position. Right? It’s now much more malleable, much more flexible. So there’s that too.
Victoria Volk: What was your health like before that pivotal moment when you realize that something needed to change and how has your health changed since?
Ann Hince: I used to have a lot of digestive issues. And tried many, many different diets, all sorts of things. But it was really associated with all that stress that I was holding inside. So that has released not fully because part of the journey is a deeper level of self awareness. Right? So oftentimes during this journey, I’ll think, okay, I can feel something now that I couldn’t feel before. And it’s not because it’s a new you know, when you paint or whatever, it’s just something that was hidden before that I’ve now become aware of. So that’s been a, you know, a little bit of a mind thing to get used to along this journey. So I’m just working at a deeper level. But I’ve also grown three quarters of an inch in my fifties, you know, that that doesn’t happen very often. You know, I’m taller than they’ve ever been in my life before and most of us start to shrink because we’re holding so much tension inside. And we tend to think the same thoughts over and over, which, you know, adds tension to those already tense neural pathways inside of us. So as we release that burden, we’re actually just becoming more of our natural blueprint. Right? So I don’t know what high time going to end up as, but I know my neck is continuing to release every day. So I would not be surprised if I grow a little bit more.
Victoria Volk: So if people are watching this on YouTube, they’ll see. I’m kind of I am kind of hunched forward. My shoulders are kind of in. My posture absolutely sucks at this moment. And so I’m at and what I know is and I’ve been feeling some stuff lately. Like, my I have so much tension throughout my shoulders and my neck. And I I know emotionally I’m going I’m feeling some things these past few days. I can recognize that. Right? I may try EFT after a week and off this.
Or a really deep meditation because I it’s been a long while since I’ve meditated. I just wanna highlight for people in that when you’ve worked on the grief, because you you say stress a lot, but I wanna reiterate that what brought you to this podcast is grief. And what does grief do? It causes a stress in the body. It physically stresses the body and not to mention the daily life that we have, can be stressful. Right? It’s But I think we label things as stressful. So how has that shifted for you? In because I was just reading something yesterday that kind of made me think about this word stressful and stress And it’s like we are such a stressed society, but as it’s at the same time, it’s maintaining It was talking about, like, our personal management, like, our management of ourselves. Like, we can’t and you might be a manager of other people and especially if you’re parent, mother, you’re managing other people. Right? You’re managing a household. But what about your personal management? How are you managing the self? And I recognize that when I’m not managing the self, I feel more stress. I feel more stressed in the body, my posture sucks, like all of these things. Right? Like and so What do you have to say to that?
Ann Hince: Well, a lot of people, when they use the word managing, right, they also think of the word controlling.
Victoria Volk: Mhmm. And I
Ann Hince: think a lot of even there’s, you know, different spiritual methods. Also talk about controlling or controlling the mind or controlling the thoughts. My whole journey has been about noticing and allowing and releasing. So, you know, in some sense, it could be called controlling or managing. But in terms of the modern day use of those words, it’s really not that. So yes, we want to notice. We want to notice how we’re feeling during the day. A lot of us suppress. We suppress or we bypass. Right? We’ll have a drink or we’ll I don’t know. People some people take drugs or some people exercise to try and avoid feeling those thoughts and the feelings and the emotions that are coming up. But when we do that, we’re just keeping that energy, that emotion, that stress, that grief suppressed inside the body. Because it it doesn’t go anywhere. It needs it needs noticing, it needs acknowledging, it needs feeling, it needs being met, right, if we’re if we’re If there’s something we want to share with someone else and the person we’re talking to doesn’t really listen. Right? If we don’t feel like we’ve been listened to, that feeling of needing to share that information stays inside of us until someone really meets us, really listens and hears us. That’s what we need to do with the emotion inside of us. Once we really hear it, we really feel it, we allow it to be felt, to be released, it will. It will relax and let go. So it’s not really about, right, managing or controlling. It’s about noticing being aware. And just allowing ourselves to feel those feelings that are living inside of us rather than forgetting them and move on, which most of us are programmed to do. Right? That’s that’s so common and that’s what needs to change. I think even in childhood, in schools. Right? If we learn history and we allow the children to talk about and to feel the emotions that are brought up, while hearing about that history, I think that’s how we change the projection or the direction of the world actually.
Victoria Volk: That phrase, self management, personal management, it was actually used by yoga guru. Sand Sandguru. I think it’s how you say his name? I’m probably saying it wrong.
Ann Hince: I don’t know.
Victoria Volk: I’ll send you a link. But, yeah, he’s a mystic and a teacher and thought leader and Yeah. I mean, he’s got what’s his program called? Inner inner something. I’m it’s case in my mind right now. I’ll share I’ll put it in show notes if anybody’s interested.
Ann Hince: I think I know who you’re talking about. Yeah. Yeah. And I you know, even him, you know, I have to be careful with my words because who am I, but I don’t know anyone else who’s developed this inability that I have. So I listen to their words. I listen to the way they talk about things. And I don’t believe he has developed this ability. So I don’t necessarily listen to what he says.
Victoria Volk: I’m just saying that’s where the phrase came from, what I was listening to
Ann Hince: a banding number. But but maybe it’s just not the best way. I mean, that’s what I’ve looked at a lot of these different spiritual methods. And I think originally, they were probably correct, but they’ve been mistranslated through the years. And, you know, people tend to think that we have to have to control ourselves. And really, it’s kind of almost the opposite of that. Well, I
Victoria Volk: think it’s not See, I hear self management and I don’t hear control. I don’t get a sense of control in that way. Like, So I think it’s a matter of perspective as well. Like and we’re all going to perceive yeah. It’s yeah. We’re all going to perceive what we see and what we hear and what we think or what we feel differently.
Ann Hince: But even Buddhism, when you look at Buddhism, it’s it’s and even yoga, like the, you know, spiritual aspect of yoga. It’s very much about controlling thoughts, controlling things you eat. You know, just all sorts of control in there. Mhmm. And I think originally, they have the right idea, but it’s just been twisted over the years. And I don’t think it’s going to get people where they think it’s going to get them.
Victoria Volk: I totally hear where you’re coming from. I mean, for me, I I feel like like, a sense of self like, I desire a sense of self mastery in a in a sense of whatever is going on in the world. To be able to feel that piece. Right?
Ann Hince: Yeah.
Victoria Volk: You can put
Ann Hince: down the ability.
Victoria Volk: Are you are you familiar with human design?
Ann Hince: I’ve heard of it. I don’t know much about it.
Victoria Volk: I’m a manifestor type, and and that’s a label or whatever, but it helps me make sense It helped me make sense of a lot of things in my life, but the not self theme of a manifestor’s anger and the the opposite of that is right right is peace. And so I know I’m feeling aligned in what I’m doing, what I’m saying, what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling, when I’m at peace. So I’ve been able I’m starting to recognize and I’ve been in my experiment with human design and in learning these things about myself. For it’s been a couple years, but it’s really helped me to open my eyes to have own awareness. Right? Of of when I’m what what not feeling peace feels like in my body, like the tension in my neck and my slouching and my turning inward because this is what we do when we are I see so many people with their your shoulders go up like this. You’re not relaxed. Right? You’re in the grocery store line, whatever. You you can just see people’s posture how they carry themselves. It’s written all over them.
Ann Hince: Yeah. They’re not aware of it. I mean, most of us Yeah. Most of us are not aware of it. There is so much hidden in our subconscious mind that we are just not aware of and that’s that’s why you have to go down this road a little bit
Victoria Volk: Mhmm.
Ann Hince: To start realizing some things that have been hidden in your a conscious mind and then you start to realize, oh my goodness, there’s so much more, let me keep going and then covering what’s in there. So yeah.
Victoria Volk: Yeah, I think grief is just in stress, is just written all over us. You know, you can see it another I see it clearly in other people, and I I can recognize it. Within myself. And so how has like, what’s life like now? Like, on the daily Are you still doing EFT? Are you still, like, how much time have you devoted to this practice? Are you teaching other people? Teaching you and we touch your kids, like all the questions.
Ann Hince: Well, I used it on my kids when they were young. My my youngest son used to have nightmares and I go and tap on him. Didn’t need any words because the emotions were already in his body. So I just tap on him and then I’d say, okay, mom, I can go back to sleep now and I would just you know, leave the room and you’d go back to sleep. So they know that it was. They just have a lot of resistance because, you know, children often do. So I’m hoping one day they’ll come back to it or or at least do some kind of shadow work to, you know, because I didn’t I didn’t change until they were you know, six and ten something like that. So they have traumas inside of them from those early years for sure. I do still use EFT not as much because I I have these other things I can use. I mean, I feel inside multiple times a day, like, many, many times a day. Fifty, a hundred times a day. And that many times, I will have something release in my my neck or my my head. So it’s almost automatic. To me for me now, it just first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is like, okay, where’s my neck gonna crack? And I will just move and allow it to crack. So it’s it’s very much a part of me now and it it wasn’t in those early years. I I just I started doing it more and more because it felt so good, you know, this tension has been stalled inside of us for, you know, for me, for decades and it felt good to release it. So I just kept doing it. Let’s see. I do, I mean, I do share the information. I have a YouTube channel that has different videos and I’ve got If you go to my website and hints dot com, I’ve got a PDF download of my cheat sheet, my two page PDF with, you know, all the basics of EFT, so anyone could learn to do it. And let’s see. What were the other questions there?
Victoria Volk: You answer with the kids, how it’s, like, physically I’m curious too, like, with food.
Ann Hince: Right? You asked about my day, like, how I feel different. And my days. My days are peaceful. I enjoy my days now.
It doesn’t matter what I’m doing. I can always find peace. And that was not the case before at all. So I’m happy wherever I go, whatever I’m doing, you know, some people will sometimes say, you know, are we looking forward to going on this trip that, you know, you’re gonna go on? It’s like, well, you know, that’s two weeks in the future. I’m not thinking about that. I’m peaceful right now. So kind of time has shifted as well. I think of it differently. Feel it differently. So that’s really nice. I mean, my goal was in a piece. So, you know, I’m not fully there yet because I know there’s a lot more tension still and I won’t feel total feet piece on the inside. Until my I think until my body is totally aligned, and I’ve got a long way to go yet on that. So but I know I know I know what I’m working on. Know what I’m working towards. So that’s and then you mentioned food. I did lots of different diets along my way before I found the EFT. I mean, all sorts, life food, vegan, macrobiotic, vegetarian, just all sorts and I let go of all my beliefs around that, not all of them. I still eat organic. Whenever I can. And I cook my own food mostly. But I’ve let go of so much tension and all those beliefs around that should have this or I shouldn’t have this or if I have this, I’m not gonna feel right. You know, I’d let go of all of that so I can pretty much eat whatever I want. Now, which is really nice. And I have some discussions online, you know, with people who think you should be vegan, you know, that that’s so adamant about it. And it’s that being adamant. It’s that tension. It’s that judgment of other people. That’s what’s holding dysys inside of their body. And I know because I was there too. I was vegan for many years. And I remember having that that judgment. And that’s tension. That’s dis ease inside of ourselves. And when we’re judging someone else, we’re hurting ourselves. So go find that judgment. Notice it. Feel it. Allow it and let it release.
And that actually releases the disease from inside of us.
Victoria Volk: Part of my intention is just having this experience lately where I had signed up for this program and, you know, the the fad right now is protein, protein, protein, and you need seen amount of protein. And what I found though is my and I this is not like, this has been going on about five months now, like and I’ve just, you know, switched a different program and still trying to maintain, like, the tracking and and, you know, the weights and but what I’m what I found, like, just in just in the last couple days, truly. Like, over the weekend. So this is very new, and this is why this tension has actually enlightened today, to be honest. Like, this is true story. I felt I was feeling heavy. I was feeling so heavy. And I was feeling like, my body is screaming at me. Like, this is not for me right now. And I was so adamant of this is what I need, this is I need this person to tell me what, you know, how much I’m supposed to be eating and I need to do these workouts and do diesel regimented. And that is so against my body type, like my body as, like, even as a manifestor. This is where this is where human design has helped me too and realizing that my desires are gonna change depending on my energetic where I am energetically, and I’m more of like in this rest cycle right now, which has corresponded to this program I’m working on, which I’ve lately just, like, I put it on the table and I haven’t looked at it. Like, I just I put it down and I haven’t looked at it in, like, over a week. Two weeks actually, probably. And I’m like, oh my god, this is what’s happening. I’m in this rush cycle. I’m not why am I pushing myself to do this program? I need to listen to my body. I need to honor my body. And as soon as I’ve done that, As of yesterday afternoon, I feel so much better today. It is crazy. How our bot like, you know what I mean? Like, it’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about of how our bodies are always communicating with us. We just you know, the judgment or the the self criticism or, you know, I should be doing this and I should be doing that or, like you said, of other people too,
Ann Hince: Yeah. And we forget that we’re so connected. Right? That was part of my journey. I realized how it’s all connected, so you could access that tension in your shoulders, in your neck. Through words, right, through through memories, through beliefs. Right? I believe that I should be doing something or controlling or giving someone else control over my body.
Victoria Volk: Yes. That agency and last my sense of agency.
Ann Hince: Yes. So that is connected to the tension in your shoulders. Or you could tap or if you’re using EFT, you could tap directly on I have tension in my shoulders. Right? You could feel the tension in your shoulders. It doesn’t matter which way you access it, right, whether it’s through words, emotions, or through physical tension itself. It’s still accessing the tension in your shoulders because it’s all connected. I know a lot of people are concerned like doctor will say, well, it’s all in your head. Right? And some people get offended by that. But if we take that to be true, okay. So what is it I’m thinking or feeling? And if we know that those thoughts and feelings are connected to the physical, then we can work with those words and with those memories and with those emotions. And that’s what EFT did for me. It’s kind of those outer layers. Okay. I’ll let me let me go through the memories of those traumas and talk through them and tap through them. And what I didn’t realize when I started to do that, that I was affecting the physical because I didn’t have that depth of self self awareness. I have that depth now, so I know that it’s all connected. So even if you don’t know that you’re affecting the physical, I can tell you, if you’re doing EFT, even on words and memories, you are affecting the physical.
Victoria Volk: I had a question. Do you have a meditation that guides people through that process of interconnecting.
Ann Hince: Not as such. I mean, I have videos on YouTube about the different steps about the feeling the feelings.
Victoria Volk: Okay.
Ann Hince: I’m feeling feeling this one about going inside. It tapes work to go inside though. So I’m not sure anyone could do that right off, but they could feel a feeling. So, like, empaths are very good at picking up and sensing their feelings inside their bodies. So that they could do that. So, yes, that’s a I do have a video series that that takes people deeper into relaxation and where they can actually notice their depth of awareness. Because I find that people don’t know. Right? We don’t know what we don’t know. So we don’t know how far we can go beyond where we are right now. So as I’ve gone through this journey, I’ve realized there’s different things that have changed in me. Right? Like being able to feel music within the body. Right, rather than hear it with just your ears. So I’ve recognized some different things that change, and so I I’ve like, take people through those, right, to notice. I mean, even just simply noticing how reactionary you are. Right? If you’re still reaction if you’re still triggered by things, or easily triggered by things, if people say you’re highly strung, then you don’t have a great depth of awareness. I’m sorry. That’s just the way it is. But it means there’s so much more you can find, so much more depth to life that you can find by doing this inner work.
Victoria Volk: And I think what people don’t realize is the deeper goal of this work, doing the work, and looking into yourself, and connecting with the self is that I think so many of us come into this life and we leave this life, not ever realizing our own potential because of it.
Ann Hince: Absolutely. My brother my brother died a few years ago. You know, he was adopted too. Right? So he had a different story from me.
He was adopted from a different family. But he Whereas I went one direction, he went into the way my parents were so he drank and he smoked his whole life and I actually tapped with him a couple of months before he died. I went to his hospital room, and he and I tapped through some of our collective childhood traumas And it was really interesting to talk through some of those things that were being through together. And to have him experience EFT. I I had to tap on him because he didn’t have the energy to tap. But but after a few minutes of tapping on on one thing in particular when we were at boarding school, when we left him the first term at boarding we drove away and we were heading to Hong Kong from England. It’s a long way away. We left him screaming in the driveway. He was just screaming for us to stay. And he remembered that. It was so clear to him, and and we tapped on it. And he said it had kind of receded more in his mind through this, those couple of minutes of tapping. So, you know, I I think if he had wanted to, do this work. He could have totally changed his life, but it wasn’t on his path. It wasn’t something he was ready to do. So, you know, some of us Some of us don’t, and some of us do.
Victoria Volk: Do you have a relationship relationship now with your birth mother?
Ann Hince: I do. I went to see here at Christmas time. Yes. Yeah. But even
Victoria Volk: though times.
Ann Hince: No. I’ve met her. I mean, I’ve met her when I was seventeen for the first time. And then then on our honeymoon, when I was twenty four. She came over when my first son was born and a couple of other times.
So, yeah, I’ve I’ve seen her less than ten times in my life, but but it’s been nice. And we have technology now, so I call her once a month. So yeah. And and she came over one time and we actually tagged together on my birth on her on her giving me up. So I think that was healing for both of us.
Victoria Volk: Did she ever tell you why?
Ann Hince: Yes. She was twenty six. She just she’d been engaged to my father and they had this one time event after she told him that she was leaving, it was that night. And she left the next morning. She got on a boat from New Zealand to head back to England, and she found that she was pregnant on the way. So, yeah, she was a single mother and she just thought that I would be better off within a a complete family.
Victoria Volk: Do you have any other siblings? Half siblings?
Ann Hince: I do. I have two half siblings from her, and I just found out who my birth father was a couple of years ago through ancestry, and he never knew I existed, and he died a few years ago. So I have a house sibling, a half sister through him. So I was finally met her. I met her at Christmas time to you the first time ever.
Victoria Volk: Was that healing for you to you know, it’s like you find out your dot and I don’t know what this is like, but So if you can elaborate, that would be wonderful. But, like, did you almost feel like like you didn’t know a half of you? You know what I mean? Like,
Ann Hince: Yes. You know, absolutely. Yeah. There was there was a palpable relief when I first met my best mother. I mean, I and again, it was tension that I had not known that I was holding probably since I was thirteen. Right? But I didn’t know it was there until I could feel it really when I met her at seventeen. And the same thing about finding out about my birthdays, I didn’t know I was I was missing something. Right? Until there was some relief when I found out, and and that felt really good.
Victoria Volk: Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. I’ve had my own ahas as I’ve heard you speak and you know, thank you for letting me share a little bit of my own personal experience throughout this
Ann Hince: day. Yeah.
Victoria Volk: I will put links to your cheat sheet, the YouTube, your website, and the show notes. But where can let me ask you this first. Is there anything that you want to share that you didn’t get a chance to?
Ann Hince: I don’t think so. We covered all sorts of things. Yeah. I mean, thing I love to share at the end is the depths of life because there’s so many people who are depressed these days or considering suicide. And and I did too as a teenager, but there was just so much you don’t know yet if that’s what you’re thinking.
So I encourage people to go down this journey and realize the depth to life, right, so that you can enjoy life more. There’s just so much enjoyment that you have not yet found, so I encourage you to do that.
Victoria Volk: I do wanna share to and ask the art. So anyone that’s not is only listening to this and not seeing it there’s some artwork on your wall beside you. Is that your artwork?
Ann Hince: It is. Yes. Wow. So so recent artwork. That’s, again, that’s been a journey.
Right? I started out doing pencil portraits. And, you know, black and white, I I drew in black and white for years.
Victoria Volk: Mhmm. Interesting.
Ann Hince: Then I became able to feel into colors. And I started using colors more and and started going less detailed rate and more just what felt right. And, yeah, I can feel into colors more now that I mean, I had no idea that that was possible before. But, I mean, I wear blue now all the time because just blue feels so peaceful full to me. And I feel a a repulsion from white. It’s like it reflects. It’s it pushes energy away from it, which I find really interesting given that people tend to think of it as a spiritual color. Mhmm. I don’t I I kind of almost don’t see white cars. I mean, I know they’re a car. I know they’re there. Don’t worry. I drive safely. But if I I have a friend who has a a white car and I I just don’t see her. I’ll see the colored cars. I’ll see blues and reds and yellows and but it’s it’s that’s been an interesting part of this journey too. You know, I say many just read changes.
Victoria Volk: Well, I just wanna highlight that you your wall is purple. You have a lot of purple in your artwork and the third eye chakra is purple.
Ann Hince: Yeah. This is a colorful room. I’ve also got a green roof with yellow highlights and three different colored lights there. There’s a a red, blue, and green. Yeah. I try and keep white out of this room. So yeah. So people I do have my artwork I have a little shop on my websites with Okay. Products from my artwork. If anyone wants to go and have a look. They’re very colorful.
Victoria Volk: Just some of the bottom on there.
Ann Hince: Thank you. If someone wants to find me, you can you can contact me on my website. And hence dot com or I’m very active on Facebook. So you can you can interact with me there. I try and post something every day, and I’m trying to explain you know, my story through other people’s quotes and and that kind of thing. I try and, you know, add an explanation to things. And also, I’m starting I’m learning how to put on retreats. So our first retreat, a friend and I are gonna put on retreats that’s called liberation beyond loss. Which is gonna be specifically for women who’ve lost a mother. Right? We’re gonna do this work, this inner work, the tapping, and the trauma release work around that loss and that grief. So if someone wants to to check that out too. That’ll be next year.
Victoria Volk: So amazing. And I’ll put links, like I said, in the show notes. Where people can connect with you and find all the goodness that you offer.
Ann Hince: Thank you.
Victoria Volk: And thank you so much for being here today and for sharing your story, and I think a lot of examples of all kinds of different grief in your story. And so thank you for sharing.
Ann Hince: Thank you. Thanks for the great conversation.
Victoria Volk: And remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life, much love.
Grief, Grieving Voices Podcast, Podcast, season 5, solo episode |
SHOW NOTES SUMMARY:
Grief isn’t merely an emotion; it’s a profound energy that demands reflection and immersion into our deepest feelings. But too often, our intellect and ego stand as gatekeepers, preventing the deep emotional healing we desperately need.
In this week’s solo episode, I speak of the body as a compass through loss. Grief tells us when to pause and feel deeply if only we stay grounded enough to heed its guidance. Neglected grief is insidious—it can manifest into physical ailments or emotional turmoil.
Key Points Discussed:
- Grief’s Energetics: I compare grief to a body of water that overwhelms us and emphasizes the importance of allowing ourselves to feel deeply rather than intellectualizing our emotions.
- Physical and Emotional Connection: Our bodies and emotions have a visceral understanding of loss.
- The Impact of Unprocessed Trauma: How past traumas, like sexual abuse or physical violence, can lead us to dissociate from painful experiences and how this affects our present life choices.
- The Opportunity for Growth Through Grief: While it might be hard to hear, especially during times of suffering, there is potential for growth through processing our grief effectively.
- Searching for Episodes by Loss Type: I encouraged my listeners to explore previous episodes categorized by types of loss, such as widowhood or parental loss, via the blog’s search function.
- Rituals and Recovery Methods: I highlighted the importance of rituals and community support in grieving processes and suggested engaging in my “Do Grief Differently” program as a way forward.
- Unleashing Painful Emotions: I shared my own transformative experience where acknowledging all forms of grief led me to release intense emotions that had been pent up inside.
If you’ve ever felt lost in your grieving process or know someone who does—remember my voice echoing softly amidst the noise: “Healing is possible. Your emotions are valid. And most importantly—you’re never alone on this journey toward reclaiming your heart after loss.”
RESOURCES:
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NEED HELP?
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
- Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7 support via text message. Text HOME to 741741 to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor
If you are struggling with grief due to any of the 40+ losses, free resources are available HERE.
CONNECT WITH VICTORIA:
Embracing Grief as a Natural Process
I understand that grief carries a profound energy – one that requires us to pause, reflect deeply, and immerse ourselves fully into our emotions. She argues convincingly that this force has tangible effects on both body and mind; thus, processing it isn’t just beneficial but necessary for healing.
Our intellect and ego can sometimes act as barriers preventing us from experiencing the rawness of our feelings during the grieving process. This resistance can halt emotional healing at its core. By acknowledging this challenge openly on her podcast, Victoria invites listeners to let go of mental blocks and embrace their vulnerability.
The Body: A Compass Through Mourning
One key insight that I share with you is viewing the body not just as a vessel but also as a guide through the labyrinth of loss. Staying grounded allows individuals to navigate their journey more intuitively by truly feeling each emotion without shying away or intellectualizing them.
Unaddressed grief doesn’t simply fade away; it often manifests itself through physical ailments or emotional disturbances. However, when acknowledged and processed properly – something that I advocates strongly for – healing becomes attainable. We can then remember those we’ve lost without being incapacitated by sorrow.
Do Grief Differently: A Program for Healing
To aid grievers along this path, I offer the program Do Grief Differently which equips participants with tools designed not only for immediate relief but long-term application throughout life’s many challenges involving loss. This approach acknowledges two critical points: first, that sadness may linger even after healing occurs; secondly, understanding how past traumas influence current behaviors is crucial in moving forward constructively.
Broadens the scope beyond death-related grief by addressing other forms such as abandonment issues or financial losses—demonstrating empathy towards all who suffer regardless of circumstance while encouraging listeners to find solace in episodes most pertinent to their unique experiences.
My comprehensive resource extends further via blog posts where I delve deeper into topics discussed on air—a testament to her commitment towards providing accessible support no matter where someone might be on their grieving journey.
Confronting Unresolved Pain Head-on
Allowing unresolved pain from festering beneath life’s surface—it can lead to ongoing physical discomforts or emotional turmoil if left unchecked.
Rituals play an essential role here; they offer structure within chaos—a sentiment echoed across various cultures worldwide—and provide opportunities for expression during times when words fail us.
By facing pain directly rather than avoiding it (a central theme), people gain empowerment over their circumstances instead of remaining ensnared by unprocessed emotions—which ultimately leads toward clarity and peace.
An Invitation Towards Self-Care & Engagement
As each episode concludes with heartfelt advice urging self-care practices especially concerning physical health impacts due to unprocessed emotions—listeners are encouraged not only listen passively but actively engage themselves within community discussions around shared experiences fostering collective growth outwards together alongside fellow grievers seeking similar paths toward wellness.
Episode Transcription:
Victoria Volk: Hello. Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon or good evening. Whatever time it is you’re listening to this solo episode. Thank you for being here. And I was not sure what I wanted to talk about for this solo episode, but then I had a song come into my head from Lotto. Which I did look it up, how to say it right. And it is Lotto. Lotto. She’s a female rapper here in the United States. Anyway, she has a song called Big Energy and that song came into my mind and I thought what else has Big Energy Grief. Grief. That’s big energy. So that’s what I wanna talk about today is the big energy that is grief. And the energetics of it specifically, grief asks us, to become quiet and stop. Stop. To stop. Stop the movement. Stop the mind unraveling to just stop and dive into the depths. Of our souls. And it’s our intellect that usually tries to not usually, it does. Our intellect is what lifts us out of that grip of grief the deep wound of grief, I think before we’re ready, before we allow ourselves to be immersed. In that deep ocean, whatever you wanna call it. However, it’s like this body of water that feels like you’re drowning. You feel like you’re being swallowed up. Our bodies and our emotions have a visceral understanding of death and loss. We know that we can no longer touch or see those who have passed, yet we can still feel the embrace of a lost lover or hear the laughter of a child who has died, our bodies miss limbs that we have lost. And our bodies remember that pain. Our bodies and our emotions experience the reality of injury of loss of separation or even death every day. These two elements body our body and our emotions. No grief. Which means they can act as our guide. If we can stay grounded to our bodies and stop ourselves from flying off into some spiritual or intellectual distraction in response to grief. And as a result, we would we would be able to receive the c the healing that grief can offer us. We just don’t allow ourselves to go to that depth to allow our bodies to feel fully and let those emotions pass through us, move through us, let the body rid itself of the emotional pain you know, that twinge that you feel, that heartache, that heaviness in your chest, when we think about either the suffering that someone else inflicted on us, because grief isn’t just about death. I’ve said that so many times on this podcast. If you’ve never heard another episode before. There’s four plus years of content there for you to check out. I advise you to check out the first ten episodes, which actually might be ten to fifteen episodes, twelve, something like that. That really dive into grief itself and give you some background information and kind of lay a foundation of what the next episodes and the years that follow really lean on. Our bodies know how to process. It’s our ego. It’s our intellect. Our logic. Our analysis paralysis is what gets in the way, is what stunts our growth through grief. I’ll call it that. We have an opportunity to grow from our grief, despite our grief. No one wants to hear that grief is a growth opportunity, nobody. If someone would have told me that after my dad died, had I not been eight years old, granted. But even as a young adult, when I was still in the throes of grief really because my early twenties were kind of a shit show. So if someone would have told me, what I just said, I would have dismissed it. I probably would have been, like, your freaking crazy and it’s bullshit is what I probably would have said. Nobody asks, for that test. Nobody asks to be in that group of people who are suffering in their grief. And there is many of you out there listening to this right now who are suffering in your grief. And I just implore you that if you have never let yourself ask deeper questions about the loss you’ve experienced? Maybe it’s abandonment, maybe it’s loss of safety or security, financial loss, divorce, estrangement, There are so many scenarios I’ve shared with guests throughout the years. Driving the issue home, that grief is not just about death. I think we’ve established that by now. As you listen to the stories that people have shared throughout the years, And if you’re unsure, like, which episodes are for you, you can go to my website, actually, and there is a search box on the right side. If you click on one of the episodes of on the pod of the podcast on my blog, on the right hand panel, on the side, the right side, there is a you can search by categories. There’s widowhood. There’s parent loss, divorce, there’s everything is broken out by category. So if you wanna find an episode that maybe relates more to your situation. There’s a way to search for that on my on my blog, so I encourage you to check that out. Because there is four plus years of episodes. And if you’re not finding something that you’re resonating with or that you’ve or you’re wondering, like, where can I is there an episode about this topic? Reach out to me. I will send you a direct link. I will find it. I want you to see yourself in the people’s stories. And that’s why I try to represent all types of loss on this podcast. Just reach out to me if there’s an episode that you’re wondering if I cover a specific topic. That being said, regardless of the loss, regardless of your experience. There is a way forward. But we have to allow ourselves to feel it. Truly feel it. Feel that big, big, grief energy. Maybe like me. You were traumatized as a child. Maybe you’re a victim of sexual trauma like myself. Where over the years, you may be have maybe use painful events or scary movies. To further hone in your skills of disassociating, of disconnecting from your body. And whenever grievous situations occurred, boom, you shit out of your body, you just disassociate, completely disassociate, unable to feel. And I think so many people who have experienced trauma in that way, sexual trauma, physical abuse, just find yourself going somewhere else in your mind. Letting your mind take you somewhere else is the best way I can describe it. And I think then the response can be then to put yourself unconsciously, I don’t think it’s conscious. I think, unconsciously put yourself in the way of situations that help you to further disassociate to further not feel. And the only way to not allow those past experiences to continue to influence your present day and your future is to go back in time and to look at those things. And that’s what so many people have told me over the years is, I don’t need to dredge up the past. The past is in the past, but my friend, the past is your present. And your future until it is healed. And I say that word healed And I almost don’t even like saying it myself because it feels like it’s the weight of it is I don’t know. I feel like the word healing has become cheapened in a way. It’s like this elusive word that I don’t know. I feel like it’s lost. It’s meaning over time. But true healing in the form of when you think about that person, when you find yourself in a in a place where you remembering something from the past that it’s not taking you back in time to the pain You’re not feeling that in your body as you once did. It’s not influencing your decisions in the present. Or what you decide to do in the future. Those are I think those are unconscious processes that you don’t connect the dots at what you’re doing, why you make the decisions you make, why you move forward the way you do is because of the experiences of the past. And so when we acknowledge, that those things are influencing us when we learn new tools in recognizing and connecting the dots from our past to our present and to our future, That’s empowering. It’s empowering. If you don’t crave your losses, the people who have died or who have inflicted suffering upon you in some way, either get erased from your consciousness as if they weren’t important or they hang around in your psyche as if you’re being haunted. This is the pain. This is the suffering. Do you recognize these things in your life right now. Ask yourself these two questions. What must be mourned? What must be released completely? Ask yourself these internal questions. And I want to make a distinction between being caught in grief because you’ve, like, fallen into this another world ocean. And being caught in grief because your grieving process has not yet completed itself. Is most of us are rushed through our public grief and left to do our real grieving on our own. Without ritual, without ceremony, or without community. And in many cases, this the trapped grief is really just unfinished grief. If your grief is stuck in the body simply because it is unfinished, then walking yourself through a ritual practice for grief will help. Oh, going through grief recovery with me will help. It’ll also teach you a lot by the way and connect a lot of dots for you. But grieving takes its own time and it won’t leave you until you give your grief reference. So many people who I’ve talked to myself included, this will be my testament that once I honored and looked at all of the grief that I’ve experienced in my life, I was finally able to thank it. I was able to let it leave my body, the anger, the grief, The resentment, so so many emotions flooded out of me. Like, it was like the floodgates had opened. It was like the dam broke. I didn’t know if I could cry anymore tears. And if it’s been a long time since you’ve cried, you probably have a dam of tears just waiting to be unleashed as well. And it takes big, big energy to hold that in. And what is that doing to your body? That big, big energy needs to go somewhere? Are you putting it into alcohol? Are you putting it into other substance use? Are you putting it into people who you pour into, but don’t fill your cup, putting it into people pleasing, putting it into putting all that energy into seeking some sort of validation from others. What are you putting your big big grief energy into if it’s not into your into yourself? And into your healing. It’s going somewhere, or it’s destroying you from the inside. You have diabetes? Are you suffering with obesity? Do you have heart issues? The list goes on and on, migraines, fibromyalgia, this insidious body affecting thing that is idiopathic. They don’t have a clue what causes fibromyalgia. I would say it’s grief. I would say it’s unprocessed trauma. All over body pain. Tingling, sometimes numbness, like pins and needles. Aikiness. Just overall aikiness. I was tested for showrooms, I was tested for RA, so many tests. They didn’t come right out and say I had fiber mildly, but Looking back in hindsight, I’m surprised they didn’t. Inflammation in the body. Is stress in the body? And where is that stress coming from? Yes, we have environmental stress. Yes, we have physical stress, grief is stress, trauma is stress. Our bodies hold onto that. Our logic, and our ego, and our minds hold onto that as a protective blanket of sorts. Thinking we’re protecting ourselves. When really we’re causing our own suffering. I think that’s the perfect way to end this episode. Just think about where you’re putting the big, big energy that is grief. Where are you putting that energy? Where is it being stored in your body? How is it manifesting in your life? What do you need to let go of and release? What needs to be honored in your past? These are the deeper questions. And when you ask the deeper questions, my friend, you get the deeper answers. And if you are needing support in doing that, a little hand holding, you know where to find me. Until next time, remember, when you unleash your heart, you unleash your life. Much love.
