Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
[00:00:00] Speaker B: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 05:00 p.m. Or Wednesdays at 07:00 p.m. If you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison church, you can find us online at Madison Church.
Be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: Next week, Sandra Denari will be talking on one of my favorite subjects of all, and that is boundaries. And every single person needs that one. So I hope you'll come and support her.
Today I'm going to be talking about grief, loss, and survivor's guilt. And for me, the one thing that I'm asked over and over and over and over again is, can't you do a grief group? Can't you do a grief group? Can't you do a grief group? And I think maybe in the fall we're going to offer a grief group.
We just could not work it out with the AEC and our schedules and everything, but keep an eye out back toward next fall. And maybe next fall we'll be able to do one on Wednesday night.
So what is grief? Grief is the process you go through as you adjust to the loss of anyone or anything important in your life.
Everybody experiences grief differently. And so to go up and say, I know how you feel, well, you don't because everybody feels differently about grief. It's highly individual. And to say, wow, you've been doing this for three months now. It's time you get over it. Now, that's another one of those things not to say, because grief has no time limit. And you'll see a little bit more about that as we go. Grief is the natural response to any kind of a loss, and there is no right or wrong way to grieve.
If the loss that you experience came through violence or some traumatic event, then you're going to have a harder time getting through it.
A sudden or unexpected loss is much more traumatic than one that you expect. My father, I knew he was going. I was prepared for that. I was praying for him to go.
Had no idea about my mother. And that loss was much, much more difficult. Not because I loved her anymore, but because it was sudden and traumatic.
And when we go through grief, we can feel a loss of control in our life because we can't control so many things in our life, all the things that play into grief. And so we can feel like that. So what leads to grief?
Well, it's not just a death. There are many things that lead to grief, and one of them can be a loss of health.
Maybe you've been diagnosed with cancer. Maybe you've been diagnosed with diabetes. Maybe you've been diagnosed with some illness that is catastrophic or is changing your life. That can be grief. We have to grieve our health.
You can lose material possessions. I think about when we went through the tornadoes, and Ruth and Gary lost so much of their house, and Amy and Danny lost so much, they lost everything, and Roy and Teresa Wilson. And all the loss that goes on. Well, that's grief. We go through a grief, we grieve those losses. Loss of a pet. Our pets are our fur babies. And when we lose a pet, we need to go ahead and allow ourselves to grieve that loss because it hurts. It's painful.
Loss of safety due to trauma. If you've been through any kind of a traumatic event, then it's going to make you more susceptible to grief, because when we go through that, we lose our safety again. We lose our sense of control.
Loss of a job. If you weren't aware that you were going to lose that job, or if you love that job, or if you needed that job, and all of a sudden you find out you don't have that job, we can grieve that job.
Obviously, the one we all think of in the terms of grief is the loss of a loved one, whether it's a friend, family member. We grieve that loss.
And then too often, we have the loss of financial stability and we grieve that.
All of these things, along with, say, a friend suffers a miscarriage or you suffer a miscarriage, and then maybe you have a loss of a friendship. All of these things have to do with grief. Now, I gave you one definition of grief, but my favorite definition of grief, and the one that I use all the time, is reaching out for the familiar, and it's not there.
Doesn't that kind of fit? You're reaching out for that thing, you know, and it's not there.
All right, so what are the physical symptoms of grief? Because there are physical physiological symptoms. You may have sleep disturbances. You may have shortness of breath as you're thinking about this or you may find yourself feeling this way. The anxiety takes over, the tightness in the throat, physical distress, weight gain. We have emotional symptoms of sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety, loneliness. And then we have behavioral symptoms. And this is probably the one that, when we do grief groups, I think this is the one that people are so surprised about, is forgetfulness. They don't understand why they have the chaotic thinking. But when we grieve, we have chaotic thinking. It's part of the grief process, worrying more about others. If you have had a big loss, if you've suffered a loss in your life, then you worry about other things.
After my mother did pass away, I was worried that everyone was going to die suddenly because my mother died suddenly. And so you can worry more about other things. You can even have irrational worries there or prolonged withdrawal from normal activity. And so these are all symptoms of grief that we go through when we suffer this kind of a loss.
Myths about grief, and there are lots of them. I just picked my favorites.
If you ignore the pain of grief, it will go away.
No, if you ignore the pain of grief, one day it's going to come back, and when it does, it's going to knock you off your feet.
You will grieve.
It's just a matter of when.
It's important to remain strong in the midst of grief.
No, we need each other when we're going through grief so that I don't have to carry all the weight. Somebody can come and help me, or I can help somebody else carry the weight of grief. It's okay to take time to grieve and to allow yourself that downtime.
If you don't cry when grieving, it means you aren't sad about the loss.
No.
And probably eventually you are going to cry. That's probably going to happen.
But a lot of people go through grief and they don't cry. And then maybe down the line, something little will trigger it, and those tears will just blow, and they will come, and they will come and they will come. I've often heard of people that'll go through some devastating loss, but they won't grieve it until a pet dies. And then when that pet dies, they grieve everything.
Moving on with your life means you've forgotten about your loss.
You don't forget about your loss.
We grieve. And I'm going to show you an example of this. We grieve for the rest of our lives.
You see, if you look at those top jars, and this is my favorite, my favorite visual and it's in your packet. It's my favorite visual on grief. And in fact, I might have a really good friend who made me one hanging in my office because I use it all the time.
People tend to believe those top jars are right, that grief shrinks over time, but in reality, the grief stays the same, but we grow around the grief.
And so as we go through grief, our jar gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
So that's in there. That's in your packet. When you have a friend that goes through grief, that's a really important thing that you can have and maybe just say, hey, have you ever thought about this?
Stages of grief?
There was a woman by the name of Kubler Ross. You've probably heard of her, I'm sure if you work in a hospital or something like that, you've all heard of her. And she developed the five stages of grief. And I don't remember what they are, and it doesn't matter because we've debunked it anyway. But she really started something with that stage model of grief. And you go through the five stages and people would say, okay, after you've gone through those five stages, you're at the end and you're no longer grieving.
And we know that's not true.
Kubler Ross didn't even really write the book about grieving somebody else. Kubler Ross wrote the book and developed the stage model for what? If I am given a terminal diagnosis, these are the things I might go through. And I would agree that I might go through those things, and I probably would go through those things, but going through them in order. Grief is not linear. Grief is not. I can check off this one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one. And when I get to the end, they're all done, and I'm through. Grieving doesn't work that way. But I do like this model.
And this is not even linear, but these are things that we go through when we grieve. And as you look at all the things on the right side, you have the loss, the hurt, the shock, the numbness, denial, emotional outburst, anger, fear, searchings. There's that disorganization again, that chaotic thinking, panic, loneliness, guilt, isolation, depression. Maybe you're having trouble reentering into life, and then you find new relationships, new strengths, new patterns, hope, affirmation, helping others and adjusting to your loss. And it'd be great if we could sit there and have this model and just check them off as we get to them and know that when we got to the end. We were through grieving.
But this is not my experience of grief, and I don't think it's yours.
This is my experience with grief. And it's all over the place, and it's messy. And about the time, I think I'm doing really, really well. And hey, I'm going into those new relationships, and then something happens, and boom, I'm back to the shock and the numbness and the denial.
There's nothing linear about grief.
Okay, it's messy, but it's something we have to go through.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
He didn't say that we could walk around it. He didn't say we could walk over it. He didn't say we could walk under it. He didn't say we could skip it.
He said we have to walk through it.
We grieve because we're human and because we love.
That's why we grieve.
This is something that I used in the anxiety one, because I use it with everything.
It's called the triangle of conflict. And with this one, I would use it with suppressing grief. We have a thought, and I can remember my thought was, after my mom died, I can remember my thought was, everybody's going to die. She died, so therefore everybody's going to die. And then I developed that feeling of panic and fear that people were going to die because she died. That was it. And then what you want to do is you want to stuff it down, because we don't want to feel that way. So we stuff it down and we stuff it down and we stuff it down. And the more we stuff it down, the more anxiety and depression goes up.
And when anxiety and depression go up, then we have to find coping mechanisms to help us deal with the anxiety and depression. And so we develop all these negative coping mechanisms, like alcohol, drugs, avoidance. That's a big one, avoidance. If I just avoid feeling the pain, if I just avoid thinking about it, it'll go away. It doesn't.
You've seen these things, overspending, reckless behavior, negative self talk. There's all kinds of them. I just put a few up there where in reality, if we want to deal with those negative emotions, we have to go back to the thoughts and the feelings.
We've got to address those. Because if we address the thoughts and the feelings and we allow ourselves to grieve, we allow ourselves to walk through that valley, then the anxiety and depression is going to come down because we're not trying to. Stuffing doesn't work very long. Eventually you will blow.
So how do we manage grief and loss?
And again, I want you to understand that grief and loss are very, very individual.
And so I can only give you things that are written by people or things that I've experienced myself, but you will have to figure it out yourself.
First of all, it's giving yourself permission to feel the loss. Go ahead and say, I've lost something that's very precious to me and I'm going to allow myself time to grieve.
Journaling about your loss is excellent. It's an excellent way to deal with those thoughts and feelings, because you can put those thoughts down in a journal and you can deal with them rather than stuffing them as you go through the grief journey. And it is a journey.
Find a few friends who are willing to walk with you through that grief.
Not everybody, but a few good friends that you can pick up the telephone and call and say, today stinks and I need help.
Don't ever try to compare yourself to someone else's grief. I'll never forget the time when I came walking out from my mom's funeral and somebody walked up and said, I know just how you feel. My grandmother just died.
You don't have a clue how I think. You don't have a clue how I feel.
And we need to watch those statements, because those statements aren't helpful to somebody who's grieving. It's not what they need.
Don't ever try to compare your grief to somebody else's grief. I can't know how you grieve.
I can't know.
The object of grieving is not to get over the loss or recover from the loss, but to get through the loss.
We have to walk through that valley. We have to allow ourselves that time to do that.
Thoughts about life, fairness, religion, God can be challenged while we're grieving.
We can have all sorts of feelings, negative feelings toward God.
Quite often somebody will come into my office and say, I am so angry with God. And I'll say, you know, he's pretty big.
He can handle it. Can you pour out that anger to him because he wants to hear you talk to him about it.
Over time, you may find that as you look back on your grief experience, you may find that grief teaches you lessons that you never would have learned had you not gone through it. That's that jar getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Because grief teaches us about life. Grief teaches us about God. If we can work through that anger with God, we can have a better relationship with God, because, you know, if you're married or if you have a best friend and you have arguments, you know that when you work through those arguments, you have a stronger relationship, you grow.
And so the same thing happens with God. You can be angry. God understands that.
But if you work it out with him, your relationship with him can be much stronger.
You really can't see this, but it's in your packet. So you can turn in your packet and find this, and you can see all the things on there. But this is something I do with people who are grieving, who come into my office, I give them this, and I tell them to take it home. And it doesn't matter what kind of loss. It's called mapping the influence of the loss of. It can be anything, whatever that loss is. And so then we map the influence by saying, okay, how did it affect my interpersonal relationships?
How does that loss affect that?
How does the loss affect my faith in spirituality?
How does that loss affect my view of the future?
Daily activities, priorities, my emotions, my body, my view of the world, my feelings about and for the deceased? And then, because we're all different, there's a blank one, and you get to fill it in.
And I'll see somebody take this home with them, and they won't pay much attention to it. And maybe they even come back the next week and say, oh, no, I didn't have time to fill it out. But when they get started with it, they need page after page after page, because suddenly they realize how much that loss has impacted every aspect of their life.
And so that's the reason we do this. We want to understand that that loss impacts us emotionally, physically, intellectually, spiritually, all those dynamics of our lives.
How do we help other people when they're grieving?
Be there for your friend. Even if you don't understand their grief. Be there for it. From I'm going to show you a little video at the very, very end. And it's my favorite video in the whole wide world. And I show it every time I get a chance. It's a Brene Brown video. So she's going to talk about, be there, even if you don't understand.
Be that source of comfort.
Listen, cry with them, laugh with them. I had someone come in who had suffered a big loss, and she said, I'm going to cry. And I said, well, that's okay, because I feel like I suffered a big loss, too. Can I cry with you? Is that okay?
Defend your friend's right to grieve in whatever way they need to grieve.
Don't let people tell them how to grieve. Stand up for them.
People going through grief may not know how to ask for help, for me to go up and say, lorianne, I know you're grieving. How can I help you? Well, she may not have a clue how I can help her, because if she's got that chaotic thinking and she's going through grief, she may not can put that together.
So come up with other ways. Wow. Can I come over and sit with you for a little while? Can we go for a walk together? Can we go out to see a movie together? Do you need a meal? Can I bring you a meal? Can I have you come to my house and share a meal with me?
Avoid telling them you understand their grief, because you don't. I'm hoping that as I say this enough tonight, you'll get it. You don't understand anybody's grief but your own. And I'm not even sure I understand my own grief when I go through it.
One thing is ask about the loss.
Let them talk about the person or the thing or whatever it is.
I am sure that grieving people, they walk in and perish the thought. We don't want to make them cry. So let's not talk about the loved one that they lost.
Really, what do they want to talk about?
The loved one that they lost, the job that they lost.
And then be mindful of holidays, anniversaries and birthdays. I have a dear friend here who still will contact me around the same time that my mother died, and she'll say, how are you doing?
Just wanted you to know I'm thinking about you, so be aware of that. Put it in your calendar that you're going to reach out to them on those special days.
Grief and children.
I've got several books up here I'll talk about in a little bit. And some of them are about working with children in grief. When you're talking with children about grief, be honest and give them little short sentences and words. You don't have to go into all the gory details of whatever the loss was. Just be simple. Give them simple answers. Tell them what they ask.
Prepare the child for what they're going to see at the funeral. And if you don't know whether or not you should take them or not, ask them. Hey, do you want to go?
I was at a funeral just the other day where the person that I was going to the funeral for said, yeah, my daughters are over there. They don't want to be anywhere near the open casket. Okay, then don't make them be over there. But they're here and they're right over there.
Ask the children what they want. Talk to the children.
A lot of times, parents will bring the child in to see me, and we'll go in there and we'll sit down and we'll put our hands in the sand and we'll play in the sand and we'll talk.
Because that child needs to be able to verbalize and talk about their loss.
Just if they're not talking about it, don't assume it's not impacting them.
They have their own ways of working through grief, and it's very different than adults because their way is very innocent.
It's very innocent in how they deal with it. If at all possible, be consistent and maintain routines.
Kids need that. They need you to stay in that same routine. If at all possible, encourage the child to ask questions.
Encourage them to express how they feel about something.
Children may act out their grief in fantasy play. I might can give them a sheet of paper and they're going to draw their grief. I remember one little boy, his big brother died very, very suddenly. And he came up with this fantasy that his brother was riding an air bike in heaven, delivering pizzas.
Okay? That's how he works it out.
Sharing your grief. I'm sad, mommy. Sad. I'm sad.
Help your child work through this.
Now, let me tell you this. Let's see if I've got it. Oh, no, that's the next one. Okay. Every child, just like every adult, every child is going to react differently.
You may notice behaviors. You may not notice behaviors. You may see them withdraw. You may see them act out. You may see them have sleep problems. You may see them have eating problems. You might see them cling to you because after all, they just lost somebody and they don't want you to go anywhere. So they might become very clingy.
If they've been potty trained and they're not wetting the bed. They may wet the bed at night. They may revert back to things that you're sitting here going, what's this all about? It's their way of dealing with grief. They may take on attributes of the deceased.
This is such an important point that I'm going to make next.
Such an important point. Didn't make it such an important point.
Don't blame God for the death of somebody. Don't say to that child, well, God needed your daddy more than we do.
What do you think that child's going to think about God?
Is he going to understand that?
Don't blame God.
There are lots of ways to help children go through that. But tell them that God is sad, too, that God is sad with us. And we know that because what did Jesus do when his friend Lazarus died?
He cried. He wept.
God is weeping with us.
Help that child to know that God feels our feelings.
And this is thanks to Ron Williams. You know, he's the grief specialist. So anytime I deal with grief, I call Ron, and he shared this with me. And I have used this over and over and over and over again.
We have big grief boxes.
We have big grief boxes. But a child has a little bitty grief box, and when his grief box gets full, he puts the top on it and he goes off in place.
And so when they're full, they're going to move on. Now, they might come back and take the top off and deal with it a little bit, but children don't grieve like adults do.
And so when your child is going through something like that, don't feel like they don't care just because they seem to be going on with life. It's just the way a child is. They're innocent. They move on.
One thing I want to move through pretty briefly is this concept of survivor's guilt.
Initially, I've changed this presentation, but initially I developed this presentation for Ukraine for when I went to Ukraine, and there was a lot of survivors guilt over there. Lot of survivors guilt. So I'm going to run through this, but that doesn't mean we don't have survivors guilt, because we do. We have it here. So survivor's guilt is a response to an event in which someone else experienced a loss, but you didn't. It could involve a loss of life, loss of property, loss of health, identity, or other things that are important to people. Imagine the people over in Ukraine that somehow their home and their possessions made it and their next door neighbors was blown to.
That's a survivor guilt can go on with that.
They lost somebody. You didn't.
You start dealing with survivor's guilt.
So it's when you come out of a traumatic event unscathed, but others around you didn't.
And it involves asking that question, why not me?
Why did I do well? But that person didn't.
You may be confused.
You may wonder, what did I do to deserve coming out of this?
But they didn't.
People experiencing survivors guilt will also say, if only I had done this, when in reality it was out of their control. There was nothing they could have done to have controlled it.
Examples of events that might trigger survivors guilt. Witnessing a mass shooting.
Why did I live and that person didn't? When your sibling faces abuse, but you didn't, why did they abuse the sibling but they didn't abuse me? Military conflict, a big one.
Natural disasters. Another big one.
This is one I think that ladies can understand. We got a lot of pregnant women right now.
What happens when somebody goes through a miscarriage and they lose a baby, but your baby's healthy? That can trigger that survivor's guilt.
Firefighters, policemen, and emergency personnel are more prone to experience Survivor's guilt.
And then when you have friends who face health problems but you don't, all of these things can trigger that idea of survivor's guilt.
So how do we know that somebody's going through it? Well, same way we know they're going through grief in some ways. They go through mood changes. They have trouble moving past the trauma. They hold on to the trauma, and they can't get over it.
Recurring thoughts. I didn't do enough. If I had just done this, if I had gone over them there and brought them over to my basement, this wouldn't have happened.
Insomnia, nightmares about the trauma, flashbacks of the trauma. Physical symptoms, eating problems. Sleeping problems. Persistent irritability or anger.
Isolation and despair. Obsessive or intrusive thoughts, loss of motivation. And I think this is a key to understanding survivor's guilt. Survivor's guilt is a combination of PTSD plus guilt.
The events haunt you like PTSD, with guilt layered on top of it.
Who is at a higher risk of developing survivor's guilt? Well, anybody with a history of trauma, those who struggle with depression, low self esteem, lack of social support, and poor coping skills, they have a greater risk.
They may develop thought processes that are negative in nature, feelings that they deserve, punishment, development of trust, issues in other aspects, thoughts of the world being an unsafe place. You may see that anxiety and panic go up, and then, of course, questioning your spiritual beliefs. But again, if you're dealing with survivors guilt, this may be a really good time to seek out a counselor and work with a counselor because you have to allow yourself to face the trauma. You got to go through the trauma if you want to deal with survivor's guilt. Allow yourself to feel the feelings without judgment.
Mindfulness and grounding. I know Karen and Sandra and me talk about that all the time, but it's very helpful. Mindfulness and grounding. Don't isolate from others, but develop that social circle. Remember those few people that you bring into your circle.
And those are the people who are going to help you help somebody else.
Practice self care.
Reframe your guilty feelings into feelings of gratitude.
Focus on the outside factors that led to the event. And talk with a professional if guilt continues.
Okay, I want to tell you a little bit about the books that are up here. You're welcome to come up and look at them.
A lot of the information that is in your packet came from this right here. Tear soup. I keep these in my office. I keep bunches of them in my office and I hand them out to people on a regular basis because love, love this book.
If you go through this book, you find out that grandy suffered a big loss. It doesn't tell you what big loss she suffered, just tells you she suffered a big loss. So you can kind of compare to it, you can relate to it. And her husband suffered a big loss, too. Okay, I still am going to show this thing, but anyway, it goes through all the things that grandy goes through, making tear soup to help process her loss. And the cool thing about this is you can read it today and you're going to have one thing jump out at you. But if you read it in a month from now, something else is going to come out. And if you read it in a year from now, something else is going to come out. And so this is on YouTube.
You can look up tier soup and you've got enough information in there to tell you how to get to it. And you can read the book. And so, love, love this book.
I think all the other books up here, Freddie the Leaf, is how to deal with telling a child about death, being sad when someone dies. All these are in my office. If you need them, let me know. You are always welcome to check them out after a suicide. How to help kids process the suicide. This is my very favorite book for children, and that is the invisible string. Doesn't matter where anybody is. They can be in the ocean, they can be across the country, or they can be in heaven. But there's an invisible string that keeps you connected. And I love, love, love this book. The last day that I work with MKC, I will read this book to them and I will tell them that even if they're not going to be at MKC next year, that we have an invisible string and we stay connected. And then this is a new one by Julie Thomason. I'm trying to get her to autograph it, but she doesn't look like the woman in here, so she says, no, but why did the snowman have to melt. And it's an analogy written by a woman whose husband died very quickly. I'm going to show this. It's only two minutes. And then I didn't know this, but you're going to come up and make an and so. But I want to show this. This is the one and only Brene Brown, and it is my absolute favorite video, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
[00:38:08] Speaker C: So what is empathy, and why is it very different than sympathy? Empathy fuels connection. Sympathy drives disconnection. Empathy, it's very interesting. Teresa Wiseman is a nursing scholar who studied professions, very diverse professions, where empathy is relevant and came up with four qualities of empathy. Perspective. Taking.
The ability to take the perspective of another person or recognize their perspective as their truth. Staying out of judgment. Not easy when you enjoy it as much as most of us do.
Recognizing emotion in other people and then communicating that empathy is feeling with people.
And to me, I always think of empathy as this kind of sacred space when someone's kind of in a deep hole and they shout out from the bottom and they say, I'm stuck. It's dark, I'm overwhelmed. And then we look and we say, hey, climb down. I know what it's like down here. And you're not alone. Sympathy is. Ooh, it's bad.
No. You want a sandwich?
Empathy is a choice, and it's a vulnerable choice, because in order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling.
Rarely, if ever, does an empathic response begin with at least.
And we do it all the time, because you know what? Someone just shared something with us that's incredibly painful and we're trying to silver lining it. I don't think that's a verb, but I'm using it as one. We're trying to put the silver lining around it. So I had a miscarriage.
At least you know you can get pregnant. I think my marriage is falling apart. At least you have a marriage.
John's getting kicked out of school. At least Sarah is an a student. But one of the things we do sometimes in the face of very difficult conversations is we try to make things better. If I share something with you that's very difficult, I'd rather you say, I don't even know what to say right now. I'm just so glad you told me.
Because the truth is, rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is connection.
