Most of us think of grief as a heavy cloak we wear after a profound loss, but what if it’s actually the thread that weaves through every day, every interaction, every passing moment? Join Eddie Reece and Bill Courtright as they unravel the surprising truth: grief, in its purest form, is a daily practice—an essential tool for living authentically and deeply. Eddie, drawing from years of therapeutic wisdom, challenges our preconceived notions, revealing that grief isn’t just about mourning the grand tragedies, but also about acknowledging and releasing the small, unnoticed transitions. Each day, we say goodbye—to a conversation, a haircut, a sunrise—and these subtle farewells, when left unacknowledged, can build up into a dam of unspoken emotions, clouding our relationships and distorting our perceptions of the present. This isn’t just a discussion about loss; it’s a journey into understanding the ephemeral nature of existence, the constant flow of time, and how embracing “goodbye” can paradoxically lead us to a richer, more vibrant “hello” to each new moment. Prepare to shift your perspective and discover the power of grieving well as the cornerstone of living well.
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Good Grief: Unpacking Everyday Farewell for Authentic Living
We’re about to get into a compelling topic, as we do every episode. Eddie tells me what we’re going to talk about. In this case, we’re going to talk about grief, which stands to reason because a lot of people who look for a therapist or consider therapy are doing so because perhaps something is difficult or perhaps something isn’t as they might want it to be. I know we spent quite a bit of time in episode three about trauma. I thought we would dive into grief based on Eddie’s recommendations. I’ll start with the question I always ask, which is Eddie, what can you tell us about grief that we don’t already know?
The Misunderstood Grief Process: It’s Not What You Think
I hope a lot of things that you don’t already know. An awful lot of people get grief and the process of grieving wrong. They tend to look at grief in general, like folks look at everything else. Grief is this thing you have in a box. You open that box and you do whatever you’re going to do. When you’re finished with it, you put it back, and then you’re done. Not an awful lot of things emotionally that I would work with with a client or with myself as a client that are like that. Grief is certainly not like that.
I look at grief as a part of everyday life. I wrote a line that said, “To live well, you need to grieve well,” something like that. Grieving well is living well because grieving is saying goodbye and processing the passing of something. When I was practicing grief and learning to incorporate it daily, when I went to bed at night, I would say goodbye to the day.
We can talk in a second about what a good goodbye entails, but for my goodbye to the day, I always replay the day. I’d be like, “That was awesome. That was awful. I wish that had been different. I’m glad that was like that. Thank you for this.” I express gratitude. You put all these different things in there, and you say goodbye because that day is gone and never coming back. I’m moving one day closer to death, so it helps keep in consciousness that we’re moving along. The days are long, but the years are short.
My wife and I have seen that plaque before, as we had kids.
Marking Time’s Passing: Grief As Daily Awareness
Sometimes, we lose sight that we’re moving along. It’s very common for people to go, “Where did the time go?” If you’re asking that question, probably to some degree, what happened in your life that you’re thinking about is that you weren’t fully present at times, and you also weren’t grieving, which is marking that passing.
If I’m saying goodbye to every day, I’m marking the passing of each one of those days. I’m a little more aware that a day has passed, like, “I started today here on my journey through my life, and I ended here.” That’s movement. Grief is every day. You and I are having this conversation, and it will come to an end. You say goodbye to that and the passing of it. You can do this with anything, especially anything that matters in some way.
You can do it with silly things, too, to make the point. If you get a haircut, say goodbye to the hair that’s on the floor. You could say, “That was once part of me. Now, it’s not. Thank you for being part of me. Thank you for spending some time there. Thank you for growing and becoming what you were. Goodbye, and I appreciate you.” You can do it with anything like that, to keep your mind set in this idea that time is passing.
That’s a big purpose of grief, my line of, “If you want to live well, grieve well.” If you’re not grieving or if you’re not saying goodbye, what happens is all of these goodbyes that you haven’t done will build up. All the grief that you haven’t experienced builds up. As that happens, we have a tendency to want to make up for it. The best example of this is in romantic relationships. You have this relationship that lasts for weeks, months, or years. It comes to an end. I don’t know of anybody who has ever done a good goodbye and a full goodbye around any of those relationships.
You end the relationship, and you might even remain friends and cordial toward each other, but you still never say goodbye to it. What happens is somewhat consciously or a lot unconsciously, there were things that you wanted that relationship to provide for you that it didn’t. Instead of saying goodbye to that and processing the grief around that, you take those things into the next relationship, and you want that relationship to make up for it. When you do that, you cannot see the new relationship for what it is and as it is, because you’re looking at it through this lens of what it needs to be to make up for the last one and the one before that, my childhood, and everything else.
Grieving well is living well.
Virtually, everybody gets married, if not everybody, to some degree, to make up for the wrong that’s ever happened to them. This sounds crazy, but when you sit with clients in a session and start working through their stuff, you’ll hear it. We want our partners to be the mother, father, brother, sister, or grandparent that was not what we ideally wanted.
I remember a comedian talking about him and his wife fighting. He said, “She gets mad about things like me leaving my socks on the floor. She starts and says, “You left your socks on the floor again. I have to pick up after you. You are leaving your clothes everywhere. It’s like you’re a child. I’m not going to be married to a child. I don’t want to have sex with a child. I’m not your mother.”
There’s a lot of truth in that, in that, probably, his mom picked up his socks and never said a word. He was trained, “Put your socks there.” They appear magically, and the mom will clean. He’s like, “Why would you do it any differently?” He has to grieve the loss of the mother he had and what he liked, so that he can see the wife that he has instead of being mad at her because she’s not the mother that he wants.
I don’t remember the details enough to pull anything from it. It was a great episode of Two and a Half Men where Charlie has this realization that the girl he’s dating is exactly like his mother. The housekeeper’s trying to tell him, “This is your mother.” Charlie’s like, “She’s nothing like that.” We all marry the things that we liked about our parents, siblings, grandparents, or whoever’s involved in our childhood. The things we like, we want that person to be that for us. The things we didn’t like, we want to change.
We want that not to be there.
Not be there, which means change. It’s like, “You’ve got to stop acting that way. I’m going to make up for having a mother who did this. You’re not going to do it.” That’s not going to make it work, rather than grieving the loss of what I never had. That is an important lesson of grief. There’s a lot of grieving to be done about the things you never got. You have to grieve those.
Beyond Big Loss: Understanding Grief In Everyday Moments
At risk of sounding a little naive, but if I’m thinking it, I’m guessing there are others out there thinking it as well. Is it more common for individuals to struggle with grief in saying goodbye to everyday type things, or would it be more dealing with the grief of major loss? When I mentioned grief at the top of the episode, I immediately went to loved ones who are no longer here.
I have bad days, weeks, months, quarters, and years I’d like to rewrite, but I never looked at that as grieving. I looked at it as a lot of things. You’re reframing my mind, which I love. How many of your clients are dealing with grief on the everyday level compared to unaddressed, resolved, or accepted grief on a major level, like a parent, a spouse, a pet, or a loved one?
Nobody’s going to come in and go, “I need help grieving my day-to-day things.” We don’t even know we’re supposed to do that, or that it’s a good idea to do that. Part of why is not only because those are gone, so say goodbye and grieve, but you’re practicing grief. Think about it this way. If you practice grief every day and some losses of the day are bigger than other losses of the day, you’re learning how to grieve. The more you learn and a big loss happens, you know the drill. What you do with the big loss is no different than the small loss. It’s just bigger. That’s another reason to do this, to say goodbye to everything.
Ideally, with somebody you see on a regular basis, you would take a moment each time that particular encounter with them ended and say goodbye to them. That would include saying any and everything you’d want to say to them if you knew they were going to die after they left. Always have those things in mind, which also keeps you conscious of the passing of things and the uncertainty of things, because they could die before you see them next time.
You’re in an ongoing relationship with a friend, family, coworker, or anybody that you have more than a passing attachment to, there should be a constant goodbye process going on with that person. You don’t have to say the same thing every time you’re saying goodbye, but you’re going to shorthand it somehow. Sometimes, I’m in the mood. It’s not the nicest way to say goodnight, but my wife says goodnight to me, and she’ll say, “I’ll see you in the morning.” I go, “I hope so.” It’s like, “One of us should be dead in the morning. I will see you in the morning. I don’t think you’re going to be abducted by aliens, but you’re going to be dead.” It’s a constant reminder. I do see it as a lifestyle.
If you’re not grieving, if you’re not saying goodbye, all of these will build. All the grief that you haven’t experienced will build up. As that happens, we tend to want to make up for it.
A “Good Goodbye”: What Does It Actually Entail?
Before I wind up forgetting the whole thing, let me talk about what a good goodbye is. The dramatic kind of goodbye is you’re with somebody, and they’re on their deathbed. This is the last conversation you’re going to have with them. You want to say everything there is to say. You don’t want to leave and go, “I wish I’d said that to them.”
A good goodbye has a lot of things. There’s reminiscing. You’re like, “I remember this time that this happened, and that was awesome,” or, “I remember this time, and that was horrible,” or, “I remember when we first met and this and that happened. I had this impression of you. I thought this about you, but as I got to know you and this and that happened, I came to know you as this kind of person. That was great. You were so instrumental in helping me with this. I wish we had had more times like this together. My life without you will never be the same. I’m always going to want to reach out to you.”
It’s whatever you want to say to them. Say things that you wish were different, like, “I wish you hadn’t done this. I wish we hadn’t gone through that. I wish I could have been more this way. I wish I’d said these things or spoken up more about this with you,” or, “I wish I hadn’t been so afraid of you about these things.” It could be anything.
You want to cover anything that’d be there. You want to not only share those thoughts. Everything I shared was a thought. You want to share the emotion that goes with them, too. Grief is the experience of pretty much every human emotion as you grieve something. The bigger the grief is, the bigger the loss, and the more you’re going to go back and forth in all of these. They’re going to be that much deeper for you.
There is no straight line of grieving. People come in and they go, “I’m stuck in my grief.” What that generally means is they think there’s a timeline, and they’re here and they can’t move on to there. That’s not the way it works. You’re probably not stuck anywhere. You’re someplace that you’re trying to get out of sooner than you’re going to. You need to explore it more.
Some people go, “I’m still not over it,” especially if it’s a big loss. I go, “Let’s say you are. You’re over it now. What would that mean if somebody brings this person up and you’re over them? What would be different?” I’ve never had anybody be able to answer that question very well. They might say something like, “It wouldn’t bother me.” I go, “What kind of horrible person are you? This person that meant so much to you, somebody brings them up, and you’re like, “They’re dead. It doesn’t bother me.”
It doesn’t mean that you break down and cry. You might tell a funny story. That’s grief. You could be like, “He was awesome, man. There was this one time. This is so funny.” That’s grieving. There’s a human emotion attached to the relationship, and you’re experiencing it. Grief changes over time. You move through different places. You’ll never get over it. Why would you? How could you be so cold to get over it?
Grief Over Time: It Changes, It Doesn’t Just Go Away
It doesn’t go away. It gets different. It gets more manageable.
Maybe it’s more manageable if you’ve been doing it, but grief isn’t anything you want to manage.
It’s not that it’s more manageable. It’s less. There’s a suddenness to it, in my opinion, and then it’s almost all-encompassing, and then hopefully, there’s some reconciling. Speaking for myself only, there were times when it was very difficult for me to think of anything other than loss and pain. It’s interesting. When you gather at those Catholic funerals, which are big and there’s lots of food, inevitably, there will be laughter. There’s a compartmentalization of the pain.
We had a death in the family that was sudden, tragic, difficult, and galvanizing. There were a lot of things. It was my father-in-law, so there were a lot of people in our home. There was a sense that everyone was here, and we were going through the funeral, the wake, the cremation, and all the things that you had to do. You’re busy.
I remember someone saying something to my wife and me. It was because we were doing okay. She said, “Wait until everybody leaves. This whole thing starts over again because you’re alone with your thoughts. You’re alone with one another. The house is different. The world is different.” She was so right. We had to go through it, but we went through it together. That made it so much more, I don’t even know what word to put on it, but it was different. I still don’t know if we processed it properly. I don’t know if my boys processed it properly. We, in this house, have a way where one day, it’s no longer a thing. I remember thinking, “That was quick. Should we have done something?”
The Cathartic Fall Apart: Devastation Is A Sensible Reaction
I can tell you how you can find out. Write a letter to your father-in-law, and do a good goodbye. The scene is you’re there at his deathbed, and you’re going to say all the things that are in this letter. When you have that letter, if you were a client, I’d have you bring the letter in, and then I’ll show you what to do with it. I would tell you what we’re going to do.
What you do is you have the client read it, but the goal is not to read it. The goal is to read out loud what you wrote, listen to it as though you had never heard it before, and see how your body responds. I’ve had people not get to the first word in a session. They look at it and fall apart, and then they gather themselves, look at it again, start to say a word, and fall apart. You’ll find out.
That falling apart is cathartic. It’s important. It’s healing.
It is part of grieving. When you lose something precious, which is the word I like, devastation is the only reaction that makes sense. Speaking of Catholic funerals, I had a therapist whom I was seeing in a group. He died after I’d finished seeing him. There was a big Catholic wedding. I got there as the service was starting. His wife, 50 or 60 years old, I would imagine, was sitting right up front. His wife was wailing. The only word is wailing. Throughout the whole service, the entire time we were in service, she wailed. There was no break. I was like, “That’s what you would do.”
It could also be that you hope it will be done for you.
If I go to my wife’s funeral, I’m going to be wailing. How else would you feel?
People are all up in their feelings and thoughts about whether or not that’s appropriate.
First of all, we’re not taught how to grieve. We’re not taught what grieving is. We’re not taught how to deal with much of anything emotionally. It reminds me of a book. I have never read the book, but I love the title. It’s called A Good Marriage Will Break Your Heart. I read an extensive interview with the author’s wife. The thesis of the book is that a good marriage will break your heart because it was a good marriage. You stay together and love each other. At some point, one of you is probably going to bury the other, so it’s going to break your heart.
As I’m hearing all this, everything that he was writing about marriage, I said, “This applies to how people live their lives.” He said that on some level, everybody knows that everything ends. He said, “You know the marriage is going to end.” I’m thinking, “You know everything is going to end.” He said, “Instead of going all in on that marriage, especially emotionally, and being as connected as any two human beings could be connected by sharing everything and caring so deeply about somebody, people don’t do that. If they do that, they know how bad it’s going to hurt in the end. They don’t want to hurt that bad, so they wind up with a mediocre marriage.”
I’m like, “That’s the way most of us live our lives. We say we want to fully live our lives, but I don’t think we do in a lot of ways.” Imagine. If you led this life that was amazing to you and it was the most incredible life you could have ever lived, and then you’re going to die, you’re going to be devastated. Who wants to be devastated?
You literally cannot see the new relationship for what it is because you’re looking at it through the lens of what it needs to be to make up for the last one.
We tend to lean toward mediocrity, not meaning to, but by never fully giving of ourselves, putting ourselves fully out there, and being all that we are inside. That sometimes is pretty awesome and sometimes sucks because there’s a lot of pain and heartache in there, too. You’ve got to put all that out there and share that with people. You went through this with your wife, and that made all the difference. We have to share these things in order to process them.
What happens is they get reflected back to us, so we can see ourselves as others see us, which means we’re seeing ourselves better. We can’t see ourselves through our own eyes. We got to see parts of ourselves. That kind of grief, you’ve got to welcome it and want it, which means you want to be good at it. I tell people, “You want to be good at this.” If they’re in their twenties, thirties, forties, and even fifties, I go, “You may have decades left to go. You want to get good at it because I can tell you from my own experience that the older I get, the more grieving there is to do.”
People say, “My dream is to live a long, healthy life. I want to have all of my senses and live a long time.” I’m like, “That sounds great. Let’s take a look at that. Let’s say you live to be 130. It’s still crazy here, and you’re still sharp as a tack at 130. You can still get around. Maybe you got a walker or you got somebody that helps you get up and sit back down, but you are 130. You’re kicking butt.
Let’s see what your life looks like. I wonder how many funerals you’re going to go to. How many hospital visits are you going to go to? How many family members are you going to say goodbye to? How many pets are you going to have to die? How many friends are you going to want to suffer? That’s what you’re asking for. You better be good at it because you’re going to be doing a lot of it the older you get.”
I’m noticing that in the last several years, it seems like once or twice a week, somebody I admired growing up dies. It’s like, “They’re dying all around me.” You’ve got to be good at it. Grieving well is living well. I haven’t come across much. Maybe some of our readers have come across something that they’ve read or seen in a movie, a book, or something that describes grief along the way that I do. Grief is almost always portrayed as you cry hard, and then you are okay. That’s just part of it.
Personal Perspectives: What Grief Means To Me
That is true. For me, personally, when I think of grief, I think of a couple of things. One, I think of hearing people say they need to grieve, or they never grieved. Almost 50% of the time, it’s referenced in a way that someone is passing some sort of judgment over the behavior of an individual as it relates to some sort of loss.
You’ll hear something like they haven’t grieved, or they haven’t grieved properly, or they need to grieve.” Outside of you and me, they’re not therapists. You’re like, “That could be,” and then you go on with the conversation. I hear that a lot, and it’s usually being said in the presence of perceived lack of dealing, negative life behavior experience, or no visual representation of that wailing.
The other thing that I hear about a lot, as it relates to grief, is the phases of grief, which is a model. You haven’t mentioned it. I have a couple of questions for you. One is that personal viewpoint that someone is a certain way because they haven’t grieved, and maybe that’s right, and maybe that isn’t. Where did the phases fall as it pertains to you?
To go back to the first thing you were talking about, when folks are saying they haven’t grieved, in that statement is an implication that grieving is this thing you take out of the box, do it, and put it back in the box, and you’re done with it.
That you can do it right or wrong.
That you do it right or wrong, and you do it at a proper pace, but that’s not how it works. What you’re hearing if somebody says that is, “They have not behaved the way that I believe they’re supposed to behave. Therefore, they’re not like me, so something’s wrong with them.” That’s what they’re saying. In terms of phases, the phases are every human emotion. You are going to go through them like that.
There’s a lot of grieving to be done about the things you never got.
Do you agree that they’re all required?
Yeah. If somebody says, “I need help with my grieving,” I’ll say, “Okay.” Their grandmother died. I’ll say, “Tell me a funny story about your grandmother.” I’ll start there to help them understand that’s part of it. To tell a funny story about your grandmother is to remember something that was precious to you. It’s a moment that mattered to you, and to say goodbye to that. It’s all of those things.
You might not even cry in the beginning. You’re in shock. In the beginning, you’ve got a lot to do in terms of arrangements and things to do. You go into remote mode and get that done. That’s part of the process. You’re able to do those things. It will happen as it happens. The trick is to be open to whatever. Don’t try to demand that you do it in a certain way or by a certain time. Make space for it.
A client was telling me about a loss he had. He says, “I notice how much I’m distracting myself.” I’m like, “Sure.” He says, “I want to stop doing all these distracting things.” I’m like, “Instead of trying to stop that, see what you can do to make time, even if it’s a few moments of getting up from work, walking outside, and taking a break, which you would normally do anyway. Take a breath and say to your loved one, ‘I wish you were here to see this weather. You loved this kind of weather.’ You may not have any big emotions about that, but say hello. This takes some time. Then, go back to work. That was a few moments. You don’t have to plan something for hours at a time. That’s the day-to-day.”
Well said.
I wouldn’t even think of saying to a client, “You’re in the C phase of grieving.”
It’s not a progression. It’s their phase. They’re stages.
You’re sad. You’re happy. You’re numb. You’ve got to be all those things over and over. It takes a while. If you tune in to the show, I think we’re made up of all these different parts. Different parts will get the news of the loss at different times. The way that shows up is you’re motoring along, and you see something or hear something. You go, “Joe would love this,” and you start calling.
That’s a part of you that hasn’t gotten the news yet. Allow that to hit you. You can grieve that. You go, “I can’t call him. I would’ve loved to have shared this with him. He would have a good laugh. I loved it when that happened. We shared that kind of humor together. I miss that. There’s certainly nobody else that I would even think about sharing this with.”
Grief & The Firsts: Navigating Anniversaries & Milestones
There are the times of year. Those are tough, the firsts.
I tell my clients that. I say, “It’s going to take twelve months from now for you to go through all the firsts. Allow that to be, and invite whatever needs to be invited in terms of how you feel and what you think. You’re going to get through the firsts, and then you’ll go through the seconds. It’ll be a little different than the firsts. You’ll then go through the thirds.”
Grief changes over time.
It’s then like, “Can you believe they’ve been gone for three years?”
It changes, but it’s there. Why wouldn’t it be?
Can I ask you a question?
Yeah.
We talked a good amount about the healthy way to deal. I’m relating to a lot of it, and it’s bringing up some thoughts, emotions, and all that stuff. What might someone be feeling or experiencing when they’re not dealing, when maybe there needs to be some attention paid to this inability to deal? What would the warning signs be?
That you’re stuffing it down?
Yeah.
The same warning signs that you’re stuffing anything down, which is an awful lot of people’s everyday lives. You’re staying busy. You’re sticking to a routine, doing the same thing day after day, which means you’re not taking time for different parts of yourself. You get up and you’re doing the same thing every day. Even if you’re enjoying it, there are probably other parts of you that are not interested in any of that.
Certainly, if there’s some fairly fresh grieving that needs to happen, as I was saying to my client, make time for that set. Set some time aside for that. Don’t go to the distractions. If you find yourself going to a distraction, pull yourself back and go, “Wait a minute. I need to sit with this loss for a while.” Write a letter. Talk to the person. Tell them things.
Tell them day-to-day stuff, like, “Yesterday, so-and-so gave me a call and we talked about this. We’re going to go to the lake. I was thinking how much you liked the lake.” It could be any of the day-to-day things that you shared anyway. Death ends the life of a body. It doesn’t end the relationship. You will always have this relationship. It’s different, but you’re carrying your irritations with them. All the things that you had with them are still there, so carry on the relationship.
Resisting The Invite: Dealing With Grief Avoidance
What about the people who are pain-averse and, at almost all costs, resist the invitation to go there because they know it’s going to be tough?
If I had a client tell me that, I would go, “You’re not pain-averse. As a matter of fact, you’re pretty masochistic.”
Probably true. I would agree with that.
I had a little saying about it. I can’t remember what it was at the moment, but Jung talked about something along the lines of avoiding pain causes pain, so you get two pains. You got pain on top of pain. You’re not pain-averse. You’re creating more and more of it. If you don’t want to experience pain, then don’t live.
You’re making sense. It doesn’t change the fact that you still hear, “I can’t do this right now,” or, “I don’t want to do this.”
I’d be like, “You don’t have to do it right now. When do you want to do it? Let’s schedule a time.” I’m serious. You need to schedule time.
I can’t be the only one who has either said or heard this.
You need to schedule a time. You need to give the loss the reverence it deserves. This is a revere to the person. Show them that. The thing that I believe about anybody avoiding feelings is that it’s not so much that they don’t want to experience the feeling, because they experience the feelings. It’s that we don’t want to experience the feelings alone.
The real damage that happens to us is not that we were hurt. That’s damaging, but the real damage that causes the problems is that there was no one there for us. If you don’t want to experience the pain, it’s probably because you don’t have the experience of sharing that pain with someone who is emotionally adept enough to not try to fix it, be codependent, and make it better, but to go, “I can see how painful this is. Grieve as long as you need. Let it rip.
If they want to be held, you hold them. If they want you to sit with them, sit with them. Bring some comfort. That’s when you heal. That’s when you lose that fear. If you’re like, “I have a pain to experience,” instead of going, “I don’t want to do that,” you go, “Who would be good to share this with?” When you do that with somebody, that’s when you’re being loved and cared for. That’s what real love, meaningful love, and caring are. You’re like, “Here’s the stuff that, for whatever reason, I’m afraid of or I don’t like. I don’t want anybody to see it, but I’m going to show it to you.” They go, “That sounds awful.”
You create that space for them to have it, and you’re right there with them. Their nervous system learns that you don’t have to be alone in this stuff. When you have that experience, it’s so profound for most people because it’s something that they have longed for their whole lives, pretty much, but never even knew they were longing for. They could rattle off a whole bunch of other longings they have, which are all substitutes.
You get that need met and go, “I got something I didn’t even know existed.” It’s not like you ran out to go get more of it. You don’t shove it away. You reach out and say, “Come here. I don’t know what to do with you, but I want to take care of you. I’m going to find somebody who can help us with this. I can’t do it well enough. I’m sorry.”
We tend to lean toward mediocrity by never really fully putting ourselves out there.
All of that is grieving. If you did nothing but live your life, you have plenty of stuff to grieve. A lot of it, if you can’t think of anything, is the loss of what you never had, especially if you believe you were somehow supposed to get it. You were promised it, and it didn’t happen. You’ve got to grieve those things because if you don’t, you’re going to keep going out there and trying to get it in some form.
That’s impossible. You are never going to be that little boy, little girl, or that precious child and have this ideal caretaker love you in this ideal way that you want to be loved all the time. That’s impossible. Even if they could do it, you can’t be little, and they can’t be younger, and you go back and do that. Say goodbye to that, and you’ll quit demanding it from everybody else.
Unprocessed Grief & Relationships: Clouded Vision & More
There’s the reason. The one thing I’ve taken from this conversation, more than anything, is that unrecognized and unprocessed grief amounts to more difficulty in the relationships we still have or had.
It’s probably, in a lot of ways, the biggest part of what we struggle with in our relationships, even more so than whatever our mess is about relationships, what they’re supposed to be, and how we’re supposed to be. It’s even outside of all that. The grief that you haven’t lived with and through will completely cloud your vision of your reality. You cannot see in front of you what is. You can’t see this person for who they are. You see them primarily for what they’re not, which you believe they’re supposed to be, because you didn’t get that, and you’re supposed to get it.
It’s more of what you wish they’d be.
You’re being mad about that. You see them through that lens, so they’re lacking in this, but that’s all made up. They’re not lacking anything in that. Couples who are struggling, that’s what they’re doing more of than seeing what they like about this person. There are plenty of couples I’ve seen who’ve been struggling for so long. They can’t even name the things that they like about the other person. They only share their grievances. That has a whole lot to do with unlived, unprocessed, and unresolved grief.
You can’t spell grievance without grief.
That’s true. It is all from the same words. If you grieve well, you live well. I feel like there are some other things that we haven’t covered about it. Maybe they’ll pop up somewhere else in another episode. This is an important issue. It took a while for me to learn the work at the end of my day-to-day life and see the world that way, but such a profound difference in my world.
To be able to pay attention to the passing of time and the passing of what will be and saying goodbye to things all the time does make a difference. We could go over any of our topics, and I could show you how not grieving is a piece of any of that stuff we’ve talked about, and how if you could grieve well, it would ease this an awful lot. I’m trying to stress the importance of it, which I don’t think I can do adequately, so I’ll grieve that.
The Whole Human Experience: Embracing All Emotions
There you go. Food for thought for future conversations, but to summarize what we discussed here in the context of grief, and I’m better for it, so I know there are many other people that are as well, is the idea of recognizing this grief, the parting, and the goodbye, and being accepting of all of the emotions that go with that, the anger, sadness, laughter, and joy, too. Maybe there’s resentment. Maybe there’s regret. Maybe there’s whatever.
My interpretation of what we talked about for the last hour was that it is a process. It could be used as a noun or a verb. You could process it, or it can be a process. At the end of the day, there may be acceptance, but it is never resolved. It’s an ongoing thing. It reminds me of some of the early episodes where we discussed your goal as a therapist and a lot of your patients who say, “I want to be happy,” and you say, “Maybe you do, or maybe you don’t. What would be a victory for me is if you could live the entire human experience and do so appreciatively.”
The real damage isn’t just that we were hurt, which is damaging, but that no one was there for us—that’s what really causes the problems.
It’s hard for people to appreciate sorrow and appreciate sadness, but to truly live and, in your words, live well, then you feel these emotions, every one of them. You feel the good ones and the not-so-pleasant ones. It’s that bitter and sweet thing. In some contexts, the sweet isn’t as sweet without the presence of the bitter.
That’s a whole other topic of how you can’t see the stars without the darkness. If you want to be happy, excited, carefree, or any of those sorts of feelings we all think are the good ones, even with those things you have experienced that you would call that, there’s more to it. There’s more of a depth to all of it. If you’re willing to experience the devastation, heartbreak, despair, loneliness, and longing, all of those things play off of each other.
We fool ourselves all the time that we can have happiness without the sadness, but I guarantee you, spend a few minutes with me and I’ll show you how pursuing your happiness has made you miserable. Many people come in here, and they go, “I did everything right. I got a nice this and a nice that, but I’m not happy.” That’s because you went out and did everything you thought would make you happy, but you’re miserable. That’s how you make yourself miserable.
You experience all of it. When you said sorrow, I hadn’t thought about this for a long time. It was a John Irving book. It might’ve been Hotel New Hampshire. There’s a dog named Sorrow. There’s a chapter called Sorrow Float. It’s a terrific metaphor. For the Pixar movie, Inside Out, the second one is out. I haven’t seen the second one. I saw the first one, which was great. It was a pretty simplified version of it all, but it is how this works. She learns the importance of sadness.
There are no good emotions or bad emotions. There are emotions, and they’re all as valuable, every one of them. Welcome them all, embrace them all, and want them all. You’re not afraid of them. If you’re not afraid of them, you can welcome them and experience them. You’ll get more of all of them. You’ll get more profound experiences with all of them.
When you share that with another human being, you get another thing that we know we want, but we don’t know what it is we want. We want to be deeply connected in the depths of those emotions. It’s great to experience a beautiful sunset by myself. I have no problem with that. I like that. To share it with somebody, too, is not better, but it is a whole different experience of being part of a herd. To know that you can do that and that these people are there for you is an awesome feeling. You get all this by grieving. That’s where I’m rambling to.
It’s beautiful. It was well said. One of the more compelling conversations on a topic that affects each and every one of us likely in different ways. I learned quite a bit. I was asking questions for myself. I was asking questions for someone else.
You were like, “Let me ask you about my friend.”
I’m not going to cliche myself to death, but I will say that some of them were for me, and then some of them were for some that I care about an awful lot. You can draw your own conclusions there. Either way, I’m grateful. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been another outstanding episode of the show. We dug fairly deep.
We could go deeper and we could go longer, but let’s put a pin here, because on the subject and topic of grieving, the sweet sorrow that is parting, saying goodbye, and recognizing that which was important to us or perhaps doesn’t serve us anymore, whatever the case might be, is important. Hearing Eddie articulate, in a way that only he can, a topic that undoubtedly affects every one of us was helpful. I, for one, am grateful. This has been our first of probably a couple of different episodes on the grieving process. I’m a fan, so thank you.
Thanks. That was fun.
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