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Gratitude... and Grief?
126 Plays1 year ago
In a special post-Thanksgiving episode, Wendy and Chris talk about gratitude--both in recognition of its power and value in affecting one's mindset, and with an eye for how it can sometimes be used to deny or bypass our less pleasant emotions such as sadness, anger, disappointment, or fear. Their own personal stories plus wisdom gleaned from the likes of C.S. Lewis, "soul-centered psychotherapist" Francis Weller, and the band Caedmon's Call inform a conversation about the interrelationship among gratitude, grief, and joy--AND how we are meant to experience all three in community with one another.
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Transcript
Introduction to Surviving Saturday
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Surviving Saturday, a podcast about holding on to hope in the midst of life's difficulties, disappointments, and dark seasons.
Easter Saturday's Agony and Life's In-Betweens
00:00:12
Speaker
Times like that remind us of the agony and despair the followers of Jesus felt on the Saturday of Easter weekend, in between the Friday on which he was crucified and the Sunday on which he rose from the dead.
Acknowledging Pain and Clinging to Hope
00:00:23
Speaker
That someday forever changed the way that humans can relate to God. But what does it look like to be honest about the very real pain we experience in the in-between? To fervently cling to hope in the God who promised us his peace and his presence at times when he feels distant or even cruel.
Meet Wendy and Chris
00:00:40
Speaker
I'm Wendy Osborne, a licensed counselor in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I'm her husband, Chris, a marriage mediator, conflict resolution coach, and trauma-informed story work coach.
Unmet Expectations and Hope
00:00:51
Speaker
Join us each episode for authentic conversations about how life not turning out as we'd expected has created the contextual soil for the growth of a tenacious hope in the resurrection and in a God who is still making all things new.
Thanksgiving: From Recipes to Connection
00:01:09
Speaker
Hey there folks. Uh, Wendy and I are excited to be back with you for another episode of the surviving Saturday podcast. Uh, this particular episode we are recording on Friday actually. Um, it's the Friday after Thanksgiving. And so kind of what's on our mind has been this concept of Thanksgiving and gratitude.
00:01:31
Speaker
Yep, so we spent yesterday cooking, trying to make some old family recipes. It's the time of year where we think about what we're grateful for.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yes. Um, I'm, I'm thinking about the family recipes for just a second. What, what ended up happening was right as we were sitting down to eat, uh, the casseroles we had cooked. I think we'd made one of your moms, one of my mom's, uh, particular casseroles that were special for us at Thanksgiving. But, um, our, one of our kids called with their partners, um, and wanted to chat and want to talk. And so the meal was sort of, uh, became secondary because we got a chance to just talk with them and connect with where they were. They're out on the West coast.
00:02:12
Speaker
Oh, it was so fun. Yeah. It actually did. It changed the whole thing. It was like the meal became less central and we got sort of what I was worried you were going to be missing was the kind of family connectional time. But we ended up being super grateful for that. So fun.
Gratitude and Grief in Relationships
00:02:28
Speaker
So fun, especially out of the blue. Yes.
00:02:31
Speaker
We also think about gratitude in connection with this podcast partly because the opening music that you heard now is from a song called Bank by the singer-songwriter Bill Maloney and a couple lines in that song it's about kind of how to connect in a relationship even in the midst of frustration, difficulty, and hard times and the chorus says don't forget to bring kindness
00:02:56
Speaker
And don't forget to say thanks. And it's their way of sort of putting a little plug in for the significance of gratitude in a relationship. Did you have thoughts about that, Wendy? Is that something you talk about with clients sometimes? Is gratitude an important feature or aspect of a relationship sometimes?
00:03:14
Speaker
So when I think of gratitude and Thanksgiving, I also automatically think of grief and I think of loss. And so it is a big part of a relationship. The gratitude is and I think so is grief. And so gratitude isn't unto denial.
00:03:38
Speaker
but it is unto holistic viewing of the other and towards the end of redemption. Yeah, I think it can be an important thing to, I would say to watch out for, it can be easy to lose gratitude.
Routine, Gratitude, and Relational Balance
00:03:56
Speaker
Yeah. The deeper you get into a relationship and after you've sort of got routine and also you've got lots of energy you're pouring out on say kids, you're pouring energy into maybe job or
00:04:08
Speaker
church involvement, community involvement, things like that. And it feels like life turns towards a lot of task management and we got to get things done and what are we doing and where are we going. And I think the reminder to pause and be grateful
00:04:23
Speaker
for the person that you have and for what they're bringing, I think that can be a helpful reminder at times because it's easy to get really hyper focused on, well, you're disappointing
Gratitude Journals and Mental Shifts
00:04:33
Speaker
me this way. You never show up and do that. I always have to do the dishes myself or whatever. Yeah. So to see things more rightly, more wholly.
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, it can become a way of rounding out how we're seeing the other person instead of just getting fixated on you drive me nuts because you don't do this or you don't remember this as a way of restoring balance. It can be helpful.
00:04:56
Speaker
There's a lot of talk out there actually about gratitude journals people have talked about that sort of thing as well In fact, we did that Do you remember that we did that about a year and a half ago? In sort of a time when we were doing some couples counseling ourselves I kind of come into a bit of a hard patch for us and it was helpful I think for us to to sort of rewrite that balance a little bit.
Gratitude as a Spiritual Bypass
00:05:17
Speaker
Oh, yeah Yeah, we every evening we try to close the day with three things that each of us individually
00:05:26
Speaker
could find gratitude for in the day. And there's actually a famous TED talk out there by a guy named Sean Acor and he's talking about how, you know, just the brain science of this, how basically you can rewire your brain to be a little bit more on the optimistic or positive side that gratitude can kind of help even out some negative thought loops that we get stuck in. Does that resonate at all when the idea of gratitude as an antidote to negative thought loops, thought patterns, stuff like that?
00:05:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think it can be very helpful.
00:05:58
Speaker
And at the same time, like Wendy was saying, we also want to hold space for, it can also be a little bit of a dangerous thing. There are ways in which maybe gratitude can, at least in Christian context, become a little bit maybe of a spiritual bypass or sort of a spiritual band-aid like, well, yes, that's hard, but give thanks in all things. Do you see that dynamic kind of at play? Do you think that's something significant as well?
Personal Experiences with Grief
00:06:27
Speaker
Well, I see it and I feel it though. I feel it in my own heart, in my own body, in my own life. Yeah. Yeah. Like you couldn't, as we were even talking about this podcast content, it was tough to settle into just, oh, let's only talk about gratitude because it felt kind of not complete, not whole. Like there's, in a way it's difficult to think about gratitude for us right now without thinking about grief also. Why do you think that is?
00:06:57
Speaker
Well, I think partly for a lot of my life, I closed my heart to grief and to sorrow because I didn't know what to do with it and I didn't know how to feel it. And I felt a lot of shame over it.
00:07:14
Speaker
And so as I closed my heart to that emotion and numbed myself out from feeling it, I also sealed the door against gratitude and against hope. And even in some ways, like a really genuine love.
00:07:32
Speaker
I think I did that too. It looked a little bit different for me. I would definitely wasn't anything conscious about shutting the door on grief or status. It was just a determination to sort of live life plucky, optimistic. That was what we, the message I got my home growing up.
00:07:49
Speaker
Lots of people have it worse, so we would always kind of compare in a not very fair way, like, well, at least we're not as bad as those people, or we've at least got a roof over our heads, or we've got this or that. And I think sometimes in my family, be thankful was sort of used as a way of shutting down, hey, I'm disappointed about this. This hurts. I wasn't happy with this. I know that it got used that way.
Superficial Happiness vs Genuine Emotions
00:08:16
Speaker
Sometimes and in being optimistic i recognize that one point you can be a little you know the idea of pollyanna like just putting the best film everything will hold on you know my favorite image of that in film is the black knight in the in the
00:08:30
Speaker
in the Money Python and the Holy Grail movie, where he's getting his arms and legs chocked up. He's like, it's just a flesh wound. It's just a flesh wound. You just kind of keep going. And I sort of resonated with that. I'm like, yes, just keep going. Just soldier on sometimes. And there's a lot that gets missed in that.
00:08:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about two just a little while ago. I don't know if you remember, but we were newly married and I found this book called 14,000 things to be happy. I remember having, I remember seeing that on a, uh, on our copy table often. Um, yeah, it's got this big sort of colorful title. Yeah. It's a tiny book, but a very thick book and it really is pages and pages of a list.
00:09:10
Speaker
totaling 14,000 things to be happy about. And I got it because I knew that I wasn't feeling as joyful or as
00:09:22
Speaker
happy as I wished to and didn't yet have categories for the reality that I was probably depressed at that point. And so I was really trying to override it by drilling into my head item after item after item that should make me happy.
00:09:45
Speaker
I think I joined with you in that I remember making, in fact, I think we still have it somewhere. I made like a jar for you of like things about Wendy that are great or something and wrote them on slips of paper for you to like pull out of a jar to be able to read. But it wasn't this magic cure. I mean, it was, I'm not saying it was a bad thing to do necessarily, but it didn't, it didn't fix the moment because I mean, when we're in places of more grief or sorrow,
00:10:11
Speaker
You don't even want to get a jar like that out. You want to kind of throw it across the rim. I mean, it was such a kind offering and I wanted to receive it, but appealing to my brain for places that my heart had gone numb just
00:10:30
Speaker
couldn't fix the situation. And then I felt shame that I wasn't being grateful and I wasn't finding joy. And that sort of compounds then. Oh yeah. It's more of a spiral. Now if you thought about sort of there are some, I would imagine some story roots with that though from your family and your relationship to care and support when you're hurting, things like that.
Wendy's Childhood and Emotional Numbness
00:10:54
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think, so I grew up the only daughter between two brothers. We lived out in the country for the first eight years of my life with animals and a lot of land and a go-kart and a pool and a treehouse and just a lot of like,
00:11:16
Speaker
things to do outside. And I found a lot of peace and comfort playing out in the woods and feeding the chickens, gathering eggs. I found a lot of fun and it really was comforting to me to be outside.
00:11:40
Speaker
And I think at the same time I come from a context with hardy and capable people who get things done. And my heart was really sensitive. And I think it was hard to parent my sensitive heart that felt a lot.
00:12:03
Speaker
and people didn't always know what to do with it. And as a mom myself, you know, I get that. Um, and so I was thinking about this little tricycle that I had. Yeah. And it was before I could ride a bike obviously, but I had this little red tricycle and for some reason I did not sit down and pedal it. I don't, my guess is knowing myself that that did not move the vehicle fast enough.
00:12:31
Speaker
that would make sense you you do like to get places fairly fast yes i like getting it done and so i would stand on it hold the handlebars and drag it but that meant that the little bar
00:12:47
Speaker
that connected the two back wheels and had a rough edge to it kept banging up against my ankle which is that is one of the worst places i hate even just the thought of getting cuts on the back of my ankle like by the killer's tendon that makes me just drop in pain right now
00:13:04
Speaker
So I would keep going around like this on the tricycle until finally I was bleeding too much and I just made the decision. I've got to go inside and do something about this. And so I remember going to the bathroom and sitting on the countertop, filling the sink with warm water,
00:13:25
Speaker
and Epsom salt because that was a cure for everything. Of course. And I would soak my little ankles and then I would dry them off and put band-aids and then I would either call it a day or I would go back out.
00:13:41
Speaker
And, you know, I'm sure that given our lifestyle, all the adults were busy. I mean, there was so much to do in a family with three young kids. And so I remember bandaging my own wounds, which, you know, I'd been taught well how to do.
00:14:00
Speaker
Yeah, but I just want to mark here that you're small enough to be on a tricycle. That's kind of heartbreaking still. Yeah. Yeah. And so tending to your own wound at that
Limiting Sorrow and Joy's Capacity
00:14:11
Speaker
age. Yeah. And so what I make of that is I don't remember crying from the water or the salt.
00:14:20
Speaker
hurting the cuts on the back of my ankles. And I think that I also had closed off my heart to feeling sad that I was doing this myself. And so I think that I had numbed my heart as well as my body to the pain.
00:14:40
Speaker
and I mean you could call that denial really it was just a childish form of it like I'm fine I'm fine I'm okay I'll just go upstairs clean the wounds put on the band-aids and be on my way but what happened is the more that I denied the presence of the sorrow the more that I closed off my heart to joy which is why
00:15:05
Speaker
20 years later, that book about being happy couldn't really penetrate.
00:15:13
Speaker
I remember, too, I think it was in the early days of Hope Community Church, which we helped plant, I remember, I think it was Mark Upton or somebody saying, and they were probably quoting somebody else, the idea of if you set a ceiling for your sorrow or what you're willing to feel of sadness, you're also, whether you realize about your setting, if you set a floor for your sorrow, you also set a ceiling
00:15:38
Speaker
for how much joy you can experience. And I remember that being a new concept. Like I hadn't thought of that at all.
Coping with Grief through Distraction
00:15:45
Speaker
And I thought of myself as a joyful person, but I would say I was more of a determined to be happy person kind of, but not to, you know, you're not going to see me sweat. You're not going to, I'm going to have a smile on my face no matter what comes. I'm in fact, I, I one time processing some of my grief from some of my early family trauma. I remember writing a song and saying,
00:16:07
Speaker
I had to put on that face again, the one that says I'm happy to all my friends. I learned that at a young age of you can't let people see the pain that's really going on, so perform, so be really successful, achieve. That was the way I kind of anesthetized and dealt with it. Well, I've got these accomplishments, so that pain and that loss doesn't resonate as much. That won't be how you define me. I think that was a big piece of how I carried it.
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And there's no limit to the ways that the world invites us to deny the sorrow and the grief. You know, I mean, we've got shopping, we've got entertainment, we've got addictions. I mean, we've got busyness. There's no end to the opportunities to deny the pain and put on a happy face.
00:16:58
Speaker
We were talking about that when we were thinking about this podcast and I know one of the places I go when I am feeling disrupted or disappointed or frustrated is I will try to research my way out of it. I will try to find an answer. There's got to be some solution. There's got to be some technique I don't know yet, some book I haven't read yet, some answer is out there.
00:17:25
Speaker
uh, that will help me solve this. And I think that's in storied for me as well.
Chris' Childhood Reflections
00:17:30
Speaker
I remember, um, growing up and I'm age nine or 10 when my parents, uh, conflict in their marriage is just reaching a crescendo and I'm a combatant. I'm involved in it.
00:17:41
Speaker
And I really, there's part of me that wanted, I was drawn into their combat and asked to have something to say. And I wanted to fix it. And I remember it's about that same time I read the Encyclopedia Brown book series. Encyclopedia Brown was my hero. Yeah. Because he was. He's good. Encyclopedia Brown boy detective. He's 10 years old. He can't solve anything. And that, you know, his dad, the chief Brown would come home and talk about this, you know, adult crime.
00:18:09
Speaker
and tell the story over supper and the whole idea was Encyclopedia would have it solved by dessert.
00:18:15
Speaker
Oh, yeah. He nothing was out of his league. And then he's out there doing it for his friends as well. You know, Bugs Meany and the rival gang and Sally's his sidekick and Bugs has always done something bad and Encyclopedia always figured out. And that resonated with me. I even had a friend who actually said he's Encyclopedia Osborne, you know, but I grabbed onto that identity of I will be able to intelligently think my way out of this. There's an answer in that those books were so
00:18:44
Speaker
In a way, I look back, they're devastating from my heart because they're like, Encyclopedia Brown solves them all. Like they never ended a story with, and Encyclopedia didn't know what to do and neither did anybody else. You know, they all ended with, he did, one of them's called, Encyclopedia Saves the Day. And I'm like, yes, I want to be that guy who saves the day with my brain.
00:19:05
Speaker
Well, and that's what it's going to ask. So then what happens in you when you can't fix it? What do you do? Where do you go then? Well, first I spent on overdrive and I try harder to fix it. Um, and the answer is, you know, there's one more thing I'll research, one more thing I'll find.
00:19:21
Speaker
and then i reach a point of i just check out i like if if something starts to feel unsolvable or overwhelming to me then i have this overwhelming urge to numb out check out dissociate from it because i
00:19:36
Speaker
I know I can't stand, and I've just in recent years been able to put a name to this, but I hate that feeling of overwhelm because I know I felt that with my parents. Basically, I'm 10. I could not solve that problem, their marriage, and they couldn't solve it. It was a disaster, and I hate that feeling of overwhelming. I've gotten in touch with it recently realizing
00:19:57
Speaker
I so much don't want to go there that my brain basically says, okay, what's on TV? What, how can I, or how can I listen to music or how can I find some way to just, just run away from that? Because again, there wasn't any, you know, somebody, Donald J. Sobol should have written a book, Encyclopedia Brown faces his fears and his, and his pain, but he didn't write that book.
00:20:17
Speaker
He had a series also of two minute mysteries where he just took the same stories and put them in adult format Same thing you solve them in two minutes and you run into the hard stuff of life There ain't nothing to get solved in two minutes and that I didn't want to live there. I didn't want to be anywhere near that Whether it's conflict in our relationship or frustration in family career, whatever it is. I want to be somewhere else.
Vulnerability and Emotional Openness
00:20:42
Speaker
Yeah, and mine, I probably relate more to C.S. Lewis and one of his famous quotes. I think it's from The Four Loves, but he says, to love it all is to be vulnerable.
00:20:46
Speaker
I
00:20:57
Speaker
Love anything and your heart will be wrong and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglements.
00:21:13
Speaker
Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable. And I think for me with pain and sorrow, I learned early the best way to deal with it was to just go be alone.
00:21:43
Speaker
And so that means that it's very hard to venture out and give my heart to someone else when it's feeling pain or on the flip side with vulnerability, it's feeling hope or it longs for love. Yeah. And so to come out of that place of aloneness and to be vulnerable and to be open to connection and open to hope is often the scariest thing I do.
00:22:13
Speaker
Yeah. And I think this is where God had some clever design, although it's been felt frustrating at times, but in connecting us and bringing us into each other's lives, because I didn't know that was all what was beneath the surface for you. And I'm Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, positive optimist, you know, whatever.
00:22:32
Speaker
I think when we ran into our disappointment and these deep feelings of sorrow and pain and my positivity could not fix it, couldn't overwhelm it, it
00:22:46
Speaker
had to introduce me to what am I going to do with pain? What am I going to do with sorrow? It's in there. I've done that sort of walking away as well. I remember during like that early stage for marriage that you were talking about a little bit, remember a song that was powerful for me was a song by the band Cayman's Call.
00:23:04
Speaker
and the song called Petrified Heart. And the chorus was, when did my heart get so petrified? When did it get so afraid to love? When did it get so hard to feel? And I remember that resonating with me, even as I was just beginning to consider this idea that what I mask with a smile is really a heart that's in danger of going just petrified, solid, locked away.
00:23:29
Speaker
And in that song they say, strike this stone with your rock, I'll take the blow until your living water begins to flow. Like basically the idea of, you know, it's going to take a touch of the divine in some way to, you know, to Jeremiah, I think the Bible talks about, I will exchange your heart of stone for heart of flesh, which sounds great and delightful, except for the fact that
00:23:57
Speaker
What does it take to do that? It takes these blows. It takes actually, you know, something to pulverize, to bring softness back. You had some thoughts, I think, from, there's a good book that we've been reading, Francis Weller's The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Did you have a quote from that you wanted to share?
Grief's Role in Healing and Community
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah, this is a long quote. It's about a page and a half, but I think it is well worth taking in. This is Frances Weller. Bringing grief and death out of the shadow is our spiritual responsibility, our sacred duty. By doing so, we may be able to feel our desire for life once again and remember who we are, where we belong, and what is sacred.
00:24:46
Speaker
I wrote this book for a number of reasons, most notably to restore soul to grief work and grief to soul work. I feel grief has been colonized by the clinical world, taken hostage by diagnoses and pharmaceutical regimes. For the most part, grief is not a problem to be solved, not a condition to be medicated, but a deep encounter with an essential experience of being human.
00:25:12
Speaker
Grief becomes problematic when the conditions needed to help us work with grief are absent. For example, when we are forced to carry our sorrow and isolation, or when the time needed to fully metabolize the nutrients of a particular loss is denied, and we are pressured to return to normal too soon. We are told to get on with it and get over it.
00:25:37
Speaker
The lack of courtesy and compassion surrounding grief is astonishing, reflecting an underlying fear and mistrust of this basic human experience. We must restore the healing ground of grief. We must find the courage once again to walk its wild edge.
00:25:56
Speaker
Grief is always in some way accompanying us. There are times when the presence of sorrow is acute. A partner dies. A home turns to ash and a fire. A marriage dissolves and we find ourselves alone. These seasons in our lives are intense and require a prolonged time to honor what the soul needs to fully digest the grief. Sorrow is a sustained note in the song of being alive.
00:26:25
Speaker
To be human is to no loss in its many forms. This should not be seen as a depressing truth. Acknowledging this reality enables us to find our way into the grace that lies hidden in sorrow. We are most alive at the threshold between loss and revelation. Every loss ultimately opens the way for a new encounter.
00:26:49
Speaker
In turn, by restoring grief to soul work, we are freed from our one-dimensional obsession with emotional progress. This psychological moralism places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems. Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard.
00:27:18
Speaker
This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coded in a mantle of shame. People in my practice routinely apologize for their tears or for feeling sad. Okay, there is so much in there that I'd like to unpack.
00:27:43
Speaker
maybe just ask you a few questions about some of that. So can you speak to the idea of grief being taken hostage by diagnoses and pharmaceutical regimes? Yeah, I think that our first instinct, because none of us like to feel the pain of powerlessness, of dying dreams and broken relationships, and there's nothing we can do to change it.
00:28:11
Speaker
And so we would rather diagnose each other as depressed, even in more of a spiritual sense, idolatrous or vain. But I think that unless grief is allowed to run its course in the presence of kind, empathetic, wise community, then it has a great propensity to stagnate into depression.
00:28:41
Speaker
or to grow into anxiety. So you're saying that there's an aspect of grief like you can't just do it alone by yourself. I think that we're meant to grieve in community.
00:29:00
Speaker
Yeah, and Adam Young talks about that a lot on his podcast, I know. And this idea of caring our sorrow and isolation that Weller talks about. There's something about that you're trapped just with yourself, just in your head. I know I've experienced that. And whereas when you can name something to somebody else and there is kindness and there's a, I hurt with you in that.
00:29:26
Speaker
Well, and I think it's because of what Weller said too that we often cloak our suffering and our grief in shame. That there's something we've done wrong to either experience the suffering in the first place or to not be able to rise above it and feel happy.
00:29:44
Speaker
Like it probably has something to do with the way that you described yourself as being a plucky optimist early on in life. And I think that shame is best dispelled when there is the kind, compassionate and understanding care of a person who has been there. Yes. The idea that somebody's they've been there
00:30:10
Speaker
your feelings don't make you crazy. Yeah. The fact that you are feeling this loss, the fact that you felt hurt or shame or pain doesn't make you bad. It actually makes you human. It makes you actually relatable. It makes you human. Yes, it makes you human.
00:30:25
Speaker
I was really struck by his words of being told to get on when they get over. I mean, I remember without saying any names, we've been in the presence of family members where one told the other, um, you just need to get over this. And this has been like two or three days of a, of a personal loss, you know, um, the lack of courtesy and compassion surrounding grief is astonishing. Um, because there's so many, you know, things out there telling us, well, here's three ways to be happy. Here's ways to get over it.
00:30:52
Speaker
14,000 things to be happy about. Yeah, exactly. Um, so what do you think it looks like to, as he says, restore the healing ground of grief and to find the courage to walk its wild edge? What do you, can you say something about what, what do you mean? What do you think that means? Well, I mean, I think for me, who found a lot of solace in being alone and tending to my own pain, both physical and emotional,
00:31:19
Speaker
It takes a lot of courage for me to venture out of isolation into the presence of another, share my sorrow and trust that it will impact them in a way that will fruit out and care for me.
00:31:36
Speaker
So part of the process is finding safe people, a safe place with which somebody with whom you can go those places. Right. And he says in another part of this book, he says, share with a wise person or remain silent.
00:31:53
Speaker
Like it's not, our deepest pains and our deepest grief edges are not meant just to merely be shared. Yes. They are meant to be shared with someone who knows what to do with them, who has lived their version of a dark night of the soul, who has found Jesus coming close to the brokenhearted.
00:32:19
Speaker
Yeah, and I think I've had an experience recently, and only really in recent years, maybe had tastes of it before that, but of a group of people gathered, and part of it has been gathered for the same purpose.
Empathy and the Memory of Trauma
00:32:33
Speaker
We're processing trauma, we're processing pain from childhood that we maybe never gave full voice to. We had plenty of ways to make it. Oh, it wasn't that bad. My parents did their best.
00:32:46
Speaker
Look how in my case, you know, my mom got us out of this horrible conflict situation But there are so many ways of shutting down and covering over you know pain that was experienced that my body actually went through and then my body actually It's a weird concept when I first heard it, but I get it now my body remembers and my body sort of kicks into into Reacting certain ways because it's been there before and the power of sitting
00:33:15
Speaker
and letting my feelings come out and somebody going, of course, that was awful, overwhelming. Of course you felt anger. Of course you didn't want to feel your feelings anymore. We feel that with you and on your behalf. And a lot of times the thing that was transformative for me, those who know me will not find this surprising, but I tend towards an excess of words and I want to put words around things.
00:33:39
Speaker
One of the most powerful transformative experience I've had in the last year or two is being in these groups where people are just sitting silent and giving me and showing me compassion in their faces. And I can tell they hurt with me and they're so far from putting some kind of spiritual bandaid on it and saying, well, but be thankful because it made you really strong and be thankful because you learned how to be resilient. I kind of bristle a little bit when I hear
00:34:08
Speaker
I remember hearing somebody, not a close friend, but somebody talking about the effects of divorce on a kid. And he said, well, kids are pretty resilient.
00:34:15
Speaker
And I felt something in me just cringe. I'm like, yes. And I don't want to deny that. And they still take hits. They still take wounds. They still take hurt that may affect how they show up in life later on. And I wonder if when you talk about sitting in these groups and not being met with scriptural admonitions to be grateful or to feel better,
00:34:45
Speaker
you are instead being met with the physical nature of the goodness of God. Yes. So you're being shown rather than told. You're having people say, come and bring it. We will not break a bruised reed. We will not snuff out a smoldering wick without saying that.
00:35:07
Speaker
they're doing that the way they're embodying that yeah which gets at the ideas that kirk thompson i know is writing a lot about these days as well how we heal in community where we are the body of christ to one another it's another note that adam gives a note to you you had a story that was related to that about um jonie action tada
00:35:24
Speaker
Did you want to mention that? Yeah I'll just I'll close with this but years ago I got to hear Johnny Eric Santada's pastor speak and for people that don't know Johnny she's a very famous woman who became a paraplegic when she was 16 in a diving accident and she is a prolific author and speaker and
00:35:49
Speaker
her pastor spent a lot of time with her when she was in the hospital for months following the accident and she was in traction and she was in deep deep grief over the fact that as a teenager she was being told
00:36:04
Speaker
she would never have voluntary use of her body below her neck. And she became a painter. She became an author. I got to watch her paint one day. Like she's a remarkable woman, but her pastor went on to write a book on suffering, which is a fabulous book. I can't remember the name right now, but he said,
00:36:28
Speaker
if you have someone in your life who has just experienced a loss I hope that if you purchase my book it will be with the full intention that they use it for lighting a fire that they will rip the pages and pour gasoline on them over wood
00:36:49
Speaker
while they sit around the fire until their tears stop flowing. And he was saying, don't use any of my truth on loss and suffering to try to numb their hearts to the violence of what they have endured. Instead, let them weep and use my words as firewood, as fodder for the flames.
00:37:19
Speaker
And it's the embodiment of Paul's words to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those
Community and Emotional Expression
00:37:27
Speaker
who mourn. I may have gotten that wrong, it may have been just, but the idea that the physical presence and the comfort there
00:37:35
Speaker
has so much transformative power. I mean, I'm watching in various contexts, I'm watching men experience that, like a bear hug from a brother is doing actual restorative soul work, meeting this deep need for connection and being seen and held, which I would have denied that I had. I would have said, no, I figured out how to
00:37:57
Speaker
get by without having a dad. I got through that all right. I'm strong. I'm the man of the house. I'm independent and all that. And it was a front. It was another way of putting on a mask, putting on a face. I've experienced much greater healing by taking the masks away. I've had people actually be empowered to call me out and say, when you go behind that wall of so many words,
00:38:23
Speaker
I don't feel as close to you, I don't see you, but when you let that feeling come out, when you admit fear or agony or anxiety or whatever,
00:38:35
Speaker
I relate to you. I want to be in your presence. And I've found that a welcoming thing where it used to be, oh, I'm never going to let you see that. Nobody's going to see this. And I resonate with, I think there's another part in the Weller book and maybe not be the quote you read, but people say often they don't want to go
00:38:54
Speaker
into the grief arena because they're afraid they'll never come out. That it will be so deep. Yes. I remember experiencing that when we had hard times in our marriage and hard times of loss with family members and things like that. I had that definite fear and the reason I was staying away from and keeping my heart busy and again still trying to solve the day and figure things out, researching whatever it was.
00:39:23
Speaker
is because I had that exact fear. Oh, if I open that wound, I'll never stop. It'll never stop. And the best thing to happen was, well, no choice but to go there. The raw feelings came. They just poured out. Might have been in the counseling room. It might have been by myself in a time of just, you know, weeping, agony, whatever, but to realize, oh, I didn't die. Well, because what you experienced instead was a container.
00:39:52
Speaker
in the form of the spirit himself or another person or group of people in which your pain could be held and not overflow the boundaries.
00:40:05
Speaker
And it's partly the idea of being able to hold these multiple things at the same time.
Grief, Gratitude, and Understanding Others
00:40:11
Speaker
Grief and gratitude can coexist. You don't just go to one or the other, but they're in the same Psalms where we read so many times. Give thanks for the grateful heart. I gave thanks to the Lord, all that. They're right side by side with those Psalms of lament and like, where are you, God?
00:40:30
Speaker
How long are you going to wait? Why are you suffering this? We only grieve what we have loved or what we wanted to love and did not get. And if we love, as C.S. Lewis said, our hearts will most certainly be broken. Yes. So it's the vulnerability in both of those emotions.
00:40:56
Speaker
Like I don't grieve in generalities. I grieve the specifics of what I have lost or what I have not received that I have deeply desired to get. I think that translates across a lot of things. I'm thinking of things that our society is dealing with, political chasms, racial divide, differences, things like that. The only thing that's changed my heart on any of that and I think made it more
00:41:25
Speaker
Receptive to an understanding of different people's experience is is grief is having access to their grief and hearing what they've been through And and really just grieving what's going on That I missed or that we didn't have any understanding of which is a whole nother probably not another podcast topic So
00:41:48
Speaker
I think that's probably enough for our episode on this topic. It will be a theme that we'll come back to. How do we hold, honestly, how do we make space for the full range of emotion and bodily responses that going through life brings us? If you hear us say nothing else on this podcast, I mean, we're gonna talk a lot about
00:42:12
Speaker
What does it look like to honestly access and wrestle with those emotions and in learning and maybe learning from from us and how we've different ways we've dealt with things but how to catch yourself before you short circuit the feeling process the grief process and that's something that we are extremely grateful for that we've had
00:42:32
Speaker
both people who've demonstrated to us and shown it to us and that's something we hope we can pass on to folks that we get to sit with as well.
Nurture Counseling Introduction
00:42:39
Speaker
Being a safe place for whatever you got, whatever you bring is something we can work with because God is, what's the another lowest quote, God whispers to us in our pleasures but he screams at us in our pain or what's that, you know, he's inviting us when we're feeling pain, when we are
00:42:57
Speaker
things are not going well, that's an invitation that we can bring that to God and He is a faithful caregiver and He can be that safe container and maybe we as the body can learn how to be better conduits of that for Him. Amen. Amen. See you next time.
00:43:15
Speaker
The Surviving Saturday podcast is brought to you by Nurture Counseling PLLC, a counseling teaching and training center based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We help families flourish one story at a time. Nurture Counseling provides counseling, counseling intensive for couples, conflict resolution coaching, story work groups, seminars, workshops, and retreats to provide a safe and welcoming context for exploring the agonizing experiences of pain, brokenness, and evil that disrupt our lives.
00:43:42
Speaker
and that God often uses to nurture deeper trust and intimacy with Him and with each other. You can find us online at www.nurturecounseling.net