Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Goodpain Episode No. 009: Loss, Grief, & Recovery - Uncanny Emergence of Collaboration
106 Plays2 months ago
This conversation explores collaboration as an evolving response to trauma that emerges after working through denial and defiance. Jeremy & Tyler examine how true collaboration requires releasing narratives of control while choosing how to show up authentically. The discussion emphasizes that collaboration isn't about achieving a final state but about daily choices of presence and engagement.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
As a content warning, this episode discusses trauma, healing, grief involving a child, and catastrophe. Due to the sensitive nature of this topic, please take care of yourself. I'm Jeremy. And I'm Tyler. Welcome to Good Pain, where we talk about life's true intensities without pretending they're easy solve.
00:00:19
Speaker
What if the things
The Wisdom in Challenges
00:00:20
Speaker
we're told to fix, optimize, or get over are actually where the real wisdom lives? Each week we gather for the kind of honest conversations you desire to be a part of more often about the relentless demands, the unexpected grief, the quiet victories, and everything in between. Because maybe, just maybe, the answer isn't to limit the hard stuff, it's to find the good in it. Welcome to the conversation.
Creative Process and Doubt
00:00:54
Speaker
This was the most challenging episode pull together. was all over the place, particularly through the middle of the conversation. was speaking at a philosophical level that wasn't connecting with me.
00:01:09
Speaker
And the best way I can describe this editing journey that took place for this episode is to reference other creative outlets that Tiffany and I have pursued. In any of these projects, there's always a point where I don't believe the end vision is going to come to fruition, that it's going to be realized.
00:01:32
Speaker
After nearly every photography session Tiffany and I have done, we've each had the feeling of, did we get what we needed? Is there enough substance to work with? Did we honor the client that we were working with so they'd be delighted?
00:01:47
Speaker
There are times when we are going through the editing process, reviewing what we captured, and a moment of dread meets us. There is a
Collaborating with Despair
00:01:56
Speaker
point also in building furniture and woodworking where the mountain feels too high to climb.
00:02:01
Speaker
I have the vision. i have the plans. I have the materials. But imagining a future where the vision becomes reality, where it comes out of my head and I actually have produced what I thought I was going to produce, that reality seems near impossible.
00:02:16
Speaker
there's this dip in motivation where my belief that I can dig out and get to the end becomes almost non-existent. I don't have that belief. And that's usually when despair sets in.
00:02:27
Speaker
In reality, standing at the end of these projects, I find I've never been disappointed. There have certainly been close calls. There have been moments where I have had to surprise myself by what was possible.
00:02:40
Speaker
And many times, these memories of pulling things out of a hat in some cases have little to do in reminding me on the next project, again, when despair shows up, when dread shows up, that I've been here before.
00:02:54
Speaker
Instead, what I've had to learn is to collaborate with the despair, that it's going to show up. The loss of motivation is going to show up. And instead of trusting my rationale or ability to perceive that arrival or finishing point as evidence that I should persevere, I've had to learn to trust the process.
00:03:15
Speaker
It's ironic that this episode was about collaboration in the process of editing it. I was being asked the same thing. There was a point when I actually considered binning the entire session and moving on to the next one, believing that what I was working with was too far gone, that nothing could be salvaged.
00:03:35
Speaker
And I'm glad I didn't. At one section of the conversation, Jeremy and I turned toward real substance. And interestingly, when it got to this point, I realized it mirrored something else.
00:03:46
Speaker
The struggle to discuss the topic of collaboration in this episode is the general struggle with finding balance between the personal and the collective experience that happens during catastrophe, crisis, trauma, and all forms of intensity.
Claire's Injury and Grief
00:04:03
Speaker
When Claire was injured, time stopped. My world shattered. The world itself cracked. That word surreal is used as a placeholder because there are no words to describe that experience.
00:04:17
Speaker
When I caught my breath and began to engage with what needed to be done, Our Clear's Journal, the blog that I used to convey what was happening, it really ended up being a reflection of what was happening inside of me in my own felt and experienced isolation.
00:04:33
Speaker
One of the deepest struggles was knowing how alone in mine and Tiffany's pain and suffering we were. And what compounded that grief was the fear that Claire was alone, lost in the dark, struggling to escape and finding no way out.
00:04:48
Speaker
That's part of that compounding effect of pain and suffering. Being in proximity to others' pain and suffering can make ours feel bigger.
Amplifying Pain and Offering Support
00:04:58
Speaker
Jeremy and I discussed these mechanics in the episode, not as directly as what I'm describing right now and not as prescriptively.
00:05:05
Speaker
We talk about it through the lens of help. We discuss how this felt compounding effect of pain and suffering can sometimes drive us to offer help that is less about the person bearing the direct intensity and more about our ability to sit as witnesses to that bearing the intensity.
00:05:22
Speaker
The people who came around us had to to bear witness to our intensity. And in the same way I wanted to take away what Claire was enduring, others wanted to do that for me. But I could not carry it for Claire.
00:05:33
Speaker
As much as I bargained, pleaded, and threatened to give me that burden, just give it to me. Don't make her carry it. It did not change the fact that she had to bear it.
00:05:45
Speaker
This three-year-old with bouncy blonde hair, blue eyes, and small stature had to bear a weight greater than I had ever born. This episode is about how we collaborate with that fact.
00:05:59
Speaker
It is about how after we thrash and fight against the fact, denying and defying that reality, we question, is there anything left? I believe there is something left because it was always there to begin with.
00:06:12
Speaker
We can collaborate with it, but it demands that we turn and face something beyond reality. It demands we turn and face ourselves. The discussion is as clean as I could make it, and no more, because the turning and facing ourselves is not linear.
00:06:29
Speaker
As much as we want our growth to be like ourselves, that photo session or like this episode or like a woodworking project, building furniture, that we start with a plan, we move through the strategy, we move through the process, and we have an arrival point, end point.
00:06:44
Speaker
As much as we want growth to have that beginning and an arrival, it doubles back on itself because it is messy and it is unclean. We start the episode with a reminder conversation around denial and defiance before moving into the discussion on collaboration, using one of my favorite movies as as a metaphor for that collaboration.
00:07:03
Speaker
And it does get messy in the middle. I am going to leave that in. If you can't handle the messiness, I'm going to encourage you to skip forward to the last 20 or 25 minutes of the episode because it does get back to some degree of clarity.
00:07:16
Speaker
And I know I'm violating some degree of best practices within audio, which is to make it clean and make sure that people don't have to sift through the messiness. I can't do that in good faith.
00:07:28
Speaker
Because the topic that we're talking about is messy. It's not clean. And at the very least, some of what we need to do is to build up the musculature of sitting with the messy and the unclean because that's exactly what we need to learn in the face of intensity is to not invade, to not inflict violence or harm on those who are sitting within the messiness and that we are strong enough to sit there with them.
00:07:53
Speaker
sit with it walk through it with me, laugh at it kind of the nonsense that emerges in the middle, because I do. I invite you to do the same.
00:08:05
Speaker
Today, I was reminded of the last time we spoke where your quote that I wrote down feverishly as you were talking was, quote, denial and defiance are part of the same team who develop authenticity. And I was wondering if you could tell me more about that because that sounded too juicy to let go. and i was hoping could tell me more. Going back
Denial, Defiance, and Authenticity
00:08:25
Speaker
to...
00:08:25
Speaker
What we're talking about denial and defiance, one thing I think we've endeavored or tried to to come across is is that despite the fact that oftentimes denial and defiance are seen as negatives, as things that we shouldn't be doing. And there were times where both Tiffany and I recognized where denial and defiance weren't serving us in our goals.
00:08:45
Speaker
There were times where denial and defiance keeps me from asking the right questions I should be asking. Yeah. There was a point where Claire needed to go to a GI doctor. This was about little after two and a half years after her original and injury. We got a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis with her, which was something that is genetic.
00:09:08
Speaker
So either Tiffany and I were the carriers, but it usually is, you know lies dormant. Then Claire got it um in dramatic fashion. um So dramatic that when we rushed her to the emergency room, we were told that she was somewhere between four and six hours of bleeding out. um She had lost so much blood. Oh my gosh.
00:09:27
Speaker
And we had been in talks with the doctors trying to to gauge, you know, is this something we should be taking her in for? So this was a new thing. Two and a half years after being introduced to this entirely new world of of brain injury, now we've got this other diagnosis, which is a chronic condition. And we started a new two-year process of figuring out how to treat it clinically, what it meant for us. during that time, there was a visit that Tiffany needed to make to this gastroenterologist.
00:09:59
Speaker
I wasn't able to attend. when Tiffany was there, she did not ask the questions that she wishes she would have. sure She had the things inside of her that were prompting. In fact, after we debriefed later on, she said, i you know, I thought of those things. I wish I would have asked. Here's the reasons why I didn't. yeah And some of those reasons ah were anchored to denial and defiance.
00:10:24
Speaker
And then there were some questions that she felt prompting her to be asked that she defied. those things, that inner teacher inside of her just prompting Just silencing that internal voice. Yeah. Okay. Now what that led to was, and we we had similar things and similar similar examples when it came Claire's skeletal system. Claire has had scoliosis and kyphosis surgery to correct Curvature of the spine, fairly invasive.
00:10:51
Speaker
um She's had reconstruction of both of her hips. So a lot of these things, Tiffany looks at the degree that it got to or the pace that it got to. And both she and I have reflected on things that we wish we would have said earlier. And we have the reasons why we didn't say those things. Mm Some of those involve not knowing how to ask certain questions. Some of them involve the denial and defiance, which is we didn't we weren't in a maturation phase that allows us to recognize that it was denial defiance keeping us from from taking some action.
00:11:29
Speaker
When we started to recognize that, when we got that hindsight, when we started looking back and we went through various stages of shame and grief and mourning that we didn't see that then, we could only see it afterwards oftentimes, even if we were being prompted ask questions, we didn't have the musculature built yet to to say, oh, it's denial and defiance that's keeping me from asking that.
00:11:52
Speaker
It's instead denial and defiance was hiding as either imposter syndrome or inadequacy or all these other things that keep us from doing what we now know we wish we would have done. And I think this is where the authenticity piece comes in is that when we look back at those things, some of those intuitive pieces, some of those questions that popped up, we're far more authentic about the values, about the people we are and we wanted to be than the denial or defiance or the imposter syndrome or the other voices in our heads that were convincing us not to ask those questions. Those were just illusions.
00:12:30
Speaker
Tiffany tells a story where she goes in to talk to a doctor and the doctor is explaining something to her. And Tiffany is nodding her head. Yes, I understand. Yes, I understand. Yes, I understand.
00:12:42
Speaker
The doctor keeps going. Yes, I understand. Yes, I understand. Gets to the end. What questions do you have? I don't have any questions. I don't know I don't know. She comes home and talks with me. And Tiffany has lots of questions.
00:12:55
Speaker
I have lots of questions. Yeah. Tiffany didn't really understand what the doctor was saying. Yeah. But Tiffany's- Totally understandable, right? So many things are going on in that moment, sitting in that doctor's room that we are not aware of. One of which is Tiffany saying, she's explaining to me things as if I am supposed to know what these mean.
00:13:16
Speaker
If I don't know what these mean, it's not, it doesn't have to do with the doctor yeah not being good at explaining things or speaking in a jargon. or at a level yeah that is not appropriate, it's Tiffany has done something wrong. She's missed something. That guilt of not being able to keep up or understand the same as a medical professional. Yes, I am Claire's parent. I should know these things.
00:13:40
Speaker
That narrative that just starts going and going and going. go That narrative is not real. yeah And yet it is real. It is very real because it drives us to make decisions that are in conflict with who we actually need to be, who we want to be.
00:13:54
Speaker
When Tiffany now will explain to you or to somebody else who's going through this and says, you are the expert here on your child and you saying, I don't understand anything that you just said. And that might be because any number of reasons. It doesn't matter why.
00:14:11
Speaker
But I need you to help me understand in a way that continues to keep me as the best caregiver for my daughter that recognizes that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it is me. And in a month from now, you get another 30 minutes with her. But that entire intervening time, i am there. And the only way for me to be that best caregiver is for you to actually be an ally to me. Mm-hmm. And there's something that happens when we let go of the denial and defiance, the imposter syndrome, the fear that's in that, and we find our voice.
00:14:46
Speaker
And yet sometimes what is needed is denial and defiance to be the first tools that we reach after. to show themselves to to be in conflict with who it is we actually need it to be so that we actually can show up. I can't say that Tiffany and I would love to believe that had we known things, had we not given into denial defiance, had we been more mature, whatever the reasons were, would we have been able to avoid Claire having surgery on her hips, Claire having surgery on her back? I don't know. Right.
00:15:17
Speaker
But when I look back and I say, what was required in order to be who we are now, to be that, that denial and defiance was a teacher to us. What happened was a teacher to us. And we take those things very seriously as parents because yes, we are caregivers. They are in our care. We are responsible for that, but we are not perfect.
00:15:37
Speaker
And we only know what we know. And that is that can be about the medical field, about the healthcare care system. That can be about the doctors. it can be about the care of Claire. It can be about the things we see we don't see.
00:15:47
Speaker
yeah But even more than that, there is so much about ourselves that we don't know already. Now throw this kind of a crucible into it and all kinds of new things are coming up that we feel we've never seen before, even about ourselves.
00:16:02
Speaker
And we're expected to know how we're going to respond in every single situation. No. Yeah.
Seeking Help and Emotional Complexity
00:16:08
Speaker
We do not. This is where we as parents, as advocates, would turn the lens then on doctors, on nurses, on those who are in these spaces, who see this on a more frequent basis, and say, you want to be a more authentic version of yourself?
00:16:23
Speaker
Stop denying the fact that parents did not go to 12 years of education. They haven't seen all the things that everybody's fully baked and able to come in and have a conversation with you as a professional.
00:16:36
Speaker
at the same level that you have with someone you went to school with or somebody who who you work with. So I think there's enough feedback that comes from this world of pain, suffering, trauma, of medical, of the medical world, of the of the healthcare system that's being given back to both parents and to caregivers.
00:16:55
Speaker
Parents, you are a bigger voice than you think you are. You can use it. On the other side, with doctors, you don't know as much as you think you do, including your belief that parents know more than they do.
00:17:11
Speaker
right And that needs to inspire some degree of humility in both parties. I think that's the authenticity that comes out. When we believe that denial and defiance are going to get us something, that are either gonna protect us or it's going to to get us back to something that we want.
00:17:28
Speaker
That's a form of control complex, and it doesn't work. But what does it give rise to? As control complexes give rise to the continued belief that more things are in our control, that we can just, through knowledge, through sheer grit and determination, wrestle things to the ground, we get to a point where we say, it's too much.
00:17:47
Speaker
I am collapsing under this weight. And there's something beautiful that comes out of that phrase. It's too much. I can't carry this on my own is that we're humbled. Humility comes in and we're able to say to that doctor who's explaining in a different language, it's, this is too much. I cannot carry all of this. Can you please help me carry this by being, giving me the kindness of explaining it to me like I'm five That's an authentic, honest, vulnerable question.
00:18:17
Speaker
For that reason, I celebrate denial and defiance. i my My only hope is work faster because time is passing during all of these things. And that's the big thing that we're most concerned about is could we have avoided Claire having a a hip surgery if denial and defiance worked its worked faster? I don't know.
00:18:36
Speaker
I don't have answers to those. and we've covered that that hindsight thinking. yeah But um that's that's a big part, I think, of why they are not bad in my mind. They can yield some some outcomes we don't want. And yet they are active in teaching us who we need to be for the long haul, not just to survive through the next week.
00:18:57
Speaker
Thank you for bringing us back and helping me understand that better. It reminds me of a story that my neighbor, his name his first name is Scott, we were having a funny conversation about being only children and he kind of blew my mind with a statement, but he said that, you know, it took me a lot.
00:19:12
Speaker
I'm pretty handy and I can fix things. And he has a full house of a wife and kids and things are breaking all the time, but he rarely reaches out. And I'm more than happy to go over and, Hey, you could borrow this tool or let me show you how to use this.
00:19:25
Speaker
He never does that. And the reason he explained it was so clear said, well, yeah, but I'm an only child. We don't ask for help. And it's like, Oh yes, there it is. That's why that was for the last 40 plus years. I'm thinking, yeah, I could have probably gotten some assistance in this area that I need help in, but I just don't think to ask.
00:19:41
Speaker
What do you think are of the talk tracks that an only child or someone like that? What are they telling themselves? Oh, I know that I can speak to this. I will figure this out. People do this. This is not a new problem. Smarter people have figured out the solution.
00:19:53
Speaker
I'm sure I can just figure it. I'm sure I'll YouTube it. Oh, whatever. And so that's, that's it. every person I've talked to who's gone through trauma or guilt or anything, yeah it's the same things. They're looking internally in a big way.
00:20:06
Speaker
We don't know how to ask for help. yeah Reading a book on asking for help, it's it's it's so comical because everything you just said is yeah people have figured this out on their own and then they hear something like, just ask for help. Oh, well, how do I do that? Well, people have figured this out. They've watched a YouTube video. We do the same thing.
00:20:25
Speaker
Yes. An absurd circular problem. Yes. We've spoken about Tony Robbins, but he's a big believer of doing a self inventory. And when he starts to feel something new, stressful, whatever it is, and he quickly goes through a checklist. He said, wait a second, this is not a new thought. Somebody else is that's smarter than me has already gone through all the suffering. I'll just look up what they did. And then that's the answer. And it's so clear and it's unemotional and it's brilliant.
00:20:50
Speaker
But I think having the humility to recognize that is the biggest challenge as with most things. Yes. Yeah, I agree. i agree. We're very complex and simple at the same time, aren't we? Absolutely. All right. All right. Let's get back into today then. So as we do, you have found inspiration in a movie that you've seen. Can you share what you've seen lately to get us on the track of what we're going to talk about today? Yeah, this is,
Living with Life's Truths
00:21:11
Speaker
you know, today we're going to talk about collaboration. That's a continuation from, as I've mentioned, a quote that that Parker Palmer uses is that are some of our biggest questions in life, we have to decide oftentimes multiple times, are we going to live in denial, defiance, or collaboration with this? The example he uses is on the biggest unifier for all of us is that that we are going to die.
00:21:36
Speaker
Sometimes we are so young and not aware of that, that we don't even know that the question is there yet. um But as we age, as we have trauma, as we come into instances where we experience loss, whether it's death, whether it is a daughter who is a near drowning victim, whether it is a diagnosis of cancer, whether like the diagnosis itself, not whether it's living with a chronic condition, whether it is having your heart broken, right?
00:22:03
Speaker
all these different things about life have so much thematic commonality amongst them that asking the question, am I, these are truths. There's a, there's a truth here. Am I going to live in denial, defiance or collaboration with that truth? And the movie that for me, when I've watched it, it resonates with these, this picture of collaboration is ah the most recent version. There's only two versions of it, but is Ben Stiller's version of, of Walter Mitty. Oh, Oh yeah. Yeah. They did have a visual didn't they?
00:22:34
Speaker
They did with Danny Kaye. I think it was, almost want to go back and rewatch that. I haven't watched that one in a very long time. I've never seen it. Yeah. I've been intrigued after learning that the one that I saw with Ben Stiller was not the original. Yeah.
00:22:46
Speaker
Some similar themes, but from what I remember, I feel the Ben Stiller version is going to be the superior version. version when I go back and watch it partially because it just holds so much yeah weight in in such a, so there's such gravity to this movie in a way that asks a couple of these core questions. Are you going to live your life in denial, defiance and collaboration is one that is denial and defiance have a different view in this movie. Walter Mitty is set out as having a massively overactive imagination. Yeah.
00:23:19
Speaker
The way Ben Stiller brings it to to life is really enjoyable. yeah It's one I resonate with quite a bit because i would argue my imagination can go 10 rounds with just about anybody's and come out the victor. The things that I imagine are absurd in the minds of many.
00:23:35
Speaker
The premise is there's so much more in the world to be experienced, even if it's just in your imagination. And what he finds, though, is is that he has developed a sense of apathy because how his denial shows up, how his defiance potentially shows up, is that he's resigned to this is the way things are. yeah He has resigned to the fact that he's been in a job for a really long time. He lost his dad in an early age and he's had to take on a more mature and responsible role for his family.
00:24:07
Speaker
hmm. They do such a good job of pointing to the sacrifices that he had make the dreams he had to let go of. Yeah. He had a Mohawk when he was growing up and his dad shaved his head for him so that he could go compete. And he was pretty good at that. Right.
00:24:22
Speaker
Then his dad dies unexpectedly and he has to go get a job and he was planning to go travel. He never did that. Like, You start going down this list and you just say, it's a picture of how not only the world and events that are outside of ourselves beat us into a form of submission that leaves us resigned, that leads us to deny that the world is what we make it, that that our dreams are possible. Yeah. It brings us to a point where within this story of asking the question, what does living mean?
00:24:55
Speaker
The movie ends up giving a picture of collaboration. It's nothing that Walter Mitty does in this movie is self-directed.
00:25:05
Speaker
It's a mystery. Yeah. And he's following clues. He was prompted to take that first step. Yes. Or that leap of, I would still throw into, for a member from the story, a strong sense of obligation to to solve that mystery ah by somebody who he felt obligation and devotion to. Yes.
00:25:24
Speaker
And it was kind of amazing, the twists and turns that he made along the way. What you just brought up is a scene that I don't know if it's, I don't think it's failed to get me at the very least choked up.
00:25:35
Speaker
Yeah. Because what happens in that scene when sean Penn's character in the still photograph yeah beckons to him, like that's a figment of his imagination that beckons him into taking that first step. I don't know, after you experience tragedy and suffering and grief and trauma, in early stages, I don't think any of us really feel like ever taking a step again. yeah And we start moving through this feeling of survivorship where we're we're going through the motions, we're doing what we can, we're trying to stay present. Tiffany and are trying to stay present for our other two kids.
00:26:14
Speaker
yeah We're working to stay engaged. We're exhausted. emotionally, psychologically, physically, I lost 15 pounds in three weeks. wow And it wasn't because I was not eating.
00:26:26
Speaker
I wasn't eating as much. Everything around us at that point is saying like, this is it. wow If anything, life has ended. And there's a truth to that. There is a truth to that. Esther Perel, when she talks about infidelity in her TED Talk, mentions that that when infidelity occurs, it's not a matter necessarily of deciding whether we can save our marriage. It's a matter of, and I'm paraphrasing her here, what she essentially says is, you had a marriage, that marriage ended. The question now is, do we want to have a second marriage? Yeah. I think for us, that's been really difficult early on. That was really difficult early on with Claire's because the fight at that point was get Claire back. Keeping things the same.
00:27:10
Speaker
Yeah. how How close to what the way things were can we get? Yeah. What does that return going to look like? And what's it, what is it going to take? I think that's where some of the denial and defiance also creeps in is, is that as things start to emerge that point more and more towards things are going to be different. It's not going to be the same.
00:27:28
Speaker
that, well, I'll show you is one of the reactions or nope, I'm not going to let that happen. That's, this is not happening. And, and, and there were times when we needed that to get through those days, but there was a point and I don't think either Tiffany and i can say ah what that point was exactly. i think we can point to a couple of things. One is, is that I think when we got close to about two years, we understood that Claire's not getting better at the rate that ah we would have hoped.
00:28:00
Speaker
And our options pragmatically or more practically, we're just getting slimmer and slimmer. It's like, okay, we've tried this. It didn't work this. We tried. It didn't work as well. For me, in talking to other people that have gone through ah cancer diagnosis or chronic condition diagnosis or anything that is involving a sense of loss, we all go through this period of trying to get our bearings straight on what is the general consensus for what this trajectory is going to look like for recovery or what we can get back to and tell us so that we have something that we can run up against and fight against and prove wrong.
00:28:40
Speaker
um or tell us so that we can either get expectations more closely aligned and and self-manage disappointment or grief or our mourning. On the other side of that is seeing that this isn't going away.
00:28:54
Speaker
All my efforts to try and wrestle it into control or point it in the direction I want it to go, none of that works.
Embracing Grief and Collaboration
00:29:02
Speaker
yeah And so what am I left with?
00:29:04
Speaker
What I found for me at times was shutting up and listening, getting better at observing and seeing what was going on moved me in a direction i didn't expect me to go.
00:29:17
Speaker
i have to interrupt for a second. yeah You said getting better at observing. You've always struck me as a very observant fellow. However, can you tell us more about what it is you observed? My ability to observe has typically always been in service to some end game. Okay.
00:29:32
Speaker
To a reality you've already known or an expectation of. Yeah, whether whether it's you know being a chief strategy officer for companies and a business, yeah I'm hired for that pattern recognition. I'm hired for observing and saying, here's where we want to end up.
00:29:46
Speaker
yeah Here's where we are. Yeah, how did we get there? and we're gonna plot our path and I'm gonna observe the things. There was a company that I worked for where early on with the board, I went and talked with them and I told them, here's the path we're going to take. And if we see these three things show up, we shouldn't take that path.
00:30:03
Speaker
In fact, we should do something else. And sure enough, those three things popped up and we took that path and it it was it was beneficial for all of the stakeholders. In the world of business, in the world of navigating systems, um my skill set is really well placed. yeah What this goes to, the observation is not the things that are going on outside of me. It's the things that are going on inside of me and my reaction to them, sometimes prompted by the things that are outside of me.
00:30:34
Speaker
And what this pushed me towards was there's an outstanding question you and I have discussed before that that I am more and more reticent to answer in the way that I did 13 and 14 years ago. And a big part of that is because I see where we are more collaboratively.
00:30:53
Speaker
That question is, if you had one wish, what would you wish? Talked about this before about the butterfly effect. But I think collaboration goes beyond just the fear of what if it cascades a whole bunch of changes.
00:31:06
Speaker
If i were to wish that Claire never got hurt, and I'd get back in my time machine and I'd go back to 1985. It's not the world being worse. It's not the world being better. Yeah.
00:31:19
Speaker
I don't have the faculties for seeing inside Autumn's and Heidi's and Claire's and Tiffany's reality and what what they are experiencing. I can only see inside mine.
00:31:32
Speaker
And the more I learn to collaborate with how myself shows up and bumps into my family's, what they're going through. regardless of whether we change things in the past or not. it It doesn't change the fact that for me, I have to collaborate with people wherever they are. I have to collaborate with a 19 year old who sees the world exclusively through her lens. I have to collaborate with Claire who has a story that says, I'm trapped in my body. i cannot escape. I cannot express and understand that there's aspects of that that are true. And there's aspects of it that are that are not true.
00:32:12
Speaker
And when i start looking less tightly to the idea that there's a perfect path, perfect decisions that need to be made, that I need to just look for the patterns, that I need to get enough knowledge so that we can avoid discomfort, so we can avoid the pain, so that we can fix things.
00:32:28
Speaker
Yeah. All of that activity is not collaborative activity. It is not recognizing that there is a much bigger world. There's more things at play that I can never account for, nor should I try to account for. And I think that's the the danger that I see not only within myself, but within a lot of the promise that we have with technology, with the the world that we've created now is this inherent belief that if we were able to develop an algorithm that accounted for every single possibility, there's this inherent belief that you do that and there's this pot of gold. What does that pot of gold look like?
00:33:09
Speaker
And where I am is I don't see perfection as the aim. I don't see not dying as the aim. The grief and the pain and the suffering that was granted to me is something I get to carry for my daughter. If she didn't have dreams, then that grief and pain and mourning means nothing. It's the fact that she was three years old. It's the fact that she had the world in front of her. It's the fact that we had big dreams for her.
00:33:38
Speaker
It's the fact that all those things existed that makes our pain and suffering so deep, so meaningful. Without those things, yeah what does what is what is happiness? What is worth living for? I'm at the point collaboratively where I say it has to exist.
00:33:58
Speaker
Sit tight and we'll be right back after this short break.
00:34:09
Speaker
Championship Sunday, final hole. Our leader stands over his bag. This is the moment that separates champions from everyone else.
00:34:20
Speaker
He reaches in, pulls out the familiar companions. Anxiety, fear, defensiveness, the old tools. But watch this, the head shake, the gentle return to the bag.
00:34:35
Speaker
Now what's he searching for? Ah, yes, he's found it. GoodPainCo.com emerges like a trusted cat This champion knows that real growth happens when we lean into difficulty, not away from it.
00:34:50
Speaker
He's walking in the green now, listening to internal podcasts about resilience, referencing newsletter wisdom about trusting the process, the setup, vulnerability in his stance, no armor, no pretense.
00:35:07
Speaker
Just authentic presence with the challenge. Stroke, smooth, confident, and it's tracking. It's tracking. Yes, pure magic.
00:35:20
Speaker
And what's he launching into the crowd? Digital shares, podcast reviews, newsletter subscriptions, the gift that keeps giving. Join the journey at goodpainco.com.
00:35:32
Speaker
Subscribe, share, review. Because champions aren't made by avoiding pain. They're forged by choosing to grow through it. Well done, sir.
00:35:45
Speaker
Welcome back to the rest of the episode.
Concert Experience and Embracing Moments
00:35:48
Speaker
Welcome.
00:35:52
Speaker
I would never say, oh, you want to be happy? Well, I'm going to wish calamity upon you so that you can learn what happiness is. If I can look at the trauma of what happened to Claire, the life that she's led, there's a lot of people that would define all of those things as bad. That's not only a disservice to Claire and to Tiffany and the work and effort she puts in to make Claire's life rich, but Which she, yes, comparatively speaking, lots of people are going to say it's it's not rich. She can't walk. She can't talk. I will gladly engage in a conversation that says, bring me up 10 people, nine of whom walk, one of which is Claire. And I will show you how Claire's life is richer than the people who can walk.
00:36:39
Speaker
run, eat whatever they want. Why? i coach these people. They call me telling me that their life is meaningless. They tell me their life is already dead and they're trying to resurrect themselves.
00:36:52
Speaker
When we start getting to this question of what are we doing? living for? are we living collaboratively? It comes a point when we say we're going to start rebuilding, that life doesn't need to be perfect in order to have dreams again, that you can pick up those pieces and assemble new ones, that you can that you may discard all of those and build something completely new.
00:37:14
Speaker
For us, we had to get to a point where we had exhausted all of our efforts, including the efforts that were tied to denial and defiance, to be brought to a point that said, what are we waiting for? What are we waiting for to get back to living, to join again? There's not this ceremony that you go to and says, today i have now committed to living collaboratively. I will no longer live in denial, defiance or whatever else. yeah it It is one that is a, that is now a companion that says, what am I going to do today?
00:37:46
Speaker
I don't know what's going to come. Am I going to choose that today is going to be a good day based on it being better than it was yesterday or better than what I believe it's going to be tomorrow?
00:37:57
Speaker
Living in collaboration is reminding myself that regardless of what happens today, i have a choice. I have a choice on who I show up as for myself and then for my family. And we went to a concert at Red Rocks.
00:38:12
Speaker
You want to talk about something that's a positive is is that having a child who is permanently disabled, when we choose to go to concerts, we get this benefit of being in the front row. Right. And so we have seen a handful of concerts and standup shows at Red Rocks from the front row. For those of you who are not familiar with this venue, this is like the most coveted place to see ah musical concert, I think is the one that peaks. And every musician that's ever played there and asked, where's your favorite place to play? Everybody hands down says, oh, it's Red Rocks. Why would you even ask such a stupid question? yes So you're living in a great spot of that.
00:38:50
Speaker
The downside, most of the shows that we like to go see there, for some reason, end up being in April, late April. Oh. And in the state of Colorado. Yes. You're rolling the dice. Yeah, that's right.
00:39:01
Speaker
The dice have not really come up exuberantly positive for us. Like, this is perfect. Yeah. The other piece we should probably mention for those that are not from this. It's outdoors. It is an outdoor video. Yes.
00:39:12
Speaker
The most recent event we went to out there, we're watching the weather forecast. This is one we've been really looking forward to. Yeah, of course. yeah There's two opening acts and then the headliner.
00:39:24
Speaker
They have a special place for our family. We all love the music. And finally, the day gets here and it is scheduled to be 28 degrees with a mix of rain and snow yeah and winds pushing 30 miles an hour. i mean, we're teetering on the edge of the venue saying this is too much. We can't do this.
00:39:47
Speaker
um Even though the venue says, you know, rain or shine. Yeah, we're here. I'll spoil a story here. I loved that night. Oh, yeah. You can set aside the idea of us creating a memory that we won't forget because of the elements, because of all those things. yeah But what I remember the most is being there, reminding myself that I'm alive.
00:40:07
Speaker
I'm with my daughters. yeah This is an adventure. And we didn't know what was going to happen. We planned our best. We had hand warmers, we had foot warmers, we had ponchos, all these different things. yeah We still were all, there were pieces of our body that were saying, it's, we're checking the clock. Is it about that time where we're going to have to go thaw out because otherwise we're going making an emergency room visit for pieces to be trimmed off? my gosh. Oh man.
00:40:34
Speaker
I loved embracing the fact that my choice to celebrate this, to enjoy this, has an impact on Tiffany's, on Autumn's, on Heidi's, on Claire's experience.
00:40:49
Speaker
I get to choose that every day, regardless of what comes. There's going to be days where I'm going to fail, and there's going to be days where I'm going to do well, and then most of the days are going to be some mix of that.
00:41:02
Speaker
We referenced it last night. We referenced that because we ended up going out to another event that was below 15 degrees in celebration of the holiday. wow And it was the same thing.
00:41:14
Speaker
I cherish that memory. I cherish the idea of imparting a legacy that when Autumn thinks of that night at Red Rocks, She remembers the band. She remembers the conditions. But what she remembers is her dad choosing to be happy. Wow. That's a great gift to give to your children is to recognize that mindset is everything and you can get through this and they will fold that into their lives. I'm guessing any hard challenge that they face. I hope so.
00:41:44
Speaker
Even if they didn't, I look at that now and I just shake my head at all the times that I have particularly growing up in America with all of the first world problems that we have. I look back and I laugh.
00:41:59
Speaker
I'm not laughing in the context of, well, I mean, compared to Claire getting hurt, I should have been happy all of the time. that I think that's something that is another shame and guilt spiral that we get into. Who am I to be depressed? Who am I to complain that my $75 steak, my $50 steak, whatever, inflation is big right now. So I really don't have a gauge on the price of steak anymore. I haven't eaten a steak in the last 35 years. So I too don't have a reference here.
00:42:30
Speaker
ah This person who prepared it for me and I'm sitting in this restaurant and it's just a slight shade too dark and it needs to be a little bit more pink and this ruined my night. The the absurdity you're proposing here.
00:42:42
Speaker
That is absurd. We all know it's absurd. And yet- Some of us don't. But what we don't need to do is take the absurdity and the then take the fact that tragedies like what happened to Claire, cancer diagnoses, all these, use that now as a bludgeon for saying, how dare you feel that way about your state?
00:43:03
Speaker
What happens within me happens within me. yeah The emotions, the reactions that come up, the pain, the suffering, it's attached to something. Mm-hmm. I don't need to shame and guilt or deny that I'm a good person or or defy that these things are coming up inside of me when when I'm disappointed by my steak being cooked too much.
00:43:25
Speaker
think it's hilarious that I can, we are using the steak as a metaphor. That's my own doing. Part of the reason why I'm feeling this is is that we want to reduce living to only the virtue, only only the ah highbrow, only the what is real. and And I'm sorry, but what comes up when somebody who might have been looking forward to a night off of not having to cook, of who's come off of a day when and maybe it was just a really rough day, yeah when that reaction comes up, it's real for them. Right.
00:43:57
Speaker
And it doesn't need to be shamed or guilted away simply because there's more suffering somewhere in the world. But what does that mean? It means that that question of curiosity of saying, where's that coming from? This doesn't reflect who I am. This person who brought this steak to me, the person who cooked it in the back, who accidentally made a mistake or is just not to the level of competence that it should be, whatever the reasons are. Yeah. I don't want to be that person who turns around and shames that person for getting it wrong. I don't want to be that person. I want to be the person who understanding. And sometimes I can do that and sometimes I can't.
00:44:36
Speaker
I don't know if I would have gotten, um'm i'm equivocating too much here. I know I wouldn't have gotten here without what happened to Claire. Wow. Because that's the path. And I get a choice of this path that I'm on. I can either live in denial, defiance, or collaboration with it, but it is my path. And what comes up for me is what comes up for me at any given time. What comes up for you, regardless of how small it is, it's a piece of you. The subjective nature, i think you're describing how personal all of these choices are.
00:45:10
Speaker
given the option, people are far better off by having the choice, making a choice because it advances to whatever the next thing is going to be. And you've talked about that quite a bit. and i thought I've always found that to be incredibly generous with respect to this experience for your family, but also how you've internalized it and what you've been able to do with your outlook.
00:45:29
Speaker
There's some pieces along the way, though, that I think I want to talk more about with respect to this collaboration piece and Tell us more about how that started when you recognized, you kind of gave some date markers about about two years in, we started to realize that there's a certain level of acceptance of some of the flowery visions of what this could be went away and it started to change and take different shape. But in that moment, I think I'm assuming here that the backfilling of where that loss of expectation to go back to but how things used to be, there's backfilling with
00:46:04
Speaker
people that you were able to lean on and have collaborative experience with that helped you get to the next day or the next step or the next part of this process. It's difficult to define it linearly, the the process.
00:46:17
Speaker
I believe that. I'll touch on some of the highlights. We've covered the initial events, the catalyst and the path that puts me on and the others that are a part of the family and all of the people that are involved. And we're now on this path.
00:46:31
Speaker
The opportunity for reflection is very limited at this point. But the reason I go back, there's things about being on that path and not even being cognitively aware of it at the time. Yeah, totally.
00:46:43
Speaker
That has really come back and been like, oh, now we can look back and see, wow, there was... There were things going on that we were not aware of at that point. And so I think it starts early.
00:46:54
Speaker
Okay. For me, it started very early. And there are a lot of different modalities for addressing trauma. There's talk therapy. There is EMDR and different techniques for going back there.
00:47:07
Speaker
There is emerging medicine right now in the psychedelics field as well. I bring all of this up because... What all of these modalities point to is respect for not re-traumatizing people. However, there is something to be said about going back and reliving the trauma.
00:47:27
Speaker
Under the hands of a professional or and that's important because there was a point where we get sucked into ah path that we weren't aware of and things start happening to us that prepare us for wherever we're going to end up. And I don't know what ah elements of those pieces all put me into, well, this is when we're going to things are going to become more collaborative. What I do know is, is that there were lots of different things along the way that we're preparing for that. So the initial event during that event, one of the things that was pretty significant for me was blogging on a daily basis for quite a while. And then ended up being every other day and it served its purpose.
00:48:06
Speaker
That activity was sunsetted. A lot of that expressive activity kept me in line with what was happening inside of me. I did not know it at the time, looking back at it and reading through the comments. And I wish I could write to the way I did on a regular basis.
00:48:24
Speaker
My heart was raw and it was just pouring out. But the the blogs that I've read have felt very unfiltered. And so I think that's what you're describing. Absolutely. so I'm just opening the tap.
00:48:35
Speaker
There was no abridging. There was no paraphrasing. There was no sensibility about how this is going to land yeah with the audience. yeah I mean, when you talk to people who who write or create, they'll say like, write from your heart. right I get it. I'm like, yes, write from your heart. And then I go and i sit down. I'm like, how did we do this?
00:48:52
Speaker
But that was a piece of it. What was around that also was the cloud of people that showed up. That blog ended up getting a pretty sizable audience. And the people that just showed up and participated to give support to our family, yeah that was a picture that I would continue to reflect on as well.
00:49:09
Speaker
There was a phase where we felt that we're not being surprised anymore. There's no more new diagnoses and there's not a lot of new. More familiarity.
00:49:21
Speaker
We had been able to settle into a cadence and a routine. At that point, what was being formed was the synthesis of what we had been through The path that it became the most clear on how that would make itself known was parenting.
00:49:38
Speaker
It was how we continued to parent Autumn and Heidi and the conversations we had and and as they went through social circumstances and went through middle school and high school and then into college and started thinking and dealing with these things. There was just a lot of active synthesis that was being done in talking through these things.
00:49:58
Speaker
That raw writing that I had early on being heart-led, when we went into into synthesis, a lot of it moved. It was heart-informed, but it was head-codified.
00:50:10
Speaker
the The head was codifying a whole bunch of things that were very real and honest, but it was very analytical. That lasted quite a while. I think it was in 2019, right before the pandemic, where I started having panic attacks that was almost this, hey, there's something else going on here.
00:50:29
Speaker
And it could have been self-fulfilled, partially because I had a number of people who had told me that the 10-year mark, strange things start coming up for caregivers and family members who experienced deep trauma. And maybe that was just them planting the seed for me to have the panic attacks and the strange things to come up because they really did. I was traveling a lot. Or allowance.
00:50:47
Speaker
for this to happen. Absolutely. Yeah. The 10th, we've talked about the 10 year mark. The decade seems to be substantial in ways that I didn't realize before. Yeah. Have you done research as to speak to why that causes? Okay.
00:50:58
Speaker
I haven't. At this point, I had not had any deep therapeutic work that was done. So meaningful work or any period. At any period. Interesting. So that's 2019. We're traveling a lot.
00:51:10
Speaker
2020 rolls around and Tiffany and I take a trip in February 2020. We fly out together and then she's going to fly back home. We spent a good amount of of that day. i was in a ah fairly bad way.
00:51:22
Speaker
And a big part of that is travel for me, particularly after Claire's accident has is something that I do not travel well. my career has required a lot of travel and so it was something that fastened my seat belt this is going to happen we're going to go through this well at this point after having a pretty tumultuous 2019 and then tiffany and i traveling and she's going to go over the ocean and something about that i am now having quite a bit of separation anxiety panic and i went back after i dropped her off i went back to the hotel room called a friend and said i need recommendations for a therapist it's time
00:52:00
Speaker
And so we were going to go through emdr Do you mind describing this for people who might not be familiar? So I'm going describe kind of the ah the not too much of the details from a clinical perspective. But there's traditional psychoanalysis, talk therapy things. This is not it. Correct. That leads into a more physical response thing that EMDR proposes to be better for. Exactly. So the the method is is that through a trained therapist, they're going to guide you through in a in a safe yeah area. They're going to guide you through essentially the reliving of the traumatic event, allow you to get close to it, to observe things from a little bit of distance and recognize where that trauma has taken root in your body and get that trauma
00:52:48
Speaker
get that to move and to be more active because trauma has a tendency to become stale and to just sit in the body. And find hiding places. Correct. So the EMDR piece, there's two pieces that I found safe about this. Number one is there is a time limit. And with the guidance, there are specific memories or moments that you're told to think about.
00:53:12
Speaker
All the while there is this physical thing that's happening where your eye movement is guided in direction that is supposed to jar or open up. So it's kind of fascinating stuff, but it is, it is looked at favorably because it is not just, well, tell me how you feel.
00:53:27
Speaker
Correct. And so it really does do some heavy lifting. Yes. So after doing all the research and and saying like, okay, im this is what I'm going to submit myself to. but Some people may have already kind of guessed what's going to happen because I'm going to remind you of the dates of when I called Tiffany and I travel on February of 2020. And I contact the therapists, get ready to go in to do my my first sessions, my ingestion session.
00:53:51
Speaker
I get back into Colorado and I go and I meet with them the first time. And the first time that I meet with them, early March, I'm in the healthcare field. So we're all talking about the same things, which is what is happening and or what is going to happen here. To the world.
00:54:07
Speaker
To the world. I never got to do my first EMDR session. That's fantastic. Yeah. Yet I got this deep kindness that was delivered to me that I didn't have to travel for the rest of 2020.
00:54:21
Speaker
Oh, what a gift. And that was unplanned, unexpected. I did not start COVID. That was, that was not planned so that I would have the, ah to to so I could avoid travel. I'm being reminded of the, yeah the whole premise of the 12 Monkeys.
00:54:37
Speaker
i was gonna get there yes uh where the person who uh brought the virus on the plane i can only assume that you guys went yes that's why we were yeah we that was the trip oh i mean there's some funny asides we we were towards that direction we were in hawaii when i took my uber ride to the airport somebody offered me colloidal silver This guy actually was fairly ahead. His solutions may have not been reasonable, but everybody else was still scratching their heads and like, how bad is this going to get? Like, yeah we're getting nervous. This guy had gone full on This thing is here.
00:55:11
Speaker
I am not... When you say this guy, you're not talking about your taxi driver. Yes. No, the Uber driver. Really? He had, he had built a partition in his car, but he had this aerosol can that was permanently attached into his air conditioning. Just the mechanics of this. Wow. Yeah. He's blowing stuff into his air system so that it gets, written there was yeah anyway, he was a character. I um i love the forward thinking yes and also the productivity. Yes. He was not waiting.
00:55:39
Speaker
So I was in Maui first and then flew over to Honolulu. Okay. We're in Maui and we get this headline from Honolulu that says Hawaii's first fatality associated with COVID is in this hotel, in this place on Waikiki beach.
00:55:52
Speaker
And I look at my phone and in five days I'm flying over to Honolulu and I'm staying in that hotel. I think those are the things that started to make it feel real was that it's, wow there's something going on here. and And then the fact that I worked for for an organization that we carried a whole bunch of the cases, the initial cases became real very quickly.
00:56:13
Speaker
All of that as an aside right to say that EMDR did not happen as planned, but I did get to stay home. Yeah. through COVID, that heart work that came out during the writing of the blog, the synthesis over it over a several year period of raising our kids and then going into COVID and having conversations that are around uncertainty in all of us in our family saying like, well, this feels real familiar. Uncertainty is is something we know. wow.
00:56:41
Speaker
We understand what's going on in the world because we felt that 10 years ago when our world came crashing down and it stopped. Right. and the fears and the concerns. We understand what that feels like. It feels different now for us.
00:56:57
Speaker
We understand why it feels different for everybody else. And it started to switch again away from this head knowledge to now a little bit of what does this knowledge, what is this experience for us?
00:57:10
Speaker
What does that mean for us in the world now? What's our responsibility? Not because the world needs it, But because deep inside of us, we see the pain, we see the suffering that uncertainty can bring. We don't even need to talk about the practical aspects of that disease, of of the fatality rate, of all of those different things.
00:57:31
Speaker
Just as a picture of what we were experiencing collectively was something that our family had experienced themes of that individually with our circle.
00:57:44
Speaker
Did you take on a ah kind of imposed obligation to help everybody else to like help guide them through in some way? i don't think through the pandemic we we felt that because we're an immunocompromised household, we were pretty strict. um we We managed that quite a bit to the consternation of 50% of the population that is in our circles as well and and continuing to repair and work through that with them. Okay.
00:58:10
Speaker
This goes back to what we were talking about with trauma itself and coming alongside people with with trauma is is that when you're in that acute phase, you cannot take away the suffering. You can come alongside and provide comfort. But in that event, there's not much that can be done. And we adopted a similar thing through COVID is is that this is the acute phase. There's a lot of thrashing. There's a lot of noise that's going on.
00:58:33
Speaker
However, coming out of it, we have been barely involved and felt quite a yearning for sitting with people as they're continuing to make sense of a world that has fundamentally changed. I do not believe that we are in a spot, whether you take the evidence of what's happening in the world right now and continues to happen in the world, whether it's geopolitics, whether it is education and whether it is relationships, flight from the church, whether it's all these different things. Yeah. At the very least, uncertainty is continuing for a lot of people. And our relationship with uncertainty now is is that uncertainty has always always been here. It's us that has sought to believe that there is less uncertainty than there actually is. And so now as people are coming to grips with the fact that there is less certainty, you have a couple of things that's going on.
00:59:21
Speaker
People are trying to revert back to the certainty of the of the past and trying to get that as built in as possible. yeah We have to rebuild. Mm-hmm. We have to get past the point of believing that we can just go back and we have to say, what does it mean to live again?
00:59:38
Speaker
COVID really prompted that for us. so The thing that came personally for me was in concert with COVID. But just because I got to stop traveling, once we came out of this and I started traveling again, i needed to say like whatever was there that the EMDR I hoped was going to help address was still there. It didn't go away because of your a hiatus from travel.
00:59:59
Speaker
and Give me timeframes again. You started traveling again or being told you had to start. I ended up starting to travel, but not at the same frequency. i ended up starting travel again towards the end of 2021. Okay. We ended up going down a multi-stage, both Tiffany and I therapeutic ah approach that we will end up probably talking about in 2021.
01:00:18
Speaker
In a future episode. Yeah, we're going to have to because it is such a big discussion. It involved creating similar situations that EMDR was promising, which was kind of creating that observer and moving trauma through. yeah What happened to me during my second session there was probably the most...
01:00:37
Speaker
meaningful session regarding the trauma that I was carrying for me time compressed and I was right back pulling Claire out of the pool well just that statement sounds so scary as a parent and so overwhelming that you had to relive all that I intellectually understand how that is so scary and there was no fear involved this is why it's amazing oh my gosh I have a lot of people in circles that have gone through similar things and there's not a lot of words to describe what goes on, how it works.
01:01:12
Speaker
For me, that would probably be the moment where collaboration became the word. Collaborative things were already in motion, but that's where I started to recognize that, oh, but wait a minute, this reality that I'm creating or or that exists in my mind, I have the opportunity for being more involved in that from a conscious perspective as opposed you being pushed along. Wow, that such a powerful statement.
01:01:40
Speaker
At that point of collaboration, there's a number of things that really started to become clear for me as well as not just internally what it meant to carry trauma, but not allow trauma to drive decision making. This really started to paint a picture of what it meant to come alongside others who were going through these things that were at earlier stages of their own traumatic event and what it meant to be collaborative with the trauma as it does its work with that person.
01:02:12
Speaker
The desire when we see someone who's in pain, who's going through that is to help. We have to ask, are we showing up helping people in denial, defiance or collaboration with the suffering? And what we see oftentimes is is that people's approach is a denial and defiance of what it even means to help.
01:02:33
Speaker
That this person's pain is so great yeah that I'm going to deny that the choices that I make have impact on their experience. I'm going to focus exclusively on my intentions that I want to help. And if people knew, and we've talked with people, we've we've even within ourselves said, if I knew what I was doing was inflicting more pain on someone, I wouldn't do it. Yeah.
01:02:58
Speaker
Except when that's brought to mind, we oftentimes, our defense is, but I didn't mean that. And what we're going to argue for is is that this is part of where we, both Tiffany and I have felt the yearning to come alongside people who desperately want to help and to provide either coaching or discussion around what does that actually mean to help. Not defined from outside, but from you.
01:03:26
Speaker
What does help actually mean? And then choosing what you're going to do, how you're going to show up based on what your authentic definition of help is. And at the very least, it's oftentimes a very Hippocratic definition of health of first do no harm.
01:03:42
Speaker
Most people would agree with that. Sure. If there are things that are high potential for harm to be done, then how do we as supporters, as comforters of those who are going through deep trauma, pain, mourning, and grief, how do we come alongside them? That's what deserves a really robust conversation on on some of the things that we've learned and some of the questions we have to ask ourselves that are different than just relying on our intentions. Because I don't hold that our intentions let us off. the hook retroactively for sure correct yeah we talked about this in a very simple term a very long time ago at the beginning of the series and using the word violence mm-hmm to describe this and what propels when people act in good faith but lack of the insight of how to be present for somebody Easier said than done, eh? Yeah.
01:04:32
Speaker
I'm looking forward to having that conversation. It's the question we get asked the most. Yeah. From people who we love and we see the hearts of people who have the intentions of, I want to help.
01:04:43
Speaker
People are hungry for some perspective on that. And and so I'm looking forward to to us having that conversation. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Let's do that next time. Awesome. Okay. Thank you, my man. Thank you.
01:04:55
Speaker
Thank you for sitting with us in this conversation, for bringing your own story, your own questions, and your own hard-won wisdom to what we're building together. If you want to keep this going, subscribe to Good Pain on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, where you can also leave us a review that helps others find their way to these conversations.
01:05:13
Speaker
And for weekly doses of conversations that go beyond quick fixes or surface level advice, subscribe to our kindling newsletter at goodpainco.com. Good Pain is recorded in Colorado on Arapaho, Ute, and Cheyenne ancestral lands.
01:05:30
Speaker
And let's remember, we are not alone in this. Our struggle is not our shame. Whatever we are carrying today, we don't have to carry it alone. We will see you next time.