Transforming Grief into Growth With John Tsilimparis

0:02Thank you for joining us for episode 535 of Live Happy Now. We all go through times of loss and grief, and it's human nature to want to avoid that pain. But this week's guest offers an entirely different approach. I'm your host, Paula Felps, and this week I'm joined by John Tsilimparis, a psychotherapist, mental health consultant, and author of Magic in the Tragic, Rewriting the Script on Grief and Discovering Happiness in Our Darkest Days. John presents a new approach to grieving and offers practices that help us look for beauty in the suffering and find purpose and joy, not in spite of it, but because of it.

0:41Let's have a listen. John, thank you so much for joining me on Live Happy Now. Thanks for having me. I have been spending a lot of time with your new book, and I really like your approach to grief. I think what's most notable for me is that it's relevant not just to the loss of someone or something we love, but for any type of adversity. And that really makes it a perfect book for us to be reading right now. Now, you discovered this whole way of approaching grief in a really personal way. So I always love a good backstory. Can you start by talking about your own grief journey? When I was young, as a teenager, there was tragedy early in my family.

1:18And it just happened to be that for me, I discovered that through the arts and through nature and through having awareness of things outside of myself, I found a way to soothe myself because my parents, who were very loving, but they were also very stoic and immigrant and didn't really have the tools or the know-how as to how to deal with it or how to help the survivors of this tragedy to manage their emotions. So I had no intention of addressing the feelings. It was just, let's just hope the feelings go away. So they didn't for me. And so I started to pair it with finding beauty. And although I didn't realize that I was doing it at the time, I realized it later, pairing my pain with splendor and beauty and things that were all around me.

2:08And so that's kind of the way that it started. I started to develop what I call an aesthetic mindset. And all that is, is the ability to appreciate depth, beauty, curiosity, and wonder in simple things. And the arts doesn't have to be that. It can be anything. But that's kind of what I learned worked for me. And then over the years, I started to use it with my clients in my therapy practice. And just to show or just to explain to our listeners that once you discovered that it wasn't just an exit path to like everything was fine. And Rosie, let's talk about when your parents died and what kind of a grief experience you had then.

2:49Well, right. So then many years later, both my parents passed away and they passed 13 days apart in 2004, although they were on separate coasts. And that brought back all of the same kind of helplessness and anger and resentment at life and all that stuff because they both suffered. They were both very sick. And so, again, that sort of brought back my ability to reach out to my aesthetic mindset. But I'm glad you brought this up earlier that this book isn't just about losing a loved one. It's about the myriad of things that we go through, the heartaches, the struggles, breakups, divorces, financial hardship.

3:28career opportunities lost, faded dreams, anything that has caused us a sense of grief can be applied in this sense. And the thing to remember, Paula, and I know you know this because you and anybody else in the world is no stranger to this, that avoiding pain and grief is a natural reflex. We all do it. Nobody likes it and nobody likes to suffer, but there's also no escaping it either. It's a big part of life. And no matter how much you hem and haw about it, you're going to experience some kind of grief and loss in your life. So my book, The Magic and the Tragic, alters an alternative to the avoidance, which is what I did years ago for a while, and helps us to instead use our grief as a tool to convert pain into something different, to convert it into thriving, and perhaps even find beauty in our suffering.

4:23And this is how you build emotional resilience. You transform heartache, adversity, and grief into purpose. And that's a concept that can feel so foreign when we're walking through that process. And I love how you focus on finding purpose and joy in your life. And you say not in spite of grief and adversity, but because of it. As I was reading it, that just kind of stopped me because we don't think this is the thing that's going to help me find my purpose and joy. Can you explain that mindset? Yeah. I mean, especially in this country, as you know, if you are always positive and stoic and all that stuff and funny and always elated, you're the life of the party.

5:06But if you're not, you're sometimes seen as a pessimist or a Debbie Downer. So we look at suffering sometimes as a dirty word. The book is saying that we want to try to change that because you want to hold your suffering and your grief in high regard. Imagine if you could live with as much confidence and faith in your suffering as you do in being happy. Your life would be vastly different. Hence, the goal is to rewire yourself to be inspired and moved by your grief, not to be afraid of your grief, despite what society or what your family says. we have to look at grief as something as natural as being happy, as natural as laughing, as natural as being ambitious about something.

5:51So that's something that I had to fight through as well. And over the years, it's been worth it because I am not afraid of my grief. Now, I'm not saying that I'm a grief monger and that I'm always looking to feel sad. I'm not. I'd rather not feel sad, but I'm not afraid of it anymore. And sometimes I can join with it in a way that feels very spiritual to me. And that to me really encapsulates what you mean by finding the magic and the tragic. But that is obviously much easier said than done, which is why we have an entire book about it. Can you talk about how we start approaching grief in a much more empowered way?

6:28So one way is to, what I like about the book most is that we use what's called inspiration exposure, which is where even in our darkest moments, we deliberately, again, instead of running from our pain, we deliberately and intentionally immerse ourselves in the awe-inspiring realms of music, art, philosophy, nature, whatever your aesthetic is, can be different for everybody. So by doing this, we find new meaning in our grief. Ask yourself, you know, the next time you hear a song that moves you, or you see a painting that uplifts you or you're in nature and you feel that it makes you happy. What is the specific mechanism that's doing that?

7:10Why do you feel that way? So in noticing that and doing that intentionally, inspiration exposure starts to change our brain chemistry because scientifically there have been awe inducement studies immersing ourselves in inspiration activates the prefrontal cortex in our brain, which is the executive brain, also known as your higher self. And once that's activated, you tend to problem solve better, your threshold for distress tolerance is higher, and you tend to respect most things with dignity much better than you would otherwise. You just cope better. And so activating that part of the brain is important when you're going through a difficult time, because you'll have a different perspective of it.

7:57So inspiration exposure is a very simple exercise where you're noticing your world around you and taking note of it and finding what your aesthetics are. And I love that because hope is also found in the prefrontal cortex. So in addition to everything that you have just mentioned, that's also how we can trigger that sense of hope, which we often lose when we lose someone that we love so dearly. You're right. I forgot to include hope. Yes, hope is a big one too with the higher self. So if I'm activating the higher self, even in my darkest moments, over time, I start to pair, again, grief with respect and dignity.

8:36I start to find even beauty in my suffering, which when people first hear that, they think, wow, that's really a hard sell. But it does work. So again, by respecting your pain and dignifying it in that process, you are reducing it as well. So it's a win-win situation. And I love that you brought up over time. We live in a society where we want a quick fix. We want a pill. We want a drink. We want something that's going to make it all go away and just stop hurting. But that's not realistic. No, this is a process for sure. This is not a sprint. I wouldn't even call it a marathon, but it's definitely going to be a process.

9:17And one has to be able to habituate to the pain. One has to be able to endure it. So again, emotional resilience is a conversion. It's a transformation of your grief into something more dignified. It's not about moving on. It's about moving through. You know, most people say you need to move on. You need to forget. That's not what we're talking about. Talking about moving through. And in that moving through, you are creating a new experience, a brand new experience that's super empowering, as opposed to always having grief be something that you avoid. And how do we cultivate that emotional resilience?

9:55Since, as you've mentioned, it's so important in doing that. How do we start cultivating that? So one thing is to notice, like I said, your inspiration exposure. Start noticing things in life that move you and giving them respect in that sense. And then you have a list. You have your go-to inspiration exposures. But there are other exercises too. So one of my favorite exercises is the rewriting your negative thoughts or you're reauthoring your grief. And here's where you are taking difficult times that you remember specifically, and you are identifying all of the static thoughts that you've attached to it.

10:33And we all get attached to things. And that's why it causes so much grief. And then we come up with different ways of looking at it. In other words, we reauthor what happened in new ways. And that is an exercise in itself. And then there's another exercise where I have people write themselves a condolence letter, a letter of sympathy, as they would write one to someone that has gone through a difficult time as well. And in that letter, you are giving yourself all the compassion, all the positive regard, all of the love that you would give somebody else who went through a difficult time without offering solutions, without offering fixes, and just really giving yourself all of the kindness and support that you would give someone else.

11:17And that's usually a powerful letter because most people feel that it's hard for them to share the grief that they've experienced. And so by giving it to themselves, they empower themselves and see a lot of the empowerment in that grief discussion. And can that help them open the door to greater self-compassion overall? Because we've talked about self-compassion on the show. It is a tough one. It is a hard one to master and where to even start. And your book spells out why it's so essential. It does a beautiful job of framing that. And that practice then of writing that letter, launch your entire self-compassion practice that will change how you view your life.

11:56Yes, that opens up a portal of inspiration that eventually starts to transform your grief, your sadness into curiosity, wonderment and personal growth. That's quite a game changer to flip that as opposed to running away from it and have this inspiration in there. And I would say that 95 % of my patients who are willing to do the exercises usually get a lot of results from it because they want to feel better. They know that the pain is not going to go away and they hope and they trust that they're going to feel differently about it. And it does work. So there's also a spiritual component too in the book.

12:40In chapter three, I talk about markers that you can reach that will induce spirituality about the situation. You don't have to be religious. It takes the woo out of woo-woo, so to speak. And it's just looking at areas that you can also create more magic in your tragic. And that's paying attention to gratitude about things you have instead of things you don't have. It's about noticing the connection, the quality of the connection that you have with people. It's about having awareness about how you feel and noticing those inspired moments that you can take note of. And of course, it's noticing that one needs purpose throughout the day.

13:17Somebody that's recovering from a tragedy, sitting around the house and doing nothing and being idle doesn't always help. So it's having purpose, even if it's just a purpose for the day. If you put all those together, you can create a sense of spirituality, like a belonging to something that's greater than you. We'll be right back with more of Live Happy Now. If you're looking for a little more joy in your week, we've got two ways to help you boost your mood, right when you need it the most. Our Sunday Sillies newsletter has become a huge hit with listeners, bringing you a weekly pep talk, a couple of lighthearted happiness hacks, and a few ideas to help you wrap up the weekend with a smile.

13:57and starting in September we're giving your Monday mornings a lift too our new wake up happy text campaign will send you a tiny dose of encouragement to start your week feeling grounded, supported and ready for whatever comes next so you can end your Sunday with a smile and begin your Monday with a little spark of joy watch for more details when you sign up for Sunday sillies under the connect tab at livehappy.com and let a happier week find you

14:28And now let's hear more from John Silimparas. Your book is remarkable in that this is something we talked about before we started recording. One thing that I really, really love about this book is you don't just give us the information in each chapter. At the end of that chapter, you give us really specific steps and a practice to put that into play in our life. And I love that approach. It makes it so simple to customize it to where we're at in our journey. Why was that important to include within the book? Because I find that, you know, everybody comes through the door of my therapy office or any therapy office with good intentions.

15:10But I've noticed over the last 30 years that the people that get well quicker or the people that get well more effectively are the people that are willing to change their behavior. So something has to give. I always say, you know, move a muscle, change a thought. And so getting people to actually do something and engage in a skills-based type of therapy or a grieving process is just more effective. Just talking about it isn't enough. You have to actually do things to change your routine, get people out of bed, get them to think differently about things, just to get their mind going. And so I thought exercises would always be best for people.

15:50So that's why I consider myself a behavioral therapist too, because I really encourage people to do things via exercise. So the process is I'm encouraging you to move towards your grief as opposed to moving away from your grief. Again, that sounds absolutely outrageous to most people, but it turns out to them that it's really not much other than what you already want to talk about. But we're going to talk about it in a way that has exercises and has a protocol. And it makes it very approachable. And one thing that I realized as I was reading through this and I was looking at the practices is it's not limited to people who are in a state of grief.

16:28Anyone who's in a state of change, who's in a state of even a little bit of upheaval in their lives, which I think right now we all are, these are very valuable practices for helping us move through our emotions and get to a more grounded state. That's right. It could be a fear of the state of affairs of the world. It could be climate anxiety. It could be a divorce. It could be, again, unemployment. It could be fallout from the pandemic. It's any kind of distress that we've been attached to. And usually grief is attached to attachment. People are grieving a loss of something or someone because they are attached to it.

17:06And that says a lot about us because that means that we were attached to something good. We loved something. We dared to love something. So some people say that grief is love unexpressed, or it reflects the magnitude of your love. It could be the love of your career, your business. It could be anything other than just a person. So it's important to look at it that way. You know, what I always bring up too is I like the classical references in a lot of the book, which you've seen or will see. One of them is a classic reference to the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks believed in the nobility of suffering, which was the kind of nobility that you took pride in having suffered.

17:49Meaning to them, this is maturation. This was a rite of passage. This is how you get vetted. This is how you become more compassionate with others and maybe with yourself. This is how you are more creative. This is how you appreciate the small things in life. And so we can take advice from them that if I hold, again, my grief in high regard and I take pride in it, I can use it to my advantage. And along that line, there are some concepts that you presented that I found truly fascinating. And I wondered if we could kind of dig into those for a little bit. The first one is constructive aching. Can you talk about what that is and what it does for us?

18:32So in holding grief in high regard or any kind of stress or any kind of unease in high regard, I'm looking at it as constructive aching, meaning there's purpose in my pain. Let me look at this as not something that I have to fear or avoid or not to knee jerk into something is wrong if I'm feeling grief. And more looking at it as this is possibly constructive as the Greeks, ancient Greeks said. And if it's constructive, I may run away from it less. I may be less avoidant of it. And I look at it as something that might teach me something. So I like that term a lot. I love that. I stopped and made a little note when I read that part.

19:16And another one, and as you point out in your book, these all sound like oxymorons, but they're not. Because another thing that you talk about is positive wounding. Yeah, so positive wounding, like constructive aching, does have an oxymoronic quality to it. So this is where I look back at my past and I choose to look at my past as something that I went through and I'm grateful that I did go through instead of looking at the past as this thing that happened to me, whatever it is, wounded me beyond repair and I'm never going to get better and it's always going to define my life. Positive wounding is, again, like the ancient Greeks, seeing it in a way that has purpose, that has meaning.

19:58you know i could look back at the last let's say five years and say well i really struggled with this loss that i had and i should have handled it better well i could also say you're really really strong and tough and you're a warrior in a sense a peaceful kind of course and here you are so i see you as a hero as a warrior as a pioneer about your own grief instead of a whatever a loser or a weak person so positive wounding and constructive aching are both pretty powerful terms when I apply it to people's lives. And then the third term I wanted to talk about is painful joy, because that one really sounds like, no, that's not even possible.

20:39Let's talk about what that is. So if again, I'm using my aesthetics, let's say music, if I'm using music that inspires me, and sometimes that music that inspires me is the melancholy kind. And most people try to move away from that. Whenever they feel sad, they don't want to hear anything sad or get in touch with anything that might raise that sadness even more. Painful joy is more about finding that within that pain, there isn't just the pain itself, but it's also a purpose. There's also some splendor in that. There's some inspiration in that. And so my pain, although it is naturally painful.

21:22And as I said in the beginning, it's a reflex to move away from it. I can actually cultivate joy in it because I am dignifying and elevating the pain with something beautiful. And music is great for that. Art is great for that. Philosophy is great for that. A passage in your favorite book is that poetry. Again, being out in your favorite place in nature can actually give you joy in your pain. And there is research that shows sad songs, can help us release pain. They can actually make us feel better because we feel less alone. Someone else relates to the way that we are feeling. So music is a wonderful tool for being able to do that.

22:04Yes, the arts can help us manage and endure our feelings in a safe environment. They give us control as to when we want to induce that pain more or less, but they also open up our imagination. They help us to heal our wounds by accessing again that aesthetic mindset. And then it just, it's a transformation that is going to happen in your body anyway, because you're going through grief. Why not pair it with something splendorous? Obviously, most of the time when we look at grief or adversity, it's in the present or the past. And you explain that we can develop these tools now that will help us accept and manage difficult times ahead, which oftentimes we don't think of.

22:49Can we talk about how you do that? If I'm addressing my grief in the moment, using the magic and the tragic, using inspiration exposure, I am going after the meat, the hardest part of being grievous, and that's in the moment that you're in. You might feel differently five minutes later, but it's really the minutiae of the moment, the pain that you're in that you want to try to address because that raises your distress tolerance skills so that the next time you feel anxious, you're not so ambushed by it. So we go after the moment. If someone's in my office and they're going through a really difficult moment, they have tears or they're really recalling something that has really hurt them.

23:30I want them in that moment to try to extrapolate as much as possible what they're feeling, what they're remembering, what their static thoughts are. And that's why the moment is better because everything else is the play of thought, Paula, if you think about it. If I worry a lot about the future, I'm obsessing about something that hasn't happened. And if I'm grieving and lamenting the past, I'm really looking at my interpretation of the past. Both of them are not real. They're all in our minds. And we suffer more in our imagination than we do in reality. Reality is always kinder than our thoughts.

24:03So inspiration exposure is about right in the moment. Let's talk about this right now. Bring that music with you. Play it with you. Bring a cassette player. Do it on your phone. Cassette player. That shows you how old I am. I have one too. I have an 8-track. Oh, an 8-track. That's really good. But yeah, so it's that. So it's in the moment. I'm glad you brought that up. It's really in the minutiae of the moment. And as we develop these tools, how can it help us manage the anxiety and the uncertainty of the times that we are living in right now? One, it doesn't make us fear the anxiety, the pain, the worry, the obsessiveness.

24:46It helps us to appreciate things we have as opposed to things we don't have. It helps us live our lives a little more to the hilt. and it doesn't put us in a position where we wake up every morning hoping that we're going to have a great day. I tell people try to wake up this morning and expect that you're going to have some grief and some worry and by doing that paradoxically your day is going to be less hard because you're expecting to feel that way. You don't want to run from it. You're expecting it and when it comes I'm going to have my tools and I'm going to be ready for it and I think that's the way you prepare yourself for the future.

25:24I tell people, this is the best advice that I can give anybody and to you as well is try to learn how to give yourself uplifting chills as often as possible. Learn how to give yourself goosebumps through your aesthetics. And that way, you're empowering yourself to feel the totality of being human. You won't be afraid of how you feel in the future because people are less afraid of what's going to happen in the world and more afraid of how that's going to make them feel. I'm going to feel so awful about that, or I'm going to worry, I'm never going to be able to sleep. So magic and the tragic helps you manage that a little bit better and not be so afraid of it.

26:02John, that's remarkable. Your book is truly magical. And I appreciate you writing it, first of all, and then coming on the show and talking about it. We are going to give our listeners a free chapter that they'll be able to download when they go to our website. So I appreciate you doing that for us. But as we let you go, What is the one thing that you want listeners to take away, something that they can start doing right now before they get your book, before they read that chapter? What can they do to start finding magic in the tragic? I would say try not to be afraid of your grief. Try to draw an imaginary line in the sand right now and say that I'm going to learn how to dignify my grief, hold it in high regard, not run from it.

26:42and know that if I do that, if I process it, if I give it respect, if I honor it, if I exalt it, I'm actually reducing it as well. Running from it will not help you in the long run. People do forget, but that usually takes a really long time. And you're not constructively using the grief as a teacher. So don't be afraid of your grief and try to imagine yourself moving towards it as opposed to moving away from it. It'll make you stronger in the long run. Fantastic. John, thank you so much again for being with us here today. I'm very excited to share this with our listeners. Thank you, Paula.