How to Process Emotions in the Face of Loss

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1:12When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized. You do? Yeah. Did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected and we made it the one. In a sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand. And on the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the Goop Podcast.

1:50bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers and seekers. Here to start conversations, because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world. Here we go. Hi, I'm Abby Schiller, goal coach, author and speaker. And though I might not have shared this before this week, I am born and raised and currently displaced from my home in Pacific Palisades. I should also add that my voice doesn't always sound this sexy, but the ash raining in Los Angeles right now has altered it, so enjoy. Originally, I had been asked to speak on this podcast scheduled for today about creating the year you want.

2:38And a few weeks ago, I had written that and edited the episode, and it was so wonderful. My expertise is in helping people design the lives that they want, and then I teach them the tools to actually achieve those goals. But then our world literally went up in flames, and that episode obviously felt extremely tone-deaf and inappropriate for what we were all going through. So given the catastrophic events in the past week in my community, the most devastating wildfires causing the loss of over 5 ,300 homes and 12 ,000 structures and the evacuation of 153 ,000 people. oh i don't think anyone is thinking about creating the year they want right now though we will at one point and then that episode will air when we're ready but instead for today i have been given the opportunity to use this platform to help so i want to talk about processing emotions in the face of loss this will be relevant whether or not you have been touched by recent events in Los Angeles.

3:50We all have feelings and we all are at some point touched by loss. No life is without it. So maybe you've experienced another kind of loss. And if this isn't right for you right now, just tuck it away or send it to a friend or listen and learn and benefit in any other way. As a coach, I help people navigate change. And even as in this case, I am experiencing the extreme threat of loss and displacement too. In fact, a friend texted me this morning, happy day six of survival. I have been coaching myself as hard as I've been holding space and listening. And when requested coaching my friends and neighbors and community and clients.

4:33And I know that one of the most crucial elements of navigating change is processing our thoughts and emotions that come up with it. So learning how to process the emotions in the face of loss can be life-saving. What I know is that collectively we are all deep in feeling. Some of those feelings, and I'm going to name a bunch because I think it helps to name them, might be worry, despair, devastated, anxious, helpless, overwhelmed, vulnerable, unsafe, angry, sad, annoyed, forgotten, despondent, lost, hopeless, uncertain, abandoned, embarrassed, ashamed, guilty, terrified, heartbroken, numb, I could go on and on.

5:30And the reason that I'm naming that is because most people cannot name more than six or seven emotions. And yet when we name them, we give word to it, we voice it, we understand it better, and we can experience it better. What I do know is that we are all feeling it. And most people really need help processing it. I didn't actually know how to process my own feelings until about seven years ago when I was taught by my friend and who's a therapist, Jennifer Waldberger. So I want to give you these skills today. The skill of actually processing feelings is, in my opinion, way more important than whatever we learned in the seventh grade math class.

6:14And I really wish that they would teach this in schools. And also I wish that math teachers don't come at me. Being able to correctly recognize and manage one's feelings and respond in an appropriate way is the basis of emotional maturity. It is so appropriate for us to be feeling whatever we are feeling in the face of pain. Each of the feelings that I named, or any emotion, are simply vibrations that we feel in our bodies. I'll say that again. Feelings are simply vibrations that we feel in our bodies. I'm going to come back to that with more. Why is it even important for us to process our feelings around loss or around anything?

6:55Well, we can't function if we don't process our emotions. When we have dysregulated nervous systems or are stuck in fight, flight, or freeze mode, we have trouble concentrating. We are constantly exhausted or burnt out or irritable or low functioning. When we don't function and our nervous system is dysregulated. We have constant anxiety that can affect our relationships. We also have physical symptoms like headaches or poor sleep or inflammation or gastro issues or bad backs, poor immunity. You know the drill. You know. You're probably feeling this. We've had a really rough few years. But what does it look like to actually process?

7:36I know that we throw these words around like give yourself space or have compassion or be kind to yourself. I don't think anybody actually knows what that means. I don't think people understand how to process. And so I want to go over that with you. So first, you have to be open to feeling. And most people really aren't. Most people close off to feeling because it's scary and painful. And we don't, we don't really value the benefit of a feeling. Or we think, you know, people will make fun of us for being in our feelings. But think of it like this. Think of it like going to the gym. When you go to lift weights once, you're not going to get stronger from that one.

8:16In fact, you may even be a little bit sore, right? It might hurt you a little bit. But if you continually have a practice of going to lift weights, you will become stronger over time. You will gain strength. You will become able to lift heavier and heavier weights. And that's the same thing with emotional and mental strength. When we can process our feelings, when we can name them and move through them, We become stronger to the experience of pain. We can tolerate more. And that is a skill that we are going to need, my friends. That is so important right now. So once you're open to feeling, then I want you to do a body scan.

8:55And before I even talk you through this, I want you to just come up with one of the feelings that you're feeling most common right now. Just name it. What is the feeling that you are feeling most commonly right now? Maybe it's despair or overwhelm or helplessness, but just hold on to that word. And then I want you to scan your body. So tell me or tell yourself since I can't hear you. Where do you feel that? How is it showing up in your body? Is it a tightness in your throat? Is it a punch feeling in your stomach? Is it a clenching? just do a body scan and tell me what the physical vibration feels like of your feeling.

9:40So notice it. That's it. Just notice the feeling of it, right? Feeling is a verb. We are actually feeling. Is it frenetic? Is it moving? Is there a temperature to it? How is it feeling? And then once you have described it and sat with it, and I often describe it as like, just pull up a stool and sit with this as if you were sitting with a friend in pain. Just sit with it. You don't have to look away. You don't have to turn away. You can be with it and observe it and notice the vibration of it. And then I want you to see if you can connect it to a thought that you're thinking. Is it, how am I going to get through this?

10:22Is it, I want to do something but don't know what? Is it, I don't have time for any of this? What is the thought that is driving that vibration, that feeling? One of the obstacles to doing this work is that we really block our ability to notice, right? Our attentions aren't where they should be to live self-aware lives. We give our attentions to our phones or the media or news or other people or work. We're all so busy. But this doesn't actually require any time. it just requires a willingness to take a few seconds to notice and feel. And in fact, sometimes we think that if we do that, we're going to just unravel.

11:02But what I have found and what research has backed up is that when we don't take a few seconds to notice and feel, then we spend an entire lifetime avoiding that feeling with other habits and behaviors to numb that pain. When in fact, we could just take a few seconds or minutes to feel that pain. So it's almost like we're given the choice of process the feeling or spend a lifetime running from it and feeling secondary pain because of it. Right. When we don't go into the feeling, we try and feel better by Netflixing or scrolling on Instagram or social media or watching YouTube or TikTok or drinking or overeating or over working or over giving or over whatever we're doing to avoid the pain of the initial feeling that we actually could be feeling.

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13:06So I want to share with you four things that have helped me and my clients process emotion in the face of loss. The first one is to manage our nervous system. Most immediately, we need to bring ourselves out of the fight, flight, freeze. So that could look like taking some deep breaths, meditating. I have ADHD. I had never thought I could be good at meditating because I thought meditating meant clearing your brain. And that is not what it means, at least not to me. Meditating to me is giving yourself five, ten minutes of stillness to watch your thoughts and train yourself to come back to your focus on the breath.

13:46And once I understood meditating as that, I also saw that as like a gym practice, but for my mind. We're always going to have thoughts. We have 60 ,000 to 80 ,000 thoughts a day. They're just coming at us all day long. But meditating, and I really like to use the Unplug app for meditation. And ironically, the woman who runs Unplug just lost her home. So if you'd like to support her, please go check out the Unplug meditation app. Meditating is a great exercise for becoming more in control of your thoughts and feelings. It teaches you how to notice your thoughts because we are not our thoughts. We are, in fact, the thinker of our thoughts.

14:28We can observe our thoughts and have thoughts about our thoughts. Isn't that crazy? So we need to manage our nervous system. And again, that can look like taking some deep breaths. There are plenty of somatic techniques that you can Google and look into. We need to make sure that we're prioritizing our sleep and that we can ground ourselves. So that looks like this. Put your feet on the ground and just imagine the weight of your body going into your feet. And what I like to do is imagine that there are roots going from the bottom of your feet into the ground all the way into the center of the earth and wrapping around the center of the earth.

15:09And then I just want you to feel that magnetic pull of your body into the ground. When we come out of our bodies, when we kind of like abandon our bodies, we're like floating around. Our energy is just kind of floating around. Grounding yourself puts you back together in so many ways. I could talk to you all day about managing the nervous system, but that is really the most important first step. The second step is to start to identify and recognize your thoughts and feelings. Notice your thoughts. Our thoughts create our entire perception of our lives. I remember at the beginning of the pandemic, people were panicking, as was I.

15:52It's understandable. There was what I call traumatic uncertainty. But my thought was that this is an opportunity for me to help people, to lead, to rise up, to hold space for people. And that thought actually created that result for me. So my brain started looking for people that I could help. It drove me to learn more about trauma and uncertainty and coping. I wasn't discounting the pain and anguish and difficulty that I was going through, my family was going through, that everyone in the world was going through. And I was looking, I was motivated to control what I could, which was to serve others who were open to being served.

16:33So how do you start to notice your thoughts? You simply start by asking, what am I thinking right now? What am I thinking? And then you just notice. So ask, what am I thinking? And then listen. Here are some thoughts that are helping me right now as my family is displaced and every single night we've been looking for signs that my house is still standing and currently it is thankfully still standing. But oh my goodness, I have over 50 friends so far who have lost everything. So here are the thoughts that are serving me right now. We will get through this. It's okay to grieve. I believe that everything is solvable and I don't need to know all the answers right now.

17:18I am so grateful that we have technology that delivers information that I need, that we have incredible firefighters. I am so grateful for all of the friends who have reached out and offered help. I am so grateful that we are safe. I could go on forever and ever. But I am so grateful is a really helpful thought for me. Pick whatever one here that works for you or choose your own, of course. Another one that helps me always is I am capable of advocating for myself, or I trust myself to figure this out, or I can reach out for help when I need it. And in terms of feelings right now, I like to think of feelings as opportunities to get to know ourselves more.

18:02Again, they're just the vibrations sent from our thoughts or in response to our environment. When we are able to listen to and pay attention to and respond to our thoughts and feelings, we create a dialogue with ourselves. When we are able to sit with and breathe into and parent ourselves and be kind to ourselves, we create a trust with ourselves and we live ultimately a much more self-aware life. So, you know, as a goal coach, if you want to have any goal, maybe that could be one of them. The third piece that has been really helpful for me this week is to fiercely take care of yourself and others.

18:41I have always had a really hard time asking for help. I'm the firstborn daughter. I grew up taking care of many people. And I had to ask this week to borrow somebody's office. I had to ask to use somebody's bathtub. I had to ask somebody to borrow some mugs. We didn't have any mugs in the Airbnb for our tea, and tea right now has been enormously comforting. And I did that, and people showed up, and it felt like such an incredible act of humanity. Please do not assume that people should know what you need and offer what you need. You need to learn how to ask, and that is part of your self-care right now.

19:28And if you're okay, if you're an okay place, you can learn how to offer. And be specific when you offer. Don't say, let me know. And we're going to get into this in a little bit. But make specific offers or just show up and do it. I'm sending you groceries. I'm dropping off a latte. I'm Venmoing you money. Whatever it is that your friend or family member needs. And then the last thing that has been helpful for me this week is to know when you are able to take action and to take it imperfectly. And by action, that could mean sending an email or making a phone call or asking for help or meeting a friend or filing an insurance claim or setting up a P.O.

20:12box. Any small step that moves you closer to the result that you ultimately want. Now, if you're experiencing extreme trauma or loss, that small action is going to look very different than setting up an insurance claim. You might need to take the action of taking a shower or eating a meal or lying down. You just need to decide the result that you want and then take the small steps to go towards that goal. But what action doesn't look like is worrying and overthinking. That's not going to get you the result that you want. The more action you take, the faster you can achieve the result that you want.

20:49And I do say imperfectly, because so many people wait till things feel right, or they think they will be right, or they will know what to do or when they're ready. But honestly, that really doesn't come. And so if you're willing to take imperfect action and make mistakes and learn, you're going to get to where you want to go much faster. We are all learning how to process and we are all processing differently. And that's okay. I'm processing too. I've been coaching clients this week and self-coaching so hard while evacuated with my family, my two kids, my husband, and my very anxious dog. Two days ago, we moved into this Airbnb, and I've never been so happy to see a washer and dryer or a couch or a kitchen for my cup of tea, even if I didn't have a cup at the time.

21:38But even as a professional, I have felt it impossible to grasp the scope of what has happened here in L.A. and I got to tell you, you might be listening to this months from now and there will be another thing that we have to find impossible to grasp and another and another. This is the new normal, I think. How do I process the heartbreak of my 50 friends? And I know that that number is going to go up who have lost their homes and their businesses. Our entire community has been annihilated. Our children's schools, our grocery stores, our gas stations, our banks, our coffee shops, our favorite restaurants, our farmer's market, our parks, it goes on and on.

22:16So I don't know how to rebuild. I know that it's going to take one step at a time. And we're going to have to manage our thoughts and our feelings. And what's so tough about this, and when I was thinking about this podcast, is that there's such a wide spectrum of experiences right now. You know, I have my friends who have lost everything. And then there's me who has been up every night until the crack of dawn, refreshing, refreshing the app, seeing where the fire is and watching my neighbor's homes burn. And then there's people who are very safe all over. And there are people who are watching this and who are very worried.

22:50There's a huge spectrum to this. And so I'm hoping that we can find these steps helpful for us. But what I wanted to do, because I think that we're in a collective grief period, what I wanted to do was turn to a therapist specializing in grief and the author of multiple books about grief and loss, Claire Bidwell-Smith, to lend her expertise on the topic. Let's talk with her now.

23:21Hi, Claire. Hi. Thank you so much for sitting with me and on such short notice. I know that you have a lot happening right now, too. How is your home? My home is okay, thankfully, and my family's okay. We are still, I think all of us in the middle of this. So we have bags packed in the car still. We are ready to go if we need to. We're heartbroken for our community, our city. I know so many people who've lost their homes, lost everything. We don't have words. We don't have the words to speak of this size loss. It's immense. I think it's growing in magnitude by the minute, the more we understand it too, which I think is really overwhelming for a lot of us.

24:04Claire, can you just tell us and tell the audience your background and why we're speaking today? Of course. I am a therapist specializing in grief and loss. I have been in private practice for almost two decades now. I've written five books about grief and loss. I see people one-on-one. I lead support groups, run retreats. I'm just always trying to create more space, language, acknowledgement around the grieving process. I entered into it from a really personal place, young in life, and worked in hospice for a while, and then have been doing this work for a long time based in Los Angeles. Thank you.

24:43So let's talk about what we're going through right now. I feel like there's so many different experiences of this, of course. Personally, I have felt like I'm in survival mode for the past week. And so I really haven't cried or I haven't allowed myself the energy to think about what's going on. I've just been in go mode. Have you? Is that? Yeah, I'm definitely still in survival mode too. It's interesting to hear you say that you haven't cried. I came close to tears last night looking at a few things online, but I also have not. And I think it's because I'm in that survival mode. I've got four kids at home.

25:24I don't even know if school's going to start tomorrow. We are really close to the evacuation zone. I woke up at four this morning because it smelled like there was a fire in my house and it was just the smoke blowing from the Palisades. So I think, you know, often we can't even process or begin to process or feel all of the emotions until we know where we are and we We don't know where we are right now. It also feels like crying is a luxury because we're so, I mean, I sat with friends the other night who also have evacuated. Their house was in direct line of fire 200 feet away. And they were looking through their ring camera and they saw the fire trucks pull into their driveway.

26:06And they were able to speak through the ring cameras to instruct the firefighters to turn the roof sprinklers on. and we all just sat there kind of frozen in this absolutely insane I'll never forget this moment but who who can cry when you're in survival mode we're not safe enough to cry that's right that's right I do think that there's so much judgment for people who go through grief that don't cry I think that comes from so much misunderstanding about grief you know I think not necessarily adhering to the five stages of grief, but there is a big process to grief. And I think in the beginning, often with profound loss, enormous loss like this, like losing a person, like going through some kind of trauma, we do enter into an initial phase of shock, denial.

26:58And it's our way of integrating the information. It's our way of protecting ourselves. And I think you'll see a lot of people not crying. You'll see a lot of people just go into that survival mode, go into that protective place. And that's really normal. Again, until we are able to process the enormity, the magnitude of the loss, and until we feel safe enough to feel vulnerable emotions like fear and sadness, only then do we start crying. And so take us through what to expect. How do we process this? It's going to take a lot of time. It really is. And I think we have to acknowledge that it's going to look like grief and it is grief.

27:37I think it's going to get harder before it gets better. I think we're going to enter into a deep, hard space where we're really aware of what's happened. We're going to see more images. People are going to go back and visit the ruins of their homes. We're going to really know the death toll. We're going to just hear more and more details. And the more that it sets in, the more heavy it's going to become. And with that heaviness, is going to come a lot of sadness, maybe some anxiety, maybe anger for some people, fear. You know, we talk about acceptance in grief. That word gets thrown around a lot.