What's Our Grief Asking Us to Do? (with therapist Claire Bidwell Smith)

26:25We don't have to look at it through this lens of like, oh, it's just the, it's ruined my life, or this is the worst thing, or I'm always going to feel like this. Grief, again, can really open us up to ourselves. It completely changes our ideas of the world. And in the beginning, that can be really scary. Again, if someone's listening and they're in the beginning of a loss, it's sometimes hard to hear that there's beauty coming, transformation, hope. but they really are available. But you have to go through this kind of fiery process of everything you thought you knew about the world and your life falling apart.

26:59And then you're standing in the embers and you're like, whoa, the whole landscape has just been leveled. And from there you begin to rebuild and reevaluate. And it's this incredible opportunity to figure out what's meaningful to you. What do you want your life to be like? How do you want to show up to it? who matters to you. When my parents were gone and I was 25, it was also as painful as it was and scary. It was so liberating because nothing mattered. I could just clear out all the stuff that didn't matter. And I didn't get caught up as much in what I thought I should be doing. And I was really able to move towards things that meant something to me.

27:38I'd been working jobs that weren't that meaningful and trying to make money and trying to be a writer and work for magazines. And I was like, I don't want to do this. This is not meaningful to me anymore. And it, it really set me off on a path to figuring out, you know, who I really wanted to be in the world and how I wanted to show up to it and myself. When I was reading your book, I thought about this, that probably the question I'm asked the most is that how do you heal from heartbreak? And something I've always said is that, you know, when your heart is in pieces, it's an opportunity to intentionally put it back together in ways you never knew possible.

28:16And it's only when you have it all in pieces that you can do that. Yeah. That's exactly the same with grief. And that's exactly how I felt about reading your book is that I was like, wow, someone is really naming kind of what you were saying and being like, God, like, I don't know if I just, when my heart was the way it was built, was, was in shape the day I was born without this heartbreak, Would I have like known what my real dream was for myself? Would I have known this? Would I have like, was I kind of moving along, you know, you, whether it's you writing for your magazines or whatever you're doing, was I just going along with something because there wasn't a kind of initial kind of dream in that original shape?

28:58And had I not been able to have that shape completely and utterly in pieces and then found a way to almost spiritually, it's a make the decision to build it again with deep intention. Could I have the life that I, that is possible? Absolutely. I think about that a lot, you know, who I am because of these losses. And, you know, I think there's a version where I would just take back my parents in a second and have a family again and have my kids know my parents and my mother get to be a grandmother. And then there's this other version where I'm like, but wait, what if I had to give up everything I've learned about myself and the world and who I've become and the compassion and the empathy and the, you know, the interest I have in, in just being human, you know, it's, it's hard.

29:51I don't know. The one mantra I say to myself every single day is if you're grateful for where you are, you have to respect the road that got you there. and in respect, there's so much love in respect, but it's not love the road that got you there. It's not like appreciate every single thing. It's not, it's actually like respect that like these things may perhaps without a single one of these things happening, the best one or the worst one does today get to unfold exactly the way it is. You know, does it create the desire to have a family to, to rebuild your family? Do you know, does it create this desire to create these incredible offerings of grief counseling to us?

30:34And in that there's so much respect to be found in our history, no matter how many tragedies we've had to endure. Yeah. That's cool to look at it on such a big level. Yeah. I, something similar, I think to myself, I have three kids and I'll think, you know, I don't want anything terrible to happen to them or anything hard to happen to them. I want to shield them from, from hardship. And then I think why, you know, everything hard that's ever happened to me has made me a better person. In knowing that truth. And I feel that every person would fundamentally feel that that is true, that they would say that like, I learned so much through what I've gone through, you know, whether they, whether they're able to kind of bravely say that it was the hard things that gave you the wisdom, but they would at least say that like where I have struggled, I have found lessons.

31:20Why do you think that grieving is just so taboo or we are so deeply avoiding it as a culture and not kind of, I don't know, like putting more space around it, you know, like you're saying without, without giving people leave or, you know, culturally trying to brush over it or hope not to look at it. Is that fear? I think the root is fear. Absolutely. But I think we're also lacking ritual and structure. And I think we're lacking a framework for which to understand death and loss and, you know, history and future. And we're so distracted with so many immediate things that are in front of us that we aren't continuing to try to develop these things.

32:03The pandemic was a really interesting lens to view how we reacted in Western culture, in America in particular to all this sudden loss and sudden change and people losing even the small rituals they had, people not being able to sit shiva or go to funerals or have these memorials for people they were losing. And yet we still have that ability all the time. We can come up with the most creative things all on our own. We can find ways to honor people. We can find ways to connect with people we've lost. And when we're not doing that and not acknowledging it, I think There's a lot of fear there. And the fear just comes up all the time because we're not exploring what does death and dying mean.

32:46We're not facing end of life to begin with. We don't even teach death and dying and end of life in medical school. Our doctors and nurses are not learning about end of life and death and grief. And same is true for psychology. There was nothing required in my grad school program for death, dying, and grief. It was an elective. I know. Yet every therapist I know deals with grief on some level, whether or not they specialize in it. People bring grief into the office nonstop, yet nobody's trained in it. It's mind blowing. And so there's a lot of fear around it because nobody knows enough and nobody talks about it.

33:21Is that why? So in your book, you say that there's the four orientations and it's entering, engaging, surrendering, and transforming. Is that why you say that you kind of wanted to emphasize entering as the first? Yeah. I mean, I think we enter into grief, you know, often without a choice. Again, like loss happens to us and we kind of enter into this space of grieving and it's really disorienting. And the beginning of that kind of grief, we're just trying to, you know, find our balance, figure out where we are, look at this new landscape. And we've entered into it without a lot of knowledge, you know, because often we haven't had role models for what it looks like to grieve.

33:59We weren't talked to about it as children. You know, we're really failing in this way in terms of talking to kids about death and dying in grief. No one's prepared for it. So we enter into grief without a map. And yet there we are. And so the second part of engaging with it is starting to really be like, okay, here I am. What do I do with this? Yet it's also at the same time really healing. whereas women again will tend to be more open to talking about their grief with friends with family with even strangers and a zoom support group you know yeah I think a lot about in ways I've like watched things when I was younger and I was like yes I learned how to be a friend who is there for another friend by watching steel magnolias because I watch this group of women and I was like oh you still get to laugh and if somebody cries or and there's no wrong way and you still should be yourself.

34:52Yeah. And it all happens in a group. Whereas you don't know where like Salby's husband was like where his grief is like taking place. There is no male equivalent of Steel Magnolias. Yeah. I think about when we watched the kind of Michael Jordan 10 episode thing when it came out and there's the game where he just cries and cries and cries, but it's like he actually had lost his dad that year, but there's no interviews, conversations. There's no books. There's no documentary on like him losing his dad or him mysteriously losing this other guy that was his, worked in the locker room that was an elder that took care of him.

35:26But there's this one game where he just let himself fall apart. And what's really interesting is that you, as the woman watching that, I was like, oh, he must've been grieving his dad. And, but we didn't have a conversation about grief in my household as we were watching it. We're like, yeah, he was really emotional because whatever happened to his dad, but it would just went right back to the, just that there was death, but not that there was then grief. But that's one of those messages again, right? That men don't talk about grief. And so they receive those messages. And so then they follow them and don't talk about it, but then they, then they're stuffing it down and they're feeling isolated and they're feeling like they're doing something wrong and it's heartbreaking.

36:01I am so grateful to Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert for talking about grief so much in recent years. And because they're really taking that lead as being men who are being so open about their experience of loss and grief. Do you think there are symptoms of grief that we don't associate with grieving? Like we know the things that like we just talked about, but when you were saying that you reached rock bottom, like, do you think there's ways that we reach rock bottom that we just wouldn't assign as rock bottom? Do you think there's ways that we see symptoms of grief that we just are like, oh my God, that's my grief.

36:35And I didn't know. Yeah. I mean, I think we're all carrying so much collective grief right now, and it's making it difficult to go back to work or to do different things. And we're not attributing it to grief. You know, we're attributing it, attributing it, attributing it to all sorts of other things. And I think the main problem actually lies in not the symptoms, but just acknowledging all the different things we grieve and how often we are grieving. and I think anxiety is a very overlooked symptom of grief that I've been talking about for a while and it's a place we go to one because we're avoiding you know other emotions of grief so it spills out in anxiety or the grief itself the loss itself has really changed our lives so much that it's created a lot of anxiety about the future about our identities and so it's creating this feeling of, you know, not feeling safe, not knowing who we are.

37:31When we're grieving, we can't always depend on who we used to be. You know, when we go out in the world, we go to a social gathering after a big loss, or we go to work, or we're parenting, and we're not the same. And we can't always rely on ourselves to be steady or to not, you know, have a breakdown or to not be consumed and distracted by the loss itself. And so there's so much that's changing just in terms of knowing who we are. And that causes a lot of anxiety. Do you think that in that there's also like this way that we allow ourselves to like live with sadness? Because sometimes I think we don't allow ourselves to have certain emotions unless they're bringing us to our knees.

38:14So we allow ourselves to have it, but we're not acknowledging it. So it's like, do you think also one of the symptoms of grief or just like that? I am just a little sad, but we sometimes think that if it's not this sadness that is like debilitating, that we can't say I'm sad or allow ourselves to say, I'm just a little sad all the time. Therefore it is a thin veil between who I am and what I'm processing. You're right about sadness. Often we think it needs to be this really huge thing that either completely, you know, knocks us down or that we have to rehabilitate from rather than just being able to carry these kind of small feelings of sadness that come up throughout the day, maybe feelings of nostalgia or missing or memory, you know, these kind of sense memories that will come when we carry loss and letting that be okay.

39:03And even listening to them, having that intuitive moment of like, why is this like moment of sadness coming when I was seemingly fine earlier? And perhaps maybe listening to what it's asking us to do, because I have found definitely that I've just been experiencing. I think I've had so many of my close friends have these really traumatic losses over the past couple of years. And it just makes me a little sad throughout the day. And then in that sadness, sometimes I'll say like, you know, I want to end the day early because I just want to be with my kids because that is a way in which I'm feeling grateful for aliveness and life.

39:39Because I do think, And as your books talk about ways in which grief asks you to reprioritize. And so even if the grief is not, it's not yours completely. Cause I couldn't say that someone else's father's grief is my grief, but I grieve with them and have an experience around it. Also that wouldn't you say would be kind of weird for me to not want to, or anyone to not want to have their own micro changes of like, oh yeah, I, I saw what I, what I felt from this loss and going through this with my friend really made me want to parent this way or spend my time this way. Or when I'm seeing this mass kind of war and mass, you know, death and grief, collective grieving of our, of us globally, I find that it's creating these kind of threads of sadness and each thread of sadness is really kind of propelling a small shift throughout how I'm living in my, you know, in each 24 hour cycle of my life.

40:39Yeah. I love that. I always say grief asks a lot of us and I feel like all of those things you're describing are really, they can be looked at as opportunities. Sometimes we'll brush them aside, you know, like a public figure will die and we'll feel that sadness. And then we'll, then we'll say to ourselves, Oh no, I didn't even know that person. I shouldn't feel this rather than, you know, looking at it as an opportunity to feel something and examine something about how we want to be in the world or like, you know, a friend loses somebody and we're, we're having an experience around that. Absolutely.

41:09And so often we will dismiss that as no, I can't have this experience. This is her grief. This is her loss. Yet. I think every single one is an opportunity to get to know ourselves better and examine that those meaningful moments of our lives. Well, cause it's also a fine line with friends because, you know, you don't want to center your experience, but it's also weird to not have an experience. And you just, I think the line, the boundary to me is always that my experience is never my friend's problem. Right. I never, you know, it's like, it's my business. Like I've got to like, you're not going to go to her and be like, I'm so sad today.

41:45I need you to help take care of me about your dad. Exactly. Like, it's not your problem, but it is still my experience. And I think that that is, you know, how I kind of go through being in community with others who experience loss is to like, say, you know, it's to not live without being affected, but to know that like, if it's not central to me and it's mine, right. Like, don't you think there's some type of ownership of like, you know, there's almost the, like you, you're not taking ownership of the person that's being grieved, but you are just, you know, allowing yourself to feel, feel that grief is present and grief, as you say, changes us and all of us, your whole tribe too.

42:32Yeah. I saw, especially during the pandemic, a lot of what I call grief shaming where people would, you know, somebody would be expressing something online about something they've lost, you know, maybe not being able to go to their kid's graduation or something. And then other people would jump on them and say, you know, Oh, you should, you know, there's so many people who have it so much worse. And, and that just broke my heart. It invalidates everyone's experience and robs them of that opportunity to kind of investigate that sadness and, and, you know, what it offers us. And I guess also that fear of being shamed, you know, I have a friend who always says, just because your hard time isn't a 10, don't let that like 10 bribe you out of feeling your six, you know, because like, and so it's like, just feel what you feel like, and know, maybe the appropriate kind of like space and not appropriate as, as in it's wrong or right, but where it should be held because what it might be is, and I think we're learning this with how we engage online is that perhaps with a group of strangers and with no regulation is perhaps actually where that doesn't belong so that you can safely feel without judgment, whatever you feel, because whatever you're feeling is always correct.

43:46Like, you know, because it's leading you, whether it's irrational, rational, whatever, it's still the starting place for something you're needing to heal, figure out, shake out, know, and so that you can kind of keep going. and this is where you know this is why so many people struggle in their grief because they enter into it and suddenly they're bombarded with all these different messages and forms of what it what they should feel and how long they should feel it and what it should look like and you know it's hard to find your way back to that intuition and so again this is the whole point of conscious grieving is how do we how do we really take a step back from all of the external stuff and get in tune and get to know our own grief.

44:35So after you've gotten to know it and you've kind of entered into engaged with, found a way to surrender and you get to transforming or you get to transformation, what has that looked like for your yourself, your clients? And then how have you seen it manifest? I think back to the way you described the opportunity that comes with heartbreak. You know, it's like everything's in pieces around you, but now is this opportunity to rebuild it and transform what your old heart used to be like, and this old experience into something really new, um, into a new version of yourself in which you move into your life and forward into your life with more intention, a clearer understanding of who you are, what your relationships are like, mortality, time, so many things, how you want to, you know, approach the end of your own life, you can't go through a significant loss without thinking about death and dying and what happens next.

45:32And those are big, scary things, yet they also lend themselves to this transformation of getting clearer about who we are. And there's a lot of beauty in that. And I think I've seen so many clients come through the really hard space and begin to rebuild, discard pieces of their lives or themselves that weren't serving them, move into different spaces that they find just so enriching, you know, with their relationships change, they kind of figure out really what they want to do and how they want to show up in their world. And there's a lot of like power and just, it can be just so profound to see that.

46:13Something I've thought about, or I reflect on a lot in the energy of transformation. And I felt this a lot in your kind of chapter on it is the word rebirth. And this idea that when something happens that truly kind of brings us to our knees or shakes us to our core or puts us into pieces, there's also this energy of a rebirth because I think a lot of the times we think that transformation is a transition from one place to another. But in transition, I have found that there's like a wrestling with a past and a present. Whereas in a rebirth, like, no, everything is new and everybody feels differently and every energy feels differently.

46:54And, and even where you live might feel like a completely different place or where you're, you know, kids go to school, I mean, like, which felt like a great place is now not a great place for you or all these things and allowing this rebirth to happen where you're like, wow, I'm like a newborn child. And that's why I need these kind of fragile energies. And then as I kind of am growing, regrowing up, I'm re-meeting people of comfort in my new life and forgiving yourself for not wanting to try to straddle an old life before this rebirth. Yeah. I think also one of the things that's really interesting about rebirth in terms of grief is that there's also a rebirth of your relationship with the person you lost.

47:42So when you lose someone significant, it feels like that relationship has been severed. There's a physicality that's gone. They're no longer walking into a room. You can't pick up the phone and call them anymore. And it feels like that relationship is over. And one of the things that you really discover in that transformation process of grief is that there is an ability to kind of reconnect, instill this new relationship with them. My mom's been gone for 27 years. And I still feel like I am in relationship with her all the time. I think about her in different ways all the time. I get to know her as I become ages.

48:16She was, as I become a mother, I'm having my kids get to know her. There's a whole rebirth of that relationship that felt elusive to me in the beginning of grief. I just, in the beginning, you just, you can't conceptualize how you're going to get to that place after this very physical relationship. And yet when you move through those other parts of grief, you eventually do land in this place where you realize that you still have a relationship with them. And then there's opportunity to cultivate that even more. Well, with that amazing advice of something that's in kind of the more like evolved space of grief being trans that if you can get to the transformation spot, I'd love to kind of end with what would be the kind of main offering to someone who's in, you know, year one, day one, where the idea that they're even entering into a phase of anything because the pain and the loss also feels like such an abstract attack on oneself.

49:15What would be your kind of main offering to them? To begin just by acknowledging the grief, stepping into it, engaging with it, understanding that this is happening. And rather than trying to fix it, trying to avoid it, trying to move through it, get over it, you know, just kind of be done with it and go back to who you were. You know, it's more about who you're going to be through this process and owning that you are in this place. I think it's really helpful to get support in grief for a really big loss. I think it's helpful to, it can be listening to a podcast. It can be reading a book. It can be going to therapy, a support group, but just really kind of giving yourself that permission to be in your grief.

49:55And often we don't get that permission even from family members. So we may have to seek elsewhere for it, but we have to start by just being in it. And it's actually the hardest thing because everyone tries to move out of it as quickly as possible. So my biggest advice would be to just be in it, but you might need support to be in it. Yeah. And sometimes the support is trying to move you out of it too, because it's uncomfortable for everyone, you know? And so in that discomfort and so hard because no one wants to see people they love in pain. I know. Is there advice you have for the person who's trying to support someone who's in grief right now?

50:32Just the reminder that you don't have to do anything. There is no right thing to say. You just show up, just be there, just acknowledge their loss and just tell them that you're there and, you know, do things that they're not asking for. I always hear people get annoyed when they're like, everyone's asking me what they can do. I don't even know. So don't ask, just do stuff, you know, go over, take out their trash. drop off some food, text them, you know, let them know you're thinking of them and show up long past. You think they need it. You know, often we give people like three months, we show up for them for three months and then we're like, Oh, I think they're good now.

51:06Or they should be good. Some people aren't even like getting to their grief until six months, 12 months. Especially because so many people deal with the logistic. Cause I feel like there's the point in which, especially if the grief is so near to your family for the first three months, people are dealing with the logistics, the bank accounts, the, this, the, that. And so I do find that the grief really starts to happen when they no longer have to, they're no longer in over their head with the logistics of the death. That's exactly right. And their, their brain has finally kind of like caught up to what's happened, the actuality of it.

51:42And so then they're really feeling it. And that's the exact same time when everybody drops away. So keep showing up. Claire, thank you so much. This has been one of my very favorite conversations for the pod. I'm so grateful. Thank you. And thank you for this amazing book. And also your book on anxiety is so incredible, even though you know this is your new one, but I recommend both to anyone here and I, and I'm personally going to get them for my friends. So thank you so much again. Thank you for your time and for really giving and providing the service for so many. It is not work that most people want to do.

52:19And so it's a real, it's a real labor of love I can tell and feel. So thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. Thank you for making space for this conversation.

52:32Thanks for tuning in to today's episode with Claire Bidwell-Smith. Her book, Conscious Grieving is out now today on March 12th. It's a beautiful guide to grief and feels like having a friend walk beside you on your healing journey. I hope you'll pick up a copy. Thanks for tuning in. This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studios. I hope you'll listen, follow, rate, and review all of our episodes, which are available for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening to the Goop Podcast.