#309: The Nuances of Grief We Haven’t Known How to Name

Transcript — scroll to read here (or download above)

****

Grit ‘n’ Grace — The Podcast for Highly Sensitive Christian Women

#309: The Nuances of Grief We Haven’t Known How to Name

Have you ever wondered why you can’t seem to let go of something, even when you know that someone is gone, or a relationship has changed, or a season is over? Things are different, and yet you keep reaching for the conversation, the connection, or the sense of belonging you once had, recognizing that we’re still discovering new layers of what we’ve lost, can really help us stop beating ourselves up for hanging on too long or refusing to let go. Today, I’m sharing two personal reflections on grief, missing my dear friend Sarah Marie, who passed away just over a year ago, while also grieving changes in my understanding of a relationship with someone who is still with us, naming our particular losses can help us understand our reactions, soften our self-judgment, and consider what we need as the holidays approach. Instead of pressuring ourselves to just let go already, we can be curious and compassionate about all that we’re still missing. Welcome to Grit and Grace, the podcast for highly sensitive Christian women. I’m your host Cheri Gregory. Are you tired of the overthinking, overwhelm, and exhaustion that can come with being a Highly Sensitive Person, are you ready to stop worrying that something’s wrong with you and start understanding and nurturing yourself as an HSP? Together, we’ll build resilience, practice self-compassion, set healthy boundaries, unlock your creativity, and learn to embrace, not fight, your God-given sensitivity. Let’s dig in. Hey, friend! I’m so glad you were able to join me again today. Have you ever found yourself missing someone, and then realizing there’s something very particular you miss that you hadn’t quite been able to put into words before. Maybe it’s being able to pick up the phone without even thinking about it, or knowing that there was someone who would understand why a seemingly small thing was such a big deal to you. Maybe the person you’re missing is still here, but something has changed in your relationship or in how you understand that relationship, and you find yourself grieving in ways that you didn’t even know were possible. Well, today I want to share a couple of recordings with you. These are some thoughts I shared earlier this year in the sensitive and strong community cafe. When I was beginning to wrap words around two very different experiences of loss in my own life, as you listen, I invite you to notice anything that feels familiar. Perhaps something I describe will help you put into words some aspect of your own experience. Maybe you’ll find yourself thinking, “Oh, I hadn’t realized that that’s what I’ve been missing too.” And here’s the thing: with the holidays approaching, we can find ourselves trying to figure out what we’re going to do before we’ve given ourselves much space to noticing what we’re feeling, what we might be apprehensive about, maybe even dreading, or what we might need in these tender places, so I want to create some space for that kind of reflection today. In the first recording, I’m talking about my dear friend Sarah Marie. We had been friends for more than 10 years. She was a huge part of the sensitive and strong community cafe, and she knew my books better than I knew them myself. Since her death, I have kept discovering thing after thing about our relationship that I, I don’t quite want to say I took for granted, but I just didn’t realize how important a part she played in my life until she was no longer there. Here’s one such thing that I was just beginning to find words for in January of this year. The thing I’m recognizing for myself that I miss so incredibly is she was the one person in my life who was always a yes and in the world of comedy, there is a rule that if somebody does or says something and then basically tosses the ball to you in the midst of an improv, you never shut them down. You never disagree with them. You always take whatever they throw at you and you run with it and you add to it. Okay, so it’s a yes. I will. I’ll go where I will take this absurd thing you threw at me, and I will add to it, and I will build upon it. And I want to be clear that Sarah Marie was not a yes man.

Sarah Marie did not agree with me all the time. That is not what I’m talking about. She was not. A fawning fan who was like, “Oh, Cheri, you’re so wonderful! Everything you do.” No, oh my skin crawls at the thought of that. But her first response to me was always yes to my heart, or yes to my enthusiasm, or yes to the potential for a new idea. And as I realize how much I miss that particular relationship that Sarah Marie and I developed over knowing each other for more than 10 years, and you know, so much of it was by Voxer, the cell phone app that I used. There were times I Voxer for four and five and six hours while driving to and from Southern California, and so you know things would build, and they would get a momentum, and they would get clarified, and and you know whatever I said to begin with probably made almost no sense whatsoever because it was so new. She always found something to grab onto that she could say yes to, even if the rest was a mess. And by the end of the conversation, so much had distilled out. And here’s the thing that’s so important, and I’m sharing this with you because I think for many of us as HSPs, we play this role for some people in our lives, but we often don’t have someone like this in our life. And I want to be clear. I have so many wonderful relationships and wonderful collaborators. I also am just recognizing the lack of the way Sarah Marie specifically did this, and I’m feeling that lack at this time, and recognizing how blessed I was. And then here’s here’s a phrase I want to teach you because it was so important to me. If people expect their work to be judged, they will be less creative because evaluation apprehension, which is the fear of negative evaluation from others, prevents them from presenting their most original ideas. Evaluation apprehension. How is that not only for a term, but also it rhymes, right? I know what that feels like, and I know that with so many people in my life, I edit myself. I don’t share my best ideas because I know it’s just going to get shot down. Again, it’s not that I need to be greedy with all the time. It’s that as a person with a mind that is constantly generating ideas, I need that person who’s going to reflect it back to me with the yes and, and I think so many of us are surrounded by people who don’t, who are not able to do the yes and, and I’m willing to bet we all have people in our lives who instead of yes and, they do the no in fact, and they’re off to the races, either tearing the whole idea apart or just going off in such a different direction. And we’re just left there going, “Oh, that is so not what I needed. I needed a sounding board. I needed a mirror. I needed somebody to bounce ideas off of.” Perhaps someone came to mind as you were listening to me share my experience. Someone who received your enthusiasm, understood your way of thinking, or helped you feel safe enough to say something before you knew quite how to even say it. Well, in this next recording, I’m exploring that experience of searching for what was so familiar, and how it has helped me recognize grief in a relationship with someone who is still living, and in the show notes you’ll find the citation and a link to the material that I briefly read aloud. I wanted to share with you something that I read about grief, and it’s really been incredibly helpful to me. I’m going to kind of read what I actually read, add a couple of pieces to it, and then just share with you a few ways I’ve been applying it. The brain does not process loss linearly; it processes loss the way it processes any attachment figure by searching. When you lose someone, your brain does not immediately register permanent absence; it registers temporary absence. The same neural system that activates when someone you love leaves the room activates when they die. The brain sends a search signal, expecting the person to return. When they don’t, the signal keeps firing?

That firing is what grief feels like. This is why grief ambushes you months or years later. A song, a smell, a street corner. The brain’s search system reactivates without warning, fighting grief, suppressing it, rushing past it, or reframing it before it is finished, moving through you, does not resolve it. It interrupts the search signal mid-process, and an interrupt. Search signal does not go quiet; it goes underground. So the thing that really caught me when I read this for the first time: when I lose something, I lose my mind. I just know that entire body panic that I can go into, and that’s over a lost receipt that I needed to get a reimbursement, or a lost idea that I thought I had jotted down, but now I can’t find it. I remember when my kids were little. There was one time I lost my daughter. We were at a clothes store, and she was hiding inside the middle of a clothing rack, and she thought she was playing hide and seek. Again, I remember the full body panic that I went into, and also even as an adult, even now, if I get separated from somebody in a in a large area, I mean, I’m talking like Home Depot. I don’t like getting separated if I go there with my husband and I can’t find him. Again, this entire body, visceral sense of panic begins welling up inside of me, and it reminded me of a quote from C.S. Lewis. He said, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” The note I made to myself is, “When we search for someone but can’t find them, this registers as fear and then panic in our bodies. We go on high alert, right? We have bodies that that live on high alert that go into high alert so fast, anyways. And so then I extended this from the loss of death. The question I asked myself is, how can we help ourselves experience safety, even as we are grieving, when the very process of grief means we are constantly being pinged by sensations we automatically associate with fear and panic and the need to go on high alert? This helped me understand. My father hasn’t died at this point. I mean, we’ve said goodbye to him so many times in the last three years, but he is still with us. In the last year, I’ve learned some really key truths that have reshaped a lot of things I used to believe about my childhood and about him and about my mom, about myself. And here’s why this has been helpful for me. I keep looking for him, I keep looking for the old version of him. I keep looking for the version of him that I believed in for the first 58 years of my life, and nothing I do helps me find him because it was a particular narrative that is is no longer holding together. And so, when I can name this, when I find myself getting angry and offended and resentful, and then bashing myself for being a bad daughter, I can use this language of “Wait a second, my brain is doing that searching thing again. It is searching for the old comforting belief I had about my dad, and when I can recognize that that is what’s happening with compassion, then what ends up happening is I relax into tears, and I can process those, I can journal those, I can metabolize those emotions through activity, swimming, taking a walk, and I relax into tears rather than bursting into reactivity, and that just feels so incredibly different. Another note I wrote to myself here is our brain tries to engage in the normal story, and so even though what I read to you here was about losing a person to death, what I really want to encourage us to do is to try this on and see how it feels when we apply it to something even like losing a version of ourselves, or losing a dream we had, or losing a particular narrative about who we thought we were, who we thought someone else was, what we thought our lives were like, and I wonder if when people say, “Well, you’re just holding on. You’re you want to be stuck.

You enjoy playing the victim.” Perhaps what they don’t understand, and we don’t even understand ourselves, is it is our brains that are searching, searching, searching, waiting for that old story to come back, waiting for that old emotion to come back, that old feeling of security, that old sense of belonging that I used to feel. Right, and when I now, as an adult, can go, oh, it makes sense that my brain and even body are searching for those things. I don’t know. I’m just finding it so incredibly helpful in understanding why certain things have taken me so long to quote let go of, and the idea of our brains, and we know especially with some attachment figures, we are biologically wired to them, and so when. They go missing. Of course, it’s going to create this sense of panic and desperation to get them back again. You know, I’ve talked with Cheri Fletcher, who lost her daughter Annie Lauren, and she said this is exactly what it’s like. And I don’t in any way mean to do comparative suffering or anything like that. I’m looking at what happens inside of us, right? What is our brain doing? What is our body doing in response to that? But if we can recognize what’s actually happening, then perhaps we can have more agency and self-compassion, and we can see progress rather than feeling stuck or finding ourselves in constant rumination. As you’ve listened to these two reflections, what’s helped you name something that you’ve been feeling, but not quite had the words for? You don’t have to figure out what to do with any of it right now, but I hope you can meet yourself with a little more compassion when these feelings show up, and with the holidays approaching, you may also be wondering, okay, so I’ve got this new understanding of why letting go can be especially challenging for me as an HSP. Now what? Well, I wanted to let you know that Cheri Fletcher, who has been a guest on Grit and Grace several times, Cheri Fletcher and I are offering a two-part workshop called Your Holiday Grief Game Plan, we’ll help you think through a hard holiday situation and develop a personalized plan that you can put on one page, so you can carry it in a purse or put it in your pocket. That way, when the hard moment comes, you’ll have something to reach for rather than having to figure everything out while you’re way overwhelmed, your calmer self gets to take good, gentle care of your future self. We’re meeting on November three and November 10, and both workshops will be recorded in case the dates don’t work for you or you’d like to rewatch. Now, if you’re already a member of the Sensitive and Strong Community Cafe, both workshops are already included in your membership, and if you’re not yet a member, registering for your holiday grief game plan includes one free month in the sensitive and strong community cafe, which means that you’ll have a place to receive support from me and sister HSPs as the holidays approach. Just go to cherrygregory.com/holiday. That’s c h e r i g r e g o r y.com backslash h o l i d a y, or you can click on the link in the show notes to find more details. We would love to help you make room for what matters and for what you need this holiday season. Thank you for listening to Grit and Grace, the podcast for highly sensitive Christian women. I hope this episode leaves you feeling encouraged, equipped to thrive, and more compassionate toward the tenderest parts of your HSP heart. Be sure to follow in your favorite podcast app and share this episode with a friend. Now, if you’re brand new to the whole HSP concept, come take the “Am I a Highly Sensitive Person?” quiz. You’ll find that link in the show notes. And remember, God created you sensitive. In Christ, you are always strong. Maybe there’s a holiday gathering you’re dreading, or a tradition you just can’t face this season, or someone you need to tell. I need to do things differently this year.

If so, Cheri Fletcher and I would love to help you think it through in your holiday grief game plan, so you can go into that moment knowing you have choices, words you can use, and support you can reach for. And if you’re not yet a member of the sensitive and strong community cafe, your workshop registration includes one free month with me and a sisterhood of amazing HS peeps. Just go to cherrygregory.com/holiday. That’s C-H-E-R-I-G-R-E-G-O-R-Y/Holiday, or click on the link in the show notes to learn more. Let’s make a plan that fits you now.