376 SelfWork: Three Unexpected Facets of Grief
The SelfWork Podcast
Margaret Robinson Rutherford PhD
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2024
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Norman Lear is someone whose work, talent, and creativity I’ve admired for a long time. I've used an interview that he gave before he died as my inspiration for this episode, when he said about his own mortality, "It's not the going... it's the leaving that's hard."
So today on SW, we’re going to focus on endings and grieving and three facets of grief that may be surprising:
- When grief is harder the second year and facing the future is hard
- When your grief means that you fear risking loving again
- When grief is characterized by "counterfactuals" - "what if's" for example - that keep you paralyzed and living the same life you did when the deceased was alive
Our Speakpipe voicemail today is from a daughter who’s looking for answers for her mom – after her mother has moved in with her own mother (the listener’s grandmother). “She feels a heavy energy…”. And asks how I can help…
Vital Links:
What are counterfactuals and how do they keep you stuck in grief?
“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”
― Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is self-work and I'm Dr. Margaret Rutherford. At self-work we discuss psychological and emotional issues and what you can do about them, |
| 0:15.3 | whether that's self-acceptance, taking action, or changing your attitude. |
| 0:19.6 | Eight years ago, I extended the walls of my practice to reach those of you who might already |
| 0:24.0 | be knowledgeable about mental health treatment but also to those of you who might |
| 0:28.1 | say you'd never darkened the door of a therapist and yet you're here I'll answer your questions while I invite you to take a few |
| 0:35.8 | minutes for your own self-work. Some people and it may be you don't know how to grieve. It's not been modeled for them. |
| 0:45.0 | They've never seen a parent cry for example or that parents show any outward expression of sadness. |
| 0:51.0 | Neither my dad or my mom cried much, but I did see tears in my |
| 0:55.6 | dad's eyes when his beloved sister, Margaret, died. I was glad to see it, although |
| 1:01.3 | it was a little disconcerting since I hadn't seen it before. |
| 1:05.0 | Welcome to this week's edition of Self- Work. |
| 1:10.0 | Norman Lear is someone whose work, talent, and creativity I've admired for a long time. |
| 1:16.0 | I was in high school in college when his first TV shows claimed the screen on the family, the |
| 1:20.8 | Jefferson's Maud, San Bernardino and son. |
| 1:23.2 | Finally, they were depictions of real, |
| 1:25.0 | or at least more real families |
| 1:27.2 | and storylines that reflected the dominant cultural conflicts |
| 1:30.7 | of our values and morals and choices, challenging racism and sexism to name only a few. |
| 1:37.0 | Normaier died a few weeks ago, and I watched a report on him actually an interview and how he talked about the fear of mortality. |
| 1:45.2 | I jotted down what he said because his words were like a thunderbolt exploding right |
| 1:50.2 | over my head as he verbalized feelings that I'd never been able to do. He was |
| 1:55.6 | talking to his adult kids and he said it's not the going I struggle with and then |
... |
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