How to support yourself (and others) through grief | Nina Westbrook

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2021

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

In big and small ways, we all experience loss: whether it’s the passing of a loved one, the close of a career or even the end of a dream. Explaining how to process many types of sorrow, marriage and family therapist Nina Westbrook highlights the importance of grief as a natural emotion and a powerful lens to help you imagine new futures -- and shares ways to support yourself and others through difficult times. (This conversation, hosted by TED curator Cloe Shasha Brooks, is part of TED’s “How to Deal with Difficult Feelings” series.)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. So often we associate grief with the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship. But family therapist, Nina Westbrook, says we too often overlook a kind of grief that can have profound impacts. The grief over the death of a dream. In her conversation with
0:23.1	TED curator Chloe Shasha Brooks, Westbrook helps us understand and manage the feelings that come
0:27.7	about when we're propelled into grief. This is from our new TED series, How to Deal with Difficult
0:33.0	feelings. Nina, you have talked about how grief can be about the loss of people and tangible things,
0:41.6	but that it can also be about the loss of dreams, something that many people have experienced over the past year.
0:47.6	Can you give me some examples of grieving for lost dreams and talk about what it means to experience this kind of grief?
0:54.3	Absolutely.
0:55.3	I believe that grief can take so many different forms.
1:01.0	And I think oftentimes when we think about grief, we associate it with the emotional process
1:09.1	that takes place when we're coping with the death of a loved one.
1:12.8	It's just not as common to associate grief or correlate grief with the loss of a dream.
1:18.7	So when you think about dreams and when they begin and how deeply they're rooted into our daily lives and our routines and how much our dreams
1:30.2	determine our decision-making process and the choices that we make throughout the course of
1:36.8	our lives. They hold a pretty significant amount of space in our minds and in our hearts.
1:42.0	Imagine a child who, you know, from a young age, we begin to dream,
1:46.4	and they begin to dream about becoming an astronaut one day
1:49.4	and walking on the moon or becoming a professional athlete.
1:52.9	And then as we grow older, we begin to focus in on what our needs are
1:59.3	and what our wants are, and our dreams begin to look more like acquiring
2:04.7	our dream careers or job positions or opening businesses, having children or finding love.
2:13.8	And the reality is that these dreams do not always work out and manifest themselves in a way that we have imagined, right?
2:22.9	And that can be so devastating for so many people.
	...

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