SelfWork YGTG: How Do You Say Goodbye?
The SelfWork Podcast
Margaret Robinson Rutherford PhD
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2021
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to SelfWork's You Get the Gist, five minutes of some ideas you can ponder for the rest of the day. Today YGTG is about saying goodbye.
When I knew back in 1992 that my husband and I were going to leave Dallas and move to Arkansas, I distinctly remember a conversation I had with my therapist. I was wondering how I would say goodbye to all these friends and family that were so important to me. It seemed overwhelming. He gave me such an important way of understanding something about goodbyes that's I'd never considered - that many of us don't handle endings very well. We don't know how to grieve.
It helped me not personalize what happened next. We'll talk about all kinds of grief - and what you can learn about how you say... goodbye.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Selfwork. This is a special edition of YGTG or You Get the Gist, and |
| 0:13.2 | I'm Dr. Margaret. We're going to talk for a few minutes about saying goodbye. |
| 0:19.2 | When I knew back in 1992 that my husband and I were going to leave Dallas and move to |
| 0:23.1 | Arkansas, I distinctly remember a conversation I had with my therapist at the time. I was wondering |
| 0:29.4 | how I would say goodbye to all of these friends and family that were so important to me, |
| 0:33.5 | it seemed overwhelming. Yes, Vadeville was only six hours away from Dallas, but I knew |
| 0:39.8 | pragmatically that most people wouldn't be able to make that trip often. They had children, |
| 0:44.2 | careers, three or four of those hours were really straight and quite boring, with a major thrill |
| 0:49.8 | being a stop in a Tokyo, Oklahoma for dairy queen, or you could stop at the Happy Days |
| 0:54.4 | diner in McAllister, where they fixed food straight out of decades past. But after all, |
| 0:59.5 | Dallas had water burger and cold stone creamery, so I didn't think food was going to be the answer. |
| 1:04.5 | Just the number of goodbyes seemed undueble. Everyone from my hairdresser, Joseph, |
| 1:09.0 | to my friends from graduate school, Amy and Levan, to my stand-in grandmother, Ed, |
| 1:14.0 | who I had literally sat with for hours as we chatted often about life. When we left Dallas, |
| 1:19.9 | she was 98. She lived to be 104, but I hated to leave her. I remember so well what Larry, |
| 1:26.6 | now that seems like an odd name for a therapist, but that was his name. He said to me, |
| 1:31.3 | wait and see how people say goodbye. Some will want to spend as much time with you as possible, |
| 1:37.2 | others will pick a fight, others you'll exchange for a meaningful gift with or time, |
| 1:42.5 | others will start distancing right away, and then notice your own tendency. How do you say goodbye? |
| 1:49.1 | I was 38 at the time. I then all my grandparents had died, aunts and uncles as well, |
| 1:54.4 | high school friend died by suicide, and I'd been divorced two times. Neither time had the split |
| 2:00.2 | been amicable, and I grieved over not just the marriage ending, but the fact that there was an |
... |
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