The TeleWellness Hub Podcast

Ep 77 The Journey Through Grief: Wendy Kessler’s Compassionate Approach

• Martamaria Hamilton • Episode 76

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Grief is more than just an emotion; it's a transformative journey. Join us on the Telewellness Hub podcast as we sit down with grief counselor Wendy Kessler to uncover the intricacies of the grieving process. Wendy, an experienced grief counselor and educator, shares her invaluable insights into actively engaging with grief to process emotions and adapt to loss. We discuss the difference between grief and grieving, and how the latter helps us reshape our identities and navigate our connections with loved ones. Wendy also clears up common misconceptions about the stages of grief, originally intended for terminally ill patients, and dives into the complexities of our individualized grieving journeys.

This episode doesn't shy away from tough topics. We tackle the profound impact of grief and the helplessness that often accompanies it, exploring how bargaining serves as a defense mechanism. Wendy explains the differences between anticipatory and post-loss grief, offering strategies to cope with significant dates and anniversaries. We also emphasize the importance of initiating conversations about grief in various settings, whether at home, in schools, or among professionals. Discover valuable grief counseling resources, both locally in San Diego and virtually, to support anyone navigating this challenging path. Wendy’s guidance offers a compassionate roadmap for finding personal ways to honor the memory of lost loved ones.

Learn more about Wendy now!
https://griefguideconsulting.com/

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Speaker 1:

Welcome, friends, to the Telewellness Hub podcast, a space where listening is not just a simple passive act, it's an act of self-care. I'm Marta Hamilton, your host, and today we get to check in with a repeat guest who holds a dear space in my heart Through our podcast interviews is how we met and she and I recorded an episode about grief during the holidays that you can revisit, as well as some other episodes, but that specific episode we recorded precisely weeks before my grandfather passed, the day after Christmas. So her words are so encouraging, truly on a personal level, also on a professional level, and her insight is so valuable. I'm so grateful that Wendy Kessler is here today. Wendy is a private practice grief counselor and educator. She offers one-on-one grief counseling, facilitates support groups and offers professional training about how we can actively grieve, so that we can adapt to all the unwanted changes of loss and create our unique path forward through pain. When our grief path is overwhelming, unfamiliar or uncertain, it helps to have a grief guide. So welcome Wendy, our grief guide for today.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, Marta. I'm so happy to be here and continue our conversation.

Speaker 1:

Yes, I'm excited to talk to you a little bit about just grief. I know we've done some really focused episodes on different subjects within grief and if you are listening, I encourage you to check those out after this episode. Just to kind of dive in a little deeper, today I want to talk about some things I had noticed in my research really starting to pop up in terms of what people are searching and curious about. So why don't we start with first just reviewing what is grief?

Speaker 2:

Grief is our natural response to loss. It is the process that's wired into human beings, that helps us to again to process emotions. I mean everything you said in the introduction. Adapt to loss all the things that need to happen when we are living with the pain of loss.

Speaker 2:

Grief is it can be really helpful to understand that there's a difference between grief and grieving, and sometimes we use those words interchangeably, but actually grief is a noun, it's the thing, it's all the things that we feel and experience. And then there's grieving, which is the process that helps us move through that pain and kind of find our path forward. And so grieving is actually very active. It's this active process that we engage in and we utilize our coping and our resilience. To be able to again to process the emotions, adapt to the changes and also to form a new sense of identity is such an important part of grief work as well. Creating continuing bonds to a loved one who's passed or relinquishing bonds if we need to that is also a really essential part of moving forward, and so it is.

Speaker 2:

Grief is so misunderstood because we live in a very pain avoidant society and a lot of times we feel like if we avoid grief, we can avoid the pain of loss. And actually, when we avoid grief, we just add suffering to the pain of loss. It is really this paradox that grieving is the path forward. It's not. The problem when we avoid grief is when we get stuck in the pain of loss and that adds additional suffering. So, learning how to grieve, I really do believe, is one of the most essential life skills that we can learn, because we're all going to experience loss throughout our lifetime and really the ability that humans have and this process of grieving has survived, you know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of social emotional evolution, thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of social emotional evolution. Grieving is still our most effective adaptive process to be able to manage the painful loss we experience. So understanding and knowing how to grieve is really essential for hopeful, purposeful, meaningful living.

Speaker 1:

What you mentioned is so true. I think I've used the two, the noun and the verb, interchangeably, and so it's so interesting to think about it in that way and when you really think about how adaptive and helpful it is. And I love what you mentioned about the opportunity to actively go through the process of grieving, to release ourselves from the space of being stuck in suffering and pain. And I'm curious because I've heard about the stages of grief and, briefly, I guess in graduate school we're briefly taught some models right, here's step one, here's step two, here's the stage of it. Can you share a little bit about how the stages of grief or grieving in the grieving process, how that plays a role in the active process of healing and working through loss and grief?

Speaker 2:

in grief, absolutely. I really enjoy discussing this topic. I am actually I've come full circle to being a big fan of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who is the person who published the five-stage model of grief. That is the one that is still most widely taught and the model most people know. And the model most people know, which is the stages of grief are denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance. And this is how we understand, most people understand grief to work that you go through these five stages in this orderly, these orderly steps and then you reach this place of acceptance and you move on with your life. And it is, you know, elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

Speaker 2:

That model was published in a book called On Death and Dying in 1969. And her work, her research she was a psychiatrist in a hospital. Her research was done on terminally ill patients coming to terms with their own mortality and she never meant for that stage model for people who are coming to terms with their own mortality after receiving a terminal diagnosis. She never intended for that model to be copied and pasted onto people living with grief people living with grief and she was very outspoken about that towards the end of her career, that her stage model really got hijacked by a culture that likes steps and orders and orderliness formula, and we want resolution, we want there to be a conclusion, we want to feel like we can conquer something and achieve success, and none of those things apply to grief. And so she published another book in 19, like the mid 90s, I think, 1995, 96, around there, but called On Grief and Grieving.

Speaker 2:

And that book is about how her the stage model for terminally ill patients could inform and help the grief journey for people living with grief. And she was very clear and yet this never, this doesn't get talked about enough Like this isn't included in like mainstream education on grief that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was very clear on grief and grieving that her stage model is not linear, it's not sequential, it's not. Her stage model is not linear, it's not sequential, it's not. You may not go through every single, you may not experience every stage. You may experience them in different orders. You likely will revisit them throughout your life when you're living with grief and loss.

Speaker 2:

So the stages whether it's the five stage model or the seven stage model, because different things have been added to it over the years they are all just experiences that are normal within grief that in for offer information to help normalize the grief process.

Speaker 2:

And a lot of those experiences can be seen as pathological when they're not, like denial, for example, serves a really helpful purpose. When we are in acute loss we have to be able to shut down and disconnect from the reality just to get some stuff done. There's phone calls that have to be made, friends that need to be done. We still have to feed ourselves and dress ourselves and just do those activities of daily living. So if you can't disconnect from the reality of a devastating loss for a little bit during your day, you can't function. So denial isn't necessarily negative, or anger or depression, depression, you know, sadness forces us to slow down and we need to slow down when we're grieving. Slow down and we need to slow down when we're grieving. Anger is, you know, we often are motivated to make hard choices and difficult changes, like anger can be this very refining force in our life. So it's understanding that each of these experiences that are a normal part of grieving serve a purpose. They're not necessarily bad, you know it is. Every coping strategy can be adaptive or maladaptive. It just kind of depends on our motivation for why we're utilizing that strategy or what we're experiencing. So it's just that the stage model can be really helpful for grievers as long as it's taught and understood as normal experiences within the grief journey that happen in a unique order and in a unique way for each individual griever, and that you're never totally done grieving and there's a lot of quotes out there from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross about that that grief never ends with a loved one, because grief is the flip side of love, and as long as you love someone who's died, you're going to excuse me, you're going to grieve that they're not here. So, but we, as we grieve, we are able to find, you know, create renewed connections that can offer comfort and we can bring them forward with us as we keep moving forward in life, in life.

Speaker 2:

And acceptance is not about being okay with a loss or being okay with the absence of a loved one.

Speaker 2:

Acceptance is merely accepting the reality that a loved one is gone, or accepting the reality of a loss in our life, and when we accept it, it opens us up to exploring and understanding and activating our own agency of well. Then, what do we need to do to be able to adapt to that loss? So acceptance is so misunderstood and can sound really cruel and insensitive to someone who's grieving a loved one If they think that means they have to be okay with it, that they're gone and they don't. We'll never be okay with it, and what you learn and gain and the wisdom and compassion and growth that can come from, will never be okay with it. And what you learn and gain and the wisdom and compassion and growth that can come from loss never makes it worth it and that's all okay. And yet keep to have this amazing capacity to be able to work through loss, adapt, grow around it and continue to live a satisfying, meaningful, beautiful life. That's what the miracle is.

Speaker 1:

Gosh, grief is the flip side of love.

Speaker 1:

I hadn't heard that described that way and I think it's so helpful to hear that and also everything you described, even for loved ones who are walking through a journey of a major loss for someone else or who are grieving.

Speaker 1:

Because I think, like you mentioned, I think we live in a society we like action items, we like check marks and lists and accomplishments and we're pain avoidant. So I think sometimes it can and I think I speak a little bit on personal level, but what you're speaking, I think sometimes, in wanting to help others through their as non-professionals right, as loved ones and friends, but want to offer some type of support, we kind of try to, it's helpful to understand that their stage is normal, to be expected, and offer some kind of deeper understanding and knowledge for them and knowing that it comes through the flip side of love, right. Yes, because I just think about how I often I think sometimes I feel like I've seen people want to push people through stages like let's get out of the denial, or for loved ones or even themselves, you know, feel like I need to be somewhere else and what I'm hearing is everyone is unique and you can't fit everyone into a certain mold of timeline of reactions, of the experience and the process.

Speaker 2:

Right, right. And the best way to support someone is not to try to move them along or to help them. It is just to be present with them, to witness their experience, to validate their emotions and to just to be willing to show up and be present and kind of in that same space where they're with what they're experiencing in that moment for their grief, without the griever feeling judged for having that emotion or feeling.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. And you know, something that I had seen in my research come up and I'm curious about is what does bargaining mean in relation to grief, like what? What is bargaining in the grieving process?

Speaker 2:

Yes, that is a great question and in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's original five stage model again on death and dying patients with terminal illness, bargaining is that stage where you know, right after denial of, there has to be something else we can do. Let's find a different doctor, find a different treatment, find a difference, like all the ways that we just try to change the narrative. So the reality of mortality isn't true In grief. What bargaining looks like in grief is all the ways that we second guess ourselves, all the ways that we kind of get stuck in shame and blame and guilt and regret and we think about I should have done this, this doctor should have done that, this should have been said this, the ways that we really can kind of torment ourselves in grief of if I had done this or not done this, or a doctor had done this or not done this, the outcome would have been different, my loved one would still be here.

Speaker 2:

And often this comes up in every grief counseling session and often what that is rooted in is it's rooted in many things. I don't want to oversimplify. One of the things that can be rooted in is we would actually rather feel guilty than feel helpless and the reality is we are helpless to save a dying loved one and it's very hard to confront that as part of our grief. And so if we feel guilty, it means that there was something that was controllable, that didn't happen correctly, that caused this pain in my life, which can actually feel easier for our heart, minds and soul to absorb than the reality of the helplessness that we have. That grief can come crashing into any of our lives. Grief and loss at any point, and there often is. We can't control it. That's a hard reality to live with.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, just hearing it is really impactful. Yes, it's huge.

Speaker 2:

So a lot of grief work is just and that's part of the acceptance too right, like accepting the reality of the helplessness and bargaining can be the shield that we put up to want to try to avoid having to confront that reality. Because if I was helpless, it truly me and my family and our doctors and our resources were all helpless to stop this loss from happening, then that means any loss can happen and that is such a hard reality to live with and again, we'd rather avoid that and part of grief counseling is that. But there are tools and strategies and coping and resilience and changing our mindset and there are ways that we can grow around that loss so that we actually can hold the reality of helplessness and still feel our agency to be able to be active within our grief and our healing and our growing experience around that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's huge. That is huge and I had also looked at that because it looks like the bargaining can come just out of curiosity. The bargaining comes, I guess, during the grief. Can it be part of the grief, like anticipatory grief? Because I had seen some terminology about anticipatory grief. So I'm curious one does bargaining play a role in that, or how does anticipatory grief differ from post-loss grief?

Speaker 2:

Yes, well, anticipatory grief is grieving a loss, we know. We do kind of pre-grieve a loss that we know is coming. And then there's post-loss grief.

Speaker 2:

And they are different and anticipatory grief is so important to name because we do need to be grieving the secondary losses that are happening when, when a loved one has a terminal diagnosis and is in decline, we, the losses, start before the moment of death. There are changes, there are, you know, life winds down like a clock and things stop, parts of our relationship stop and end, you know, before the person, before our loved one, dies. And so we start grieving those losses and those changes all along the way. And when we don't name them, give ourselves permission to feel them, process them, it adds to that sense of overwhelm and almost feeling paralyzed by the intensity of emotion. And almost feeling paralyzed by the intensity of emotion when we don't have the release of recognizing oh, I'm grieving the loss that it's hard that my loved one could walk last week and now they're having a hard time getting around, or they could, they could, they can't converse with me the way that they used to be able to converse Like. Those are real losses. That, again, grief is how we adapt to any loss, not just death loss, but all the non-death losses too. So there's a lot of non-death, secondary losses that we're experiencing as we approach end of life and grieving those is important.

Speaker 2:

Part of anticipatory grief is that we're learning coping strategies, we're building resilience, we're understanding what we need to adapt to loss. But and that's important and it matters and it's helpful but it's also so necessary to understand because sometimes again, we can be very we want to be efficient people and we want to. You know, there can be this mindset. If I, if I participate wholeheartedly in anticipatory grief, then post-loss grief will be easier. And that's actually not true about that. No, it's not true and it's important to recognize that you.

Speaker 2:

It's necessary and beneficial to grieve anticipatory grief to just have relief from the overwhelm of the secondary, non-death losses. But the moment our loved one dies, it's a completely different loss, like experience of loss and grief to have our loved one not physically in this world anymore and it is a new experience of grief. There's no short like. Anticipatory grief doesn't give us a shortcut through post-loss grief and just to be prepared for that, but anticipatory grief, when we participate, can participate again, we can learn coping strategies, we can understand our grieving style better, we can know better what we need and what's helpful for us in grief. That certainly helps, but it's not going to be a shortcut or lessen the pain of post-loss grief, we still do have people.

Speaker 1:

What about anniversaries? Because, as I'm hearing this, I'm wondering how I know everyone is different, Every case is different, and I remember in some of our previous episodes you've shared some stories about how different people might approach an anniversary of a loss. And I'm wondering, because I'm hearing the anticipatory grief. There might be some of that with recollecting, perhaps, I don't know, when it comes to anniversaries of a loss and it never ends like we talked about the process of grieving a loss. What is your approach to this?

Speaker 2:

And again this yeah, this also comes up with all of my clients and in my personal life as well, because we do post-loss. We anticipate the anniversary of a loved one's death or their birthday, like those dates that come up on the calendar.

Speaker 2:

There's a lot of angst with those dates coming up, and so this again is where agency is helpful in recognizing we don't have to passively grieve, we don't have to just white knuckle, try to bear it and endure the pain and get through it. That I encourage my clients. Make a plan for that date. Make a plan Like when you see that date coming up on the calendar. Make a plan for how you want to spend that day. Do you just want to do something fun? Do you want to like spend time with friends and family, or do you want to actually like memorialize, remember, honor your loved one in some way and or something else? And there's no right or wrong. Do you want to spend the day binge watching your favorite TV show? There's no right or wrong in how you choose to spend that day. Just make a plan in advance, because that's activating your own agency, that you don't just have to passively endure the day and the morning of that day. If you wake up and the plan that you've made feels wrong, then ditch the plan. That's still utilizing agency and that still is more helpful than just feeling like there's nothing I can do. I have to passively endure this. So creating a plan is so important and also what's fascinating on this topic is that as people move forward in their grief and kind of more time, there's more time between loss in the grieving journey.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes people it's hard to imagine when you're in early grief, but years past the death, the date of death, sometimes you can't forget that that date is approaching and this is part of the bodies keep the score, like I have clients that will. I that will be saying I am, you know they're three years. This just happened in a support group two weeks ago. Someone was saying that they just feel so off and we're naming all the reasons that they were feeling off and and after listening for a while, I mentioned are you connecting that this is the month of your loved one's death anniversary? It's been three years but you are and it was just this, like she wasn't connecting that anymore and realize again her body. Like we, we stay in rhythm with the calendar, whether we realize it or not, and that was a reason why I contribute her to, why she was feeling so off. So it is important to be intentional with how we spend those, how we plan for those days, even if we reject the plan the day of.

Speaker 1:

I love that, to be able to have that, and it just sounds like you offer so much support through your grief counseling. Just real brief like what is grief counseling the process look like? Could you share a little bit about that and how people can connect with you?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely so. You know, grief really is a journey and you know, I my social media, I use the term grief guide because my all of my clients are on their own unique path. And again, grief is this process that helps us adapt to all the changes, process, the emotions, find our way forward. But and it's also our natural response to loss we have the capacity to grieve within us. It comes hardwired in human beings. However, there are so many reasons why grief gets complicated. There's so many different reasons, internal and external complicators of that natural grief trajectory that cause grief to get stalled, derailed, where we just get stuck in our experience of loss. And so my work as a grief counselor is to, first and foremost, provide a safe space for my clients to come and share their own grief story, offer a compassionate, nonjudgmental space where I witness and validate their experience, where my clients can talk to me unedited about their grief, because most supporters in a griever's life, the griever has to self-edit as they're sharing their grief so that they don't make the supporter feel too awkward or uncomfortable.

Speaker 2:

That's just a part of our society's the phobia that we have with grief and and death and dying and grief, that's true. So that unedited space to just tell your raw story, however you need to, with whatever emotion, whatever language, um, and again in a non-judgmental, compassionate space, and have it witness, validated, that's the first thing I offer. And then from there, that's like the starting point of us starting the journey together and from there we start walking along and I am listening to my clients and understanding their unique experience and need. So I see myself as having like this backpack of tools and strategies and resources and support. So, and I want to honor the uniqueness of every grief journey, so, as they are naming what they are needing, where their grief is complicated, whether it's internal or external, you know I can pull things out of my backpack to offer that may be helpful in just navigating kind of the next few steps to take, as they're kind of creating their own grief map of how to keep moving through their grief journey towards, like, growth and meaning and purpose and hope and meaning and purpose and hope and, you know, just a sense of direction and equilibrium and stability in their life.

Speaker 2:

Again, because grief kind of takes all those things away.

Speaker 2:

But again, what we need to kind of resume that is unique and helping them to discover that and utilize that so they just feel less lost in their grief experience, because we don't grow up teaching people how to grieve, we don't grow up learning how to actually understand grief as a life skill that we can use, you know, to again find our path forward versus being lost.

Speaker 2:

That stalls the grailing grief. So that's what I'm helping my clients with. And it's also really important to understand that grief largely is an experience of anxiety, more so than depression, and we often mistakenly think of grief as sadness when it is this. It's a stress response of our brains trying to understand and make sense of this loss in our life, and so a lot of grief counseling is helping clients to manage the anxiety that is normal within grief and we don't fix that. But you can learn how to live with and manage and kind of lessen the distress of it so that again you can experience a sense of moving forward. So a lot of grief work is actually working with anxiety and our stress-based responses that are activated in grief.

Speaker 1:

What an amazing gift to have you to guide us. I hope these conversations open up um other conversations at homes, at schools, among professionals, just just so important to look at this. Like you mentioned, we we all experienced this um through the history of time and we all will experience a loss, and ourselves as well. So I love that, all the support that you you offer, and what a life-giving gift. Uh, what's the best way for people to connect with you?

Speaker 2:

Um, well, you can go to my website, which is my grief guidecom. Um, or follow me on Instagram, which is mygriefguide at Instagramcom, and would love to connect with you to offer resources to tell you more about grief counseling. I do offer grief counseling in person at my office in San Diego, but also virtually online as well over Zoom, so would love to talk more with anybody about that that's interested.

Speaker 1:

Love that. And, wendy, as always, thank you so much for being a part of our wellness journey today. Thank, you.