Topic: Grief causing relationship problems

ERP 135: How To Handle Grief And Loss In Relationship

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Welcome to The Empowered Relationship Podcast, helping you turn relationship challenges into opportunities and setting you up for relationship success. Your host, Dr. Jessica Higgins, is a licensed psychologist and relationship coach who shares valuable tips, tools and resources for you to dramatically improve your relationship.

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Thank you for joining today’s podcast episode. Today’s episode is 135, How To Handle Grief And Loss In Relationship. If you are a consistent listener, I just wanna take a moment and say thank you for being patient; I have had a multitude of technological issues. I almost can’t even believe it. It’s been several weeks now. I wanna say almost a month ago I had a client nudging me, and she was like “Okay, I’m waiting for your latest podcast episode”, and I was like “I have been publishing weekly, I’m not sure what’s going on…” After a few questions I learned that her player – my episodes weren’t uploading.

Through some investigation, I learned that my feed was broken, and there were a lot of issues going on with that. Some of you who were on my list were aware of that. Fast forward, after a week and a half of really troubleshooting and getting people who specialize in this, and ended up having to merge all of my podcast episodes to a different hosting company. Anyway, I’m not gonna bore you with technological details… But then I had all this malware happening, and it shut down both my websites; this happened twice, when I thought I had been paying for security services on both websites.

Well, long story short, I finally got that all resolved and have the highest level of security now on both sites, fully in operation and configured correctly, and all of that… So I’m hoping that moving forward I will be free and clear from those issues, at least for the time being. So again, thank you for your patience, and if you’re a new listener, I just wanna say “Welcome to this show”, and just to give you and all of us a touchdown for the purpose of the Empowered Relationship podcast.

The intention is to help us all be better equipped to navigate the tricky terrain of long-lasting intimacy. Most of us, when we enter into romance, relationship, partnership and marriage, we don’t tend to have a full understanding of what’s involved and what it’s gonna ask of us. And on the Empowered Relationship Podcast, we are discussing the full range, the full spectrum of the relational experience. On one end of the spectrum, we have the challenges. We might feel confronted with insecurity, upset, fear… Parts of ourself perhaps we didn’t even know existed, that will bring us to depths inside of ourselves that we were maybe not anticipating, that we might label as hard and difficult.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the things we might label as positive. That’s that emotional connectedness, that warmth, that love, that union and oneness. It might also look like ecstasy, and joy and bliss in the ways that we connect – sexual intimacy, playing together, being together, being creative together… All of these things that bring a great sense of fulfillment.

So we have the low and the high of the relational experience, and we have everything in between, and most of the in-between is really focused on the consistency, the stability, the safety and this foundation of the relationship. So really here we’re trying to look at all aspects of the relational experience and trying to be more mindful, more aware in the process of developing ourselves, knowing that the lows will ask us to grow and learn, just as the highs will ask us to grow and learn.

In a nutshell, I really truly believe relationship is one of the most profound ways to develop ourselves, to become more whole, to become more integrated and fulfilled. If you would like access to today’s show notes, you can visit my website DrJessicaHiggins.com, and you can click on Podcast and find all the episodes there on that page; the most recent episodes are shown at the top. Again, today’s episode is 135, “How To Handle Grief And Loss In Relationship.”

Grief is a universal emotion. Loss is an experience we can all relate to. Many of you have reached out to me — I live in the Santa Barbara, California area, and over the last several months we have been enduring great devastation through natural disaster… First with the Thomas Fire, and how much it covered the terrain and how many acres it burned. Then followed by the mudslides in Montecito and people losing their homes; many people lost their lives. I think the headcount of that was 19 or more, and it’s just been a huge, huge tragedy. And sadly, this occurs… Even in the last year, there have been several major natural disasters. The earthquake in Mexico City, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, to just name a few.

These tragedies have occurred in our environment, and we also endure loss in our families and in our intimate relationship. Unfortunately, I’m working with several couples right now that are experiencing the process of being separated, going through a divorce, and the grief and the intense emotion is all-encompassing at times.

I also wanna add that if you’re in a place in your life right now – and I hope that you are – where things are safe and good, that you can appreciate that and feel grateful and enjoy that harmony and that security, and I wish that for you and all of you.

I also wanna add that there are smaller, more subtle experiences of grief and loss that might not be so intense, but they also ask of us to confront the feelings of grief. That might be as simple as “I really, really want time with you, and you’re not available”, and that can feel like rejection, that can feel like loss, and it can also bring up feelings of grief.

Another common experience in relationship is when we’re getting in touch with our desire and our needs, and perhaps we have prioritized the relationship and the togetherness, but we have not necessarily advocated for our desire and our needs, and we might be in that position of feeling like we’ve lost touch with ourselves. So in those instances, bringing forth some of what you’re wanting, that may even feel like deal breakers, that puts you in a position perhaps where you’re questioning… Questioning the relationship, questioning how to be you in relationship. So the very threat or the risk of considering these issues can confront you with again, this sense of preemptive grief and loss.

There’s also personal circumstances that can evoke this feeling of grief and loss, and we might struggle with “Is it okay to feel upset?” Perhaps you didn’t get the house that you were really hoping you would get, or perhaps the job, or even struggling with infertility… There’s lots of things that we will feel disappointment and loss around. Grief is such an intense emotional experience, yet it’s so interesting to me that often we feel so alone.

In today’s episode I’m gonna talk to you a little bit about grief, then I’m gonna give you some tips, and ideas and stories around how to deal with if you’re in an experience of feeling grief and loss.

One of the things that I believe contributes to this experience of feeling alone is that we’re not entirely sure how to be with ourselves in this uncomfortable emotion. I have a client who is unfortunately in a place of separation with her husband against her desire; it’s not what she would wish for and it’s not what she’s wanting, so she’s in a deep place of processing grief and loss, and looking at a lot of herself. It’s transformational, in some ways, and also heartbreaking and devastating in other ways.

One of the things that she’s coming to terms with, which I think we can all relate to, is being okay not being okay. How to feel messy, how to be tearful, how to be upset and not together. So often, particularly in the United States, I feel like there’s the messaging that the ideal is to be happy, to be sexy, to be successful, wealthy… These things that we admire, that are beautiful, but in the shadow is perhaps we don’t know where it’s okay to be sad, to be insecure, to be afraid, to be angry. So when we are brought to our knees, and sometimes beyond our control, it can feel disorienting, humbling, overwhelming and almost as if we don’t know how to calibrate.

This is particularly true when we don’t have what I would call emotional literacy, emotional intelligence. We have not invested much time and area in dealing with our emotional world. This can be true for many reasons. I’ve had numerous clients describe their family upbringing and how emotions did not have a place… That my father was so stoic, and my mother was so busy, and I never actually saw anyone deal with emotion.

Or some people experience “Emotion is scary. It’s to be avoided.” Or others feel that it’s irrational, or it doesn’t have a purpose, or it will be dangerous. This gets reinforced through school, right? Particularly for young boys… That there’s not a place to be sad. We all hear the stigma of “Don’t cry. It’s okay, suck it up. Be a boy, be a man!”, that type of thing, and there’s a lot of bullying or teasing that might go on if a young boy is feeling sensitive or having emotion about something. So we’ll get messaging from many different aspects of our life, and this even — fast-forward into our careers. There’s certain industries that require the professional to be disconnected from their emotions.

I came across this quote by Lt. Al Benner with the San Francisco Police:

“To function effectively in our job, you must annihilate, smother, and suppress normal emotions like fear, anger, revulsion, and even compassion. To do so otherwise is to invite overwhelming doubt or hesitancy when decisive action is required. The penalty for your achieved competence is a mindset that might as well be a foreign language to your social contemporaries. We are victims of our own success. When these same normal and appropriate emotions surface in personal relationships, we automatically shut down and wonder why, over time, that the people we care about the most complain that we are aloof, cold, and uncommunicative.“

So this is some description around the training of disconnecting from emotion and how that is important in that line of work. I think this is also true for surgeons, doctors and nurses… Also, people who might do trauma relief. There’s some way of being with people in disaster or crisis, and somehow being almost inhuman, like “I have a job to do, and I need to protect, I need to serve, I need to heal, so I can’t be in the emotional realm.” What this then does when we’re in a position, again, as this lieutenant was saying, he didn’t necessarily have a way to put on his work hat and then take off his work hat at the end of the day and put on his personal hat.

What this results to is being unaccustomed to meeting your emotions, and we have very little experience, so it feels very foreign. And when we’re talking about grief and loss, people feel in unfamiliar territory and uncertain about how to move forward. I’ve had clients sit across from me in deep sorrow and grief, and they look at me and wonder “What’s wrong with me? How come I can’t handle this? How come I’m not coping better?” and one of the first things I’m trying to convey to them is this is what it’s supposed to feel like. It’s supposed to feel like all I can do is be a puddle on the bathroom floor, weeping. Whether or not that’s actually what someone would do is that’s what it feels like. We feel unable at times to face life. It’s unbearable. We’re dealing with immense pain. There’s actual research that shows sometimes heartbreak is registered in the same parts of the brain as actual physical pain.

When we are in this experience of grief, to whatever degree, it can often feel disorienting. We don’t know which way is up, which way is down. Life as we know it has changed. The ground is not stable. It’s almost as if we feel shaken. We might even feel shattered inside. Our hopes, our dreams, what we’ve longed for, worked for, has crumbled. We might even have a shaky sense of who we are; our identity is now altered.

Particularly when we talk about relationship – we were talking about family sometimes, we were talking about homes that have been built, we were talking about life that’s been created together, that’s now crumbling, or in question, or is feeling threatened. Internally, our nervous system and our brain are trying to calibrate. It takes an immense amount of energy for our brain to try to cope. The process of mourning may feel as though it takes all your mental energy, so therefore you might feel foggy, you might feel unable to make decisions, you might feel slower, or even scrambled and disoriented.

In the early stages of grief, we are experiencing a biological response. Hormones and chemicals are being released, and your internal functioning is actually shifting into emergency mode. This might explain why your breathing will change, perhaps, or it feels more shallow. Your digestion slows; you don’t feel hungry, and you’re having difficulty sleeping, or perhaps sleeping too much.

The parts of the brain that are active and more of a resourced place, like your ability to make decisions, and self-control, and self-expression, and defined meaning, and also your memory, and being able to integrate, and your attention and being engaged is all gonna be offline. So we’re not gonna feel as able to engage and connect, we might feel exhausted.

Really what’s happening here is your body, your nervous system is trying to heal, it’s trying to cope and repair. All of these things are not signs of “something’s wrong”, it’s sings that your body is working overtime to get yourself back into homeostasis… So just be patient and give yourself that support. I’m gonna move into in a moment some of the tips that can help you in your grieving process.

Another note before we move on to just brief overview of the stages of grief is one of the things that complicates grief is that it will tend to activate experience of previous loss and grief. So if we’ve ever experienced a tragedy in the past and we’re experiencing something currently, all of the past feelings are likely to feel present and re-emerged, especially if they weren’t fully integrated at the time. This is where trauma becomes a factor as well; if we’ve experienced any trauma in the past, that can also be activated, so I wanna invite you to be very aware and mindful of your experience. If you feel triggered, or if you feel overwhelmed, and you’re having memories of past hurt and pain – that’s understandable; there’s nothing wrong with you. Again, it’s just part of what happens when we’re activated, and it’s this very pronounced emotional state.

If you are having an experience where you’re feeling incredibly activated and perhaps aware of previous injury or trauma, I wanna encourage you to get extra support. This is a very important time, and it possibly might be overwhelming. So for you to face all that’s getting brought up and perhaps being triggered in you, to get that support in the way of therapy or coaching (therapeutic coaching), that can really help you do some of this work in a more productive way.

In a previous episode I shared a personal story, and I’ll put the link on today’s show notes if you wanna hear that full episode. What was happening for me at the time – this was many, many years ago – I was grieving a very intense love relationship. I was with a guy and we had been together for a couple years, and we thought we were gonna create a life together, get married, and we were the one for each other… And yet, we were in a situation where we were over, and we had said “This isn’t gonna work.” I was grieving tremendously. It was all-consuming.

I won’t go into the full story of it, but I wanna mention, to the point of hooking previous grief – I did some profound, deep work that it actually took me to loss and grief from my childhood, where I felt lost from my biological father; he died when I was three months old… And then feeling loss of a significant father figure. And just the loss that I had experienced as a child, all became very fresh and very aware as I was dealing with my relationship breakup.

Ultimately, this was an incredibly transformational time. Notably, this is one of the things that propelled me into studying relationship and pursuing this career in helping couples be better equipped in navigating relationship, ultimately doing my dissertation and devoting my life’s work to the topic of intimate relationship. And I am forever grateful for that professionally, and also personally. It allowed me to do my inner work, to then be prepared to meet my now-husband and to foster the type of relationship we have now.

So yes, I was dealing with more than just a breakup. It was complicated, because there were other occurrences of deep loss that I was also dealing with. So the invitation here is just to pay special attention to when you feel activated or triggered if you’re feeling any feelings of grief, and that it’s feeling compounded by previous loss, that that’s a normal experience and just to, again, pay extra attention and give extra care.

Now I would love to just do a brief overview of the five stages of grief. I’m imagining you have encountered this at some point in your life, so I’m not gonna spend a lot of time on this… One thing I wanna note is that grief is very personal and individual. It’s gonna look different for each person. While I’m gonna address these five stages, they’re not designed to be gone through sequentially. Sometimes that might be how it operates or it might be how your process occurs, but it’s not necessary. You can skip a step, you can go back to a step, you can ping-pong around them, and it can take as long as it needs to take. Yes, we don’t wanna encourage ruminating and recreating the trauma…

I even have a client that I have worked with and I really was specific with him about discerning the difference between being hard on himself, thinking negatively about himself, and being really actually harmful to himself, versus just feeling sad and grieving. So if there’s any inclination to be self-critical or even be depressed, and even have issues with hurting yourself in the way that you maybe have addictive tendencies, or… There are a number of ways that we can cause self-harm. And that there’s a difference. I wanna be really clear about the immense pain is the process of grieving and mourning, it’s not being hard on yourself and hurting yourself, either mentally, emotionally or otherwise.

Another note is that grief looks different in children, and adolescents, and sometimes between men and women, so this is not meant to be an exhaustive description of grief, but just, again, my point here is that no one way is right; it, again, will look different amongst us all.

The five stages. Number one stage is shock, denial. This is when, perhaps if you’ve ever been in a car accident and you just feel numb. Part of why — if it’s a very extreme accident, paramedics don’t want you to be moving around, because you’ll think you’re fine, but you may not be fine. Because the adrenaline is rushing, and it’s just too much to absorb. We haven’t actually done inventory and we have not settled enough to actually survey the injury.

So that shock, that denial, when it comes to relationship, typically we will be unwilling — it’s almost like “This is too much, I can’t deal with it”, or “I don’t know how to process this. This can’t be happening.” So it’s this denial of like “I can’t go there.”

The second stage is anger. As it relates to relationship, this could look like “This is messed up. I’m so mad at you. You screwed this all up. Why did you do this to me?! You ruined my life. I wasted so much time with you.” It’s just this litany of statements that could be said from this place of anger.

The third stage is bargaining. “What if we tried this? We haven’t tried that, let’s try that. What if I was different? I’m gonna change these three things about myself.” There’s an attempt to fight, there’s an attempt to bargain and try to negotiate, and it’s not actually dealing with the loss or the grief. It’s not accepting. “What if this were different? What if that were different?” and there can be this anxiety, this stress of not wanting to face.

The fourth stage is acceptance. “She’s leaving me” or “I don’t wanna be in relationship anymore.” “I am sad, but this is what it is.” There’s a real understanding and coming into truth and honesty of the reality of the situation. “This is over.”

I remember there was a time where my husband and I broke up when we were dating. In the very early stages we were working some things out and I think we broke up for a week, and I was in it, I was accepting the fact that we were not together, and I wasn’t trying to be hopeful and try to have all these strategies of how we can get back together. I was just accepting, and I remember all I could do was go to yoga. I wanted to get a T-shirt that said “When all else fails, go to yoga”, because I just was beside myself; I just felt so much pain and so much sadness, but I was still functioning, I was still doing what I needed to do professionally, and this was one of my self-care techniques – to be present with myself, to breathe, to accept, and that’s one of the things that yoga really provides for me, is this sense of being in the moment and being aware of the sensation.

I just found such relief in the ability to be in my body and just accept and allow myself to feel. It was a sense of like letting go to find myself; it’s such an interesting play, that there could be such a sense of connection from letting go, but I truly felt, as I was able to accept and let go, that I found a sense of presence and enrichment in that experience. It was sad, and I felt great sorrow for sure, but I felt a sense of equanimity and connection with myself that I was being honest and real.

The fifth stage is moving on, moving forward, perhaps looking at how to do some self-improvement work, betterment, possibly even making new relationships with others, friendships, or even possibly dating if you’re ready. Some of my most powerful relational work occurred when I was single, grieving a relationship and moving on. What I was able to do – I think I’ve mentioned in past episodes – a friend called it “mining the gold of the relationship.” I did this individually, and I really did a deep dive in myself to learn, and that’s one of the things that I hear consistently from teachers across various traditions – when tragedy occurs, it’s what we choose to learn from it that’s the difference maker. We all have experienced some level of hardship, some more than others, and that it’s what we choose to take away, the lessons that can be gleaned, the learnings that occur, that change us, that evolve us and allow us to be better off because of it.

Not everyone learns from their hardships. Not everyone is more mature, wiser because they’ve been through something difficult. It takes a willingness to look for the learnings and to be able to integrate that for self-improvement.

To address dealing with grief and loss, I have six tips to offer you, and I’ll be sharing them with you in the acronym of TRIBES. As I look at the time, I try my best to keep the shows to 30-45 minutes, so what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna create a part two to this topic. I will be recording this in the next day, so you will not have to wait long for part two. This will be part two to “How To Handle Grief And Loss In Relationship”, as I give you the six tips, using the acronym of TRIBES.

Thank you so much for your interest in improving your relationship. When experiencing grief causing relationship problems it is necessary to know how to handle it to save your relationship and have a better connection with your partner.

I hope you will stay tuned for that episode, and I look forward to sharing with you then. If you have a comment, I’m gonna encourage you to check out the show notes, which can be found on my website, DrJessicaHiggins.com scroll down to the bottom, and you can find the comment section there. I would love to hear from you – hear what you think, or if you have something to add on the topic. You can also visit Empowered Relationship on Facebook and you can also join the conversation there as well.

Until next time, I hope you take great care.

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