This podcast episode delves into the complex nature of grief, emphasizing the distinction between viewing grief as a series of stages versus experiencing it as a series of seasons. Dr. Ray Mitsch reflects on the emotional turmoil and experiences that arise during the grieving process, particularly highlighting the "spring of our grief" where feelings of sadness, anger, and denial can resurface unexpectedly. He shares personal anecdotes and insights, illustrating how societal expectations can complicate our understanding of grief, often leading us to idealize the deceased rather than confront the reality of our loss. Through thoughtful exploration, he encourages listeners to engage actively with their grief rather than passively waiting for healing to occur. By embracing the seasons of grief, individuals can better navigate their emotions and find a path toward healing and acceptance.

Takeaways:

• Grieving is a complex process that involves navigating different seasons rather than fixed stages.
• We often seek control over grief through stages, but seasons reflect a more accurate experience.
• Emotions during grief can be unpredictable, resembling the changing weather in spring.
• The concept of grief work emphasizes active engagement in processing emotions and experiences.
• Cultural expectations can distort our understanding of grief, leading to unrealistic ideals.
• Communication about loss should embrace both the positive and negative aspects of the deceased.

Links referenced in this episode:

• sgi-net.org
• sgi-net.org/store
• sgi-net.org/community
• sgi-net.org/donate
• facebook.com/StainedGlassInternational
• linkedin.com/in/raymitsch
• instagram.com/SGI_International
• open.spotify.com
• apple.com/podcasts
• iheart.com/podcast

The Critical Journey

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Well, welcome everybody, to another edition of the unscripted podcast, the Collected Wisdom of Life, Living and Sorrow.

And as the name implies, it really doesn't have a script.

I come into these with certain themes and other things that are pressed into my awareness by God and by inner relationships with people and things that I notice.

And that's why I'm sitting down and just sharing those with you.

So thanks so much for taking some time out of your schedule to sit down and reflect with me about life and living and ultimately the subtext of our lives, which I think is really going to be there as long as we're human.

And I don't know at what point we won't be, but is just sorrow and loss and the nature of that.

And this week has been a heavy, heavy, heavy reminder of that.

In my experience, it seems like you can't get out of a month without hearing or knowing someone or some family that has been affected by loss in one way or another.

And that's certainly been the case for me this week.

I attend a group of men and we had a young guy, at least in my estimation, and we won't get into my age to compare, but he contracted an illness that once you've contracted it, you don't get rid of it.

And it eventually took his life and he died.

And so the biggest challenge I think we face is something that Paul talks about in Thessalonians when he talks about us particularly grieving people that we know have trusted Jesus.

How do we grieve, but grieve with hope?

And in a lot of cases, we end up using the hope against our grief rather than allowing our grief to exist.

And that really is a part of what some of what I want to talk about tonight in looking at and thinking about what I call the spring of our grief.

If you're interested and want to know more about it, check out my book on the bookstore@sgi-net.org and you can go to the store and you will find it there for purchase.

And it's entitled the Seasons of Our Grief.

And one of the biggest challenges I think we face, and I just noticed it even this week because we had an election and half of the people were unsatisfied with the outcome.

And it seems like it is burned into the cultural consciousness to think of our grief in terms of stages rather than in terms of seasons.

And I think I've been puzzling over this lately about why does that hang on so tightly?

Why do we hang on so tightly to the idea of stages And I think part of it, the only conclusion I've come to, even over the years, because I have forwarded the idea of there being seasons of grief rather than stages of grief, is that we like to maintain a sense of control over the uncontrollable.

And the way to do that is to identify the stage that we're in.

And that way we can find some validity around it or something a little bit like that.

And that's.

I think, that the teaching value, the opportunity for learning that exists in sorrow is a willingness to lean into our helplessness and our inability to handle things.

And ultimately, when we get to that, then the question is, well, then what do I do?

And what that means then is if I'm going to confront my vulnerability, my helplessness, and not in all things, but certainly around death, that's for sure.

Then I am called either to control more things in order to make sure I don't feel the pain of the sorrow, or I have to choose to trust someone bigger than me who has a clear idea of what is going on and how we might actually have a God that is invested in redeeming the universe in such a way so that at some point we can actually live without sorrow ever.

And that's a.

It seems like a pipe dream, I think, to a lot of people that that's simply impossible.

And then I gotta go back to trust again, because I'm trusting someone's word, if you will, about that.

And I think generally we don't really like that much.

And so one of the things that I have been thinking about, because I had.

We've had a lot of snow here in Colorado.

It's an early season November snow that's usually really, really wet.

And I was supposed to speak last Thursday at Focus on the Family about the seasons of our grief.

And I had talked a little bit about the nature of grief and how we got to where we are and the things that really go into that.

And the way that we think through some of these things ends up being either stages or phases or something similar to that.

That is very much a part of the landscape in what we're talking about here and what I want to talk about here.

But I think some of it is that we judge the stages as more understandable than describing it in really any other way.

And even when we talk about development, usually we're most comfortable in talking about stages.

So it's a stage they're going through when we're talking about kids or something like that.

And there are other ways to Think about grief development, physical, emotional, psychological.

All of those developments, if you will, are put into.

Which is the most popular one is Erickson's stages.

And there are eight stages that people go through from birth to death.

And they make sense of things, but there is not bright lines on the edges of those stages.

You don't just cross over into one, and now we're there.

And the same thing with moving on to the next one, although I think we find some kind of comfort in knowing where we are in stages allows us to do that.

So I think ultimately, in a lot of cases, it's just easier to talk about stages than it is to talk about our experience with grief, rather than how we can predict it and explain it and understand where we are now.

We can still do that with seasons, but it's not nearly as bright and it's not nearly as cut and dried.

And I think we find some measure of safety in the certainty of the stages that we do.

And so one of the biggest problems we have in dealing with grief is that when we use words like stages or phases or things like that, it tends to imply a certain level of passivity, like, I'm just waiting for me to pass through it, and I'll pass through it.

I just need to hang on and survive and do the best I can with what I've got, and then.

And then I'll be done right.

And the whole idea of stages are very similar to that.

It seems like it's more of an identification structure or a way to identify things rather than an actual experience.

And I've had that told to me over and over again.

I have experienced it myself.

It's not nearly as cut and dried as that.

I can exist in two stages at the same time.

And most people will hearken back to Kubler Ross's stages.

And the one thing that I would remind everybody who's listening is Elizabeth Kubler.

Ross wrote her book about death and dying, not about grief and grieving.

And in a lot of ways, she had made.

She's made comments before about she never really intended the stages to be used in talking about grief, because it's a different thing.

It's an entirely different thing.

And so it goes into a lot more of our need for certainty and predictability and explanation and ultimately control that the stages are really all about.

And because of that, then even the conversation with a loss in the arena of politics, people were talking about what stages they were in.

And it's like, it's not really stages.

Let's just talk about where we are, instead of saying what stage I'm in or what I'm not, and how do I describe the landscape as I experience it right now?

And so, like I said, I think it's easier to talk about stages.

I think it's better and even more accurate to talk about seasons.

And here in Colorado, and depending on where you're at, as you're listening to this podcast, is that you may be in a different season.

In most of North America, it is the fall.

And fall means different things for different parts of our country.

Obviously the Southwest, it's going to be maybe a little cooler, maybe.

And in the north, it means snow and cold, temps and all the things that go with that.

So it means different things.

It's not nearly as clean cut, I think, as the stages tend to have us believe.

And the worst part about that, just to add to that point, the worst part about that is that one, it makes it sound like it should be predictable.

And two, once I'm through it, I'm done.

I don't have to do it again.

And that's just fundamentally not true.

It does not comport at all with the reality of people's experiences of going through grief.

So I think it's better to think in terms of the seasons because ultimately, in a lot of ways, we're trying to describe the indescribable.

And what we end up bypassing is being present with the indescribable, the things that we don't like, if you will.

And that really is a significant part.

What I prefer to do is to talk about grief and the things that we experience in grief and sorrow in more in the sense of seasons that we experience and certain things that we need to engage in, we need to do something with.

And one writer in particular calls it tasks.

And even when we think about the physical world of development, we talk about tasks there as well.

And that certainly is the case here with what I want to talk about tonight.

When we're looking at the season of our grief and I reflect on it based on my own season, because at the front end, generally the grieving process starts with winter.

Everything's dead.

I am numb.

I can get things done.

I can do a lot of things.

I mean, I.

And the funny thing about it is that's usually during the time when we're actually doing the memorial services and the celebrations of life and the wake and all the other words that are kind of rooted in culture or any particular culture in some respects.

Where I grew up in the Northwest, in Indiana, And Illinois area, there were funeral homes.

So you went to a home to visit somebody who was dead.

So it's just a weird, strange warp of language.

And our language tends to betray how badly we want to try to do what I would call Gilda Lily.

In other words, I want to make it look better than it is.

Because if I can make it look better, I can twist reality into my own liking rather than live in the reality as I have it.

And so when we hit the spring, everything wakes up just like in spring.

Winter can intrude in spring, just like summer can intrude in spring.

And it's during the spring that we are fighting between reality and the reality we wish it would be.

And in some respects we end up fabricating a reality that suits our efforts to not feel what has actually happened.

And as I said over this last week or so, what I have experienced is I had a.

And I would call, I don't know if I call it devastating, but it was a significant loss that I had last March.

And this only kind of triggered a lot of those emotions that I believe if I were doing my own self diagnosis, which is not wise to do because I've got a vested interest in terms of how this is going to look and feel and everything else.

But I would say that I'm in the spring of my grief.

And so what has happened then is that the emotions will wake up and then they will go dormant.

It doesn't mean they don't you stop feeling anything, but it does mean that we end up feeling.

We have these rises and falls.

So you can have spring days where it feels like summer, and then you can have spring days, it feels like winter and, and everything in between.

And ultimately everything is waking up.

And so is my.

And our emotional apparatus, if you will, all the feelings start showing up.

And generally this is when people have the most work to do, if you will, around handling and engaging with the loss that they experience.

And so the temptation is for what would otherwise be labeled as denial is so much more than that because we can minimize the significance of the loss.

We can minimize the importance of the person.

I can engage in a certain level of spiritualism, like people becoming angels kind of idea.

And even in the Christian realm we have that and we have that kind of language.

And some of it is really just to try to take the sting out of what has actually happened.

So all of our dreams of what we wished it could have been are now made possible by willing listeners who don't know the history.

They don't know where they've come from.

They don't know enough of the history to question whether or not what we're talking about is true or not.

And so we can add and subtract in terms of the history that we have.

And so we end up being bombarded by all the emotions that would otherwise have been denied somewhere.

And these start coming at us fast and furious during this springtime of our grief.

And this is usually the time when we end up distorting things and diluting, making them less powerful or even magnifying them and being overwhelmed by them.

All of that is very much a part of the landscape of this springtime of our grief and how we experience it and what it actually looks like.

So the other layer I think we have to contend with is a cultural layer.

And my wife and I just was talking about she went to a celebration of life service.

And a lot of people have some really strange ideas about grief.

And they can make it as if it really didn't happen or it wasn't that big of a deal.

Now, one thing that I think is instructive from Elizabeth Kubler Ross is she makes mention of the fact that anticipatory grief is something very different than grief itself.

We experience it differently, we see it differently, we experience different emotions even during that time.

And when the person finally dies, something else hits us, then it's not quite the same.

So a lot of times people think of grief as something that they can do on credit.

And if I do it now, then I won't have to do it later.

And that's not entirely true, really.

And one of the things that is so embedded in our culture is that, and I think a lot of people just feel it viscerally and they don't know is speaking ill of the dead is that they can't defend themselves.

So what am I doing?

Why would I do that?

And the reality is people are really, really pretty complicated.

And when somebody dies, what we choose to reminisce about or talk about or reflect on oftentimes because of that very thing of you don't speak ill of the dead because something is going to happen.

What you end up finding is that the person sounds as if they should be inducted into the sainthood.

In the Catholic Church, when they were complicated people, they had their own fair share of brokenness.

And that brokenness either could refine them into becoming deeper and deeper people, or it could impact them to becoming bitter people or cynical people or overly optimistic people that can't see the negative of anything.

Because they're afraid that if they do, they will just get sucked into this vortex of negativity.

And all of those things are a problem because we're not living in reality as it is.

Instead, we're trying to create a reality as we would have it be.

And the challenge, I think, is that when somebody dies or we lose somebody, are we going to talk about it in a realistic fashion, or are we going to talk about it in an idealistic fashion and thereby only feed more and more fuel into the denial of what I am actually experiencing.

And I can go down that route, but it ends up aborting a lot of the effort and a lot of the work that I have to do in my grief process and how it actually feels and the nature of what that is.

So whatever it is, there is a distinct effort on the people involved that are left behind to keep intact whatever the idealistic notion is rather than the realistic notion.

Now, let me give you an example, even from my own life.

My dad passed away.

My dad died when I was 12.

He was a not a Vietnam.

He was a great war vet.

He was a World War II vet.

He had fought some stints in Guadalcanal in the South Pacific.

He was a Marine, and also some stints on Iwo Jima, one of the most deadliest battles in the South Pacific.

And I believe, looking back as a kid, that.

That he probably had some pretty significant PTSD after all that he saw with his service.

And after he died, my mom did things like mummifying his remains.

Not his remains meaning body.

He was buried bodily.

But there was a closet in our house that was a cedar closet.

It was lined in cedar, which would allow the clothes to stay intact and not get moth eaten or anything like that.

Usually the clothes that came out smell pretty good on top of it all.

And me as a kid would often like to.

When I was a little kid, I'd love to hide in a closet.

And it was in that closet that she kept his dress blues from the Marine Corps and then also his regular uniform.

And it was usually a drab green kind of color.

And I still vividly remember that.

And that stayed that way for a long, long, long time until she had a fire in the house and it took out that whole thing.

And otherwise it probably would have still been there by the time we ended up liquidating the estate and selling off the house.

And that's kind of a way to deny the reality of what actually happened.

And it was almost as if she was waiting for him to come back and to be able to slip into his uniform again and be the pride of the Mitch clan.

And that really is a lot of what goes into this particular stage of grief.

There's work to be done here.

There is work to be done that I think we have to be mindful of.

And it.

It's one of the reasons why for a lot of therapists, they talk about it in terms of grief work.

It's not something that I passively wait for.

Time heals all wounds, because it won't.

Time will.

Will make things worse if I do nothing with it.

On the other hand, if I do something with it, it will.

It will be an active part of my healing and recovery from the grief that I would experience and what I might feel.

So all of that is very much a part of this spring of our grief that we experience.

There are a lot of other things that show up, like psychological symptoms that look like depression, things like that.

It is the same thing that people experience during the spring.

And everything is waking up, like I said.

The feelings of sadness and anger and blame and guilt and regret and anxiety are all very much a part of that.

So you have the physical side of it, and then you have the physical or the emotional side of it, I should say.

And then the physical side, where there's a hollowness in the stomach that people will report or a tightness in the chest.

Interestingly enough, a lot of times people end up in the ER experiencing an anxiety attack and thinking they're having a heart attack, and that would be a part of this.

And oversensitivity to noise they experience, or a sense of depersonalization where they're walking down the street and nothing seems real, including themselves.

See, all of that is very much a part of the spring of our grief.

And when it comes to how we think, there's confusion.

There is this sense of disbelief, which obviously is very understandable.

There's a sense of presence, like somebody is watching over us, the person who's died.

And it can get severe enough that it would precipitate some significant mental health interventions, like hallucinations and things like that.

So you can have all of that within this season time that I think is worth noting and paying attention to behaviorally.

You can have social withdrawal, you can have long periods of tearfulness, visiting the places that remind them of that person.

All of those things are very much a part of this springtime.

As I said, they idealize the person who's died, and they may actually move away altogether.

It's called a geographic cure.

And they may actually move away just to get away from all the memories that are contained in the spots that they visited or the house or anything else that they might experience.

So the thing to keep in mind is with every season, certain tools are necessary.

And one of those tools that I encourage people to engage in, and I do myself, is just journaling.

And that's not trying to be Hemingway here.

It's just a reflection on the day and what you're experiencing and the thoughts that you're having and the confusing emotions that might be assaulting us in the midst of all of that.

And there's some physical things that somebody can do if somebody has actually died, and that's sorting through belongings and actually giving people around them the permission to talk about the person who has died themselves.

So the one thing that always comes into the picture, and I mentioned this early in the starting of doing this podcast, is regret and guilt and shame.

And there's a specific definitions that I want to make sure I get clear here when I talk about guilt.

Because regret is I should have done X, Y and Z.

And if I had, then the person may not have died.

And there's lots of people that think that way.

And kids even think that way if they hadn't misbehaved, their parent wouldn't have died or something along those lines.

But guilt is when I have violated a moral standard.

Shame is an assault and a condemnation of my person, who I am, my identity itself.

That's what shame really is all about.

So it's very easy to jump from violating a moral standard, which I can change and I can improve, I can do it differently, I can avoid doing that, and that would resolve the guilt.

But it moves from I've done something bad to I am bad.

And that's really where shame comes into the picture.

And it really complicates the grieving process because there is a self punishment motif that comes in and me feeling miserable and, and feeling all the things that I am, I deserve because of the kind of person I am.

And that's what has impacted the person that I cared about who died.

So all of those things are very much a part of that.

And then feeling victimized by life, victimized by death of the person, all of those things are very much a part of the landscape.

And seeking out some kind of support group of some sort or other people in our lives that have been through the grieving process and are not going to tell you to just, you know, to just suck it up and get on with life because it's not going to get much better, and this is not going to change.

And that's just the way life is.

And those kind of people you should run from, those are not the people that you need to be around because of the nature of what they're suggesting is not to embrace the reality in which we live.

And those are very important that those kinds of people tend to complicate the picture of grieving for many of us and what we experience.

So the spring of our grief is an important phase of work that we have to do during this time.

And that's why I wanted to spend some time talking about it, because we have a very strong bent to dilute and distort and to run away from all of the things that are very much a part of the significance of grieving and the grieving of a person of significance to us.

And we have to make sure that we allow that to exist.

I mean, think about it.

If you go back and look at the book of Job, you could say that Job went through a significant level of grieving at losing all of his kids and all of his belongings and everything.

His life was completely decimated entirely.

And his friends did a really good job, actually, in the first seven days because they didn't say anything.

The minute that they opened their mouths was the moment at which everything went south.

Because generally most of their attention and attempts was to blame Job for why he got in the position he was in.

And that's not helpful, needless to say.

But unfortunately, the grieving person does that as well.

They're already blaming themselves for the situation that they're in.

And the way out.

There doesn't seem to be a way out.

And in a lot of cases, you end up finding people engaging what we might call learned helplessness, where they just give up.

They give up because it's not going to get any better.

Then no matter what they do, is not going to make anything any better, so why bother?

And so they'll spiral into an addiction, or they'll spiral into the social withdrawal and just pulling away from people because they don't want to experience the loss again.

And that's entirely understandable.

I think generally, in my early years after my dad died, that would be me.

I had withdrawn from people.

Now, the funny thing about it is if you talked to anybody around me, they would have never known that I was withdrawn from them.

I put on an appearance of connectedness and.

And engagement when I was pretty well disengaged from investing in relationships where I could get hurt.

Again or somebody could leave me again.

And that was very much a part of that as well.

So the spring of our grief is an important aspect of it.

And seasons, I think are worthwhile considering looking at grief in that frame or from that lens because there's a respect and what I want to say, a specific connection to living life that way.

Because we live life in seasons as well.

We do.

I think we experience that.

And that is why shouldn't we experience our grief the same way?

And that was on my mind and heart to talk about tonight.

And hopefully it will give you something to think about.

And if you have questions, Feel free to DM me on Instagram @SG International and other places on Facebook I can be found and any messages can be left at Stained Glass International in Facebook and in LinkedIn it's Ray Mitch.

So all of those things, please join us.

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Dr.

Mitch.

So any of those you can find us and check out all the resources that are on the website there and the store as well.

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And that is it for tonight.

Thanks so much for joining me.

I appreciate your time.

I hope there's been something here of interest.

And if you want to know more, or if you want to hear me talk more about the seasons, I'd be happy to do that.

Just us know or let me know on the website or on the social media outlets.

Until next time.

Love you later.

Bye.