Ep 5: How do you rebuild after losing the love of your life? Once you find that special person, it’s hard to imagine life without them. The reality is, some of us have to deal with this loss. 

This week, business psychologist Hazel Showell speaks to Madeleine Mansfield - an incredible woman, academic and widow - who experienced the loss of her husband and the life-changing decisions that followed.   

Hazel guides you through Madeleine’s story, uncovering the tools she used to overcome tragedy, and the thought processes that helped rebuild her life. 

If you want a better understanding of the endings happening in your own life. We have the perfect thing for you, Hazel’s 5-step worksheet, developed specifically for listeners of this podcast.

** Click here for your Thriving Through Endings worksheet now. **

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[00:00:13] Madeleine Mansfield: When it's tough, you just gotta keep going cuz it won't be tough forever. Forever.

She quit a job with nothing but dog walking and plans next many walks later, she says, education and learning consultant best describes her work. Now, Madeleine's is a story of surviving, an ending that many would fear. This episode is about intense emotions, and how you can learn to harness them for good and recognize when they're sending you down the wrong path.

Pay attention to her choices around confronting or ignoring emotions, and we'll come back to that later. But first, let's go back to the beginning.

Madeleine had never gone to university, but she'd managed to make a success of herself. She had a well-paid job, but she could do it with her eyes closed.

[00:01:39] Hazel Showell: So in her early twenties, Madeleine enrolled in university as a mature student, setting her on a bold new trajectory. And

[00:02:01] Hazel Showell: Madeleine accepted a job teaching at the university, and it was around that time a relationship started with Steve.

And, um, we started going swimming together and I started getting him into running. And then before I kind of knew what had happened, that friendship had turned into a wonderful, wonderful relationship. I was a very good teacher and he got very fit and decided that he wanted to do an Ironman, which is an ultra triathlon.

And so he was training for that and he was understandably losing quite a bit of weight quite quickly. I was concerned about the amount of weight he was losing, and then it became clear that he was struggling with some of his swallowings, and we were a bit worried anyway. Um, tests showed that it was, uh, Stomach cancer stage four and had already spread to his lymph nodes.

So terminal cancer, we were told it would be months. So we made the absolute most of those months. And in that time we managed to get married, planned a wedding in six weeks. It was a, um, it was one of my greatest ever projects, but it was only months

She tried to distract herself with a new puppy called Sky, and on top of her university work, she threw herself into volunteering and got involved in fundraising. One of my

[00:03:59] Hazel Showell: world's best widow. All the while numbing the pain with alcohol, she pushed herself to the point of exhaustion.

At this low ebb, Madeleine experienced another tragic ending. Her stepdad, Bob died, also from cancer, buried on the 22nd of March. Bob's funeral just so happened to be the two-year anniversary of Steve's death. So much grief for her to deal with.

And I found myself on my own in, an apartment in Bangkok, having lost the man that loved me. Having watched my stepdad die and watched my mom feel the pain that I had felt two years earlier, I was really, really

[00:05:13] Madeleine Mansfield: I don't regret doing it at all. Um, it was a, I'm very pleased that I chose to try, but actually, you know, I was working long hours and there's only so many Buddhas that you wanna go and see on your own. It's not a lot of fun when you go into another time and go, oh yeah, another Buddha. And every day I was waking up and my core realization was, it is another six hours before there is anyone in this world who loves me, who will be.

The final bit for me was just thinking, do you know, actually you don't have to tough it out, you don't have to tough it out. You can actually just surround yourself with people who love you and try your best. Once I kind of realized that bit, time

Cuz these are some pretty big things to get through. Honesty

Meditation, journaling, just keeping, keeping a track of where I'm at at the moment, those mindful practices allowed me to get back to that place where it was. Breathe in, breathe out, repeat, and actually when it's tough, you just gotta keep going cuz it won't be tough forever. , but you've gotta find ways to make sure that you're not focusing on forever, that you're focusing on.

I'm alive now for this second. Right now is not hideous. It's not awful actually. Okay, let's go to the next bit.

And to be able to sort of stop right what we're doing, find a better way, and also know how to ask for help. And it's something I think many people can struggle with. You know, am I drowning or waving? And it's hard to say, actually I'm drowning. I can't do this. I need a bit of help. We also talked about the stuff that doesn't help.

I dunno if you want to say a bit more about that through your whole journey of the stuff that really doesn't do to anyone who's going through what you've been through.

You can't undo, you know, if you are in a massive period of grief or change or loss, don't do anything. You can't undo, sell your house, or something like that. But actually, they don't, if somebody else is going through it, you know, don't tell them. Have turmeric. Yeah, bloody turmeric. It's not helpful. Another thing is don't talk to people about the stages of grief and explain to them that it's okay if they feel angry.

Cause quite often, from my experience, I didn't know what anger was. I was like, I don't think I feel angry. Meanwhile, I'm going out and grunting whilst doing deadlifts and punching walls, but I don't feel angry. This is exercise. It's. Challenging. I think when you are in extreme emotions to be able to identify what they are, I don't think it's helpful for somebody else to try and identify them for you.

I grew up, I think, in a family where Anger wasn't valued and sadness wasn't valued particularly or appreciated. If I was angry, that was something to be suppressed and sadness is something that I didn't particularly see and actually that kind of working through of, oh, okay, I'm angry today, and that's just as good.

Valid. Acceptable as being joyful by golly, feel it, feel all of it in a bid to be seen, to be productive and busy. One of my therapists said to me, Madeleine, there's no badge. You're not gonna win, an award for being the world's best widow achieving the most. What is it that you think you're gonna get?

You're not gonna cure cancer and you're not gonna get a. So do you know what? Maybe leaning into some of this pain might be a good thing. I know that it was said to try and make me angry. Did it work? Yeah, absolutely... I don't know why there's not a prize for being the best widow. Dammit.

Or you're so close to the emotion, you can't name it, and it's hard to be able to express your own lived experience to someone else. But I was also picking up upon the idea that every family's got the hot potato emotions that are not valued or not permitted. And so of course you won't develop tools to deal with those emotions.

So those would be the two emotions that you would have nothing in your toolkit for. And yet they are the two emotions you've. Felt the most. Absolutely.

It was almost as though I felt I needed to direct that to something or someone, and I couldn't see at the time that it was okay just to be angry that I didn't have to have, they didn't have to be a bad guy in this scenario. , you know, I didn't have to say, oh, I'm angry at cancer, or I'm angry at a treatment plan or, or at Steve for leaving me, or, or any of those things.

Actually, it was okay just to go, oh, this is what anger feels like. I'm angry. That was a, a sort of has been a big learning for me and also that actually the realization that both, that anger and sadness that I wasn't particularly great at the feeling. I mean, gosh, don't get me wrong, Hazel. There were days I was in a hit of sobbing and despair, but I don't think it was terribly well processed, but some of that sadness and anger, this wasn't about Steve dying.

It was about what Steve represented and what Steve represented was a joyful finding after years of shitty relationships. So it was what he represented as much as the man himself. And that took a long time to realize, um, you know, it, it's, it's never about, it's never just about the thing, it's about what that thing represents in the, in your future as much as at the moment I think was something I.

Work my

[00:12:52] Madeleine Mansfield: think it is also the identity. You build an identity for yourself.

A relationship in a friendship, in an organization, or in a role, professional role. And when that ends, there is a period where you are at to loss as to who you are anymore in certain people's eyes. But also when you look in the mirror in this, in, in my case, if I was not the love of Steve's life, the woman who cared for him, who built.

I knew life with him who was able to look after all of his needs and be there for him, and also was not the person that he thought I was. You know that phrase, be the person your dog thinks you are. All I wanted to be was to be the person that Steve thought I was because he thought I was amazing. You know, we died.

He died during our honeymoon period, so I was still up there to redefine myself... It's not just hard, but it's, it takes a lot of emotional

Oh, I've

Don't shrink.

[00:14:58] Madeleine Mansfield: I. A big part of me as a person is that I love a new challenge and I like moving on to new things. And I know a very good friend of mine has said to me sometimes she's never sure whether or not I'm running towards something new or running away from it. And I think in periods of grief, I have done quite a lot of running away from, but I also do have always been a person that, you know, I'm easily bored.

I wanna like a new. When after I got Skye, before my, my stepdad died, I decided that actually what, I didn't want, was a career in academia anymore because it meant I couldn't spend time with her and actually, what I realized was my identity was not about being an academic. It was about, I guess I, I might have a love of learning, but it's not working in, it's not working in that kind of environment.

What's more important to me is to be able to commit time to the things I love. A job is there to buy me time. I decided that I didn't want to do that. I started working myself. I worked as a consultant in various different projects and that's what took me to Asia for a while working from home after I come back and after sort of the end of lockdown, I realized that what was really important to me was to be able to.

See more of my family that was down south. Steve and I had a cat called Catherine who was ancient, as old as the hills, and she passed away, bless a little heart, and in doing so, I had a moment of realization that I didn't have to stay in Manchester, and I decided that I. Sell the house and move down to Essex where my mom is and my sister is.

I didn't realize how, how powerful it would be moving away from the road where I had loved and lived with Steve, where I had cared for him, and where he died, and actually being there where he had lived and died was wonderful and it was what I needed when he died. But five years later, actually, I was still holding onto that bit and I didn't realize quite how much.

And in moving away, I think I gave myself permission somehow to let my life open up a

[00:17:24] Madeleine Mansfield: Yeah. I'm. Very, very deeply in love with a wonderful man who likes Steve, makes me feel like me, and he's, he's glorious all any of

[00:17:40] Madeleine Mansfield: Yeah. Isn't that all we want?

Isn't that all we want? We just want, you know, actually, I don't need, I don't... I don't need somebody to take care of me. I don't need somebody to pay the bills. I don't need any of that. But I tell you what, I do want someone to share the ride with and somebody who I can feel at home with who sees all of me and, and likes all me for me and I, you know, that is a real joy and he is wonderful.

And we have added to our collection of dogs another little, little one. Nelly the puppy with him. I know. I am. and that is

So Madeleine's story absolutely reminded me of that saying, if you're going through, hell keep going. And she's a wonderful example of you being what you believe yourself to be and many people think they are. And fail to see the love around them, or they think they're not clever enough to learn and so don't, and in sadness, we need to heal and not hurt ourselves more.

Madeleine's one of the kindest souls I know, and I do wish her all the happiness and love in the world, she has earned her happy ending. Now, if you are going through something very d. The important thing is to be kind to yourself to heal if you need to heal and to figure out how to ask for the support you need.

And if you're grieving personally, I think it's actually the job of the people around you to ask you what you need from them and to be okay that you might not be able to answer. But they've gotta keep on asking and keep asking until you can. Because some things will leave you feeling numb and feeling the need to withdraw.

This is the big version of what happens when our amygdala, which is the fierce center of the brain triggers. If you think, most of us notice the freeze flight fight, so imagine that as a big emotional res response, freeze becomes nonflight, becomes to run away to with. And fight. Well, yeah, that's where the anger comes from.

And Madeleine, scribes, she worked out that you didn't need to be angry at, there was no bad guy. But anger does have a purpose. And I'll talk about that shortly because it's about anger. After all, it's not anger at, but it is anger because, and all of those big emotions come from somewhere and it's because a very primitive part of our brain has triggered, and it's triggered in a very lasting.

So yes, you might get angry and destructive. That includes being self-destructive. You're human, and there are grief counselors, there are therapists, there are friends, and there are dogs. Can't recommend cats personally, and I am a cat lover. You need someone just to hear you and to be okay with all of you, all of that messy human emotion because that's okay.

All of it is. And throughout the endings, big emotions can arrive a bit unannounced and a bit unwanted. The key is to be willing to accept them as they arrive because they all have a role. The interesting thing with emotions, especially in certain cultures, we can be a little worried about them. Uh, Madeleine mentioned that in her family, anger and sadness were not particularly valued emotions.

Many families have certain emotions that are not accepted or are suppressed, and as a consequence, you don't grow and develop with the tools to deal with those motions. In some families, It's totally okay to express sadness by crying, but it is absolutely not acceptable to get angry. In other families, you can rage, you can kick the door in, but you certainly couldn't express fear or sadness, and so that's quite typical.

But if you don't have the tools when they arrive there huge excessive form. In such a bereavement or you know, any kind of major loss, then you absolutely will not be equipped to deal with them. The one thing to remember is when this very primitive part of our brain is triggering, your brain only has two gears and two directions forward and back, fast and slow, and the job of the motion is to move us.

So sadness pauses away slowly to heal, and when we feel like we can rejoin society, we can do that. We can move back into the stream of life and we can carry on, but we do have to pull away for a little while. Anger is about fast forward, forward getting our needs met. The irony is you are less likely to get your needs met if you are just expressing anger all the time because other people don't tend to respond too well to it.

So you use the emotion to notice get, you have unmet needs and you find a different way to express them. Fear, the job of fear is to move you quickly to await safety. Interesting. When people express emotions like disgust, well it's to move us fast away from the thing we are. Contempt is actually pushing us slowly away from the thing we judge or feel superior to.

Actually, there's a correlation, uh, 95% correlation to divorce in five years, by the way, to people expressing contempt is not a great one, and it is the only asymmetric expression on the human face if you imagine that sneer. But when we express emotion, we see people getting very emotional about things.

Actually, it's quite straightforward when we start to interpret and understand them, but as Madeleine said, sometimes we don't even know what we are feeling. The first step is to learn to say, I feel X because Y. So not at, there's no judgment here. I'm not angry or sad. I'm sad because I'm angry because our emotions are our emotions.

Nobody in the world is powerful enough to make you feel single. Only you are that powerful. That's why you can control those emotions. They are hard, cuz they're very primitive. Now, happiness or surprise, all of those emotions move us towards, and as we heard at the end of Madeleine's story when you are feeling happy when you can feel awe when you can feel these wonderful positive emotions, it moves us towards the positive things in ours.

So it's allowing ourselves, even in the middle of sadness, to allow both sadness and even if it, I'm sad because my relationship has come to an end, or I'm grieving, and this is a beautiful morning. Just to be able to still feel the awe or the happiness in small things because it's only when we get binary that we only allow ourselves one emotion.

Humans are capable of very complex emotions, and it's allowing us to feel this and that. And once we can realize we can experience two things at once. Perhaps we allow a bit more space for the positive and we can rebalance and know that over time if we keep going, we will get through this. The one thing with emotions though, is whatever emotions you express, as long as you talk about what you feel and why it probably won't do you any harm, but repress it, sweep it under the rug, it won't just trip.

It's a huge thank you to Madeleine. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of Endings. If you'd like to share your thoughts, I'd love to hear them and you can reach me at taser Cs on Twitter or on LinkedIn, and if you're interested in understanding the endings happening in your own life a little better. I have the perfect thing for you.

It's my five-step worksheet developed specifically for listeners of this podcast and based on years of my research. This first step will only take you 20 minutes to complete and will bring you a lot closer to understanding how to make these difficult decisions around endings. Click on the link in the show notes to download your thriving through endings worksheet.

Now finally, if you know someone who might benefit from hearing about bereavement, please share this episode with them. I'm Hazel Carter Shall, and I hope you'll join me again for another episode of Endings.