the Ghostbusters Tackle Grief

The other night we watched the 2016 Ghostbusters movie. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It’s very funny. But that’s not really my point right now. Though, if you don’t believe me, here is the trailer:

My family enjoys this movie, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about grief. and about how the only way to get through grief is to grieve.

Grief is our natural emotional response to any significant loss or change.

Emotions are energy.

Energy must expend itself. Bad things happen when we bottle up our emotional energy. We can either explode and lash out at others. You know the saying: “Hurt people hurt people.” Grief hurts. Or, we can implode and direct that emotional energy back at ourselves in self-destructive thoughts or behaviors. Part of learning to deal with grief is learning how each one of us processes emotional energy in healthy ways.

The only way to get through grief is to grieve. That emotional energy must let itself out because it is our love with nowhere left to go. The only way to get through grief is to grieve. Just like in Pixar’s ‘Finding Nemo’ where the only way through the trench is “through it, not over it.”

Grief is our natural emotional response to any significant loss or change.

Emotions are energy.

Energy exhausts itself.

Grief is not not the same thing as depression.

Grief comes and goes like waves. Depression is a constant heaviness that does not lift no matter the circumstances. The two often intertwine, but they are not the same. If you wonder if you might be experiencing depression, please contact a trained professional.

Grief is our natural emotional response to any significant loss or change.

Emotions are energy.

Energy exhausts itself.

The only way to get through grief is to grieve.

Back to Ghostbusters: there’s this scene where they’re testing out their new equipment behind the Chinese food restaurant where they rent office space.

Melissa McCarthy’s character Yates gets caught up in a laser beam that separates her from her footing and changes her direction and shakes her about just like grief does for so many of us. As she’s flailing about, Leslie Jones as Toran says: “I guess she’s not bending her knees enough, right?” This, of course is a reference to ate McKinnon’s Holzmann trying to ease Yates into all this by saying: “You’re going to want to plant your feet firm; bend your knees to compensate for the extra kick-back.”

You can’t plan for grief. You think you can, but grief is an emotional process that doesn’t care what preparations you’ve made. It will whip you about and leave you unsteady, but it does not control you.

Yates finally comes to earth only as Holzmann urges: “She’s doing a marvelous impression of a deflating balloon. We’ve just gotta let her ride it out until it’s out of juice.”

This is the grief process. “We’ve just gotta let her ride it out until it’s out of juice.” I wish I had different news for you, but the only way to get through grief is to grief. Pay attention to your emotions and how you process them.

Sitting With The Brokenness (More About Grief, Kintsugi and The Art of Precious Scars)

In 2019, I began exploring the idea of using Japanese art of Kintsugi as a metaphor for the grieving process.

At that time, I was serving as a Hospice Chaplain/Bereavement Coordinator/Volunteer Coordinator at a small hospice. Part of my job was offering ongoing grief support for the Bereaved. Much of the curriculum that I came across was either trademarked, overly religious for the groups I was leading, or just full of empty platitudes. So I started creating some conversation-starters for support groups on my own.

Somewhere during this time, I learned about the Japanese art of Kintsugi, sometimes known as “the art of precious scars.” If you’re not familiar with Kintsugi, you can read my original post or Google Kintsugi yourself.

Somewhere during this time I also began working through the idea that we must explore what it means to carry our losses forward with us in life in emotionally healthy ways. Kintsugi is a perfect metaphor for this. The mended pieces are beautiful because of their journey through brokenness.

Since that time, I have transitioned to serving as a full-time Bereavement Counselor for a large hospice. Day after day I talk to people trying to work through the grieving process. I have talked to hundreds, if not thousands of people fumbling their way through the loss of a loved one.

And I keep coming back to the idea of Kintsugi being a perfect metaphor for what it might look like to carry our loss forward with us in emotionally healthy ways. I am reminded of a quote by Anne Roiphe: “Grief comes in two parts: the first is the loss, and the second is the re-making of life.”

I can’t remember where I came across a description of the process a Kintsugi master might go through when someone would bring a broken piece to them. They would spread the broken pieces out on a blanket and sit in front of them. They would just sit with the brokenness.

This feels unnatural. We want to hide our brokenness. We want to fix it. But grief is not a problem to be fixed. It is a process to go through. If grief is love for someone with nowhere left to go, then it is not a problem to be fixed. It’s natural to mourn and cry out that this isn’t the way things are supposed to be; to admit that things feel broken.

Grief comes in two parts: the loss and the re-making of life.

And when those Kintsugi masters would sit with the broken pieces, they were not just sitting with the brokenness, they would pick up the pieces, and feel them; trace the edges, and they would begin to envision what the piece might look like after it’s mended. How its brokenness would become part of its story in beautiful ways.

As we acknowledge our loss and brokenness, we must learn to not dwell on the past (the loss); we acknowledge it and its pain, but we set our sights towards an emotionally healthy future (the re-making of life.). This will look different for everyone but I believe that kintsugi can help us understand what it might look like to carry our loss forward with us in emotionally healthy ways.

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• Read the preface piece to this post: Grief, Kintsugi and The Art of Precious Scars

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Untitled Poem For Grievers

It doesn’t take much
for me to lose myself in grief;
the hurt of loss and the fog of loneliness
wash over me until I don’t know where I begin.

The waves come and they go,
the tides seem random (but they’re not)
sometimes its:
the scent he used to wear,
the song she used to love,
the rhythm and jangle of everyday life
the shadow in the corner eye.

And the waves come
And the waves go
And sometimes I don’t know where I am
And sometimes I don’t know where to go
tossed and battered
wounded and scarred
but still hoping to still be hopeful.

And as the tide swallows itself
I’m left with the song,
or the scent,
or the pain of life without you,
And I know
that this feeling
is my love for you
with nowhere left to go.

So please remind me of our connection
and give me something to hold on to.

And as the tide retreats,
I exhale the emptiness
and breathe in our love
and my heart can again see the light.

Though you’re gone,
You’re not.
You are always with me.
We are always together.
It’s just different.

It doesn’t take much
for me to get lost in our love
because though you’re gone,
that’s still where I find myself
and I’m no longer lost.

Even in the waves, 
I know 
that our love
remains my anchor.

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• ©Brent Thomas, 2020

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Of STUGS And STERBS

Everyone is unique. And everyone grieves differently. If someone tells you that they know exactly what you’re going through, they don’t. If someone tells you that they can’t imagine what you’re going through, that might not be terribly helpful, but it’s at least true.

While it is true that no one processes loss (grief is the natural reaction to any significant loss or change) the same, in my role as a Hospice Bereavement Counselor, I do come across lots of people with similar experiences.

One of the familiar themes I come across is people who describe grief as feeling as though it comes and goes, almost like the waves of the ocean. Sometimes you might feel the wave coming before it hits you while others you feel blindsided as the grief floods your soul. And we don’t always know what triggers one of these unexpected onsets of grief and sadness. Sometimes it might be hearing a song on the radio, a particular place or smell. Other times it’s as if we’ve been unexpectedly hockey-checked right in to the boards.

It must be noted that these “waves” are not the same thing as grief in general and that not everyone will experience them. But I’ve talked to enough people to understand that enough people experience these waves that we need to talk about them. Believe it or not, there is a technical term for these unexpected onsets of intense grief. We call them Sudden Temporary Upsurges of Grief, or S.T.U.G.s for short.

Part of the grieving process is growing in self-awareness. We are wise to examine ourselves and how we process difficult emotions. What is helpful for us? Are there certain songs that were important to you and your loved one? Movies? Places? Foods? Understanding such “triggers” will not prevent STUGs, but they will help you prepare for when they come. And this is important because, it is these STUGs which can be so raw and painful that we often turn to S.T.E.R.B.s (yes, another acronym).

The Grief Recovery Institute defines STERBs as: “Short Term Energy Relieving Behaviors. They are activities you use to distract yourself from painful feelings that follow a major loss.” The first thing to understand is why they are called Short Term Energy Relieving Behaviors rather than “Emotion” relieving behaviors. The answer is because grief is emotional and emotions are energy. As John Lydon might say: “Anger is an Energy.” As we experience a wide range and intensity of emotions, we have physical effects. Some people will feel anxious, others tired, etc. We don’t know what to do with all that energy and quite frankly, we want to get rid of it/calm it/ignore it/whatever we can. So we turn to certain behaviors to try to cope with all these energies wreaking havoc on our bodies and psyches.

We call these responses STERBs. These are (short-term) attempts to distract ourselves from our grief. They might be the desire to numb ourselves, or to just “check out”. There is no comprehensive list of STERBs because, just as everyone grieves uniquely, everyone tries to cope differently. Some people will turn to sex, alcohol, drugs, video games, the internet, exercise, shopping, hoarding, gambling, workaholism, isolation, eating/starving, etc.

We turn to STERBs because we believe that they are helping us recover from our grief. But, when we’re honest with ourselves, they do not make us feel better. They just make us feel different. Yes, they might distract us for a bit. They might even numb our pain for a bit. But, just like STUGs are “temporary,” STERBs are “short-term.” They do not help us move through, process, or recover from our grief, they simply postpone the process.

Just as growing in self-awareness can help us prepare for STUGs, growing in self-awareness can also help us face our loss (which must happen to move through grief in an emotionally healthy way: Read my piece: “Grief: When You Come To This Trench, Swim Through It, Not Over It”) rather than turn to STERBs.

Grief forces us to be honest with ourselves. Grief forces us to know ourselves better. And, knowing that grief is something we will all face, maybe it’s best if we all started thinking about ourselves now. Am I the type to try and distract myself from difficult things with business? Am I the type of person who tries to numb difficult emotions? Knowing such things about one’s self in the here and now will not only help us when waves of grief crash over us but the next time we hit an emotional speed-bump.

The Grief Playlist: Learning To Practice Emotional Situational Awareness

Grief is universal and universally unique. It is something we will all experience and we will all experience differently. No one grieves the same even though there are some things that a Bereavement Counselor often sees.

One common experience I see is that when someone is experiencing the grief of losing a loved one to death (particularly a traumatic, painful or unexpected death), they will often (and often at the most inopportune times) find themselves re-living the most painful moments. They find themselves (often unwillingly) rehearsing mental images or replaying scenes or conversations and it just seems to come on like a fresh stab in the heart, making it impossible to “move on” like all their friends keep telling them to.

I am not a professional counselor. Nor do I claim to be. But I pastored for around 15 years, served as a Hospice Chaplain for over 3 years, and currently serve as a Bereavement Counselor and hospital Chaplain Intern. So this is a familiar conversation and a common question that I’ve come across over the years:

is it possible to change our thought patterns?

This question has primarily been in my mind lately with relation to helping bereaved people cope with unhealthy thought patterns in their grieving. But of course it applies to more than that. It applies not only to other types of grief but other unhealthy thought patterns as well and I’ve helped people use this technique in a variety of settings. Through conversation after conversation, I tried to develop a practical approach based on the simple but powerful proposition: we can change our thought patterns.

Of course different people will have different outcomes and/or levels of “success” and we must be honest that this is a difficult, slow process. This is not a promise that you’re going to be just terrific by tomorrow. But it is an approach that we can put in our toolboxes that I do believe is helpful for many. And it starts with driving (sort of).

I don’t know about you, but I’m the sort of Introverted person who likes to sort of live in my own thoughts. And, I am not advocating this at all, but I have this bad habit where sometimes I’ll get in my car, arrive at my destination and sort of jolt myself out of the fog; I don’t remember driving there. I just totally spaced out, wandering around in my own thoughts, perfecting the argument I should have made three days ago, etc., but certainly not engaged in the moment. 

This is exactly how many of us go through life. We are passive and usually re-active when something happens rather than pro-active. We sort of sleep-walk through life. We go about our business, we numb ourselves with our shows or drink or gardening or whatever, until it’s time to go to sleep. Not only does it seem like many of of “sleepwalk” through life, it seems that many of us take active measures to keep our brains “asleep” and disengaged. Because being “present” in the moment means dealing with things.

But our subconscious is not passive. Nor is it quiet.

So, back to those people struggling with traumatic grief experiences (or whatever unhealthy thought patterns your brain likes to randomly insert into your days). At times, it can be silly things like a commercial jingle, as demonstrated in Pixar’s Inside Out:

But other times, it’s those traumatic memories of our loved one’s suffering and our loss and the things we wish we hadn’t said and the things we wish we had done differently. Whatever it may be, the feeling remains that we will never break the cycle.

One helpful way I’ve come to think about this process is that the subconscious mind has certain “playlists” it likes to blare in to the mind. Sometimes we may understand why the mind “pressed play,” something triggered it that we can identify, that song, or smell, or the way the light hits the bank building in the evening, while others it will be like a Jack In The Box we didn’t know was wound up waiting to burst. 

One of my favorite playlists is one called Daily Driver. I listen to it . . . while driving around, daily. I’m currently on volume 04 of this playlist, which I started early last Summer. This playlist has kept a few of the original songs on it, like Creedence Clearwater Revival’s version of “Heard It Through the Grapevine” and the Rolling Stones’ “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” but lots of other songs have come and gone. In other words, I have, as the mood struck, removed and replaced songs. Some have been removed and then replaced again like “On The Road Again” by Canned Heat. 

I know that we’re trying to simplify a lot of neurons and chemistry and biochemical things and years of thought patterns and I definitely don’t want to oversimplify, but it has helped me to think of my thought patterns like my Daily Driver mix (Listen to Volume 01 here and Volume 02 here). Yes, it’s what comes on when I get in the car but I can change it. I can keep parts or get rid of parts. I can switch the order. But this takes learning and practicing what I call “Emotional Situational Awareness”©.

One common theme among various faith traditions is the idea of “living in the moment.” Some traditions teach about the pursuit of Zen in the moment, which is more of an ongoing inner-peace, but nonetheless requires real-time awareness. 

“When asked ‘What is Zen?’ a Zen Master replied, ‘Your ordinary, everyday life.” This is as good a place to start as any. Zen, like life, defies exact definition, but its essence is the experience, moment by moment, of our own existence - a natural, spontaneous encounter unclouded by the suppositions and expectations that come between us and reality. It is, if you like, a pairing down of life until we see it as it really is, free from our illusions; it is a mental divestment of ourselves until we recognize our own true nature.”

Others teach about “taking every thought captive,”(2 Corinthians 10:5) and, at the risk of oversimplification, I think that these various faith traditions mean, at least in part: “wake up!” Practice situational awareness. Be present. Be alert. Engage and interact. It’s not a foreign concept to anyone who can play video games. Video games require something about being aware in the moment, but, for some reason, many of us do not live our lives in general this way, much less our emotional and spiritual lives.

The idea of situational awareness can apply not only to being aware of and engaged with our surroundings but can be applied to our internal lives as well. What if we learned to practice emotional situational awareness? In other words, what if we practiced cognitively being aware and engaged in the moment so that when those GRIEF PLAYLISTS pop up, we learn how to shuffle the playlist in the moment?

What if we learned to rehearse and insert different memories and mental pictures into that playlist, and, as a result, we were gradually able to change our emotional reactions to our memories? This is hard work and it is a slow process, but it is part of moving forward with life. This is part of what I mean by learning to practice Emotional Situational Awareness. Find some sort of metaphor/analogy that helps you quantify what happens with your thoughts. I love music and making playlists, so for me that’s an easy one. You might need to think of another analogy.

But like a good DJ can read and respond to the crowd, adjusting the mix “on the fly”, those who learn to practice emotional situational awareness can learn to “edit” their mental patterns in real time.

I have seen many people respond positively to this method and I’d love feedback, especially from those with more counseling experience than I have. What are your thoughts?

• Listen to/Download Volume 01 of my Daily Driver mixes.

• Listen to/Download Volume 02 of my Daily Driver mixes.

Grief, Kintsugi and The Art of Precious Scars

I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but I live in a city without a lot of historical context. When buildings get old, we tear them down and put up a Starbucks. But when we lived in Louisville, there were buildings that had been there for a hundred years and people could tell you the story. Part of that is that I live in one of the youngest states in the Union, but part of it is cultural. Some cultures preserve history better. Tradition.

Some cultures hold on to things better than others.

I won’t talk about grief all of the time. But, as a Hospice Chaplain, it is something I deal with every day. Grief can begin long before a loved one’s death and last long after. It is the price we pay for love. It shows that our hearts are alive, despite our mind’s assertions otherwise.

Grief is something we will all experience and yet we will not all grieve the same. This includes how we finally come to grips with our grief and how we view ourselves in relation to grief. Some people try to “just get over it” and try to just get back to life without really allowing themselves to pass through grief. For some people, grief is viewed as just that time of crying when someone died, and now I’m back to life. But for others, it is the result of love and it is evidence of the hole that is now left right in the middle of our lives. It is something that shapes us.

The question becomes whether we identify grief as part of our beautiful story or whether we try to hide it.

In some cultures, we try to hide our scars. Makeup. Clothing. Plastic surgery.

We try to hide our brokenness.

Some people are more comfortable with brokenness than others. Some of us want to sweep it under the rug and keep on pretending that no one trips over the big pile under the middle of the rug.

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed or dusted with gold. Sometimes known as “gold joinery,” “golden seams,” or “gold repair,” this is more than just repair. This method brings new life to pieces by highlighting their brokenness. My Modern says:

Beautiful seams of gold glint in the cracks of ceramic ware, giving a unique appearance to the piece. This repair method celebrates each artifact's unique history by emphasizing its fractures and breaks instead of hiding or disguising them. Kintsugi often makes the repaired piece even more beautiful than the original, revitalizing it with new life.

The practice itself arises from several different Japanese philosophical concepts: 

Wabi-Sabi: seeing beauty in the flawed or imperfect. 

Mottainai: regret when something is wasted

Mushin: the acceptance of change 

and

“As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise . . . Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated” (Wikipedia)

What if we treated grief as something not just to “get through” or to bury but understood it as part of life and as part of our beautiful stories? What if we all believed that our stories were beautiful? Kintsugi helps us see how brokenness can be beautiful. But what if we believed it about ourselves?

None of this makes grief easier or diminishes its weight. But I hope it helps give us the perspective that it is part of what makes each one of us so unique. No piece of Kintsugi are the same. No two people are the same. And it is our grief that helps shape us.

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• Read my follow-up piece Sitting With The Brokenness (More About Grief, Kintsugi and The Art of Precious Scars).

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Grief: What to Expect (the unexpected).

One of the beautifully mysterious, confounding, and yet comforting things about life is that everyone is different. And yet, how often we forget this. We marvel at snowflakes and ignore other people as though they weren’t walking miracles themselves. We inspect and catalog plant species, marveling at their differences while flattening out humanity into cardboard caricatures.

Though “Grief is the natural response to loss or change” and “the price we pay for love,” and everyone grieves, not everyone grieves the same. And grief is more than a simple emotional response to loss. It is a physiological reaction that may differ from person to person. Some people may want to sleep all the time while others won’t be able to sleep. Some will lose their appetites while others will find comfort in food. Some people will need silence and time alone to process while others will find it more helpful to be in crowds and around people. Some people will have guilt or anger while others have only sorrow. None of these is “right” or “wrong,” they are just the different ways people move through grief.

We need to stop trying to prescribe how everyone will do everything. For a religion that claims to be for people who don’t have it all together, Christians often try to pretend that we have it all together. And that we can tell everyone else how to do things. We hold financial seminars telling people how to deal with their money, we have conferences about parenting and marriage. But the truth of the matter is that cultural statistics, bankruptcies, divorces, etc. are not all that different for those who claim to be Christian and those who do not. I’m not saying God’s Word does not have helpful things to say about all of these topics, including grieving, but I am saying that we need to stop telling people how long or how they should grieve.

One of the questions I am most often asked is: How long will my grief last?

I don’t know. How long did you love that person? You will never forget them, so in a sense, grief never ends. I know most people don’t want to hear that; that grief never ends. But it does change. It will not always feel like we’re gasping for air in the belly of the best. But grieving is the process of admitting and accepting our loss and finding the “new normal.” Things go on. Even without the ones we love. There are still bills to pay, mouths to feed, yards, to mow, dishes to do. Only now, we must face them alone.

If grief truly is the price we pay for love, then grief is also the process of discovering life after loss. There will be tears, there will be sorrow, there will be loneliness, anger but there is also the simple process of being changed by our loss. Grief is the redefinition of who we are in relation to what we’ve lost.

If I’m saying anything at all (and believe me, there is much more that I want to say beyond this post), it’s that I would love to see the Church make more space for lament. I would love to see Christians move beyond prescribed 1,2,3 step programs for everything and I would love to see Christians move beyond trite-isms and embrace the grieving process as an essential part of life.

As with yesterday’s post, I very much would like discussion. What has your experience with grief been? How has it shaped you? What was helpful? What was not? What would you like others to know?

What Is Grief? And How Can I Learn To Be Thankful For It?

It has been said that the only sure things in life are death and taxes.

I think we should add grief to that list.

Live long enough and you will experience grief.

And yet, even though we will all experience grief, it is one of those things that no one likes to talk about, much less consider. As such, there is not always a consensus about what grief actually is. It’s troublesome that we don’t talk more openly about something we all face and it’s even more troublesome that many of us are unable to define such a common experience. One of the first things I do is just try to write out a couple of different perspectives. When I began counseling people through grief as a Hospice Chaplain, one of the first things I did was piece together some basic definitions and try to distill them down to as few words as possible:

Deep sorrow, sadness and a mix of other emotions, especially caused by someone’s death.

Grief is the conflicting feelings, possibly including relief resultant guilt, caused by the end of or change in something familiar.

Grief is the normal/natural emotional reaction to loss or change of any kind.

Grief is the natural response to loss or change.

Grief is the natural response to loss or change. This seems like a pretty fair and straightforward definition which also accounts for the fact that grief will not look the same for everyone.

I don’t know how you begin to think about such topics, but once I narrow down a definition into my own fewest words as possible, I like to look at other people’s words. I like to look at quotes. They’re like different sides of a prism. Since everyone is different and, no one grieves the same (though there will be similarities), understanding how other people process grief can help us process grief ourselves.

“Grief is never something you get over. You don't wake up one morning and say, 'I've conquered that; now I'm moving on.' It's something that walks beside you every day. And if you can learn how to manage it and honour the person that you miss, you can take something that is incredibly sad and have some form of positivity.” (Terry Irwin)

“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” (Anne Lamott)

“the way I think about grief is that it is the great tug-of-war, and sometimes the flag is on the side you don’t want it to be on. And sometimes the game has exhausted all of its joy, and all that’s left is you on your knees. But, today, even though I am sad, my hands are still on the rope.” (Hanif Abdurraqib)

“Every one can master a grief but he that has it.” - (William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing)

“Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.” (Anne Roiphe)

“Grief is the price we pay for love.” (Queen Elizabeth II)

Every once in a while, you come across a quote that just stops you in your tracks. Grief is the price we pay for love.

Everyone wants love but no one wants to grieve. Grief is the price we pay for love. No one wants to think of love as a trade-off; and it’s not really, not in the strictest sense. But grief reminds us that we care. Grief reminds us that our feelings are alive and that, we are still in touch with life; with relationships; with thankfulness. Grief is proof that we are human.

Grief is the result of losing something that was important to us; a job, a spouse, a position in life, a loved one; whatever it is. Grief is the act of trying to adjust to the “new normal” after a loss. Grief is the process of moving on with life when we don’t want to.

It does not mean forgetting what we’ve lost.

It is far too common to hear people say things like: “You’ve just got to move on.” This is not helpful or true and I may explore why in future posts, but for now, let me just say that grief is one of those things that must not simply be faced but embraced in order to move forward. It must be passed through.

Of course it changes us, and that’s part of the point.

I hope to write more about the idea of grief and the process of recovery, but for now, I’d love your thoughts. Have you experienced grief? How would you define grief? How did you move through it (or did you?)? Did it change you? What did you learn?