The Adventure of Grief: Dr Geoff Warburton at TEDxBrighton

I was lucky to have two grandmothers teach me how to live after a loss in my childhood. They had both experienced great loss in their lives. One of them had lost two brothers in World War I and then lost a young husband to heart disease. The other grandmother. She lost two young children due to lack of medical care, which was actually due to poverty, and then she lost her husband due to lung disease due to coal mining. They lived in a time in the UK when death and loss were part of everyday life. Now we both had very different approaches to life after a loss.

One of my grandmothers regularly told me I'm ready to box. Jeffery, meaning that she was tired of the world, ready to die and be placed in a coffin. The story she told me would be more often than not. about her suffering and if she wasn't suffering she sometimes made it up. I mean, I remember one day at lunchtime when she told me that Jeffrey had had surgery last week, and they took me out and it was on my cheek and I could see. the doctors and what my other grandmother was doing, when she faced difficulties, most of the time she told me that it's all part of the game.

Jeffrey meant that pain and suffering were part of everyday life. Now the story she told me most of the time told me. being fun and most of the time filled her days with activities knitting, cooking for others, being in her kitchen while buttering bread and laughing was my favorite place to be for the same generation of Grandma, two completely different approaches to loss, one about surviving, the other about thriving I didn't realize the lesson my grandmother had taught me until I completed 25 years of intense study about loss. I'm not so sure I needed those 25 years to get to that point, but the research was officially verified anyway.

What I did was listen to hundreds of people's stories about their

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and identify what made people thrive after a loss. By the way, this is a bit of an aside in a way, what that research showed was there was absolutely no correlation between a generation and the ability to deal with loss, but that's not what my grandmother gave me back to grandmothers, it's well, and that for me here, just in case, in depth, so this is what I was taught, even if you have lost the love of your life, you have not. been deceived by life no matter how tragic the circumstances are but we deceive life we ​​deceive life if we close our hearts after losing someone this grammar over here she believed that having lost the life of a loved one had deceived her and she believed that throughout her life so that she was living a life where everything was bleak and something was missing the other grandmother embraced life she did not deny the pain of

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she embraced it as part of life and lived in a way that a grandmother embodied the question for what me and the other why not The death of my grandmother I was in my twenties and this threw me into a very strange place.

I became very emotionally numb and in an effort to get my emotional life back on track I began my personal study of loss now, at the time when death was very much on the minds of people in the Western world, particularly in the United Kingdom, this slogan, some of you who were around in the 80s, you may remember this, don't die of ignorance, this was posted in the mailbox of every person in the United Kingdom that I was a part of. of the UK government's campaign to prevent the spread of HIV, no one knows if it actually worked, but what we do know is that it scared the shit out of most people, including me.

I was so curious and motivated to learn about the loss that even though I was terrified. I put myself right in the center of the AIDS epidemic by joining a group of innovators to build a center for people with HIV and AIDS. At my first meeting with this group I almost fainted partly out of fear but mostly because I was holding my breath. I was trying to avoid getting AIDS anyway despite my reluctance to breathe around these people, their loving nature really broke down my barriers. and they gave me some insights into loss, vital insights, I know that most of that original group of people have since died.

AIDS, so today I pay tribute to them by passing on some of that knowledge. This was not just any group of people. It was a group of people who believed that embracing your emotions kept you alive and loving. They said they continued to function despite being in an environment that was hostile to them. Now, how many of you have said that if I allow myself to feel my emotions I won't be able to function? It's much more likely that they won't actually function. If we block our emotions, research shows we are much more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression, eating disorders, even become violent, if we suppress our emotions now, I'm not saying we should act on our emotions, not at all, I'm not sure when that will happen.

It's about hostility. feelings and I'm not saying that we should focus on emotions, otherwise you might get lost in them and then our lives will become like a soap opera like Standards or Dallas or something like that. I'm not saying that at all, I'm just saying that if we allow our emotions to be the fuel of our life and our living that's what these people attributed to their ability to walk out the door and face that hostile world not only together. we built the first residential Support Center in the country for people with HIV and AIDS now call the London Lighthouse the ability to do that, creativity was certainly attributed to this ability to embrace our emotions.

This venture was so successful that actually the original advertising agency that had developed that slogan, don't die of ignorance, came to us and said look we know we did it wrong this is Ted kids watching we know we were wrong we want to get it right this time Will you show us how to do it? So we did it and there is help to promote our work and we came up with a slogan that was quite different which was together we can make a difference so the power of emotion the power of emotion sounds good sounds quite simple turns out it's not that simple that is what I discovered later in my journey turns out that those people who truly thrive after many embrace more than just their emotions, they accept what brings them pain.

It turns out that if you want to do this, which is basically dairy life, you need to accept everything that pain brings you, so let me guide you through the pain, okay? I'm going to give you a safety briefing before you do it, just keep your heart open and how you do it is just stay with your experience, whatever it is, nothing else is okay, so in the pain you will meet the hate that you have. you will encounter anger, you will encounter emotional pain, you will encounter anger, you will encounter terror, if you get past that you will probably feel broken, you might feel crazy, you might end up in a total emotional abyss, chances are good that You end up in an emotional abyss, you need to feel so emotional, you need to let that abyss swallow you, now you can see why I don't get invited to parties much, so you can feel it. that in that abyss a part of you is dying and maybe a part of you needs to die close your experience of the abyss and you close the flow of life here is the thing block that anger and you will block your vitality block that fear and you will block your emotion, you will block that deep emotional pain and you will block your access to compassion, you will even block your hatred and you will block your access to peace, you will block your experience of that abyss and you will block access to the depth of who. you really are and the energy that is going to take you forward right in the center of that abyss in that silence you will find your liberation even if you have lost the love of your life now we do it so as not to get away from what hurts us or not get away from what makes us unhappy, we must embrace all those emotions to connect with the flow of life, connecting with the flow of life is what will ultimately make us happy, happiness for the people I met on my journey. it was about the way they traveled it wasn't a final destination it wasn't a place they reached when they overcame the pain it was about how they remained open to their experience now if we closed off our experience yes we are actually more likely to feel or get depressed how many of you here maybe even when you come here today to be well?

There is talk about loss and grief. How many of you associate pain and loss with sadness and depression? The thing is, pain is not depression and it should not be treated as such, and here's a perhaps bleak example: antidepressants. I have never met anyone who has found a solution to pain through antidepressants. Now I'm not saying that antidepressants are bad and that sometimes people need them and sometimes we need them if they're not working and we need something to help us get through that period, but it's not a solution to grief. Antidepressants, as they are in the public domain, most of us know will increase serotonin levels in the brain, which most of them also do. suppress something in the brain which is the dopamine system, the dopamine system is involved with pleasure arousal and our connection to the world and to each other, so if you think about that, the research is just scratching the surface of what it really means dampening a dopamine system, you know, a life without dopamine is a dead life, it gives a completely different meaning to this phrase, so talking about dying as it is, when I was preparing this talk, I just went over the topics with my boyfriend like you and him do.

I pointed out that I had overlooked my own pain, so my thoughts immediately went to my brother, who died in a car accident several years ago, but when he asked me this question I felt dead, I felt numb, my heart felt so closed. , so I thought. I talked about this for a moment because when he died I felt pain, I felt anger, I felt rage, I felt terror, but at the time I felt emotionally numb, so I thought it would be best not to go over my experience and if it was to practice what I preach, I needed stay with whatever pain he was causing me, so I stayed with this experience and I noticed that I felt really guilty, I felt guilty that he was in that car accident, not me, and then when I realized that guilt, I felt it and it was a little heavy and I felt overwhelmed and anxious and I felt gloomy and I felt sad and then I imagined I was looking at Chris and I said look, look at me and I looked at him and I imagined.

What would you say to me and this is what I bought you? Stupid, don't be so stupid. I assume you know what door means, but for those unfamiliar with dome, DAF means if you are crazy or ignorant, then again the word ignorance haunted me, so it was kind of a wake-up call and I stopped. and I thought and somehow realized that it was obvious that after all those years of doing that research we honor their dead more by choosing to live this well. guilt, I felt like it was a burden, that I was closing my heart, it was a kind of unhealthy guilt where I was attacking some boundary, it was actually a survival guilt that was closing my heart, so I thought, "well." I'll go back and picture my brother Chris so I looked at him and said I'll live well for both of us and when I did my heart came back online.

I feel lighter. I still felt her. I felt this piece and the heart was alive and this is what happens if we let love be there for those we've lost, we settle, we find a bright and beautiful peace, and if we let it, we let the pain run its course , will open our hearts, will set us free. knit cooking transmit knowledge be creative come here and do a TED talk to be truly alive this is an idea about what can happen if we let pain open our hearts pain can illuminate your life loss can be a life

adventure

so here is another slogan: don't die of ignorance, let loss be a life

adventure

and the way to do it, just stay there, breathe and let your inner experience guide you, thank you.