Why knowing more about grief can make it suck less | Lisa Keefauver | TEDxUTAustin

Thank you, I want you to imagine that you are a famous actor and you are about to go on the Broadway stage. You've been playing the role of the main character in this show for the past few seasons, which means you know the plot and the dialogue. the song lyrics backwards and forwards, you even have an intimate relationship with each character on the show. You know the location of each prop on the set so much that you can reach your goal with your eyes closed every time you can easily describe the colors. texturizes the sensations of each accessory you hold and you are able to predict the exact moment when the crowd will roar with laughter or gasp with concern, but most importantly you know who you are sharing scenes with, what the future holds, where you should be. when you should speak and why your character behaves the way he does and then this happens.

The program's manuscript is destroyed and with it goes all the information you need to navigate the stage. That is exactly what happens to us in our pain. Our lives are constructed from the stories we tell about our experiences, and a death or some other devastating loss of capacity in a relationship, perhaps a traumatic event, is akin to the manuscript of Our Lives being torn to shreds and then returned to us. returned without instructions on how to do so. rewriting it about how to live our lives and pain is the journey we take as we rewrite and live the emerging story of Our Lives, that mangled manuscript metaphor I developed years ago.

I was a clinical social worker trained in narrative. therapy I had spent almost a decade working in foster care adoption Family Services Crisis Intervention, which meant I was working with people and communities in deep

grief

And yet, when I looked at the stories and descriptions of

grief

in my own field in our media in this country I suspected they were limited, flat and misleading, but honestly it wasn't until I went through my own personal year of hell that I really began to understand the problem with our collective history of grief after a year of see my warm before A young, kind, athletic husband became someone neither he nor I recognized after a year of asking doctors questions and getting no answers.

I found myself lying next to my husband of 44 years as he died in my arms just two and a half weeks after finding out he had a brain tumor the size of a grapefruit the entire time after Eric took his last breath. Somehow I took my first breath without him and got up and went home and told our seven-year-old daughter that her father was dead, but he wasn't. It wasn't until I had to return to work two weeks later as Clinical Director that I really began to understand the limitations of our grief history and how much damage it was causing to my daughter and me, my clients, my friends, my family, well, everyone. us as a widow.

I was learning what it felt like to not be seen as a therapist. I became a compassionate listener as a director and co-founder of nonprofit organizations. I learned to be an advocate, an educator, a writer and a speaker. I knew I had some skills and I knew I didn't want anyone else to suffer unnecessarily like my daughter and I had done with my clients, so I set out to become a grief activist. I started person by person to reduce the harm, but people are suffering a lot and that's why my activism grew. very quickly from hosting a podcast to working with individuals and organizations as a writer, keynote speaker, and even as a professor of loss and grief at the School of Social Work right here at the University of Texas at Austin as a grief activist.

I am not under any illusion. that I can

make

grieving easy I really wish I could, but grieving is hard, there's no way around it. Instead, my vision is to eliminate our unnecessary suffering and pain, and to do that, I knew I had to take on the biggest challenge standing in our way. grieving illiteracy, you see, we are grieving illiterates because individually and collectively we have only consumed a singular, misleading, and very limited history of grieving in the west. Our grief story is something like this grief happens when someone close to you dies, you feel sad, maybe angry, but only for a while.

Those feelings may last for a while, say a few months, but again, only if you were close to that person, do you keep it to yourself if you should find a therapist or another group of grieving people like you. that you don't take your pain on other people you stay busy you go back to work you know it because it's good for you and as soon as possible you move neatly and orderly through the five stages of grief as a sort of -Make a list and Voila, if you've tried hard enough, if you're good enough, if you're strong enough, in about a year you'll be done and now you can move on if you or someone you know has experienced a profound loss.

We know how false and complete that story is. So, if we all know it, why does it persist? Why are we still so illiterate? The simplified answer is that in our modern, largely secular capitalist society, we have built a culture with systems and institutions that value and reward things like productivity over process Simplicity over complexity Destinations over Travel revalues ​​stoicism over vulnerability and The list goes on and maybe you can start to see how those values ​​reinforce that history of pain and instead of questioning our values ​​or our systems we end up questioning ourselves for Honestly, that seemed like a lot of self-criticism and hatred for not being on top. of my work game when I was asked to return two weeks after Eric's death and the unreasonable pressure we put on ourselves in the wake of the loss comes. at a high cost to all of us, from our physical health to our mental health to our collective well-being, not only because as individuals we suffer unnecessarily but because we inflict that suffering on other people, we do it individually and on an individual level. institutional level for the wrong policies and systems we built and defend, so now that we all know the problem with our grief history, we can no longer be illiterate about grief, but this is the point in my talk where I pause and tell you.

I remind all of you that you shouldn't blame yourself for not

knowing

I said you should it's not surprising that we are mostly illiterate honestly it's practically in the air we breathe instead I want to invite you all to do something that I ask my students to do at the same time. At the beginning of each class, come here, take a deep breath, let it out, return your awareness to this moment, let go of wherever your mind has taken you, and come back here for today's

less

on. Now I am going to rely on the wisdom of my fifth grade teacher, Mrs.

Davis, to expand our grief stories by breaking them down into the most important who, where, when, and why components - what I like to call the five questions of grief. who experiences grief, each of us as a human being is telling a story of our lives that involves people, places, abilities, hopes and dreams, and being alive means that some of those things will come to an end and others will never begin as soon as who we mourn, it can be anyone or anything, yes we mourn the death of those we love, but we can also mourn the death of people we were estranged from or people who are no longer in our daily lives.

In fact, we may grieve the versions of ourselves we had before the loss occurred and the versions of ourselves we never had the chance to be in after. The most important thing to remember is that you can mourn anyone at any stage of their life or death, including versions of yourself. What do we do now? Well, we mourn the known, the true, the connection and the meaning we have. The pain we have attached to the stories of Our Lives insists that we come to terms with what is no longer, was not, or will be. Grief takes many forms, starting with anticipatory grief, the kind many of us have likely experienced in the wake of a loved one's terminal diagnosis. to all kinds of ambiguous losses, such as those in which someone is physically present but psychologically distant, perhaps as in the case of Alzheimer's or addiction, honestly, what I experienced when my husband quickly became unrecognizable or the type of loss in that someone is physically distant but very present in our hearts and minds when someone disappears perhaps imprisoned displayed in reality the full list of types of grief fills the alphabet with things from complex and compound grief to disenfranchised grief that often results from systems of oppression to traumatic grief and the list goes on, but remember whatever you are suffering from, it is a normal response to loss to explain where it actually has two parts to where the pain comes from, i.e. the source and where. va, that is, what impacts pain, while death, loss is the most obvious source of our pain.

We can grieve many types of losses from the maturation phases of our lives, such as leaving home for the first time or retiring, to unexpected accidents and disruptions, such as catastrophic injuries, chronic illnesses, other life-limiting events, other sources of grief that often overlooked include things we had a reason for. hope to become one, but I never liked the lack of a loving relationship with a parent, infertility, maybe even a sense of being safe in the world as a result of trauma, but it is equally important to understand where grief is going. , that is, what impact it has. and I think we can all agree that grief impacts our emotional well-being even if we incorrectly try to limit the range of feelings to a very small category, but grief actually impacts our entire being, which includes our cognitive, our physical , our spiritual and our relational well-being, the most important thing to remember is that wherever your pain comes from, it will affect all areas of your life.

The fourth question is when do we cry and, honestly, the question I get asked most often is when does grief end, since we experience multiple losses at multiple times in our lives we actually grieve throughout life we ​​can even start to cry months or years after a loss maybe we weren't ready to deal with it maybe we didn't have the right kind of support in our lives maybe we hadn't even recognized it as a loss until now when it comes to the question of when does grief end. Contrary to the myth of our only grief story, it does not end per se, grief simply transforms and, in fact, we are transformed by it further.

The important thing to remember is that pain becomes part of your story, it is not your whole story, although I know it may feel that way at first. Now our final W is why we grieve and I think metaphor and the other Ws helped us see why humans are storytellers, something that is deeply rooted in our neurobiology. We need stories to feel safe, to feel connected, to

make

sense of our lives, and to thrive. So why are we sorry that a fundamental part of our manuscript has been torn to pieces? I wish I had known about the five questions of grief when Eric died and I suffered unnecessarily for years because my grief didn't look like what I thought.

I wish I had known about my grief sooner so I could have supported him better. our little daughter, clients early in my Social Work career, friends who lost parents and children during that time, but now I do know and,

more

importantly, all of you do too, but

knowing

is just the first step, so before I leave here today, how about we practice your new pain Literacy As we return to the theater for the last time, this time I want you to imagine that you are holding your own manuscript, maybe it's a little torn, maybe Maybe you're even completely devastated because you've recently experienced a loss.

To hold your manuscript and your heart carefully when you are ready, you will write what you know, you will write it when you need it, but you will revise it frequently. I suggest you invite a friend or a therapist to help you. You remember what you know and it helps you discover if your emerging story includes unhelpful thoughts or harmful dialogue. Lastly, I want you to take a moment and look around this room. I'm serious, take a moment, look around the room. Yes, everyone you see has their own torn or shredded manuscript to rewrite, so set your expectations let go of the idea that you owe the other actors anything remember there is no date for the opening call there are no lines to that you memorize there is nothing you can interpret it is only you, kindly, patiently and compassionately, rewriting your manuscript your emerging story one that includes the memories the values ​​the love and the meaning you are giving to what you havelost thanks