Secret #51: New thinking on grief with Dr. Ray Owen
Grief is an inevitable part of life, but do we truly understand its complex nature and the different ways it affects us? Dive into this enlightening episode as Dr. Ray Owen, a seasoned clinical and health psychologist, unravels the multifaceted world of grief. With over forty years in the National Health Service, Dr. Owen brings unparalleled insights into the universality of grief, its manifestations beyond just sadness, and how cultural nuances affect our grieving process.
Explore why grief can be so much more than just a singular emotion, as Dr. Owen discusses everything from anger and shame to the dark side of resilience and the concept of disenfranchised grief. Together with hosts Emma Waddington and Chris McCurry, this episode delves deep into the cognitive processes that accompany loss, whether it's the death of a loved one, a pet, or even an identity shift due to life changes.
Perfect for anyone experiencing loss or for those seeking to better understand this profound emotion, this conversation provides actionable insights and empathetic understanding. Decode the secrets of coping with Dr. Owen’s valuable perspective—your journey towards healing could begin right here.
Topics Discussed in this Episode:
Universality of human grief
Varied facets of grief expression
Role of cultural influences on grief
Challenges of disenfranchised grief
Navigating loss and life transitions
ORDER Justin Case Sits with Anxiety: An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Workbook for Ages 8-12 (ACT Workbook Series for Kids)
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Interview with Psychologist Dr. Ray Owen
05:58 "Workbook: Managing Anxiety in Kids"
07:09 Complexity of Grief and Loss
12:58 "Grief's Universality and Isolation"
16:45 "Grief: Normal vs. Abnormal"
19:30 "The Changing Perception of Resilience"
23:18 Dual States of Grief Management
27:03 Questioning Normal Grief Reactions
30:04 Impact of Loss and Relationships
32:31 Complex Dynamics of Grief
36:45 "Playing Life's Game with Resilience"
40:33 Athlete Retirement: Grief and Rebuilding
41:48 Balancing Forward-Thinking and Grief
About Dr. Ray Owen:
Listen to Two Old Psychologists Talk About Stuff Podcast
Dr Ray Owen is a consultant clinical psychologist and health psychologist with over 35 years experience of working in physical health settings within the hospitals, hospices and community health settings in the UK. He has specialised in working with significant physical health problems, particularly cancer, neurological conditions, pain and also with grief. He has a special interest in using the Psychological Flexibility approach (e.g Acceptance & Commitment Therapy) in adjustment to significant life changes (including end of life care), and in promoting this perspective in medical, nursing and other healthcare colleagues. He teaches and supervises internationally on these topics. He is an Association of Contextual Behavioural Science Peer Reviewed Trainer.
He is the author of two successful self-help books published by Routledge – ‘Facing the Storm’ (2nd ed 2013 ) and ‘Living with the Enemy’ (2014), both of which were shortlisted for the British Medical Association Popular Medicine Book of the Year Award. He is co-host of the podcast "Two Old Psychologists Talking About Stuff"
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Introduction and Guest Introduction
Emma Waddington: Welcome to Life's Dirty Little Secrets. I'm Emma Waddington.
Chris McCurry: I'm Chris. Today we are pleased and honored to have Dr. Ray Owen as our guest. Dr. Owen is a clinical and health psychologist who specializes in therapy for cancer and [00:01:00] palliative care patients. In addition, he's an acceptance and commitment therapy trainer recognized by. The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, Dr.
Olin has worked for nearly 40 years in the British National Health Service, delivering therapy, supporting doctors and nurses, and leading a team of psychologists, helping people affected by chronic physical health conditions, and he's published a number of scientific articles and respected journals and his self-help books.
Highly recommended. One is called Living with the Enemy, coping with Stress of Chronic Illness using CBT Mindfulness and Acceptance, and also facing the storm using CBT, mindfulness and Acceptance to build resilience when your world is falling apart, which is now in its second edition. And there'll be links to those books and other resources in our show notes.
So welcome Dr. Owen today.
Exploring the Many Facets of Grief
Chris McCurry: We're gonna talk about grief and the many ways that [00:02:00] grief can present itself, so thank you so much for coming on with us.
Dr. Ray Owen: Thank you. Thank you for asking me. It's always a fascinating, if not necessarily the cheeriest topic to talk about.
Chris McCurry: It's true. And most people, when they think of grief, they think of, you know, loss and sadness and sort of a classic picture of that. But I know in your work you've really explored this topic and you have seen that there are many facets to this many aspects, many presentations for grief.
So I, I'm sure our listeners will have, uh. to get out of this.
Dr. Ray Owen: Good. I hope so. You know, one of the thing that's always drawn me to grief is its universality. You know, we can go back to Freud saying that, that grief is the price we pay for loving someone. I suppose on a more day-to-day basis, any of us who are lucky enough to have anything or any one. That we love in our lives and who are [00:03:00] ourselves lucky enough to live, you know, through childhood into adulthood, will experience significant loss. And with that significant loss will come a variety of forms of pain and challenge. And I'd argue that grief is probably the commonest form of profound distress. Most humans will encounter. Most of us are fortunate enough, we're not going to find ourselves living with panic disorder, obsessive compulsive problems. Many of us will, but virtually everybody will grieve and grieve significantly at some point in their lives. And that's one of the things that, that, that drew me to this area.
Manifestations of Grief Beyond Sadness
Chris McCurry: In your work with people with chronic illnesses and death and dying what are some of the ways that grief can manifest itself? Other than just, you know, sadness, I.
Dr. Ray Owen: It is quite a kind of commonplace to recognize that different strong, powerful emotions can show up within grief, [00:04:00] you know, one of the commonest. Widely held models of grief, sees us as walking through sort of phases if you like, starting off with denial and anger and moving through depression and so on.
And though nowadays we tend not to see that model as being that typical or that useful Indeed. What that earlier way of thinking associated with a. Brilliant writer called Elizabeth Kubler Ross. Did highlight was alongside yes, that sadness that often seems the hallmark of grief.
Understandably, there will come sometimes come anger, there will come fear. And also some of the less, if we want to put it this way, less clean, unpleasant emotions. You know, the trickier ones, guilt. Shame regret very common parts of [00:05:00] guilt and sometimes for some people, kind of harder to make room for than the sadness, which is more, I suppose in many settings sort of culturally expected. I, I Guess I need to put huge proviso over this that, you know, with using the word cultural that alongside stuff that may be kind of direct. Products of how our minds and our brains work generally as a species. Many aspects of how we respond to loss, how we construe loss, how what we do next is shaped by the culture we grew up in.
So I could talk very confidently of kind like, you know, northwestern European cultures of various sorts. But the things I say, I wouldn't want necessarily to be taken to be representative of every culture in the world. 'cause that wouldn't be the case.
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Emma Waddington: And why? Why is it that sadness appears to be so much more acceptable than [00:07:00] guilt and shame and anger? You're saying it was, you know, there's that cultural message, but is there anything else?
Dr. Ray Owen: I suppose there is a kind of a. A dominance there. The grief in that grief is really kind of a response to an absence, to a disappearance of something important. So the classic example is, you know that your life has been made worse by the absence of that element, and that's kind of how we tend to think, like one of the. Something taken away, something lacking, something missing. So I guess that's one of the reasons why kind of sadness might be front and center in, in, in grief. However, it's never that simple, is it? And we know that some of the folks who particularly struggle following, say, a bereavement. So where the loss is the death of someone. So the people who struggle most and for longest. Are people where [00:08:00] there was a very ambivalent relationship with a person who
died or an outright kind of conflict, relationship or the person, you know, let's take an extreme example. You know, the person who died was your abuser. We know that sets up a complicated path on from there, and it's not as simple as just sadness.
Emma Waddington: That is so interesting. And so is it, would you say it's just grief then?
Dr. Ray Owen: I mean, I think that's one of the central questions actually. And the re I'm not here to talk in great depth about the research because I'm not, Primarily a researcher. I know it's one of the questions that folks do struggle with on this whether when we say sort of the increase in traumatic memories, you know, the increase in anger at the fact that there can never now be a resolution, you can never either put things right or see the person. Suffer are punished for the awful things they did, you know? [00:09:00] Is that part of a grief process? Is that something else? From the position of a clinician, which is kind of what I am at heart in a sense we could get lost in that conversation. What's actually happening is this human being is experiencing these things, and when we use a, a word like grief. Some of it might be talking about specific processes of adjustment to loss, but most of the time what we're talking about is a context where the hu this person has lost something and is now suffering as a consequence of that and the different bits of it we may tease apart in different ways and try and support 'em.
Challenges in Diagnosing Grief
Chris McCurry: That's part of the fundamental problem of diagnosing and categories
is we,
we try to. Put things into these boxes and human beings refuse to be put into boxes and everybody's gonna experience it differently. Again, whether it's depending on their culture or their personal history their biology, whatever it may be.
So [00:10:00] yeah, we can't categorize these things too neatly.
Dr. Ray Owen: no, and grief certainly has gone down that path. Um, you know, one of the, one of the paradoxes of getting involved as a clinician is if something is so universal, is so much a, an arguably of a necessary part of the loving relationship and the response to the loss of a, say, a loving relationship, then what on earth are people, therapists doing, getting involved?
Emma Waddington: great question.
Dr. Ray Owen: Yeah. You know, and we know that the most appropriate or the most helpful things in the context of a loss, particularly loss by bereavement, are the things that kind of every culture throughout history has found, you know, it's kind of compassion, it's practical support at that time. You know, taking some food round, helping with things meaningful ritual. Again, what that, what shape that for [00:11:00] that takes will depend. You could have rituals that are very, like long cultural traditions and may or may not be tied in with religious belief systems, but you also have new and relatively spontaneous rituals. I was, I was in Italy a few weeks ago, and you know, there sometimes on rural roads you get little roadside shrines, and that's been a tradition that's been going for centuries and centuries. And of course, I don't know if this is true in other countries, certainly in the United Kingdom, this new ritual has developed just in the last couple of decades of flowers at the roadside. If somebody's say, died in a road traffic accident, well that didn't exist.
Before, but this is kind of a new ritual that's be, that has meaning. And so yeah, the following of meaningful rituals and provision of companionship. You know, those are the core things. You don't need therapists, doctors, psychologists involved for those bits.,
Emma Waddington: I think it's so, [00:12:00] so important that you raise this, 'cause this is something that I ask myself too, and I guess some people don't get that support, don't get those rituals, and maybe that's where they turn to therapy or their grief is not considered, What we call the disenfranchised grief, right? It's not recognized by society. So society or their community is not gathering around them and offering them that support, that compassion, that help or the support, the help the compassion runs out because it's been too long and I'm putting air quotes, and, you know, three to six months you should be back to functioning. And that's how people turn to therapy because you know, in our communities, and like you said, we can't speak to other communities, but in our community, grief isn't something that we do very well. We don't gather around very comfortably. And one of the things that strikes [00:13:00] me about grief is that on the one hand, like you said, it's something we will all experience. And that was such a beautiful reminder. Of how common it is, and yet, you know, it can be labeled as a condition how common it is that we'll all experience grief, and yet how uncomfortable we feel with grief. How most people that I work with who've experiencing grief or have had a terrible loss, an unbearable loss, feel really alone and feel often a burden to others. Because they don't want to overwhelm others with their grief. And so I do think that as a community, we're letting grief down. Like we are not very good at supporting grief and accepting that we will grief and that people can have these tremendous emotions and that sort of, what you said about, you know, grief being very messy and complicated and lots of emotion.
The sad, [00:14:00] the ugly crying that we sometimes talk about, you know, with grief is acceptable but so many others aren't. Although I think the ugly crying is also a problem for many people. Like they feel deeply ashamed and will isolate. So I think despite it being just a matter of time before we experience tremendous grief, it isn't something we do very well. And maybe other cultures do with the, their rituals and their community. But I don't think in the West we're too happy maybe not too happy. Maybe it is a bit of denial that we don't want to sort of, to face the reality. But I do think a lot of people find it hard, and I do think it's cloaked. With a mysticism. Like even as clinicians we're told, you know, can you see this client who's experiencing grief? We go, yes. Have you had training in it? do you know how to work with grief? So there's something about grief that's kind of, on the one hand, we all know what we need [00:15:00] to do and how to support.
On the other hand, it's incredibly difficult.
Dr. Ray Owen: I think that's a, think that's a astute point. And one of the things that's, I suppose, tied together a couple of threads in my career has been both on the grief side after a loss of a significant change has happened, and also in anticipation. Whether of the death of another person that you love or of your own your own mortality or a change in your physical function that that alters your life fundamentally. You know, one of the things that ties 'em together is something very clear and very actual has happened. But we're not in the position of saying, well, you see this is all just about, you've got this habitual way of looking at stuff that always gets you into trouble.
And some people are really cursed with that and it ruins their lives. But with these kind of situations, it's, everybody's gonna look at it and say, well, hang on the person you love most. Of course. So that [00:16:00] reason I think sometimes, simpler, more basic psychological interventions which have sometimes arguably overemphasized. So the internal causality that it's a problem arising just from within. I think sometimes that can feel a bit intimidating when we are dealing with a big, tangible thing that there's a big societal sort of, not taboo, but a big societal recognition that, well, that's awful. So, yeah, I think the, you know, are you trained bit is not necessarily, you need a fundamentally different set of skills because I really think you don't. you do need to be ready to apply that in a context where the big bad thing ain't going away.
Dr. Ray Owen: that person, will always have died and that person will always be absent. And so sort of looping that back a little bit to the slight tendency to diagnose, you know, which arguably, you know as you were saying, Chris is sort of part of that way that humans make sense of the [00:17:00] world by categorizing. Try and impose some sort of order on the chaos of reality. And of course we import that in and it works, arguably works relatively well for lots of physical health problems. Sometimes it doesn't work so well around psychological distress and suffering. And in grief, we've certainly that distinction between, well, this is and I'm gonna take my turn to. Huge amounts of think have been expended in categorizing problematic or abnormal grief. And you can see, you know, with good heart why people have done that. To try and say, well, we shouldn't really be sending everybody off to see a therapist because they're sad that somebody's died. That's not right. And at the same time, if you have somebody five years in. He's still at this very high level of distress. You know, self-care gone out the [00:18:00] window, unable to relate well to other people. Constantly thinking about the person who's died, seeing no future for themselves in it. Then I think it's worth saying that person could probably do with a bit of help or at least deserves a try of somebody. So, you know, without getting lost in. At what point does it become prolonged grief or unresolvable grief? It's just, oh, look, here's somebody who's really struggling. Isn't it time that somebody kind of tried to sit down with and see if there's any way we can help them a bit? I think that's a more functional kind of distinction. Then this classic thing of categorizing and sorting.
The Role of Resilience in Grief
Chris McCurry: I know one of the things that you've talked about is the whole idea of resilience and how there's a dark side to that and how it's applied and that resilience can become just another kind of finger wagging, you know, you should be more resilient [00:19:00] or. A way of, 'cause we've on this podcast talked about burnout and how, you know, the idea of being more resilient, maybe just another way of our overlords getting us to go back into a situation that's not healthy.
Can you speak a little bit about that in terms of resilience and how that's been incorporated? Either. For good or for ill in this the grief process.
Dr. Ray Owen: Yeah it's been fascinating to watch the development of the use of the word resilience and how bad a press it's got over the last decade or so. And absolutely there is now that association. With kind of, you know, blaming the victim in in, in a society which asks a lot and often too much of individuals in the pursuit of the wellbeing of others rather than themselves. [00:20:00] And yes, the sort of the concept that anybody who fails to deliver and then deliver more on less and less resources, it's a failure of resilience on their part if they can't, rather than a perfectly normal human reaction. So there is that bit, and that's why I think that interestingly, there was a conversation that went on with my publisher in the second edition of the book about the word resilience and whether we still wanted to use the word resilience whether it now got such a bad press. I, I kind of fairly strongly defended it because the court. Concept is an important one. You know, when people were first talking about resilience in a vaguely psychological way, not just in a general language way, you know, people are identifying two components, which is the ability to recover from major setbacks and the ability to persist in the face of difficulty. Now, if. It is your employer overlord who is giving you the setbacks and setting on [00:21:00] attainable levels of difficulty of what's being asked off you, then absolutely. That's kinda like an abuse of the concept. However, life will give you setbacks. is absolute given and. There is not just individual episodes of major setbacks that are gonna knock you on your backside. There's also gonna be at times sort of continuing pressure that you're gonna be working against, not because somebody's abusing you and something's wrong, because that's what life gives us. You know, that's not much of a secret, is it? But it's, that stuff will happen. You know, bad stuff happens sometimes you gotta try to keep going when it's tough, and that's what resiliency is. So even if you're not gonna ask people to be resilient in unacceptable situations, things going just normally are gonna call that from us. And grief has an element of that as well. You know, the tho so these old sort of models that are sort of best known that you go through these stages of grief and at some point you'll get to [00:22:00] acceptance, you know, very widely distributed in society, that sort of thinking. Sanctified almost, you know, to the point there's a whole episode of The Simpsons that refers to that model and has Homer working his way through it.
Chris McCurry: It must be must be real then.
Dr. Ray Owen: it must be real. I mean, how could it not be, you know? And he manages it in about 30 seconds. So, you know, we are all clearly missing a trick.
The Dual Process Model of Grief
Dr. Ray Owen: What are the kind of consequences of that way of thinking that grief is like based on phases or is in a linear time-based process? Of course there's kind of truth in that 'cause things do change somewhat over time with grief. That's most people's experience. But what what are the kind of much more useful models? Of grief is something called the dual process model. Okay. Which sounds very grounded, sounds very scientific well explained. It's gotta sound well. Yeah, of course. And what that says is, yeah, but you don't just sit around crying for the [00:23:00] six months, for six months, and then maybe a couple of years later you get around to light. Beginning to learn to do new things. Actually those are those who have been bereaved or who've suffered a loss of a non bereavement type. Recognize that normally you're having to do stuff right from the first moment. You're sorting out practicalities, you're sorting out the will, you're going down to the bank to see if you have some money released to pay the funeral director. So actually you are rebuilding life almost from the start alongside feeling the acute pain of loss. Rather it be some linear secrets that you work your way towards. So in this model, it's like, there's two, I mean they're called it orientations, but there's like two states that we kind of swing between a loss oriented one and a restoration oriented one. Or we could say a rebuilding one. And it's not that we gradually move from onto the other, but even within a single day, we'll swing backwards and forwards multiple times. And so at one moment [00:24:00] we are. Wondering what on earth we're gonna do about the future. In the next moment, we are actually sorting some of that future out, and in the next moment we are back in the bedroom looking at photographs in floods of tears, and the pervasiveness of the idea that grief should be a more or less linear process. It's shown by the fact how many people I've met who describe these perfectly normal patterns of grieving. See them as being madness. I thought I was going mad. I swing up and down all day. Sometimes I'm doing this and sometimes I'm doing that. And when we can sort of walk them through, this is how we think.
A lot of people are just the relief.
And I'm not mad.
Chris McCurry: Is so immense. So the two, yeah, those two aspects be very much kind of woven together.
Now I could see how somebody would really be disturbed by that because, you know, if I'm [00:25:00] really valuing this person and really grieving appropriately, you know, I should be completely bereft. But here I am, you know, like you say, I'm at the bank trying to sort out the finances.
Chris McCurry: and that's where perhaps, you know, or worse yet, I'm laughing at some things somebody said,
you know, at the funeral. And oh my goodness, I shouldn't be feeling any joy at this point in time. So maybe some resentment or some guilt starts showing up. And trying to make room for all of that is, is a very tricky thing.
Dr. Ray Owen: It is tricky and if we can help people have that concept that this stuff will show up, you know, it's true in lots of situations, and here's a particularly clear example of it. We don't really get to choose what shells up. All we get to do is choose, have some degree of choice over what we do next. So enabling people to say that yes, sometimes you will. [00:26:00] So here's, I mean, here's a good example, feeling kind of angry and resentful against the person who died. Okay? Not at the extreme.
Navigating Complex Emotions in Grief
Dr. Ray Owen: We're perhaps talking about before where there've been this long-term kind of toxic relationship. The person had been an abuser or something, but feeling angry may be that they died and left you.
Even when you're not done well, they have no choice whatsoever in the matter. The amount of extra knots that people tie themselves in around that feeling of guilt and then their shame at feeling guilt and their resentment of feeling shame about feeling guilt. Oh, just, you know, it's what the Buddhist would call a second arrow.
You know, the first arrow is the suffering itself. And then the second arrow is the one we kinda shoot ourselves with with
all of those other complications. And that's where having a kind of a space and some support can really help people to be able to sort of see those things as well as sometimes the practical skills of how do you make room for
[00:27:00] for shame.
Emma Waddington: That's just so. So true that we get ourselves into knots about so many things, and the grief is yet another one that we get ourselves into knots about, like this judgment and these sort of double, triple, quadruple arrows that we land in.
The Myth of Normal Grieving
Emma Waddington: cause there's no 'cause I sometimes, you know, in, in my practice and even with friends have, you know, been asked but. the normal way to grieve? What if I'm not crying? What if, you know, I had somebody ask me today, 'cause I asked my team what are the questions? What are good questions for rayo? And, And um, one of them said, well, can you ask about, you know, what if somebody hasn't grieved properly, they've just got on with life, will it hit them later? And it just sounds like this, I mean, when, I don't know who this, you know, what this person is experiencing and what getting on with life actually looks like. Maybe it is what you've said, you know, functioning because they [00:28:00] have to function. But actually in the back room, like we say, in, in, you know, in on our podcast, you can't judge people's outsides because we dunno what's going on inside.
So are they functioning? Who knows? Emotionally, what's happening for them. But this idea that there is, you should be going through grief a certain way. You should be crying a lot, you should be feeling a lot of sadness, like you said and yet grief can look very differently for many reasons.
Like so interesting to hear that, you know, if you've had a complicated relationship, because I see that. You know, and I have people dreading it. I have people dreading it. If my parent dies and I'm, you know, not speaking to them, how am I gonna cope with their death? I should be getting ready for this now.
'cause I, they can kind of see that it's gonna be complicated already. So it's so it can be incredibly complicated. Our experience of grief and this idea that somehow there's a right and wrong way just gets us into [00:29:00] more knots.
Dr. Ray Owen: Oh, absolutely. You know, I spent spent many years part of my work was in hospices and, one of the things I got very used to was the ward doctors and nurses tended to be very accurate in picking up who needed extra support. Particularly, you know, family members. Yeah.
Some of my work was with the person who was ill and dying. Sometimes it would be with family members as they were kind of living through the. stays, hours of the per of the person's life. But very often the kind of thing that staff were picking up is, I think they're gonna really struggle afterwards, you know, and for seasoned hospice staff to be saying that it's not just a general statement of truth, it's now we've spotted something. Interestingly, couldn't always quite articulate why. But there's just like, they, could smell it. This person's gonna really struggle. And sometimes that's about the things that we know are kind of, again, it becomes medical to talk this way, but kinda like [00:30:00] risk factors or more problems in grief, you know?
So some of it is about the previous struggles that person has had. If they've struggled with mental health difficulties all their life or they struggle significantly with losses, sometimes it's about the person who has died. So, yeah, we've talked a bit about ambivalent relationships. I mean, that sort of lifelong ideal relationship and the loss of the kind of the soulmate, of course, that hits people phenomenally hard. It's kind of a sort of suggestion that hits harder earlier. And if you've been lucky enough to be in that kind of relationship, maybe do you know relatively better? Because there's less me and awfulness about something about sometimes also about the, circumstances of the death. So, okay, this doesn't really reply to hospices so much.
It does occasionally, but you know, very sudden, unexpected deaths. At the other end of it very protracted, long [00:31:00] deteriorations and high burden of care. And of course we know things like death by. Death by homicide. Violent deaths. Deaths where there isn't a body. So the death is sometimes just assumed or death is certain, but there wasn't a body. We know some of these things are kind of risk factors as well. And you know, is what we are working on. Then purely grief. Well, it comes back to the idea we were talking about before. It kind of almost doesn't matter
You, you dealing with a human and a human who's suffering. If you've got some
idea of the processes of, oh, here's some of the stuff that loss tends to do to people, here's stuff that being plagued by traumatic memories tends to do to people.
Then we work with the person rather than work with a categorization of a diagnosis.
Emma Waddington: I find it really interesting to think. It's just so much more liberating. When we are thinking about just emotions as opposed to right or wrong emotions, and what emotions come in, what sequence, and you know, are we there [00:32:00] yet? Have we got to the right stage? And when am I gonna get to acceptance?
And you know, you can just hear the struggle and I can see why. Certain deaths would be more challenging 'cause there's more emotion that comes with it. Like you have a bigger pot, a bigger container, you need a bigger container to carry all of that versus, you know, some of the other grief that you've described that perhaps the container is neater and therefore easier to carry. I don't know.
Dr. Ray Owen: I think by the time you've kind of. Looked at the sort of personal history of the grieving person, the nature of the relationship between the grieving person and the person who died. The nature of the death and the time left off the death. The context. 'cause we haven't even really talked about the fact that you know, all of this so far is kind of fell within or between people.
Psychological, you know, if people are simultaneously. By the death [00:33:00] being rendered homeless or stateless maybe. You know, suddenly all these other sort of societal factors really come into play.
Disenfranchised Grief: Unseen and Unspoken
Dr. Ray Owen: Quite apart from what you mentioned before, Emma, kind of astutely that you know, some death some grief is disenfranchised, you know, is less, approved and Okay. And you know, I, we've seen the textbooks and all the examples. You know, I suppose classic ones would be that I've certainly been involved with were where the grieving person had a decades long affair, the person who died and of course when the person died, the sort of the formal legal family. Very much the center of attention, but this person, you know, couldn't even show up at the funeral.
So you've got that, you've got where people will disagree on the grounds of ethnicity or sexuality with the nature of the [00:34:00] relationship. So, you know, that's kind of not okay. I'll tell you the biggest single one is whether it was human or not.
Biggest single source of disenfranchised grief is death of a pet.
Sometimes a pet is the single best relationship a person
has ever had. The only non-abusive one. The only unconditionally loving one. The only one that's not like, you know, based on what can I get out of you with most animals. Devastating for the person and psychologically, way more significant than death of any human they helped with shared the world with and yet just a pet. Oh, for goodness sake, it was just a pet. Get another one.
So, you know, in terms of dis working with disenfranchised grief, that's the category I've come into. I don't think anybody's ever come to me because of the death of a pet, mainly because they were ashamed.
But you start peeling the layers away of why is this person reacted? And then you discover that, well, actually they presented for this problem.
They presented for that problem, but actually what's [00:35:00] driving in the middle of it was, you know, they lost their soulmate who happened to be a dog or catter or whatever, and that's what needed the work.
Grieving Non-Death Losses
Emma Waddington: And so what that sort of leads me to think about is different types of grief, right? We, that's, we describe the. Disenfranchised in terms of the loss of a partner or a pet, a loss of a being. But some people experience tremendous grief, loss of identity when they lose a job or they lose a status. A status.
So they, you know, they're no longer married or so there's different types. Of grief in that way too. I wonder if we can touch on that. 'cause
Chris McCurry: Well, there's, There's just getting old, which
Emma Waddington: also.
Chris McCurry: near and dear to my heart. At this time there's a lot of loss. Just, a number of years ago I was working with an older gentleman. He was in his early seventies as I am now, but I was [00:36:00] quite a bit younger. And he had some anxiety issues and we did some nice work together.
But one day he was talking about getting old, and I think Emma's heard me mention this before, but he said, when you get old, you experience a lot of loss. You know, your kids move away, your knees don't work. It says, well anymore, you know, you lose your job or you retire and then that's part of your identity.
Maybe, you know, friends and a spouse die. He said it's a lot of loss, but he said, it's like playing a game of chess. He said, when you play chess, you're going to lose pieces. It's part of the game. And sometimes you may lose an important piece like a rook or maybe even your queen, but you don't quit the game.
You adjust your strategy based on the pieces you have left, and you play the best game you can.
And, I have thought about that for the last, like, you know, 12 or 15 years as I lose my chest pieces over [00:37:00] time. You know, my son moved out and body doesn't work so well anymore and, so, you know, just trying to play the best game you can with the pieces you have left and, you know, grieve the loss of some of these things.
Of course. But the orientation, the focus is on, favorite definition of resilience is a struggling Well,
Dr. Ray Owen: Nice.
Chris McCurry: and I've mentioned that to parents on many occasions where, you know, it's a struggle, We're struggling. Well,
Dr. Ray Owen: And I guess what that makes me think, Chris is is that sometimes I work with people is to work out what well means for them. know, because it could be then very, it could be very easy to be attached to the kind of the obvious surface form of things. You know, the chess pieces themselves.
And yes, they go and yes, there's pain of them going with the concept of what game am I actually playing here? Gives us then the chance for saying, I'm still in the game. And I'll play my strategies and as you say, struggling. Well, well, you know, that kind of begs a question about what [00:38:00] we mean by what we mean by, well,
Chris McCurry: It may not be.
Dr. Ray Owen: no, as my, my mother I grew up in the northwest of England was was very fond to saying in her later years is that there's no good about getting old. And you know, yeah, I mean that there are benefits. Aren't there meant to be the accumulated wisdom and all these things and
Chris McCurry: I get discounted cinema tickets. Yeah.
Dr. Ray Owen: Oh, there we go. I've not quite hit that yet as soon. But for sure. Yeah. Yeah. There are many losses and some of them are kind of, those, if we are lucky enough, are those gradual losses, which still hurt. And, you know, we have some opportunity for sort of adjustment to. And for kinda like getting, kind of getting used to. I think where it gets tricky are when we have like multiple losses very close together and again in yeah, it's easy to think of g type of losses for [00:39:00] that. You know, when we do get older, then obviously more of our friends are dying. But even with younger people, you know, one of my first jobs that qualifying was with, at a regional HIV and AIDS unit in the early 1990s where, you know, we were supporting quite a co cohesive community in Manchester who were losing an awful lot of people and everybody had lost multiple people, previous partners and things.
So, you know, that sort of, you can get very specific situations where you get. Concentrated losses, but as we say, like with age, we get that. So there are multiple, there are multiples of losses, but also I think sometimes there's a kind of added shock from things being not in the natural order of things or sooner than people would anticipate.
Athletes and the Sudden End of Careers
Dr. Ray Owen: So one group I've worked a little bit with have been sports people, athletes whose careers have come to an end.
Unexpectedly, which is of course a kind of a real possibility. And you kind of, you meet these young, [00:40:00] people who are in their, you know, late teens, early twenties, and since they were young enough to know they loved sport and to be being picked out as something a bit special has been their entire lives.
It's been all their time, all their energy. But it's also been their identity, the place they get validation, a way of living by their values. All of those things are around the sport. And then, It could get taken away from you in the blink of an eye, you know, one tackle that kind of wrecks your, your ligaments, and then suddenly at the age of like, you know, early twenties.
But even if they have a successful career and make it all the way through to the grand old age of 30 when it's time to retire, you know, suddenly we are in that situation of say of having two sets of problems. We've got the grief. For what you're losing and we've got the rebuilding. So it's actually very much back to that, that, that
grief model. It's the rebuilding. What am I gonna do next? And you know, how can I live [00:41:00] by those values that used to get supported in my sports life, in a life beyond being an active athlete. But if we spend all our time on helping the person build the way ahead. What we would call restoration. Are we building orientation in this model? And we don't spend enough time saying, this really sucks, doesn't it?
It must really hurt that you're not that anymore. Let's just make room for that and notice what happens if we get too tangled up in it, you know, but make room for it. As well as moving forward.
Balancing Grief and Moving Forward
Dr. Ray Owen: And what I would say that zooming outwards from even from this wider level of grief, is in therapy generally. I think those of
us are involved in more like behavioral therapies, more than purely reflective psych based therapies. We're very often helping people build their way ahead. Build a life that more suits their values than what they've been [00:42:00] enjoying recently. And I think it's great to have therapy models that allow you to do that.
I really do. And I think one of the big risks, and I see it a lot in like younger therapists who are just getting into this kind of stuff, is you get so hooked on building the way forward that you
forget to make room for the, that really sucks, doesn't it? That really hurts. Can we just spend some time with how unfair it was that happened to you?
I suppose that would be kind of my other point, that yes, we can think about grief for bereavement. That's gonna be the biggest part of your work in some ways. But then there's grief that's around other major life losses, loss of role, loss of job, loss of career, loss of identity, loss of health and youth. But then there's also that bit of grief that's just a part of everything. And if we don't make a room for that, then we are less able to do the other stuff that we wanna do as say therapists.
Chris McCurry: [00:43:00] And that may be a good place to end. any final thoughts though?
Dr. Ray Owen: Okay. Here's my final thought. There, there's a dilemma in grief therapy, right? Grief for somebody you truly loved is a lifelong process. It will change. It shouldn't be so high intensity, but it's lifelong. So when would grief therapy end? Because the grief still gonna be there. So here's kind of what came to me over time that when thinking about grief and grief therapy, the person you're helping is like a ship and they're gonna be sailing off across the Atlantic onto their own. In the direction they're choosing as a therapist with a little tug belt, right? We know about this harbor. We know where some of the currents are, we know where some of the rocks are. We can sometimes work with them in their engines to get them off the odd sandbar and help them work out which way they should be pointing as they leave the harbor and set off on their lifelong journey. And at that point we have to cast off.
Because if this [00:44:00] little tug bolt stays tied to that big ocean liner, I'm gonna be pulling you off course and I'm gonna be holding you back. So, although it might feel a bit scary at that point, we need to cast off and I need to wave you on your way and wish you well with a future ahead.
Emma Waddington: I love that. That's really lovely. Thank you so much. I have learned so much today, honestly. It's just been really nourishing. And validating of so much of our, of what I've witnessed and seen, and I've learned a lot. Thank you.
Dr. Ray Owen: Thank you for asking me.
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