Grieve That Sh!t

It's a concept. I don't think a lot of people think about the fact that love and hate can exist at the same time in our heart. Happy and sad can exist at the same time. That's where the term bittersweet comes from. We have opposite emotions or how we call them conflicting feelings. These can happen at the same time. And it's completely normal. It's natural, but people don't know how to interpret that. When it happens, they feel crazy, because it's like, how can I love this person, but hate them and don't want them in my life. How can I be happy that my son is going off to college, but then broken and sad. The minute the door closes behind him, conflicting feelings exist all the time.

We have to start prioritizing our grief. We do need.  No one wants to be without love. But when you have love and you have these relationships through death, divorce, and again, break up of a romantic relationship, you lose it. But no one wants to deal with it. They essentially want to throw their hands up or stick your head in the sand, be sad, be miserable or run out and get another love. We don't prioritize our grief and it will essentially bleed out into other areas of your life.

This episode was recorded just two weeks after the Uvalde, Texas shooting.  Sharon asks Erica to go back to the moment when she learned that Austin had died to help people understand what those parents might have been feeling in the moments leading up to finding out that their lives were about to be forever changed as a result of this tragedy. 

What is closure?  What does that even mean? What is closure and how did that come to be a term associated with relationships or brokenheartedness and why is it that I feel like you always hear it on the news? We gotta get all the newscasters together and tell them to stop using the word closure. Closure is a term used to describe the process of acceptance after the death of a loved one.

Is crying required in order to grieve?  Absolutely not. Isn't it funny how people think that if you don't cry, then you haven't grieved or they associate their grieving with crying. Like we put the two together. When people see you out in public and you're not doing the ugly cry walking around the grocery store, they say, oh, you're doing so good. You're so strong. It's so insulting because we are totally grieving.  Our hearts are broken. Crying is not required inorder for somene to grieve.

The Sisters discuss the choices that a woman and a man have to go through when making the decision of whether or not to have an abortion and the grief that is connected to that.   

The Sisters talk about the griever resisting healing, resisting the pain. In the first few weeks and months after the loss, the most important thing that the griever can be doing is allowing in the pain, but no one ever tells them that.  One of the ways is to  bring the grief up, like bringing it up when the time is appropriate. And one of the ways we do that is with a voice recording of Austin.  You can use pictures or videos of your loved one as well, it's just important to make sure it's being done.

Erica is 100% the poster child of what true healing looks like. True healing does not look sad. If you are truly healed from a broken heart, you are living your best life. You're living the best life that you can in honor of your loved one. That's what true healing looks like. The things that people say, the things that people do can be so funny when it comes to grief.  Grief is sad but when you do healing work you will be able to find a life that is worth living.

The Sisters interview Erin Burden owner of Yoga with Erin B.  Erin shares how she was so devastaed by the loss of her daughter Dakota who ended her life in 2018.  It was Erin and Dakota's plan to teach yoga together, however once Dakota's death Erin could hardly get out of bed because her grief was debilitating.  Her desire to get back into yoga was to keep her connection with her daughter but she soon realized it was also helping her with her grief.  Today Erin strives to work specifically with grievers based on her own experience.  

Prolonged grief is a condition that occurs, according to the medical industry, grief that lasts over a year. Prolonged grief is a disorder that was just added to the DSM five, the diagnostic statistical manual of mental disorders. The DSM five is, whatever disease you can come up with and until recently, grief was never in it because grief is not a mental disorder. 

www.healingstartswiththeheart.com