How to Manage Grief Over the Holidays

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Transcript

Host: Tessa Lackey:

If you are in a season of grief, especially during the holidays, it can be a really difficult time, and ironically, not the most wonderful time of year like it might be for some. Welcome to Prescribed Listening. I'm your host Tessa Lackey. In this episode, whether this is a new season of grief for you, or you are trying to help somebody who's in a season of grief, or maybe it's just something that happens to come back up during this time of year, we're talking about ways that you can be in tune with your emotions, and if you're somebody that's looking to reach out and help, things that you can say that are helpful and things that may not be as helpful.

In this episode, we have Hannah Gullickson, who's a behavioral healthcare manager for UTMC at the Rupert Health Center in the Department of Psychiatry who's giving us tips on how to do all of this and more when it comes to your grief. So here's our episode with Hannah.

All right, well, Hannah, thank you so much for joining us today on Prescribed Listening. So just to get an introduction to you, tell us what you do for UTMC.

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

So my job is Behavioral Healthcare Manager. My license is in LPCCS. I'm a licensed counselor.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Okay, awesome. So just for a little bit of background and what we're planning on talking about in this episode, we're recording this over the holidays and we're talking about grief specifically and its impact on people for what some is not the most wonderful time of year. And because everyone grieves differently, it can be different kinds of hard for other people. So just to get a baseline, what would you define grief as?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

So I would define grief as our response to loss, and I intentionally make that really broad because loss can be a lot of different things. Grief is, a combination of emotions, thoughts, behaviors, loss of functioning. And so with that being broad, there can be a lot of different things that mix together to form whatever is each person's unique grief experience.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

So with that, what would you say the difference between grief and mourning is then?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

I think of grief as being broader than mourning. Mourning I think of specifically your response after a death. And a lot of times that comes with specific traditions or rituals. They might be cultural, they might be religious. Grief is very broad. It's a response to any sort of loss.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

And then what is the difference between grief and grieving?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

So grief doesn't really ever go away. If you've ever lost someone or something important to you, you know that it doesn't really ever end. It changes over time, but that intense process of grieving when you're actively grieving, that doesn't last forever.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

For someone that is going through a season of grief, what are some emotional and physical symptoms that people would be experiencing?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

I think the first thing that people think of with grief is sadness, crying, this heaviness. I also think grief can come with a lot of anxiety, like just this feeling like the world's not right anymore. And confusion about maybe what your identity is, what your role in the world is. It can come with some loss of functioning. You might have a hard time accomplishing your responsibilities, taking care of yourself. You might just not be motivated to do the things that you normally do.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

For some people when they're dealing with these really heavy emotions, sometimes people tend to push those emotions away. And then for some people, we tend to lean on other people or really want to get those emotions out of us. So for those specific people who tend to want to bottle it all up and just want it to go away and are just completely fighting those feelings, should they just continue going about that? If everyone grieves differently, is that something that is helpful or is it not helpful?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

So it's normal. It's normal to want to avoid anything that's uncomfortable or causes you pain. It's not always healthy or the most efficient way to resolution. So I would say somewhere in between. We don't want to dwell in our sadness and we don't want to just live in that, but we also don't want to avoid it because any avoiding, judging, ignoring, suppressing of our feelings, it actually amplifies them. I don't know if you've ever noticed that if you push something down, it tends to catch you harder on the other side. So we want more of this process of, it's a really mindful process of being aware and acknowledging what's happening without letting it control you.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

So I think of that visually as if you have a bowl of water or something, you're trying to shove a ball or something like a tennis ball and you're trying to shove that tennis ball down, but it keeps floating back up kind of a thing.

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Exactly, yeah. Kind of like a buoy, right?

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Yeah.

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

And more so having this perspective of, I like the metaphor of the waves of the ocean, like the waves of the ocean, they just come and go. There's nothing that we can do to stop them or control them, and our feelings are like that. They come and go and just letting them naturally take their course, acknowledging what they are. There's this psychologist named Dan Siegel, and he has this intervention that it's as simple as it sounds, but he calls it, name it to tame it. Just the idea that when you name what you're feeling, you have so much more power over it. It lets you know what to do about it. Whereas if you don't ever name what you're feeling and you either you dwell in it and you let it overtake you or you avoid it, what tends to happen is it controls you.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Okay. So I guess for those people that on the opposite side of things, they're bursting with emotions and they're not in a place where they want to shove it down and they just want to talk to everybody about what's going on and they don't know what to do with themselves with the amount of grief that they feel, what would you recommend for them?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Name it to tame is helpful for that too, because in my experience, those people don't always know what they're feeling. It's intense, but it's not specific. So spending some time. So talking it out is a great way to get those feelings out. Journaling is a great way, even doing task oriented activities. If you like cooking a meal, if you like riding your bike, if you like doing your nails, things like that really help us process those feelings and release them rather than it feeling like they're exploding out of us.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

So then for people who are, whether it's the grief that they're experiencing and that comes up at this time of year, it's something new that happened or it's just something that they're reminded of because of just this time of year itself, how can they take a step to take care of themselves or to improve themselves and to not be as weighed down of the feelings?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Yeah. So the first thing I think of is practicing self-compassion, which that's a fancy way of just saying being nice to yourself. So knowing that whatever, grief is really hard to deal with no matter how it hits you, when, how long. And so being kind to yourself and knowing that what you're going through is normal, you can't control it, it has to run its course. And treating yourself emotionally, like you would treat yourself if you had the flu. You're going to give yourself a break. You're going to let yourself not do as much as normal. You're going to take care of yourself. You might do things like make a cup of tea or watch a movie that makes you feel comforted. Other things I think of is making sure that you are resting, eating, drinking water, hydrating, moving your body. Those are so important for health.

And when we have a lot of strong emotions, sometimes we forget to do those things. So refocusing on those things, and then we can use this skill that we use a lot in therapy that we call just reframing. So it is just shifting your thoughts a little bit. So instead of thinking about grief as something really terrible and it doesn't feel good, it's never going to feel good, but the idea is that we grief because we cared. We grieve because we loved something, someone, and that grief is a reflection of how much we cared. I don't grieve things that I never had a chance to care about or I never connected with. And so reframing grief is this really beautiful process that we actually get to go through because we've walked a journey with someone or something.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

So obviously this time of year, no matter when that instance that caused that grief happened, it's something that just comes back up. Would you say almost as you would take care of a leg injury, for example, or a physical injury of any kind, knowing that walking into this time of year you need to take care of yourself a little more mentally 'cause you know that those feelings are going to come up.

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

So you can be proactive about it. Sometimes it also just blindsides you. My favorite analogy for this is called the ball in the box analogy. I don't know if you've heard of this.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Mm-mm.

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

So for grief, you picture a box and at the bottom of the box is a button. And that button, if it's hit, you feel pain, that's your pain button, and inside the box is a ball, and that's your grief. If you can picture this, okay. When you first experience grief, that ball is huge. It fills up the entire box and it's constantly pressing on that pain button. You just don't get a break. Over time, the ball slowly starts becoming smaller and shrinking, and it never really goes away, but at some point it bounces around the box like our old Windows Explorer screensaver, and it hits that pain button sometimes, but it's not constantly. And when it's bouncing around that box, sometimes it feels like it just randomly hits that pain button and that can blindside us. Then sometimes one grief can trigger another too. If you have multiple griefs in that box, they can bounce off of each other too.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Yeah. I have family members that they lost two different people at different years, and it landed in one week of each other. So that week in particular for some people in my family, it is very weighted emotionally, and it just adds to everything. But especially, I remember this year it was a lot, yeah.

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

For sure. And then you add this societal and cultural expectation of the holidays where you're supposed to be joyful and you're supposed to be happy and you're supposed to enjoy all of it, and you're supposed to create memories. And for some people that feel so unattainable when they're grieving. They're sad. It amplifies what they don't have or what they've lost. And so when you put all that together, the holidays can really just amplify grief and make it even harder to cope with.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Should you put on a mask if you're someone that's grieving and is struggling to be happy?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

So as a therapist, I'm never going to recommend that you put on a mask because I want you to be the most genuine version of yourself. But I will say that a mask is definitely a tool in your toolbox that you can pull out when you feel like you need it. Let's say you just can't get out of going to a work holiday party and you're grieving and it seems like everybody is happy and joyful, and you just don't want people to ask you over and over again, "What's going on? Why aren't you enjoying this? Why aren't you"? You can pull the mask out of your toolbox temporarily to get through that time. That might be something you need to do, but I don't want you to wear the mask all the time, and I want you to realize that you have control over putting that on and taking that off.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Realizing it is a mask and not your actual face kind of thing.

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Correct, yeah, yeah.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

So for other people that are on the outside of that grief and are seeing a family member or a loved one, friend, whoever, and are picking up on that grief, what are some things that are helpful?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Yes. So one thing that I think is helpful is to know that your presence matters. There's no right thing that you can do. Sometimes it's listening, sometimes it's just being there. A lot of times people think they need to do something really tangible with grief, bring food, give gift cards, and sometimes that's helpful. It definitely lets people know that you're thinking of them, but another strategy is literally just asking them, "How can I support you right now? What would mean a lot?" Sometimes it's just knowing that someone's there. Sometimes it's having them come over. Sometimes it is practical things like food.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

So while we're talking about grief, I don't feel like we can get through a conversation about grief without talking about the stages of grief. What would you define, and then again, as we've said multiple times in this episode, everyone grieves differently. So are the stages of grief also different for each person?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Yeah. So traditionally, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is the person that came up with the stages of grief, and she came up with these five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. And when she first came up with a theory, she really presented it as this linear process that you go through. We now know that that's not the case because you can take as long as you need to go through each stage, and you can also hop back and forth. It's not linear, so you might get through denial and anger and bargaining, and you might be in depression, and then something might happen that reminds you of your loss and you might be right back in anger. That's super normal. The most important thing to know is that, like you've said over and over again, which I think is not always the thing that you want to hear, is that everybody grieves differently and your grief is normal.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Well, I think it's important to note too, you had said that you can jump back into certain stages. It feels very validating to hear that, "Oh, I'm not falling behind. It's very normal to go be in a different stage of things." So would you say that in this example where you were saying falling back into anger, that it's just putting an identity to the feelings that you're having versus going back to stage three or something?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Yeah. No, definitely, you're not regressing in your grief. Grief is more like a rollercoaster that has a lot of loopty loops than a straight A to Z line.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Yeah. Well, and like you were saying before, when you define grief, grief is something that sticks with you for forever. It's for people that haven't experienced it on the level that others have, it's hard to just understand that in general when you're just trying to be helpful, but you don't have the experience.

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Right. Yeah. And you just said when you're trying to be helpful, one thing that comes to mind too with that is there are certain things that aren't helpful with grief, like telling people, "Everything's going to be okay." Sometimes things, even like they're in a better place. If we say these things that we think give people comfort, but sometimes they don't really, sometimes people just need to hear it's okay that you're angry right now. It's okay that you don't know how to function in this moment. I'm here for you. What do you need?

Host: Tessa Lackey:

I feel like I've heard a lot of people who, when referring to someone else's grief, they've said things like, "Oh, that happened five years ago. Why are you still upset about it?" So to-

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Or you have to let it go.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Yeah. And as someone that has seen different grief and experienced grief, would you say that that's helpful?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

No.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

'Cause I don't see it as helpful either.

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

No. Yeah.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

So what are some other things that you would say in terms of helping someone who's experiencing grief? So essentially it's helpful to ask them outright, "What do you need? What can I do to help you?"

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Yeah. "How can I support you?"

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Gotcha.

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

For sure. "What do you need from me? How can I be there for you?" These just open-ended questions that let people let you know, "I don't really need anything right now, but it's just good to know that you're there." Or "You know what, would you come over for coffee sometime?" They might suggest something that we hadn't even thought of, and that probably means a lot more to them.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Yeah. I love that. You can't read everybody's mind. It's nice to be able to just open up the conversation with people.

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Yeah. Yes.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Awesome. And then any final advice for someone that's listening to this and is looking to manage their grief, especially around the holidays?

Guest: Hannah Gullikson:

Yeah. So I would just go back to that, like acknowledging what's happening, knowing that it's normal, being kind to yourself and taking care of yourself through it rather than trying to control it.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Thank you so much again, Hannah, for joining us for this discussion about grief. I hope this episode helps you to work through the holidays and to work through this season of grief that you may be in right now. And if you like this episode and are looking for more health tips from trusted experts, like the ones at UTMC, hit subscribe. That way you don't miss an episode. Happy holidays, everybody.