Grief is the one thing on this show that everyone listening will go through, and most of us are handed no tools for it at all. In this episode of the Brain Software Podcast, Mike Mandel and Chris Thompson set the usual comedy aside and talk about what grief actually does to a person, and what you can do about it. Mike treated grief professionally for seven years, and he has been flattened by it more than once. Both show up here, along with three techniques you can use on yourself tonight.
What You’ll Learn
- Grief is not restricted to death: Grief is the psychological response to significant loss of any kind. People grieve the end of a marriage, the sale of a family home, the loss of independence or mobility, and even a future they had already assumed was coming. Widen the definition and a lot of unexplained heaviness starts making sense.
- Getting over it is the wrong target: Roughly eighty percent of people are functional again inside two years, and twenty percent are not. Functional does not mean finished. Grief integrates into who you are and changes you, and that is different from staying debilitated by it.
- New grief fires the old grief with it: Losses do not sit in separate compartments. Mike’s observation from years of treating it is that grief bundles, so one trigger reaches everything else in the bucket at once. It explains why a small loss can level someone.
- Rate it before you treat it: Subjective units of distress, zero to ten, give you something to measure instead of a feeling to guess at. Skip seven, because seven is where people hide. Take the number, run a technique, take the number again.
- Three things you can do tonight: Hold the ring finger and wait for the pulse. Run the six points of Mike’s tapping method while naming the emotion out loud. Or pick up the wind telephone and say the thing you never got to say.
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Episode Summary
Mike opens with a working definition worth keeping: grief is the psychological response to significant loss. Not death, loss. Once the definition widens, so does the audience for the episode, because almost nobody gets through a decade without losing something that mattered. Then he gets specific, and this is the part you will not get from an article. He lost both parents young, bonded with his wife’s parents, and lost them three months apart. His answer at the time was vodka and sleep, which he is careful to say was not alcoholism but an ineffective attempt to process something he had no tools for. He describes complete amnesia around pets he had as a teenager, and almost no memory of the months his mother was dying. Grief does that, and none of it means anything is wrong with you.
The frame running through the whole conversation is that grief is not a problem to be solved, it is a process to be facilitated. There is no detour and no bypass. What helps is ritual, objects that carry a connection, a listening ear who will let you talk without trying to coach you, movement, nature, and sleep. What hurts is rebounding into a new relationship or a new pet before you are resourced enough to choose well, self medication, and camping in a support group that only rehearses the pain. Strong emotion makes all of us temporarily stupid, as Human Givens theory puts it, which is exactly why the decisions made during grief tend to be the ones people regret.
From there it turns practical. Mike explains SUDS and why you should skip seven when you rate yourself. He walks through Jin Shin Jyutsu, where the ring finger maps to the lungs and to grief, and why the sighing makes sense once you know that. He covers six step tapping, the same method he used on his own fibromyalgia, and Freespotting, where you let your eyes settle wherever they want and hold the feeling until you notice you are smiling. And he closes with the wind telephone. In 2010 a man in Japan put a disconnected phone booth in his garden so he could keep talking to a cousin he had lost. After Fukushima, strangers began lining up to use it, and wind telephones have since appeared around the world, including one in Minden, Ontario, on the river walk. What makes it work, Mike says, is that it turns a meandering internal conversation into an external one. Which is the line the episode was built for: sometimes grief is not asking you to get over something, it is asking you to finish a conversation.
Additional Resources:
Mike Mandel’s 6-Step Tapping Method for Fibromyalgia
Transforming Negative Emotions With Freespotting
Sometimes Grief Is Asking Us to Finish a Conversation
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