March 13, 2023 • 30 mins
We’re on break, creating all new episodes for season 3. In the meantime, here’s one of our favorite episodes from the past year. See you soon.
Our early childhood experiences of grief - and how our family systems dealt with loss - have a huge impact on our adult behaviors and relationships. This week, author Allyson Dinneen (Notes from Your Therapist) joins me as we discuss generational grief stories. We also have the first of many conversations addressing your number one most asked question: how does a grieving therapist (or another healthcare provider) go back to work?
About this week’s guest:
Allyson Dinneen is a marriage and family therapist, author, and the creator of the immensely popular Instagram account, Notes from Your Therapist - which is also the name of her recent book. Allyson’s work has been featured in Forbes, The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, and more. Find her on IG @notesfromyourtherapist
Questions to Carry with you:
Exploring the risks and rewards of telling the truth
Notable quotes:
“I plan to keep my conversation going with grief my whole life.” - psychotherapist Allyson Dinneen
References:
Megan and Allyson discuss a question from a previous episode that aired on January 3rd. That episode is linked HERE.
Find all this, plus instructions for how to submit YOUR questions to be answered on a future show in this episode of Here After with Megan Devine. Tune in, subscribe, leave a review, and share the show with everyone you know. Together, we can make things better, even when they can’t be made right.
To submit your questions visit megandevine.co
For more information, including clinical training and consulting, visit us at www.Megandevine.co
For grief support & education, follow us at @refugeingrief on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok
Check out Megan’s best-selling books - It’s OK That You’re Not OK and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed.
Want to talk with Megan directly? Join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A sessions. All the info at this link.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine.
Each week we tackle big questions from nurses, therapists, and
other helpful people that let us explore how to show
up after life goes horribly wrong. This week, what Childhood
Losses tell us about adult grief with special guest psychotherapist,
author and one of the nicest people you would ever
hope to meet, Alice and Denine. It's two grieving therapists
(00:23):
talking about the ups and downs of being human in
a professional world. One note about this episode, everybody, you
might notice that the sound quality is a little different
than usual. Everybody was at home on their own laptops
using zoom to record because we were all following public
health guidelines. Still a good one, though, don't miss it. Friends.
Will be right back after this first break. Before we
(00:52):
get started, one quick note. While we cover a lot
of emotional relational territory in each and every episode, this
show is not a obstitute for skilled support with a
license mental health provider or for professionals supervision related to
your work. And one more note. Hereafter with Megan Divine
is currently on break between seasons. We'll be back before
(01:13):
you know it with a whole new season with even
more incredible guests. In the meantime, here's one of our
most loved episodes. We'll see you soon, Heyn, Your questions
this week were all about what happens when you try
to lean on helpers for support and the result is
not exactly what you were hoping for. We've also got
(01:36):
a great question about helping others when you're not even
sure you can help yourself. So therapists, good friends, helpers
of all kinds. This episode is definitely for you. I
still have one of Alison Denied's Instagram posts saved in
my phone from way back years ago when I first
discovered her work. You might know her by her Instagram
handle Notes from Your Therapist. Alison has this way of
(02:01):
absolutely skewing the connection between childhood experience and adult behavior
patterns in her short handwritten notes. Now. I haven't gone
back to look in my phone because I have way
too many photos in there, but I think the one
that I have saved in my phone is something about
it being okay to have needs as somebody who was
raised to have no needs whatsoever. That one definitely got
(02:24):
to me, and that's the essence of Alison for me
in very few words. Her simple statements are full of
permission you didn't know you needed. Alison Deneen is a
marriage and family therapist, an author, and the creator of
the immensely popular Instagram account Notes from Your Therapist. She
specializes in emotions, emotional neglect, and relationships, the messy stuff. Obviously,
(02:48):
she's also intimately acquainted with grief. Hey, Alison, I'm so
glad you're here. Hi Megan, thank you so much. You
are so welcome. I'm so thrilled to have you. I
feel like I feel this way with most and my guests,
but I feel like you and I have clearly already
met before in person or at least spoke a lot.
But it's it's really an Instagram. It's an Instagram relationship. Definitely.
(03:10):
That is such a new and different thing. So I
do feel as if I know you. I've seen you
speak on Instagram before, so it's like you're already a
friendom finally getting to me. Yeah, we're really we're forging
new relational territories all the time. And this is actually
something that I really love about your Instagram feed your
book too. I mean, you focus on relationships, but the
(03:32):
grief that sort of runs through relationships. On your website,
you say that you grew up on a dairy farm
with and I quote from your website here a lot
of catastrophe and grief all around me. And I did
not know that about you until I started doing some
research for our time here together. But you and I
share the whole like New England childhood thing I grew
up as well. Yeah, and we're you and I are
(03:53):
around the same age. And to not spoiler alert, I guess,
but we even have dairy farm culture together because I
grew up summers on my relatives dairy farms. So that's fantastic.
You grew up on a dairy farm, so like you
have a lot of that, I have a little bit
of that. And I feel like we could spend an
entire episode just unpacking the emotional culture and the conditioning
(04:14):
embedded in all of that sort of New English farm culture,
stoicism and self reliance. You know, when you were speaking
a minute ago, you talked about so much of your
work is about the route experiences of childhood and how
those spiral out into the rest of life. So if
you think back to the roots of your own childhood,
(04:35):
what do you wish the adults in your life would
have known about grief. Well, I think what we're talking
about is generational trauma. So they would have had to
have been adults who were supported when they were children
to see all their own emotions of loss and grief.
But they grew up exactly the same way, which was
(04:57):
like repressing anything that felt painful, that shouldn't hurt, that
shouldn't be hurting you after all these years, and so
they just literally didn't have the skills too. There's just
a sense inside of them that it's wrong to be
feeling bad, that life is about feeling strong or good
and with few needs. So it's like having to envision
(05:20):
different parents, which is really hard to do. Like, what
do I wish my parents had known about grief? Boy?
I wish that they had conveyed that we can live
with it. It's safe to grieve, it's safe to miss
people we loved, and we can actually live with that.
(05:42):
And that actually, for me, it's been a way to
feel more alive living with it. My grief experience started
really young. My mom was twenty five when she died
in a plane crash, and I'd been flying with her
that day. In her small plane and I was almost four. Anyway,
(06:04):
she died in a plane crash and we never spoke
about her again. Ever. Some of my earliest memories are
of my grandparents, so my mom's parents showing up at
the house and in the devastation of the immediate aftermath
when someone dies, and my saying something about my mom,
(06:25):
and they just collapsed. They just collapsed, And I instantly knew, like,
I can't do that. Like when you're a child, you
need adults to feel stable to you, and so no
one has to tell you. We don't talk about that.
You just absorb it through every cell in your body
by watching how they handle it, and they shut down.
(06:45):
So I learned to shut down. And when I think
back now on my childhood, I really feel like a
part of me was kind of dead inside from not
being able to well to feel like clearly these feelings
I must have had, And feelings are part of our
nervous system, they're part of our bodies, So I feel
like I must have been deadening this whole part of myself.
(07:08):
So I don't know if that answers your question. It
does I think it answers it really beautifully, and thank
you for sharing that with me and with everybody listening.
These aren't easy stories, right, And you and I do
this kind of work for a living, and still when
we share our own stories, there is like you get
the sense of the weight behind that. Right, there's a
(07:30):
reason why we do what we do. What you just
share there with like, we don't have to be verbally
told not to talk about things we learn. One of
my old colleagues used to say that children watch the
adults for a living, Right, It's sort of the role
of the child to get their cues, learn about the world,
learn what's okay and what's not okay, to do, say
(07:52):
and feel by watching the grownups around them. And your
story just really describes that mechanism so beautifully. Like I
learned very quickly that no matter what was real for me,
that truth and that reality was not safe in the world,
and so I did what I needed to do to survive,
which was to make that part of me dead. And said,
(08:13):
I think what you describe there as something really common
and really normal and really human and it doesn't belong
to just that New England stoic, self reliant culture. Right.
I love that you brought up generational trauma in there too,
because there's you know, I think over the last maybe
(08:33):
five to ten years or so, there's started to be
some conversations and discussion about intergenerational trauma and what that
looks like, and how we carry family stories with us,
how we carry cultural and racial stories with us. So
this this whole topic of how do we learn what
is okay to feel and okay to say it's not new.
I love that about children being professional watchers. That's how
(08:57):
we learn how to cope with things in life by
watching what the adults do, so you have to relearn it.
Then as an adult, you don't even know that you
need to relearn things. The way that I unexpectedly came
to relearn all of this was when my husband, the
greatest love of my life, was killed in an accident,
(09:20):
also like my mom, doing the very thing that he
loved most in life. And we just had had a baby,
I had a three month old baby, and it hit
me like a ton of bricks that I could not
do to my daughter what had done to me. I
could not pretend that he'd never existed. I just couldn't.
(09:42):
Like I had that feeling inside of me of how
much it had killed me to pretend I didn't have
a mom. I didn't love my mom. I didn't want
to know more my mom. I didn't want to like
love and celebrate my mom. In fact, in a weird way,
I felt like what I lost, like the monumental thing
that I lost in not being able to grieve her
(10:02):
was how much of the ordinary things that I wanted
to know about her? Like I wanted to know things
and I didn't know any of them, Like what color
did she like? You know, what did she look like
when she woke up in the morning, Like what put
her in a bad mood? Like little expressions that she had,
(10:23):
And I had been so hungry for that as a
kid that I just knew, like I just I didn't
know how it was going to go forward, but I
knew I couldn't do what had happened to me to
my own daughter. And it makes me think of what
you were saying, asked me before I think Megan about
like what do I wish that my parents would have
taught me in this? So I figured this out on
(10:45):
my own now, but I wish that they had taught
me that, yes, those things might hurt to remember those details,
but we can actually live with that. And I think
what happens when you struggle with emotional neglect, because that's
the parents that I'm talking about, the generation that I'm
(11:07):
talking about, and it's so pervasive even now, is that
when you're so cut off from painful feelings and difficult feelings,
you literally think you can't live through that. You literally
have this physical feeling of it's dangerous to feel sad
or to feel loss or to feel hopeless because you
(11:29):
haven't had the experience. You have nothing to draw on
except escaping painful feelings. So I think that comes factor
and you don't get a chance to get to the
point where it might be like at overtime it turns
from being like so excruciatingly painful to remember them to
(11:50):
something of like I'm happy now when I can remember
things about my husband. But if I've never started down
that path, I wouldn't even be doing that. Welcome back everybody, Okay, Alison.
(12:11):
One of the things that I love about you and
your work is that you're honest about the whole work
in progress thing. I mean, we've actually been talking about
this the whole time. So even though you do this
for a living, having emotionally vulnerable conversations is still hard sometimes,
and it's the same thing for me. Being human is hard.
(12:31):
We've all got prior experiences that tell us it's not
cool to tell the truth about who we are and
how we feel, or that it's somehow even unhealthy what
you described with your own childhood experience. It's unhealthy or
unsafe to be sad or confused or overwhelmed. And there's
this fine line. Honestly more of a big gray, murky area,
(12:52):
but there's this fine line when you work in a
profession where you're supposed to be this open, accepting, wise
person and you've got your own stuff going on. So
I want to use that idea as a way to
get into this next listener question that helps us sort
of talk about how we navigate to human and prose
at the same time. You're ready, yes, okay, So here's
(13:15):
this listener's question. I'm a marriage and family therapist and
I've been in private practice for six years. I recently
experienced a stillbirth, and I'm preparing to return to work
in a few weeks. I am so anxious to meet
with a few of my clients when I get back.
Though they were working on pregnancy losses and fertility issues
before I went out on maternity leave. I left as
(13:37):
one kind of therapist, a person who expected a live
baby at the end of this, and I'm afraid I'm
coming back as not the same therapist they knew. Do
you have any advice on how to handle this? So
this listener question, honestly, like we had to pick from
probably fifty similar questions of therapists or social workers, a
(14:02):
whole lot of nurses sending in very similar questions. I've
experienced a devastating personal experience, and I have to go
back to work and navigate and work with people having
their own devastating personal experiences. And this is a really
human thing that all of the helpers are human. How
do you navigate that intersection for yourself, Alison, knowing what
(14:25):
you carry in to the office to the therapy space.
I was working as a therapist in a clinic before,
right before my husband was killed an accident. I was
actually on my maternity leave and was supposed to go
back the week after his accident. And after that, I
(14:45):
of course quit my job because I was numb and
destroyed and could barely survive, and I had an infant
to take care of. So I spent the next year
or two years literally just trying to survive, and like
(15:06):
so much of my life fell over, Like I just
thought I would never even feel joy in my life again.
I didn't think it would be possible for me to
be a therapist again. It just, in fact, it seemed
like there's no way that I would ever be able
to be a therapist again. How could I support anybody
else when I could barely support myself. So it took
(15:30):
me a while. It just took me a lot. There
was so much heeling to do. And when I finally
got back to realizing, I wanted to be a therapist again,
and I wanted to work in private practice so I
could just be more particular about hours and time and
flexibility and clients that I see as well. There's no
(15:51):
easy answer to something like this. Yeah, there's no easy answer,
because I think I had to get to a point
where I felt recovered enough to be able to talk
about it, to be strong enough to talk about it,
and that meant just having like incredible like my own
(16:14):
therapy and my own resources and friends to support me.
The kind of therapist that I am is I'm pretty
open you boundaries, but open with my clients in terms
of I think what I'm talking about is I'm an
emotionally available person because that is how I see therapy
(16:36):
as working. As we need therapists to be emotionally available
in ways that our parents weren't available to us. So
I can't just be a blank slate. I can't because
that's what people grew up with, is unavailable caregivers. So
balancing that thing about being available on being myself and
(17:00):
also tending to my own boundaries around it. I don't
know if I can say much more about this one
make and it's so hard to It's so because this
letter writers in a different place than me, Like I
would not have been able to do it. I don't
know if I would have been able to continue with
the same clients. Yeah, this is another thing that you
(17:21):
and I have in common. I mean, I was in
private practice and also had a side gig in an
agency when my partner died in an accident, And I
also quit for very many of the same reasons that
you just shared with us. That like, there was no
way I had the capacity or the interest just to
be blunt about it, right, for sitting with other people's pain.
(17:44):
There was no way I could do that. And I
also had the ability to take some time off and
come back and recreate things that suited me, and there
is a privilege in being able to do that. There's
so many things about what you just said that I
want to dive into, and I know that we're sort
of rounding the corner to the end of the episode,
but there's so many good things in here, and one
(18:06):
thing that I want to pick up on. There's something
you said after you shared your personal experience, and that
the turbulence of trying to come back into this practice.
You said, I'm in such a different place than this
letter writer, and it's almost like you and I have
a number of years between the accident and now and
(18:27):
trying to look back at the intensity of the fresh
moment for this listener. In a way, I think this
is where a lot of grief support and our ideas
about grief and how we show up for each other,
whether personally professionally, I feel like this is where we
fail is those of us who have been through these
life altering events often forget what it's like to be
(18:47):
that ripped open. Like I think sometimes we can say, well,
you just compartmentalize and you do the job ahead of you,
forgetting that compartmentalizing is very often impossible in those early days,
right maybe the task ahead of you if you don't
have the ability to step back from this work, and
certainly for healthcare workers right now there's such increased demand,
we don't often have that the ability or the space
(19:10):
or the support to step back from it. But there's
just like, this is such a complex this is actually
she with so many different guys. Yeah, when you're saying that,
I'm thinking about, like how it's such sort of like
a statement about the culture we live in that people
aren't supported to be off of work and have to
worry about things like going back to work. Because I
(19:31):
kind of think it's inhumane to ask someone who's in
the midst of the very very beginning of such terrible
grief to have to then support other people because it's
just and then imagine being that client, Like it's very
easy for me to put myself in the shoes of
a client, and there's I would not want to need
(19:52):
much from my therapist if I knew that she had
just been through that. So, yeah, like there's one more
complex layer there, right that, Like, if you come in
as a as a client and your therapist is like,
you know, I was out on maternity to leave, but
my baby died and I'm here and I'm here for you,
and as a client, very often people are going to
(20:14):
be thinking, oh, crap, like I don't I don't want
to bother her, I don't, you know. So then so
then this, like the therapeutic containers, starts to fall apart,
right that. Here's the therapist or the professional trying to
compartmentalize their personal devastation so that they can do their job,
keep the paycheck coming in, keep serving the people that
they care about, and here are the clients or the
(20:35):
patients coming in and saying, oh, I don't want to
have any needs in this space because I'm human and
I have compassion and empathy and I don't want to
need too much. So, you know, we share this, this
listener question, and I bring it to you so that
you and I can have a conversation about it, not
so that we have a solution, but so that we
(20:56):
enter the conversation about how hard this is. I mean,
there's there's quite a number of things that somebody in
this listener's position might do to help them through it.
But really, right now, just to name how impossible this
all is and how complicated this all is, and there
is something that happens with the passage of time. It
(21:16):
is not true that time heals all wounds, but as
you so beautifully described, Alison, and it echoes my own
experience that there is a film that forms in a
way with the passage of time and with enough support
around us where we can come in and sit with
other people in pain and feel it but not be
(21:37):
consumed by it. And knowing your capacity, I I wish
there are an easier answer to that, but you know,
knowing your capacity is perhaps it's not a client you
can see at this time. I think of it as
my main job to primarily be in charge of my
own needs so they aren't kind of spilling out for
(22:03):
clients to have to deal with it requires so much
personal work to be able to recognize, like I just
again reiterating, because it can't be set enough. There are
no easy answers to this. I wish I knew there
was a script or a protocol to follow, but you
have to just be feeling into yourself, like can I
(22:24):
do this for this person? I can't be here for
this person, and then it's not a kind thing anymore.
It's not a helping thing anymore if you can't. But
it is not a showing up. I love that we
think that it's a kindness to show up and keep serving,
and honestly, that's not always a kindness. If you're showing
up to serve somebody and you're really not there and
(22:44):
you're really not doing good work, and you have the
option to say no, given your practice or the agency
where you work, it's not a kindness to give from
that place. And actually that was last week's episode. We
had that the therapist story, right, So if you don't
know what I'm talking about, everybody, go back and listen
to the episode that came out on January third about
(23:06):
the ghosting therapist. It's okay as a professional to have
a boundary right to be able to say, I'm so
glad that you worked up the courage to come and
look for help and support you so much to deserve it.
For personal reasons, I can't work with you. I'm happy
to help you find somebody else if that would feel
useful for you, but otherwise you know, I wish you
(23:26):
well and hope you get the support you deserve. It's
okay to say I can't do this and again likes
what I started. We started this episode with having hard
conversations is part of being a therapist, Having hard conversations
that don't have easy answers, and that we can show
up and have this conversation even though I don't know
(23:47):
what the solution is. You know, it's just like staying
in the conversation and yeah, that that conversation with clients
that are ongoing, that is treating them with respect and
care yourself with respect and care to know, you're sort
of showing them you're role modeling the example that I'm
(24:08):
not a savior. I don't have savior complex that I'm
supposed to save everyone. I'm hurting. It's beyond my capacity
to cope right now. And let me help you find
someone that might be more helpful for you right now. Yeah,
that might be able to hold the pain in the
room that deserves to be heard. Yeah, I love this.
This is actually a really beautiful, sort of full circle
(24:32):
place to come back to because I have in my
notes here a quote again from your book where you
say I plan to keep my conversation going with grief
my whole life. And that's really what you just said,
isn't it. You know that as therapists, as professionals, our
conversation with ourselves goes on our whole life. It's it's
how we do our own life, and it's how we
(24:53):
continue to show up in our professional lives. And really
all of these conversations are conversations about I be so
glad that you say that, because that makes me see
that that was even a conversation about grief, my grief
that I can't help someone right now that I care
about that I may have to step away from this
relationship because I can't. There's a grief in that, that's right.
(25:17):
Grief is everywhere, and that's not a bad thing. Right.
Grief is part of love. And I've said this many
times before that really everything that we talk about here together, everybody,
this is relationship work. It's a relationship with yourself, relationship
with the people around you, relationship with the wider world.
(25:39):
This is a conversation about grief that we have through
our whole lives, whether we know we're talking about grief
or not. So thank you so much. Alison for being
here with me today. It has been fabulous and complicated,
which is exactly what I was hoping for. Can you
let everybody know where they can find you and whatever
(26:00):
else do you want people to know? Megan, it's been
such a pleasure. I just adore your work and it's
been life saving for me too, So thank you for
having me and mainly on Instagram at Notes from your Therapist,
that's primarily the way people can reach me. It connects
to my website, that kind of thing, so excellent. Thank you.
(26:21):
Be sure to check out your book and your book
is you want to give everybody that so called Notes
from your Therapist just to make things easy, which I love,
I love, love love like you don't have to remember
multiple things, everybody. If you google Notes from your Therapist,
you're going to find Alison on Instagram, You're going to
find her book, You're going to find her website and
(26:42):
check her out because she's amazing and she's awesome and
we love her. So stay tuned after this break for
things you can do to start playing around with the
things we talked about today, because you know that I
love to give you all homework. I'm also going to
tell you how you can submit your question for me
to answer in a future show, So don't miss that part. Friends.
(27:03):
We will be right back. Each week I leave you
with some questions to carry with you until we meet again.
It's part of this whole This stuff gets easier with
practice thing. This week another set of reflection questions. Telling
(27:24):
the truth is hard for most people, especially if you
aren't from a culture or a family where telling the
truth was accepted or is acceptable. What do you risk
if you tell the truth? What does it cost you
to lie? Even a lie of self protection costs something.
There's no one right answer to these things, but asking
(27:46):
yourself these questions can really yield some useful information, information
that can help you decide where to lean into that
vulnerable human connection where you most need your truth to
be told. And as Alison and I were discussing how
to use what you learn about yourself to help you
get better at relationships, I was going to say better
at your job. But we don't just value you for
(28:07):
your capitalistic production. But really, these questions can help you
understand who you are and what you need in the world.
So give them a go. Want to submit your question
for me to possibly address on the air. This show
is nothing without your questions. It is. It's literally a
Q and A show. You can ask me anything you'd like.
Bring me your clinical questions, your frustrations about a relationship,
(28:30):
the things that scare you. Ask me how to handle
that one interaction that always leaves you feeling like a
deer in the headlights and you really wish you knew
what to say. Let's talk it out. Call us at
three two three six four three three seven six eight
and leave a voicemail. If you missed it, you can
find that number in the show notes, or visit Megandvine
(28:51):
dot coo. If you'd rather send an email, you can
do that too, right on the website Megandvine dot coo. Friends,
we want to hear from you this show. The whole
world needs to hear your questions. Together, we can make
things better even when we can't make them right. You
(29:12):
know how most people when they're looking for a new
podcast to listen to, they sort of scan through things
and look at the show description. Well, for this show,
I think most people would think, I don't want to
talk about that stuff. So here's where you come in
your reviews. Let people know of that it really isn't
all that bad In here We talk about heavy stuff. Yeah,
but it's in the service of making things better for everyone.
(29:34):
So everyone needs to listen. Spread the word about Hereafter
in your workplace, in your social world on social media
and click through to leave a review. Subscribe to the show,
download episodes, and send in your questions. Want more Hereafter?
Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues.
(29:55):
Life is full of losses, from everyday disappointments to events
that clearly divide life before and after. Learning how to
talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or think
positive workplace posters. That's an important skill for everybody. Find trainings, workshops,
books and resources for every human trying to make their
(30:16):
way in the world after something goes horribly wrong at
Megan Divine dot COO Hereafter with Megan Divine is produced
and written by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy
Brown and Elizabeth Fasio, edited by Houston Tilly and studio
support from Chris Urine. Our music is provided by Wave
(30:36):
Crush
This is here After, and I'm your host, Megan Divine.
Each week we tackle big questions from nurses, therapists, and
other helpful people that let us explore how to show
up after life goes horribly wrong. This week, what Childhood
Losses tell us about adult grief with special guest psychotherapist,
author and one of the nicest people you would ever
hope to meet, Alice and Denine. It's two grieving therapists
(00:23):
talking about the ups and downs of being human in
a professional world. One note about this episode, everybody, you
might notice that the sound quality is a little different
than usual. Everybody was at home on their own laptops
using zoom to record because we were all following public
health guidelines. Still a good one, though, don't miss it. Friends.
Will be right back after this first break. Before we
(00:52):
get started, one quick note. While we cover a lot
of emotional relational territory in each and every episode, this
show is not a obstitute for skilled support with a
license mental health provider or for professionals supervision related to
your work. And one more note. Hereafter with Megan Divine
is currently on break between seasons. We'll be back before
(01:13):
you know it with a whole new season with even
more incredible guests. In the meantime, here's one of our
most loved episodes. We'll see you soon, Heyn, Your questions
this week were all about what happens when you try
to lean on helpers for support and the result is
not exactly what you were hoping for. We've also got
(01:36):
a great question about helping others when you're not even
sure you can help yourself. So therapists, good friends, helpers
of all kinds. This episode is definitely for you. I
still have one of Alison Denied's Instagram posts saved in
my phone from way back years ago when I first
discovered her work. You might know her by her Instagram
handle Notes from Your Therapist. Alison has this way of
(02:01):
absolutely skewing the connection between childhood experience and adult behavior
patterns in her short handwritten notes. Now. I haven't gone
back to look in my phone because I have way
too many photos in there, but I think the one
that I have saved in my phone is something about
it being okay to have needs as somebody who was
raised to have no needs whatsoever. That one definitely got
(02:24):
to me, and that's the essence of Alison for me
in very few words. Her simple statements are full of
permission you didn't know you needed. Alison Deneen is a
marriage and family therapist, an author, and the creator of
the immensely popular Instagram account Notes from Your Therapist. She
specializes in emotions, emotional neglect, and relationships, the messy stuff. Obviously,
(02:48):
she's also intimately acquainted with grief. Hey, Alison, I'm so
glad you're here. Hi Megan, thank you so much. You
are so welcome. I'm so thrilled to have you. I
feel like I feel this way with most and my guests,
but I feel like you and I have clearly already
met before in person or at least spoke a lot.
But it's it's really an Instagram. It's an Instagram relationship. Definitely.
(03:10):
That is such a new and different thing. So I
do feel as if I know you. I've seen you
speak on Instagram before, so it's like you're already a
friendom finally getting to me. Yeah, we're really we're forging
new relational territories all the time. And this is actually
something that I really love about your Instagram feed your
book too. I mean, you focus on relationships, but the
(03:32):
grief that sort of runs through relationships. On your website,
you say that you grew up on a dairy farm
with and I quote from your website here a lot
of catastrophe and grief all around me. And I did
not know that about you until I started doing some
research for our time here together. But you and I
share the whole like New England childhood thing I grew
up as well. Yeah, and we're you and I are
(03:53):
around the same age. And to not spoiler alert, I guess,
but we even have dairy farm culture together because I
grew up summers on my relatives dairy farms. So that's fantastic.
You grew up on a dairy farm, so like you
have a lot of that, I have a little bit
of that. And I feel like we could spend an
entire episode just unpacking the emotional culture and the conditioning
(04:14):
embedded in all of that sort of New English farm culture,
stoicism and self reliance. You know, when you were speaking
a minute ago, you talked about so much of your
work is about the route experiences of childhood and how
those spiral out into the rest of life. So if
you think back to the roots of your own childhood,
(04:35):
what do you wish the adults in your life would
have known about grief. Well, I think what we're talking
about is generational trauma. So they would have had to
have been adults who were supported when they were children
to see all their own emotions of loss and grief.
But they grew up exactly the same way, which was
(04:57):
like repressing anything that felt painful, that shouldn't hurt, that
shouldn't be hurting you after all these years, and so
they just literally didn't have the skills too. There's just
a sense inside of them that it's wrong to be
feeling bad, that life is about feeling strong or good
and with few needs. So it's like having to envision
(05:20):
different parents, which is really hard to do. Like, what
do I wish my parents had known about grief? Boy?
I wish that they had conveyed that we can live
with it. It's safe to grieve, it's safe to miss
people we loved, and we can actually live with that.
(05:42):
And that actually, for me, it's been a way to
feel more alive living with it. My grief experience started
really young. My mom was twenty five when she died
in a plane crash, and I'd been flying with her
that day. In her small plane and I was almost four. Anyway,
(06:04):
she died in a plane crash and we never spoke
about her again. Ever. Some of my earliest memories are
of my grandparents, so my mom's parents showing up at
the house and in the devastation of the immediate aftermath
when someone dies, and my saying something about my mom,
(06:25):
and they just collapsed. They just collapsed, And I instantly knew, like,
I can't do that. Like when you're a child, you
need adults to feel stable to you, and so no
one has to tell you. We don't talk about that.
You just absorb it through every cell in your body
by watching how they handle it, and they shut down.
(06:45):
So I learned to shut down. And when I think
back now on my childhood, I really feel like a
part of me was kind of dead inside from not
being able to well to feel like clearly these feelings
I must have had, And feelings are part of our
nervous system, they're part of our bodies, So I feel
like I must have been deadening this whole part of myself.
(07:08):
So I don't know if that answers your question. It
does I think it answers it really beautifully, and thank
you for sharing that with me and with everybody listening.
These aren't easy stories, right, And you and I do
this kind of work for a living, and still when
we share our own stories, there is like you get
the sense of the weight behind that. Right, there's a
(07:30):
reason why we do what we do. What you just
share there with like, we don't have to be verbally
told not to talk about things we learn. One of
my old colleagues used to say that children watch the
adults for a living, Right, It's sort of the role
of the child to get their cues, learn about the world,
learn what's okay and what's not okay, to do, say
(07:52):
and feel by watching the grownups around them. And your
story just really describes that mechanism so beautifully. Like I
learned very quickly that no matter what was real for me,
that truth and that reality was not safe in the world,
and so I did what I needed to do to survive,
which was to make that part of me dead. And said,
(08:13):
I think what you describe there as something really common
and really normal and really human and it doesn't belong
to just that New England stoic, self reliant culture. Right.
I love that you brought up generational trauma in there too,
because there's you know, I think over the last maybe
(08:33):
five to ten years or so, there's started to be
some conversations and discussion about intergenerational trauma and what that
looks like, and how we carry family stories with us,
how we carry cultural and racial stories with us. So
this this whole topic of how do we learn what
is okay to feel and okay to say it's not new.
I love that about children being professional watchers. That's how
(08:57):
we learn how to cope with things in life by
watching what the adults do, so you have to relearn it.
Then as an adult, you don't even know that you
need to relearn things. The way that I unexpectedly came
to relearn all of this was when my husband, the
greatest love of my life, was killed in an accident,
(09:20):
also like my mom, doing the very thing that he
loved most in life. And we just had had a baby,
I had a three month old baby, and it hit
me like a ton of bricks that I could not
do to my daughter what had done to me. I
could not pretend that he'd never existed. I just couldn't.
(09:42):
Like I had that feeling inside of me of how
much it had killed me to pretend I didn't have
a mom. I didn't love my mom. I didn't want
to know more my mom. I didn't want to like
love and celebrate my mom. In fact, in a weird way,
I felt like what I lost, like the monumental thing
that I lost in not being able to grieve her
(10:02):
was how much of the ordinary things that I wanted
to know about her? Like I wanted to know things
and I didn't know any of them, Like what color
did she like? You know, what did she look like
when she woke up in the morning, Like what put
her in a bad mood? Like little expressions that she had,
(10:23):
And I had been so hungry for that as a
kid that I just knew, like I just I didn't
know how it was going to go forward, but I
knew I couldn't do what had happened to me to
my own daughter. And it makes me think of what
you were saying, asked me before I think Megan about
like what do I wish that my parents would have
taught me in this? So I figured this out on
(10:45):
my own now, but I wish that they had taught
me that, yes, those things might hurt to remember those details,
but we can actually live with that. And I think
what happens when you struggle with emotional neglect, because that's
the parents that I'm talking about, the generation that I'm
(11:07):
talking about, and it's so pervasive even now, is that
when you're so cut off from painful feelings and difficult feelings,
you literally think you can't live through that. You literally
have this physical feeling of it's dangerous to feel sad
or to feel loss or to feel hopeless because you
(11:29):
haven't had the experience. You have nothing to draw on
except escaping painful feelings. So I think that comes factor
and you don't get a chance to get to the
point where it might be like at overtime it turns
from being like so excruciatingly painful to remember them to
(11:50):
something of like I'm happy now when I can remember
things about my husband. But if I've never started down
that path, I wouldn't even be doing that. Welcome back everybody, Okay, Alison.
(12:11):
One of the things that I love about you and
your work is that you're honest about the whole work
in progress thing. I mean, we've actually been talking about
this the whole time. So even though you do this
for a living, having emotionally vulnerable conversations is still hard sometimes,
and it's the same thing for me. Being human is hard.
(12:31):
We've all got prior experiences that tell us it's not
cool to tell the truth about who we are and
how we feel, or that it's somehow even unhealthy what
you described with your own childhood experience. It's unhealthy or
unsafe to be sad or confused or overwhelmed. And there's
this fine line. Honestly more of a big gray, murky area,
(12:52):
but there's this fine line when you work in a
profession where you're supposed to be this open, accepting, wise
person and you've got your own stuff going on. So
I want to use that idea as a way to
get into this next listener question that helps us sort
of talk about how we navigate to human and prose
at the same time. You're ready, yes, okay, So here's
(13:15):
this listener's question. I'm a marriage and family therapist and
I've been in private practice for six years. I recently
experienced a stillbirth, and I'm preparing to return to work
in a few weeks. I am so anxious to meet
with a few of my clients when I get back.
Though they were working on pregnancy losses and fertility issues
before I went out on maternity leave. I left as
(13:37):
one kind of therapist, a person who expected a live
baby at the end of this, and I'm afraid I'm
coming back as not the same therapist they knew. Do
you have any advice on how to handle this? So
this listener question, honestly, like we had to pick from
probably fifty similar questions of therapists or social workers, a
(14:02):
whole lot of nurses sending in very similar questions. I've
experienced a devastating personal experience, and I have to go
back to work and navigate and work with people having
their own devastating personal experiences. And this is a really
human thing that all of the helpers are human. How
do you navigate that intersection for yourself, Alison, knowing what
(14:25):
you carry in to the office to the therapy space.
I was working as a therapist in a clinic before,
right before my husband was killed an accident. I was
actually on my maternity leave and was supposed to go
back the week after his accident. And after that, I
(14:45):
of course quit my job because I was numb and
destroyed and could barely survive, and I had an infant
to take care of. So I spent the next year
or two years literally just trying to survive, and like
(15:06):
so much of my life fell over, Like I just
thought I would never even feel joy in my life again.
I didn't think it would be possible for me to
be a therapist again. It just, in fact, it seemed
like there's no way that I would ever be able
to be a therapist again. How could I support anybody
else when I could barely support myself. So it took
(15:30):
me a while. It just took me a lot. There
was so much heeling to do. And when I finally
got back to realizing, I wanted to be a therapist again,
and I wanted to work in private practice so I
could just be more particular about hours and time and
flexibility and clients that I see as well. There's no
(15:51):
easy answer to something like this. Yeah, there's no easy answer,
because I think I had to get to a point
where I felt recovered enough to be able to talk
about it, to be strong enough to talk about it,
and that meant just having like incredible like my own
(16:14):
therapy and my own resources and friends to support me.
The kind of therapist that I am is I'm pretty
open you boundaries, but open with my clients in terms
of I think what I'm talking about is I'm an
emotionally available person because that is how I see therapy
(16:36):
as working. As we need therapists to be emotionally available
in ways that our parents weren't available to us. So
I can't just be a blank slate. I can't because
that's what people grew up with, is unavailable caregivers. So
balancing that thing about being available on being myself and
(17:00):
also tending to my own boundaries around it. I don't
know if I can say much more about this one
make and it's so hard to It's so because this
letter writers in a different place than me, Like I
would not have been able to do it. I don't
know if I would have been able to continue with
the same clients. Yeah, this is another thing that you
(17:21):
and I have in common. I mean, I was in
private practice and also had a side gig in an
agency when my partner died in an accident, And I
also quit for very many of the same reasons that
you just shared with us. That like, there was no
way I had the capacity or the interest just to
be blunt about it, right, for sitting with other people's pain.
(17:44):
There was no way I could do that. And I
also had the ability to take some time off and
come back and recreate things that suited me, and there
is a privilege in being able to do that. There's
so many things about what you just said that I
want to dive into, and I know that we're sort
of rounding the corner to the end of the episode,
but there's so many good things in here, and one
(18:06):
thing that I want to pick up on. There's something
you said after you shared your personal experience, and that
the turbulence of trying to come back into this practice.
You said, I'm in such a different place than this
letter writer, and it's almost like you and I have
a number of years between the accident and now and
(18:27):
trying to look back at the intensity of the fresh
moment for this listener. In a way, I think this
is where a lot of grief support and our ideas
about grief and how we show up for each other,
whether personally professionally, I feel like this is where we
fail is those of us who have been through these
life altering events often forget what it's like to be
(18:47):
that ripped open. Like I think sometimes we can say, well,
you just compartmentalize and you do the job ahead of you,
forgetting that compartmentalizing is very often impossible in those early days,
right maybe the task ahead of you if you don't
have the ability to step back from this work, and
certainly for healthcare workers right now there's such increased demand,
we don't often have that the ability or the space
(19:10):
or the support to step back from it. But there's
just like, this is such a complex this is actually
she with so many different guys. Yeah, when you're saying that,
I'm thinking about, like how it's such sort of like
a statement about the culture we live in that people
aren't supported to be off of work and have to
worry about things like going back to work. Because I
(19:31):
kind of think it's inhumane to ask someone who's in
the midst of the very very beginning of such terrible
grief to have to then support other people because it's
just and then imagine being that client, Like it's very
easy for me to put myself in the shoes of
a client, and there's I would not want to need
(19:52):
much from my therapist if I knew that she had
just been through that. So, yeah, like there's one more
complex layer there, right that, Like, if you come in
as a as a client and your therapist is like,
you know, I was out on maternity to leave, but
my baby died and I'm here and I'm here for you,
and as a client, very often people are going to
(20:14):
be thinking, oh, crap, like I don't I don't want
to bother her, I don't, you know. So then so
then this, like the therapeutic containers, starts to fall apart,
right that. Here's the therapist or the professional trying to
compartmentalize their personal devastation so that they can do their job,
keep the paycheck coming in, keep serving the people that
they care about, and here are the clients or the
(20:35):
patients coming in and saying, oh, I don't want to
have any needs in this space because I'm human and
I have compassion and empathy and I don't want to
need too much. So, you know, we share this, this
listener question, and I bring it to you so that
you and I can have a conversation about it, not
so that we have a solution, but so that we
(20:56):
enter the conversation about how hard this is. I mean,
there's there's quite a number of things that somebody in
this listener's position might do to help them through it.
But really, right now, just to name how impossible this
all is and how complicated this all is, and there
is something that happens with the passage of time. It
(21:16):
is not true that time heals all wounds, but as
you so beautifully described, Alison, and it echoes my own
experience that there is a film that forms in a
way with the passage of time and with enough support
around us where we can come in and sit with
other people in pain and feel it but not be
(21:37):
consumed by it. And knowing your capacity, I I wish
there are an easier answer to that, but you know,
knowing your capacity is perhaps it's not a client you
can see at this time. I think of it as
my main job to primarily be in charge of my
own needs so they aren't kind of spilling out for
(22:03):
clients to have to deal with it requires so much
personal work to be able to recognize, like I just
again reiterating, because it can't be set enough. There are
no easy answers to this. I wish I knew there
was a script or a protocol to follow, but you
have to just be feeling into yourself, like can I
(22:24):
do this for this person? I can't be here for
this person, and then it's not a kind thing anymore.
It's not a helping thing anymore if you can't. But
it is not a showing up. I love that we
think that it's a kindness to show up and keep serving,
and honestly, that's not always a kindness. If you're showing
up to serve somebody and you're really not there and
(22:44):
you're really not doing good work, and you have the
option to say no, given your practice or the agency
where you work, it's not a kindness to give from
that place. And actually that was last week's episode. We
had that the therapist story, right, So if you don't
know what I'm talking about, everybody, go back and listen
to the episode that came out on January third about
(23:06):
the ghosting therapist. It's okay as a professional to have
a boundary right to be able to say, I'm so
glad that you worked up the courage to come and
look for help and support you so much to deserve it.
For personal reasons, I can't work with you. I'm happy
to help you find somebody else if that would feel
useful for you, but otherwise you know, I wish you
(23:26):
well and hope you get the support you deserve. It's
okay to say I can't do this and again likes
what I started. We started this episode with having hard
conversations is part of being a therapist, Having hard conversations
that don't have easy answers, and that we can show
up and have this conversation even though I don't know
(23:47):
what the solution is. You know, it's just like staying
in the conversation and yeah, that that conversation with clients
that are ongoing, that is treating them with respect and
care yourself with respect and care to know, you're sort
of showing them you're role modeling the example that I'm
(24:08):
not a savior. I don't have savior complex that I'm
supposed to save everyone. I'm hurting. It's beyond my capacity
to cope right now. And let me help you find
someone that might be more helpful for you right now. Yeah,
that might be able to hold the pain in the
room that deserves to be heard. Yeah, I love this.
This is actually a really beautiful, sort of full circle
(24:32):
place to come back to because I have in my
notes here a quote again from your book where you
say I plan to keep my conversation going with grief
my whole life. And that's really what you just said,
isn't it. You know that as therapists, as professionals, our
conversation with ourselves goes on our whole life. It's it's
how we do our own life, and it's how we
(24:53):
continue to show up in our professional lives. And really
all of these conversations are conversations about I be so
glad that you say that, because that makes me see
that that was even a conversation about grief, my grief
that I can't help someone right now that I care
about that I may have to step away from this
relationship because I can't. There's a grief in that, that's right.
(25:17):
Grief is everywhere, and that's not a bad thing. Right.
Grief is part of love. And I've said this many
times before that really everything that we talk about here together, everybody,
this is relationship work. It's a relationship with yourself, relationship
with the people around you, relationship with the wider world.
(25:39):
This is a conversation about grief that we have through
our whole lives, whether we know we're talking about grief
or not. So thank you so much. Alison for being
here with me today. It has been fabulous and complicated,
which is exactly what I was hoping for. Can you
let everybody know where they can find you and whatever
(26:00):
else do you want people to know? Megan, it's been
such a pleasure. I just adore your work and it's
been life saving for me too, So thank you for
having me and mainly on Instagram at Notes from your Therapist,
that's primarily the way people can reach me. It connects
to my website, that kind of thing, so excellent. Thank you.
(26:21):
Be sure to check out your book and your book
is you want to give everybody that so called Notes
from your Therapist just to make things easy, which I love,
I love, love love like you don't have to remember
multiple things, everybody. If you google Notes from your Therapist,
you're going to find Alison on Instagram, You're going to
find her book, You're going to find her website and
(26:42):
check her out because she's amazing and she's awesome and
we love her. So stay tuned after this break for
things you can do to start playing around with the
things we talked about today, because you know that I
love to give you all homework. I'm also going to
tell you how you can submit your question for me
to answer in a future show, So don't miss that part. Friends.
(27:03):
We will be right back. Each week I leave you
with some questions to carry with you until we meet again.
It's part of this whole This stuff gets easier with
practice thing. This week another set of reflection questions. Telling
(27:24):
the truth is hard for most people, especially if you
aren't from a culture or a family where telling the
truth was accepted or is acceptable. What do you risk
if you tell the truth? What does it cost you
to lie? Even a lie of self protection costs something.
There's no one right answer to these things, but asking
(27:46):
yourself these questions can really yield some useful information, information
that can help you decide where to lean into that
vulnerable human connection where you most need your truth to
be told. And as Alison and I were discussing how
to use what you learn about yourself to help you
get better at relationships, I was going to say better
at your job. But we don't just value you for
(28:07):
your capitalistic production. But really, these questions can help you
understand who you are and what you need in the world.
So give them a go. Want to submit your question
for me to possibly address on the air. This show
is nothing without your questions. It is. It's literally a
Q and A show. You can ask me anything you'd like.
Bring me your clinical questions, your frustrations about a relationship,
(28:30):
the things that scare you. Ask me how to handle
that one interaction that always leaves you feeling like a
deer in the headlights and you really wish you knew
what to say. Let's talk it out. Call us at
three two three six four three three seven six eight
and leave a voicemail. If you missed it, you can
find that number in the show notes, or visit Megandvine
(28:51):
dot coo. If you'd rather send an email, you can
do that too, right on the website Megandvine dot coo. Friends,
we want to hear from you this show. The whole
world needs to hear your questions. Together, we can make
things better even when we can't make them right. You
(29:12):
know how most people when they're looking for a new
podcast to listen to, they sort of scan through things
and look at the show description. Well, for this show,
I think most people would think, I don't want to
talk about that stuff. So here's where you come in
your reviews. Let people know of that it really isn't
all that bad In here We talk about heavy stuff. Yeah,
but it's in the service of making things better for everyone.
(29:34):
So everyone needs to listen. Spread the word about Hereafter
in your workplace, in your social world on social media
and click through to leave a review. Subscribe to the show,
download episodes, and send in your questions. Want more Hereafter?
Grief education doesn't just belong to end of life issues.
(29:55):
Life is full of losses, from everyday disappointments to events
that clearly divide life before and after. Learning how to
talk about all that without cliches or platitudes or think
positive workplace posters. That's an important skill for everybody. Find trainings, workshops,
books and resources for every human trying to make their
(30:16):
way in the world after something goes horribly wrong at
Megan Divine dot COO Hereafter with Megan Divine is produced
and written by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy
Brown and Elizabeth Fasio, edited by Houston Tilly and studio
support from Chris Urine. Our music is provided by Wave
(30:36):
Crush
Host
Megan Devine
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The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.