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Family Estrangement:Permission to grieve someone who is still alive · The Spiritual Shitshow Podcast

• 0:01
  I knew I wasn't finished with this conversation yet, and if you haven't listened to part one on family estrangement, go back to the episode because that's where I shared more of my personal experience and where I'm at today with healing or more importantly, holding a space of radical acceptance with family estrangement.
• 0:21
  I spent the whole morning in meditation and just allowing whatever was coming up to be present.
• 0:27
  But I don't wanna tell that story again.
• 0:29
  I just wanna talk about why it hurts so much, because after that episode that I recorded, I started to wonder how many people are actually walking around carrying complicated family relationships?
• 0:40
  How many people aren't speaking to a sibling?
• 0:45
  How many people have a mother they love but don't feel emotionally safe with?
• 0:49
  How many people have a father that they barely know?
• 0:52
  How many people have built families with their spouses and children and still carry the strange ache around the family that they came from?
• 0:59
  And it turns out, after a little digging, it's a lot of us.
• 1:06
  Family estrangement isn't rare.
• 1:09
  one of the largest studies of family estrangement in the United States came out of Cornell's Family Reconciliation Project, and their research estimated that 27% of Americans were currently estranged from a close family member.
• 1:22
  That's roughly one in four people.
• 1:25
  One in four people are currently estranged from a close family member, And to be fair here, depending on how researchers define estrangement, whether it's a complete cutoff versus very limited contact, or if it's emotional estrangement versus physical estrangement, estimates change.
• 1:44
  But the bigger point here is this is not some strange little experience happening on the outskirts of society, and more than likely, many of us are experiencing family estrangement.
• 1:59
  Millions and millions of people are living with it.
• 2:03
  research following American families across time has also found that estrangement isn't necessarily permanent.
• 2:11
  People can move in and out of estrangement.
• 2:14
  Relationships rupture, reconnect, and sometimes rupture again.
• 2:19
  And for me, that's been the hardest thing because I have to hold a radical acceptance around the reality that there's been a rupture, and a reconnection more than likely is not happening in the future.
• 2:33
  And also I'm not interested in the rupture, the reconnect, and a rupture again.
• 2:41
  Family relationships are not static.
• 2:43
  They are systems, and this is what I have to begin to look at within my own self, that this is a system, and when one person changes, the system has to respond.
• 2:56
  The other thing is, which I don't want us to get trapped in this healing loop either when I say this, because, we're not the ones responsible for healing the whole family line, and you hear that all the time.
• 3:08
  I'm cleaning up the generational trauma and karma, and I...
• 3:12
  That feels like, uh, no, no, I'm not agreeing to any of that.
• 3:15
  I feel like everybody should be responsible for doing their part.
• 3:19
  I'm not the one who's solely responsible for holding all of the healing.
• 3:24
  and there is information that when one person changes, the system has to respond.
• 3:31
  There's an entire field of psychology around this called the family systems theory Family systems are actually a thing, and there's an entire field of psychology around this called family systems theory.
• 3:45
  One of its pioneers, and her name is psychiatrist Murray Bowen, proposed that we don't develop psychologically in isolation.
• 3:54
  We develop inside emotional systems.
• 3:58
  Families develop patterns, roles, triangles, alliances, expectations, ways of handling conflict, ways of handling emotions, Maybe you're the peacekeeper.
• 4:11
  Maybe you're the achiever.
• 4:13
  Maybe you're the caretaker.
• 4:15
  Maybe you're the one who doesn't need anything.
• 4:18
  Maybe you're the eldest, so you're responsible for your siblings.
• 4:22
  Maybe you're the emotional one.
• 4:24
  Maybe you're the free spirit.
• 4:25
  Maybe you're the rebellious one.
• 4:28
  Maybe you're the person everybody calls when something goes wrong And those roles can become so deeply embedded that decades later you can walk into a room with your family and feel yourself becoming that person again.
• 4:42
  And that to me is fascinating.
• 4:44
  I just experienced that with my husband's family, and I had to have a conversation with my husband telling him,"I see the role that I have played within systems, which is like the free spirit, and the goofy one, and the one who everybody can laugh at, and I don't wanna play that role anymore, and I'm trying to figure out how to authentically reclaim myself within the system without the role I can feel myself literally shape-shifting in certain situations, in certain relationships, and I become a completely different version of myself And this is one reason I don't think family triggering us automatically means we haven't healed.
• 5:25
  I think family can activate some of the oldest relational patterns stored inside of us.
• 5:32
  Your attachment system can get involved too.
• 5:36
  Now, attachment research gives us another lens.
• 5:39
  Our earliest relationships help teach our nervous systems what connection feels like.
• 5:45
  Can I depend on somebody?
• 5:47
  What happens when I need something?
• 5:49
  What happens when somebody leaves?
• 5:51
  What happens when somebody's angry?
• 5:54
  What do I have to do to maintain connection?
• 5:58
  Do I people please?
• 6:00
  Do I withdraw?
• 6:01
  do I disappear?
• 6:03
  And then the family estrangement can touch those very old questions.
• 6:08
  Your adult brain might understand perfectly well why you have a boundary, but another part of you is still in the experience of I have lost belonging.
• 6:22
  And belonging is incredibly important to human beings.
• 6:27
  And I think for me, this is where my pain point lands so deeply is because when you're young and you want to belong to love, unconditional love, to belong to a healthy family system, to belong to a sister where we get to create new things, to-- I get to participate in my nieces' lives, I wanted to belong And again, belonging is incredibly important to human beings.
• 6:58
  And then I wanna transition here.
• 6:59
  From an evolutionary perspective, we are social mammals.
• 7:04
  For most of human history, being connected to a group wasn't simply emotionally pleasant, it was survival.
• 7:12
  We needed one another.
• 7:14
  So rejection isn't always experienced by the brain as some minor social inconvenience, betrayal, abandonment.
• 7:24
  Research on social rejection has even found overlap between neural systems involved in social pain and those involved in physical pain.
• 7:33
  in other words, when someone says,"Why can't you just get over it?" There are very real psychological reasons why relational loss can hurt so deeply.
• 7:48
  And then there's ambiguous loss Reading up on ambiguous loss also brought me so much peace and ah, such a deep breath of okay, it has a name.
• 7:59
  I'm not experiencing myself as crazy or emotionally unstable or unable to get through this.
• 8:08
  But there is a psychologist, Dr.
• 8:10
  Pauline Boss, and she developed this concept of ambiguous loss.
• 8:16
  It's loss without clear ending.
• 8:20
  Someone can be physically absent but psychologically very present.
• 8:25
  They're alive.
• 8:26
  So my estrangement from my sister, she's alive.
• 8:29
  She literally lives seven minutes from me.
• 8:32
  She's somewhere.
• 8:33
  I can run into her at any time at any grocery store But our relationship is severed.
• 8:39
  There is ambiguous loss and that creates a completely different kind of grief.
• 8:46
  And I am so happy to be sharing this with you because I wish I had this information 10 years ago.
• 8:52
  It would have offered me so much peace instead of feeling like I have to handle it all myself, and what I'm feeling is crazy, and I'm even crazier because I can't let it go.
• 9:02
  It's a thing.
• 9:03
  Death has rituals.
• 9:06
  We have funerals.
• 9:08
  We send people flowers.
• 9:09
  People acknowledge you lost someone.
• 9:13
  An estrangement doesn't have that.
• 9:18
  There isn't a ceremony for losing your sister while she's still alive.
• 9:23
  There isn't a sympathy card for realizing you're probably not going to have the mother-daughter relationship you've spent your entire life desiring.
• 9:33
  Nobody necessarily acknowledges the grief of losing nieces and nephews because of an adult family rupture, and there isn't a funeral for the family you thought you were going to have.
• 9:46
  And that grief becomes almost invisible There's another psychological concept that fits here beautifully, and that's disenfranchised grief.
• 9:59
  Disenfranchised grief is described as grief that isn't fully recognized, validated, or socially supported.
• 10:08
  And family estrangement fits right into that experience and it makes sense'cause it's hard to talk about, and it feels heavy, and society doesn't give you permission to grieve it.
• 10:19
  Instead you hear,"But she's alive," or,"That's sad," or,"That's sad'cause it's your sister," or,"There's a spiritual meaning to it," or,"Family's family," or,"You only get one sis-" you hear all of these things and suddenly instead of being witnessed in your grief, in the reality of what is happening, what has happened, you're defending your boundary, and that can create grief on top of grief And that is why this type of grief takes time because right at the beginning of you experiencing it, you're probably compounding grief on top of grief on top of grief that eventually you're gonna have to unravel the layers.
• 11:05
  there's the original loss, and then there's nobody understands why this feels like loss.
• 11:11
  And for me, I wasn't only just grieving the person, and this is the part that I keep coming back to.
• 11:18
  A sibling isn't simply one relationship.
• 11:21
  A sibling can represent childhood, and history, and shared memories, and things that you've built together, and nieces and nephews, and holidays, and family vacations, and the idea that we were gonna grow old together and build a family that we didn't get to have, and someone who remembers your parents, someone who can tell you stories that you don't remember, and you can connect on childhood memories So when those relationships rupture, we can be grieving an entire ecosystem of belonging grief on top of grief.
• 11:57
  We can be grieving the family we never actually had.
• 12:02
  the apology we thought might someday come, the sister relationship we imagined we'd have when we got older, the cousins, the phone calls, the village That's grief.
• 12:16
  And you can grieve something that never happened.
• 12:20
  So why does it keep coming back?
• 12:22
  and this is why I wanna share,'cause again, if I had this information and this type of support 10 years ago, I may, maybe my acceptance journey and my healing journey and my self-love journey and my rebuilding journey and my reclaiming my story, maybe it wouldn't have taken so long.
• 12:40
  So I really do hope that this information is supporting you if any of this resonates.
• 12:48
  'Cause I am in the loop of why can't I get out of this?
• 12:51
  Why do I keep telling...
• 12:52
  Why do I feel this way?
• 12:56
  So why does it keep coming back?
• 12:59
  Grief researchers increasingly understand grief less as something we simply complete and more as something we learn to integrate, which is probably why that you should let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go doesn't work.
• 13:15
  and maybe the words here and the support needed is let's integrate it all.
• 13:21
  There's a model called the dual process model of coping with bereavement Gosh, all this, and all of this information is reminding me I, I don't wanna get back into therapy, but again, here we are.
• 13:34
  But this model of coping with bereavement suggests that healthy grieving involves moving back and forth between two states.
• 13:42
  There's moments where we can orient towards loss, so we can be missing, crying, grieving, remembering, feeling, hoping.
• 13:52
  And there are moments when we need to orient, towards restoration: working, parenting, creating more sparks of joy, trying new things, building relationships.
• 14:08
  It's back and forth, and I love this because, again, this offers way more grace when you are in one state and you're trying to get into the other.
• 14:16
  It's okay to be dancing in the back and forth the dual process model of coping with bereavement.
• 14:28
  I don't need to permanently leave my cemetery of sadness, and I don't need to live there Sometimes I visit and sometimes I am fully immersed in my life, and both are part of living In this, I'm also being reminded that radical acceptance doesn't mean approval.
• 14:46
  and the word acceptance can get misunderstood constantly because acceptance doesn't mean approve.
• 14:56
  It doesn't mean I approve of it, or it's okay, or I'm not in pain anymore, or I deserved it, or I'm allowing this person back into my life.
• 15:07
  It doesn't mean I'm forgiving someone before I'm ready either.
• 15:12
  Radical acceptance means acknowledging reality as it currently exists instead of continually fighting internally with the fact that it exists This happened.
• 15:27
  This is the relationship right now.
• 15:30
  This person may never change, and if they are a narcissist, that's probably a fact.
• 15:38
  I cannot control what they believe about me.
• 15:42
  I cannot force accountability.
• 15:46
  I cannot make someone understand my experience, and maybe the hardest part is I may never receive what I wanted from this person That's hard I can see how parts of myself keep negotiating.
• 16:04
  if I just do a little bit more healing work, or if I forgive them, or if I reach out to them, or...
• 16:09
  No It's not maybe if I explain it differently, or maybe if I show up more, or maybe if I self-sacrifice or abandon myself, or maybe if I Maybe someday they'll realize how bad they hurt me and...
• 16:23
  No I'm not a fan of hope, and it's not because hope isn't wrong, but what I have discovered is that hope can quietly become the thing keeping us tethered to the something that we can't control And I think, again, hope keeps us from radical acceptance.
• 16:41
  it keeps us from really landing in and seeing and feeling the totality of the situation This next part I am also allowing to land deep within my bones, which is acceptance is not reconciliation.
• 16:58
  And this is huge When things rupture, we immediately are trained to go into forgiveness.
• 17:07
  We bypass the anger, the abandonment, the sadness, and we wanna go straight into forgiveness and moving on.
• 17:16
  You can radically accept a relationship without reconciling it.
• 17:21
  You can forgive someone and still have a boundary.
• 17:24
  No guilt, no shame.
• 17:27
  You can understand somebody's childhood wounds and understand why they are the way they are, and still refuse to participate in the way that they treat you You can love someone and not speak to them.
• 17:42
  You can wish someone well from very, very, very far away, and you can decide reconciliation is something you want.
• 17:50
  accepta-acceptance is not reconciliation, and there isn't one spiritually evolved answer here What I find sometimes is that spiritual language pressures people towards reconciliation.
• 18:05
  Forgive, choose love, raise your vibration.
• 18:09
  Clearly you're not healed from that because there's still a charge.
• 18:12
  Everyone is your teacher And I have tried all of that, and they did bring me lessons.
• 18:19
  and what I am learning for myself is compassion without discernment can become another form of self-abandonment I love this quote by Ram Dass where he says,"If you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family." He talks about how family is given And for me, it's can I hold both?
• 18:42
  Can I hold my chosen family and also the reality of my family?
• 18:46
  And Ram Dass talks about family as given relationships, people that we choose and there are people we are simply given.
• 18:58
  We arrive inside a family system filled with personalities, wounds, expectations, traumas, and histories that existed way before we even got there.
• 19:10
  Ram Dass saw these relationships as part of a spiritual practice.
• 19:15
  Not necessarily, and I wanna highlight this, not necessarily because we're supposed to fix them, but because they show us where we are attached, where we react, where we are still trying to control things, where we are demanding another person to become different before we're willing to experience peace.
• 19:42
  And that hits home for me.
• 19:46
  Can I allow what is to be what is and allow myself to experience peace within that experience?
• 19:55
  If you think you're enlightened, go spend a week with your family.
• 20:00
  And that may just be one of the truest spiritual teachings ever spoken.
• 20:04
  And as I say that, I am so annoyed by it as well Because I know I can record these podcasts, and I can feel so"Oh, I got it," and, I've learned so much more, and I can see the silver lining, and I can get a text, and a part of me is right back to where I was 10 years ago.
• 20:22
  What part of me just got activated?
• 20:25
  But now I know that is not failure.
• 20:28
  It just is information There's one more thing I wanna add.
• 20:33
  You know, this, I can do all of this work and be with my family and feel those same wounds, same tears, same abandonment issues, the same part of me that is showing up to,"See me.
• 20:47
  Look at me.
• 20:48
  Love me." And what I'm learning is There's a practice of being able to develop the ability to remain connected to yourself while you're connected to other people Can I remain myself while somebody else is having their experience of me?
• 21:05
  And maybe that's a spiritual practice too.
• 21:07
  Ram Dass wasn't asking us to become indifferent He was interested in the attachment.
• 21:14
  Can I love you without requiring you to behave accordingly?
• 21:18
  And then all of this brings us back to radical acceptance.
• 21:21
  I see that you are who you are.
• 21:24
  I see what you're capable of.
• 21:27
  I see what you're not capable of, and I release myself from trying to make you different And that is radical acceptance Can I stay tethered to myself and centered in myself while also seeing you as you are?
• 21:45
  So how do we actually practice this?
• 21:48
  What I'm willing to practice is naming the reality.
• 21:54
  This is what is happening right now.
• 21:57
  Being able to name the grief and be okay with it.
• 22:01
  I am grieving my sister.
• 22:03
  I am grieving my mother.
• 22:04
  I am grieving not having a family I always wanted to have.
• 22:08
  I am grieving what I hoped would happen And then I'm interested in what happens when I separate the grief from the action If I'm feeling grief or anger or abandonment or sadness, it doesn't mean I need to send a text Missing someone doesn't automatically mean the boundary was wrong.
• 22:31
  Also, if I am feeling these things, it doesn't mean that I am in the wrong and my boundary is wrong and I am wrong The practice here is to practice regulating before action.
• 22:48
  Give it a pause Let the activation, the trigger, let it settle before you decide what the feeling means.
• 23:00
  Let yourself walk, cry, move, feel And then practice both/and.
• 23:09
  I love them, and I can't have them in my life.
• 23:14
  I miss them, and I'm healthier without this dynamic.
• 23:18
  I wish it were different, and it is what it is Also, if you've been listening to these podcasts, I think everything needs a witness.
• 23:29
  It is so helpful to have your grief, your story, your sadness, your celebrations, your success, your dreams witnessed Find people who can hold the complexity without forcing reconciliation And then also return to the life that exists.
• 23:50
  Acceptance isn't a resignation.
• 23:54
  And what I'm learning is when I am accepting things to be what they are and to things to be how they are, and allowing myself to feel all of it appropriately and to validate it, that I can also be the witness to my own story I am seeing that it gives me my energy back I'm curious if this is what freedom feels like.
• 24:19
  I will always carry certain family wounds.
• 24:21
  I will always carry certain sadnesses and grief, and maybe you will too.
• 24:28
  Maybe something happens when you're 70 years old and you still feel that tiny ache inside of you That doesn't necessarily mean that the healing didn't work.
• 24:39
  It simply means You loved and you lost something.
• 24:45
  You are human, and some of these aches or our internal cemeteries of sadness are just part of the biology of who we are.
• 24:58
  And the goal is not to become so healed that nothing hurts.
• 25:04
  The goal is to become capable of holding the pain without allowing pain to become the center of our days So these things that we've talked about today is integration, radical acceptance Learning to live meaningfully with unresolved loss.
• 25:24
  An ability to bring us back to attachment, awareness, and love That acceptance doesn't always mean getting over it or forgetting it or pretending that it doesn't hurt, and it may hurt forever.
• 25:39
  But all of this, especially coming back to one in four people are experiencing this, maybe this podcast can help you loosen your grip, soften the heart, and bring the energy back and the love back and the light back to you.
• 25:59
  You are not alone.
• 26:00
  You are so deeply loved, and you are so deserving of having a vibrant, fun life.
• 26:06
  Grief can exist, but so can we Hopefully this podcast can help you, to inspire you to get back into love, back into purpose, back into joy, back into living, but also back into accepting that all things can exist.
• 26:24
  All of it.
• 26:24
  All of it.
• 26:25
  All of it.
• 26:25
  All of it.
• 26:26
  All of it.
• 26:26
  All of it.
• 26:27
  No guilt, no shame, no letting go, no forcing, not raising your vibration so you don't feel anything.
• 26:33
  All of it.
• 26:34
  Bring all of it.
• 26:35
  All of it.
• 26:35
  All of it is what's making you human.
• 26:38
  All of it's what's adding to your soul story.
• 26:40
  All of it deserves to be loved.
• 26:42
  Now, that's the most powerful part here.
• 26:44
  All of it, all of you deserves to be loved