Latest / The Living Loss | Navigating Invisible Grief & Identity / RP | Living with Collective Grief: The 80s Baby Experience
Transcript
- Daiana, LMHC: Hola amigos, soy Diana Bernard. Cassandra y yo estamos en un descanso Estamos preparando para nuestra S2 y queríamos mantener la conversación. Hoy vamos a replay un episodio que fue cerca de nuestros corazones, episodio 3. Así que es justo al principio. Este es tema que volveremos a hablar de cada vez, porque, de nuestra generación, siendo un bebé estamos teniendo un gran Y en el segundo sábado estamos investigando preparando muy específicamente realidades que los millenarios antiguos hoy. Vamos a tratar temas como navegar la generación Es el emocional de los niños creyentes mientras simultáneamente necesitamos curar nuestro propio. cosas que sucedieron a nosotros cuando éramos niños. Y también para muchos, tenemos padres estamos perdiendo nuestros padres y estamos recuperando de una crónica. que hemos ahora empezado a establecer fronteras y actuar en formas en las estamos llegando a conocer a nosotros mismos y aprendiendo nuestros límites, aprendiendo a confiar en nosotros mismos de nuevo. En este episodio hablamos de ampliar nuestro puente de tolerancia, que es cómo para encontrar glimorias de alegría e incluso paz cuando el mundo se siente realmente caótico. También hablando de honestidad y reducción de vergüenza. Y eso es lo que va a validar nuestro sistema y a reconocer que las son pesadas, es el primer paso a estar realmente sentado mejor. Así que estamos esperando volver muy pronto. Y en el tiempo, agarra muguero favorito. Sigue en disfruta este episodio donde miramos, cuando hablamos de cómo podemos mover de solo sobrevivir a nuestro historial, a realmente vivir en vez de ello. No podemos esperar a verlos en la segunda Cassandra: Hello friends, I'm Cassandra Harris Towner. Daiana: and I'm Diana Bernard. Cassandra: As licensed mental health counselors, we're unpacking the quiet complex griefs that don't come with a funeral because you can't heal what you don't acknowledge. Daiana: Welcome to the Living Loss Podcast. We're so glad you're joining our conversation as we name these losses and create a meaningful path forward together. Please subscribe and share this episode. It helps us grow this community and reach others who need to know that their grief is valid. Let's dive in. Cassandra: So in today's episode, we're unpacking this collective and cumulative grief. We're talking about the braced feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop and how we can acknowledge that life is scary while still making room for growth and joy. So we are working on defining collective and cumulative grief at the same time, because they sound really, similar, but they're not necessarily the same thing. Even just the collective versus the cumulative can be a little bit confusing for others. So Diana, can you tell me a little bit about what collective grief is? Daiana: Yes, so you're right. And it sounds like a tongue twister. And when you're reading it, it looks like the same word. All right. Collective and cumulative. I think about math as well. Cassandra: a little bit, yeah. Daiana: Yeah. All right. So collective grief. This is the heavy, heavy weight shared by a group of people like a generation or a nation. And it's shared trauma, the feeling of we're going through this together. We recently had that feeling during the pandemic, right? We felt like we were going through it together, but it often lacks a clear end point, which is how I felt. I thought, when did it end? Cassandra: I don't know, some days it still feels like there's a lot of remnants out there of it, and there is. There's a lot of emotional remnants, there's a lot of even physical remnants. I still see people from time to time wearing masks, which personally I appreciate, because if you're sick, keep it to yourself. And Daiana: Mm-hmm. Cassandra: at the same point in time, there's this underlying grief where people remember it in a way that, yes, it happened, but it's almost like a fever dream. Like, did Daiana: Yeah. Cassandra: the world really shut down? for that period of time? Did the United States really shut down for that period of time? It really did. And there's a lot of grief and loss involved in that, especially when you're looking at the children that were born into that time period or raised during that time period or had to leave school during that time. There's a lot of different moving parts there. Daiana: Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. So many layers, depending on what stage of life you are in. I was thinking about the people who graduated and started looking for jobs around that time. It's hard enough when you graduate and you think that you have some kind of idea of what you're going to do or you don't. And then for no one to have an idea of how to get a job or what to do. I think that's a hard time in our lives in general to graduate and then be unemployed. But then to go through it and I can see how circumstances like that people are recovering. It's a work in progress. It's figuring things out. It's timelines going completely upside down. Cassandra: Well, it's even the things that we don't think about changing that changed. So many people went from a regular nine to five job to gig work. So many people completely changed their career paths. You and I both started our master's program right then and there in the beginning of the pandemic. And there's even, sorry, but there's even Daiana: I know. Cassandra: this collective grieving of what we lost. I have people that I know that I spoke to recently. that are still aggravated, I'm gonna say, about the fact that Walmart's not open 24 hours anymore. Like, that's been going on for five, six years now, and it still affects them like it was today. Daiana: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. They're probably night owls or don't like to shop with a Cassandra: It's easier to shop at night. Daiana: lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. Cassandra: So how is that different from cumulative grief, Daiana: Alright, so cumulative grief is grief overload. It happens when you experience multiple losses in a row without enough time to process one, the one before it. Cassandra: Mm-hmm. Daiana: Unfortunately, it's devastating when we see, and we talk a lot about non-death grief, but when you have multiple deaths of a friend, a family member, tragic. deaths in the same year. You hear that a lot at the end of the year like this year almost killed me because of this cumulative grief. we were talking about last week about delayed grief. And if we're delaying it because it's too much, we don't know when it's going to pop back up Cassandra: Mm-hmm. Daiana: and it's going to hit another one. Also, when we, and I'm sure we have all noticed this, when we experience a new loss, all of the past loss is like a resurrection. They all come back. So that sense or that feeling of cumulative grief, grief overload happens more often than we think. Cassandra: And what comes to mind for me is like how collective grief and cumulative grief run hand in hand, because sometimes there's like these huge events that affect everybody and then they just happen and happen and happen and happen. So you had mentioned earlier that we had 9-11 happen. I was a sophomore in college when that happened. And then when I graduated college, it was... 2005, shortly thereafter, as I'm trying to find my own personal way through the world and into the workforce, I actually moved from New York to Florida. And the county that I moved into, 350 teachers had just been laid off. My undergrad was in art education. And you can probably guess what some of the first jobs to release were. So I wasn't the only one going through that. It was collective, but it was also cumulative. And, you know... All that started to change and everything started to heal a little bit and things started to get a little bit better and the world shut down. So it cumulatively comes together to be this huge collective grieving moment. If you ask my children about 9-11, they have a very different experience about it than what we had because we lived it. So Daiana: Right. Cassandra: it can be a lot of very confusing entities all at once and you're not- always sure why you feel the way that you feel, why you feel constantly on edge. Daiana: Yeah. Today we're going to make the connection between this type of grief, the collective and the cumulative, and us 80s babies. How we're so lucky. Yeah, and before we get to that, that's going to come up next where we're going to make that connection. Why Millennials or what is it called? Zennials Cassandra: elder millennials. Daiana: Elder Millennials. I don't know about that one. Cassandra: I embrace it, I got enough gray hair to be like, no, that's about right. Daiana: Yeah. All right. So we're going to talk a little bit a little bit of psychoeducation here. And the concept is called the window of tolerance. And it was developed by Dr. Dan Siegel. All right. So the way this looks like is that you have these three parts, right inside the window. And when you're inside the window, you feel grounded, flexible, you can handle the news without spiraling. I don't know about you, but I haven't been here in a while. We outside. Cassandra: We've been in the hyperarousal state for a little bit of time now, and the hyperarousal state is a little bit different from being inside Daiana: Yeah, tell me about the hypervival. Cassandra: the window, where we feel like we're in that constant fight or flight zone. Like I mentioned it earlier, where you're constantly feeling braced for whatever's gonna happen next. It's that other shoe mentality area. For the 80s babies, this could look like Cronston and... chronic anxiety, I'm gonna raise my hand on that one, Daiana: Yeah Cassandra: amounts of panic throughout your day or throughout your week or throughout your month and being constantly on guard, like you're stuck in the state of high energy and hypervigilance. It's not uncommon with people that fit into this elder of millennials, zenial, however you want to say it, the people who have lived through these tragedies. live also in this state of mind, it takes a lot of work to get us out of that. Daiana: I really do with all seriousness because I think we laugh because it is you laugh or you cry, right? So we're gonna Cassandra: Mm-hmm. Daiana: cry. We're definitely gonna cry some days, but I really do believe this is where we live. The ceiling, it's called the ceiling, right? So we're, I haven't seen that window maybe, you know, no, no. Cassandra: not entirely certain I've ever seen the window. It also, though, makes me think of, said the ceiling, there's also the floor, because there are Daiana: Mm-hmm. The floor. Cassandra: some days that I'm also in the hypo-arousal state, which is the floor, and this can be the freeze zone, like, I know I got stuff to do, but I just can't do the thing. It could look like numbness or disassociation or feeling checked out or the need to constantly scroll through... Facebook and YouTube reels and just suddenly lose two hours of my life. Not that I've done that. Daiana: Mm-hmm. Cassandra: But, and just checking out from the world because it simply feels like too much just to feel everything. And I don't know about you, but I tend to swing between those two feelings, the hyper arousal and the hypo arousal, with very little time inside the window. Daiana: Yeah, we're going to talk about maybe a glimpse of a window later in this episode. And when you're talking about that floor, I think we have to get there. We have to just, I don't know if you've ever just laid on the floor, if you ever lay on a cold floor or the end of yoga when you're just laying there. My favorite part. Cassandra: My favorite part. Daiana: Why? Because you have to rest. You have to sometimes. It's important to just check out. Just close everything out. Turn off your phone if you can or just get off social media. Allow your brain to just zone out. Cassandra: And I'm thinking about this podcast and what we're doing to build the community. And honestly, I want to hear from people. If their experience is not this, if their experience isn't the hyper arousal or hypo arousal, I would love to hear about that and know what it is that they do. If those feelings should happen to come up, if they're living inside the window, I want to hear about that. I also want to hear about the people who have had similar experiences to ourselves, but I think it would be fascinating to hear a little bit more about what it's like to be inside that window and how we manage that time. Daiana: Yeah, you can email us those stories, questions at hello at livinglosspodcast.com. All right, so here comes the 80s baby connection. We talked a little bit about this already, but because we've experienced so much cumulative trauma, our window have physically shrunk. pushed into fight or flight much faster than previous generations because our baseline for quote unquote normal has been shifted in the past 20 plus years of global instability. That's it in a nutshell, right? we have been, I heard somewhere it's like you're only supposed to experience one of these major things once in a lifetime. Yeah, that doesn't exist anymore. Cassandra: Well, I'm not certain who decided that and who didn't get the memo on that because that's not necessarily how that works. Daiana: I know. Wishful thinking. Cassandra: Even in our own lives, if you're supposed to only experience like one or two major losses or major events in your lives, I missed that bus as well. It Daiana: you Cassandra: can stack up and it can become incredibly exhausting. Daiana: It is very exhausting. And when we were thinking about our timeline of trauma, there are so many things that we did not even mention, right? Like you did mention 9-11, the recession. Did you mention? You mentioned the recession, right? Yeah. Cassandra: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Daiana: And one thing that you didn't experience, but I do want you to talk about it, was living in New York. I was born and raised there and I had my first child in 2012 in the beginning of the year. And at the end of that year, in October 2012, we had a hurricane in New York called Hurricane Sandy. And that was a wild year. First of all, New Yorkers, we don't really know about hurricanes and it did damage. It did quite Cassandra: Mm-hmm. Daiana: some damage. I worked at a psychiatric hospital in Staten Island and we had to shuttle to Queens. We had to take all of our patients, our clients to Queens to live there while they were fixing up our hospital. Cassandra: Wow. Daiana: It was a scary time and you can imagine being a first time mom struggling with leaving the baby, then having to commute on the FDR. I don't know if you know the FDR, but. Cassandra: I'm familiar. It's not a great time. Daiana: Yeah, no, it's not a great time. And was it the or was it the Bell Parkway? Either way, they're both not fun. But that was one that was specific to me. And then to see that was my first time seeing the devastation of a hurricane. They were many deaths and Staten Island being small. We knew each other. People knew each other was somebody's dad and And even now as I'm talking about it, I specifically remember the hospital that I worked at is right near the beach. Like you can walk to the beach from there. And there was a car that was left there and abandoned. it's like to even think about this is like really hard for me still. It was a mom who was escaping where her two little boys and the water took them. The water Cassandra: Ugh. Daiana: took them away and she couldn't get them and it was very dark and the two little boys passed. And that car was there for a while. And I have a friend that she worked in the parks department and she used to come to the hospital to see the kids and bring the animals sometimes. And she has kids as well. She's a mom and she wrote a note to the mom and left it with a flower on there just in case. So, you know, there's these moments that, and we're gonna talk more about it later, is that that was the best year of my life. I had my first baby and it was also a really difficult one. And talking about collective grief, cumulative grief, Cassandra: and Daiana: see, I've been getting confused. That's when they compound, right? Cassandra: Mm-hmm. Daiana: It was the first time I've ever experienced a mass shooting, especially at a school. So that year was the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Cassandra: And I lived in Florida during that time. Sandy Hook was 2000 and what year was that? It was 2012. That's what I thought. Daiana: 12. I believe it was 2012. Cassandra: And having lived in Florida during that time, everybody was in like a complete state of shock. And I think are still in a complete state of shock. There's since been documentaries and different things that have come out giving more information about it. However, like you had mentioned earlier, I had my first daughter in 2011. And the terror that you feel about just sending your child to school and then trusting them in the care of someone else, can think would also be considered collective grief because as a parent, I can't imagine what that must have been like for them. And almost every day, I think about it. because it can happen at any point in time, it's definitely cumulative that stays with you and continues to travel with you even beyond the time period of when it happens and when it occurs. Daiana: So when we're talking about us being 80s babies and Millennials, all of this that we are talking about in the early 2000s, 2012, these are things that those feelings are the ones that we're still having today. Exactly the same. What are you feeling, Cassandra? Cassandra: I'm a little overwhelmed right now. It's interesting that living in like the state of waiting for the other shoe to drop, I don't often stop to think about the things that have gotten me to that point. When I feel like I'm living in this consistent fight or fly, Only when I have a mirror held up that reminds me of exactly how I got to this point do I really give myself a chance to process it. And so, like we were just saying, even sending my children to school on a daily basis, I am conscious that I am entrusting their safety to someone else. And sometimes it's not enough. Most of the time. In my experience, it has been, but that doesn't always mean that it always will be. And so there's, we had talked about anticipatory grief. In the past, it's not so much as dwelling on the... the negative or the what could happen, it's just being aware that things are outside of my control and having grief about that, about the lack of control that I have because the only true control I have is my reaction and that is it. Everything else is outside of it. And that in and of itself can be heavy. So if you take the cumulative grief and add it to everything else that's going on, even today, like in the world that we live in today, Daiana: As we're talking about it. Cassandra: there's so many different moving parts at all times, and so much of it is outside of my control. So how do I keep these people that I brought into this world safe? How do I keep them happy? How do I keep them healthy? How do I keep them from... having to live through the repercussions of my keeping lytic roof. Daiana: you Yeah. I think that all of this is just all too familiar. I think we haven't talked about 9-11 or 2008 recession or all of these things, 2012. I hadn't spoken about it in a long time. And I felt the same. And I can tell we were both feeling a Cassandra: Mm-hmm. Daiana: bit of a flooding of emotions at the same time, difficult to talk about. And when we think about our kids, if we stay there thinking about it, I think about it quickly and then I stop. Cassandra: Yep. Daiana: I'll think about it for a moment and then I have to let it go, right? Cassandra: I'll settle spiral. Daiana: Because we have to support our families, we have to work and it's also healthy for them as well to live. I would always think about... When I was a younger teenager, people would say, talk about the innocence of a child and we want to maintain their innocence. You know, don't let them know certain things. And I really didn't understand it until fast forward becoming a mom, how short their childhood is Cassandra: Mm-hmm. Daiana: and how there will be time for them to experience this heavy grief because it is our world. We live in a broken world, right? and how to preserve that while they're in school doing drills. Cassandra: So it becomes almost commonplace to them. unless I sit and talk to them and explain the importance of why they're doing these things, it doesn't occur to them that's anything more than when we were growing up, or at least when I was growing up, we had a lot of stop, drop, and rolls. I have never Daiana: Mm-hmm. Cassandra: once been on fire in my life. However, I know that if I were to, I would stop, drop, and roll. I've also never been stuck in quicksand. However, I know that because of how I was trained and how I was raised, if I should ever find myself in quicksand to try to float and don't struggle, these are things that I just took for granted that could potentially happen in my life and they were preparing me for it. Daiana: Yeah, that's the balance, right? That we want to not protect our kids so much that they don't know how to live in the world and teaching them about the world. It is a balance. It is tricky. you have three kids, I have three kids. And we all know all of our children are so different. So the way I speak to one about it, I have to speak differently to the other. They're in different personalities, different ages. So what we're doing, parenting, it's out of this world difficult in this world that we live in. Cassandra: And then there's the added bonus to at least one of my children is neuro spicy. I think she is incredibly neurodivergent. So her reactions to grief, her reactions to things that are happening around her are different from how a neurotypical child, which I have neurotypical children as well, would respond. One feels a grief deeply while the other one feels it at a more surface level. And so learning how to navigate that and be. consistently supportive of both of them and what it is that they need. I'm speaking of my two older children, because my youngest one is four and she's just four. So she doesn't quite process all of these things yet, but the two oldest, Daiana: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Cassandra: they have definitely different ways of looking at the world. Daiana: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, Cassandra, we had a feeling that this was going to be a two-parter, right? Cassandra: Mm-hmm. Daiana: And I think it's needed. I also jotted down, Neurogrief, because that's its own episode right there. Cassandra: It's a whole topic, it's a whole week long. Daiana: Mm hmm. All right. So this is officially part one. And we're going to be back with part two, where we're going to talk about Cassandra: the timeline of trauma, the why we're tired, why all of these things happen. I think I kind of gave away a little bit of a spoiler like early on and talked about the 9-11 and 2008 recession and COVID. And we've touched on Sandy Hook and we've touched on different things. But when you see it all laid out and you actually realize what we've lived through and what we've seen and what hasn't even happened yet that's coming down the pipeline, there's a reason why we're tired. Daiana: Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're going to talk about that timeline briefly and then we're going to go on to radical honesty. What is the different truth over positivity? Right, we're going to talk about reducing shame and then the shift that we have to make in order to live fully, live good lives is surviving, going from surviving to living. And that's going to be in our next episode. Cassandra: And I'm excited for that last part, the surviving to living. Like, even though all of these things happen and we're all living with this collective and cumulative grief, there are really good, joyful moments that I can pick out in every single day if I try hard enough. I don't always remember Daiana: So that's Cassandra: to try, but I try to try. Daiana: You try to try and that's all we can do As we wrap up today's conversation, we're moving on to our favorite part of the show, living loss lessons. This is where we bridge everything we've talked about with one tangible takeaway you can use right now. Cassandra: These lessons aren't necessarily about fixing the pain, but finding a way to carry it. Sometimes it's a tool to practice, and other times it's reflecting on the meaning that you've built from a loss you've never asked for. It is the strength that you've gained, even in the midst of all of the hard stuff. My lesson today could be about even the duality of experience. I can be heartbroken by the things that I'm afraid of or the things that have happened or the things that could potentially happen, but I can still crack a joke with my kids and we can have a ridiculous laughing fit over something nonsensical. And the laughter doesn't necessarily betray the grief. It's just, how we survive it. Daiana: Yeah, I'm right there with you. I think for me, today's lesson is about that resilience, that meaningful resilience where you actually said it right before here. I'm not biting off of you, but it is a strength. It's really the resilience, the strength that we gained through these decades of uncertainty. I said that I used to say that a lot during COVID, the uncertainty, the uncertainty. And one day I realized we have lived in uncertainty before Cassandra: Yeah. Daiana: COVID, right? So you wouldn't choose the hard loss. I don't think I would ever choose the hard loss. I think I could learn lessons without hard losses, right? But we can honor the version of ourselves that grew through it. And that also Cassandra: Mm-hmm. Daiana: inspires me to grow through it today. Cassandra: Absolutely 100%. Daiana: Thank you so much for being a part of our circle today. Remember by sharing this episode, you are helping us reach someone else who is carrying their loss in silence. Let's keep growing this community together. Subscribe, share, and know that your story matters. I'll see you in part two. Cassandra: We'll see you then.