Latest / Turning Grief into Growth: The Journey of Transformation / Episode #29-Joanne Harpel

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Episode #29-Joanne Harpel · Turning Grief into Growth: The Journey of Transformation

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to this episode of Turn Grief into Growth, The Journey of Transformation.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: This is a podcast that's hosted by Greg Jacobs and Don Lipsteam.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: Don, I gotta tell you, the allergies in the Ohio Valley right now are just horrendous.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: They're just uh really wreaking havoc on my sinuses.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: So you have to bear with me just a little bit.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: I've got a little runny nose and might actually have to blow my schnaws uh during this podcast.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: So for those on YouTube, I apologize.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Uh everybody else, I'll try to mute myself.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: But uh how are you doing, Don?
0:29
SPEAKER_01: I'm doing pretty good.
0:30
SPEAKER_01: No worries on the blowing your nose or or um, you know, even if you talk a little bit less than normal, Greg.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: I don't I don't think anyone will mind.
0:43
SPEAKER_01: Um but uh you know we had the allergy season.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: Um down in South Carolina um about a month or two ago, and yeah, it was bad.
0:53
SPEAKER_01: It was really bad.
0:54
SPEAKER_01: So um sorry you have to go through that.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: I would be remiss if we didn't talk about your lighthouse uh that you walked around uh today.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: And uh I found this nice little joke.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure everybody's already heard this, but uh it always cracks me up.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: Two battleships were out at sea during heavy weather for several days.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: The visibility was poor with patchy fog, so the captain remained on the bridge, keeping an eye on all activities.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported light bearing on the starboard bow.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: Is it steady or moving astern?
1:23
SPEAKER_00: The captain called out.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: Lookout replied, steady, captain.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: The captain then called to the signalman, signal that ship.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: We are on a collision course.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: Advise you change course 20 degrees.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: Back came a signal.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: Advisable for you to change course 20 degrees.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: The captain said, Send.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: I am a captain, change course 20 degrees.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: I'm a seaman, second class, came the reply.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: You had better change course 20 degrees.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: By that time, the captain was furious.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: He spat out, send, I'm a battleship, change course 20 degrees.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: Back came the flashing light.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: I'm a lighthouse.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: So that's my little joke for today, Don.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: You and your lighthouse on your island that you walk around.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: All right, we're excited to have Joanne Harpel uh as our guest on today.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: Don, I'm gonna turn it over to you and let you introduce our guest today.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you, Greg.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, I'm delighted to have Joanne Harpel um as our guest.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: Uh she's not only uh a colleague and and a friend of mine, um, but uh she is the past, the president.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, not the past, the she is the president of Coping After Suicide.
2:34
SPEAKER_01: And she's an international authority on suicide bereavement and postvention, uh, with nearly 25 years of experience.
2:44
SPEAKER_01: Her work has been recognized with the two highest awards in the field from the American Association of Suicidology and the International Association for Suicide Prevention.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: She's been invited to speak all over the world, including by the American Psychiatric Association, the U.S.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: Army, the South Korean National Police Agency, and now turning grief into growth.
3:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, that's that's a pretty big deal, right?
3:17
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
3:17
SPEAKER_01: On our podcast.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: Um, she's trained thousands of professionals, including clinicians and doctors, funeral directors, clergy, and school personnel.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: She is the creator of the award-winning documentary Talking Out Loud, Teens and Suicide Loss: A Conversation.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: Uh, by the way, this is an excellent movie.
3:39
SPEAKER_01: I have had the privilege to see it more than once.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: And um, it really is something I hope that we get into uh talking about that uh in the podcast.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: She also appeared live on stage at the 2018 Grammy Awards in connection with the suicide prevention song 1-800-273-8255.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: Before opening her private practice, she spent over a decade as a senior director with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the largest suicide prevention organization in the world.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: Joanne began her career as a corporate lawyer with the leading uh New York City law firm.
4:22
SPEAKER_01: She is an honors graduate of Amherst College and has graduate degrees from Cambridge University and the NYU School of Law.
4:35
SPEAKER_01: She has worked with hundreds of families and communities across the country to help bring hope and healing, and she continues to do this work as president of Coping After Suicide and so many other roles that she plays.
4:53
SPEAKER_01: Just welcome Joanne.
4:55
SPEAKER_01: We're so grateful to have you.
4:57
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
4:59
SPEAKER_02: I am I'm always a little touched, extra touched when someone that I know personally invites me and and welcomes me so warmly.
5:12
SPEAKER_02: So thank you.
5:12
SPEAKER_02: And nice to meet you for the first time, Greg.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: Same here.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: Well, Joanne, tell us a little bit about yourself.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: Tell us what you do.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: Um, break this down a little bit for us, uh, especially the coping after suicide and what that looks like.
5:27
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
5:28
SPEAKER_02: So the first thing that I usually mention is that I am not a clinician.
5:33
SPEAKER_02: I'm not a therapist, I'm not a psychologist or a social worker.
5:37
SPEAKER_02: What I am is an expert in suicide loss specifically.
5:42
SPEAKER_02: And I got into this work the way many of us do.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: I was touched by it personally.
5:47
SPEAKER_02: I lost my younger brother, Stephen, to suicide in 1993.
5:53
SPEAKER_02: He um was 26 years old and I was 29 and working as a lawyer at a big fancy New York City law firm.
6:02
SPEAKER_02: And his death really led me to take stock of my life and think more carefully than probably I ever had up until that point about what was really important to me, what what mattered in terms of how I spent my time professionally?
6:20
SPEAKER_02: And so I made a huge career change and for the last now 25 years have focused exclusively on working with families and communities to help them cope with the aftermath of losing a loved one to suicide.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: Can you tell us a little bit about um what like what does coping after suicide actually do?
6:49
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
6:49
SPEAKER_02: So it's a national practice because I'm not a clinician, I'm not bound by all the limitations on what therapists can often do where they have can only practice in their state.
7:00
SPEAKER_02: I have the freedom to practice anywhere.
7:02
SPEAKER_02: So I do everything from working with individuals in a way that resembles grief counseling, although it's I'm not providing any kind of therapy.
7:12
SPEAKER_02: I'm a little bit of a combination of a coach and an ex-subject matter expert and a warm, caring ear.
7:21
SPEAKER_02: Uh, so I work with individuals, I work with couples, I work with families, I do a lot of professional education.
7:28
SPEAKER_02: So next in a couple of months, I'm going to make a presentation to a statewide funeral directors association, for example.
7:37
SPEAKER_02: I do a lot of work with schools when there's been a suicide of a student, they'll bring me in to work with the faculty and the administration and the psychological services department to help them cope with that loss.
7:50
SPEAKER_02: Um, and then under the auspices of coping after suicide, we have more than a dozen national suicide bereavement support groups, all of which are specialized based on relationship loss.
8:04
SPEAKER_02: So, of course, Don, you know this well.
8:06
SPEAKER_02: Don is the facilitator of our groups for fathers who've lost a child to suicide.
8:12
SPEAKER_02: And then we also have groups for mothers, for siblings, for spouses and partners, for people who've lost a parent.
8:18
SPEAKER_02: We have a group just for teens, we have a group just for 20 and 30 somethings.
8:23
SPEAKER_02: So I do a wide range of things coping after suicide does.
8:28
SPEAKER_02: All of it is related to helping people find their way through the darkness after there's been a suicide loss in their lives.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, no matter what loss, I think there's that darkness.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: Um we have a lot of listeners that uh are uh their loved ones might have died from a you know car accident or motorcycle accident.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: Um it might have been an overdose, it might have been a suicide, um, might have been stepping on on an IED overseas during wartime.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: Um there's certain types of loss, I think, that uh really um add a complexity uh to it with uh, for example, suicide.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: You know, the the questions of is there something I could have done more?
9:11
SPEAKER_00: So Don's son, Josh, uh passed away from suicide.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: My son passed away in an auto accident.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: Um there's probably with suicide survivors more questions surrounding like, could I have done more?
9:24
SPEAKER_00: Why, you know, the why questions uh than maybe you know a sudden loss uh type thing.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: So how do you how do you navigate those murky waters uh with people when it comes to you know blaming themselves or wondering if they could have done more on the type of loss?
9:41
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so you know, it's certainly true.
9:44
SPEAKER_02: Loss is loss and grief is grief, and losing someone who is precious to you is awful and heartbreaking and tragic.
9:54
SPEAKER_02: And in that sense, it doesn't matter what the cause of death was, the loss itself is a universal experience.
10:01
SPEAKER_02: And also with certain causes of death, as you mentioned, there are there are sort of a predictable set of questions and emotions that people tend to grapple with.
10:12
SPEAKER_02: And those show up most often in what we refer to as deaths of despair.
10:18
SPEAKER_02: So suicide, but it can also be deaths that may not have been intentional but are associated with um substance use typically.
10:26
SPEAKER_02: Um also deaths that were sudden, violent, unexpected, so-called traumatic losses.
10:33
SPEAKER_02: So there are there are sort of categories of losses.
10:36
SPEAKER_02: Certainly everyone's experience is individual, but there are certain questions that tend to come up, and you point to a couple of them in exactly the right way.
10:45
SPEAKER_02: So with suicide, I've never met anybody yet, including myself, who wasn't grappling on some level with that question of why.
10:54
SPEAKER_02: Why did this happen?
10:56
SPEAKER_02: And for some people, that why is a very literal, concrete question where they're replaying their loved one's life or their loved one's last few days, conversations that they had, decisions that they made.
11:10
SPEAKER_02: And that can often include a lot of questions about did I have some role?
11:15
SPEAKER_02: Did I miss something?
11:16
SPEAKER_02: Did I, is there something I should have done or something I did that I now wish I hadn't done?
11:22
SPEAKER_02: Is there something that I said or shouldn't have said or didn't say?
11:26
SPEAKER_02: Um, replaying the the entire sort of history and all of the different decision trees, often with a sense of am I am I to blame somehow?
11:37
SPEAKER_02: Am I culpable?
11:38
SPEAKER_02: And and you ask how I deal with it with people, what I try to do is separate out.
11:44
SPEAKER_02: I'm talking with my hands, which is a little weird over video, I realize.
11:49
SPEAKER_02: Um, separate out on one hand, asking those questions, asking, am I to blame somehow?
11:56
SPEAKER_02: Am I at fault somehow?
11:58
SPEAKER_02: That is a normal expected part of coping with the loss like this.
12:05
SPEAKER_02: Almost every single person does it in some way.
12:09
SPEAKER_02: And separating out the fact that you're asking those questions from whether there is actually an answer to those questions.
12:17
SPEAKER_02: You know, our brains, when we're looking for an answer, our brains assume that if we just keep digging deep enough, we'll find the answer.
12:25
SPEAKER_02: That if we're asking the question, am I to blame?
12:28
SPEAKER_02: I must actually be to blame, and I just need to keep digging until I find the way I am to blame.
12:33
SPEAKER_02: And so what I try to do is separate for out for people the fact that you're doing that digging is what people do after a suicide.
12:42
SPEAKER_02: It does not mean that there is, in fact, something to find.
12:46
SPEAKER_02: And so I try to normalize what they're going through and sort of situate them in the humanity of people who have all lost so much of suicide, and but not make it mean that you in fact are somehow to blame.
13:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, uh you said this earlier that you know loss is lost no matter how the person we loved died.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's and that's you know terrible and hard.
13:17
SPEAKER_01: Um I consider uh suicide, overdose, um, car accidents uh of a child or or somebody young that is um you know hasn't lived their life, it's a complicated grief, right?
13:36
SPEAKER_01: Um it it causes more uh questions.
13:41
SPEAKER_01: When somebody dies uh of old age, like we know they they lived a good life and they they died.
13:48
SPEAKER_01: Um that's expected, that's supposed to happen.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: But when somebody dies of suicide, um it's much more complicated because of the questions that you brought up, Julian.
14:02
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think I think that's that's absolutely true.
14:05
SPEAKER_02: It's the the nature of the death itself brings up a lot of questions and and difficult things to deal with.
14:12
SPEAKER_02: Certainly when when the death is of a young person, there is the there is the layer of tragedy about all the years they didn't get to live.
14:21
SPEAKER_02: Um but I also try to be um as as sort of neutral as I possibly can be about putting things into categories because even someone who dies of natural causes at a very old age, the people who are left behind grieving them may have had very complicated relationships with that person in life.
14:45
SPEAKER_02: And so this the cause of death may not be the source of a lot of complexity, but the nature of the relationship can be.
14:53
SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
14:54
SPEAKER_02: And I and I also yeah, I also find that we live in a world that that has this sort of imaginary hierarchy in the sky about which deaths are most tragic, which people who are grieving are most deserving of support.
15:12
SPEAKER_02: And often that means that other people are are left less supported than they need to be because we all are carrying around these unspoken assumptions about who's suffering the most.
15:24
SPEAKER_02: So I try as hard as I can when I'm working with people not to bring my own narrative to it, but really hear what's hard for them.
15:33
SPEAKER_02: So often my very first question to someone that I'm working with is I'll say I this is gonna sound like a really, overly simple question.
15:42
SPEAKER_02: I don't mean for it to.
15:43
SPEAKER_02: What's been hardest for you so far?
15:46
SPEAKER_02: They'll tell you what they're struggling with.
15:49
SPEAKER_02: And sometimes you could have predicted it, and many times you can't.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, it's it's interesting that you mentioned that because you can have a son or a daughter who's taking care of an ailing parent that's, you know, say 88 years old or something, and they're taking care of them every single day daily.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: And when their mother dies, for example, they might feel a sense of relief in the fact that they're not suffering anymore.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but then there's this whole gap of every single day, I've been doing this.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: Now what do I do?
16:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, so there's a lot of just complexities.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: Uh, there is no cookie cutter.
16:27
SPEAKER_02: That's that's right.
16:28
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I work with so many people who lost a spouse or a partner who come to me because they're grieving and yet they have been divorced for many years, or they were estranged at the time of their relationship, or they were the victim of physical abuse at the hands of their partner, and but yet they're still grieving, and they find that so confusing.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: I I have a question for you.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, in your bio, Don was reading that uh you had also been invited to go speak at the U.S.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: Army.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I also was invited to go speak at the Army.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: It's not a comparison.
17:03
SPEAKER_00: I'm not trying to say that.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh, went out to Fort Knox and uh spoke to some of the command leadership.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: It was Suicide Awareness Month.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: My son did not die by suicide.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, uh, and Don and I both had military children.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: We we are very cautious on this podcast to make sure that we're not emphasizing this is not a military podcast.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is for everybody who is experiencing grief and loss.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: But there's this whole aspect of picking up the pieces afterwards, uh, that I feel like there's a lot of different groups out there that are trying to pick up the pieces for the survivors.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't know that we have done as good of a job, um, and I might be speaking out of turn on this, on the preventative aspect.
17:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, what are your thoughts on that?
17:51
SPEAKER_02: So there is no way to work in the field that I work in, which is usually referred to as suicide post-vention, right?
18:00
SPEAKER_02: What happens afterwards, without having knowledge and awareness about suicide prevention, because they go, they do go hand in hand.
18:09
SPEAKER_02: And certainly we know that people who have lost someone to suicide are at increased risk for suicide to some extent themselves.
18:18
SPEAKER_02: So they are definitely related.
18:20
SPEAKER_02: Um and I try to keep up on what the latest research is telling us about what we know about what leads to suicide.
18:31
SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that is happening in the field now is a shift to not away from looking at suicide as an outcome of mental illness, depression, and so on, but to broaden the lens and really look at suicide as a phenomenon itself.
18:51
SPEAKER_02: How do how does someone go from thinking about suicide, what we call suicidal ideations, thinking about suicide to actually acting on it?
19:01
SPEAKER_02: That what is referred to in the research as the ideation to action mechanism.
19:07
SPEAKER_02: How does someone go from thinking about something to actually acting on it?
19:12
SPEAKER_02: Because many, many, many, many people have had some kind of suicidal thoughts at some point in their life.
19:19
SPEAKER_02: It's not a particularly unusual thing, but only thankfully a tiny fraction of them ever act on it.
19:25
SPEAKER_02: And what the what the field is trying to figure out now is how does that happen?
19:31
SPEAKER_02: How can we identify the people who are most likely to act on it and and what what happens during that process?
19:39
SPEAKER_02: And one of the findings that always strikes me, and when I share it, um usually is new information, is how short the window of time is between when someone actually reaches that point of no return and makes that final, final, final decision to take their life, the amount of time between that and when they act on it is measured in minutes, sometimes an hour or two.
20:06
SPEAKER_02: It's very, very short.
20:08
SPEAKER_02: Now, that doesn't mean there hasn't been a long runway up until that point, in some cases, years or decades.
20:15
SPEAKER_02: Um, but the actual window of time between when someone hits that suicidal crisis to when they actually act on it is tiny.
20:26
SPEAKER_02: And so those of us who are grieving a suicide loss, who are so consumed with why didn't I stop it?
20:32
SPEAKER_02: Why didn't I see it coming?
20:33
SPEAKER_02: Why didn't I do something?
20:35
SPEAKER_02: I think most of us are operating on the belief that we had a big wide window to step into.
20:41
SPEAKER_02: And the truth is we don't, that the window is very, very short.
20:45
SPEAKER_02: And so the suit you you asked about suicide prevention.
20:49
SPEAKER_02: It's a it turns out it's a really tricky, tricky thing to prevent suicide because you don't always know when someone is in that very short window of time.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
21:02
unknown: Wow.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for that.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: You know, we've talked about we've we had a guest on a friend of mine who um was really uh contemplating suicide in a parking lot, and I called him up and he said, if it wasn't for me calling him at that exact moment, he's not sure what would have happened.
21:21
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I do think that it's important for our listeners just to call out um it's it's more than a seminar, it's more than a suicide prevention telephone number.
21:30
SPEAKER_00: Um, it's about being someone to somebody else and not just checking on them necessarily, but really establishing those friendships and community.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, and we've for some reason we've gotten away from that from the the 70s and 80s and 90s I grew up in, um, where we need to just really have more outreach and more community where people feel a belonging connection.
21:53
SPEAKER_02: There is yeah, there is no question that belonging that.
22:00
SPEAKER_02: Feeling like you belong, feeling connected is a protective factor against suicide.
22:06
SPEAKER_02: There's that's absolutely true.
22:08
SPEAKER_02: The tricky thing about that is that for those of us who lost someone to suicide, where we were very connected to them, where we were very involved, where they did know how much they were loved, where we where we were part of their community and nevertheless they took their own life, it's a it's it can actually reinforce that sense that I failed them somehow, I wasn't enough.
22:36
SPEAKER_02: It's it's so I think the messaging is both and that the community and the connectedness is important.
22:42
SPEAKER_02: There's no doubt about that, but suicide is exceedingly complex.
22:48
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
22:48
SPEAKER_02: And it's not just a matter of reaching out and connecting.
22:53
SPEAKER_02: I remember hearing a man speak at a at a conference who had made and survived a very serious suicide attempt.
23:02
SPEAKER_02: And he was asked, you know, what should we do?
23:04
SPEAKER_02: What should we as a community do to try to reach out to people and help them?
23:09
SPEAKER_02: And he said something that has always stayed with me.
23:12
SPEAKER_02: He said, I don't know what to tell you to do.
23:15
SPEAKER_02: All I know is that whatever you're doing, do more of it.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: That's uh powerful.
23:25
SPEAKER_03: Right?
23:26
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
23:28
SPEAKER_01: Julian, uh, would you be able to take us back?
23:32
SPEAKER_01: Because I know you are huge and and helping people now, um, but it you had to have gone through some struggles before you got to where you were be where you were able to um support others, support us um through this.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: Uh are you able to just share that how that transition took place?
24:00
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
24:01
SPEAKER_02: And and thank you, Don, for seeing that and naming that because it is it is true.
24:07
SPEAKER_02: Um, all of us who got here had a had a journey, had a path.
24:14
SPEAKER_02: It it didn't start out so um so neat and nice and neat.
24:20
SPEAKER_02: So my brother um took his life in July, and that September, so just about maybe six weeks later, there happened to be a healing conference for survivors of suicide loss in my area.
24:34
SPEAKER_02: It was part of um what was called international now International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day.
24:42
SPEAKER_02: And I walked into this conference with my mother and my much younger brother, he was uh 15, and we walked into this conference and stepped foot into the auditorium and I looked around, it was you know, 250 people, and I looked around and I was just so overwhelmed that this how can it be real that I belong here?
25:07
SPEAKER_02: How am I even in the right room?
25:10
SPEAKER_02: And we sat down, and the people who were speaking at the conference were people like we are now, right?
25:17
SPEAKER_02: Much further along in their loss, and they started talking, and I remember so vividly through the haze of all of my brand new grief, thinking I'm gonna do that someday.
25:32
SPEAKER_02: And I had no idea how this was, I mean, this was weeks old, and I was in no condition to actually do it, but I just had this sense.
25:43
SPEAKER_02: Um, I had a colleague, a professional colleague who was a minister, and she said she used an expression that I've always loved.
25:50
SPEAKER_02: She said, Sometimes you know something deep down in your knower.
25:55
SPEAKER_02: And I knew deep down in my knower in that moment that somehow I was gonna do this.
26:02
SPEAKER_02: Um and I had no sense of what how that was gonna happen or what how to even begin.
26:12
SPEAKER_02: I just could feel it.
26:14
SPEAKER_02: And I took a few years to um to write my own ship.
26:19
SPEAKER_02: I went to support group meetings once a month for probably two years.
26:25
SPEAKER_02: Some groups were suicide loss, and some groups were for sibling loss because a big part of my grief wasn't about how he died, it was who he was in my life, the fact that he had been my sibling.
26:37
SPEAKER_02: Um, I read every book I could get my hands on about suicide.
26:42
SPEAKER_02: There was no internet then, it was the 90s.
26:44
SPEAKER_02: So I went to the bookstore, went to Barnes and Noble, and found the shelf labeled death.
26:50
SPEAKER_02: They actually had a death shelf in the bookstore.
26:52
SPEAKER_02: And I bought every single book that I could find with the word suicide in it because I was um, I knew nothing about it.
26:59
SPEAKER_02: I didn't know about anything about mental health, mental illness, suicide, nothing.
27:04
SPEAKER_02: So I I read as much as I could.
27:07
SPEAKER_02: I I went to support groups, I did a lot of my own healing work in therapy.
27:13
SPEAKER_02: Um and at the back of every one of the books, they would have a list of resources.
27:20
SPEAKER_02: Right now you would just go on the internet, but then you you would have to rely on what was listed in the appendix of the books.
27:28
SPEAKER_02: And they all listed different organizations that worked in the field, including the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which is the biggest organization focused on this, but also happened to be based in New York City, which is where I live.
27:43
SPEAKER_02: And I cold called them and I said, I lost my brother.
27:49
SPEAKER_02: I'm a lawyer in New York City, which I was at the time.
27:53
SPEAKER_02: Um, I'd like to get involved.
27:56
SPEAKER_02: Can is there some way I can help?
27:58
SPEAKER_02: And that that it was that simple.
28:02
SPEAKER_02: It was the combination of the gut feeling, giving myself the time to so that I wasn't in that that raw grief, and then taking a deep breath and reaching out.
28:15
SPEAKER_02: And and one of the things that I that I learned through my own experience, but I've seen it also over and over again, is that often when people are very newly breathed, they want to get take action, they want to get involved, they want to do.
28:31
SPEAKER_02: And that impulse is so understandable.
28:36
SPEAKER_02: But if they ask my opinion, I will tell them to wait because you can't skip over the hard emotional experience of grieving just by getting active and getting busy and giving back.
28:51
SPEAKER_02: It I wish that it worked that way, but it doesn't.
29:02
SPEAKER_02: But they're doing it from a from they're speaking from their wounds, and you want to get to a place where you're speaking from your scars, not speaking from your wounds.
29:12
SPEAKER_02: That's when you'll be able to be genuinely helpful to someone else.
29:16
SPEAKER_00: So that's powerful.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: That is speaking from your scars, not your wounds.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
29:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, my situation was very similar.
29:27
SPEAKER_01: Um, I think about my the my introduction to taps.
29:32
SPEAKER_01: And you know, I had tried other other groups and other things, and it just didn't feel feel right initially.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: Um, but when I walked into this room with all these other people, wondering how did I get here and and you know, but yet I walked in and there it was that what I was looking for was that hope, that hope that I could get through this and knowing that I wasn't alone in doing so.
30:05
SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, it sounds like you know, you took the bull by the horns, and and it's almost like your brother Stephen uh guided you or led you.
30:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, would you how's that land with you?
30:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that lands as true.
30:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that lands as true.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's powerful when we take our uh our loved ones with us everywhere we go, and uh it gives us a sense of purpose.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I was walking two miles at the cemetery yesterday, and I just said out loud, I was like, David, I'm walking in your honor.
30:37
SPEAKER_00: Um nobody there to hear me or anything, but I he he walks along with me.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: That's that's how I feel.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: You know, there was a couple things I wrote down.
30:45
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, you don't get from point A to point B uh overnight.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I've had people ask me, How in the world do you speak so openly about your grief?
30:54
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Well, you didn't see me sucking carpet fibers, screaming and crying on the floor earlier on.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's putting the work in.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: We talk a lot about that on this podcast.
31:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, Don and I separately had a vision of starting a podcast um without even talking to each other.
31:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh for probably a year before we started this, I remember sitting on my back deck with a friend of mine who did a podcast.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I really want to do a podcast, but I have no idea how to do it.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: And and here we are, you know, several months in.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I don't know if this is the 28th episode or whatever, but um just uh continuing, you know, moving forward.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: And it's just little baby stuffs, things you learn along the way.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: I I wrote a book in 2009, and I'm embarrassed to even tell people I wrote it.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: And the reason is it's it was called uh to be continued an ordinary man on extraordinary journey.
31:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it was before David died.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: And I look back on it now, I'm like, I didn't know anything uh at that point.
31:53
SPEAKER_00: And people asked me to write another book now, and I'm like, you know something?
31:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm not ready.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: I'm only five years out.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: I do write a lot, I do a lot of magazine submission articles and things, but I like what you said, speaking from your scars and not your wounds, uh, because there is this essence of wanting to make a difference and getting out there.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: And you do have to be cautious earlier on, if especially if you're in the mourning stage of heavy grief earlier on, that you're really exercising self-care and not taking on too much because you can't be all things to all people, as much of a difference as you want to make.
32:31
SPEAKER_02: I I think that's right.
32:33
SPEAKER_02: I um I cannot take credit for the expression speaking from your scars, not from your wounds.
32:38
SPEAKER_02: I totally stole that from someone that that used it in some conference that I went to.
32:43
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I but it just captures it so perfectly.
32:47
SPEAKER_02: I also um heard a con another concept that really made sense to me, and I suspect it will to you also, and that is you don't get through something like this one step at a time.
33:00
SPEAKER_02: You get through it one evolution at a time.
33:04
SPEAKER_02: In other words, all of the things that happen, all of the things you do, all of the things you learn, all of the feelings you feel along the way get rolled up into the experience, and that's what moves forward.
33:17
SPEAKER_02: It's like a you know, a snowball that starts out small and then as it rolls through the snow, gets more and more snow packed onto it.
33:24
SPEAKER_02: And so I think when people are very newly bereaved, they have this sense that there's a path in front of them, and I just need to take one step and then the next step and then the next step.
33:34
SPEAKER_02: And it's actually not that way.
33:36
SPEAKER_02: It's that having taken the first four steps, you're now on the fifth step with the benefit of all of those four steps rolled up into it.
33:45
SPEAKER_02: So it's the whole thing that's now moving forward.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: You're not starting over every time.
33:49
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
33:51
SPEAKER_02: And you can't predict where you're gonna be at step 26 because you haven't had the first 25 steps yet, and all of those inform who you are when you're standing at step 26.
34:03
SPEAKER_02: And it's really hard for people at the very beginning to understand that it's actually the living through it that enables them to live through it.
34:13
SPEAKER_02: And they want, they want, they're like, they'll come to me and they're basic, they don't use this language, they're but they're basically saying, just give me the syllabus, tell me what I need to do to place out of the entry level and get right into the you know, the PhD program.
34:27
SPEAKER_02: I want to skip over all this hard, messy stuff.
34:30
SPEAKER_02: Tell me what I need to read, tell me what I need to do.
34:33
SPEAKER_02: And the the true answer is it's actually the living it and breathing it and watching yourself survive day by day that is what enables you to continue to grow and turn your grief into growth.
34:49
SPEAKER_01: That that builds the strength, right?
34:52
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
34:52
SPEAKER_01: The resilience.
34:54
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
34:54
SPEAKER_02: And it's watching yourself be resilient that helps cultivate more resilience.
35:00
SPEAKER_04: Right.
35:02
unknown: Wow.
35:03
SPEAKER_00: You remember those choose your own adventure novels in the 80s that you used to you could buy them and it would be like you'd be on page 12, and it would say you could either go to page 36 or 72.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: And if you went to 36, it might take you back to you know page four or whatever.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: And there it was really a choose your own adventure.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: There's several different endings to the novel.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I do feel like some people just live in fear of making the wrong step forward and that it's going to be the wrong path.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: And it's like you just gotta live.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: You just gotta live.
35:35
SPEAKER_02: And and I, you know, I usually will say to people the the list of things that are wrong is very short, right?
35:43
SPEAKER_02: There's sort of a short list of really obviously self-destructive, problematic things to do when you're grieving.
35:50
SPEAKER_02: Drinking and driving as an example, right?
35:52
SPEAKER_02: I mean, there are certain things that we would all recognize as not optimal behaviors.
36:00
SPEAKER_02: The whole rest of the universe is what we all do when we're trying to figure it out as we go.
36:07
SPEAKER_02: There aren't very many wrong things to do.
36:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Craig, Craig and I um have coined uh sustainable and unsustainable uh ways to you know get through this.
36:21
SPEAKER_02: Um that's perfect.
36:24
SPEAKER_02: I love that.
36:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, as we uh as we wrap this up, Joanne, is there any um any words of wisdom that you would like to leave our our listeners with?
36:39
SPEAKER_02: Um I I hesitate to assume that it's it's wise.
36:46
SPEAKER_02: I I guess what I would say is there are a couple of things that have really helped me, and when I've shared them with other people, they seem to find them helpful too.
36:56
SPEAKER_02: Um one is that you will always have a relationship with the person who died.
37:04
SPEAKER_02: It's a different relationship because they're not physically here, but you will always have a relationship with them, and the relationship you have with them now is probably pretty similar to the relationship you had with them before it just takes a different form, and that you will also always have a relationship with the grief, and that is a separate relationship, and and like any relationship, it can be unpredictable, it can have its own rhythm and its own timing, and you don't necessarily have a lot of control over it, and it also is ever evolving and ever changing.
37:47
SPEAKER_02: Um the other thing that helped me was understanding that that the way the human brain copes with grief is not that you sort of go through stages and then it gets better and you have closure.
38:02
SPEAKER_02: That is not, I wish that that was the case.
38:04
SPEAKER_02: It's not at all what happened.
38:07
SPEAKER_02: What actually happens is that you toggle back and forth between the grieving and the living.
38:15
SPEAKER_02: And sometimes you have a little bit of say over which which you're doing, and sometimes you're just toggling and at the mercy of the experience, but that both are true.
38:27
SPEAKER_02: The grieving is true, and the living is also true.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: That's good.
38:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Greg, I I don't know about you, but I would love to have Joanne on again um in the future if she'd be willing to join us down the road.
38:44
SPEAKER_01: Uh a lot of a lot of really helpful information that uh I think our listeners can um learn a lot from you.
38:56
SPEAKER_01: So thank you.
38:57
SPEAKER_00: I agree, I agree.
38:59
SPEAKER_00: Joanne, thank you so much uh for coming on our podcast.
39:02
SPEAKER_00: I, you know, there was one thing that you had said I wrote down just because you asked the question does not mean that there's an answer.
39:07
SPEAKER_00: And I was told by a wise person earlier on, keep asking the why questions, just don't expect an answer.
39:14
SPEAKER_00: And um, I I think that the way you phrased it is uh really good because our minds are constantly seeking that answer.
39:22
SPEAKER_00: And it's if we're asking the question, there's got to be a resolution to it.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: That's why I was in such a manila folder stage right at the beginning of my grief journey, trying to close out his estate and this and that, um, and trying to you know put a resolve uh to everything.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: And I thought I'd be over it.
39:38
SPEAKER_00: And uh it doesn't work that way.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: So, Joanne, thank you so much uh for coming on.
39:43
SPEAKER_00: We are uh better people uh for listening to this.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: And uh yes, we look forward to hosting you again in the future.
39:50
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.
39:51
SPEAKER_02: I'm so sorry for the reason that we were all here and that our paths have crossed, but grateful to know you both.
39:58
SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
39:59
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
39:59
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Joanne.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to listen.
40:05
SPEAKER_00: We hope turning grief into growth spoke to your heart and becomes a part of your own journey of healing and transformation.
40:12
SPEAKER_00: If you know someone who could use a little hope, please share this episode with them.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: And don't forget to follow, like, or subscribe on your favorite platform so you don't miss what's coming next.
40:24
SPEAKER_00: Don and I can't wait to share more conversations to help you keep turning your grief into growth.
40:30
SPEAKER_00: Until next time.