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Episode 36: Dealing with Grief, Loss, and Sadness
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today's episode is about grief sadness loneliness yeah and it got me to thinking you know when I was a kid a young kid young before I pretty yeah I pretty was a rare of a lot of things going on my great grandmother passed away and we went to the funeral for just a little bit our parents just you know we didn't really understand what was going on my older sister though she was a couple years older than me she was just distraught now I remember feeling to myself wow like great grandma passed away but you know that's I I didn't really have a lot of emotions about it it was just like oh she's gone whereas my sister a couple years older she was just distraught with grief and sadness even though they weren't exactly you know they weren't old enough to be close together so got me thinking what was this evolutionary psychology reason behind so much grief loss and sadness and what age has to do with it and then all these other things so I'd like to talk about that on the show today in addition to that you know going through some of the articles online and going through some psychology classes in college I've heard about the stages of grief and they are denial bargaining depression anger acceptance and this seems to be the commonly accepted reaction to grief and loss and I also started thinking you know maybe maybe with all the stuff we've talked about on this where things aren't at first as simple and subtle as they appear with some of these explanations I thought well you know what we can cover this and see what we can learn about grief and sadness and loss sure yeah so alright you want me to just TF those folks go for it sure okay well first of all the stages that people are referring to the supposed five stages of grief this was the brainchild of Elisabeth kubler-ross who was a I'm not sure what she was I think she was a she was some kind of mental health professional and she she worked she's one of those gutsy people that was willing to work with dying patients and you know bless anybody who who has that in them to do and kubler-ross you know had that in herself to do that and she then wrote about this this was a this was way ancient stuff I think this book was written in the 60s or 70s 50 years ago or so and I think it was called on death and dying I'm not I'm not sure I'm not remembering everything exactly but so she proposed these five stages of grief and boy she got a lot of grief for it she became an international star behind this in psycho sort of psychotherapy and pop psychology circles but she she opened herself up to plenty of criticism from the academics and the academics ultimately destroyed her theory yeah and that later on she said well you know that's not really what I meant so it turns out that the fire ages yeah so there are not five stages of grief that is not true there are there are quite a few processes of which the processes were reactions that kubler-ross described are fairly common in people that are having grief reactions and so people will go through sometimes people will sort of do some bargaining in their head sometimes they will you know be angry you know not not always not not any of this is or depressed like a lot of times nobody experiences much of any of these experiences that she talks about sometimes somebody will experience two or three of them etc they will come in no particular order so this is not a staged process this is a this is an unpredictable process by which individuals will grieve different losses very differently even in their own lifetime I know the same individual staring at two different losses will have very different reactions and so so what what grief really is is a is simply the the processing of a loss is what this is so so but it's the reaction to a loss processing is starting to get fancy in the talk talking like a psychologist but what's really happening is you know you if you think about it you are constantly experiencing gains and losses throughout your day and so if you think also about for example a sports team playing I don't know a preseason basketball game in the NBA well there's little losses and gains that are taking place all through that game and each of them you will watch if you watch inside the fans or the individuals you are having emotional reactions of either positive or negative and the negative reaction is what we you could call grief okay and we might say well no I mean a big loss well grief is just the word that we use to describe a big loss and so your psyche you know people say well no I really save that for death oh really well what if you're Pete Carroll and you make make a haywire call the last play of the Super Bowl last year and your team loses do you experience grief I think you do okay in other words any reasonable person would say wow that whole locker room is really bummed they're really upset they're like they can't believe they lost so I go god you know they're their fortunes they're sometimes you know major millions of dollars to those individuals and tremendous prestige twisted on a single moment in that game and so and what it means for their futures and whether or not they were Superbowl champion blah blah so you better believe that they have very negative reactions to that some of them more negative than others and so depending upon what it meant to the individual and essentially how closely it was tied in with their survival reproductive success so I remember Richard Sherman who had already won a Super Bowl title the previous year with Seattle he was bummed that he was like hey you know that's football and that's because he already had a big world championship ring on his finger and a big fat contract whereas somebody else that had never won a Super Bowl that was on that team and was thinking they were within literally ten seconds of winning one there their reaction could have been much greater and so again seems like a strange thing to be talking about football with juxtaposed to grief but what I'm pointing out here is that there is not a special set of independent emotions that we're going to call grief what there is is that there's a host of different reactions that are going on associated with losses and some of those losses are small some of those losses are great and then there's a process by which the human being will analyze those losses so let's talk about grief as it usually happens and why the person will go through this process the whenever you lose something big you need to know it there needs to be whatever you lost something that it is important for your survival or reproductive success you had better have a reaction to tell you that you lost it and it better be negative and the reason is is if it's not then that would lead you to be careless with that asset so you can imagine for example a a woman with you know a thirty year old woman with a pair of seven-year-old twins and she goes down bathing in the Ganges and one of them gets eaten by an anaconda right front of her okay so now now do we think that she should have a negative reaction yes she should have a horrific Lee negative reaction she should be traumatized for life for having that happen she put a tremendous amount of biological energy into that seven-year-old kid and she lost it out of carelessness perhaps because she did not analyze the magnitude of the threat that not being able to see through the muddy river if she ran across benefit on taking a bath in that River next time she'd realize it isn't worth it I could have lost my life for the loss of my or the loss of my other son so I'm never going to do that again okay so the the grief reaction tells you that was a tremendous mistake now in the case of your your a situation where your sister is looking at grandmother dying there's you know we could speculate as to why she was marking this as a very substantial loss okay now I'm not sure but I would be willing to bet that she was actually tracking the responses of some other people in your house so the so what we do when we're kids we are we are tempting to learn what is really valuable and what you know what is important and we do this by watching the expressions of emotion from other people expressions of emotion are are actually the the observable manifestation of cost-benefit analysis that is taking place inside those brands so whatever you see somebody experiencing a feeling they always are experiencing that feeling for a reason and the reason is that there is either a substantive cost or substantive benefit to their genetic success that is transpiring so if they're biting into an ice cream cone and they're smiling it's because their brains are cataloging that there's a lot of energy I eat calories in that food and that that appears to the stone-age brain to be of high biological value and that's why they're experiencing a pleasurable response and so you could watch their faces and you can see you can infer how good that food tastes by watching the emotional reaction of the people eating it now it's kind of silent to when when people people are trying to eat a healthy diet and I watch their faces when they eat old the discussions that they show oh god that's beautiful that's just hitting a little too close to home so so anyway that is that is correct and and so in in the same way that we are we are built to have resonant experiences of people that we are watching in order to so a little kid can be cheering wildly at a game that he doesn't really understand very well but his parents and it's been his big brother or cheering and for some reason they're cheering really really loud because their team just got a big hit and it looks like you know in the next few seconds the guys going to round the bases and they're going to win the World Series now this kids only like four or five years old so he doesn't know about the World Series he doesn't know how often it happens he doesn't understand the significance of this what he does understand the significance of is the emotional reactions of his dad and his brother that he does know okay so he's designed by nature to have his nervous system have responses that essentially resonate or track that because he's this is part and parcel of learning how valuable things are when you don't know for sure this is uh this is what I'm going to call computer checking it could also be called in empathic in a resonance but what the what the mind is doing is it's checking other other minds in its environment and it's finding out what's going on so so for example you can see in experiments on in emergencies that were done in the 1960s by Stanley Schachter actually Darlie and Latin a they did some very interesting experiments where they would have two people in a room and they would have a guy walked by the room with a ladder and then start working in the other room and then have the ladder fall and have and you know and essentially have a guy sound like using some pain and in in the original or the room where the two guys are waiting one of them is a Confederate and so one of them is just going to sit right there and read his newspaper or as a magazine and not move a muscle and the question is what will the other person do and if we are not moving a muscle and reading the newspaper that it's something like ninety percent of the time the other individual will not move they'll stay right there on the couch and they will just sit in that waiting room because they're supposedly waiting for some appointment whereas if they're in there by themselves they will actually rush into the other room and ask the guy if he needs help okay so this is an example and there's different interpretations of this but there are there's plenty of evidence to suggest that we look to other people for cues to find out how good or bad things are so in this case your sister was having a pretty acute grief reaction because she knew obviously she intuited what death is and that it's this bad thing and that it's a one-way ticket and you can't retract it so we can't fix it and so and so grandma is going to be gone now she doesn't know how bad that is for her survival and reproductive success but it's not good and she can tell because she can look at her environment of people close to her and she can see that they're actually pretty upset and maybe one of the people is very upset might have been your mother or maybe her grandmother okay so as a result she's on alert that this is really a bad thing and the emotional she will reaction she's having is because she's computing that this must be very expensive for her because it's expensive for somebody very close to her so that's that's what grief reactions are is they are they are just like any other feeling they are derived from cost-benefit analysis about gene survival and so that is their route and that route can take some strange places so for example about 20 years ago my father was suddenly in deep trouble and cardiovascular disease and he got an operation and he almost died and so he was very very close to death for several days and I was having huge grief reactions and the reason was is he was pretty young he was in his mid to late 60s and I was pretty sure that it was a mistake to have the operation but he did it anyway and so I was essentially doing Monday morning quarterbacking on all the decisions and so I had a lot of psychological turbulence thinking about what a horrible decision this was you know how it is that we made this mistake and what a tremendous loss it was and the loss to me was that he was still quite young he was his - too much of that body and mind were way too fit to be dying behind something as simple as cardiovascular disease something very very fixable with diet and lifestyle changes so fortunately he survived and he would live another 15 years and then he got sloppy again with his diet and then he died at 82 now when he died at 82 interestingly enough I had no grief reaction at all so I loved the old guy but he had he did the last half a year of his life was not worth living and when he finally passed away it was basically a relief and I was mildly sad that he was gone and I still think about him often but I did not have what you would call a grief reaction that's because I did this was this was already very well processed I had already analyzed the whole loss well in advance it didn't happen suddenly and so therefore there really wasn't there was no shock to my system that there was some big loss that I hadn't seen coming so a big component of grief reactions is how much has the loss already been analyzed and and a big reason why losses need to be analyzed is they need to be essentially prevented if possible and so if you've experienced a big loss and that loss was surprising then it's very likely the grief reaction is going to be quite acute because your nervous system is going to be basically trying to get your attention and say that we need to analyze the daylights out of why we had this loss because we never want to have a similar loss in the future so we clearly may have failed to take essentially you know protective measures against this mistake and so we you know we need to be very very you sort of guilty and miserable etc about the fact that this happened so that we are sensitized to these conditions and we don't make the same mistake again so these are the in other words what I'm trying to explain to people in a way that that we we do not let me explain briefly Nathan how psychologists typically will see this they will see feelings as sort of part of your life and you have to have them and then they have a really ridiculous idea that if you quote block your feelings this is not good for you physically like that this is how psychologists think they they are very uneducated about - right yeah so this is all really haywire thinking about how psychologists go about their analysis of why people feel and and why they they do the things they do this is all incorrect it's got there is no there's not a single scrap of evidence well I there's a tiny scrap of evidence that is essentially meaningless in this in this whole pile of craziness about quote how you have to feel your feelings and if you block them this is bad for you etcetera etcetera no the this is not what's going on feelings are our signal signals of genetic survival and and or M loss so every feeling that you have is a old circuit that is going off in response to data that is telling you that you've either had a slight win or slight loss or a big win or a big loss and so if you have a big loss and it was a surprise in any measure it did not seem like it should have happened then what your nervous system does is it analyzes the magnitude of the loss and it will then run a an assessment about how much mental energy it is worth searching for the cues and the clues that would have made this preventable okay and so it may search a long time like for example I had a woman a client that was in her must have been must have been 80 years old and she had been grieving the loss of a child that she had lost in an auto accident at about 50 years earlier and she apparently she'd been to but therapy and nothing and fix this and this was really very unpleasant process for you know her in her life she was routinely grieving this and this didn't make any sense to me other than the fact the brain was still questioning the decision-making that she had she had done and she was still Monday Morning Quarterback enos and I couldn't understand why now I'm not going to give you the details because the details if this person this person still could be alive and they could hear this and I'm not going to I want to protect their identity but the point is is that there were some social circumstances in this accident that when other people came to analyze it they essentially pointed the finger at her and it turned out that this is not this is not the case there were other people that had made mistakes in the situation that had led to this accident and all that needed to be was to be analyzed from an objective perspective and pretty soon it became obvious from the recounting that she had done everything humanly possible to stop this from happening now once I had taken her through and what I did is I went back through the entire accident and I'm fascinated that nobody had done this before by the way and so I took her back through this in a in a method similar to what Edna phowa uses with rape victims and nfo is a famous University of Pennsylvania professor that that revolutionized the treatment of PTSD and so what I did is I went through this what we would call frame by frame and every little decision everything that she could remember we fed this all into our analysis of what transpired and by the time we got done it was obvious to her as it was to me that she had made you know excellent moves and really you couldn't have improved her performance when that happened what was remarkable was that her grief essentially disappeared by the end of the session so this was 75 minutes and we were done and I checked in with her a week or two later and it turned out she remained done in other words the the haunting of her nervous system that have been going on for five decades quote a grief reaction that wouldn't leave and that that nothing could help turned out what it needed was it needed exactly what we do need when grief when grief will go on indefinitely when grief is going on indefinitely folks it's because there is a part of the mind is puzzled and it's like a jigsaw puzzle that you haven't solved and there is some part of this that you haven't quite grasped Org rocked it and you it the mind knows that it's closed and it keeps searching and it keeps searching and to keep searching it's like Einstein looking for the unified field theory it haunts them all you can haunt them all the way to their grave okay whereas when when you can if you and solve it if you can get somebody to help you solve it if you can actually see through what the nervous system is worried about and and where it feels like it's not sure that it got it figured out right if you can get it analyzed properly then you can close the loop and end the grief okay so that that is another function of grief let me I'll give you another quick example of a query interesting sure yeah I'll give you one more question I had a woman that I probably may have told this story before but I had in a different context but I had a woman that got married early in life and by her late 20s you know seven or eight years later her husband and they they got a divorce and they had been like highschool sweethearts so they'd been together kind of their whole lives and they got a divorce and then I came upon the scene about 15 12 12 15 years later I think is about 12 years later and she was the husband ed had gotten remarried and had a couple of kids lived on the other side of the country and this gal could not stop thinking about him and she dreamed about him constantly and and the problem is this is what an open-loop is so she was quote grieving a loss of this relationship and I said no what's happening is you are not sure that you didn't make a mistake okay so you you are haunted by the idea that you made a mistake you know it's been another 12 years you haven't found anybody as good and your nervous system is cycling and cycling over this and the only way to fix it is for us to go to go across the country meet him sit down a lunch and process it that's how you're going to do it okay so she did she packed up her car drove 3,000 miles and met this guy for lunch and by the end of lunch she was done okay in other words very quickly other words they they were very friendly the the wife knew that this is going to happen you know she wasn't hitting on him she just wanted to like connect and I said this is what this is going to be you're going to have this experience that shut that loop off forever okay and that loop had been open for like I said about 12 years so the this this makes sense that if we cannot understand something and it seems like it's very important that it will haunt us until we get the insight and the mind will continue to spend energy on it to the extent that it feels like it can solve it and and then very often the just to close this thought out that the mind will very in most cases it will start to fade down on how much energy it expends on on a grief process because it will find out that it can't solve it it can't solve it it can't do anything about it it will run the cost benefit and run the cost benefit on those energy expenditures and it will eventually fade this down to very quiet but not in all cases oh so one last thing and then you can ask your question my point here is to explain that grief reactions are no different in principle than any other reaction of any animal and that is that they have an evolutionary route they have an evolutionary purpose and their purpose is to aid and abet gene survival the purpose is not to quote protect the ego the question their purpose is not to quote you know I don't know feel the pain on or the dead or anything else under the Sun okay the any other explanations are incorrect to varying degrees the reason for grief reactions is because grief reactions evolved as a signaling device to aid and abet decision-making that would statistically increase the likelihood of survival and reproductive success for humans that's why human beings have these reactions so these reactions are principled they have a purpose and when they extend on our particularly painful it is because the loss generally was either particularly unpredictable or possibly preventable in other words unpredicted unseen not anticipated and and and the gloss to the individual was very significant and those are those are prime examples of factors that will lead a grief reaction to be extended and relatively severe hmm now my question is how about grief reactions with things that I guess science doesn't know yet for example or at least people believe they don't know about for example cancer or old age I guess old age is kind of it is it is but my mind is processing this and thinking okay well if I had somebody it was just somebody you know I was deeply close with and they were say you know 4050 years older than me and they passed away yeah how could I have prevented that I mean there there wasn't really you know they passed away of old age or they passed we have some cancer that can't be modified with with diet lifestyle changes right sure and so these are you're going to have grief reactions to people that are valuable that you lose and and those grief reactions are an inevitable part of the fact that you valued them highly so the you can't value someone highly and not care about whether or not you lost them okay so that that is the that's sort of the issue now I think that what's happening with some of the the consternation of grief reactions around say big the extended horror of someone dying of cancer is that you are you're seeing that the person is alive and that they are in a bad process and it feels very strongly like that process could be preventable in other words it could be stoppable and so as a result you are feeling the urgency in the panic that is like oh my god it's slipping away you know I'm saying and and every every indication that the person is losing the battle is is essentially reminding you the time is running short and that you you must you must find the solution and if you don't find the solution you're going to lose this individual and this individual is very valuable to you and so this is the this is the swirl of grief and you know the the horrendous process that we go through when someone very close to us is very ill is that we the fact that this is not like was a very different kind of a deal whereas if you know or our brother goes out you know to war and then he's been he dies and he comes back and we're like oh my god like what happened then how did this happen and oh my god I can't believe it's my brother and etc etc so we're having this huge grief reaction after the fact as we try to figure out you know how this could have been prevented whereas when we're watching someone who is alive and they're slipping away that's a different process there is a there's an urgency and a in a sort of a panic and a helplessness that are all going in swirling around essentially taking up workspace in the brain as as you you run the numbers on what could I possibly do is there anything that we could possibly do to to fix us and once again the more valuable the individual is the greater the grief reaction is going to be okay so if it's your uncle who you kind of like but he was kind of a jerk it's like ah well it's kind of too bad for Uncle Bill you know I mean and you feel a little bit bad for them you know but you don't feel that bad whereas if it's a beloved father you would feel tremendously bad okay it's like oh my god this is one of the four most valuable people in my world for god sakes or three or two or it might be the most valuable person in your world at which point the loss is tremendous and the mind says keep searching keep making sure you're not missing anything I'm saying keep looking keep looking we've got to find a way out of this problem and and that's that is the that that's how these processes are all a little bit different because they're all a little bit different angles on evolutionary problems one of them is it's too late and it's over and there's nothing to be done because the person is gone you know what could we have done differently how did this happen you know etc what on earth can I learn from this because I never want to experience a loss like this again and so that's one way the grief works but the other way that it works is it works right there in real time as we're staring at the individual as they're slipping away so they are two somewhat different processes all but the processes all have the common thread of essentially gene survival is being a lost and we don't like it and is there is there anything that somebody can do if they're presented with a problem that they really can't figure out yeah that's interesting I I think they're you know every each individual is different so there's different individuals have sort of a different amount of this is where the big five comes into this so if you happen to be an individual who's very emotionally unstable and you are very open to experience and then you're going to then you are going to be looking for every bizarre crazy cure in the world and you're going to be all excited when you find when you think you find something because you know somebody says if you give coffee enemas you know I mean it's going to get rid of their cancer and so you're going to want to get your your dad to try that you know I'm saying and you're going to be all excited about it and your etc but if you are not so open to experience where you are not so emotionally unstable then you are not going to be so turbulent in the experience so this is I can't remember in the 1980s there was a woman at the University of Michigan and forgotten her name she was for a long time probably the academia's most respected voice in grief and which I can't remember I haven't it it's been a long time since I took a final I can't remember her name that I should it'll come to me in the middle of the night tonight but Camille Wortman Camille Wortman that's who it is so anyway uh to try to sound smart fuck you baby do it you're faster than getting good good for you okay I'm almost positive I got that right so anyway so what what what she had done was done something that nobody had done well this is post kubler-ross and Wortman actually went and and gathered data on people that had gone through grief reactions and she watched them and she she took took psychological data on them had them fill out forms and did interviews so forth and she did this for an extended period of time after after losses and what she found was interesting uh and in she didn't have the kind of theory that that I've just given you that that this is all part of the the web of evolutionary design but what she did find was the following she found that she actually thought in terms of sort of personalities rather than in terms of a combination of personality and situation which was probably a weakness of her analysis I'd have to go back and read her papers and see how much she equivocated on these issues but as I recall she essentially said that there's sort of four different types of people and how they go through grief and I'm sure that's a mistake but she said there's people that have very mild grief reactions and that in two weeks they are pretty much as good as they ever were and she then noticed that there was people that were horrendously depressed you know for two years and they would very very slowly come out of a grief reaction and then I forget there was a couple in between so she described these four different instead of four five stages agree Fortman had four categories of grief and unlike kubler-ross she actually had data so this was very you know legitimate science that was done and it was very interesting and there was some clinical utility out of this because what one of the things that she discovered was the the people the two weeks later she actually found that people were having in other words just as that this was a very important insight and discovery actually and that is that people were very often having just as many positive mood states as they were normally but they were also having waves of negative mood states and one of the problems is is that they could be like their their beloved mother of might had died six days ago and then they go out with their friends for a friend's birthday party and they're like laughing and joking and having a good time and somebody might say god you seem fine I thought you were all bent out upset about your mother dying and here's the deal they were upset about their mother dying but they are actually not they aren't uniformly constantly upset about their mother dying they can be moved into different social situations different situations with having different neural circuits fire and be quite unconscious of that at that period of time that their mother died in other words it's still there that's in their mind but it's extremely quiet and they can be having a very positive experience and and and then if you pointed out interestingly enough they can feel guilty because it's as if they don't care about their mother which is not true and so the the very interesting thing about wormans work is that I was able to use this clinically with people in my career where they were having this to them like I'm I'm laughing you know with my friends but my loved one just died read very recently in the last few days or last couple weeks and I would say this is actually very common uh this is a common thing that that your your your emotional life is quite compartmentalized so notice you can be really upset with you know some clerk at Macy's and then you can walk out and then there's a message on your phone from some girl Nate Nathan I'm just giving your thought that everyone right that that you wanted to hear from and suddenly boom you switch and you see the ove this flirtatious text from this great girl and you're like suddenly you're happy yeah I'm saying so we just shift the situation and suddenly your emotional state you've still got lingering irritation with the clerk but it's it's dialed down by ninety percent now that we're looking at our cell phone looking at the look of the text message so this is explaining the human emotional life can go through very very rapid shifts as we can see in any football game bitch we can uh we're all high because we just scored a touchdown oh god you know they just scored a touchdown on now so we're going really well we're almost going to score we're all happy oh we fumbled now we're miserable so you're seeing these dramatic shifts of emotion depending upon circumstances human beings do the same thing during the life processes when they have are experiencing or have experienced a major loss and so we will not see them put on a black veil and be miserable for X period of time okay that is not how human beings work human beings are there their emotional light is shifting constantly and if they've had a major loss they will ruminate on that loss to varying degrees depending upon you know how big the loss was and how expected or unexpected it was yeah my my dad has a interesting idea as to what he wants to do his feet had his own funeral and they my dad's hilarious my mom and him would always just jokingly argue at the dinner table and he said I don't want anybody crying in my funeral I will have lived a good life so he's joked several times about having a hidden video in there in you know in their home where he sits there and makes all kinds of says all kinds of things that he's always wanted to say makes all kinds of dirty jokes that he never could do ah and says all kinds of yeah getting humor and his Liz Dale will say that you have to play this at my funeral he was happy oh what a character I've never heard of anything quite like that Nate and I think that is brilliant and and just fascinating fantastic what a character Wow what a great idea I think I'm gonna I think I'm gonna copy that cuz God knows people are going to be miserable my funeral goodness that's cry either for sure for sure I promise oh yeah you'll bring a date ring one for us to do yes I don't wanna name the Mabel or or Goodwin you know no no Mildred Mildred yeah oh my goodness all right Zach is that good or do that that is that look that's great I think that that's great any kind of final thoughts as to what people can do for for their own griefs it sounds like it sounds like what you're saying is for if people are dealing with extreme amount of grief is to cycle through and to see what if from an objective standpoint what could have been done to prevent this yes so that they know 4x time right and if they can't cycle through this to go on your website and talk to you yeah you steam dynamics org sure item II you could just describe to what what is got you caught on a loop and I may be able to appoint you a direction or or at least give you you know maybe worth finding a therapist hopefully a competent one cognitive behavioral is the the direction that I typically like to go and in other words get some help because you are not designed to these these reactions were designed to get your attention and to be part of a normal loss process they were not designed to have you cycle for years on these things and if you're cycling for a very very long time then absolutely get some assistance and see if we can we can think our way out of it because we probably can mm-hmm and any any words that you have for friends who have experienced extreme loss and grief how to console them how to support them best um I'm trying to think about that I don't I think all you're really you mean like if you have a friend of yours just experienced maybe they lost their mother or something there's really there's nothing special that we do we follow our instincts and do a pretty good job of this this is just all about letting them know that that they that we are these are times when people signal to each other you know how important how important are we to each other and sort of what what does the coalition matrix look like and so when if our friend loses their their mother and we know that they are in you know in in pretty tough shape then all we need to do is to communicate with them that we're really sorry for their loss that is there are things that we can do yeah I'm saying and the better the friend it is the more energy you spend actually doing things rather than saying you know when it's your when it's like your 14th best friend what you say is gee you know let me know if there's anything I can do when it's your 4th best friend you should say hey I'm going to take care of this and I'm going to take care of that okay so you signal by your actions how valuable they are to you and that that's how they will this will help their emotional life stabilize and realize that they're valuable that you're sending them an esteem signal and in your actions will speak very loudly there
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