How to Manage Grief

I want to introduce you to a way to think about something that's incredibly inevitable. I mean, totally inevitable. We all will experience grief because sadness is part of life. And sadness based on loss, which is grief, of course, is something that we don't have to go looking for in point of fact will find us. Grief is losing something or someone that you love. We typically think about it as because our loved one's dying, but it could be your company goes bankrupt. It could be being fired from your job. These can be real sources of grief, and it can be little or big, as a matter of fact. It's the loss, the involuntary loss of something you cherish. Now, why am I talking about it? Because when we talk about it, the research can give us a tremendous amount of value in understanding what it is, why it happens, how it's normal, and how to deal with it. And that's my goal here. Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. I'm a behavioral scientist and that's what I get to do all day. That's what this show is all about. That's what I write about and teach about as well. I'm so glad to have you here. Thank you for joining me this week and I hope every week for ideas on how you can learn how to live a better life using science, how you can change your habits, and just as importantly as anything else, how you can teach these ideas to other people. One way that you can lift other people up is by sharing this show with others, which I appreciate you doing very much. That's why I do it, is to get the broadest possible audience of people who are dedicated to the pursuit of happiness in our lives and the lives of other people as well. Please do share this episode or any episode that you want with your friends. 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That's grief. and if i do my job i want to introduce you to a way to think about something that's incredibly inevitable i mean totally inevitable we all will experience grief because sadness is part of life and sadness based on loss which is grief of course is something that we don't have to go looking for in point of fact will find us i want to talk about what's happening when you're feeling grief how long it's likely to last but most importantly when it inevitably does come knocking at your door what you can actually do to turn grief from unmitigated loss into a means of growth a means of development as a person and how you can actually help other people in subsequent areas of grief in their lives in other words how we can make what seems like a terrible curse maybe even into a blessing so that's today's show i was struck some years ago um in 2010 to be specific of something i read about the terrible fukushima earthquake and tsunami that overwhelmed the nuclear plant on the coast of japan and wound up killing 20 000 people you remember this it was just maybe you don't remember it but it was horrible it was like one of the worst in a developed country, an unimaginable disaster. There was an artist in Japan named Itaru Sasaki, who had members of his family that perished in this terrible tragedy. And he was trying to figure out some way to make that loss more meaningful. He made an art installation that wound up having a profound impact on the entire region. He created something he called the kaze no denwa, or the wind phone. What it was, was in his town, which had lost 10% of his population, by the way. I mean, no joke. Everybody lost somebody in his town. He set up a phone booth with a phone that recorded people's calls but wasn't hooked up to anybody else. And in the wind phone, he asked people to come and to call their dead relatives and leave them a message. 30,000 people have done it to date. 30,000 people have gone. It'll be old men who are totally stoic and will be weeping into the phone as they're talking to their wives or their children or something. And it was this incredible opportunity to create a means of communication where one hadn't existed, even though everybody doing it knows they weren't talking to their family member, but they were expressing something that probably they had never been able to express. And it was an emblem of this universal human experience. It tied people all around the world when they saw this. You know, crazy art installation. No, it was an example of the experience that we all have in life. It was a humanness that was exhibited in that. Grief that those people felt, that you have felt, that you will feel, creates a psychological or physiological disequilibrium. It is the case in which you are supposed to be with someone or have some set of circumstances permanently. You've accommodated yourself to a kind of a permanence with someone or something and it's taken away. Grief is losing something or someone that you love. We typically think about it as because our loved one's dying, but it could be your company goes bankrupt. It could be being fired from your job. These could be real sources of grief and it can be little or big. as a matter of fact. It's the loss, the involuntary loss of something you cherish. That's what grief is all about. Now, when it comes to the death of a loved one, I mean, it's as normal as can be. Look, 3 million people die each year in the United States alone, one in one hundredth of the population. And according to pretty good research, this is research in the Journal of the American Medical Association, an article called Treatment of complicated grief, a randomized controlled trial. Each person who dies on average leaves five people bereaved. And that means that at any given time, 15 million Americans are experiencing fresh grief. 15 million Americans. That's extraordinary. That's 5% of the population. You look right, you look left. One in 20 people is freshly grieving, which shows how ubiquitous it is. And yet it feels so strange and it feels so unusual. And people feel so uniquely unfortunate when it actually happens, even though it's almost the most normal thing that we could expect. When we talk about prolonged grief, which is lasting, where the ill effects are lasting psychologically, lasting more than a year, that afflicts about one in 10 bereaved people where the mourner's suffering really remains high over an extended period. Now, why am I talking about it? Because when we talk about it, the research can give us a tremendous amount of value in understanding what it is, why it happens, how it's normal, and how to deal with it. And that's my goal here. Let's distinguish between a couple of different things. Bereavement and grief are not the same thing. Bereavement is the experience of loss. There's the experience of losing somebody that you love, for example, a parent dying, God forbid, a child dying. grief is the physiological or psychological or social response to that experience so you see how this works it's like you you experience the loss and then you have an experience subsequent to that loss what do you do the response to that experience that's what grief actually is there have been some pretty famous studies on this that probably you have heard of the most The most famous study of grief comes from the Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler who wrote On Death and Dying a very very famous book that has actually taken a lot of criticism over the years because it's not perfect. I'll talk about that a little bit, probably more in a minute. But she did fundamental work in this book On Death and Dying, where she talked about the fact that people who are experiencing grief, they typically pass through five stages. This is really interesting because, you know, the idea that there's an algorithm to grief, it just shows how funny we are as people, right? People feel uniquely unfortunate when they're grieving, but they, they, they don't behave uniquely is what Elizabeth Kubler-Ross found. She was studying people who learned they were going to die. I'm going to die, that kind of thing. By the way, you're going to die. So am I. But it was, they were given a death sentence for whatever reason, the cancer diagnosis that was terminal or whatever, but it applies to all sorts of grief. You know, somebody dies that you're close to. It's the same basic process. The five stages are when something creates grief in your life. The first thing you naturally do is deny it. Like, no, it can't be real. It can't be real. No, no, it can't be real. That goes by pretty quickly and it goes into anger where you're angry that this is befalling you. The universe has treated you unfairly. The third stage is bargaining. It's weird because people will actually bargain and say, okay, God, or whomever, if you'll take this away, then I'll behave in a particular way. And they'll fantasize often about what if they actually could change something? What would I give? They'll say, part of the bargaining will be like, what would I give to not have this happen? And they'll be like, people will say this all the time when they're in the bargaining phase of grief. I would literally give everything I own if I had not incurred that loss, to not incur that loss. That's evidence of this kind of bargaining. Even though they realize they can't do it, They're still thinking in that way because that's a natural part of the cognitive algorithm of grief. The fourth is just when sadness comes in, when there's this activity of the part of the limbic system that experiences affective pain is there. And last but not least is acceptance, where you accept that this is actually going to happen. Newer research has suggested that not everybody goes through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression in the same order. And furthermore, that they actually go by pretty quickly for most people. And the newer research shows that most people get to acceptance pretty fast when there's something like this. They accept that somebody has died. They accept that they're going to die. And that acceptance is a period of tremendous generativity, typically. Now, I want to talk about that later because I want to talk about how you can prepare yourself for acceptance in a way that you grow as a person. And that, in point of fact, can enhance the joy of life for whatever time that you've got left. When medical providers in the literature, and this comes from a pretty interesting article from 2017, as always, I'll put it in the notes, they see a pretty common symptoms of grief, which is a separation response. One is yearning for that with which you've been separated. One is longing. Yearning and longing are sort of different, aren't they? There's sadness, of course. And then here's the interesting part. There's hallucinations. this is typically the case that that there's disorientation when you lose something that you consider to be part of your life it's like losing a bit of your cognitive ability that's what we what we often see which is why when one of your aging parents dies the other one might talk about the person like they're still alive that's a benign hallucination very very common um you'll be alarmed if that happens to one of your aging parents but it shouldn't alarm you because it's extremely normal that that would actually happen acute grief really acute grief in its early stages can actually resemble mild dementia in this way it's not dementia don't worry there's not a destruction of the neurons in the substantia nigra this is not you know we're we're not talking about that what it is is extreme disorientation because permanent became impermanent all of a sudden and that discrepancy between perceived reality and experienced reality leads to this disorientation that we're talking about here yearning longing sadness and and even hallucinations and you'll see this you know i remember this and remember my family um lost her mother and she said that her mother was actually walking around on the roof i'm like what are you talking about yeah she's up there like what with no history of hallucinations it's just common is the way that this turns out now what's the brain's response to grief and the answer to this actually comes if you've been following my work for a long time, affective pain. In other words, sensory pain is the ouch part of something that happens to you physically. The affective part is I hate that part. Different parts of the brain for the two kinds of pain, as a matter of fact. That affective response involves a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. Often that's actually narrowed down to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. It's a part of the limbic system designed to make you feel pain and mental pain, sadness. So which is weird, like why did we evolve sadness? And it makes sense, doesn't it? Because we're evolved to have an aversive response to losing things and people that we love. You have sadness because it's supposed to be really, really uncomfortable, terrible as a matter of fact, so that you will avoid the loss. When you can't avoid the loss, it becomes an inevitable source of pain is what it turns but but if you can't avoid the loss you will because you don't want to feel sad which is why you know if you didn't have any sadness or you weren't worried about sadness you didn't feel discomfort with your sadness you would say everything that you think all the time to your loved ones and you'd be fired and friendless and divorced in like a week and that would be bad for you so we've evolved sadness so that we will avoid loss so that we avoid grief is what it comes down to and that thing that we've that we've evolved is the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex which is the part of the brain dedicated to that kind of pain now there's also i'm going to come back to that in a second um but there is also a set of experiments that that are able to measure grief with respect to skin electrical uh conductivity believe it or not how well your skin conducts electricity will be indicative of how much interior pain you're feeling it's a kind of a physical measurement of how they do that article called behavioral triggers of skin conductance responses and their neural correlates in the primate amygdala and why is that because you're amped up and when you're really amped up in sadness um your brain i mean you're we can actually put wires on your skin and see how electrically how much current is passing through your skin or how well your skin conducts electricity. I guess it's neither here nor there, but it basically shows, once again, what I've been talking about over and over again, which is psychology is biology here. It's all one thing. It's not just in the ether. When we say it's in your head, we literally mean it's in your head. Now, you might think, once again, that debilitating grief is like a glitch, but it's actually a feature how we feel this pain. Once again, we need to feel pain because that's a survival imperative. So we're not left alone so that we have an aversion to loss. Grief is loss that we can't remediate and we can't avoid. When somebody dies, you can't get it back. And so the result of that is unremitting mental pain. Your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is not calming down. Well, it actually is, but it just takes time. So when you lose somebody that you love, it's like a jetliner has crashed and there's a pinging black box in the bottom of the ocean. Ping, ping, ping. But the battery wears down. And so the pinging is less and the pinging is less. And sooner or later you will recover. I'm going to talk about that in a second. I'm going to talk about two things. How fast does it take for the pinging to stop? But I'm also going to talk about how you feel about the pinging stopping because there's a pretty interesting phenomenon where people grieve because they're not grieving. But more on that in a second. So the whole point is, If you're grieving, that's completely normal. That's physiologically healthy. That's your brain working properly. And it's not supposed to do that forever. It's doing that just in case you can actually get the person back. And when they die, for example, and you can't, then it will wear away. How fast? How fast? For most people, pretty fast. As a matter of fact, there's one 2019 study of depression in women who were widowed. And women actually get over this much faster than men. I mean, you've probably seen this in couples that you know, where women who are widowed are actually able to recover faster or better than their husbands. Men do worse. And part of the reason is that women have thicker social networks. They tend to have more friends. They have more people that they can rely on when they're feeling grief. Men, way, way, way fewer. And if your wife dies and you're left utterly alone in the world, that's why mortality increases so dramatically among widowers compared to widows. But the study in 2019 of depression of widowed women says that in the first month after the death of the spouse, there's a 38% decrease in mental pain. Sadness decreases by 38%. That's a lot. In one month, you know, oh, I'll never feel better. Yeah, probably won't like significantly in a few weeks. Within the next two months, there's an additional 25% decrease. By a year and a half later or a year later, there's an 11% decrease on top of that, meaning that in about a year, the average woman who loses her husband in one year will be 74% less sad, according to these studies. And that kind of figures. I mean, that's kind of what we see. And part of the reason for that is that a lot of evolutionary biology suggests that one of the reasons that women tend to live longer than men is not just because men, you know, randomly shoot guns and drive fast and take more drugs and alcohol, is because women have been evolved past childbearing years to assist in extended family care for grandchildren, for example. It's kind of normal for women to be widowed more than it is for men to become widowers And so you need a mechanism in which their sadness is not unremitting Evolution has actually provided a mechanism by which women can recover They don forget their husbands If they love their husbands they don't forget their husbands. But they're not going to be disabled by the sadness for that long. And I hope you take comfort in that, by the way. That's an important thing to keep in mind, that we're supposed to be sad, but we're not supposed to be sad forever. Now, the second thing that's worth keeping in mind is that people who are bereaved and experiencing grief, they very frequently experience what's called post-traumatic growth. In other words, loss itself actually leads to generativity and gain. And a lot of people are ashamed of this, as a matter of fact. They don't want to admit that good things happen to them as a result of the loss. But this is nothing to be ashamed of at all. This is something to actually celebrate. There's five areas of life that will often get much better in the years after the loss of a loved one. A really bad grief experience. This is somebody you truly love. Number one is a greater appreciation for your own life. You savor life. Savoring is important to happiness. The second is improved relationships, that you pay more attention to the relationships that currently exist. You're paying attention to the fact that your remaining relationships are scarce and it's important to be enjoying them. The third is a recognition of new possibilities. People don't, when they think about the permanence of their circumstances, which is embodied in the people around them, they don't often think about new possibilities in their lives and they have an impetus, they have a stimulus to think about new possibilities when the permanent becomes impermanent, if you know what I mean. So that's not a question of using somebody's death as an excuse to do new stuff. It's a recognition that there are possibilities in your life and people find that as a source of post-traumatic growth. The fourth is personal strengths. People find they have strengths that they didn't know that they had because they have to do something they never thought they'd have to do. You know, I've talked to women, for example, they lose their husbands and they have to take care of finances and maybe take care of a family member and provide for family and do arrangements. And I was like, I didn't know I could do that. I didn't know I could do the family taxes. It's new strengths because they had never done that before or vice versa. personally i don't do the family finances so um number five is spiritual development people most frequently become more spiritually adroit in loss and and there's some hypotheses about what that might be the case loss illuminates the same hemisphere of your brain the right hemisphere in which you have transcendent religious experiences and so loss itself when it's unremitting and especially when you submit to the loss you don't fight the pain you don't fight the pain you you practice non-resistance to the pain, you finally say, no mas. It's weird. When you're helpless, in helplessness, there lies a little bit of bliss. When you give into it, this is why Christian people often say, Lord, I leave this grief at the foot of your holy cross. That's a kind of bliss, isn't it? And there's a version of that in your philosophy. There's a version of that in your faith. Your spiritual development is part and parcel with the religious experiences that you're going to have, your grief might lead you into the enlightenment and the transcendence that you seek. That's common. That's good. So what are you going to do? How are you going to use all this information? How are you going to change your life with this? Here are four ways, based on the science I've talked about, that you can find meaning in grief and grow through grief. How you can be better at grief because again the wrong answer is to avoid grief it's not going to happen like if you're a normal person if you're not a sociopath you're gonna grieve because you're gonna experience loss the question is not whether you will but what you'll do when it does when this happens when this befalls you and i'm going to give you four things to keep in mind right now four very practical suggestions plus one more so number one is look for meaning is actually look for meaning what does this mean when you lose something? What does this experience actually mean? This is a search for coherence. Why do things happen the way that they do? And again, you're not going to be able to answer this question perfectly. And the contrary, these are mysteries. You know, the book of Job in the Hebrew Bible, where Job suffers and suffers and suffers, and his children are taken from him, and everything he owns, and his relationships are destroyed, and his friends show up to explain he must have done something wrong. And this goes through chapter after chapter. But the 38th chapter of Job, God and Job talk. God comes to Job in a whirlwind, right? And Job, I mean, he's got some stones, man. I mean, he puts God in a dock and he says, like, I was everything. I did everything right. I was your servant and you took everything away from me. Explain yourself. And God says, it's very funny actually, because God is actually, I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but it's worth mentioning again. God is sarcastic with Job. He says, oh, okay. Okay. I'll give you an explanation. You're so smart that you deserve an explanation from God. Obviously, fine. I will explain your loss and your grief and your pain after you explain to me why I created the heaven and the earth. You're so smart. Tell me, why did I create the fishes in the ocean and the stars in this guy. You're so smart. Lay down me, Einstein. And what he's saying is, it's a mystery. It's a mystery. In mystery, we can actually find meaning, look for meaning. There's a wonderful study from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst that interviewed college students who had recently lost a parent and asked them their sense of meaning in the world, how just the world is, how random, how controllable. It asked them meaning questions of coherence and purpose and significance. And what did they find? They found that the students that were asked to look for meaning in their grief, that their grief was less intense. That a search for meaning itself was one of the ways, as I talked about a minute ago, that that pain per se was the source of generativity and that provided relief itself, these big why questions. A common way to deal with this is to is to ask spiritual religious questions why does this happen what is the mystery and then to lay it at the foot of the holy cross or whatever is your means for doing just that the version of that number two change your identity this one's interesting that when a loved one dies you change why because it's an illusion that you are two people let me tell you my wife Fester and I, we're one flesh, man. We're two right hemispheres of our brain. We're two hearts beating as one. We are. It's an illusion. You know, the old Zen Buddhist Cohen, what is the sound of one hand clapping? That's an absurd question, except it's not because what it is, that answer to the Cohen is the sound of one hand clapping is an illusion. There's only a sound when you add a second hand, and that is the illusion of your individuality, and especially with your soulmate, with the person that you love the most, or anybody that you truly love, that is your second hand clapping. And when that hand is taken away, that trueness of the unit is changed. You're different. You're a different person when you're experiencing grief. So be different. That's what this research talks about, about older adults when they lose somebody, that they would consciously embrace a different kind of identity. They would do different things. often that they would never have gone cycling. They would never have joined a bridge club. They never would have gone square dancing ever because the old man, he wasn't into it. And because that's not who they were. Well, that's not who they are anymore. Now, that makes people feel guilty. And by the way, that leads to lots of resentment among adult children when an aging parent dies and the other one actually starts going out and having fun for the first time, but it's completely healthy. It's not any sort of casting of aspersions on the dead spouse. On the contrary, it's an example of somebody actually using grief as a force for good and a recognition that, yeah, we were one. We were one. He died. And now I'm not the same person anymore. I'm truly meaningfully changed. Now, there's lots of things that you can do where you change your identity that are not so great. You can race into a brand new marriage. i recommend that that often leads to grief itself um if it's a mistake but going out more with friends or getting into new activities but becoming a new person through it can be generative here's number three and this comes from the work of my colleague at the harvard business school mike norton who talks about adopting rituals he has a wonderful new book about about rituals per se i'll put it in the show notes that when people adopt morning rituals by that i don't mean like in the morning, I mean, like morning, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, even trivial sounding ones, that they're tremendous meaning making things in the lives of a grieving individual, almost certainly because they interact with the functioning of the brain. When you're doing something in a repetitive way, it creates a sense of meaning in the brain that's actually experiencing this unremitting pain in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. I mean, again, this research has not been done. I'm only triangulating across a couple of different areas of science, but it makes perfect sense that this could be the case. So, you know, some people, they'll have religious rites. If you're Jewish, you'll sit Shiva when somebody dies. As a Catholic, when somebody dies, I will pray a rosary for their holy soul for a certain number of days, or a novena for a person's soul. Maybe you'll play a favorite song on particular days to remember the person. Maybe you'll write letters to the loved one, or maybe you'll go to the Japanese wind phone and leave a message. But people who do this, by the way, they get not just relief, they get understanding, they get comprehension of what this is all about. This mystery this complex mystery becomes easier to comprehend than it was before One of the studies that Mike Norton and his colleagues have done it shows that when rituals become part of the grief process that people tend to believe it or not they estimated that people actually experience 28 less grief or 28 greater understanding of grief or something relief in some way shape or form Here's number four. This one's really important. And I mentioned it before, and I want to come back to it. I wanted to come back to it. Grief doesn't have to be permanent, and you shouldn't grieve the loss of your grief. Now, what a lot of people do is they say, I missed the pinging of the black box in the bottom of the ocean. Something's wrong with me and I don't feel it anymore. And part of the reason is because the last memory that they feel that they have of a person, for example, that they lost was the sadness of the loss of that person. And they feel like they're being disloyal almost, or that they're forgetting that person because they're losing the intense grief. It's like the person's fading. They're fading. I don't want it to fade. And I feel guilty because it's fading. but the truth of the matter is that this is supposed to happen your dorsal anterior cingulate cortex shouldn't be lit up like a christmas tree for the rest of your life that's not the way it's supposed to work the person you loved and and lost wants you to be happy again this is normal you have to let yourself actually become happy again and not hold on to grief through a sense of guilt or a sense of loss of the memory itself when grief starts to subside that's a signal that things are working correctly, not that things are working incorrectly. You're not supposed to suffer forever. Allow yourself to recover. Here's one more idea. One of the most effective ways to treat grief is by treating other people with grief. The kind of grief that is typically the worst is when somebody loses a child. I lost both my parents. Many of you have lost your parents. And it's sad, but it's not a tragedy in its way, unless it happens way, way, way too young. But even then, It's natural that the older generation dies before the younger generation, but there's something that feels profoundly unnatural and thus is extremely psychologically and even physiologically disequilibrating about the experience of losing a child. And this is the kind of grief that people say that is hardest to recover from. Lots and lots of studies actually show this. But there's one thing that consistently helps people suffering the most intense grief for the loss of a child, and that's helping other people who've lost children. I've recommended this a lot because I've seen it in literature, but I've also seen it in real life, that when somebody loses a child, they'll be in intense pain a year later, but it will be better if they find people who have had fresh loss. Say, I understand. I understand. And they hold their hand and they listen. Listening turns out to be the way to actually do that. when somebody is grieving and you're helping them, whether it's the loss of a child or either a kind of grief, if you're relieving your own grief by helping somebody whose grief is fresher, you got to know the best way to do that. And the best way to do that is very clear in the literature as well, which is listening, sitting in silence, holding somebody's hand. There's a tendency to want to chatter and chatter and chatter and help and talk and talk and talk. And that's completely unnecessary. I don't have to show you the studies, you know, in your heart that is true. just listen, be present, and listen to somebody whose grief is fresher, and this will help them, and this will help you. You know, the Japanese wind phone simulated a healing listener. Ear-attentive silence can be the real thing. A couple of questions before we finish. This is from Ryan Authis, who wrote into the website. Do you know of any evidence that shows how successful people may be more inclined to be sure that they will succeed again if any venture is undertaken. Yeah, there's a whole lot of literature from the world of entrepreneurship that shows that when people have a couple of failures, that they're actually better at dealing with failure. And when they've had a couple of successes, they get better success. And this is really important because that means that you need a couple of failures so that you can avoid future mistakes. And that's good for your success, but also you have kind of an emotional fortitude. But once you've succeeded a couple of times, you know how that feels. That's reps is how it works out. It's also the case in careers. I mean, my first career, when I left the classical music business and I went back to graduate school to become an economist, this was brutal. I didn't know if I was going to succeed, but each career change after that, when I would quit and start again, take it down to the studs, those earlier successes made it, gave me the reps so that I kind of know how to succeed. So that's absolutely the case. So what I'm telling you is you need both failure and success is what it comes about. You need lots and lots and lots of experiences for you to get the success that you seek. You need to be good at failure and good at success and trying a lot of stuff and not being afraid is the way that you deal with that. Okay, here's from Anonymous. Once again, this comes to the email address. Kind of a long note, but I'll read it to you nonetheless. I was raised in a strong Catholic family, but I've decided to stop attending Catholic church and I'm in a struggle to find what it is that makes me feel small or helps me ascend like you suggest in your faith and spiritual practices. As I prepare to propose to my girlfriend, congratulations, my parents strongly oppose the idea of us not marrying in a church, but it doesn't feel right to do so when I'm no longer an active member. I'm struggling to balance my excitement with the anxiety of potentially hurting them. I hear this a lot. I got a question. How do you think you might feel in 10 years? The great, maybe the greatest hockey player who ever lived, Wayne Gretzky, he was asked, how do you know where to go all the time you're always like magically in the right place on the ice they said no no i just skate to where the puck is gonna be it's funny because it sort of makes sense but you know you see the puck and you skate toward the puck you know he goes he looks where the puck is gonna be and he skated there that's good advice for life so i get it you're not going to church you're not going to church you don't want to go to church you decided not to go to church probably bombing out your mom but you know just don't you'll have no schism as long as you don't tell her that her values are stupid, you know, live your life and let other people live theirs. I've talked about this on the show before, but ask yourself this, have I ruled it out for the rest of my life? Or have you said, I don't want to go to church now. In 10 years, where do you think you're going to be? Now that's a strategic decision for you to think a little bit about what you'll be glad you did earlier. There is no hypocrisy in getting married in the church. Look, there's no hypocrisy in not getting married in the church. This is a decision you have to make, but remember, life is long. I would discuss this with your fiancé. Where do we think we want to be? Go be that now, or at least set yourself up to be comfortable being that later, and that might help you inform your decision and to proceed in a spirit of peace. finally alan asks how can i move past recent failures and regret that feel constant self-doubt and paralysis especially if i take radical responsibility and self-blame for everything that's gone wrong i hear this a lot i get it you know self-blame and condemnation uh and people are prone to this now i could dig into your childhood and make all kinds of predictions about when you were a little kid yada yada yada it doesn't matter we are where we are right now there's three things to do when something doesn't go right and you go into the cycle of self-blame what are you doing you're treating yourself like your worst enemy you're treating yourself that alan i bet you never treat anybody else this way i bet you never say to anybody that in your life you moron you're single-handedly responsible for everything that's going wrong you wouldn't do that because you're not a jerk you're a good person right so that requires that you start treating yourself like that you need to be metacognitive which is to say see yourself in the third person and treat yourself as if you were in the third person. This is how you heal this. What do you do? Number one, something goes wrong. Got it. Nope. Something's going to go wrong for me today. Guaranteed. You too. Number one is understanding. What happened? Why did it happen? Coldly. I mean, you have to suss it out. There's no blame. Understanding is not blame. Write it down. two acceptance it went wrong it went wrong right still no blame number three forgiveness instead of blame i'm going to forgive myself right that doesn't mean i don't understand it doesn't mean i don't i don't i'm not going to try to be better because only then after forgiveness could you actually make resolutions for future action now what have i done i've understood the problem i've accepted the situation which is very important i've forgiven myself for screwing up if i even I did screw up, by the way. And I made a resolution for actually how I can be better in the future. This, by the way, is the great way that in religions you confess your sins. Say, okay, what happened? I get it. I accept it. I'm sorry I did it. And I'm going to forgive myself. But most importantly, I'm going to make a resolution not to do it again. And that's what you need to do. And until this becomes natural, you need to go through the algorithm. One, two, three, four. And metacognitively, consciously, thinking about thinking. I'll work this into the way that you're living your life come to the end of office hours another episode I hope you've enjoyed it I hope it's been useful to you um if you know somebody who's experiencing grief please do share if you find it useful um because we need to help each other through this let me know your thoughts at officehours.arthurbrooks.com or write your comments any place where you're seeing this or listening to this like and subscribe on Spotify youtube or apple and leave a comment please do i mean on anything for example comments criticism suggestions questions love it all follow me on social media platforms on instagram and linkedin any place else where you get your content um scroll me and let's learn together a little bit and order the meaning of your life finding purpose in the nation of emptiness my my brand new book on the meaning of your life and the meaning of mine as well i hope you have a wonderful week i hope that you have a generative week whether you're grieving or not i hope that you find meaning in everything that you do you lift other people up in the bonds of happiness and love that you need and so do they we'll see you in a week