Hello, welcome back to the podcast. You’re listening to Practically Happy with Miranda Anderson. This is episode number 268. Today, I want to introduce an idea about a new way to journal. I’ve talked many times on the podcast about journaling your gratitude and the many research evidence-based benefits of developing a practice of gratitude.

Today’s episode takes that practice a little bit further, maybe widens it into a little bit more holistic practice where we invite room not only for gratitude, but also for grief. You wouldn’t be wrong in thinking it is a little bit paradoxical to talk about grief in a podcast about happiness.

The truth is that real happiness, a full well-being in all aspects of our lives, includes all aspects of the human experience and an acceptance of things that go wrong in addition to excitement and enthusiasm and focus on things that go right. In today’s show, I’ll share some stories, ideas, some research, and an invitation.

Segment: Mindful Moment

To get us started today, I thought that we would do a mindful moment. One of the best ways that we can create space for all our experience, all our emotions, is to learn and practice being present. Finding space to be still enough to be in touch with where we are, how we’re feeling, and make some mind, body, spirit connections.

So, for the next 90 seconds, I want to invite you into a place of stillness and presence. If you’re driving, you can do this with your eyes open, try to do a moving meditation. If you’re walking, same thing. If you are in a place where you can just take a minute to put everything down and either stand firmly with your feet planted or find a place to sit, close your eyes gently.

Close your eyes and take a big, deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth.

Focus on the feeling of the air passing through your nostrils.

See if you can envision it coming up into your sinuses and swirling around, flowing down your throat, in through your lungs, and your lungs expanding to capacity.

All that oxygen passing through those membranes into your cells and flowing through your whole body, enlivening your system.

Such an important thing, our breath, that happens automatically, breath after breath all day long, and we can bring our attention to it and feel it.

If you have other thoughts creeping in your to do list or a worrisome relationship or other things, come in, acknowledge those thoughts, non-judgmentally, and dismiss them for now. Redirect your thoughts back to your breath, and the feeling of it expanding through your body, and then releasing.

Take three more deep breaths with me and feel yourself here in this moment and nowhere else. One, two, and three.

Let your eyes flutter open, move your fingers and your toes, bring yourself back into awareness of your breath. Present state, where you are, what you’re up to, and feel the peace and calm that comes through giving yourself a moment of presence, just a moment of mindful breath. Thank you for breathing with me today.

Grief like Waves

When I was in Costa Rica this summer, one of our favorite things to do was surf. I had a great time.

I had had a handful of surfing experiences before this trip. I had taken a surfing class when I was a teenager in Santa Barbara. I had taken a surfing class in Hawaii maybe another one a few years ago in Costa Rica.

When I lived in Costa Rica in college, I– along with my brother and a couple friends– bought a surfboard, a shortboard, and we would play around with it. We didn’t really know what we were doing, but so I’d been surfing a couple times, a handful of times. I really enjoyed it.

A few years ago, when one of my good friends turned 40 out in Huntington Beach, her girlfriend, now wife, took us, who’s a professional surf instructor, took us and we did an afternoon of surfing at the beach, and it was so fun.

That was like the most recent surf experience I had and I’m just a big fan. So, it was delightful. I had a chance to practice surfing when we were there in Costa Rica for a whole month. We spent the first week up in the jungle, but then the last three weeks we took lessons and then rented surfboards about every other day the whole trip.

My kids got into it, Dave got into it, we all really liked it, and it became something that I looked forward to in the morning, grabbing a board and going out and hitting the waves for a couple hours in, the afternoon, whenever the tide was right, which we got conflicting information.

I think it depends on the beach, but where we were, one instructor said it was great right around high tide when the waves were closer to the beach, but your ride length would be shorter because they were crashing like close to the beach.

And then another person said that for our stage, maybe it was because we’re a little bit more beginner. The lower tide, like around, lower tide was better because the waves were further out. This is a flat beach where we were in Nosara– Playa Guiones is what it’s called.

The waves would break further away so we could ride them for a little longer and then turn around and head back out.

One thing that I noticed as I was trying to get from riding just on the frothy inside the break waves to level up a little bit, get a little bit better and ride a bigger wave out beyond the break. My biggest challenge was not in riding the wave. It was in getting out to a place where I was beyond the break.

If you don’t have much experience with surfing or you’re not familiar with kind of these lines that happen right off the shore of the ocean. There’s usually a breaking point where the waves turn from these gentle swells into a frothy cap. And when you’re a beginner surfer on the beach we were on, you’d stay right inside.

You try to catch the wave as it was frothy, and you just ride that foam. A more experienced surfer will go out beyond that point. They go beyond the point where the waves are crashing into the point where they’re forming. You paddle onto the wave as it’s coming up and cresting and then ride down the smooth front of it before it’s turned over before it has made the foam.

And like I said, my biggest challenge this summer was getting out beyond the break. What I noticed was I would be paddling out or walking out the beach is shallow in this area, so you’re mostly walking out holding onto your board. You can be a hundred yards from shore and still be like up to your waist in the water.

And I would get to the point, the crash zone, where the waves were turning over and crashing onto me. The way I was taught to get through this area was to prepare for a crash by either pushing up straight armed onto my board so that I went through the foam up and over, or what I think is most common in different parts of the surfing world is flipping your board over so you’re riding underneath it, the wave crashes onto your board and you’re diving in through the middle of the wave.

So, it’s not crashing onto you you’re cutting through the middle of it, tunneling through in the water and then coming up on the other side.

I didn’t want to be underwater.

Here’s what I noticed about myself. I didn’t want to be underwater. That felt scary to me, which sounds ironic when you’re in the ocean and you’re surfing.

I didn’t want to be under the water. And so, I would try to prepare myself by pushing up on my board or kicking through it, almost riding it sideways, like I was trying to avoid, I was trying to avoid. the crash of the wave by pretending it wasn’t going to happen. So, I’d push up and kick, kick to get over the top of it.

And sometimes it worked, but more often I would get to where I was upright, pushing up on my board, lying flat, like a seal position on top of the board, trying to get over the wave and it would flip me over. And then not only would I be under the water, but I would be under the water unprepared and then be tossed around and be uncomfortable.

Add to that, that getting beyond these waves is a real strength workout, like your muscles are getting worn out, not only are you paddling, sometimes you’re pushing on your feet, walking on the ground, every time you’re underwater being tossed by the waves, you’re trying to figure out how to get back up where there’s air.

The whole process was difficult for me. And especially we had heard a couple of these days, the days that I was trying to go out beyond the break were tricky days. The instructor, maybe it was to make us feel better, but we would see him on the beach. He wasn’t teaching us that day, but he said, this is a rough day.

Like even professional surfers are experienced surfers are having a hard time getting out beyond the break today, just because of the nature of the wave patterns. I was pretty determined and there was one time that I looked at my watch and just thought I’m just going to paddle as long as I can I’m going to try to get through this I’m going to just deal with being tossed around as much as I can to get out there.

I worked on paddling, kicking, being tossed, getting back up, trying to go underneath the wave the way that I was taught, all these things for about 45 minutes. And at the end of 45 minutes, I was not beyond the break. I decided to just turn my board around, catch a frothy wave, ride it in, and sit on the sand and just pant for a while because it was exhausting.

It was easier when I decided to not try to avoid the waves crashing, but just accept this is going to crash, and so I’ve got to go under it, and I’m going to have to hold my breath, and I’m going to have to kick hard, and I’m going to have to be uncomfortable, but I’m going to be more comfortable accepting and acknowledging and passing through this discomfort open, being open to it as part of the process, then I will feel the discomfort of trying to pretend that it’s not happening and just getting slammed and crashed around and jumbled up inside the waves.

I still haven’t gotten very good at getting out beyond the break. But by the end of our trip, with the acceptance and preparation for those waves as they were coming, I was doing a better job.

How waves are like grief

I’m thinking about this experience that I had surfing. Because of a great quote from Joan Didion from the Year of Magical Thinking, which is a seminal book about grief.

In this quote, she says, “Grief is different. It has no distance. Grief comes in waves, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the daily of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of waves.”

As I wanted to talk today about having a grief and gratitude journal, I thought about this quote, about this book, which I really loved, and about the waves.

You may wonder did something happen? Is, did Miranda have some, traumatic thing go on in her life recently? A loss that we don’t know about. Not necessarily.

Grief is, the definition of grief is usually talked about as the anguish experienced after a significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person.

And grief includes psychological distress, separation, anxiety, confusion, yearning, obsessive dwelling on the past, apprehension about the future. And if you are currently experiencing or have experienced this type of deep personal loss, I’m so sorry. I’ve experienced the loss of all four of my grandparents with whom I was close.

Really sad, tragic losses of a nephew a couple years ago. And the most personal intense loss that I’ve experienced was a miscarriage between my two boys that affected me far deeper than I would have expected.

All in all, without glossing over those losses which are relevant, I do feel I’ve been lucky in the world of loss, to not have repeated brushes with those type of deep, intense personal deaths and losses.

Subtle Loss

However, the last few years have been filled with subtle losses for everyone, me included. COVID turned the world upside down in a way that we have not yet recovered from and may never truly recover back to a place that, as if it hadn’t happened because it did happen. The expectations of the way that life was going to look are now different than they had been a few years ago.

Along with that, life is filled with ups and downs and as a natural optimist, my usual focus is on, okay let’s move on from it. What now? What do we learn from it? How does it benefit us? All great skills. Really great, resilient skills. What I’m learning in my forties is that it’s also a great skill to create space and accept and acknowledge the disappointments and the losses along with the beautiful benefits.

Now, a couple of weeks ago, I talked about. giving space for the whole story, how I’d been telling the story of my last year, these last 12 months with a lot of, it’s been hard, here’s some things that have happened and that I wanted to balance that out with the, and it’s been great, refocus on both.

And today’s episode is similar in nature. It’s allowing space to refocus on both. Particularly though, I wanted to be specific about how we process Grief. How we allow space for it, and if we are allowing space for it, and what that looks like for each of us. I wanted to dig in a little bit to some research surrounding grief and what it looks like, what some recommendations are, and how it might be processed well.

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Another quote from the year of magical thinking is this:

“We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality, even as we push it away. Failed by our very complication. So wired that when we mourn our losses, we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves, as we were, as we are no longer, as we will one day is not at all.”

Change

 A change of situation, a new season of life even a new opportunity. comes hand in hand with some loss, some moving beyond the thing that we once were into the thing that we now are.

Even happy changes– for example– a baby going from that sweet army crawl to pulling up on furniture to walking across the room may have a young mother mourning subtly the loss of this first stage of that child’s life and recognizing that was so sweet and now that we’ve moved beyond it, we’re not going back at least not with this one.

It’s a bittersweet feeling it can be good and bad at the same time and when we only create space and allow for the good. Culturally, it makes more sense to, we like a happy story. We want to talk about the things that are going well. Particularly social media is a highlight of all the wins.

And it can be, we can feel some pressure, cultural, social pressure to ignore the things that are going wrong or to pretend like they’re not, or to hide them even from ourselves, to feel bad even within ourselves that we’re not entirely satisfied with the way something may be.

Dr. Mary Frances O’Connor is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, and she studies grief and grieving.

One thing that she said in a recent interview with the American Psychological Association is that the heart of grieving is around yearning. Yearning for a person or things to be back the way they were before. Then she talks about a resilience model.

It’s interesting. She says, many people need exposure to the memories of their loved one or to create space to open to the experience what they hoped would happen to understand, they’ll do different types of exposure therapy, will they’ll talk through and record these thoughts. And then they develop the skills of how I move into the feeling of grief and then out of it again.

This develops new skills around emotional regulation and acceptance. This discussion of figuring out how to move in and out of grief with acceptance and clarity and recording and telling that story in different ways felt familiar to me to the stress model.

And in fact, Dr. Pauline Boss, who’s a professor emeritus in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota, coined a term ambiguous loss in the 1970s.

And one of her quotes says, ambiguous loss is not a medical model. It’s a stress model.

Dr. Pauline Boss talks about ambiguous loss as not the actual loss of a person, but the psychological absence. So maybe someone, a partner, is preoccupied with work, and so they’re here, they’re, home sometimes, they’re at work sometimes, but their mind is absent. They’re not giving the time. Attention and engagement to the relationship that you hope for, even though you haven’t lost that person physically.

Ambiguous Loss

The psychological absence would be termed an ambiguous loss, that the person’s there but not there. This can also happen with our devices. She says even our preoccupation with screens at home can cause a sense of loss of relationship and of engagement among a family because of the preoccupation with our phones or screens that there’s a sense of loss.

I’ve talked about this with my therapist in terms of not losing something you had. Instead, recognizing that someone or something, a part of your life, a situation, a relationship, is not going to be the way that you expected it would. Even though it wasn’t ever that way, even the idea that you thought it might be and you planned for that, can create a sense of ambiguous loss for something that you will not experience.

During my experience with miscarriage, I wasn’t very far along. I was only 10 weeks pregnant when I started to experience a natural miscarriage and the grief that I had associated with that loss had less to do with the relationship that I had with this embryo because I hadn’t yet formed a relationship with the embryo personally.

I know, women experience pregnancy loss differently. I hadn’t felt a movement. I didn’t feel intensely connected to this baby the way that I did later in my pregnancies with my other children. It was early, and my loss was not about that infant at that moment in time. It was about the timeline that I was losing.

I had a due date. I had started to prepare in my mind for Christmas with a baby and started to plot out. How the difference in age would fit between my oldest and this child and all the different things that would go along with the family dynamics of that spacing and this time next year, X, Y, Z, things can happen. And the loss was not of something that I felt that I had, it was of an idea that I was hopeful for.

I think parenting in general can come with this sort of idea of the people who our children may turn out to be. And I’m learning that’s best left wide open, it’s best left wide open with sort of a curiosity around who might you become, rather than a prescribed idea of this is who I want you to be.

That said, it’s natural to prospect about the future, particularly if you’re a parent and you have children. One example that may be relatable to some of you is that we have two boys,14 and 12, and my husband was a sports guy with a capital S. He played all the sports growing up. He played soccer.

He wrestled. He did football. He, with friends played, I don’t think he played on a basketball team, but he played basketball with friends and church. And then he went on to play rugby in high school, in college. He went, he played rugby professionally. He was doing that when we met. He coached rugby.

He continues to help with the rugby team here at the University of Richmond. He loves sports. And one of, we’ve talked about how one of his expectations, just a simple expectation, was that it would be so fun when he had these boys, to throw the ball around with him, to teach him to catch, to go out and kick a soccer ball or to toss a rugby ball around and show up to their soccer games or their football games.

And while we gave our boys both many opportunities to try these different things. They both played soccer, they both have, tossed the rugby ball and the football around. Neither of them is interested. They don’t really like sports the way that my husband did. And not because they’re not good at them.

They’re coordinated and strong and they’re just not that interested. That’s not where their passion lies. And while we still can do it, we can toss a frisbee or we can go out and bring a rugby ball to the beach or whatever our preconceived idea and this expectation, even though it was a lightly held expectation of in this stage of life, shuttling the boys back and forth to, sports practice and having the teammates over for Gatorade and pizza parties and this sort of the lifestyle that comes with that.

That type of situation, which many of you probably have experienced or are experiencing like a sporty kid lifestyle and not to say that boys are the only ones, because our daughter does love soccer. We love taking her to soccer games and cheering her on, and she does go to team parties and things like that.

The there’s this sense of ambiguous loss around what we thought might have been that simply isn’t. And while it’s not something that we want to cry all day about and spend a long time on, it is a part of our human experience to recognize sometimes I feel bad that we’re missing out on that. And not even for our kid’s sake because to be totally honest, our boys don’t, they don’t feel bad about it.

They’re not sad about it. They’re fine. They’re doing the things they love to do and we’re happy to support them in those things. I feel a little bit sad sometimes for me because that was a mothering experience that I was excited about that it turns out might not be part of my motherhood experience, at least not right now.

So, what do you do with that? What do you do with my kids are healthy and they’re happy and I love them and they’re wonderful and I appreciate who they are? And there’s also this subtle sense of sometimes I feel a little bit. Sad for the loss of something that I hoped for that hasn’t come to be. You create space to feel that, and that feeling is grief.

Now we’re going to circle back around to the waves because what I’ve recognized along with the help of my great therapist is that like the way that I reacted when surfing. Knowing that these waves were going to crash but trying to just avoid it and pretend it wasn’t going to happen, I’d run from it and then it would be worse off than if I had just acknowledged it and accepted it and felt it.

Hold my breath. It’s uncomfortable to be under the water like that. Hold onto the board, feel it, but also come up on the other side and being able to breathe, rather than pretending it’s not going to happen and then just being tossed around by it. This is the way that I’ve also been approaching some of these.

These emotional experiences of grief. I don’t really want to be experiencing them. I think that I tell myself, that’s not valid because my kids are happy and so why should I, a football, a Super Bowl party is silly. Why do I care about that? Invalidating my own feelings.

Write down the good and the hard

Acknowledging, accepting, and allowing my own feelings is uncomfortable and allows me to get to the other side. The way that I’ve come up with my therapist and one of my friends to do this is to include space to record that grief in my journal. I am a longtime gratitude journaler. I’ve talked about it for years on this podcast and practiced it years before that. I believe in the power of writing down and training our brains to recognize what’s good in our lives.

And now I’m coming to a place of kind of full circle allowance for the things that are hard in our lives too. And creating a physical space to write that down. At the beginning of the year, the end of last year in December, I went out and found a new journal. I didn’t have to buy it because I have a little stack of journals at home.

I grabbed a new empty one and I wrote on the inside cover, my journal of gratitude and grief. And I allow space, I give intentional space when I write to write about the things that I’m loving and that are going so well in my life and that I appreciate and things that I’m sad about and that I feel badly aren’t going the way that I hoped for and expectations that are not being met and I’m learning to give space for both.

Benefits of Journaling Grief and Gratitude

Processing Emotion

It has long been known that writing about our emotions allows us to process and make sense of them. It provides a structured way to explore and express complex feelings, and all of that contributes to our emotional well-being. So, while it seems paradoxical that writing about things that have been hard or that you’re sad about in your life, contributes to your well-being, that is what research shows.

Enhances Self-Awareness

Keeping a journal that includes both positive and challenging experiences can also enhance self-awareness, personal growth, and discovery.

Promotes Balanced Perspective

Balancing gratitude and grief in writing can also help you maintain a more balanced perspective on life. There is a time where gratitude and optimism as the only thing that we care about becomes toxic positivity because life is not only made up of positive events. So, creating space for both gives us balance.

Observe Your Personal Journey

Another thing that is important about documenting these things is the ability to observe your personal journey over time. It can highlight for you your own personal growth, resilience, and the ability to find joy even amid the challenges. Research suggests that regular journaling, including expressions of gratitude and processing grief, can contribute to overall mental health outcomes.

Reduces Stress

It may reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. Encouraging you, so this is my invitation, write about your gratitude and your grief. Foster a holistic approach to your emotional well-being where there’s space for both.

Take that deep breath and dive under the water and it’ll be uncomfortable and intentionally allowing space for that prevents you from being tossed and turned by your emotions when you’re not expecting it.

Of course, you don’t need my permission to experience your emotions. Sometimes it’s helpful to hear that someone else is feeling something similar and going through something, even simple things that are hard in daily life. That’s part of being human. It’s part of the richness of the fabric of our lives.

And I hope that if you feel like this exercise could be helpful for you that you will also grab yourself a gratitude and grief journal and explore accepting your emotions more broadly this year with me.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for tuning in today to episode 268. Friends, we’re so close to 2 million downloads. I’m excited and I’m trying to figure out the best way to celebrate.

If you have any ideas of how to celebrate this milestone in the podcast, send them my way at miranda@livefreecreative.co.

I also just the two things that I’m going to be talking about for a little while, or that I have some space on my trip to Turkey.

Come To Turkey!

I had a friend who I went out to lunch with. She said, I’m so glad I’m so excited about this trip because I wouldn’t want to go on this trip just by myself with my family. I don’t know enough. I don’t feel comfortable. And so having it be a guided girl’s trip with someone I like and knowing that we’re going to have everything planned for us, that we just show up, it’s a stress-free vacation, but also an incredible cultural exploration of this diverse and beautiful land is going to be so fun.

I said, I agree. I’m so happy that you’re coming.

So, there’s still space on that trip. If you. want to explore the world and you don’t really know where to get started, this could be a place to get started. You can sign up through the link in the show notes today.

Try Out Coaching!

And finally, if you could use some help navigating your own emotional journey, having some clarity in your values, your strengths, and the decisions that you’re trying to make right now in your lives, you may be interested in my coaching.

I have free exploratory coaching calls available through the link in my show notes. It’s a half hour call where we can just chat, and you can see if it’s a good fit. I can explain more about how my coaching process works. And if you are interested, you can sign up and become a coaching client where I will give you regular support, encouragement, and advocate for you in living your best life.

I hope you have a wonderful week, and I will chat with you again soon. Bye.