In this heartfelt episode of Through a Therapist’s Eyes, we dive deep into why grief truly sucks – and why it’s still a vital part of healing. From the brain’s trauma-like response to loss, to the layers and patterns of grief that don’t always follow a neat timeline, we explore how it affects not just emotions, but sleep, appetite, cognition, and even your immune system. We unpack concepts like “pre-grieving,” discuss the hidden pain of disenfranchised losses, and share practical strategies for navigating the storm – whether that’s through small acts of self-care, rituals of remembrance, or simply allowing yourself to feel without judgment. Join us as we break the silence around grief, challenge the clichés, and remind you: what you’re feeling is not only real – it’s necessary.
Tune in to see why Grief Sucks Through a Therapist’s Eyes.
Think about these three questions as you listen:
- What loss are you still grieving—and how does it affect your daily life?
- How do you feel when others say things like “at least…” or “time heals all wounds”?
- What small act of self-care could help you today amidst grief?
Links referenced during the show:
https://www.throughatherapistseyes.com/category/podcasts/anxietyanddepression
https://www.throughatherapistseyes.com/category/podcasts/mentalhealthtips
forallmentalhealth.comourmhm.orgthementalmastery.com
thementalmastery.comourmhm.org
Intro Music by Reid Ferguson – https://reidtferguson.com/
@reidtferguson – https://www.instagram.com/reidtferguson/
https://www.facebook.com/reidtferguson
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3isWD3wykFcLXPUmBzpJxg
Audio Podcast Version Only
Episode #322 Transcription
up there and we’re originally, she’s from Massachusetts and I’m from Kentucky, but we spent. Much of our youth, childhood and youth in Bradenton, Florida and adulthood.
So we have family there. My parents are my dad is 99,
Chris Gazdik: 99 years old. Incredible. And they
John-Nelson Pope: live by themselves. And my sister is having trouble a little bit having to do this herself. And my brother has a lot of issues health issues. And so joy and I are going down there and just to, to move back home.
And we’re going back to a place called Bradenton, Florida. Or the Pittsburgh
Chris Gazdik: Pirates play their preseason baseball. That’s right. Exactly. And so [00:05:00] March and we haven’t made a pact. I’m coming down, right, right. You are. Yes sir. And
John-Nelson Pope: so it’s, and we’ve got four bedrooms.
Victoria Pendergrass: Where am I in this invite?
John-Nelson Pope: You’re in this, right?
We can all
Chris Gazdik: go down to see the Pirates play baseball. Hell yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’d be great. Yeah. We’ll do, we’ll do an annual live show at the Pope residence maybe. Yes. Maybe you could do that. Yeah. Well, Victoria’s in Neil, I’m in.
John-Nelson Pope: You could do it at my Neil brother state mansion. We got So something going on here.
Yeah. Yeah. But you have all
Chris Gazdik: the mics and stands and everything. Or we gonna have to bring em. Oh, he’s, we, we can
John-Nelson Pope: carry ’em car enough. We carry. That’s so I look forward to, but I’ll be joining you all weekly on, of on the video zoom virtually, virtually teams. So this is the
Chris Gazdik: saving grace. We’re very pleased that John is gonna be able to continue working with the through therapist eyes.
As a matter of fact, this is gonna be your only professional, I guess, major focus. Is that a true statement?
John-Nelson Pope: That is a true statement. You’re kind
Chris Gazdik: of semi retiring it
John-Nelson Pope: this deal. I am not being in a church anymore. And that’s gonna be, it’s [00:06:00] stressful. Yeah. It’s a lot on you. Yeah. The church I, I, I currently serve and have is my last Sunday is Sunday is they’re selling their properties and you know, it’s kind of bittersweet, but mm-hmm.
And it’s bittersweet leaving you guys. Okay.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: So,
so anyway, I
Victoria Pendergrass: cried when I read your email. I.
John-Nelson Pope: Thank you.
Victoria Pendergrass: And then when I first saw him, I don’t know if he told you this, when I first saw him in the office after he sent that email, I gave him like a bear hug. Oh no. You know what she did? Yeah. No I didn’t.
John-Nelson Pope: I was like, finally,
Victoria Pendergrass: look, now we can, she’s not
Chris Gazdik: sappy free at last.
Free at last. Now can tear down the walls. My office, big office. And now I might be able to sing to her Uhhuh. Oh gosh. Yes. You could do that. No, no. Oh, is that a No, I’m still not
Victoria Pendergrass: getting a no call. John,
Chris Gazdik: you’ll call John to get the singer so he can sing to me. Alright. [00:07:00] Listen, I’ve said some nice things before I feel like I’ve said him on the show, but I guess not.
It was you was an email. You did. Why did we do that on the show?
John-Nelson Pope: I don’t know.
Chris Gazdik: Did we? We didn’t already announce this. Yes, you did. So this, I think you did is the last one. Maybe we did. Yeah. Okay. Well that’s cool. I guess I’ll just suffice it to say, you know, it’s actually really special. I mean, I know you said you’ve lived on you know, multiple continents and moved around the world, three continents through the state, lived in insane.
That’s just really cool to be able to
John-Nelson Pope: Well, I was in, in military moved as a pastor, like it’s gotta be at least 12 times. Yeah. So, so anyway,
Chris Gazdik: so now we’re going back home. So that’s just special. I, I can feel that being a West Virginia. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I’ve always thought it’d be cool to retire in West Virginia.
You actually,
Victoria Pendergrass: you accidentally did your emergency thing. And they called.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, they called you? Yeah. I literally, it’s an emergency Mount Holly. I really, okay. If they call me back. We got a 9 1 1 in intervention for all of this, man. Well, we’ll move on. That’s the [00:08:00] topic. Feel free to sprinkle in the, the thoughts, the senses that you have.
I kind of coordinated this month a little bit along these lines next week will be how to, how to, how do we deal with transitions and stuff? So a lot timing. Yeah. I figured it was, you know, some things that we could do. And honestly, so this show, grief Sucks. Uhhuh is a show that, you know, we’ve done on the, on the show before, but there’s, there’s, mm-hmm.
I’m gonna add a couple of things probably. Okay. A long time listeners of the show can kind of keep track. You know, I, I, we, we don’t renew hardly any content, but we’ve gotten to the point where Spotify and different podcast platforms only go back like a hundred episodes or whatever.
Victoria Pendergrass: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That’s why I noticed when I first, yeah.
Chris Gazdik: So, so, so grief is one that we’ve definitely covered before, but we’re gonna add it to the sort of different angles, different pieces for sure. But I, I’m just picked up on the history of our show that we’re gonna have a few more. Mm-hmm. Like we do moral courage. We do you know, EFT and all that kind of stuff.
You gotta go deal with 9 1 1.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah, they’re gonna arrest me.
Chris Gazdik: [00:09:00] Nine one one’s coming for you. He’s gotta go deal with this. Oh man. That’s awesome. That’s why I saying
Victoria Pendergrass: thank you. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve actually done that before too.
Chris Gazdik: What
Victoria Pendergrass: accidentally held what wasn’t on my watch, accidentally held down the emergency, but oh, it haven put, I put my phone and my cup holder upside down, and it was just the night, right?
Enough pressure. I’ve come close, I’ve done the cancel. And and then I had 17 missed calls from my husband and my mother who are listed as my emergency contacts when it’s sent them help on into distress.
Chris Gazdik: So, Victoria, why does grief suck and why is its necessary? What is this grief thing? What do you, why does it suck?
How do you handle grief? What is it? How do, yeah, man, why grief sucks and why is it necessary? What’s going on in your just random thought? Well, I mean, you mentioned,
Victoria Pendergrass: you mentioned one thing about transition and grief is a form of transition, and so like people hate change.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. They really don’t deal, I mean, and change.
Well, I hate change
Victoria Pendergrass: and, and I think that like, I mean, I, I know probably today we’ll look at grief mostly as like the death. Of [00:10:00] someone, you know,
Chris Gazdik: we must certainly would not,
Victoria Pendergrass: but it is, well, if you would let me finish it. I was gonna say that it’s more all over. It’s more than just the death of someone. Yeah.
Or the passing of someone. It is like the loss of a friendship. The loss of a job. The loss of a, anything
Chris Gazdik: concept.
Victoria Pendergrass: Anything, yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Like loss of an awareness.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. Loss of like a, like a belief that you’ve been taught your whole life. Like It is, it is a, it is a very wide concept. I don’t know words to put that people don’t realize
Chris Gazdik: it.
Like, honestly, I’m, I, I grieve my kids leaving home. Yeah. I mean, empty, empty nesting is hugely grieving. Yeah. And people realize that. And you’ve gone through a lot of transitions. Leave. Yeah. May have. May have. Thank you for that. So, you know, I mean, it’s, it’s like so broad. Yeah. It’s so broad. Even for
Victoria Pendergrass: me, the loss, the loss of a single life of like a non kid life, you know?
Oh, yeah. And it’s not to say that [00:11:00] I, you
Chris Gazdik: choose getting married, but you lose and being single.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. But like, you know, or it was just me and my husband for a while, or my husband and I for a while. You know, and it’s not that I don’t, I mean, I love my child, but it is still a process of like, grieving, okay, well now who am I after?
I’ve like given birth,
Chris Gazdik: I very, and
Victoria Pendergrass: blah, blah, blah. You know, all the things. I very
Chris Gazdik: clearly remember our last pre kid date. Yeah. So she was pregnant, got a limo, went down to a play, had to leave the play early. The limo driver was pissed. I we were upset. He was like, I’m sorry. You know, grape, sparkling, grape juice in the line in limousine and all.
Yeah, it was, it was the premium ’cause we were losing our Yeah. You know, non kid set. I mean, that’s why
Victoria Pendergrass: a lot of people drew like a babymoon. Yep.
Chris Gazdik: You know? Yep.
Victoria Pendergrass: They go and enjoy time away before, because as I talked with a client today, that after you have children there is, if you go somewhere with your children, it is not a vacation.
It is a trip. It is a trip to the beach, a trip to the [00:12:00] mountains, a trip to Disney. This is true. It is not a vacation.
Chris Gazdik: Not a vacation
Victoria Pendergrass: until your kid is like six, I don’t know. Y’all have older kids, 16, maybe. Then you, then they can, can start to maybe enjoy it a little bit more. You know, you get a little bit of
Chris Gazdik: that, you get a little bit of that.
Victoria Pendergrass: But yeah. Especially with my 3-year-old. Yeah. We’re not going on vacations unless it’s just me and my husband.
Chris Gazdik: Mm-hmm.
Victoria Pendergrass: It is a and they’re, and they’re few
Chris Gazdik: and far in between for, for a lot of time. So so here’s, here’s something I, I wanna focus this in on that I think is really important for people to understand about grief.
Yeah. Is, is very much, you know, there’s, there, I like to think of it as a kissing cousin to depress.
Victoria Pendergrass: Could be. Yeah. So if you, if you think
Chris Gazdik: of all the symptoms of depression, what are they?
Victoria Pendergrass: Loss of interest and things? Sadness most of the day. Nearly every day.
Chris Gazdik: Loss appetite. Loss of appetite, concentration
Victoria Pendergrass: issues, suicidal thoughts, irritability irritability right.
Yeah. And how [00:13:00] many
Chris Gazdik: of those do you experience with grief?
Victoria Pendergrass: Do
Chris Gazdik: you ever think about this?
Victoria Pendergrass: Victoria? Yeah. Probably are like all of them. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Have you ever thought of the, the parallels, even the
Victoria Pendergrass: suicide, even the suicidal thoughts can be self-harming thoughts or thoughts of death? Yeah. Because it’s not just suicidal thoughts, it’s just thoughts of death, of recurrent death, like
Chris Gazdik: morbidity.
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Have you ever thought of the correlation between grief and depression?
Victoria Pendergrass: I’m curious. I don’t think, not intentionally.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: I haven’t never been like, oh, this is the, you know, these are connected, or these are basically the same. But I can see it interest like, yeah. I mean, it’s not surprising.
Interesting.
Chris Gazdik: You’ll find over your career to come still a little maybe early to get so much repetitive statements. Yeah. But you’ll find the phrases, the statements that you make. This is one for me that I’ve said many times over the years, you know, grief is a kissing cousin to depression. Yeah. And then I go on to explain, you know, what you’re experiencing is literally exactly like what people that experience chronic depression go through.
Mm-hmm. All of them. You’re crying, [00:14:00] you’re tearful, you don’t know why. Yeah. Emotions are very labile. All of the other things with sleep, you’re not interested in
Victoria Pendergrass: things that you’re usually interested in. It’s depression.
Chris Gazdik: These are the depression symptoms. Yeah. So it’s, it’s really, you know, grief, they think of it and talk about it as like, not just a loss.
I mean, it’s a whole body experience to where, you know, the whole freaking thing is kind of going on where your body hurts. That’s what they say with depression, you know, the commercial, it hurts, it physically has pain.
Victoria Pendergrass: Right? Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: And, and so all of the other things that kind of go along with it, it’s a full experience, mind, mood, body, spirit, the whole nine yards.
Everything’s involved. Oh. So first of all, we got feedback from Frank. Frank says, that was funny, funny, funny. Okay. Yeah. So are we back from the 9 1 1? What happened? Yeah. Oh
John-Nelson Pope: yeah. No, they didn’t come out after me. I just made sure that canceled you, you wanted, you wanted to take a look? Yeah, I wanted to make sure it was canceled.
The, the long arm of the law was on its way. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know what caused it.
Victoria Pendergrass: I did, you probably had your wrist bent where it was like pressing it. Mm-hmm. Let’s, [00:15:00] for extended period of time. Let’s, let’s
Chris Gazdik: stay moving. So, okay. I, I haven’t really thought of this a whole lot, but when you’re talking about.
John, you know what, why grief sucks. What it is, why is it necessary? Have you all thought of grieving or grief events as like small trauma events? Yes, I have a go. Yeah. Do you have Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, I was, we just got done talking, John, I look at, you know, grief as being basically depression mm-hmm. Or kissing cousins.
So I never really thought of it in, in a trauma sense. I really haven’t really, because I’m so stuck on depression.
Victoria Pendergrass: Oh. Think that’s where my brain always goes. Think. So part of my, part of my like, intro assessment when I see people is I get to a SEC session where I ask about like, abuse and victimization, and then I ask about trauma.
Like trauma. The trauma question. Yeah. But I kind of break it up. Do you? And most people without prompt for me, most people will say Yeah. The death of someone. Yeah. The, like, the, you know, the grief of like, you know, I was there when someone died. I was there. Like, I witnessed, you know, I was there with them [00:16:00] when, when they got sick, I found my grandma through the hospice.
Mm-hmm. And you know, or Yeah, I came in one from home one day and someone was, you know. You know, on the floor or something like, yeah, I was
Chris Gazdik: second on the scene with my sister. So, I mean, it’s funny because I, I have heard that, and people do bring that up on their own volition, and I always read it down under the trauma section.
But it’s funny, I never really correlated it. I correlated it way more with depression.
John-Nelson Pope: I had a, a, a client that whose son was killed in an, an accident which was preventable. And so, and she was a very religious person and she literally had cardiomyopathy as a result of it. Broken heart syndrome.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, I’ve been, I’ve been into that lately.
Yeah. I’ve had a couple of clients and, and some personal experiences, you know, with this whole broken heart syndrome thing. We’ve talked about it on a show before. Right. But that’s, that kind of trips me, me out, John Suos, huh? Yeah, that trips me out, man. Yeah. It’s even being a therapist, it’s kind of amazing to me.
Mm-hmm. You know, one of the things is my mom. Mm-hmm. I, I truly [00:17:00] believe my mom who is a dementia patient now on a memory care unit the death of my sister, we believe caused mm-hmm. I believe now caused that.
John-Nelson Pope: That just, it just pushed her off the Yeah. Man, it, I just,
Chris Gazdik: I have a hard time conceptually believing that, and even knowing what I know, man, it’s wild.
John-Nelson Pope: There’s, with PTSD Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder there’s several good books many good books that have been out and think it was brought to our awareness during the Iraq, Afghanistan military actions and did you go back to Vietnam? Well, yes. It goes back, it actually goes back to the Civil War.
It’s kind, well,
Chris Gazdik: obviously, but it didn’t, but where we began to realize it more. Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. It was Vietnam. It’s when they started, right? There was, there was a movie called coming Home. And it was about a, a veteran that had was paralyzed and, it was one of the, the people that was taking [00:18:00] care of him got involved with her anyway.
There was also this wounded person that was wounded internally and emotionally with PTSD and he killed himself Yeah. As a result. Oh boy. So it’s a, it that was bringing that into attention that came out around 1979 or something like that. So that’s where it
Chris Gazdik: framed your mind. Right. Right.
John-Nelson Pope: And, and there’s, it’s funny, if I could
Chris Gazdik: just interrupt because I, I, I, I start with trauma when it’s a traumatic event mm-hmm.
And then move to grief mm-hmm. After, and I, but when it’s grief, I don’t think trauma mm-hmm. When it’s clearly a grieving event. Mm-hmm. I just, I’m, I’m backwards. I, I, I don’t know it. I I will adjust that. There’s, there’s, there’s
John-Nelson Pope: a good book called The Body Keeps Score. Are you familiar with that, Vander?
Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s good stuff.
Chris Gazdik: Tell us about that.
John-Nelson Pope: Well, it, it’s he’s Dutch but it’s the author, but he’s done a lot of research in in post-traumatic stress disorder and grief reactions, people that they, they actually have [00:19:00] physiological reactions to, to their grief and to their trauma.
Chris Gazdik: Mm-hmm.
John-Nelson Pope: And so the body never forgets. And so you it’s a process where one person, where a person starts to heal. See, what’s funny
Chris Gazdik: is I, that material I apply in my clinical brain to trauma. Mm-hmm. Not so much grief. This side. Yeah. I’m, I’m learning. I’m growing, man. Yeah. You know, so now I’ll, I’ll have that.
I think they’re intertwined. I mean, I’ve
Victoria Pendergrass: literally lit lint that book out to people, to a client. Have you? Yeah. It’s really good. Actually, a client of mine has it right now. It’s very, it’s not in my, it’s not on my bookshelf. It’s, I
Chris Gazdik: hope you get it back. I know. I never do that. I never do that, John. Eh,
Victoria Pendergrass: the last person that had it had it for about a year.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: exactly. So, you know. Exactly. It doesn’t happen very often. What?
Chris Gazdik: Okay, let’s move on. ’cause there’s a lot with this topic of grief. I really, really, when we talk about why it’s necessary, why do we hate Victoria if that’s a tuna strong word. No, we don’t hate Victoria. No, we [00:20:00] don’t hate Victoria. It’s not what I said.
Nobody email in on me on that. I said, Victoria, why do we hate, if that’s not too strong of a word, the phrase time heals all wounds. You might have
Victoria Pendergrass: to, I don’t wanna make this episode explicit, so it’s a bunch of bull crap. We’ll keep it family friendly. Yeah. It’s. Ah, I don’t like, I mean, it’s just ’cause it’s not accurate, right?
Like,
Chris Gazdik: I love your nonverbals here. It’s so awesome. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: It’s just that like, and also when you’re grieving, no matter what you’re grieving, that’s not the crap you wanna hear.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: I just lost someone or I just lost something. Or I just, you know, another one
Chris Gazdik: of those are, I understand.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. And I’m like,
Chris Gazdik: you just don’t, you can’t.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. My thing is, is I’ve, I’ve said a thousand times, there’s another one of these phrases where I’ve kinda worked out, like, time heals all wounds is just a farce. It’s, it’s really unfortunate because it sets up unrealistic [00:21:00] expectations. It takes time to resolve things or, oh yeah. It takes a little bit of time to compartmentalize them and numb them out.
Time doesn’t do anything. You’re doing one of those two things. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And one is bad, one’s good. Yeah. Not right, not wrong, but one is really healthy. One is really. Very potentially destructive. So this whole idea of avoiding or short-cutting your grief that leads directly to feeling disconnected, to feeling numb, to feeling just dis what’s the word I’m looking for?
Dissociated. You know,
John-Nelson Pope: when I was in doing pastoral clinical pastoral education in a hospital setting one of the chaplains there facilitated a group and it was, he called it Good grief. Yeah. And yeah. Good grief. It’s a cool phrase. Yeah. Good grief is a cool phrase. But, but he was talking very much about what, what this topic is about.
Yeah. It’s it’s, it’s, [00:22:00] you, you don’t avoid the, the grief. I think if you, if you try to bury it and you will, it will come out some other way. It will cause other, other issues, right? Yeah. Other harm. Yeah, other harm. Physiological and emotional relationship wise. You know, it’s funny, I think, I think that a
Chris Gazdik: lot of people kind of get caught with good grief.
Mm-hmm. As you used that phrase, I’ve never used it. I may steal that from you because like you were saying, Victoria, you know, when we’re talking about what happens with grieving Yeah. I mean, you, you, you have a child and you grieve the loss of being single when you’re married or you know, kid less when you’re, are already married.
You know, it’s like you want this change. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But you’re grieving the loss that resulted from making this change that you chose. I think people feel like I’m not really allowed to be sad about that. Mm-hmm.
Victoria Pendergrass: Right. Yeah. I chose to keep this pregnancy and follow through with it, and I chose to stand [00:23:00] up in front of whoever you believe in and friends and family and, you know, declare my vows to this person.
I, you know,
Chris Gazdik: I can’t grieve this. Yeah. But you need to, ’cause otherwise that comes out to play. You know, I heard years after, obviously many, many years after my wife had actually made the comment. She’s like, I really think we should have stayed in West Virginia before, you know, after we got married for a little while.
I think that would’ve helped a lot. I’m like, oh, okay. Well, good to know. Never, never knew. You know. Right. I, you know, but it does make sense. Mm-hmm. She was going through something, never really resolved it or dealt with it, and it came out that way.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, and then that’s the thing though, many years later, you know, I think it just is a, an, I’m always talking about the, a recipe for resentment, but like, yeah, I think it does.
That’s where it can lead to if you don’t deal like with the grief.
Chris Gazdik: Right. It’s just, and, and there’s another thing we’ll talk about layering, well, I guess I’ll throw it in now. Do you, do you guys think about [00:24:00] this? Conceptually, if you can imagine grieving. Mm-hmm. So you come across a grieving event, and then what do we do with trauma?
Well, we do a trauma line and we, we experience like, well, what kinda losses or traumas have you had in addition to this one? So you get a full picture. Do we, do we think about that with grief? Because I don’t know that clinicians as much think layering or like what, what multiple grieving events that go into this current grieving event.
Mm-hmm.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because
Chris Gazdik: maybe it’s just common sense and I just, I haven’t heard many clinicians talk about it.
Victoria Pendergrass: I mean, I don’t necessarily know if I like, I think it’s just depends on also like the client. I don’t know. But yeah, I mean, it would make sense because like say I lost someone a year ago and then I lost another person, or I lost another thing like eight months ago and then I lost another thing six months ago.
Like if I haven’t originally dealt with that first grieving. Or is that what you’re talking about? Absolutely. [00:25:00] Then like the one that came eight months ago, then now you’re adding that to it.
Chris Gazdik: Yep.
Victoria Pendergrass: And then I still haven’t grieved either one of those things. And then the third one comes along since months ago.
Now you got a percentage of the first,
Chris Gazdik: a percentage of the second and the fullness of the third.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: And on and on it goes. Goes. And none of
Victoria Pendergrass: it is resolved. Right. You know, none of it is like being dealt with and it all
Chris Gazdik: comes back up. Yeah. That’s what happens when you experience, I lash
Victoria Pendergrass: out, I push away friends and family, those that love me.
I, you know, maybe start getting into bad habits or skills, like this is really important. Understand skills.
John-Nelson Pope: We have client that has having nightmares about his father and I’m gonna speak louder. Okay. But he’s, he tends to go low, John
Chris Gazdik: or Neil.
John-Nelson Pope: Alright. He’s. He’s having nightmares about his father. He was very estranged from his father.
And he said, I don’t grieve. I don’t grieve about him. I don’t Yeah. Miss him, but, right. ’cause he had killed himself. Oh my gosh. His father. Mm-hmm. And his [00:26:00] father keeps coming into his room and in, in his dreams
Chris Gazdik: mm-hmm.
John-Nelson Pope: And confronting him. And he’s having a real struggle with that. See, that’s he, it’s going to come out.
It does. Yeah. In, in so many different ways. It’s almost, would you call it inevitable? I think it’s inevitable. It’s inevitable, yeah. Yeah. I would agree. We we’re wonderfully made. I mean, we’re, we are magnificent creatures. Humans. Humans are, and I don’t, we don’t do magnificent things a lot of times, but we’re very complex.
Mm-hmm. And there’s so many shades and nuances into who we are.
Chris Gazdik: Right.
John-Nelson Pope: And I, I think that we have to have an environment where people can be open about their feelings and their thoughts, their sense of anger, betrayal feeling guilt if somebody dies. And there’s a part of you that feels like.
Wow, that’s, that’s actually good for [00:27:00] me. And yet you might feel guilty about that and that’s gonna be, it’s another factor. Complicated grief.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. Well, a complicated, yeah. There’s something called complicated bereavement. And I, I, I, I, I feel like that’s what we’re talking about with layering. Yeah. You know, and I’ve thought of that for years.
I’ve talked about that, you know, with people and help them understand exactly what Victoria, you and I just went through, because honestly, what it really amounts to when you’re 54 years old and you have a loss, let’s just say. I don’t wanna say somebody died because that’s just too easy. Let’s say we’re, we’re really attached to John and he’s moving and leaving to Florida, and we start feeling a lot of feelings about that.
And
John-Nelson Pope: I start singing goodbye to you. Oh,
Chris Gazdik: goodbye
John-Nelson Pope: to you.
Chris Gazdik: Oh my goodness. Goodbye to
Victoria Pendergrass: you.
Chris Gazdik: Neil. Cut his mic off.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, like he’s trying to make me cry today. Yes,
Chris Gazdik: he is. Because we will feel feelings from that. Yeah, for sure. But if we’re not really aware at 54 years old, we’re having a grieving event that we have a hundred [00:28:00] percent of, but we literally have probably, you know, 60% of loss.
Number one when you were 10.
Victoria Pendergrass: Mm-hmm.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. How much percentage of graduation when you, when you grieved, you know, losing the transition into adulthood, leaving, leaving your small town. Okay. So that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. It’s good grief. Good grief, but there’s energy of sadness. Yeah. That builds up from number one to number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 flows.
6, 7, 8, 10, 12, like, and you’re 54 and you’re gonna feel a percentage of all of them. If you’re not resolving them as you go.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yes.
Chris Gazdik: When you resolve them, you’ve let go and you process and you’re literally free. You know, I can prove that to people. I like to prove to clients. Have you ever watched children at a funeral?
You’ve seen them all the time, John. Yeah. What are the, what are the kids like? They’re amazing. They’re
John-Nelson Pope: amazing.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: They’re very real. They’re very there. They’re, yeah. Yeah. They’re, and it depends on how, how old [00:29:00] they are. It does. Yeah, it does. The younger, the better. Yeah. You know, like I get questioned all the time, like, should I take my kid to the funeral?
What? I’m like,
Chris Gazdik: oh yes.
John-Nelson Pope: As a minister, I would say Yes. Yes, definitely do that. Because that, you know what, they’re gonna teach you how to grieve. Right. Literally. And you know, they could even laugh and play. They’re amazing.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. They’re like crying in a puddle in the corner. ’cause mommy’s not gonna wake up.
And and then I wanna cook. I’m hungry. Can we go eat? I’m so hungry. Yay. I’m gonna play with my friends in the back of the church when we’re gonna throw a ball and then I’m gonna come back in and What do you mean she’s still sleeping? Oh, I’m sad again. It’s just so free flowing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It it’s beautiful.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: The whole spectrum of emotion.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, I mean, and I’ve all, and I know I’ve said this before when we’ve talked about grief, but like, it’s, to me it’s also the whole idea and acceptance of that. Like, grief doesn’t shrink over time. We, like, we stay, we get bigger. Grief stays the same size, so we [00:30:00] grow around the grief.
Oh my God. Like the grief is always there. And then I actually recently had someone tell me, a client tell me that they, that they read or heard or were doing something where they were like, well, the grief has always been there. It was just love beforehand.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, it was love with what?
Victoria Pendergrass: Like no, it was just love beforehand.
Like it was love before it turned into grief.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, okay. I like that.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Conceptually, but also that, so you pair them together. The two could be true at the same time.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah, but also like, I mean, we grow around grief. Grief is stays the same size, like it doesn’t shrink as time goes on and heals wounds or whatever, whatever.
Unless
Chris Gazdik: you’re resolving it.
Victoria Pendergrass: But no, it’s still there.
Chris Gazdik: Well, okay. Like what, I mean, we probably saying the same things in different ways. I bet. Yeah. What I mean is that the intensity level goes down. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: You get, you go from crying every day to like, you can think about them and you smile to yourself and you think about, oh, [00:31:00] that was such a great thing, whatever it was, or whoever it was, and then we can move on throughout our day.
Yes. We got, you can
Chris Gazdik: never get to letting go enough to where you get to zero.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. No, there’s not such, no.
Chris Gazdik: You know, you, but you can get down to 10.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. Because
Chris Gazdik: if you’re sitting around 80 or a hundred, that’s just chronically painful and you have dreams and it comes out in all the things we were talking about.
Yeah. Right.
Victoria Pendergrass: I mean, I. Sorry. No, go ahead. I mean, like, I have a fr my, my, I’ve mentioned this before, any moons ago on here, but like, my best friend was killed and this December it’ll be, oh, this, right? What is 2025? This December it’ll be 15 years. Like, there’s not a day. Oh, wow. That goes by that I don’t think about her.
Chris Gazdik: Wow. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: But I might have some spells every once in a while where I like, feel super emotional still there or whatever. And I still cry, but like, when she crosses my mind at some point or multiple times every day, like I, it doesn’t ruin, like it doesn’t [00:32:00] hard stop my day. Intensity
Chris Gazdik: isn’t there? Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: Like I still miss her.
All the things.
John-Nelson Pope: You were, but like, you were quite a bit younger too, so you were I was a
Victoria Pendergrass: senior in high school. Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Senior in high school. And so you’re a teen. Yeah. Which was
Victoria Pendergrass: where I graduat waited 15 years ago.
John-Nelson Pope: Well, I was, I was gonna say you were in middle school, but thanks. But, but that is, things are so intense.
Yeah. Particularly during your adolescence and all of that. So it’s sticks with you, it sticks with you. It’s in, it says more content. Yeah. Yeah. More,
Chris Gazdik: more, more emotional energy. Yeah. Victoria, my litmus test for a resolved. Mm-hmm. Emotion is that when you feel the intensity. Of the emotion, like it just happened.
Mm-hmm. Later on, that’s clearly unresolved. Yeah. But it’s also unresolved if you have little to no contact with the emotion from when something first happened. A resolved emotion is when you feel a gradual decline over months or Yeah. Years. [00:33:00] Right. Where it gradually, every time you touch it, you let go of a little bit of it.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because you’re feeling it, you’re allowing it to be present. And part of you, as you say, John, part of the, the nuance of what makes us, our experience, us. Right. And so when you re-experience it later on, it’s just a whole lot less intense Yeah. But it’s the exact same emotions that’s important.
Mm-hmm.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. Good
Victoria Pendergrass: points.
John-Nelson Pope: The tapestry of your life is that you were able to, to see the knots on one side of the tapestry and on the, and on the front you can see the beauty of it. Yeah. And so there was, there’s that sense that sometimes when you’re initially. Grieving. All you could see are the knots and the pain and, and all of that.
But the beauty of, of processing your grief and age is the griefs still there, but you turn the tapestry over and you see the beautiful patterns. Yeah. Mm-hmm. You see it in all its richness.
Chris Gazdik: Well, if you’re agreeable, I’m, I’m, I didn’t ask you, but John, I [00:34:00] would say, you know, my own experience right now, you know, with you going to California or California, geez.
Florida. California. California, California Dream you know, going, going down to California, I see the knots like I’m, you know, we’re, we’re recording with you for the live, for the. Maybe not the last time ever, but it’s not gonna be the norm until,
John-Nelson Pope: until spring training.
Chris Gazdik: You know, hearing you sing to Victoria in the hallways, which I’m not eing, lly gonna be allowed to do.
Those are the knots, right? Yeah. Like I, you know, John’s not gonna float in here like a fart on the wind when a client comes and leave and I’m gonna knock on his door and he is not here. Yeah, I know. He is not gonna be here. It’s like those are the knots, right, Victoria? Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: No, I’m gonna miss you.
Bringing weird snacks and things.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. He’s got, that’s
Victoria Pendergrass: so, yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Strange tomato drink or something recently. Well, no,
Victoria Pendergrass: that those, those Mexican sodas, Uhhuh, they’re Mexican sodas. I drink almost all those and gave a lot to clients, but these are so good.
Chris Gazdik: And the ice cream bars, John, they killed me. Hey, I brought those.
Oh, you did? Well you [00:35:00]
Victoria Pendergrass: brought the keto friendly ones, right? I did. I brought the ice cream sandwiches.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, okay. Well that was your fault then. Yeah. Well, but those are the nuts and the beautiful tapestry is how beautiful is it that you’re gonna be able to be with us? We transition into video meetings. Mm-hmm.
Which I think we will enjoy the mm-hmm. The, the, the fluidity with, and you know, and, and we’re gonna do some fun things and we’re gonna have more of your attention and focus on through a therapist eyes. Yep. Right. What a beautiful tapestry going home. So I love that there’s knots. You turn it over and there’s the beauty landscape.
Mm-hmm. Change. Yeah, change. Change
John-Nelson Pope: is hard, but change is inevitable. And it can also be very good.
Chris Gazdik: That’s partly why do it, Victoria. It’s partly why buoy. It’s partly why grieving is necessary. Yeah. It’s just absolutely necessary.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, because like.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. Okay. One more, one more concept. Go ahead, John.
John-Nelson Pope: I, I’m just saying right now, because I am moving, [00:36:00] we’ve been so busy and everything happened so quickly.
The selling of the house and buying of the house mm-hmm. It all happened in one day, basically for us. Lightning speed, lightning speed when we got what we wanted. But I hadn’t been able to process it. I’ve, and so that is something that will hit me probably when I get holed up down in Florida. It’s, it’s an interesting,
Chris Gazdik: really interesting point.
And Victoria, Neil and I are probably ahead of you mm-hmm. In kind of managing the emotion. Mm-hmm. We’re feeling whereas you are not yet. Right. Say more about that, because that’s a really cool piece of this that I think people get really confused about.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. Well there’s just so many un so much unfinished business.
You have to close up shop, you have to say goodbye to your clients. Yeah. And all of that. Yeah. I’m trying to take care of my clients.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. While also taking care of yourself and,
John-Nelson Pope: yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And that is, and [00:37:00] there, it’s very difficult for, for some of them, a couple of ’em are like, happy. That’s, no, they’re, but it, it, it’s not, my wife and I have not been able to sit down and say, this is what we’re gonna miss about the Oh, yeah.
The church. It’s just happening. Yeah. The, the friends that we have, we’ve acquired in the last decade, we’ve been here 10 years, and
Victoria Pendergrass: well, it’s like when you get, it’s like when you get in a car wreck and you have like, adrenaline, right? That adrenaline’s pumping through you. Or when something crazy happens and you have pumping through with adrenaline, but the, as soon as you like, sit still,
Chris Gazdik: that and your body calms down
Victoria Pendergrass: and you start to realize how much pain you’re in and like, what’s actually injured, you know, and like mm-hmm.
Or, you know. A
Chris Gazdik: hundred percent. Well,
John-Nelson Pope: isn’t it interesting that we’re, we’ve talked about physiological pain
Victoria Pendergrass: analogies Yeah, yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Analogies mm-hmm. Because of the trauma of grief. Mm-hmm. For [00:38:00] example, or grief itself. We, we tend to, to want, in our culture and our society is to just be very stoic about it.
Or certain,
Chris Gazdik: never let ’em see you sweat. Yeah. Never. Right. Crime not Okay. Collected.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Let me be tough about it. Yeah. I remember, I, I, it was almost a resentment for years. Not really a resentment, but it was like, what are you doing? The first person that died in my life was, my grandma always say, I love you, grandma.
Can’t wait to see her again. But, you know, when, when she died, it was really amazing because she had an aneurysm and I was at the foot of the bed, man. Mm-hmm. And my mom was up there at her ear. My sister was over there on the other side, and my brother was to my right. He couldn’t get outta the room fast enough.
Mm-hmm. But he got caught. And she actually flatlined, she died when we were in the room and whatever. Now I experienced that as beautiful. Mm-hmm. I, I I just thought it was, yeah. Amazing.
John-Nelson Pope: Well, there’s a chaplain that’s, yeah, I’ve seen that so many times. But,
Chris Gazdik: you know, he left [00:39:00] Uhhuh, you know, we went back to the waiting room or whatever when we were done, and he was gone.
I’m like, where’s my brother? Like where, so he truncated it, he truncated it, man. He said, I was like, he came back finally, and I’m like, where you been man? And he’s like, oh, I just had to go out back, man. I just had to lose it. But, you know, yeah. He really has this thing where he really feels like he has to be strong for the rest of us.
And, and yeah. And you know, and I was always like, dude, strength is like sharing that with me. Like I’m, I’m a mess over here. Like, where are you? But, but it’s okay. Right. ’cause there’s no right or wrong he needed to do that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it, you know, I’d learned that later on and a couple years later.
Yeah. We
Victoria Pendergrass: all handle grief differently.
Chris Gazdik: Yes. Say more about that.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, I mean, you know, sometimes like you find out something happened or you lose something. Some people’s first instinct is to cry hysterically. Other people, it’s to punch a hole in the wall because they’re so angry. Other people, it’s to like run away and isolate themselves.
Like our [00:40:00] instinct for what we do when we grieve is all different. And that’s okay like that. And that’s the okay part is like, because there’s definitely no right or wrong. Yeah. It’s not a right or wrong answer. And so, yeah, I mean it’s, and then that’s where like, you know, it, we don’t really have the right to judge how other people grieve.
And because,
Chris Gazdik: and we have to accept it. Yeah. Like I really need no reason for me to be upset with my brother that day. Yeah. I was. Mm-hmm. I was, but there’s no reason.
John-Nelson Pope: But that’s
Chris Gazdik: how you were
John-Nelson Pope: reacting in your grief,
Victoria Pendergrass: right? Yeah. And just because like even then. You, you might think you might react a certain way if you were told the same information or you were in the same position, but the truth is you really don’t until you’re in it.
Chris Gazdik: That’s why. One of our, our three questions, how do you feel when others say things like, at least, or, oh, I understand, or, you know, time heals all wounds. Like these phrases are just so disconnected. Okay,
Victoria Pendergrass: well, yeah, but like
Chris Gazdik: they’re disconnected.
John-Nelson Pope: Would job. You, you know, the book, book of job? The story of job.
He was, he wrote, he had it rough brother. [00:41:00] He did, he did. The, his the adversary, which was Satan was the one, and that’s how you pronounced it. But’s, not Satan. Satan. Satan. Could it be Satan? But Satan, yeah. But took his family, except for his wife who complained a lot. He said, she said, curse god and die.
So, so Satan knew what he was doing? Yeah. Oh yeah. But God said it’s, you can take anything that he has. He’ll keep his faith no matter what. Just don’t, don’t take his life. Okay. And Satan proceeded to take everything and the only thing that it was very good thing was he had three friends that came in.
And now they, they kind of went off and made some mistakes later on. But for, they stayed with him for seven days and didn’t say a word, then that’s what he needed. Mm. And so just be sat with Yeah. Just to be sat with [00:42:00] He was with, with them. With, with him. Right. So that’s, I think that’s important. I think sometimes you can say too much and you can or you try to do euphemisms or bromides or something like that where you know he’s in a better place.
Or would you like to be
Chris Gazdik: alone or would you like me to sit with you? Uhhuh? It’s a good question to ask. Yeah. Very valid.
Victoria Pendergrass: What do you need? Mm-hmm. What do you need? What can I do? Yeah. What do you need in this moment?
John-Nelson Pope: And check back later. Mm-hmm.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: And, and that, and that’s important. Check back later. Have check back later.
Because I’ve had people tell me. Like thus they said, well, if there’s anything I could do for you just let know. You have no idea in that moment, let me know. Just let me know. Yep. Well, you don’t know what you want. Right. So, so you have, and they resented that they were upset that, that they were abandoned basically.
Mm-hmm.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. There’s this episode, you know me, I’m always, has a, always [00:43:00] have a Grey’s Anatomy. Okay. Analogy. There’s anatomy, there’s a Greys Anatomy episode. What better is
Chris Gazdik: that? Is that, is that intended with Job. Job and Grey’s Anatomy is
Victoria Pendergrass: there’s this episode where Izzy Stevens, one of the main characters, her love interest dies.
And when they finally get her home, she just lays on the bathroom floor. And instead of like, I mean, they try to co walk coach her grief
Chris Gazdik: can be debilitating. Yeah. They
Victoria Pendergrass: try to get her to get off the floor, but ultimately, like the, her and her group of friends, like they just take turns laying on the floor with her.
John-Nelson Pope: That’s the book of, and like. That’s awesome. And
Victoria Pendergrass: they, and they just sit there, like they talk, they try to help her get up, but like, they’re not pull, you know, they’re not sitting there like trying to pull her up. Like, come on Izzy, get up. Yeah. They’re just like, you know, with her, come on. And she’s not saying anything.
She’s just saying. But like, they just get on the floor and sit with her and they kind of just talk, you know, just to kind of be present and like, that’s okay. That’s okay.
Chris Gazdik: It’s beautiful.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: You know, I mean, it reminds [00:44:00] me of the moment we did talk about it on the show, John. I don’t know why. I guess we just made an earlier announcement, but this, today’s the last live show.
You know, when you sat on the floor with me when we were moved? Yeah, we talked about that. A few episodes.
John-Nelson Pope: See I must have watched that g Grey’s Anatomy.
Chris Gazdik: It must have, or you just learned how to be sensible. Yeah. Yes.
John-Nelson Pope: I did 14 funerals when I was in 1979 at my first church.
Victoria Pendergrass: 14. I believe that
John-Nelson Pope: 14 funerals.
That is in West Virginia. That sounds like
Victoria Pendergrass: a lot. Is that a lot? Is that a lot? That has
John-Nelson Pope: a whole lot. That’s a whole lot. Okay. For a small church. Oh, yolk Church. And they were
Victoria Pendergrass: all members of your, like of the church? Yeah. Sometimes Victoria’s
Chris Gazdik: small church only has 13 families. Right.
John-Nelson Pope: You know, in and of itself.
I mean, that whole, that whole church was traumatized. I got to where I was actually watching Open Casket and I thought I saw somebody breathe. I mean, it was just like, oh, wow. One, two, come two. Yeah. One.
Chris Gazdik: So there’s one other additional thing in this little segment and we’ll get off, but I, I, I’m, I’m, I’m curious if you guys have thought of this either [00:45:00] in time.
I don’t, I don’t know if it, it’s, it’s unique to me and it’s actually only a recent thought that I’m playing around with. Have you ever thought of pre grieving?
Victoria Pendergrass: Yes.
Chris Gazdik: Pre grieving? Yes. Okay. So evidently it’s not original to me, John. No, I mean, Don, what do you say, Victoria? I don’t know
Victoria Pendergrass: necessarily like if I’ve thought about it in that way.
Sorry, I’m just checking the weather. ’cause I thought I heard.
Chris Gazdik: Finder.
That’s random. Come on. Focus.
Victoria Pendergrass: But look. A, DHD over here. Okay. My gosh. But yeah, I mean, preg, I look at preg grief as more, I’m gonna use death as an example, but like, okay, someone gets like my paw paw who had who died of pancreatic cancer.
Like we knew Yeah, it’s coming. Like by the time they found it, like it was, that was where we were headed. And so like there is these moments where I kind of think back and I like that time where, you know it’s coming Now, I don’t think you can fully prepare yourself because you don’t really, again, you don’t know how you’re gonna [00:46:00] act until it happens or until you lose that thing or that person.
But is that kind of what you’re talking about like this? So it is, but that’s like prepping yourself like
Chris Gazdik: so, so I’m gonna go with my old thoughts first, John. And then I’m going to add, and we can wrap this up with this concept of pre grieving. ’cause my old thoughts stopped at very clear and still it’s gonna make me sound like I’m not a subscriber of pre grieving, but.
But hold, hold on. Hear this all the way through. So my thoughts used to stop at, you cannot grieve before the loss happens. Mm-hmm. And that is because there’s two parts of your brain. We all know the frontal cortex is the thinker part, and then the hypothalamus is the emotion part. The thinking part of our brain can be abstract.
We can reason, we can predict, we can perceive, we could do a lot of things that Right. You know, before, during, and after events and such even. Right? Mm-hmm. We can imagine things happen, but the emotion is not that way at all. It is only an exclusively in the moment. You’re only experiencing the emotion of right [00:47:00] now, again, you’re prefrontal cortex thinker will make you remember or rego into and do all sorts of things.
So there’s interplay. But I used to say, you can’t grieve until it happens. Okay.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay. Right. I hear a but coming.
Chris Gazdik: But yeah. But there’s a, but now because there’s a, there’s pre grieving where you can think about it when you have these known things. And then also there’s like this sort of grieving. An event, which is actually like a series of events.
Divorce is a good example of that. It’s not an event, my gosh, there’s so many litany line of events, and you’re grieving kind of all along the way. It’s different strings. Yes. Yeah. So it’s almost like this pre grieving, the actual mm-hmm. Event. Right. So
Victoria Pendergrass: is it almost like again, I’m gonna use death again as an example of grief, but like, if it’s, is it almost like, okay, I have a, you know, a grandmother who’s in her like late eighties?
Is it like, like, she’s not sick or anything, but is it like that thought of like, sometimes I think about like what it will be [00:48:00] like when she passes away. I did that with my dog. I always use that as an example. Yeah. You know, or like. I know I love my cat and I love my dog, but like, they’re not gonna be here forever because they just don’t live as long as we do.
So like, and I know it’s kind of morbid and sad, but like sometimes I find myself thinking about like, well, like what are we gonna do? Like, how am I gonna feel? Like, what? And I start to think, here’s, here’s the thing that’s important,
Chris Gazdik: that’s occurring to me with that thought. Yeah. Right. There’s, there’s a danger in that.
Right. And, and here’s what I would maybe perceive the danger, John. It’s a bunch of the nuance, right? So you have the knowledge of your grandmother. Dying and you’re imagining that and yeah. Doing very, very normal. And that is what we’re talking about pre grieving or, and you have to really assess, is this though potentially very much all of those previously layered grieving experiences that have lots of leftover percentage, that you’re actually feeling that in preparation for the other There’s mixing there.
Yeah, [00:49:00] there’s mixing. Is that so?
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: yeah,
John-Nelson Pope: yeah. No, I buy that. But I, I will say this is that in clinical pastoral education which is done in hospitals and they have chaplains that are, are trained in, there’s a, a behavioral aspect to it, a psychological counseling aspect to it is that they have the chaplains in training, the interns, write their own funerals and prepare for it. Yeah. It’s not fun. It’s not fun. Have you done that or no? No. There’s an activity or two. I’ve done similar and contemplated and think about it. Yeah. And part of it, we do that in the
Chris Gazdik: military all the time. Write your own. Ugh. Yeah. It’s very emotional.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah, it is.
It is. But that’s a sense. Or have, haven’t you all ever dreamt that your grandparents or your parents died?
Victoria Pendergrass: Yes.
John-Nelson Pope: I mean, I woke up crying. Yes. On several occasions. Prob, I guess. [00:50:00] Yeah. I don’t know. Not that I remember. That’s, I think that’s pretty grieving. Yeah. Probably. Don’t I
Victoria Pendergrass: tell you that I had, yeah. I had that dream one time where I like couldn’t find little man.
Oh, you did? Yeah. Yeah. It was just, yeah, and I like woke up like freaking sobbing. Ouch. Because I, like, in my dream, I like couldn’t find my child. It makes me wanna cry right now. Terrify terrifying. Like, it, like it gives me anxiety. It was just a dream. Like,
Chris Gazdik: yeah, but it, but it’s real feeling. Yeah. It’s emotion.
Oh yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: no. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: So we got a, we gotta a Facebook says Carolyn says, good stuff. I really needed. Oh, absolutely. Hello Carolyn. We’re glad to be there. So let’s answer Carolyn in this sort of next segment, like, what do we do about this? How do we manage grief? What do we do? How do we cope? How do we move? I know you can’t.
You got, quote unquote normal grief. Mm-hmm. We’ve talked about that. Prolonged grief disorder. I think that speaks to the layering, honestly. Mm-hmm. And then people talk about disenfranchised or ambiguous grief. And I think that’s the pre grieving stuff.
John-Nelson Pope: And I, I think, and there’s no fixed timeline. I think you’ve, you’ve mentioned heck with, with [00:51:00] the Cooper loss, we haven’t mentioned it, but
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
Go.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. Because you can actually be in different stages of grief. The Kler Roth’s model is,
Victoria Pendergrass: What is it? Deny an denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance.
Chris Gazdik: And ask me though. What Kubler Ross is.
John-Nelson Pope: Kubler Ross was a a no, no.
Chris Gazdik: Is that, ask me. Okay. Who’s Kubler Ross? She is somebody who got it wrong.
Yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: because I was gonna say not wrong. Not wrong at all. Okay. I was gonna say, like, my number one thing that I do now is like your grief sheet that you gave me
Chris Gazdik: that go there is
Victoria Pendergrass: like, I,
Chris Gazdik: let me test you. How many of ’em do you know? We’ll play a game ’cause I’m gonna do it by memory.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay. The first one is the, sorry,
Chris Gazdik: go ahead and set it up first.
Okay. I, I interrupted you.
Victoria Pendergrass: So Chris has this sheet that I know he didn’t create himself. He got it from somewhere else, but it breaks. Okay. So we know the five stages of grief, blah, blah, blah. But it breaks it down into more than than that. And it gives you questions, it’s kind of like prompts to think through as task processing.
The group, the task. And the last one [00:52:00] is literally like, I can’t remember it word for word, but the last one is literally like continue with your everyday life and start from the beginning whenever you need to. Or something like, like it’s literally go back to the beginning whenever you feel like you’re, you know, very previously grief
John-Nelson Pope: loss.
Yeah. And so we’re, we’re dropping in and out of those things all the time. Don’t you agree? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And
Victoria Pendergrass: so it’s like, like the first one, these tasks, the first one is like, define the loss. And then it’s like, what is the meaning behind the loss? And then it’s another task. Like, I can’t remember the more of them, but there’s more of them and it’s celebrate the Oh the
Chris Gazdik: beauty of the bonds.
The beauty and
Victoria Pendergrass: the loss. And like, so it actually create a ritual. Yeah. Create a ritual. Like, and it’s
Chris Gazdik: do it with other people’s present. Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: And it’s, it creates more of like. So when I use it in therapy, I either like, will go through each thing in therapy, or if they’re like journaling people, then I might task them with like journal each task.
Yeah. Journal. Like each one is a prompt that you journal about or just talk out loud in your car, like go through it. [00:53:00] But then the second I feel
Chris Gazdik: like a proud parent, John, like this is awesome.
Victoria Pendergrass: The second half of the page is like feelings and emotions that you’ll experience with grief. And it lists the fi like anger, depression, but it also lists things like confusion, guilt, confusion, mm-hmm.
What’s another one? It’s like, and it states that like remembering that grief is not linear. It is fluid. It is. We are bouncing all up around one. Damn. I’m angry. The next Sam says,
John-Nelson Pope: all right, it’s not so much, and I, you, you said Kubler Ross is wrong. Yeah, I I I was being silly. No, no, no. What I’m saying is, is that she didn’t have the, all the picture Right.
She, it’s
Victoria Pendergrass: not that simple.
John-Nelson Pope: It’s not that simple. In fact, she’s not actually the one that first came up with it. So that Is she not who did? No, I I’m not sure that I Yeah, bummer. But, but she was able to articulate it and, and, and that Neil
Chris Gazdik: who, who created the stages of grief, I, I gotta know that. I, I, I’m sorry, John.
I gotta That’s okay. Go ahead.
Victoria Pendergrass: But yeah, [00:54:00] it’s, she, she, no,
Chris Gazdik: I interrupted John.
Victoria Pendergrass: She was on the right track.
Chris Gazdik: Right.
Victoria Pendergrass: It’s just not as simple as she lays it out to be.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: Because even once you get towards acceptance. You still are gonna have sad days. You revisit it, you’re still gonna have angry days where you’re like, God.
Mm. You know? And like
John-Nelson Pope: when I have clients that are dealing, let’s say, for anxiety, they, they want, I wanna be curative, having anxiety. No. Yeah. That’s none. That works. You’re able to, we’re gonna
Chris Gazdik: have
John-Nelson Pope: a hard time with that one. Work with this. This is, you know, it’s Erickson’s stages developmental stages.
Chris Gazdik: Developmental, yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. So we, we fall in and out of those stages as well. I mean,
Chris Gazdik: I think we’ve learned that. Yeah. It used to be presented pretty linear, but Yeah. Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: It’s, yeah, it’s not linear. We’re, we’re, we’re like we’re like it’s not linear. It’s more like a cycle. And you, you go up and you improve and sometimes you recapitulate and you go over the same things over and [00:55:00] over again, but you’re, each stage you’re able to, to accomplish something, taking more energy out of it.
Take yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, I this I love that, Victoria. Thank you. You did a wonderful job. I’m so awesome. Thanks. Because I, I, I helped, I presented that to her ’cause I had found that at a conference. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Do you know, I found that at a conference for chronic relapsing and addiction. Mm-hmm. And they, they, I believe it presented this grieving process.
I, and I use it all the time now.
Victoria Pendergrass: It’s like Bible mm-hmm. In my, that’s really,
Chris Gazdik: yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: Therapy session. Anyone who, who, anyone who sees me notes. Well, it’s just because they probably have this, if, if we’ve talked about grief in some
Chris Gazdik: way, it’s just fundamentally different. It’s, it’s the difference between going through stages in the linear way and then having tasks uhhuh to accomplish.
Well,
Victoria Pendergrass: and I just like that it gives you a different way of thinking about it. Like, and it, it kind of forces you to confront these things. Yeah. Like what is the beauty in the loss? Mm-hmm. How are we defining the loss? Like, how can we create a ritual, like, how can we do, how can we continue to live our lives and not let this thing [00:56:00] be the thing that weighs us down and not let us make, you know, not let us continue on in our lives
Chris Gazdik: in any order.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah,
Chris Gazdik: in any order. Any order, right? So, what else? Let’s move on. So what else do we do all to, to, to, to manage grief? What what, what are you gonna be knee deep in, John? How are we managing this A lot. I
Victoria Pendergrass: mean, this sounds obvious, but allowing yourself to feel, if you wanna cry, freaking cry, you know? Now I will add, like, do it safely.
Like if you’re going down 85, going 90 miles an hour, please don’t like, be boohoo crying ’cause you probably can’t see. So please pull over and then have your tears and then continue on your route to wherever you’re going. But like, yeah, feel your feelings if you get angry, feel the anger, but be safe about it.
Let me ask the woman
Chris Gazdik: a question. Okay?
John-Nelson Pope: I want to go to,
Chris Gazdik: go ahead. Something after
John-Nelson Pope: this.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, yeah. Go ask her. The, the woman question I have is, is it true that women feel they can cry or that they’re not allowed to cry? Because men are told we’re not allowed to cry.
Victoria Pendergrass: Mean I think it’s myth. I mean, yeah. Some women do feel like that.
I’m like, you know [00:57:00] what?
Chris Gazdik: Right.
Victoria Pendergrass: It’s not your business. Don’t, if I wanna cry, just let me cry.
Chris Gazdik: My point is, is this is not a guy problem. This is a human problem. Yeah. That we don’t allow ourselves to feel Yeah. Women also.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. No. Yeah. No.
John-Nelson Pope: Okay. When I was at that same church with the 14 deaths, I had another one that she died of, of, of having her esophageal varice, in other words.
Oh yeah. She, that’s bad. She was, they found basically suffocate, right? Suffocated, yeah. Yeah. From the blood that from the erosion of the blood, blood to death. Mm-hmm. And she had chronic alcoholism and she had five children and they were all under the age of 12. And on top of that, her husband didn’t support her or the kids.
He was a very wealthy dentist. Anyway, so I’m going down, driving to Roanoke, Virginia from West Virginia to best State New [00:58:00] Union. Right. The best state, new Union mountaineers. Yeah. And I got overwhelmed.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: I was just so angry and filled with grief and rage. And I went and I just pulled off the road and I screamed at the top of my lungs.
Soul screamed. Soul screamed. Oh man. Oh, love a good scream. So, yeah, and I was grieving, yeah, I was grieving for those kids. I was grieving for her. Her mother said, oh, she, she just had liver cancer. Her mother enabled her as well with the the. The alcoholism.
Chris Gazdik: Mm.
John-Nelson Pope: But, but that was a very difficult time for me because I just was overwhelmed.
I’m, I’m feeling it right now.
Chris Gazdik: You’re feeling it right now. Mm-hmm. Is the percentage that’s left. Mm-hmm. And it’s less than that, but it goes from a soul screen still there though, all the way down to like, you know, it’s okay. Like, you’re not losing your mind right now, but you [00:59:00] do. You really do feel it. I thank you for sharing that.
Yeah. That’s, that’s a powerful, it really comes in waves. Mm-hmm. It does. Yeah. And man, them waves can be tsunamis, brother.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. I, I was just, I I noticed on one of the notes it said 12 months for normal grief. I think what’s normal is normal for you. Yeah. Oh yeah. In other words, for, so there’s some, some people that have grieved for.
18 months, two years seems to be at, I don’t think that’s abnormal necessarily. Yeah. I think when it gets much longer than that, it can be
Chris Gazdik: so, oh, I’m glad you said that because there, there’s a lot of curiosity. I, I feel like people have very strongly, when you get into this, it’s kinda like, how long is this gonna last?
Mm-hmm. People wanna know like, what is
Victoria Pendergrass: Oh yeah.
Chris Gazdik: And you know what I tell people? I, I, I wonder if you guys have. What you guys say, but I, I don’t, obviously there is no time, there’s no right or wrong, there’s no timeframe. Everybody’s different. But I like [01:00:00] to give people some guidance. Mm-hmm. And I think it’s fair to give guidance that it’s measured not by days obviously, or weeks but not by years either.
Mm-hmm. The measurement tool is months. Mm-hmm. And it might be 19 months or 12 months or seven months, but it’s really measured in months. Sometimes it’d be pretty quick, three, four months even with big losses, by the way, y’all. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. There’s not really any reason
John-Nelson Pope: why it has to be years. Yeah. And there’s the two concepts of time.
One’s the Greek the Kronos is time, which is chronological time. 12 months. Okay. Mm-hmm. Chronos. And then there’s ros, which is eternal time. Oh, I don’t understand Ros. Okay. Well, we experienced that transcendent moments. Yeah. When, when you say. Yeah, it all makes sense and all of that. So I would say that good grief enables you to tap in, not on the Kronos time, but on the ros time, which is the fullness of time and which there’s that, that true healing that takes [01:01:00] place.
Okay. Okay. Wow, that’s cool. So I get all religious and philosophical on you.
Chris Gazdik: Well that’s, that’s Greek ology. Yeah, that’s I mean, listen, we have had the human emotional experience, which we endeavor to figure out together. I don’t think I said that in the grand opening. I don’t think you did. No you didn’t.
That’s a first Victorian, we
John-Nelson Pope: didn’t do a five star review either.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah,
Chris Gazdik: that’s a fir Well, I got distracted with the big news man. Yeah. Like, wow.
Victoria Pendergrass: I think one thing that is important to say for as far as like coping and things, and I know Chris, that you have said this many times before, is that we’re not making any big decisions.
Chris Gazdik: Yes. After no major decisions in the, in the space of that. Yep. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: And I think that’s interesting, and I wonder how often y’all get this, but I’ve had quite a handful of clients who have talked about, and it’s usually not them, it’s usually like they’re talking about like a parent or someone, but like they’re, they, they lose a parent and then their parent that’s still around is like married to somebody else within like two months
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: Or something. Oh
Chris Gazdik: boy. Yeah, yeah. Or you
Victoria Pendergrass: know, it’s like a quick [01:02:00] turnaround and then you’re like,
Chris Gazdik: what
Victoria Pendergrass: did you, not even gr like what?
John-Nelson Pope: Well, and, and part of that, be careful about judging though. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: I mean, and I’m not judging, but I think that sometimes it’s hard for the people that are sitting on my couch to understand
Chris Gazdik: a hundred percent.
Victoria Pendergrass: Like why would this person who was married for 35 years or whatever, like. Loose. I’ve, I’ve seen that more,
John-Nelson Pope: and I will say this, this is generalization, but with men, men don’t last very long without a lot of time a partner without a partner. And so part of that, I would say
Victoria Pendergrass: it is mainly, is mainly husbands, right?
For my clients. The other, yeah. So,
John-Nelson Pope: and the other aspect of that is just that, that people have to, to, they have to really be able to, to sit back and, and go, go with the, the grief. They have to, they have to feel it and experience it and to feel that [01:03:00] emptiness and. Refill themselves in ways. I think that’s why we’ve kind of gotten away from that.
We don’t like death very much. The Victorians loved it, but we, we don’t Oh, it is avoided topic. Avoided. Oh yeah, a hundred percent. And now we should say, you know, not avoided,
Chris Gazdik: voided, as I said, avoid it. Yeah. Yeah. We just like to avoid it, which is not realistic. Mm-hmm. Listen kissing cousins grief and depression.
Mm-hmm. I have said a thousand times. What’s enemy number one to depression? Mm-hmm. Isolation. Well, what do you think enemy number one to grief is?
Victoria Pendergrass: Isolation. You do
Chris Gazdik: not want to go through grieving alone. Mm-hmm. No. Right. Right. That is a bad idea.
John-Nelson Pope: So, so the rituals are, are good, like putting, putting like some Jewish folks, they put the
Victoria Pendergrass: lighting
John-Nelson Pope: candles, candy and covering, going to the, covering the mirrors and
Victoria Pendergrass: going to the grave to put [01:04:00] flowers like once a week or at some periodical time.
Time are ritual. Year after
Chris Gazdik: year after year, you continue to do this process. You know, my dear friend Adrian lost his son at Cody, goodness gracious it is been like five years now. And so we have gone and done a balloon release and he calls it his Heaven Day. Mm-hmm. You know, and so we do a balloon release and we celebrate Cody’s birthday and they have people come over every year.
It’s, it’s beautiful. It’s absolutely beautiful celebration of life. It’s a celebration of life, truly, as they say. And, and we, we, we, you know, we always have pizza. Cody’s, Cody’s food was pizza. And it’s just, it’s awesome. I’m so honored to be a part of that ritual to be there for my friend.
John-Nelson Pope: So you are.
You were a, a true friend, so you got down on the floor with Adrian,
Chris Gazdik: like a hundred percent a Aaron, Adam, Aaron or Adam? Aaron? Aaron. Aaron Clark, my buddy Aaron. Sorry. Oh, I’m sorry. My kids’ names are mixed up in all this. Aaron and Adam, they’re all the same. Uhhuh. But what else we need to cover? Ah, mindfulness you know, we talked [01:05:00] about the rituals thing, you know?
Oh, you mentioned the decisions. Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s a lot that we go into kind of trying to manage and deal with, you know, these, these losses throughout time. And I, I, I really feel like commenting really about the hopelessness that people can feel. I mean, people get into desperate spaces with this stuff.
They really do. It’s
John-Nelson Pope: like, you know, I’m wondering, can we truly be a human, fully human without having experienced grief?
Victoria Pendergrass: Probably not.
John-Nelson Pope: Oh, wow.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, because grief don’t think goes beyond the bounds of just death, so then, yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Mm-hmm. Well, it’s, yeah. Well, I mean,
Victoria Pendergrass: because I do, I, I think
Chris Gazdik: a better exp a better way of putting that maybe John is, is that, is, is grief a universal experience for humans? It’s the same thing, and Yeah. I mean, absolutely.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I, you know, maybe a 2-year-old, 3-year-old is not part of the group yet. You know, when you get that first hit well, I think I know where you’re going. [01:06:00] Correct me. You’re right. Go ahead.
Victoria Pendergrass: Like, sorry, I’ve gone away from my mic. Like losing your favorite toy. Oh, things break. Okay.
That’s why I was my, where’s your mind going?
Chris Gazdik: You know where mine went immediately when you said that.
Victoria Pendergrass: What? This is gonna be crazy. Holy
Chris Gazdik: crap. Okay. Psychologists need to study this somehow. This is gonna, this is weird. Never had this thought. Do babies grieve losing the womb?
You know. Yeah. Prob
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: There’s what, what’s Neil say? Cried. They cried. Yeah. They cry when they come out.
Victoria Pendergrass: I mean, they prob they can’t cognitively make sense of it. Yeah. Grief is an experience. Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: But, but that was a, that was rebirthing that was very in vogue back in the 1970s. Well,
Victoria Pendergrass: even
John-Nelson Pope: well, okay.
Things like
Victoria Pendergrass: breastfeeding Go, go further,
John-Nelson Pope: John. Well, that was where people would have difficulties in their lives with addiction or let’s say in terms of, of being [01:07:00] antisocial. And so what they do wanted to do was and by that I mean therapist and quacks, who is that? We’re gonna rebirth the person.
Yeah. We’re gonna wrap them up in swaddling and have them go through experience nce flut
Chris Gazdik: the experience of them after
John-Nelson Pope: several days.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is, that is kooky. And so I’m not going obviously that far. And I know this isn’t an original idea, obviously, as you just pointed out. But, so I don’t think that we can extrapolate you know, dysfunction in whatever later on in life from simply being born.
But I think it is really part of the, here it is natural emotional process that you engage, that you’re kind of inherently possessed Uhhuh in the womb. Yeah. Yeah. And you probably grieve leaving the womb. Well, I mean,
John-Nelson Pope: one could argue, you least argue, have a physical response of Yeah. That’s the Garden of Eden.
We all wanna go back in the womb it’s innocence. Hmm. And we wanna re have innocence restored. Wouldn’t that be nice? Yeah. And we wouldn’t have to worry about death and think about it or our [01:08:00] own di demise. Yeah. Or demise of loved ones.
Chris Gazdik: So, so we have the shrink wrap up. I think closing up thoughts We need to wrap up with this.
Grief does suck though, doesn’t it?
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: It just sucks.
Victoria Pendergrass: My closing thought is,
Chris Gazdik: so are we going to the shrink wrap up? Yeah, I guess so. Victoria banging, go.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. That threw, don’t say that.
Chris Gazdik: What? Oh, banging. That’s bad.
Victoria Pendergrass: No, that just took me a second to recover. Crap. Okay. Sorry. No, I mean, grief sucks. Like, don’t be alone.
You don’t have to do it alone. I mean, go to therapy. If you need to talk to somebody, go to your C clergy. Yeah, go to a clergy, go to whatever, and work through it. Don’t let it just simmer down. Don’t push it down, because then it’s only gonna be worse later on.
Chris Gazdik: Okay. Grief sucks. Shrink wrap up, John, you or I?
John-Nelson Pope: I’ll do it. Okay. Okay. Grief is a natural [01:09:00] process. It’s a human experience. It’s when I think that we become fully human in, in the sense we go. We, we are in the process of becoming human all our lives and grief is a natural part of that. And as we work with it and not avoid it, we embrace it. We don’t have to like it, but we always are able as a result of it, can benefit from it.
Chris Gazdik: Alright. I think my shrink wrap up is gonna be, you know, look, I love that we talked about this being a universal human experience and it really is, it is one of desperate dread. And despair and hopelessness that really kicks in. Grief is a kissing cousin to depression and that is a dark, dark place that we don’t want you to be alone.
And we want you to know and understand that with this human emotional experience that we all universally have, that you do have agency, [01:10:00] you do have things that you can do, you will get through it. This does end even measured by months, if that helps you to get through the tougher times because it comes in waves.
But really and truly, you got this, you got this, you got it.
Neil Robinson: I gotta keep in mind, John’s not leaving us. He will be back. So I can’t give him like the pity win just ’cause he’s leaving. Yeah. Okay. So no pity win for John. I, I love them all. I think Chris’s was the best. I like the, the, the emphasis on the time that it is months, it’s not days.
It does take time to heal. So, no, I would agree. But I think John’s was second with, you know. Universal experiences. Honestly, you guys were all great, but I think I like Chris’s wrap up at the end. And now John’s mad at me.
John-Nelson Pope: No, I’m not. I want you to take my rowing machine.
Chris Gazdik: It’s,
John-Nelson Pope: he’s gonna kick his rowing machine back.
Goodness. Alright. I’m gonna
Chris Gazdik: end this show with something cool that I’ve kind of gotten away from when I have guests on the show, I, I used to make a big deal out of, now it’s gotten more [01:11:00] virtual and you know, whatever. But there was a moment when I was a kid, an insecure kid, struggling with the divorce years and all that kind of stuff.
And this kid looked at me and when we were busting tables and he was like, I felt like he was a cool kid. I really had a lot of respect for this kid. He was really neat. His name was Schoo, that was his nickname. Wow. And he gave me a high five John.
John-Nelson Pope: Okay.
Chris Gazdik: He gave me a high five and I was like, wow, how cool is that?
So when I have live guests and I have somebody sharing their story and sharing their thing mm-hmm. I used to like to do, I haven’t done it for ever, Neil have I, it’s been a long, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? So I’m about ready to give you a high five in signification of like, look, it’s a special moment.
Thank you for sharing your with us. It’s all. That’s what it means.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. Ready? Yeah. Thank you. Good job, guys.
Chris Gazdik: All right. Ready break When we get to keep you. Stay well. We’ll see you next week. We’ll be live on the mics. One more time with Victoria and I and maybe somebody. And then we’ll see you in Florida, brother.John-Nelson Pope: That’s right. You see me in Florida, sunshine State. Take care. Stay well. [01:12:00] Bye.up there and we’re originally, she’s from Massachusetts and I’m from Kentucky, but we spent. Much of our youth, childhood and youth in Bradenton, Florida and adulthood.
So we have family there. My parents are my dad is 99,
Chris Gazdik: 99 years old. Incredible. And they
John-Nelson Pope: live by themselves. And my sister is having trouble a little bit having to do this herself. And my brother has a lot of issues health issues. And so joy and I are going down there and just to, to move back home.
And we’re going back to a place called Bradenton, Florida. Or the Pittsburgh
Chris Gazdik: Pirates play their preseason baseball. That’s right. Exactly. And so [00:05:00] March and we haven’t made a pact. I’m coming down, right, right. You are. Yes sir. And
John-Nelson Pope: so it’s, and we’ve got four bedrooms.
Victoria Pendergrass: Where am I in this invite?
John-Nelson Pope: You’re in this, right?
We can all
Chris Gazdik: go down to see the Pirates play baseball. Hell yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’d be great. Yeah. We’ll do, we’ll do an annual live show at the Pope residence maybe. Yes. Maybe you could do that. Yeah. Well, Victoria’s in Neil, I’m in.
John-Nelson Pope: You could do it at my Neil brother state mansion. We got So something going on here.
Yeah. Yeah. But you have all
Chris Gazdik: the mics and stands and everything. Or we gonna have to bring em. Oh, he’s, we, we can
John-Nelson Pope: carry ’em car enough. We carry. That’s so I look forward to, but I’ll be joining you all weekly on, of on the video zoom virtually, virtually teams. So this is the
Chris Gazdik: saving grace. We’re very pleased that John is gonna be able to continue working with the through therapist eyes.
As a matter of fact, this is gonna be your only professional, I guess, major focus. Is that a true statement?
John-Nelson Pope: That is a true statement. You’re kind
Chris Gazdik: of semi retiring it
John-Nelson Pope: this deal. I am not being in a church anymore. And that’s gonna be, it’s [00:06:00] stressful. Yeah. It’s a lot on you. Yeah. The church I, I, I currently serve and have is my last Sunday is Sunday is they’re selling their properties and you know, it’s kind of bittersweet, but mm-hmm.
And it’s bittersweet leaving you guys. Okay.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: So,
so anyway, I
Victoria Pendergrass: cried when I read your email. I.
John-Nelson Pope: Thank you.
Victoria Pendergrass: And then when I first saw him, I don’t know if he told you this, when I first saw him in the office after he sent that email, I gave him like a bear hug. Oh no. You know what she did? Yeah. No I didn’t.
John-Nelson Pope: I was like, finally,
Victoria Pendergrass: look, now we can, she’s not
Chris Gazdik: sappy free at last.
Free at last. Now can tear down the walls. My office, big office. And now I might be able to sing to her Uhhuh. Oh gosh. Yes. You could do that. No, no. Oh, is that a No, I’m still not
Victoria Pendergrass: getting a no call. John,
Chris Gazdik: you’ll call John to get the singer so he can sing to me. Alright. [00:07:00] Listen, I’ve said some nice things before I feel like I’ve said him on the show, but I guess not.
It was you was an email. You did. Why did we do that on the show?
John-Nelson Pope: I don’t know.
Chris Gazdik: Did we? We didn’t already announce this. Yes, you did. So this, I think you did is the last one. Maybe we did. Yeah. Okay. Well that’s cool. I guess I’ll just suffice it to say, you know, it’s actually really special. I mean, I know you said you’ve lived on you know, multiple continents and moved around the world, three continents through the state, lived in insane.
That’s just really cool to be able to
John-Nelson Pope: Well, I was in, in military moved as a pastor, like it’s gotta be at least 12 times. Yeah. So, so anyway,
Chris Gazdik: so now we’re going back home. So that’s just special. I, I can feel that being a West Virginia. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I’ve always thought it’d be cool to retire in West Virginia.
You actually,
Victoria Pendergrass: you accidentally did your emergency thing. And they called.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, they called you? Yeah. I literally, it’s an emergency Mount Holly. I really, okay. If they call me back. We got a 9 1 1 in intervention for all of this, man. Well, we’ll move on. That’s the [00:08:00] topic. Feel free to sprinkle in the, the thoughts, the senses that you have.
I kind of coordinated this month a little bit along these lines next week will be how to, how to, how do we deal with transitions and stuff? So a lot timing. Yeah. I figured it was, you know, some things that we could do. And honestly, so this show, grief Sucks. Uhhuh is a show that, you know, we’ve done on the, on the show before, but there’s, there’s, mm-hmm.
I’m gonna add a couple of things probably. Okay. A long time listeners of the show can kind of keep track. You know, I, I, we, we don’t renew hardly any content, but we’ve gotten to the point where Spotify and different podcast platforms only go back like a hundred episodes or whatever.
Victoria Pendergrass: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That’s why I noticed when I first, yeah.
Chris Gazdik: So, so, so grief is one that we’ve definitely covered before, but we’re gonna add it to the sort of different angles, different pieces for sure. But I, I’m just picked up on the history of our show that we’re gonna have a few more. Mm-hmm. Like we do moral courage. We do you know, EFT and all that kind of stuff.
You gotta go deal with 9 1 1.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah, they’re gonna arrest me.
Chris Gazdik: [00:09:00] Nine one one’s coming for you. He’s gotta go deal with this. Oh man. That’s awesome. That’s why I saying
Victoria Pendergrass: thank you. I’m not gonna lie, I’ve actually done that before too.
Chris Gazdik: What
Victoria Pendergrass: accidentally held what wasn’t on my watch, accidentally held down the emergency, but oh, it haven put, I put my phone and my cup holder upside down, and it was just the night, right?
Enough pressure. I’ve come close, I’ve done the cancel. And and then I had 17 missed calls from my husband and my mother who are listed as my emergency contacts when it’s sent them help on into distress.
Chris Gazdik: So, Victoria, why does grief suck and why is its necessary? What is this grief thing? What do you, why does it suck?
How do you handle grief? What is it? How do, yeah, man, why grief sucks and why is it necessary? What’s going on in your just random thought? Well, I mean, you mentioned,
Victoria Pendergrass: you mentioned one thing about transition and grief is a form of transition, and so like people hate change.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. They really don’t deal, I mean, and change.
Well, I hate change
Victoria Pendergrass: and, and I think that like, I mean, I, I know probably today we’ll look at grief mostly as like the death. Of [00:10:00] someone, you know,
Chris Gazdik: we must certainly would not,
Victoria Pendergrass: but it is, well, if you would let me finish it. I was gonna say that it’s more all over. It’s more than just the death of someone. Yeah.
Or the passing of someone. It is like the loss of a friendship. The loss of a job. The loss of a, anything
Chris Gazdik: concept.
Victoria Pendergrass: Anything, yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Like loss of an awareness.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. Loss of like a, like a belief that you’ve been taught your whole life. Like It is, it is a, it is a very wide concept. I don’t know words to put that people don’t realize
Chris Gazdik: it.
Like, honestly, I’m, I, I grieve my kids leaving home. Yeah. I mean, empty, empty nesting is hugely grieving. Yeah. And people realize that. And you’ve gone through a lot of transitions. Leave. Yeah. May have. May have. Thank you for that. So, you know, I mean, it’s, it’s like so broad. Yeah. It’s so broad. Even for
Victoria Pendergrass: me, the loss, the loss of a single life of like a non kid life, you know?
Oh, yeah. And it’s not to say that [00:11:00] I, you
Chris Gazdik: choose getting married, but you lose and being single.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. But like, you know, or it was just me and my husband for a while, or my husband and I for a while. You know, and it’s not that I don’t, I mean, I love my child, but it is still a process of like, grieving, okay, well now who am I after?
I’ve like given birth,
Chris Gazdik: I very, and
Victoria Pendergrass: blah, blah, blah. You know, all the things. I very
Chris Gazdik: clearly remember our last pre kid date. Yeah. So she was pregnant, got a limo, went down to a play, had to leave the play early. The limo driver was pissed. I we were upset. He was like, I’m sorry. You know, grape, sparkling, grape juice in the line in limousine and all.
Yeah, it was, it was the premium ’cause we were losing our Yeah. You know, non kid set. I mean, that’s why
Victoria Pendergrass: a lot of people drew like a babymoon. Yep.
Chris Gazdik: You know? Yep.
Victoria Pendergrass: They go and enjoy time away before, because as I talked with a client today, that after you have children there is, if you go somewhere with your children, it is not a vacation.
It is a trip. It is a trip to the beach, a trip to the [00:12:00] mountains, a trip to Disney. This is true. It is not a vacation.
Chris Gazdik: Not a vacation
Victoria Pendergrass: until your kid is like six, I don’t know. Y’all have older kids, 16, maybe. Then you, then they can, can start to maybe enjoy it a little bit more. You know, you get a little bit of
Chris Gazdik: that, you get a little bit of that.
Victoria Pendergrass: But yeah. Especially with my 3-year-old. Yeah. We’re not going on vacations unless it’s just me and my husband.
Chris Gazdik: Mm-hmm.
Victoria Pendergrass: It is a and they’re, and they’re few
Chris Gazdik: and far in between for, for a lot of time. So so here’s, here’s something I, I wanna focus this in on that I think is really important for people to understand about grief.
Yeah. Is, is very much, you know, there’s, there, I like to think of it as a kissing cousin to depress.
Victoria Pendergrass: Could be. Yeah. So if you, if you think
Chris Gazdik: of all the symptoms of depression, what are they?
Victoria Pendergrass: Loss of interest and things? Sadness most of the day. Nearly every day.
Chris Gazdik: Loss appetite. Loss of appetite, concentration
Victoria Pendergrass: issues, suicidal thoughts, irritability irritability right.
Yeah. And how [00:13:00] many
Chris Gazdik: of those do you experience with grief?
Victoria Pendergrass: Do
Chris Gazdik: you ever think about this?
Victoria Pendergrass: Victoria? Yeah. Probably are like all of them. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Have you ever thought of the, the parallels, even the
Victoria Pendergrass: suicide, even the suicidal thoughts can be self-harming thoughts or thoughts of death? Yeah. Because it’s not just suicidal thoughts, it’s just thoughts of death, of recurrent death, like
Chris Gazdik: morbidity.
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Have you ever thought of the correlation between grief and depression?
Victoria Pendergrass: I’m curious. I don’t think, not intentionally.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: I haven’t never been like, oh, this is the, you know, these are connected, or these are basically the same. But I can see it interest like, yeah. I mean, it’s not surprising.
Interesting.
Chris Gazdik: You’ll find over your career to come still a little maybe early to get so much repetitive statements. Yeah. But you’ll find the phrases, the statements that you make. This is one for me that I’ve said many times over the years, you know, grief is a kissing cousin to depression. Yeah. And then I go on to explain, you know, what you’re experiencing is literally exactly like what people that experience chronic depression go through.
Mm-hmm. All of them. You’re crying, [00:14:00] you’re tearful, you don’t know why. Yeah. Emotions are very labile. All of the other things with sleep, you’re not interested in
Victoria Pendergrass: things that you’re usually interested in. It’s depression.
Chris Gazdik: These are the depression symptoms. Yeah. So it’s, it’s really, you know, grief, they think of it and talk about it as like, not just a loss.
I mean, it’s a whole body experience to where, you know, the whole freaking thing is kind of going on where your body hurts. That’s what they say with depression, you know, the commercial, it hurts, it physically has pain.
Victoria Pendergrass: Right? Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: And, and so all of the other things that kind of go along with it, it’s a full experience, mind, mood, body, spirit, the whole nine yards.
Everything’s involved. Oh. So first of all, we got feedback from Frank. Frank says, that was funny, funny, funny. Okay. Yeah. So are we back from the 9 1 1? What happened? Yeah. Oh
John-Nelson Pope: yeah. No, they didn’t come out after me. I just made sure that canceled you, you wanted, you wanted to take a look? Yeah, I wanted to make sure it was canceled.
The, the long arm of the law was on its way. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know what caused it.
Victoria Pendergrass: I did, you probably had your wrist bent where it was like pressing it. Mm-hmm. Let’s, [00:15:00] for extended period of time. Let’s, let’s
Chris Gazdik: stay moving. So, okay. I, I haven’t really thought of this a whole lot, but when you’re talking about.
John, you know what, why grief sucks. What it is, why is it necessary? Have you all thought of grieving or grief events as like small trauma events? Yes, I have a go. Yeah. Do you have Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, I was, we just got done talking, John, I look at, you know, grief as being basically depression mm-hmm. Or kissing cousins.
So I never really thought of it in, in a trauma sense. I really haven’t really, because I’m so stuck on depression.
Victoria Pendergrass: Oh. Think that’s where my brain always goes. Think. So part of my, part of my like, intro assessment when I see people is I get to a SEC session where I ask about like, abuse and victimization, and then I ask about trauma.
Like trauma. The trauma question. Yeah. But I kind of break it up. Do you? And most people without prompt for me, most people will say Yeah. The death of someone. Yeah. The, like, the, you know, the grief of like, you know, I was there when someone died. I was there. Like, I witnessed, you know, I was there with them [00:16:00] when, when they got sick, I found my grandma through the hospice.
Mm-hmm. And you know, or Yeah, I came in one from home one day and someone was, you know. You know, on the floor or something like, yeah, I was
Chris Gazdik: second on the scene with my sister. So, I mean, it’s funny because I, I have heard that, and people do bring that up on their own volition, and I always read it down under the trauma section.
But it’s funny, I never really correlated it. I correlated it way more with depression.
John-Nelson Pope: I had a, a, a client that whose son was killed in an, an accident which was preventable. And so, and she was a very religious person and she literally had cardiomyopathy as a result of it. Broken heart syndrome.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, I’ve been, I’ve been into that lately.
Yeah. I’ve had a couple of clients and, and some personal experiences, you know, with this whole broken heart syndrome thing. We’ve talked about it on a show before. Right. But that’s, that kind of trips me, me out, John Suos, huh? Yeah, that trips me out, man. Yeah. It’s even being a therapist, it’s kind of amazing to me.
Mm-hmm. You know, one of the things is my mom. Mm-hmm. I, I truly [00:17:00] believe my mom who is a dementia patient now on a memory care unit the death of my sister, we believe caused mm-hmm. I believe now caused that.
John-Nelson Pope: That just, it just pushed her off the Yeah. Man, it, I just,
Chris Gazdik: I have a hard time conceptually believing that, and even knowing what I know, man, it’s wild.
John-Nelson Pope: There’s, with PTSD Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder there’s several good books many good books that have been out and think it was brought to our awareness during the Iraq, Afghanistan military actions and did you go back to Vietnam? Well, yes. It goes back, it actually goes back to the Civil War.
It’s kind, well,
Chris Gazdik: obviously, but it didn’t, but where we began to realize it more. Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. It was Vietnam. It’s when they started, right? There was, there was a movie called coming Home. And it was about a, a veteran that had was paralyzed and, it was one of the, the people that was taking [00:18:00] care of him got involved with her anyway.
There was also this wounded person that was wounded internally and emotionally with PTSD and he killed himself Yeah. As a result. Oh boy. So it’s a, it that was bringing that into attention that came out around 1979 or something like that. So that’s where it
Chris Gazdik: framed your mind. Right. Right.
John-Nelson Pope: And, and there’s, it’s funny, if I could
Chris Gazdik: just interrupt because I, I, I, I start with trauma when it’s a traumatic event mm-hmm.
And then move to grief mm-hmm. After, and I, but when it’s grief, I don’t think trauma mm-hmm. When it’s clearly a grieving event. Mm-hmm. I just, I’m, I’m backwards. I, I, I don’t know it. I I will adjust that. There’s, there’s, there’s
John-Nelson Pope: a good book called The Body Keeps Score. Are you familiar with that, Vander?
Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s good stuff.
Chris Gazdik: Tell us about that.
John-Nelson Pope: Well, it, it’s he’s Dutch but it’s the author, but he’s done a lot of research in in post-traumatic stress disorder and grief reactions, people that they, they actually have [00:19:00] physiological reactions to, to their grief and to their trauma.
Chris Gazdik: Mm-hmm.
John-Nelson Pope: And so the body never forgets. And so you it’s a process where one person, where a person starts to heal. See, what’s funny
Chris Gazdik: is I, that material I apply in my clinical brain to trauma. Mm-hmm. Not so much grief. This side. Yeah. I’m, I’m learning. I’m growing, man. Yeah. You know, so now I’ll, I’ll have that.
I think they’re intertwined. I mean, I’ve
Victoria Pendergrass: literally lit lint that book out to people, to a client. Have you? Yeah. It’s really good. Actually, a client of mine has it right now. It’s very, it’s not in my, it’s not on my bookshelf. It’s, I
Chris Gazdik: hope you get it back. I know. I never do that. I never do that, John. Eh,
Victoria Pendergrass: the last person that had it had it for about a year.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: exactly. So, you know. Exactly. It doesn’t happen very often. What?
Chris Gazdik: Okay, let’s move on. ’cause there’s a lot with this topic of grief. I really, really, when we talk about why it’s necessary, why do we hate Victoria if that’s a tuna strong word. No, we don’t hate Victoria. No, we [00:20:00] don’t hate Victoria. It’s not what I said.
Nobody email in on me on that. I said, Victoria, why do we hate, if that’s not too strong of a word, the phrase time heals all wounds. You might have
Victoria Pendergrass: to, I don’t wanna make this episode explicit, so it’s a bunch of bull crap. We’ll keep it family friendly. Yeah. It’s. Ah, I don’t like, I mean, it’s just ’cause it’s not accurate, right?
Like,
Chris Gazdik: I love your nonverbals here. It’s so awesome. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: It’s just that like, and also when you’re grieving, no matter what you’re grieving, that’s not the crap you wanna hear.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: I just lost someone or I just lost something. Or I just, you know, another one
Chris Gazdik: of those are, I understand.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. And I’m like,
Chris Gazdik: you just don’t, you can’t.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. My thing is, is I’ve, I’ve said a thousand times, there’s another one of these phrases where I’ve kinda worked out, like, time heals all wounds is just a farce. It’s, it’s really unfortunate because it sets up unrealistic [00:21:00] expectations. It takes time to resolve things or, oh yeah. It takes a little bit of time to compartmentalize them and numb them out.
Time doesn’t do anything. You’re doing one of those two things. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And one is bad, one’s good. Yeah. Not right, not wrong, but one is really healthy. One is really. Very potentially destructive. So this whole idea of avoiding or short-cutting your grief that leads directly to feeling disconnected, to feeling numb, to feeling just dis what’s the word I’m looking for?
Dissociated. You know,
John-Nelson Pope: when I was in doing pastoral clinical pastoral education in a hospital setting one of the chaplains there facilitated a group and it was, he called it Good grief. Yeah. And yeah. Good grief. It’s a cool phrase. Yeah. Good grief is a cool phrase. But, but he was talking very much about what, what this topic is about.
Yeah. It’s it’s, it’s, [00:22:00] you, you don’t avoid the, the grief. I think if you, if you try to bury it and you will, it will come out some other way. It will cause other, other issues, right? Yeah. Other harm. Yeah, other harm. Physiological and emotional relationship wise. You know, it’s funny, I think, I think that a
Chris Gazdik: lot of people kind of get caught with good grief.
Mm-hmm. As you used that phrase, I’ve never used it. I may steal that from you because like you were saying, Victoria, you know, when we’re talking about what happens with grieving Yeah. I mean, you, you, you have a child and you grieve the loss of being single when you’re married or you know, kid less when you’re, are already married.
You know, it’s like you want this change. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But you’re grieving the loss that resulted from making this change that you chose. I think people feel like I’m not really allowed to be sad about that. Mm-hmm.
Victoria Pendergrass: Right. Yeah. I chose to keep this pregnancy and follow through with it, and I chose to stand [00:23:00] up in front of whoever you believe in and friends and family and, you know, declare my vows to this person.
I, you know,
Chris Gazdik: I can’t grieve this. Yeah. But you need to, ’cause otherwise that comes out to play. You know, I heard years after, obviously many, many years after my wife had actually made the comment. She’s like, I really think we should have stayed in West Virginia before, you know, after we got married for a little while.
I think that would’ve helped a lot. I’m like, oh, okay. Well, good to know. Never, never knew. You know. Right. I, you know, but it does make sense. Mm-hmm. She was going through something, never really resolved it or dealt with it, and it came out that way.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, and then that’s the thing though, many years later, you know, I think it just is a, an, I’m always talking about the, a recipe for resentment, but like, yeah, I think it does.
That’s where it can lead to if you don’t deal like with the grief.
Chris Gazdik: Right. It’s just, and, and there’s another thing we’ll talk about layering, well, I guess I’ll throw it in now. Do you, do you guys think about [00:24:00] this? Conceptually, if you can imagine grieving. Mm-hmm. So you come across a grieving event, and then what do we do with trauma?
Well, we do a trauma line and we, we experience like, well, what kinda losses or traumas have you had in addition to this one? So you get a full picture. Do we, do we think about that with grief? Because I don’t know that clinicians as much think layering or like what, what multiple grieving events that go into this current grieving event.
Mm-hmm.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because
Chris Gazdik: maybe it’s just common sense and I just, I haven’t heard many clinicians talk about it.
Victoria Pendergrass: I mean, I don’t necessarily know if I like, I think it’s just depends on also like the client. I don’t know. But yeah, I mean, it would make sense because like say I lost someone a year ago and then I lost another person, or I lost another thing like eight months ago and then I lost another thing six months ago.
Like if I haven’t originally dealt with that first grieving. Or is that what you’re talking about? Absolutely. [00:25:00] Then like the one that came eight months ago, then now you’re adding that to it.
Chris Gazdik: Yep.
Victoria Pendergrass: And then I still haven’t grieved either one of those things. And then the third one comes along since months ago.
Now you got a percentage of the first,
Chris Gazdik: a percentage of the second and the fullness of the third.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: And on and on it goes. Goes. And none of
Victoria Pendergrass: it is resolved. Right. You know, none of it is like being dealt with and it all
Chris Gazdik: comes back up. Yeah. That’s what happens when you experience, I lash
Victoria Pendergrass: out, I push away friends and family, those that love me.
I, you know, maybe start getting into bad habits or skills, like this is really important. Understand skills.
John-Nelson Pope: We have client that has having nightmares about his father and I’m gonna speak louder. Okay. But he’s, he tends to go low, John
Chris Gazdik: or Neil.
John-Nelson Pope: Alright. He’s. He’s having nightmares about his father. He was very estranged from his father.
And he said, I don’t grieve. I don’t grieve about him. I don’t Yeah. Miss him, but, right. ’cause he had killed himself. Oh my gosh. His father. Mm-hmm. And his [00:26:00] father keeps coming into his room and in, in his dreams
Chris Gazdik: mm-hmm.
John-Nelson Pope: And confronting him. And he’s having a real struggle with that. See, that’s he, it’s going to come out.
It does. Yeah. In, in so many different ways. It’s almost, would you call it inevitable? I think it’s inevitable. It’s inevitable, yeah. Yeah. I would agree. We we’re wonderfully made. I mean, we’re, we are magnificent creatures. Humans. Humans are, and I don’t, we don’t do magnificent things a lot of times, but we’re very complex.
Mm-hmm. And there’s so many shades and nuances into who we are.
Chris Gazdik: Right.
John-Nelson Pope: And I, I think that we have to have an environment where people can be open about their feelings and their thoughts, their sense of anger, betrayal feeling guilt if somebody dies. And there’s a part of you that feels like.
Wow, that’s, that’s actually good for [00:27:00] me. And yet you might feel guilty about that and that’s gonna be, it’s another factor. Complicated grief.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. Well, a complicated, yeah. There’s something called complicated bereavement. And I, I, I, I, I feel like that’s what we’re talking about with layering. Yeah. You know, and I’ve thought of that for years.
I’ve talked about that, you know, with people and help them understand exactly what Victoria, you and I just went through, because honestly, what it really amounts to when you’re 54 years old and you have a loss, let’s just say. I don’t wanna say somebody died because that’s just too easy. Let’s say we’re, we’re really attached to John and he’s moving and leaving to Florida, and we start feeling a lot of feelings about that.
And
John-Nelson Pope: I start singing goodbye to you. Oh,
Chris Gazdik: goodbye
John-Nelson Pope: to you.
Chris Gazdik: Oh my goodness. Goodbye to
Victoria Pendergrass: you.
Chris Gazdik: Neil. Cut his mic off.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, like he’s trying to make me cry today. Yes,
Chris Gazdik: he is. Because we will feel feelings from that. Yeah, for sure. But if we’re not really aware at 54 years old, we’re having a grieving event that we have a hundred [00:28:00] percent of, but we literally have probably, you know, 60% of loss.
Number one when you were 10.
Victoria Pendergrass: Mm-hmm.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. How much percentage of graduation when you, when you grieved, you know, losing the transition into adulthood, leaving, leaving your small town. Okay. So that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. It’s good grief. Good grief, but there’s energy of sadness. Yeah. That builds up from number one to number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 flows.
6, 7, 8, 10, 12, like, and you’re 54 and you’re gonna feel a percentage of all of them. If you’re not resolving them as you go.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yes.
Chris Gazdik: When you resolve them, you’ve let go and you process and you’re literally free. You know, I can prove that to people. I like to prove to clients. Have you ever watched children at a funeral?
You’ve seen them all the time, John. Yeah. What are the, what are the kids like? They’re amazing. They’re
John-Nelson Pope: amazing.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: They’re very real. They’re very there. They’re, yeah. Yeah. They’re, and it depends on how, how old [00:29:00] they are. It does. Yeah, it does. The younger, the better. Yeah. You know, like I get questioned all the time, like, should I take my kid to the funeral?
What? I’m like,
Chris Gazdik: oh yes.
John-Nelson Pope: As a minister, I would say Yes. Yes, definitely do that. Because that, you know what, they’re gonna teach you how to grieve. Right. Literally. And you know, they could even laugh and play. They’re amazing.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. They’re like crying in a puddle in the corner. ’cause mommy’s not gonna wake up.
And and then I wanna cook. I’m hungry. Can we go eat? I’m so hungry. Yay. I’m gonna play with my friends in the back of the church when we’re gonna throw a ball and then I’m gonna come back in and What do you mean she’s still sleeping? Oh, I’m sad again. It’s just so free flowing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It it’s beautiful.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: The whole spectrum of emotion.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, I mean, and I’ve all, and I know I’ve said this before when we’ve talked about grief, but like, it’s, to me it’s also the whole idea and acceptance of that. Like, grief doesn’t shrink over time. We, like, we stay, we get bigger. Grief stays the same size, so we [00:30:00] grow around the grief.
Oh my God. Like the grief is always there. And then I actually recently had someone tell me, a client tell me that they, that they read or heard or were doing something where they were like, well, the grief has always been there. It was just love beforehand.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, it was love with what?
Victoria Pendergrass: Like no, it was just love beforehand.
Like it was love before it turned into grief.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, okay. I like that.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Conceptually, but also that, so you pair them together. The two could be true at the same time.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah, but also like, I mean, we grow around grief. Grief is stays the same size, like it doesn’t shrink as time goes on and heals wounds or whatever, whatever.
Unless
Chris Gazdik: you’re resolving it.
Victoria Pendergrass: But no, it’s still there.
Chris Gazdik: Well, okay. Like what, I mean, we probably saying the same things in different ways. I bet. Yeah. What I mean is that the intensity level goes down. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: You get, you go from crying every day to like, you can think about them and you smile to yourself and you think about, oh, [00:31:00] that was such a great thing, whatever it was, or whoever it was, and then we can move on throughout our day.
Yes. We got, you can
Chris Gazdik: never get to letting go enough to where you get to zero.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. No, there’s not such, no.
Chris Gazdik: You know, you, but you can get down to 10.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. Because
Chris Gazdik: if you’re sitting around 80 or a hundred, that’s just chronically painful and you have dreams and it comes out in all the things we were talking about.
Yeah. Right.
Victoria Pendergrass: I mean, I. Sorry. No, go ahead. I mean, like, I have a fr my, my, I’ve mentioned this before, any moons ago on here, but like, my best friend was killed and this December it’ll be, oh, this, right? What is 2025? This December it’ll be 15 years. Like, there’s not a day. Oh, wow. That goes by that I don’t think about her.
Chris Gazdik: Wow. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: But I might have some spells every once in a while where I like, feel super emotional still there or whatever. And I still cry, but like, when she crosses my mind at some point or multiple times every day, like I, it doesn’t ruin, like it doesn’t [00:32:00] hard stop my day. Intensity
Chris Gazdik: isn’t there? Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: Like I still miss her.
All the things.
John-Nelson Pope: You were, but like, you were quite a bit younger too, so you were I was a
Victoria Pendergrass: senior in high school. Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Senior in high school. And so you’re a teen. Yeah. Which was
Victoria Pendergrass: where I graduat waited 15 years ago.
John-Nelson Pope: Well, I was, I was gonna say you were in middle school, but thanks. But, but that is, things are so intense.
Yeah. Particularly during your adolescence and all of that. So it’s sticks with you, it sticks with you. It’s in, it says more content. Yeah. Yeah. More,
Chris Gazdik: more, more emotional energy. Yeah. Victoria, my litmus test for a resolved. Mm-hmm. Emotion is that when you feel the intensity. Of the emotion, like it just happened.
Mm-hmm. Later on, that’s clearly unresolved. Yeah. But it’s also unresolved if you have little to no contact with the emotion from when something first happened. A resolved emotion is when you feel a gradual decline over months or Yeah. Years. [00:33:00] Right. Where it gradually, every time you touch it, you let go of a little bit of it.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Because you’re feeling it, you’re allowing it to be present. And part of you, as you say, John, part of the, the nuance of what makes us, our experience, us. Right. And so when you re-experience it later on, it’s just a whole lot less intense Yeah. But it’s the exact same emotions that’s important.
Mm-hmm.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. Good
Victoria Pendergrass: points.
John-Nelson Pope: The tapestry of your life is that you were able to, to see the knots on one side of the tapestry and on the, and on the front you can see the beauty of it. Yeah. And so there was, there’s that sense that sometimes when you’re initially. Grieving. All you could see are the knots and the pain and, and all of that.
But the beauty of, of processing your grief and age is the griefs still there, but you turn the tapestry over and you see the beautiful patterns. Yeah. Mm-hmm. You see it in all its richness.
Chris Gazdik: Well, if you’re agreeable, I’m, I’m, I didn’t ask you, but John, I [00:34:00] would say, you know, my own experience right now, you know, with you going to California or California, geez.
Florida. California. California, California Dream you know, going, going down to California, I see the knots like I’m, you know, we’re, we’re recording with you for the live, for the. Maybe not the last time ever, but it’s not gonna be the norm until,
John-Nelson Pope: until spring training.
Chris Gazdik: You know, hearing you sing to Victoria in the hallways, which I’m not eing, lly gonna be allowed to do.
Those are the knots, right? Yeah. Like I, you know, John’s not gonna float in here like a fart on the wind when a client comes and leave and I’m gonna knock on his door and he is not here. Yeah, I know. He is not gonna be here. It’s like those are the knots, right, Victoria? Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: No, I’m gonna miss you.
Bringing weird snacks and things.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. He’s got, that’s
Victoria Pendergrass: so, yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Strange tomato drink or something recently. Well, no,
Victoria Pendergrass: that those, those Mexican sodas, Uhhuh, they’re Mexican sodas. I drink almost all those and gave a lot to clients, but these are so good.
Chris Gazdik: And the ice cream bars, John, they killed me. Hey, I brought those.
Oh, you did? Well you [00:35:00]
Victoria Pendergrass: brought the keto friendly ones, right? I did. I brought the ice cream sandwiches.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, okay. Well that was your fault then. Yeah. Well, but those are the nuts and the beautiful tapestry is how beautiful is it that you’re gonna be able to be with us? We transition into video meetings. Mm-hmm.
Which I think we will enjoy the mm-hmm. The, the, the fluidity with, and you know, and, and we’re gonna do some fun things and we’re gonna have more of your attention and focus on through a therapist eyes. Yep. Right. What a beautiful tapestry going home. So I love that there’s knots. You turn it over and there’s the beauty landscape.
Mm-hmm. Change. Yeah, change. Change
John-Nelson Pope: is hard, but change is inevitable. And it can also be very good.
Chris Gazdik: That’s partly why do it, Victoria. It’s partly why buoy. It’s partly why grieving is necessary. Yeah. It’s just absolutely necessary.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, because like.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. Okay. One more, one more concept. Go ahead, John.
John-Nelson Pope: I, I’m just saying right now, because I am moving, [00:36:00] we’ve been so busy and everything happened so quickly.
The selling of the house and buying of the house mm-hmm. It all happened in one day, basically for us. Lightning speed, lightning speed when we got what we wanted. But I hadn’t been able to process it. I’ve, and so that is something that will hit me probably when I get holed up down in Florida. It’s, it’s an interesting,
Chris Gazdik: really interesting point.
And Victoria, Neil and I are probably ahead of you mm-hmm. In kind of managing the emotion. Mm-hmm. We’re feeling whereas you are not yet. Right. Say more about that, because that’s a really cool piece of this that I think people get really confused about.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. Well there’s just so many un so much unfinished business.
You have to close up shop, you have to say goodbye to your clients. Yeah. And all of that. Yeah. I’m trying to take care of my clients.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. While also taking care of yourself and,
John-Nelson Pope: yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And that is, and [00:37:00] there, it’s very difficult for, for some of them, a couple of ’em are like, happy. That’s, no, they’re, but it, it, it’s not, my wife and I have not been able to sit down and say, this is what we’re gonna miss about the Oh, yeah.
The church. It’s just happening. Yeah. The, the friends that we have, we’ve acquired in the last decade, we’ve been here 10 years, and
Victoria Pendergrass: well, it’s like when you get, it’s like when you get in a car wreck and you have like, adrenaline, right? That adrenaline’s pumping through you. Or when something crazy happens and you have pumping through with adrenaline, but the, as soon as you like, sit still,
Chris Gazdik: that and your body calms down
Victoria Pendergrass: and you start to realize how much pain you’re in and like, what’s actually injured, you know, and like mm-hmm.
Or, you know. A
Chris Gazdik: hundred percent. Well,
John-Nelson Pope: isn’t it interesting that we’re, we’ve talked about physiological pain
Victoria Pendergrass: analogies Yeah, yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Analogies mm-hmm. Because of the trauma of grief. Mm-hmm. For [00:38:00] example, or grief itself. We, we tend to, to want, in our culture and our society is to just be very stoic about it.
Or certain,
Chris Gazdik: never let ’em see you sweat. Yeah. Never. Right. Crime not Okay. Collected.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Let me be tough about it. Yeah. I remember, I, I, it was almost a resentment for years. Not really a resentment, but it was like, what are you doing? The first person that died in my life was, my grandma always say, I love you, grandma.
Can’t wait to see her again. But, you know, when, when she died, it was really amazing because she had an aneurysm and I was at the foot of the bed, man. Mm-hmm. And my mom was up there at her ear. My sister was over there on the other side, and my brother was to my right. He couldn’t get outta the room fast enough.
Mm-hmm. But he got caught. And she actually flatlined, she died when we were in the room and whatever. Now I experienced that as beautiful. Mm-hmm. I, I I just thought it was, yeah. Amazing.
John-Nelson Pope: Well, there’s a chaplain that’s, yeah, I’ve seen that so many times. But,
Chris Gazdik: you know, he left [00:39:00] Uhhuh, you know, we went back to the waiting room or whatever when we were done, and he was gone.
I’m like, where’s my brother? Like where, so he truncated it, he truncated it, man. He said, I was like, he came back finally, and I’m like, where you been man? And he’s like, oh, I just had to go out back, man. I just had to lose it. But, you know, yeah. He really has this thing where he really feels like he has to be strong for the rest of us.
And, and yeah. And you know, and I was always like, dude, strength is like sharing that with me. Like I’m, I’m a mess over here. Like, where are you? But, but it’s okay. Right. ’cause there’s no right or wrong he needed to do that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it, you know, I’d learned that later on and a couple years later.
Yeah. We
Victoria Pendergrass: all handle grief differently.
Chris Gazdik: Yes. Say more about that.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, I mean, you know, sometimes like you find out something happened or you lose something. Some people’s first instinct is to cry hysterically. Other people, it’s to punch a hole in the wall because they’re so angry. Other people, it’s to like run away and isolate themselves.
Like our [00:40:00] instinct for what we do when we grieve is all different. And that’s okay like that. And that’s the okay part is like, because there’s definitely no right or wrong. Yeah. It’s not a right or wrong answer. And so, yeah, I mean it’s, and then that’s where like, you know, it, we don’t really have the right to judge how other people grieve.
And because,
Chris Gazdik: and we have to accept it. Yeah. Like I really need no reason for me to be upset with my brother that day. Yeah. I was. Mm-hmm. I was, but there’s no reason.
John-Nelson Pope: But that’s
Chris Gazdik: how you were
John-Nelson Pope: reacting in your grief,
Victoria Pendergrass: right? Yeah. And just because like even then. You, you might think you might react a certain way if you were told the same information or you were in the same position, but the truth is you really don’t until you’re in it.
Chris Gazdik: That’s why. One of our, our three questions, how do you feel when others say things like, at least, or, oh, I understand, or, you know, time heals all wounds. Like these phrases are just so disconnected. Okay,
Victoria Pendergrass: well, yeah, but like
Chris Gazdik: they’re disconnected.
John-Nelson Pope: Would job. You, you know, the book, book of job? The story of job.
He was, he wrote, he had it rough brother. [00:41:00] He did, he did. The, his the adversary, which was Satan was the one, and that’s how you pronounced it. But’s, not Satan. Satan. Satan. Could it be Satan? But Satan, yeah. But took his family, except for his wife who complained a lot. He said, she said, curse god and die.
So, so Satan knew what he was doing? Yeah. Oh yeah. But God said it’s, you can take anything that he has. He’ll keep his faith no matter what. Just don’t, don’t take his life. Okay. And Satan proceeded to take everything and the only thing that it was very good thing was he had three friends that came in.
And now they, they kind of went off and made some mistakes later on. But for, they stayed with him for seven days and didn’t say a word, then that’s what he needed. Mm. And so just be sat with Yeah. Just to be sat with [00:42:00] He was with, with them. With, with him. Right. So that’s, I think that’s important. I think sometimes you can say too much and you can or you try to do euphemisms or bromides or something like that where you know he’s in a better place.
Or would you like to be
Chris Gazdik: alone or would you like me to sit with you? Uhhuh? It’s a good question to ask. Yeah. Very valid.
Victoria Pendergrass: What do you need? Mm-hmm. What do you need? What can I do? Yeah. What do you need in this moment?
John-Nelson Pope: And check back later. Mm-hmm.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: And, and that, and that’s important. Check back later. Have check back later.
Because I’ve had people tell me. Like thus they said, well, if there’s anything I could do for you just let know. You have no idea in that moment, let me know. Just let me know. Yep. Well, you don’t know what you want. Right. So, so you have, and they resented that they were upset that, that they were abandoned basically.
Mm-hmm.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. There’s this episode, you know me, I’m always, has a, always [00:43:00] have a Grey’s Anatomy. Okay. Analogy. There’s anatomy, there’s a Greys Anatomy episode. What better is
Chris Gazdik: that? Is that, is that intended with Job. Job and Grey’s Anatomy is
Victoria Pendergrass: there’s this episode where Izzy Stevens, one of the main characters, her love interest dies.
And when they finally get her home, she just lays on the bathroom floor. And instead of like, I mean, they try to co walk coach her grief
Chris Gazdik: can be debilitating. Yeah. They
Victoria Pendergrass: try to get her to get off the floor, but ultimately, like the, her and her group of friends, like they just take turns laying on the floor with her.
John-Nelson Pope: That’s the book of, and like. That’s awesome. And
Victoria Pendergrass: they, and they just sit there, like they talk, they try to help her get up, but like, they’re not pull, you know, they’re not sitting there like trying to pull her up. Like, come on Izzy, get up. Yeah. They’re just like, you know, with her, come on. And she’s not saying anything.
She’s just saying. But like, they just get on the floor and sit with her and they kind of just talk, you know, just to kind of be present and like, that’s okay. That’s okay.
Chris Gazdik: It’s beautiful.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: You know, I mean, it reminds [00:44:00] me of the moment we did talk about it on the show, John. I don’t know why. I guess we just made an earlier announcement, but this, today’s the last live show.
You know, when you sat on the floor with me when we were moved? Yeah, we talked about that. A few episodes.
John-Nelson Pope: See I must have watched that g Grey’s Anatomy.
Chris Gazdik: It must have, or you just learned how to be sensible. Yeah. Yes.
John-Nelson Pope: I did 14 funerals when I was in 1979 at my first church.
Victoria Pendergrass: 14. I believe that
John-Nelson Pope: 14 funerals.
That is in West Virginia. That sounds like
Victoria Pendergrass: a lot. Is that a lot? Is that a lot? That has
John-Nelson Pope: a whole lot. That’s a whole lot. Okay. For a small church. Oh, yolk Church. And they were
Victoria Pendergrass: all members of your, like of the church? Yeah. Sometimes Victoria’s
Chris Gazdik: small church only has 13 families. Right.
John-Nelson Pope: You know, in and of itself.
I mean, that whole, that whole church was traumatized. I got to where I was actually watching Open Casket and I thought I saw somebody breathe. I mean, it was just like, oh, wow. One, two, come two. Yeah. One.
Chris Gazdik: So there’s one other additional thing in this little segment and we’ll get off, but I, I, I’m, I’m, I’m curious if you guys have thought of this either [00:45:00] in time.
I don’t, I don’t know if it, it’s, it’s unique to me and it’s actually only a recent thought that I’m playing around with. Have you ever thought of pre grieving?
Victoria Pendergrass: Yes.
Chris Gazdik: Pre grieving? Yes. Okay. So evidently it’s not original to me, John. No, I mean, Don, what do you say, Victoria? I don’t know
Victoria Pendergrass: necessarily like if I’ve thought about it in that way.
Sorry, I’m just checking the weather. ’cause I thought I heard.
Chris Gazdik: Finder.
That’s random. Come on. Focus.
Victoria Pendergrass: But look. A, DHD over here. Okay. My gosh. But yeah, I mean, preg, I look at preg grief as more, I’m gonna use death as an example, but like, okay, someone gets like my paw paw who had who died of pancreatic cancer.
Like we knew Yeah, it’s coming. Like by the time they found it, like it was, that was where we were headed. And so like there is these moments where I kind of think back and I like that time where, you know it’s coming Now, I don’t think you can fully prepare yourself because you don’t really, again, you don’t know how you’re gonna [00:46:00] act until it happens or until you lose that thing or that person.
But is that kind of what you’re talking about like this? So it is, but that’s like prepping yourself like
Chris Gazdik: so, so I’m gonna go with my old thoughts first, John. And then I’m going to add, and we can wrap this up with this concept of pre grieving. ’cause my old thoughts stopped at very clear and still it’s gonna make me sound like I’m not a subscriber of pre grieving, but.
But hold, hold on. Hear this all the way through. So my thoughts used to stop at, you cannot grieve before the loss happens. Mm-hmm. And that is because there’s two parts of your brain. We all know the frontal cortex is the thinker part, and then the hypothalamus is the emotion part. The thinking part of our brain can be abstract.
We can reason, we can predict, we can perceive, we could do a lot of things that Right. You know, before, during, and after events and such even. Right? Mm-hmm. We can imagine things happen, but the emotion is not that way at all. It is only an exclusively in the moment. You’re only experiencing the emotion of right [00:47:00] now, again, you’re prefrontal cortex thinker will make you remember or rego into and do all sorts of things.
So there’s interplay. But I used to say, you can’t grieve until it happens. Okay.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay. Right. I hear a but coming.
Chris Gazdik: But yeah. But there’s a, but now because there’s a, there’s pre grieving where you can think about it when you have these known things. And then also there’s like this sort of grieving. An event, which is actually like a series of events.
Divorce is a good example of that. It’s not an event, my gosh, there’s so many litany line of events, and you’re grieving kind of all along the way. It’s different strings. Yes. Yeah. So it’s almost like this pre grieving, the actual mm-hmm. Event. Right. So
Victoria Pendergrass: is it almost like again, I’m gonna use death again as an example of grief, but like, if it’s, is it almost like, okay, I have a, you know, a grandmother who’s in her like late eighties?
Is it like, like, she’s not sick or anything, but is it like that thought of like, sometimes I think about like what it will be [00:48:00] like when she passes away. I did that with my dog. I always use that as an example. Yeah. You know, or like. I know I love my cat and I love my dog, but like, they’re not gonna be here forever because they just don’t live as long as we do.
So like, and I know it’s kind of morbid and sad, but like sometimes I find myself thinking about like, well, like what are we gonna do? Like, how am I gonna feel? Like, what? And I start to think, here’s, here’s the thing that’s important,
Chris Gazdik: that’s occurring to me with that thought. Yeah. Right. There’s, there’s a danger in that.
Right. And, and here’s what I would maybe perceive the danger, John. It’s a bunch of the nuance, right? So you have the knowledge of your grandmother. Dying and you’re imagining that and yeah. Doing very, very normal. And that is what we’re talking about pre grieving or, and you have to really assess, is this though potentially very much all of those previously layered grieving experiences that have lots of leftover percentage, that you’re actually feeling that in preparation for the other There’s mixing there.
Yeah, [00:49:00] there’s mixing. Is that so?
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: yeah,
John-Nelson Pope: yeah. No, I buy that. But I, I will say this is that in clinical pastoral education which is done in hospitals and they have chaplains that are, are trained in, there’s a, a behavioral aspect to it, a psychological counseling aspect to it is that they have the chaplains in training, the interns, write their own funerals and prepare for it. Yeah. It’s not fun. It’s not fun. Have you done that or no? No. There’s an activity or two. I’ve done similar and contemplated and think about it. Yeah. And part of it, we do that in the
Chris Gazdik: military all the time. Write your own. Ugh. Yeah. It’s very emotional.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah, it is.
It is. But that’s a sense. Or have, haven’t you all ever dreamt that your grandparents or your parents died?
Victoria Pendergrass: Yes.
John-Nelson Pope: I mean, I woke up crying. Yes. On several occasions. Prob, I guess. [00:50:00] Yeah. I don’t know. Not that I remember. That’s, I think that’s pretty grieving. Yeah. Probably. Don’t I
Victoria Pendergrass: tell you that I had, yeah. I had that dream one time where I like couldn’t find little man.
Oh, you did? Yeah. Yeah. It was just, yeah, and I like woke up like freaking sobbing. Ouch. Because I, like, in my dream, I like couldn’t find my child. It makes me wanna cry right now. Terrify terrifying. Like, it, like it gives me anxiety. It was just a dream. Like,
Chris Gazdik: yeah, but it, but it’s real feeling. Yeah. It’s emotion.
Oh yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: no. Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: So we got a, we gotta a Facebook says Carolyn says, good stuff. I really needed. Oh, absolutely. Hello Carolyn. We’re glad to be there. So let’s answer Carolyn in this sort of next segment, like, what do we do about this? How do we manage grief? What do we do? How do we cope? How do we move? I know you can’t.
You got, quote unquote normal grief. Mm-hmm. We’ve talked about that. Prolonged grief disorder. I think that speaks to the layering, honestly. Mm-hmm. And then people talk about disenfranchised or ambiguous grief. And I think that’s the pre grieving stuff.
John-Nelson Pope: And I, I think, and there’s no fixed timeline. I think you’ve, you’ve mentioned heck with, with [00:51:00] the Cooper loss, we haven’t mentioned it, but
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
Go.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. Because you can actually be in different stages of grief. The Kler Roth’s model is,
Victoria Pendergrass: What is it? Deny an denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance.
Chris Gazdik: And ask me though. What Kubler Ross is.
John-Nelson Pope: Kubler Ross was a a no, no.
Chris Gazdik: Is that, ask me. Okay. Who’s Kubler Ross? She is somebody who got it wrong.
Yeah,
Victoria Pendergrass: because I was gonna say not wrong. Not wrong at all. Okay. I was gonna say, like, my number one thing that I do now is like your grief sheet that you gave me
Chris Gazdik: that go there is
Victoria Pendergrass: like, I,
Chris Gazdik: let me test you. How many of ’em do you know? We’ll play a game ’cause I’m gonna do it by memory.
Victoria Pendergrass: Okay. The first one is the, sorry,
Chris Gazdik: go ahead and set it up first.
Okay. I, I interrupted you.
Victoria Pendergrass: So Chris has this sheet that I know he didn’t create himself. He got it from somewhere else, but it breaks. Okay. So we know the five stages of grief, blah, blah, blah. But it breaks it down into more than than that. And it gives you questions, it’s kind of like prompts to think through as task processing.
The group, the task. And the last one [00:52:00] is literally like, I can’t remember it word for word, but the last one is literally like continue with your everyday life and start from the beginning whenever you need to. Or something like, like it’s literally go back to the beginning whenever you feel like you’re, you know, very previously grief
John-Nelson Pope: loss.
Yeah. And so we’re, we’re dropping in and out of those things all the time. Don’t you agree? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And
Victoria Pendergrass: so it’s like, like the first one, these tasks, the first one is like, define the loss. And then it’s like, what is the meaning behind the loss? And then it’s another task. Like, I can’t remember the more of them, but there’s more of them and it’s celebrate the Oh the
Chris Gazdik: beauty of the bonds.
The beauty and
Victoria Pendergrass: the loss. And like, so it actually create a ritual. Yeah. Create a ritual. Like, and it’s
Chris Gazdik: do it with other people’s present. Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: And it’s, it creates more of like. So when I use it in therapy, I either like, will go through each thing in therapy, or if they’re like journaling people, then I might task them with like journal each task.
Yeah. Journal. Like each one is a prompt that you journal about or just talk out loud in your car, like go through it. [00:53:00] But then the second I feel
Chris Gazdik: like a proud parent, John, like this is awesome.
Victoria Pendergrass: The second half of the page is like feelings and emotions that you’ll experience with grief. And it lists the fi like anger, depression, but it also lists things like confusion, guilt, confusion, mm-hmm.
What’s another one? It’s like, and it states that like remembering that grief is not linear. It is fluid. It is. We are bouncing all up around one. Damn. I’m angry. The next Sam says,
John-Nelson Pope: all right, it’s not so much, and I, you, you said Kubler Ross is wrong. Yeah, I I I was being silly. No, no, no. What I’m saying is, is that she didn’t have the, all the picture Right.
She, it’s
Victoria Pendergrass: not that simple.
John-Nelson Pope: It’s not that simple. In fact, she’s not actually the one that first came up with it. So that Is she not who did? No, I I’m not sure that I Yeah, bummer. But, but she was able to articulate it and, and, and that Neil
Chris Gazdik: who, who created the stages of grief, I, I gotta know that. I, I, I’m sorry, John.
I gotta That’s okay. Go ahead.
Victoria Pendergrass: But yeah, [00:54:00] it’s, she, she, no,
Chris Gazdik: I interrupted John.
Victoria Pendergrass: She was on the right track.
Chris Gazdik: Right.
Victoria Pendergrass: It’s just not as simple as she lays it out to be.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: Because even once you get towards acceptance. You still are gonna have sad days. You revisit it, you’re still gonna have angry days where you’re like, God.
Mm. You know? And like
John-Nelson Pope: when I have clients that are dealing, let’s say, for anxiety, they, they want, I wanna be curative, having anxiety. No. Yeah. That’s none. That works. You’re able to, we’re gonna
Chris Gazdik: have
John-Nelson Pope: a hard time with that one. Work with this. This is, you know, it’s Erickson’s stages developmental stages.
Chris Gazdik: Developmental, yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. So we, we fall in and out of those stages as well. I mean,
Chris Gazdik: I think we’ve learned that. Yeah. It used to be presented pretty linear, but Yeah. Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: It’s, yeah, it’s not linear. We’re, we’re, we’re like we’re like it’s not linear. It’s more like a cycle. And you, you go up and you improve and sometimes you recapitulate and you go over the same things over and [00:55:00] over again, but you’re, each stage you’re able to, to accomplish something, taking more energy out of it.
Take yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, I this I love that, Victoria. Thank you. You did a wonderful job. I’m so awesome. Thanks. Because I, I, I helped, I presented that to her ’cause I had found that at a conference. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Do you know, I found that at a conference for chronic relapsing and addiction. Mm-hmm. And they, they, I believe it presented this grieving process.
I, and I use it all the time now.
Victoria Pendergrass: It’s like Bible mm-hmm. In my, that’s really,
Chris Gazdik: yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: Therapy session. Anyone who, who, anyone who sees me notes. Well, it’s just because they probably have this, if, if we’ve talked about grief in some
Chris Gazdik: way, it’s just fundamentally different. It’s, it’s the difference between going through stages in the linear way and then having tasks uhhuh to accomplish.
Well,
Victoria Pendergrass: and I just like that it gives you a different way of thinking about it. Like, and it, it kind of forces you to confront these things. Yeah. Like what is the beauty in the loss? Mm-hmm. How are we defining the loss? Like, how can we create a ritual, like, how can we do, how can we continue to live our lives and not let this thing [00:56:00] be the thing that weighs us down and not let us make, you know, not let us continue on in our lives
Chris Gazdik: in any order.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah,
Chris Gazdik: in any order. Any order, right? So, what else? Let’s move on. So what else do we do all to, to, to, to manage grief? What what, what are you gonna be knee deep in, John? How are we managing this A lot. I
Victoria Pendergrass: mean, this sounds obvious, but allowing yourself to feel, if you wanna cry, freaking cry, you know? Now I will add, like, do it safely.
Like if you’re going down 85, going 90 miles an hour, please don’t like, be boohoo crying ’cause you probably can’t see. So please pull over and then have your tears and then continue on your route to wherever you’re going. But like, yeah, feel your feelings if you get angry, feel the anger, but be safe about it.
Let me ask the woman
Chris Gazdik: a question. Okay?
John-Nelson Pope: I want to go to,
Chris Gazdik: go ahead. Something after
John-Nelson Pope: this.
Chris Gazdik: Oh, yeah. Go ask her. The, the woman question I have is, is it true that women feel they can cry or that they’re not allowed to cry? Because men are told we’re not allowed to cry.
Victoria Pendergrass: Mean I think it’s myth. I mean, yeah. Some women do feel like that.
I’m like, you know [00:57:00] what?
Chris Gazdik: Right.
Victoria Pendergrass: It’s not your business. Don’t, if I wanna cry, just let me cry.
Chris Gazdik: My point is, is this is not a guy problem. This is a human problem. Yeah. That we don’t allow ourselves to feel Yeah. Women also.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. No. Yeah. No.
John-Nelson Pope: Okay. When I was at that same church with the 14 deaths, I had another one that she died of, of, of having her esophageal varice, in other words.
Oh yeah. She, that’s bad. She was, they found basically suffocate, right? Suffocated, yeah. Yeah. From the blood that from the erosion of the blood, blood to death. Mm-hmm. And she had chronic alcoholism and she had five children and they were all under the age of 12. And on top of that, her husband didn’t support her or the kids.
He was a very wealthy dentist. Anyway, so I’m going down, driving to Roanoke, Virginia from West Virginia to best State New [00:58:00] Union. Right. The best state, new Union mountaineers. Yeah. And I got overwhelmed.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: I was just so angry and filled with grief and rage. And I went and I just pulled off the road and I screamed at the top of my lungs.
Soul screamed. Soul screamed. Oh man. Oh, love a good scream. So, yeah, and I was grieving, yeah, I was grieving for those kids. I was grieving for her. Her mother said, oh, she, she just had liver cancer. Her mother enabled her as well with the the. The alcoholism.
Chris Gazdik: Mm.
John-Nelson Pope: But, but that was a very difficult time for me because I just was overwhelmed.
I’m, I’m feeling it right now.
Chris Gazdik: You’re feeling it right now. Mm-hmm. Is the percentage that’s left. Mm-hmm. And it’s less than that, but it goes from a soul screen still there though, all the way down to like, you know, it’s okay. Like, you’re not losing your mind right now, but you [00:59:00] do. You really do feel it. I thank you for sharing that.
Yeah. That’s, that’s a powerful, it really comes in waves. Mm-hmm. It does. Yeah. And man, them waves can be tsunamis, brother.
John-Nelson Pope: Yeah. I, I was just, I I noticed on one of the notes it said 12 months for normal grief. I think what’s normal is normal for you. Yeah. Oh yeah. In other words, for, so there’s some, some people that have grieved for.
18 months, two years seems to be at, I don’t think that’s abnormal necessarily. Yeah. I think when it gets much longer than that, it can be
Chris Gazdik: so, oh, I’m glad you said that because there, there’s a lot of curiosity. I, I feel like people have very strongly, when you get into this, it’s kinda like, how long is this gonna last?
Mm-hmm. People wanna know like, what is
Victoria Pendergrass: Oh yeah.
Chris Gazdik: And you know what I tell people? I, I, I wonder if you guys have. What you guys say, but I, I don’t, obviously there is no time, there’s no right or wrong, there’s no timeframe. Everybody’s different. But I like [01:00:00] to give people some guidance. Mm-hmm. And I think it’s fair to give guidance that it’s measured not by days obviously, or weeks but not by years either.
Mm-hmm. The measurement tool is months. Mm-hmm. And it might be 19 months or 12 months or seven months, but it’s really measured in months. Sometimes it’d be pretty quick, three, four months even with big losses, by the way, y’all. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. There’s not really any reason
John-Nelson Pope: why it has to be years. Yeah. And there’s the two concepts of time.
One’s the Greek the Kronos is time, which is chronological time. 12 months. Okay. Mm-hmm. Chronos. And then there’s ros, which is eternal time. Oh, I don’t understand Ros. Okay. Well, we experienced that transcendent moments. Yeah. When, when you say. Yeah, it all makes sense and all of that. So I would say that good grief enables you to tap in, not on the Kronos time, but on the ros time, which is the fullness of time and which there’s that, that true healing that takes [01:01:00] place.
Okay. Okay. Wow, that’s cool. So I get all religious and philosophical on you.
Chris Gazdik: Well that’s, that’s Greek ology. Yeah, that’s I mean, listen, we have had the human emotional experience, which we endeavor to figure out together. I don’t think I said that in the grand opening. I don’t think you did. No you didn’t.
That’s a first Victorian, we
John-Nelson Pope: didn’t do a five star review either.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah,
Chris Gazdik: that’s a fir Well, I got distracted with the big news man. Yeah. Like, wow.
Victoria Pendergrass: I think one thing that is important to say for as far as like coping and things, and I know Chris, that you have said this many times before, is that we’re not making any big decisions.
Chris Gazdik: Yes. After no major decisions in the, in the space of that. Yep. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: And I think that’s interesting, and I wonder how often y’all get this, but I’ve had quite a handful of clients who have talked about, and it’s usually not them, it’s usually like they’re talking about like a parent or someone, but like they’re, they, they lose a parent and then their parent that’s still around is like married to somebody else within like two months
Chris Gazdik: Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: Or something. Oh
Chris Gazdik: boy. Yeah, yeah. Or you
Victoria Pendergrass: know, it’s like a quick [01:02:00] turnaround and then you’re like,
Chris Gazdik: what
Victoria Pendergrass: did you, not even gr like what?
John-Nelson Pope: Well, and, and part of that, be careful about judging though. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: I mean, and I’m not judging, but I think that sometimes it’s hard for the people that are sitting on my couch to understand
Chris Gazdik: a hundred percent.
Victoria Pendergrass: Like why would this person who was married for 35 years or whatever, like. Loose. I’ve, I’ve seen that more,
John-Nelson Pope: and I will say this, this is generalization, but with men, men don’t last very long without a lot of time a partner without a partner. And so part of that, I would say
Victoria Pendergrass: it is mainly, is mainly husbands, right?
For my clients. The other, yeah. So,
John-Nelson Pope: and the other aspect of that is just that, that people have to, to, they have to really be able to, to sit back and, and go, go with the, the grief. They have to, they have to feel it and experience it and to feel that [01:03:00] emptiness and. Refill themselves in ways. I think that’s why we’ve kind of gotten away from that.
We don’t like death very much. The Victorians loved it, but we, we don’t Oh, it is avoided topic. Avoided. Oh yeah, a hundred percent. And now we should say, you know, not avoided,
Chris Gazdik: voided, as I said, avoid it. Yeah. Yeah. We just like to avoid it, which is not realistic. Mm-hmm. Listen kissing cousins grief and depression.
Mm-hmm. I have said a thousand times. What’s enemy number one to depression? Mm-hmm. Isolation. Well, what do you think enemy number one to grief is?
Victoria Pendergrass: Isolation. You do
Chris Gazdik: not want to go through grieving alone. Mm-hmm. No. Right. Right. That is a bad idea.
John-Nelson Pope: So, so the rituals are, are good, like putting, putting like some Jewish folks, they put the
Victoria Pendergrass: lighting
John-Nelson Pope: candles, candy and covering, going to the, covering the mirrors and
Victoria Pendergrass: going to the grave to put [01:04:00] flowers like once a week or at some periodical time.
Time are ritual. Year after
Chris Gazdik: year after year, you continue to do this process. You know, my dear friend Adrian lost his son at Cody, goodness gracious it is been like five years now. And so we have gone and done a balloon release and he calls it his Heaven Day. Mm-hmm. You know, and so we do a balloon release and we celebrate Cody’s birthday and they have people come over every year.
It’s, it’s beautiful. It’s absolutely beautiful celebration of life. It’s a celebration of life, truly, as they say. And, and we, we, we, you know, we always have pizza. Cody’s, Cody’s food was pizza. And it’s just, it’s awesome. I’m so honored to be a part of that ritual to be there for my friend.
John-Nelson Pope: So you are.
You were a, a true friend, so you got down on the floor with Adrian,
Chris Gazdik: like a hundred percent a Aaron, Adam, Aaron or Adam? Aaron? Aaron. Aaron Clark, my buddy Aaron. Sorry. Oh, I’m sorry. My kids’ names are mixed up in all this. Aaron and Adam, they’re all the same. Uhhuh. But what else we need to cover? Ah, mindfulness you know, we talked [01:05:00] about the rituals thing, you know?
Oh, you mentioned the decisions. Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s a lot that we go into kind of trying to manage and deal with, you know, these, these losses throughout time. And I, I, I really feel like commenting really about the hopelessness that people can feel. I mean, people get into desperate spaces with this stuff.
They really do. It’s
John-Nelson Pope: like, you know, I’m wondering, can we truly be a human, fully human without having experienced grief?
Victoria Pendergrass: Probably not.
John-Nelson Pope: Oh, wow.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Pendergrass: Well, because grief don’t think goes beyond the bounds of just death, so then, yeah.
Chris Gazdik: Mm-hmm. Well, it’s, yeah. Well, I mean,
Victoria Pendergrass: because I do, I, I think
Chris Gazdik: a better exp a better way of putting that maybe John is, is that, is, is grief a universal experience for humans? It’s the same thing, and Yeah. I mean, absolutely.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I, you know, maybe a 2-year-old, 3-year-old is not part of the group yet. You know, when you get that first hit well, I think I know where you’re going. [01:06:00] Correct me. You’re right. Go ahead.
Victoria Pendergrass: Like, sorry, I’ve gone away from my mic. Like losing your favorite toy. Oh, things break. Okay.
That’s why I was my, where’s your mind going?
Chris Gazdik: You know where mine went immediately when you said that.
Victoria Pendergrass: What? This is gonna be crazy. Holy
Chris Gazdik: crap. Okay. Psychologists need to study this somehow. This is gonna, this is weird. Never had this thought. Do babies grieve losing the womb?
You know. Yeah. Prob
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: There’s what, what’s Neil say? Cried. They cried. Yeah. They cry when they come out.
Victoria Pendergrass: I mean, they prob they can’t cognitively make sense of it. Yeah. Grief is an experience. Yeah.
John-Nelson Pope: But, but that was a, that was rebirthing that was very in vogue back in the 1970s. Well,
Victoria Pendergrass: even
John-Nelson Pope: well, okay.
Things like
Victoria Pendergrass: breastfeeding Go, go further,
John-Nelson Pope: John. Well, that was where people would have difficulties in their lives with addiction or let’s say in terms of, of being [01:07:00] antisocial. And so what they do wanted to do was and by that I mean therapist and quacks, who is that? We’re gonna rebirth the person.
Yeah. We’re gonna wrap them up in swaddling and have them go through experience nce flut
Chris Gazdik: the experience of them after
John-Nelson Pope: several days.
Chris Gazdik: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is, that is kooky. And so I’m not going obviously that far. And I know this isn’t an original idea, obviously, as you just pointed out. But, so I don’t think that we can extrapolate you know, dysfunction in whatever later on in life from simply being born.
But I think it is really part of the, here it is natural emotional process that you engage, that you’re kind of inherently possessed Uhhuh in the womb. Yeah. Yeah. And you probably grieve leaving the womb. Well, I mean,
John-Nelson Pope: one could argue, you least argue, have a physical response of Yeah. That’s the Garden of Eden.
We all wanna go back in the womb it’s innocence. Hmm. And we wanna re have innocence restored. Wouldn’t that be nice? Yeah. And we wouldn’t have to worry about death and think about it or our [01:08:00] own di demise. Yeah. Or demise of loved ones.
Chris Gazdik: So, so we have the shrink wrap up. I think closing up thoughts We need to wrap up with this.
Grief does suck though, doesn’t it?
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah.
Chris Gazdik: It just sucks.
Victoria Pendergrass: My closing thought is,
Chris Gazdik: so are we going to the shrink wrap up? Yeah, I guess so. Victoria banging, go.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. That threw, don’t say that.
Chris Gazdik: What? Oh, banging. That’s bad.
Victoria Pendergrass: No, that just took me a second to recover. Crap. Okay. Sorry. No, I mean, grief sucks. Like, don’t be alone.
You don’t have to do it alone. I mean, go to therapy. If you need to talk to somebody, go to your C clergy. Yeah, go to a clergy, go to whatever, and work through it. Don’t let it just simmer down. Don’t push it down, because then it’s only gonna be worse later on.
Chris Gazdik: Okay. Grief sucks. Shrink wrap up, John, you or I?
John-Nelson Pope: I’ll do it. Okay. Okay. Grief is a natural [01:09:00] process. It’s a human experience. It’s when I think that we become fully human in, in the sense we go. We, we are in the process of becoming human all our lives and grief is a natural part of that. And as we work with it and not avoid it, we embrace it. We don’t have to like it, but we always are able as a result of it, can benefit from it.
Chris Gazdik: Alright. I think my shrink wrap up is gonna be, you know, look, I love that we talked about this being a universal human experience and it really is, it is one of desperate dread. And despair and hopelessness that really kicks in. Grief is a kissing cousin to depression and that is a dark, dark place that we don’t want you to be alone.
And we want you to know and understand that with this human emotional experience that we all universally have, that you do have agency, [01:10:00] you do have things that you can do, you will get through it. This does end even measured by months, if that helps you to get through the tougher times because it comes in waves.
But really and truly, you got this, you got this, you got it.
Neil Robinson: I gotta keep in mind, John’s not leaving us. He will be back. So I can’t give him like the pity win just ’cause he’s leaving. Yeah. Okay. So no pity win for John. I, I love them all. I think Chris’s was the best. I like the, the, the emphasis on the time that it is months, it’s not days.
It does take time to heal. So, no, I would agree. But I think John’s was second with, you know. Universal experiences. Honestly, you guys were all great, but I think I like Chris’s wrap up at the end. And now John’s mad at me.
John-Nelson Pope: No, I’m not. I want you to take my rowing machine.
Chris Gazdik: It’s,
John-Nelson Pope: he’s gonna kick his rowing machine back.
Goodness. Alright. I’m gonna
Chris Gazdik: end this show with something cool that I’ve kind of gotten away from when I have guests on the show, I, I used to make a big deal out of, now it’s gotten more [01:11:00] virtual and you know, whatever. But there was a moment when I was a kid, an insecure kid, struggling with the divorce years and all that kind of stuff.
And this kid looked at me and when we were busting tables and he was like, I felt like he was a cool kid. I really had a lot of respect for this kid. He was really neat. His name was Schoo, that was his nickname. Wow. And he gave me a high five John.
John-Nelson Pope: Okay.
Chris Gazdik: He gave me a high five and I was like, wow, how cool is that?
So when I have live guests and I have somebody sharing their story and sharing their thing mm-hmm. I used to like to do, I haven’t done it for ever, Neil have I, it’s been a long, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? So I’m about ready to give you a high five in signification of like, look, it’s a special moment.
Thank you for sharing your with us. It’s all. That’s what it means.
Victoria Pendergrass: Yeah. Ready? Yeah. Thank you. Good job, guys.
Chris Gazdik: All right. Ready break When we get to keep you. Stay well. We’ll see you next week. We’ll be live on the mics. One more time with Victoria and I and maybe somebody. And then we’ll see you in Florida, brother.John-Nelson Pope: That’s right. You see me in Florida, sunshine State. Take care. Stay well. [01:12:00] Bye.