Join Dr. Lara and Casey Nichols from Valley Fitness Kickboxing; as they are open, honest, and transparent about vulnerable situations in their lives where they both experienced the loss of their brothers. You won’t often hear these conversations and the impact of not allowing yourself to feel your emotions when you are grieving. More often than not, people run away from feeling emotional and physical pain; and this leads to dis-”ease” and dys-”function”. As tough as the conversation is to share in the open, it brings healing to the individuals and to others who hear this message. We want people to know it is okay to feel your emotions when you experience the loss of a loved one, and that it is OKAY to get professional help and support when you do not have the right support system in your life. Not everyone is capable of helping others emotionally, and there is no need to be alone in this process. Loss is inevitable in life; and it is better for people to be equipped with resources, tools, and support before it even happens. If you are experiencing difficulty with grief, loss, emotional support or mental support, please reach out for guidance or referrals to the right people.
Suicide support: Dial 988 if you find yourself in a dark place. There is help. Find local support groups for grief/loss, church groups for prayer and support, and counseling resources are available.
Complications of Suppressing Grief Transcript
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole person approach to your wellbeing, spirit, soul, and body. Join me your host, Dr. Ana Lara, a naturopathic, doctor, entrepreneur, and a servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body. We are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Physician Heal Self, the podcast. I’m Dr. Alara. And today we’re going to have a conversation about a topic that not many people like to have, and that’s discussing grief. So as this episode airs in early October, we’re coming into months where people will start experiencing hard times as they have had loss in their life. It’s inevitable, and so people sometimes have a really hard time going through the holidays. So joining me, I have my guest, Casey Nichols from Valley Fitness Kickboxing. The reason that we are having this conversation is that one day after we were done with kickboxing, you were checking in on me how I was doing with my dad’s loss. This led to a very awesome conversation that we started to have about grief and how we both interestingly process grief in a very unhealthy way at one point in our lives.
So I think it’s very important that we have a platform to talk about these things and to share our knowledge and wisdom with other people who might be younger because no one really teaches us how we process loss. How do we process grief?
Yeah, like we were saying in that conversation, it’s kind of funny how when you’re brought up your parents and everyone that’s guiding you in life, teaches you all these things, but they kind of don’t teach you. One of the most important things is when grief strikes and it will strike, what do you do? And we’re all different people from different genders, cultures, whatever, but it’s happened to you and there’s not a one size fits all, but you’re going to have to find your way of dealing with whatever is happening to you and you can ignore it.
It’s going to happen to all of us, right?
We’re going to experience the loss of a loved one, of a friend, or family member, loss of a job. Anything that we lose brings grief into our lives. So we’re going to talk, we’re going to really in-depth here and talk about some of the things that we found that we had in common and how we process grief unhealthy at one point in our lives. So share a little bit about your story.
So this past Monday, which was August 26th, I celebrated five years of sobriety. So that means that for six years I was not sober, going all the way back to 2013 when I was 33 years old. My older brother passed away, and it was a very tragic thing. We didn’t expect it. Unfortunately, he took his own life. So it was extremely horrible and tragic, and no one saw it coming. It’s not like we were dealing with this illness. It was horrible. And at that point, I was 33 years old. I lived in Southern California. I had a good job. I had a girlfriend, I had a bunch of friends. I had a really good life. And I mean, I had gone out drinking with friends and stuff. We went out, but I didn’t use anything on a consistent basis. I should say that I didn’t use drugs at all, really.
I might smoke some weed or anything, but when that happened, I was beside myself with grief. I remember literally feeling like I got hit by a truck. It affected not only me emotionally, but physically, it was I can’t even express to somebody how horrible and the weight that you feel on you. It’s unbelievable. And so when I came back to Arizona for his service, a girl that I went to high school with gave me a Percocet at his service, a painkiller. And I remember being at his service and then the after party of the wake afterward, and I didn’t feel that bad. I remember I saw old friends, it wasn’t fun, but I didn’t feel that horrible weight of depression. And so I thought, well, I should get some more of those Percocets. And so that started a very long, very dark, very horrible self-medicating process.
And eventually, that turned into a dependency and it turned into more of a chemical dependency than an emotional thing. But long story short, I didn’t deal with the grief in the right way. I didn’t go to a grief counselor, and my group of friends didn’t know what to do with me. It was such a horrible thing. And it happened out of the blue. And all of my guy friends, I literally remember they all said the same thing. They said I don’t know what to say to you. And they were being genuine, and I felt bad for them. And I know they felt horrible for me, but it’s such a strange thing, and guys don’t know how to deal with that stuff. No one’s ever told us what to do. And I remember a couple of friends invited me over for dinner and we had these awkward dinners and conversations. They were trying to do something. They knew they needed to do something, but they didn’t know what to do. And some friends tried not to bring it up and that didn’t work. And I remember I had one or two friends, we’re just going to get you drunk. We’re just going to keep getting you drunk.
And that didn’t work. And I just went through this very slow, very long process of pulling away from everyone. They felt weird. I felt weird. And then my usage tripled. Quadrupled. And fast forward, probably in 2015, so two years after that, my life was obliterated. My job was gone, my girlfriends were gone, my girlfriend was gone. It’s okay. My girlfriend was gone, my job was gone, my friends were gone. My money was gone. At one point, my freedom was gone. Everything was demolished. I burned my life to the ground, all because I couldn’t go to therapy or I couldn’t find an outlet for that. Now, my mother went through the same thing I did, and probably even worse, she lost her son.
My mom has every reason in the world to be a bitter person and to be mean and to just hate life and hate God and everything. My mom is the kindest, sweetest, nicest person on the face of the earth. And she said horrible things happen to her. She lost her son. She lost her own brother when she was in her twenties, but she loves life and she’s the kindest person ever. When my brother died in 2013, her best friend came to the house every day, got her out, took her to coffee, took her for walks, and they talked about it and they talked about him and they talked about all the fond memories. And she didn’t bottle it down. She didn’t ignore it. She had someone with her that she could just talk to. And she didn’t actually go to grief therapy, but she had a grief therapist built-in with her best friend Marcy.
And my mom got through it pretty well. I did not. I’m supposed to be the big, strong, tough guy, and fast forward two years and I’m still a mess. And not only now, I created a much bigger problem because I had a dependency and I still never dealt with my brother’s death. So even when I got clean and sober, then I had to go through the grieving process all over again. So as a guy, it was extremely hard not only to see it and to be like, okay, I have to deal with this. I can’t avoid it, but then what do you do? Do I go to counseling? It’s such a strange, horrible thing, but if you don’t deal with it, strange, horrible things are going to happen to you. And I am proof that if you don’t deal with the problem, it’s going to become much, much, much bigger.
Yeah. Wow. Thank you for sharing all that. I mean, I know that this is getting recorded, but I’m just sitting here listening to everything that you’re saying. If the cameras are not there, and I just want to say thank you for being willing to be vulnerable and share all that detail because this is why I tell people, any person, any good person can go down any of these behavioral patterns and end up in chaos. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person. And it comes from not dealing with grief in a healthy way. And this is a great example of what I mean. There are so many great points that you share with your friends, they care, and they care about you.
They loved me.
They didn’t know what to do, but they didn’t know how. And that is the honest truth of society in our world and our friends. And sometimes people, don’t know how to show up.
And guys especially, we are the heavyweight champions of not dealing with our emotions and ignoring our emotions. And when something happens to someone you care about and it’s so powerful, it affects you. You don’t know how to deal with them. You’re supposed to do something, but you don’t know what to say to ’em. And we need as a society, but men, we need to figure out, and we should have older role models teaching us, okay, when life punches you in the face, you do this and this and this, and it’s okay to have feelings. It’s okay to talk about it. It’s okay to express this stuff and to get it out and not let it bundle up and build up. And it’s like an emotional cancer.
Great analogy. It is an emotional cancer. And you’re right, we have a society that we live in and in many different small social circles that they’ve given the term emotions or feelings and negative connotation, but it’s not. God gave us these feelings and emotions for a reason, but we do need to learn. How do we balance that? How do we navigate them? How do we use them? And then what do we listen to or not?
I think more people are becoming aware of that and they’re trying to learn that. But emotional regulation is really important. Especially I can see in men too, culture that I just heard many people in my family when a little boy is crying, stop crying when girls cry. I mean, that’s the wrong message to send because when you do lose your brother from suicide, that’s what you want to do. Do you want to cry?
Yeah. I was raised under a very strong and silent type. Boys don’t cry in a very John Wayne household. If people know what that means, and when feelings hit me over the head like a ton of brick, I did not know how to deal with them. And so I didn’t. I self-medicated and self-medicated through a tragedy like that. Even a minor tragedy, self-medicating is the wrong thing to do. Like dumping gasoline on a fire, you’re taking a problem and you’re making it 10 times worse. It literally ruined my entire life.
I always tell people, Casey, we can deal with the emotions or the situation right now and pay the price now and do it, or we can do it later, but it’s going to come with accumulated interest and it’ll be harder. You made such great points, like you said, yeah, you got over the addiction, but you still haven’t.
I had to go through it.
You still had to go through the grief process.
It’s like you go through the grief process early on or you do it later on and it’s going to hit you at one point, but no one tells you that when you’re 33 or 20 years old.
And I realize in this whole process, and I’m actually a very emotional person, and I’m more in touch with them now, and I think I know how to deal with them now a little bit better than I did. But trying to ignore that they even exist is just foolish.
It’s ludicrous.
It’s stupid.
It’s the dumbest thing to think you’re a human being.
You’re going to have emotions because that is what makes us human. Rocks don’t have emotions.
It’s part of the good part of it being human. Yeah.
And here’s the one thing I learned through my journey, and I’ll share my story because we both made unhealthy choices.
I went in one direction.
There’s no one better than the other one. I always said it was just a matter of time that I would probably go down the rabbit hole in one way or another. But is that, so one thing that I learned in my healing process, and then I’ll share my story, is that when we suppress one emotion, like a bad emotion, we don’t want to feel grief really. We don’t want to feel the sadness. It sucks to feel sad. We don’t want to feel it. We want to avoid it. And by suppressing the sadness, we also suppress all the other emotions. So our brain has a part that I should have brought my brain prop today.
But there’s the limbic system. And in that limbic system is the amygdala and this part of the brain, the amygdala, is the center of the brain where we feel emotions, the good and the bad ones. We also perceive pain there. Isn’t that interesting that the same part of the brain where we perceive pain is also the emotional center.
Very connected.
So emotions can be painful.
Oh God, yeah.
And pain can cause you to be emotional. I’ve worked with a lot of people with chronic pain who have had tragic accidents, and what do they do? They feel emotional men who all of a sudden feel very emotional. And sometimes those emotions come out as anger. Emotions are not bad. It’s what we do with them, how we react to life around us. So an emotion could be love and joy and happiness, laughter, those are your emotions are good, but so is sadness and anger and rage and frustration, loneliness and sadness. All of those are emotions.
Yeah, it’s a yin or yang. And I think one of, if there’s a point I could get across to the viewers out there is that if you’re a guy or a female, having emotions is not a bad thing.
You’re going to have emotions. You want to have emotions. You want to.
You just need to know how to deal with the bad ones and the good ones when they come up. Have an outlet for them.
You can use a sports analogy, you need to have a playbook when something really, really bad happens.
And that’s it. You got to have a playbook.
We have to have some tools and things too.
That’s a great way.
So that when you do feel that you have an outlet for it or you have a way to regulate it. So if you suppress sadness, you’re going to suppress joy and happiness. Love.
That’s actually a really good point. So when I was going through the dark ages as I call ’em, I was using, which you would think would be a really fun, happy time. I don’t think I smiled for four years straight. Not only did I suppress my negative emotions, I suppressed everything, all of them.
Everyone described me as like they said, you were a very watered-down version of yourself. You had no joy. You were just like a zombie. You just were a version of yourself that was like 70% or 60% faded away. Your personality was gone. I suppressed everything.
So the interesting thing about grief is that it will hijack your brain. There’s such a thing as grief brain, and brain fog. Well, people have grief.
That makes sense. They grieve and their brain is hijacked. And that’s why you see that in other people. And obviously our stories. There were good things that came out of that because we walked that journey to know what it’s like. So my story was when I was 20, my brother who was 34 at the time, had leukemia. And he was young, he was fit. He was a lively person. In the life of our family, he had four children too. And I just thought I was super optimistic. Super optimistic. God is going to heal him. He’s going to get healed. He’s going to fight. This is in 1999, okay, medical treatments then were not what they are now. He had no fighting chance. He did maybe a couple of treatments of chemo and he decided on his own that he wasn’t going to do that. And he kind of came to accept his death. I didn’t. I was still optimistic and I was in denial. You have the four or five stages of grief. I was in denial that whole time.
He’s not going to die. He’s going to make it.
So when it did happen, it felt like it was sudden.
I had this God moment where, a day after his birthday, I went hiking South Mountain. I ran up this trail in August. It was hot. It was early morning. And I had this encounter where when I got to the top, I said, God, take my life and give it to him. And I’m trying not to get emotional here, but I wanted to give him my life because he had four children and I didn’t. And I felt like if I could just give him my life, I remember saying to God, God, people need him. He has children. Nobody needs me. That I heard God’s voice clearly say, that’s not the way it works.
You heard it.
I heard him tell me, that’s not the way it works. His time has come. And it was something about hearing that that just kind of brought me to my knees and said, yeah, he’s leaving. He’s done. And I had, of course, that encounter kept me there where I knew that, and some people may believe this or not, it doesn’t really matter. I know what I experienced at the top of that mountain that day. I felt the encounter of God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus all in that moment on top of that mountain. I was desperate. And I heard God tell me that his son had already shed his blood on the cross for us. I was not going to church at this time, Casey.
You weren’t really at this time. I believed in God. I had, but I didn’t like going to church. I knew everything about the Bible. No, but God told me that he already shed his life for us. And that while I had a noble heart, that’s not the way it worked.
Wow. I didn’t know that part.
And not many people know that. Well, now they will. So even after that, even after you had that God moment, which you would think would be kind of cathartic, right?
But I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry. That was one of them while he was ill. That was the first time I cried. But I didn’t cry. That was the rule. I’m not going to cry around my family and my brother. I wanted to be strong for him and the family.
That makes sense in a certain context. But you’re when you’re by yourself, did you break down?
I broke down when I was by myself.
Yeah, you probably needed to.
I needed to. A month later, he died. And I remember not crying after that. Not crying for his service.
The funeral. I was just like a rock. I felt that I needed to be strong. That was a good thing. But if you remember my conversation with you when I was six years old and I experienced the death of someone, it was one of my aunts. I didn’t know we died. I didn’t understand any of that. And I had this situation where I went up to the casket and I touched her. And immediately my brain knew she was not there. She’s not there.
I had such an emotional, strong emotional response at that moment. I cried so loud. I mean, I was really not able to remember. I was six years old and obviously the adults around me were not able to help me through that. So they were yelling at him. Women, I remember women yelling, calm down, calming me down. And that was actually firing up my brain more, creating more of a trauma response for me. I remember that night going to sleep, crying. I cried and cried and cried until I fell asleep. I was not allowed to participate the next day in any of the funeral arrangements that they did. But I remember nobody talked to me about it.
I don’t remember anyone hugging me, touching me, telling me, it’s okay. You’re safe. And that’s why the little girl, me needed a hug. You’re going to be okay. Okay. And then someone to tell me this is what happened. Never had that.
That’s really interesting. When you very first experienced it, nobody, communicated to you in a way that you needed to be strong and shut up,
Shut up.
And then the second time it happened to you, you did it unconsciously,
Unconscious, or subconsciously.
It was making up for that response. You thought, oh, this happened again. This is what I’m supposed to do.
I remember clearly after the age of six, I constantly thought about God and I would think about why God put us on this earth. Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I supposed to do here? And when we die, where do we go? Where did my aunt go? I knew her physical body was there, but as a child, I knew she wasn’t there. So I was trying to explore the soul and the spirit at six years old, and I had no guidance from anyone, and I wasn’t talking about it to anyone. And so constant, I remember it was a constant everyday thing that I would think about and process it.
So when your brother passed, did you kind of repeat that same thing right after it happened? What was the next six months of your life?
So from the time I was six years old to my adult life, I made it the intention that I was going to become stronger and stronger emotionally. But my perception of stronger was to not show.
That’s a really good point. Express strong emotion. Being strong emotionally does not mean ignoring your emotions. No knowing yet.
And I did that knowing how to deal with them.
And I remember every year I kind of mentally would check myself like, I’m getting stronger. I’m not crying. I’m not crying about this. I’m stronger and stronger, more resilient, ignoring it. And I was patting myself on the back for that. And it was unhealthy. It was an unhealthy way to look at emotions. So when my brother got sick, I was strong. Besides that one moment at the mountain when it broke down, everything else was I’m strong, strong. So when he did pass away, on September 19th is when he passed away in 1999, I remember unconsciously not realizing my actions, I went into complete avoidance, not thinking about it. It wasn’t something I planned. I went into autopilot. And then I know this now because I have unpacked all that and done a lot of healing in the last 10, 15 years of my life. But what I realized was that I felt this immense pain of seeing my brother, a strong young man dying slowly before me and thinking, this hurts a lot. It hurts a lot to see someone die. And so then I thought, I never want to feel this again. Forget this. And unconsciously realizing that the closer someone is to me, it’s going to hurt me.
So you keep people at bay, right?
So I started putting up, I said I put up walls around me, around friendships and family kept, if I don’t have connections, I can’t get up. I can’t. If I don’t have a connection, it’s not going to hurt me.
That’s such a horrible way to, I can just run away from, it’s such a man thing to do.
Yeah, it’s very true.
So this is why I think this conversation is important because a lot of people think that only men do this. But no, a lot of women run away from the pain too. And it could be a cultural family upbringing thing, whatever. But I went into avoidance. So what I did is I overworked myself. I was in college, I was working. I was part of all these different nonprofit organizations. Anything I can volunteer myself to, I signed myself up too. As long as I didn’t get to see my family, I was good.
So you avoided all your family members? I avoided everyone. I remember shortly after my brother passed away if I was in my mom’s presence and she started to cry and reminisce about him, I would peace out a mouth.
I was so cold. I wasn’t rude to her, but I would find a way to, I need to peel myself away from this. I don’t want to sit in your pain and discomfort because guess what? I don’t want to sit in my pain and discomfort. And I did a whole conversation a couple of episodes back on the Art of Compassion. And I said on there, I know these things because I have walked through them. I was doing these things. And I know that when someone can’t sit with your pain, they don’t have compassion. It’s because they don’t want to feel your pain. They don’t want to feel their pain. They can’t go through it themselves.
They can’t go through it.
I remember a couple of months after it happened, my mom talked about him all the time, and I had a lot of that feeling of trying to avoid the conversation or trying to change the subject. And then I heard someone else a long time later talking about, if you do that, you’re robbing yourself of the memories of that person. So if you get so closed off to a point that you’re not able to talk about how wonderful they were and how amazing they were and all these good times that you had together, not only are they gone, but now all those memories are gone. But if you deal with it in a healthy way, then you’re able, and now I can talk to my mom. We reminisce about ’em all the time and it’s great, and it feels good to talk about all that fun stuff. But if both of us didn’t get to a place where we could, then neither one of us would be able to talk about those emotions. So if you don’t deal with it, you’re going to rob yourself of all these beautiful, amazing memories of that person. And that’s wrong.
I didn’t go through my healing process until I think my body caught up to me eventually.
Yeah. When did it hit you?
I was like 26, 27 years old. I remember it was 2006. That’s when I was like, I physically cannot function. My brain was not there. And I went to the doctor and they’re like, oh, you have hypothyroid. You have this, you have that. But Casey, I just knew in my heart that it was all that grief that never dealt with all the emotions that were just piling up inside of me that I never dealt with. And I walked away from that doctor’s visit asking myself, what did I do? What did I do that contributed to me being here? And immediately my mind went to my brother’s laws. And I was almost angry. I was angry like, damnit, why is this still showing up? It’s been eight years ago, seven years ago. Why?
In a way, you said to yourself, I’ve already dealt with this, but you never did.
I never dealt with it.
I was avoiding it. So there are ways that we deal with trauma, and one of them is avoiding it,
We just avoid it. We don’t look at it. It’s just easier to keep moving. And I would not recommend to anyone to do that because that will make it worse.
It’ll eventually turn up.
It’ll either come out in a different area of your life or it’ll come out as stress or something. Anger will find, yeah, that’s a horrible one. And then you take it out on people around you.
Absolutely. It’s a horrible way to do it. You either take it out on other people or you take it out on yourself. You feel guilty for whatever.
Exactly. And the other way that, I mean, there’s many ways, but the other way that people sometimes will deal with trauma is to minimize the problem. So you have this big situation that happened, experience, but you make it small so you can handle this little problem instead of this big situation that happened. I realized through my process of dealing with grief and all of that, that unpacking the trauma was that I was an expert at avoidance and minimizing.
I grew up in the hood. No big deal.
So what? Drive by shooting?
Yeah, it happens. No big deal. It wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t see it as a big deal. And I became an expert at doing that in my life. So now I had to unpack that and say, no, we face the issues that come at us in the moment that we’re in. And it was a process. I remember I probably started my healing journey definitely from 2007 and on. And even through medical school. I always say medical school was a hospital for me. It really was. I had many great doctors and colleagues who helped me through the process. And I knew that God needed me to heal through that before I became a doctor.
That makes a lot of sense.
And that’s why you it has to be fixed before you can fix others.
And that’s why this podcast is called Physician Heal Myself. Because I have to go through that process of healing myself to be comfortable working with other people. Can you imagine in my office, people are sharing their trauma, their pain, their hurt, grief, and you’re like, can’t talk about this. I could never have been the doctor that I am today had I not given myself that time to heal and process the trauma and just unpack it all and now allow myself to feel. And I realize, Casey, that feeling those emotions is actually my superpower because being in tune with my emotions makes me feel other people’s emotions. And that’s what makes me a good doctor, is that I can feel their pain and I can understand what compassion, where they’re coming from. I can have empathy for them and guide them.
Someone told me a long time ago that your feelings are there for a reason and we’re connected to each other and to this plan and into life and to reality. And you don’t want to disconnect any of those little feelers. You need to know how to deal with them and how much attention to pay to ’em. But you don’t want to disconnect from anything.
You need to be a part of this whole thing, and you need to be a part of the culture and the people around you. And so if you’re disconnecting, then that’s a horrible, horrible way to go. Absolutely. So even if you have negative emotions, those negative emotions are there for a reason. All our emotions are there for a reason. So you need to figure out why and figure out what you can do with it versus disconnecting.
And I’ll even go further to say that. Absolutely. I feel, I’ve always said that our emotions are little antennas in our body, in our nervous system, that it’s our feelers that we feel the environment is safe or not. And our nervous system is really quick. It’ll let us know whether this environment is safe or not. That’s really what our nervous system is there for. Are you safe or not? And the moment you don’t feel safe, that’s when we start doing the dumb, unhealthy things, whatever it is. But the emotions are there and it is a network of, that’s why you can go into an environment and it’s fun. It’s safe. Or you’re like, Hey, there’s something really here going on. I got to get out.
You got to gut. Yeah, you have to trust your gut. So what’s one thing that you wished you would’ve done when you got off that mountain when your brother passed within those first couple of weeks?
Oh, what a great question, Casey. I wish I would have been more expressive to my brother to just really tell him how much he meant to me. And I know that that whole experience brought me closer to God. It really did. And I wish I would’ve understood what I know now that I understood then. And that was when I knew where his soul was going to go, because this experience around with my dad was different when he passed
Away. Yeah, that’s a good point. There are different types.
Yeah, that’s what we were talking about So that’s what I would’ve done. That’s what I would’ve done, is I would’ve been more expressive to him of my love, because my brother was kind of like a rough guy. But if there’s one thing I’ll tell you of everyone in our family, he was the most expressive emotionally. He hugged us and loved us. And that’s what was missed was that that’s what he represented to me in our family, that he was comfortable expressing himself. I wasn’t.
So he was a rough, manly man and in touch with his emotions.
He was the kind of guy who, if someone started trouble with him, would have no problem fighting. But at the same, actually, he was the one who started teaching me how to fight when I was young. Yeah. He was like, you’re going to need to know how to fight.
You’re going to need to know.
Someone’s going to mess with you. You need to fight back.
Yeah. That’s actually a pretty good analogy. If you’re a human being walking on this face of the earth, grief is going to happen.
It is.
So you need to learn how to fight it.
I felt very unfair. Why him? He’s healthy. He’s young.
He’s vibrant.
Why I’ve asked that question? I’ve screamed at heaven so many times and see with my dad, I didn’t ask that. It’s a different type.
It’s a different type. So we talked about when we were at the gym, we were talking about how, and some people might disagree with this, it doesn’t really matter. You’re entitled to your opinion. But I do believe that grief is different based on each experience.
Because you could have two brothers that pass away. Suicide is very gnarly. There are so many unanswered questions. Its closure. Makes it difficult.
Yeah. There really is.
It’s horrible. There’s all these questions you have.
It’s horrible. Almost on every scale. It was almost so bad. It was overwhelming. And I remember feeling like in a day’s for those first couple of weeks or days, it just, what? And then all these questions that you’re never going to get answered.
Never.
And you have to figure out a way to come to terms with that.
Yeah. I’ve had friends who’ve committed suicide, and I can’t imagine what the family felt.
Oh my God.
But I know as a friend, I’m like, why did you do that? Why?
And then you get angry and it’s like, could I have prevented it? Why didn’t I see it?
Yeah. I blamed myself. I blamed others. I blamed God.
Right. Everyone.
I don’t know. Hopefully one day I’ll get to ask him.
You will. You’ll get your answer. Sometimes people’s pain is so much they cannot handle it. It was overwhelming.
It’s overwhelming to him.
It was overwhelming. I felt like I was falling off a cliff.
Yeah. So it’s like, can you imagine, what was your brother experiencing in his life that he was led to Just end it there.
Yeah. Pretty horrible. If I were going to, I kind of ask myself the same question. I think I was so overwhelmed and I was surrounded. I was in, I am a guy’s guy, early thirties. I needed professional help. I mean, it would’ve been great if I had a buddy that I could have talked to an outlet, but I was so far gone that I should have sought grief counseling right away. And just to deal with all of those questions, all of the what ifs, all of the anger, all of the confusion, frustration to just talk about all that stuff and just get it out with someone that knows how to help you navigate all of that. That would’ve been extremely helpful. And it’s kind of funny to think where my life would’ve gone if that point in my life. I hadn’t taken a sharp left. But if I just would’ve either not ignored my emotions or just heavily medicated them, if I just would’ve dealt with them as they came up, if a thought came up or something happened, just talk about it and just deal with it and get it out. I let the river flow through you and don’t dam it up, river.
I love that. I love that. I think that’s a great point. I definitely think that talking about it there is healing. Because it wasn’t until I started talking about it that it brought me healing. But at that point, I did EMDR.
Did you really?
Yeah. I had to do EMDR through some of that just to help remove it. Got to the point in my life that anytime I even would think of his name or think of him or his name would come up or anything like that, I would just cry. It was like had no intelligence in, I couldn’t express myself.
Yeah, it takes your body over.
EMDR was very helpful to me, and that’s where I found healing at the physical level as well, once I dealt with the emotional stuff. But I’ve realized that after that, now this is many years ago, right? I could talk about things, sorry, I had to clear my throat. I could talk about things that I wasn’t able to talk about before without letting the emotions control me anymore.
And I think that’s really, you’re either going to have control of your emotions or your emotions are going to have control of you eventually, and it’s going to lead you down this path of destruction. So if anything, I want our audience to just know that we’re real people who had hurt. We love losing someone we love and we took this unnecessary turn,
Did the wrong thing.
But we learned a lot in that process, and even if it took us many years we can teach others. And I would really love for young people to be wiser than we were and to learn ways of coping with loss early on versus not doing it. And we don’t know when these things happen, but just to know that there are experts out there, there are professionals out there that you can talk to. If your friends and your family are not good outlets for you to talk to, then get someone who’s neutral and have that conversation.
Someone who can guide you through dealing with those emotions and can help give you the healthy tools to do it. There is no easy way.
No, there isn’t. And I think that’s a good point. I think we can all agree that something bad is going to happen and there isn’t a one size fits all. Take this pill and it’ll cure everything. Whatever your situation is, whatever your context is, your solution might be different than somebody else’s, but there is a solution to it, and you’re just going to have to go and try a couple of things until you find the right thing. But bottling it up is not going to work.
It’s not going to help.
And I wish that our guy culture wasn’t so strong silent type. There are some good points to that, but I think if you’re not, you’re ignoring that you even have emotions, and you’re going to get bit in the butt pretty quickly.
I hope that over the generations, our culture evolves a little bit and guys get a little more in touch with how to deal with their emotions. And I wish guys would be better fosters or role models for younger men. I didn’t have too many guys. I didn’t have a good dad. That’s a whole different episode. But I wish there was an older guy, I wish I had a brother that could teach me, no, don’t do that, do this. Or, Hey, I see you going down that path. Do this.
The importance of older men in a young man’s life, learning from others. I think that’s really important that men are mentoring other younger men.
Yeah. That’s a whole other issue that I think men are because women do that.
Yeah, they do this a lot.
If you see a girl crying, all of her friends will huddle around and go, oh my God. If you see a guy crying, his buddies will either hand him a beer or go make fun of him. It’s interesting with your situation how they’re like, Hey, let’s just get you more drunk.
And that’s literally, I remember I could picture his face, we’re just going to get you drunk until you feel better. And I was like, I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. But yeah, women are so good at, I feel like girls at such a young age deal with their emotions way better than guys do. And some guys are stunted emotionally at five and six years old, and some at 13 years old. But you’ll see girls huddle around each other and take care of each other better than guys do. So when those horrible things happen to us guys, we need to be proactive to find an outlet or figure it out. Because dude, you’re going to wind up in a dark, dark place.
And even one of the things that you said that I see in my clinic is that younger men are more interested in taking care of themselves, their mental and emotional health.
I like that.
Just young people in general. They are more open to taking care of issues early on, which I appreciate. And I encourage that because one of the things that our audience should know is that the older you get and you’re not dealing with your trauma and your emotions and all those issues, it gets harder with every decade. So in your thirties, okay, you got an opportunity in your forties, you still got the opportunity. But it is almost like consistently the 50-plus-year-olds that
come in that have never resolved the issues from their past. It’s showing up physically, it’s showing up in their behavior, and they’re like, I don’t know why I can’t handle this situation. I’ve dealt with worse in the past. It’s like, yeah, it’s because you never dealt with those issues. Then now your nervous system is just overloaded and it needs healing.
You need to let some of that go.
Yeah. You can almost over the years, emotionally tie yourself into knots and you need to, and there could be one master not, and little sprinkles off of it, but there might just be one knot that got tied 20 years ago that you never untie.
You need to untie that. That’s a really great analogy. Really great analogy. I feel like this conversation can just continue in many directions. Just like our last episode on nutrition. I think it can really go down in many directions. And more than anything, I just want people to know that you have every right to feel the emotions that you feel. And here’s the interesting thing, if you just give that sadness enough time to feel it and then move on for the day, it’ll dissipate. If you need to cry, cry. If you feel angry, find an outlet. Go kickbox, pass my outlet. Go work out. Move your body. There are so many benefits to moving your body that will help with the grief. So I want to give some tips, and I’ll probably do more episodes on the process of grief because I just feel like especially going into these next months with the holidays, I know personally I just, no matter what, I just feel some sort of way. My dad just died, so I know the holidays are going to be different.
So one of the things that grief can help is making sure that you’re resting. I know sometimes when people are grieving, it’s very difficult for them to even sleep, to eat, but try to keep a routine, a healthy routine throughout your day where you are making sure you’re eating, where you’re making sure you’re exercising, moving your body, and that you are making time to spending with others. Find a buddy just like your mom had someone to turn to that saved your life.
Find someone that you can turn to and that you can tell them, Hey, I need you to hold me accountable if you see me kind of avoiding or doing these things, I want you to do that. I did that. I did that this last time with my dad. Before when I knew, I said, Hey, I’m going to need you to hold me accountable. I’m going to need you to check in on me. I would have never in my past years,
See, that to me is emotional, I would never have reached out to someone.
That to me is emotionally strong, knowing that you need it and asking for it and that you could potentially go down that rabbit hole again.
And I told myself, I’m doing things differently this time. I’m not going to do the unhealthy behaviors that I did when my brother passedaway. If I had a guy friend say that to me, I would think, wow, that’s really emotionally strong emotionally. How mature of him to say.
Yeah. And I think that’s it. I think people in general, men and women, just need to grow emotionally, be more mature to know how to support each other and be there for each other. But yeah, build that, but make yourself a priority mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to feel like you’re falling apart. It’s okay to be vulnerable and say, damn, it hurts. This hurts. I’ll tell you this time around with my father’s passing, what’s made the biggest difference has been my relationship with God.
Yeah, it has. And I’m not saying it to be all Kumbaya or superficial since sincerely, the things that God revealed to me throughout the last months of his life and when he passed and after that brought me this just unexplainable peace.
It’s got to be comforting,
Very. And it’s still strange to me. I’m okay to say it feels strange to feel peace.
Do you think it feels strange because in some way you think you feel okay that he’s gone?
I feel peace because I know where his soul is at. If you go back to when my aunt died, I knew she wasn’t there, and I didn’t know
Where point she was going? You didn’t know where she was. That makes a lot of sense. But now I know, and there were revelations that my dad shared with me that I’m like, he never read that. He never read the Bible. He never saw that. How would he know that?
He’s just spitting out verses.
So I knew that God was putting that in him, and that brought me peace. So that’s the other thing with if you don’t have a relationship with God, find one W asap. Get to it. Pick up a Bible and read it. Go hike South Mountain.
Go hike South Mountain by yourself. Run up South Mountain or a mountain if you’re not in Arizona. But find those moments to do that, to grieve, Hey, we’re going to wrap this up. We can keep going, I’m sure, but I hope you’ve taken some value out of our conversations. A male and female perspective, and our experiences is that we dealt with grief in a very unhealthy way. And if you’ve lost someone, whether it’s recent or many years ago, I highly encourage you find the courage to just dig deep down, go get the help that you need. Hire an expert, someone who’s a professional, who can help you process the grief. If you currently have someone you’ve lost in your life, find someone to talk to. If you don’t have a friend or family member to do that, then find help. There are support groups that are for free, and there are many people that you can hire that maybe your insurance will even cover for you to do that. It’s much better for you to deal with grief upfront and give yourself time. There is no time limit.
That’s true.
There’s no time limit on when it’s just, that it doesn’t get easier. The load just gets a little bit lighter over the years. So as always, thank you for your time. Share this message, share this video with someone that you think would benefit from it. And until next time, be blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share and subscribe, help this message, and reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about Raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.