The Different Types of Grief

(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) I know I've been talking a lot about

grief lately, but there's a good reason for

that.

And the truth is, the reason is because

we don't talk about grief enough.

And when we do, we tend to silo

it into very specific types of grief and

very specific forms of grief that match certain

narratives.

And the truth is, grief is far broader

and far more common in our lived experience

than we'd like to think it is.

And grief can come from a lot of

different things.

So in this episode of Feathermane Soul Wisdom,

I thought I would dive into the definition

of grief, some grief that we don't talk

about very often, and how that connects with

my work for wild spirit storytelling.

You're listening to Feathermane Soul Wisdom, a podcast

for those looking to rediscover their wild spirit

in spite of life's challenges.

If you're living with a chronic illness or

neurodivergent or consider yourself disabled, and you're looking

to connect with your own inner untamed essence,

then this show is for you.

Your host is Kit Kaelstoe, Wild Spirit Storyteller.

Thanks for listening.

And now on to the episode.

Hello, I'm your host Kit Kaelstoe, and this

is the Feathermane Soul Wisdom show on the

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So today we're going to be talking about

grief, the different forms of grief, how that

grief does and does not show up in

our conversation, and how does this grief connect

with my work as a grief pathfinder, but

also with wild spirit storytelling, because I believe

the two things go hand in hand.

I want to start, as I often do,

with some definitions.

So looking at the Merriam-Webster dictionary, when

I look up the word grief, the definition

is a deep and poignant distress caused by

or as if by bereavement.

And I want us to kind of put

a pin in that because bereavement is one

of the very commonly discussed sources of grief,

but it's only discussed in the terms of

death, death or loss.

And there's many other ways to be bereaved

as we're going to discuss.

The flip side of that is a cause

of such suffering.

So the definition gives the example of life's

joys and griefs.

And so we could look at grief as

anything that causes suffering.

That broadens our window of grief.

That broadens our definition.

And I think that gets us closer to

what we look at when we talk about

some of the other forms of grief that

don't get discussed so often.

The other definitions are more troublesome or annoyance,

a playful criticism like getting grief from your

friends, a disaster, a mishap or a misadventure.

And those I just don't feel really get

to the heart of the real grief work

that is at the heart of our lived

experience as neurodivergent people, of living as chronically

ill or disabled, or of being queer in

this society, or even the grief of having

a food allergy or a food intolerance or

even climate grief.

So I've given you a little sneak peek

there about what we're going to be talking

about.

But when it comes to grief, I think

on one hand, most psychology papers, most definitions

really agree that grief is a deep, intense

sadness or emotional distress.

It's not a pleasant emotion.

It is a sadness or distress.

But what isn't discussed, except in the abstract,

is that in order to grieve something, we

have to have loved or appreciated something or

someone.

And there's a flip side there.

There's a almost a yin and a yang

or a kind of a wheel of fortune.

We love, we grieve.

We love, we grieve.

That exists in our lives.

Now, to be fair, a lot of the

psychology comments, a lot of psychology papers do

say that grief happens when you lose someone

or something important to you.

But the examples that they give are the

death of a loved one, a divorce, a

job loss, or a major life change.

Now, the one definition that I happen to

be looking at also mentions a health change.

And so that, again, gets us closer to

the type of grief work that I work

with.

But grief, at least in this context or

the context of a lot of psychology and

a lot of self-help documents, there is

an assumption there, whether spoken or unspoken, that

grief goes away after a while.

There is an assumption that grief can be

fixed.

That much like when you get that paper

cut or your cat accidentally scratches you and

you think, oh, I need to put a

band-aid on that, you know, some period

of time later, obviously for a minor wound

like that, it's a few days.

Grief can take much longer to kind of

be incorporated into your life that, you know,

it goes away.

And I feel like that that's a very

common misconception about grief and that really colors

our conversation about grief.

Grief does not completely go away.

What happens is we learn to live with

the grief.

We learn to live with the loss.

We start to look at what does our

life look like now that we have experienced

this loss or that we are experiencing this

loss.

Because anticipatory grief, such as when a pet

or a loved one is in a hospice

type situation or you can see that somebody

is getting older and you know that you're

going to lose them because that's what happens.

You know, we all succumb to death.

And by narrowing grief down to that one

thing, I think in some ways that lessens

grief because grief is a very broad, very

complex emotion.

And grief can happen, you know, for many

different reasons.

Like I said, a lot of the grief

workers that I encounter tend to do so

from the standpoint of you have had this

experience and I can help you not feel

bad about this experience.

So it's very much from an open shut

type situation.

And I know we don't want to hear

that grief does not get resolved, but it's

true.

Because if somebody passes away, I mean, you

know, my great grandparents passed away when I

went in the 90s when I was in

high school.

They have not been a part of my

life for longer than they were a part

of my life.

And yet I still have very fond memories

of visiting their family farm.

I still, you know, I miss them.

I still think about, you know, what, what

would they think?

What kind of conversations would we have, especially

as I have embarked on having a small

farm here where we live.

Now, I don't break down and just become

incapacitated with grief.

I don't break down and cry and I'm

unable to function because enough time has passed

that that pain has lessened.

And so while the pain is still with

me, in a sense, I have companioned it.

I've learned to live with it.

I've learned to build my life with this

new reality.

And so that is something that happens with

grief where it doesn't, it's not a light

switch.

It doesn't just turn off and on.

It kind of, it fades.

It fades to the point where we can

carry it easier.

It becomes easier to carry, but it's still

a part with us.

And that's why I think when we look

at grief, especially around like chronic illness, acquired

food intolerances, allergies, even ones that we didn't

acquire as an adult, ones that we've lived

with.

If we think about this grief as a

way to carry things better, a way to

make things easier to carry, I feel like

that's a much more realistic and much more

lived experience of grief.

So the common assumptions about grief are that

grief happens after a death or after a

major life change.

But there are other forms of grief.

And again, holding in our head the thought

that grief comes because we love something or

we love someone.

I think it makes it easier to look

for these other sources of grief in our

lives.

As somebody who is trained in pet loss

and in pet bereavement, one of the forms

of grief that I think that we experience,

even while the individual is still with us,

is there is a grief of not doing

enough.

And let me talk about that just a

little bit.

And I'll try not to get emotional because

I'm actually, this is a grief that's very

near and dear to my heart right now.

So my senior mare will be crossing the

Rainbow Bridge before winter.

She just turned 27.

Her arthritis is getting very bad.

So while the spirit is willing, sadly, her

body is failing her.

And I'm going to make the compassionate decision

to let her pass before winter.

I had big hopes for this summer, for

how we were going to spend our last

time together, for what we were going to

do.

And then I got very sick.

Now, your grief about not doing enough may

not be that dramatic.

But I think especially when we're faced with

a senior companion animal that we cannot have

that conversation with, to make sure that they're

okay with what we're doing.

There is a fear or a worry that

we're not doing enough.

And that lends itself to grief.

We feel regret, we feel remorse, we grieve

because it's a great pain that we're not

doing enough.

But the grief of not doing enough.

I've also seen that in my discussions with

people who are parents, parents worry that they're

not doing enough for their children.

When we talk about the climate or our

political situation, there is grief that we're not

able to do enough.

And like with recycling and conserving energy and

trying to do all the right things to

help save our planet.

And a conversation that my spouse and I

have quite often is, we can do as

much as we can do, but we are

only two people.

Whatever we do will never be as much

as what corporations or governments could do.

So while yes, we need to do what

we can do.

We also need to understand that are not

doing enough, pales very much in comparison to

a company or a government not doing enough

or not doing what it's supposed to be

doing.

So the grief of not doing enough, the

antidote to that a lot of times is

understanding that you're doing the best you can.

And when you do the best you can,

there are no regrets, no remorse, only appreciation

and gratitude for being able to do the

best you can.

And when it comes to like our companion

animals, they for the most part, do not

stress over whether they get the extra fancy

treats or whether they get regular treats.

They just know they're getting treats, they're getting

attention, they're getting love, they're getting affection.

And so the grief of not doing enough

really ties into the grief of us not

feeling like we're enough.

And that often comes from external messages.

And you're going to find that actually, when

we talk about grief, that a lot of

grief that we feel, especially when it's not

related to bereavement or to major life changes,

is that it's coming from external messages and

things that we're told we should do or

we should be.

And because of that, that is why we

feel like we're not doing enough or we're

not good enough.

Or again, you can sense a theme there.

As somebody who is extremely late diagnosed neurodivergent

and who through this summer, and getting some

some answers, like finally has answers for like

decades old health issues.

One thing that I have really faced is

grief for others.

And grief for others comes because we grieve

when other individuals maybe did not have the

chance or the opportunity to get the answers

that we have.

We also have grief for others because they

maybe have lived or did live with a

condition or with a neurotype that they were

not aware of.

And so they did not get the support

and resources that they need.

Grief for others comes from the we love

them.

And so as this has come up for

me, what is, you know, what has come

up is that I love my family members.

I see echoes of what they dealt with,

what health conditions they have, and what I

have.

And I grieve that they did not get

the answers that I have.

And so we grieve for them, because you

imagine how you want better for them, how

much different their lives might have been, if

they had had the answer sooner, or if

they had had the answers at all.

And you think about just the way that

maybe they thought about themselves, or that they

struggled with things.

And you know, we love them.

So we don't want that for them.

We did not want them to struggle.

We did not want them to experience the

pain that they had, because they did not

have answers.

And a lot of times, that grief and

not having answers, simply is because, especially around

like neurodivergent brains, or certain health conditions, that

we just simply didn't have the answers or

the information at that time that we have

now.

And so it's a case where I don't

think that there was a way for them

to experience the knowledge that I have.

But yet we grieve that they didn't, and

we grieve about how that impacted their lives.

That comes kind of hand in hand with

the grief of what if.

The grief of what if, it impacts us

and it impacts other people.

On one hand, the grief of what if

could be considered a thought experiment.

What if I had been diagnosed as a

child as multiply neurodivergent, and received the support

that I definitely needed, but never received?

What if the diagnosis that I had gotten,

and the help that I'm getting now, had

come 10 years earlier?

What if a guidance counselor had sat down

with me, and actually explained a little bit

more about my options, and my interests, and

how that might relate to my college career,

when I was actually, you know, leaving high

school, going into college, rather than figuring these

things out when I was 50 or almost

50.

The what if can be a thought experiment.

And I want to say that it's an

important thought experiment.

There's so many questions that you can play

what if with.

And as an author, I think a lot

of what drives our stories, what drives our

inspiration, is the idea of what if.

That is, you know, Marvel did a whole

series called What If, and then started messing

with their characters, and doing different things with

them.

And some of it was okay, and some

of it was absolutely fascinating, and we wish

they'd done more.

When we look at that, we don't necessarily

see the grief that's there.

But if we allow ourselves to dwell on

it, then we would actually allow ourselves to

experience that grief.

The grief of what if has to do

with mourning a life that did not exist,

but had the potential to exist.

Now, I admit, one way that I try

to kind of abate this grief, or deal

with this grief, is that I would like

to think that there is an alternate universe,

or several of them, where the things that

I didn't get in this life, or the

grief that comes from the what ifs in

this life, actually were resolved.

And that that version of myself got the

support, got the help, and is living an

amazing life.

Now, that doesn't necessarily change my life for

the better.

But it helps me to kind of understand

and believe that everything works out, and that

there's a balance to the universe.

Now, again, when it comes to grief, you

know, things like that can be construed as

a little bit of gaslighting, or toxic positivity,

depending on how it's approached.

It's very helpful for me.

It may not be helpful for you, I

acknowledge that.

The best way to focus on the grief

of what if, is to be in the

moment, to practice mindfulness, and to know that

yesterday is gone.

We can't change yesterday.

We can mourn yesterday.

And that mourning is very, very appropriate, and

can be very, very deep and powerful.

We also can't worry about or mourn for

a future that may never come.

We don't know what tomorrow brings.

I have an idea of what I'm going

to do tomorrow.

But who knows, things could happen and tomorrow

could not go out as planned.

Maybe it's a lot better.

Maybe not so much.

We don't know.

And so by focusing on this moment, what

can I do to support myself in this

moment?

If what part of my what if grief

is not having supports or not having resources,

what can I do to cultivate those things

in this moment?

Not only does that help comfort the past

version of myself that you know, my body

remembers, my mind remembers, that there's a version

or a time of me where I didn't

get something or the what if, you know,

didn't happen.

I can actually actively work to make that

happen.

Yeah, so I think that the what if,

that really reminds us to come back to

the moment.

And after talking about all these different versions

of grief, and the ways that we don't

discuss grief within our culture.

One of the things I really want to

say is that grief often comes from things

outside of ourselves, the loss of a pet,

the loss of a family member, the loss

of a job or an opportunity or the

loss of supports.

And grief takes that external event and brings

it in internal.

We don't feel that grief is like some

nebulous thing floating in front of us or

surrounding us.

We feel that grief deeply in our hearts,

in our souls, in our bodies.

We feel that grief inside of us, those

tears come from inside of us.

Nobody splashes water on our face.

And that's what tears are.

They actually come and are driven by our

embodied life, our embodied experience, our embodied being.

And so the biggest change that I would

love to see, when it comes to discussing

grief, and how we think about grief, is

that we no longer think about grief as

something external that can be fixed or something

superficial that can be fixed or wiped away

or healed or covered over.

Instead, we need to understand grief as something

that is internal, that is embodied, and that

comes from the very core of ourselves, stretches

through our tissues, our cells, our muscles, our

fascia, our skin, our sinews, and fills our

entire being.

And that is how we need to look

at finding our new path forward of telling

our stories of working with grief to bring

that back into a more communal and a

more embodied experience.

I hope this podcast has been helpful.

I've got some other topics on my list.

So I assure you, not every podcast going

forward, we'll be talking about grief.

But I do think it is important that

we have these conversations, and that we work

with these conversations.

If you would like to work with me

more on grief, or wild spirit storytelling, or

how you know how to get in touch

with your wild, untamed nature, just if you'd

like to work with me more, I want

you to reach out through feathermanesoul.com.

Click on the contact link, book a discovery

call, or just send me a quick email.

I also have a newsletter and several free

resources for people.

And you know, the topics of my podcast

going forward, we'll be talking a little bit

more about those resources.

Thank you so much for sharing this time

with me.

Thank you so much for listening.

And until next time, the wild in me

sees the wild in you.

You've been listening to the feathermanesoul wisdom podcast

hosted by Kit Kelstoe.

Learn more about feathermanesoul at feathermanesoul.com.

As a wild spirit storyteller, Kit is passionate

about helping those who are neurodivergent, disabled, or

living with chronic illness rediscover their own inner

wild spirit.

Visit feathermanesoul.com to receive free gifts or

book a free call with Kit to discuss

how wild spirit storytelling can help you.

Music is Running with the Horses by Purple

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