Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True Podcast: Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries; community events; classes to start your day and relax in the evening; and special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Megan Devine. Megan Devine is a psychotherapist and a bestselling author recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t even call grief. She’s the author of the bestselling book on grief in over a decade. It’s called, It’s OK That You’re Not OK. It sold over half a million copies since it was published, I’m proud to say by Sounds True, in 2017, and it’s been translated into more than 25 languages.
And just to tell you a story about this book that I think is illustrative of its power to reach out to people who are grieving. Someone that I’m close to came to visit Sounds True, our offices, back in 2017, and they had recently suffered a devastating loss in their life, but I wasn’t sure which of our many books would really speak to them. I said, “There’s a shelf over there with all the books we’ve published to date, several copies of each. Please go ahead and choose whatever you want.” And this was the one book that they picked off the shelf and they said, “OK That You’re Not OK. That speaks to right where I am right now.” Megan Devine is also the author of a new journal for grief. It helps people explore their grief in practical and creative ways, and it’s called How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed. Megan is an executive producer and host of the podcast It’s OK That You’re Not OK and a featured expert on the PBS documentary Speaking Grief. Megan, welcome.
Megan Devine: Thank you. I love that It’s OK origin story. It makes me remember that you were the one who gave It’s OK That You’re Not OK the title. I don’t know if you remember that.
TS: No. Really?
MD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You did. You did. I don’t even remember what the working title was, but I remember in one of our first meetings, one of the first email volleys, somebody said, “You need to let Tami name the book for you because she’s magic with titles.” And so you were the one that named it.
TS: There you go. I was patting myself on the back without even realizing.
MD: There we go. We make a really good team.
TS: There you go. The very first sentence of the book, Megan—all yours—“The way we deal with grief in our culture is broken.” Let’s start right there. What’s broken about it, and how did we get here? How did we get here as a culture?
MD: Ooh, which one of those do I want to start with? What’s broken is that we seem to have absorbed this idea that anytime somebody’s going through something difficult, our job is to sort of bounce back quickly, right? Any hardship that happens to you, you’re supposed to transform and come back stronger and more powerful. And if one of your friends or your family members is going through a hard time, we think that our job is to make them feel better, help them find resilience and strength. We have this idea that we really shouldn’t be affected by the things that we’re going through, by the things that we find difficult, that happiness and resilience and strength are really the measures of health. And that our job—as good friends, as supporters, as loving, caring people in the world—our job is to push somebody through something painful as soon as possible in order to help them find resilience and transformation.
And that narrative, that bad things happen to help you grow, that you need to push through to the other side and get over things quickly and integrate them, that narrative is a cover for our fear of losing the things that we love. That narrative is a cover for the deep emotions that we have for the fragile nature of this world and this life in so many different ways, right?
And where did we get this? I mean, I spend the whole first part of the book talking about the historical roots of pain avoidance, right? It’s a very normal thing to sort of look for order and safety in the world. We don’t like to really look at how tenuous and fragile and unpredictable the world is. So for example, if somebody’s child dies, I feel like that kicks off a really primal fear in us that, oh my gosh, I could be next. Their grief is making me really see how tenuous the world is. I don’t like that, so I need to push them to clean up that grief, to get over it, to get through it faster, or I need to find a way to make sure that I’m different from them so that doesn’t happen to me. Right?
To me, the entirety of grief avoidance, grief phobia, is that fear of the knowledge that we don’t know what’s next for us, that life is actually unpredictable and nothing we do can protect us from losing the people we love or losing the bodies that we love. And it sounds like such a downer. Of course, we try to avoid this stuff. Of course, we try to make grief into this transformation story where you come out better and stronger than before. But really the best way to prepare ourselves for losses that may happen is to turn to face that directly and have honest conversations about what grief really is and what we really need inside it, and sort of kick over that old inherited idea that hard things happen to help you grow, and that resilient, healthy people rise above the losses that happen. It’s a very big mouthful, but I could rant about this stuff forever.
TS: One of the things I’m curious about, and you point to it in your new journal, How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed, is this difference between pain and suffering, because you’re talking about pain avoidance now. So let’s say we’re not avoiding pain. What’s suffering and how do we not let our pain turn into prolonged suffering?
MD: I think this distinction between pain and suffering is really powerful, right? Grief itself is a normal, healthy response to any kind of loss—loss related to death, loss related to chronic illness, loss related to the world as we knew it doesn’t exist anymore. Grief is a collection of biological, emotional, relational symptoms or experiences, right? That pain, it just is what it is. There’s nothing that you can do to fix somebody’s pain if their child died or their body doesn’t work the way that it did anymore. That pain is valid and it needs to be supported and it needs to be tended. What can’t happen to it is it can’t be disappeared. Suffering though, suffering is different. So if you think about pain as like, this person’s never going to be not dead, or my body’s never going to be back to the way that it was before a chronic illness. That is an immovable truth.
Suffering, though, are the things that happen that we sort of load on top of that. So for example, if I lost my partner, that pain is what it is. Suffering is things like telling myself that I brought this on myself, that if only I were stronger or I worked harder, it wouldn’t hurt so much. Suffering is not eating or not sleeping. Those things that make your experience feel harder or harsher. Suffering also shows up really, really often in what it feels like to be a grieving person in this culture and having people try to cheer you up or tell you it’s not that bad or you shouldn’t be feeling the way that you’re feeling. Suffering is all the stuff that gets loaded on top of that pain that makes it harder to tend to the pain itself. Suffering is where we have a lot of power. It’s where we have a lot of agency. A lot of the tools that we use in meditation or in psychotherapy, a lot of the tools that we use in that are really designed to help relieve suffering. It’s just that we think if you use those tools correctly, you won’t be in pain.
TS: Yeah. I think part of what I want to understand here from your perspective is the role of the stories we tell ourselves about pain. Because in a pure meditative context, where I first heard this idea of separating pain and suffering, with pain, you’re just kind of with the raw sensation. There isn’t even a narrative about it. And I was trying to imagine, what’s grief without the story with the narrative. The narrative’s so important. It’s what happened, it’s what I lost, it’s whom I love that I won’t see again. And then I was like, well, is all of that suffering or is that what you mean by it? This is where I was trying to sort of sort it out, because how do I grieve without story?
MD: That’s a really good question. Let me see if I can unravel a little bit. I think you’re right. I mean, we’re storytelling creatures, right? That lack of story is undifferentiated chaos. We need something to hold onto. And there is a bedrock human reality in there.
I’m going to use my own example. My partner is dead. I have a response to that, right? In my language and my way of thinking about it, that’s not a story. That’s not spun. Those are facts. This happened and I have a response to that, and my responses to that make sense. I’m not going to talk myself out of my feelings and the way that I think about this, right? Where spinning a story might come from is the things I tell myself about that core fact, right? This shouldn’t have happened. It’s not fair. Nobody else has to go through this. We were good people. That story that the world works on the merit system—I did all the right things and this still happened. It’s not fair. Also, that story that other people give to us. “You have to make meaning in this. They wouldn’t want you to be sad. Now you know what’s really important,” which is a really rude thing to say to somebody who’s just lost someone.
So I think maybe if we differentiate between the central happening and then the interpretation is where a lot of suffering comes in. Whether we apply that interpretation to ourselves or that interpretation comes from the outside world, a lot of suffering comes from that.
I also want to bring in one other piece though. That’s not the only form that suffering can take. And remember, if we think of suffering as the things that make tending to that central pain itself more difficult, all the things that on a normal average day make your day harder—if you haven’t eaten, if you didn’t sleep well the night before, if it’s one stressful event after another and your bandwidth gets eroded. All of those things make it more difficult to allow the pain that is present, for you to be present and well-tended. So I think sometimes suffering, when we talk about suffering, it’s all about the stories we’re telling ourselves or the rotten way that people are treating us. And that’s all in there, but there are also things that are intrinsic to this human form, the care and feeding of this human form that can make suffering worse.
TS: Now at this point, you’ve worked with thousands of grieving people. What have you found helps people tend well to their own pain?
MD: I love this question, because the answer isn’t what you would expect. Letting people be in pain is orders of magnitude more helpful than trying to help them not be in pain. That is not what we’ve been taught. That’s not what we think would be the most useful. There is something incredibly healing in the power of acknowledgement. The power of acknowledgement is when somebody says they’re in pain, you come back with, “Yeah, you are. That makes sense. Do you want to tell me about it?”
If there is one thing that I can take from the last 10 years of this work, my own personal experience, and literally thousands and thousands of grieving people, that acknowledgement, not trying to talk somebody out of their pain, that is what makes pain more survivable. It really, really does. When you let your or somebody else’s pain exist, you remove the energy drain of trying to defend your pain’s right to exist.
Let me give you an example here that can feel a little woo-woo.
TS: Sure.
MD: But if I say, “I’m having a really hard day right now. I’m feeling really weepy and tired and emotional. It’s the fourth birthday since they died.” And I say that to my friend, and my friend says, “It’s been four years. Let’s go out and celebrate. Maybe we should go dancing or something. You know that they would love to celebrate their birthday if they were here.” Then what I need to do is defend my right to feel how I feel, or I have the need to feel like I need to justify. “Yeah, I know they would be out partying if they were still here, but I don’t feel that way.” So we’re adding to my suffering, because this person isn’t seeing what I am saying about what I feel right now and how I feel right now and what I need, right? So just that acknowledgement, joining that person. And this is classic couples counseling. Joining the person, affirming that they feel how they feel and that it is valid. It seems so counterintuitive, because that’s definitely not the way that we’re taught.
TS: What do you think makes someone really good at being able to do that, to join with someone else’s pain?
MD: I think getting a lot of practice with being comfortable, being awkward or feeling awkward and tolerating your own helplessness. Tolerating your own helplessness is huge. So let me tell you what I mean by that. If I am talking to a friend and they say, “My mom is really sick. It’s really hard to watch somebody I love suffer.” I’ve been doing this work for a very long time. My impulse is to make them feel better. Even knowing that won’t work, my impulse is to make them feel better, because I feel helpless in the face of their pain. I don’t want them to be in pain, right? If I can’t tolerate the reality that I actually can’t fix this for them, then I’m going to jump in with things that make them feel better or that I hope make them feel better.
So in order to really be skilled at supporting somebody without fixing their pain for them, you have to build up your tolerance for that feeling of being helpless. You also have to be willing to be awkward doing it, right? I think a lot of times we say things and then we cringe. We say things because we want to make sure that we say the right thing or we don’t want to screw something up, so we get really panicked and we work ourselves into a bit of a tizzy. It gets a lot easier if you just lead with, “I have no idea how to support you, and I’m probably going to do it wrong, but I am willing to be weird about it if you feel supported,” right?
TS: Yeah. Well, it’s very interesting that you bring up being OK with our own helplessness, because that’s something that’s very hard for me, just to speak confessionally for a moment. I mean, I started my own company, I’m all into agency and choice and go. And there’s always a way. So how does someone get better at accepting helplessness, especially if they’re like a go-getter type?
MD: Yeah, we know why we call it a meditation practice, right? Because you have to practice, because you have to do it over and over again. I think this is one of the places that the practice of mindfulness I think is really helpful. If you know that you are a go-getter and you are a fixer and you also know that some things can’t be fixed, then it becomes paying attention to that for yourself. Like, here comes my friend, saying they’re having a really tough day. “It’s hard to watch my mom be this sick.” And you know that you’re like, oh, there’s my impulse to fix this for them. I recognize that. Let me step back for a second.
As long as you are in that habit of recognizing, I have an impulse to fix things, I have an impulse to solve this problem, then you can apply more skill in when you use that tool. That tool is awesome. If there’s a leak in my roof, I want somebody to come and fix that thing, right? So it’s not one or the other. It’s not that our impulse to fix things or to solve a problem is wrong or bad. It’s not. It’s just that that approach doesn’t apply to everything, and we have to learn when that approach is needed and when it’s not.
There’s actually a really helpful way to practice this or interrupt this for yourself if you know have that habit of going in and fixing things. If you can start saying to people, when they’re coming to you and they’re talking about something that’s difficult, if you can ask the question, “Do you need a solution to this right now? Would that be helpful or do you need an ear?” Before we charge in with doing what we think that person needs, give them a minute for them to tell us what they need. “Do you need a solution right now? I’m happy to problem solve this with you. Or do you need some time to be heard in this? Because I can do that too.”
TS: Now, you mentioned the power of acknowledgement, just having our pain acknowledged by ourselves, by other people, and I hear you on that. I was surprised, though, in the journal where you made this distinction between acknowledgement and acceptance. So I got very interested in this, because I push myself to acceptance when things that are really difficult happen in my life. I’m like, Tami, orient towards reality. This actually happened. Because it happened, you have to accept it, because it happened. I don’t just say acknowledgement is good enough. I push. And I thought, hey, I wonder what Megan thinks about that and why she so significantly draws this distinction between acknowledgement and acceptance.
MD: I love that you brought this up, because I love particular word things. OK, so the way that we use the word acceptance is like, you have to be OK with this. You have to accept that they died. You have to accept that this isn’t going to work out the way that you wanted to. You have to accept that this happened. You have to accept that whatever, right? We use that. I’m not saying you do this, but we, in general, often use acceptance as a way to make somebody stop having the emotional response they’re having. “Stop being upset about this. Just accept reality.” So we sort of weaponize acceptance as a way to make ourselves or make somebody else stop having the emotional response that we’re having. That is rude. There are some things that are unacceptable, right?
I’m not OK with the fact that my partner drowned. I’m not OK with the fact that half the world is on fire. I’m not OK with a lot of things. I don’t have to accept them, right? In the journal, I made distinction between accepting and allowing. This thing has happened. I don’t have to be OK with it and it’s not movable. So what are the ways that I can live alongside this given the fact that I’m never going to be good with it? To me, there’s a lot more breathing room in that. There’s a lot more kindness in that. I think if you find yourself scolding yourself to accept something, I think taking a step outside that, the next ring out of that, and ask yourself like, do I find this thing unacceptable? Or what would it be like if it was just OK that I felt this way? Can I find a way to live alongside something that is unacceptable to me because I can’t change it?
Taking that wider step outside of it, I think this also opens up room for agency. Because as you said, some things that we’re having a hard time accepting, it’s because we want to change them. Well, is there anywhere you can change this? Is there anything that is in your power? Can you advocate for something to be different? I don’t have to accept a non-response to the climate crisis, right? That’s unacceptable. Are there ways that I can advocate for changing that system? Changing what’s happening, right?
I feel like acceptance is a way that we shame ourselves or dismiss our emotional responses to something that really shouldn’t have happened or that we really didn’t want to happen and forcing people or forcing ourselves to accept. I don’t know. It just feels really rude. It feels rude. And I don’t think that it leaves any room for asking ourselves, is there any movement here, or is this the brick wall that can’t go anywhere? And if that’s the case, I don’t have to be psyched about that wall. But how do I live with this, and what else do I need? I’m not a big fan of the words that we use to make ourselves stop feeling how we feel.
TS: Now, when it comes to grief, I think people have all different kinds of ideas about what’s considered a reasonable amount of time to be grieving. It’s reasonable to be an intense grief for this amount of time, and then it’s supposed to trail off. And then there’s all these questions about, well, maybe it’s complicated grief. Have I entered the world of complicated grief? So I’m curious how you view this, the length of time and the notion of complicated grief.
MD: Yes. Let me start by defining some terms. Complicated grief, prolonged grief disorder, those are categories, diagnosis codes in the medical model, the way that the medical industry looks at a human experience. I’m not going to go into the whole background here, but literally the reasons that we have diagnosis and diagnosis codes are so that we can say, “This person deserves to have their treatment reimbursed by insurance.” That is literally what those codes are for. If you are going to present this person and they come to you needing assistance and support and an ear and validation and medication where necessary, all of these things, we have to be able to go to the insurance company and say, “Look, they have this, this, and this. This justifies you shelling out payment for me so that I can support them,” right?
In order to do that, by the way this system works, we have to say that this person is not normal. We have to say that. This person has a disorder. They’re not doing it right. And since they’re not doing it right, you have to pay for me to help them get it right. That is very overly simplified. Lots of complex layers in there, but for now, that’s what that is.
So the whole reason that we have Prolonged Grief Disorder and what used to be complicated grief disorder is an insurance reimbursement issue. So when you’re looking at how long is too long, who’s making that decision? And what worldview are they standing in when they make that decision? If you come from a grief-averse, capitalistic culture where we hold up as the highest form of health that you can show up to work—you can perform your duties, you can keep your house clean, you can keep people fed, you can go to work and you are not obviously or overtly have feelings—then we end up with things like, within six weeks after the death of your parent or your child or your sister or your best friend, you should be back to normal.
Within six weeks you should be back to normal. You should not be sad. You should be able to do your job the way that you were doing it before. Your relationships should be fine. You should be completely stable emotionally and basically be good. You should be over it. And if you’re not, you’re doing it wrong. That is literally what the definition is in there. You get six weeks, right? It actually depends on whether you’re looking at the international regulations or the US regulations. Sometimes it’s six weeks, sometimes it’s six months, which should tell you that it’s not scientific immutable fact. We are trying to put measurable parameters around unique human experience. And when we do that, we’re saying this is correct and this is incorrect. You have to question, what is the mindset that those ideas about how long grief should last and what it should look like, where do those ideas come from? Whose ideas are those?
The real problem for me around pathologizing grief, which is what those things do, is they give the grieving person a false and harmful idea of how they should feel and how they should be operating. If the doctor says by three months after the funeral of your child, you should be back to work and doing just fine, and you’re not, then you think you’re doing it wrong. So we add suffering on top of your pain. We add suffering because now I’m failing this too.
And the damage that does for the rest of us trying to be good supporters is, we learn this stuff too. The doctor said you should be good in three months. If you’re not good in three months, then I have to intervene. I have to talk to you about resilience.
It is such a disservice to not only put parameters around what healthy grief looks like—and healthy grief is grief that disappears really quickly and you don’t know what’s there anymore—but also to give it such a short time span. If you’re listening and if you’ve been through this or you haven’t been through this, but you’re not even done with the end-of-life paperwork at the end of six weeks, let alone done grieving. This idea that we are supposed to be unaffected by something so foundational, that’s nuts.
TS: Do you put any kind of arc on it, our development journey, if you will?
MD: Sure.
TS: What is that? Like, over time?
MD: Yeah. I think this is the tricky thing when people yell at me or they leave comments or they flame me online. I’m not saying that there aren’t times when we need extra support in grief. The same things apply here. If somebody is no longer eating, if they’re not sleeping, if they’re feeling suicidal, if they’re self-harming, if they are leaning on addictions or addictive substances or addictive patterns in ways that are causing them harm, it doesn’t mean they’re doing it wrong. It means we really need to pay attention to, what’s the support here? What do they need? Losing somebody close to you is an experience of dissolution. Of course you’re going to be affected by it.
The only times I get concerned about somebody is if they are not eating, not drinking water, not sleeping, they’re causing self-harm, they’re doing harm to others. And even then, I’m like, “You’re not grieving wrong. You’re grieving in a way that is not supportive to you, that is not sustainable. Can we talk about the things that you need around you so that you can survive what you need to survive?” I think we get really confused in that binary all-or-nothing thing. Like, if I say that all grief is healthy grief, then we’re like, oh, it’s just a free-for-all. Or no grief is healthy grief after the six-week point. There is nothing about human existence that is binary. Binary belongs to computers, right?
What I really advocate for here is, can we humanize this very human experience of grief? Can we talk about what is normal in grief? Because normal grief is a really big span of things. I don’t know them entirely off the top of my head, but the diagnostic criteria for Prolonged Grief Disorder are things like having a hard time relating to the rest of the world after somebody close to you dies, feeling sad, longing for your person after they’ve died—if it’s been either six weeks or six months, arbitrary markers here. Longing for your person after they’ve died is one of the diagnostic criteria for prolonged grief disorder. That is the most normal human thing ever, right? I’m never not going to miss my partner. I’m not thrown to the floor by it 24/7 anymore, but my longing is not a pathology, right? My stepson turned 18 the day after his dad died. He is going to miss his dad for the rest of his life, and that’s not a disease, that’s not a disorder. That is normal human experience.
This is the real danger to me in pathologizing things like grief is, we start to push it even further underground. We had this opportunity, I think, during the pandemic, when so many people were experiencing grief—loss at a really big scale, but also grief around the loss of households and jobs and the world as we knew it. We had this really democratic, in a way, experience of grief. And we had this opportunity, still have it, but had this opportunity to really look at the ways that we talk about grief. What’s normal? How do we talk about it? How do we support it? We had this opportunity to do something completely different than what had come before. And unfortunately, the choice we made was to double down on pathologizing grief.
I have a whole lecture series that I do around the different kinds, in history, when we’ve been through intense periods of loss, and the medical model that came forward to greet it, and what happened next. We have done this over and over and over again, which comes back to where we started, around we are so terrified of truly feeling what it is to lose those we love that we have created entire systems to avoid it, to denigrate it, to silence it.
TS: Now, I just want to make sure I’m following you here in terms of what happened during the pandemic. How did we pathologize grief during the pandemic?
MD: Prolonged Grief Disorder is a new diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, right? So we come through this pandemic, so many people are grieving. At the same time, here comes in this debate over whether Prolonged Grief Disorder belongs in this statistical manual that all clinicians need to use in order to get insurance coverage. That’s what I’m talking about.
TS: I got you. OK.
MD: Here’s this mass grief experience and here’s this thing that comes in through the medical world that says, those things that you’re feeling right now, they’re actually unhealthy. There was more than one headline during the pandemic that said the entire world is at risk of Complicated Grief or Prolonged Grief Disorder if we don’t act fast.
TS: OK, so let me see if I understand something, Megan, that you’re saying. If I’m basically taking reasonable care of myself, trying to sleep, exercise, eating well, if I’m able to function in my life reasonably well at least, and yet many, many years after a life-altering loss, I still have a lot of sadness, a lot of longing, a huge desire to be close to the person that I loved and to talk about them even after they’re gone, you would put that all in the range, and I just want to make sure, of just how grief lives in us, how we carry what we can’t fix. Is that true? Am I saying that accurately?
MD: I think that’s accurate. It reminds me of one of the first talks I gave to medical providers a long time ago. I did my talk about normal grief and what grief is really like. A psychiatrist stood up and said, “OK, so here’s the situation. I have a patient that I’ve been seeing for years and every single time they come into my office, the first story they tell is about how their mom died when they were 16. Literally, I’ve been seeing this patient for almost 10 years, and they tell this story every single time. What do I do? Or what does this mean?” And I was like, “Well, have you heard them yet? If they have to tell that story every single session, have you heard them yet?”
Because what we usually do, I’m putting myself in a provider’s position now, if I have a client who comes in every single week for 10 years and starts with the story of how their mom died when they were 16, and I go into the things that I’ve learned, which is talking about resilience and “What would she want for you now? And that was such a long time ago, let’s talk about today,” I’m not hearing what they’re coming to me for, right? If instead, I respond to that with, “You know, what I’ve noticed is that almost every week for the last 10 years, you’ve come in and you’ve told me that your mom died when you were 16. What’s important about that story? What do you need me to know in that story?” You’re going to get a very different response.
It’s not wrong that somebody misses their mom for the rest of their life. It’s not wrong. If they are 5 years, 10 years, 15 years—if they can’t have a conversation or a relationship with somebody else without bringing that up, I’m not going to say they’re doing it wrong. I’m going to say there’s something missing, right? There is something missing that they’re not getting because they have to lead with that story in every single interaction. I’m really mindful of not pathologizing that, because we live in a culture that is not so skilled at listening and responding to grief. I’m really, really mindful of what I think is too much or too long.
TS: Yep. One of the things you mentioned that can be helpful to the person who’s grieving is to bring up the name of the person that they’ve lost, to say it directly, even if it’s awkward. And I noticed for me, in certain situations, it does feel awkward. I’m like, should I bring it up? Will this be a trigger in a bad way? But I want to honor the loss, and I don’t quite know. I’m wondering if you have any suggestions there for those of us who want to help our grieving loved ones.
MD: Yeah. I think everybody thinks that. Remember that I’ve been doing this for over 10 years. This is literally my job. I do this all the time, and I have those internal thoughts of like, do I say something? Do I not say something? I don’t want to upset them more. That is a normal part of being awkward and alive, right?
I’m a really big fan of naming the awkward. So if I’m not sure if I should bring something up, and I’m not really sure what the right thing is to say, and we’re coming up on the holiday season, and I’m not sure if I should mention blah, blah, blah, I will say that. I will say something like, “I have spent so much time thinking, wondering about if I should bring this up to you or not bring this up to you. I don’t want to upset you by saying it, but I also don’t want to upset you by not saying something. So how are you feeling about this upcoming holiday season? Do you want to talk about your sister? Or does it feel more comfortable not to? I’m happy to follow whichever way you want to go.”
I think we silence ourselves because we feel unsure and awkward. And a much better, more effective and efficient solution is to name that awkwardness, which is on the road to making it about you, but you don’t have to make it about you, right? So let me give you an example. If, Tami, this is going to be your first holiday season without your best friend because they died last year. Hopefully that didn’t happen for you, but if it did, that’s what we’re using for an example. And I’m not sure if I should bring it up or not. I could say, “I’m not sure how you’re feeling about this upcoming holiday season. I know Sarah died earlier in the year. I just want to make sure that I’m here for you in the ways that you need. Do you have a sense of how you want to include her or not include her in this holiday season?” And then we’re going to leave space for you to say something.
Making it about me would be like, “I spent all day trying to think about this. And you know how stressful that got for me that I was worried about this for you? And I know we should talk about how this is for you, but I remember when I used to do this with my mom.” And then we’re not talking about you anymore at all. We’re talking about how hard this is on me. And that does take practice, and it takes a willingness to not do it perfectly. But I feel like we’re either managing the awkward or we’re addressing the awkward, managing the awkward or we’re addressing the awkward. And only one of those options has a chance for things to get better.
TS: Now, another suggestion you make is not to say something like, “What can I do to be helpful? And how can I help? I’m here.” I mean, so many people have said that to me, and I’ve said that sentence to people even though I know it’s not the right sentence to say. What do I say when I want to say, “I’m here for you. What can I do to be helpful?”
MD: Let’s first talk about why that’s not as helpful as we think it is. So if I’m feeling really overwhelmed, I just had a really bad cold, the dog is sick and all of this stuff, and my friends know that I’m having a hard time. And they say, “Tell us what you need. We want to help.” That seems really supportive, but now the burden is on me to figure out what I need to match those needs with somebody who might be able to fill those needs and then have the courage to ask for the help that I need. Those three things, knowing what I need, knowing who might be able to do it, and then asking for it—that’s not something we do in everyday life, right?
A lot of people, maybe even most people, are not comfortable asking for help on a regular ordinary day. You put in something like illness or somebody died, right? Asking them to then do something that feels scary on an ordinary day is just light years beyond what they’re capable of doing. They also may not know what they need, right? So a much more helpful thing to offer—if you know the person or you’re friends with them or you know enough about their life to know some of the things that might be going sideways—it’s much more helpful to say things like, “I would be happy to drop the kids off at school Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week if that would be helpful for you. Would you like that?? Or, “I can drop food off on Tuesday evening. Let me know if that’s something you want.” Offering something concrete is much more helpful than giving an open offer.
And the other thing is, it’s often more helpful to give people the chance to say yes or no. Really clear example of this is with food. The thing that we know how to do when somebody is going through a hard time is feed them. I love that impulse. What that often looks like for the receiving person is you have 19 lasagnas, and you don’t eat dairy, right? So if you have something to offer, offer something concrete, clear, something that you’ll actually do. Don’t offer something that you’re not going to do. Offer something concrete, actionable, that you can actually deliver. And then ask the person if that’s what they need, or would that be helpful? Is that a good day for you? Make that barrier to saying yes or no much easier to jump over.
TS: Now, Megan, with your work with thousands of grieving people, it evolved for you, and you started exploring the topic of hope and hopelessness. How did that emerge?
MD: Hope and grief are more related than we think they are. One of the things that has come up more and more often in the grief-related-to-death community—I’ve had folks who have been with me from the beginning, so they’re hitting years 8, 9, 10, 11 after their losses—they’re starting to wonder about what’s next. But knowing what they know, that life can change in an instant, it’s hard to feel hopeful. It’s hard to feel like the future has any sort of solid footing at all. And so wrestling with optimism or hope or dreaming forward feels like a really complicated concept.
A lot of what I’ve been talking about over the last several years is that everyday grief—that we don’t call grief or non-grief, that doesn’t relate to death. We have this idea that grief belongs to death and that’s the only thing, but grief is a whole big spectrum. Certainly with the state of the environment with the rise of fascism, with all of the overwhelming bad news, a lot of people are experiencing grief for the world as we knew it, grief for a future that doesn’t seem like it’s going to show up anymore, that’s not logical, that doesn’t seem likely—that overwhelm. And it can be very small, very personal. It can be communal, it can be global, right? That grief, that overwhelm translates into hopelessness. There’s simply no way forward.
When I really realized that this was a big issue, I was talking to my dad, who is awesome. He called me one day and he said, “Meggy, I grieve the loss of our neighborhood that we had when you were a kid. It was the right time to leave, but I really miss that house and that neighborhood and I really grieve that.” And there’s so much of that. I feel like there’s just so much in everyday life that is full of grief, so I’m carrying that with me as I get older. And with everything that’s going on, I really don’t feel any hope at all for the world that all of you are inheriting. And it’s a grieving process to me to feel like there’s no hope for this world. That no matter what we do, nothing’s going to shift or get better, that the forces are too big. And you can hear it in my voice. That’s so crushing, to feel like we have no hope anymore. What a loss that is.
I feel like hope and hopelessness is a grief that we really need to talk about. And this concept of hope, do we need it? Is it necessary? What does it even mean? What would it mean to have hope knowing what you know and living what you’ve lived, whether that is personal or communal or collective? I think it’s a really interesting question, and to me, it’s the same conversation that we have about grief. Let’s turn to look at what breaks our hearts. Let’s have that conversation. I don’t think that hope or optimism or a way forward can be found without turning to face how hopeless so many of us feel. And again, that is personally, communally, and often collectively.
TS: So help me make the connection. When someone tunes into their heartbreak about something that’s happening, and they don’t feel optimistic, and you seem to lead with so much integrity around our emotional experience, like we’re not going to make something up. I’m not going to make up that I’m suddenly hopeful. So how do I get there if that is just not my reality when I look at what’s happening, —let’s just say for the environment right now? Knowing everything I know about climate science, etcetera, no, no hope. No hope is here. What am I going to do, Megan?
MD: Yeah, I cannot fake things and I don’t [inaudible].
TS: I know that. I know that about you.
MD: We know this about me. I cannot do that. For me, the stuff that I’m exploring around hope now is the difference between transactional hope and functional hope. And let me define some terms here. I feel like the way that hope gets thrown around is this sort of moral compass, right? How dare you give up hope? We have to be optimistic. Look on the bright side. All of these things. It’s often a thing that asks us to deny what we know or avoid what we’re afraid of, like, let’s bring hope into a terminal diagnosis, right? For some people, they won’t have a discussion with the person who has the terminal diagnosis. They won’t have a discussion about what their end-of-life wishes are. They won’t have a discussion about what they want done with their physical bodies, because we have to hold out hope for a cure. We cannot have a conversation about what happens if you die, because that means that we’re not hoping, right?
There’s this real transactional vibe to the ways that we usually talk about hope. We hope that things work out for the best. We won’t actually talk about how scared we are, because then we’re not being hopeful, and we’re failing some optimism code, right? Trash, absolute trash. I was talking with Koshin Paley Ellison, who is one of the cofounders of the New York Sun Center, and I asked him the question that I ask all of my podcast guests like, “Knowing what you know and living what you’ve lived, what does hope look like for you?” And he said, “Hope is garbage.”
“Really? Tell me more about this.” He said, “Well, hope is always in the future. It’s not in the present. It is, by definition, the way that I understand hope, living in something that has not yet arrived while ignoring the current situation.” And that really struck me. He said that that story of Pandora’s box—Pandora was given the box of evils by pissed off gods and brought it to humankind, and she opened it in pestilence and war and famine and disease and violence all came out. And then just as before she closed it, hope kind of struggled out of the box. We usually tell that story by saying that some kind and compassionate god snuck hope into the box of all of the evil things as something to help humankind survive. And Koshin said, “Babe, hope belonged in the box of evil things because it makes us stop looking at what is real and here and now. And it makes us complacent to the suffering around us, because we believe that something will get better, but we don’t know what to act on to make it better.”
So if we need hope, if the absence of hope feels devastating, if the absence of hope feels like complacency, if hope itself is important, how do we make hope functional? How do we build it into something that lets us see the reality at hand, take action where we can take action, and support each other and focus on what is important and what is beautiful and what is useful right alongside what is real? To me, the only hope we have for the beautiful world we long for is by looking at what is true and what is unfixable and what is unredeemable and what are we terrified of, so that we can really talk about, what do we do now?
If there is any hope for us, it is in understanding why we feel hopeless and turning to face that and rebuilding a sense of hope that feels beautiful and useful, that feels functional, that doesn’t ask us to lie about what’s here. And maybe to come back to your example for yourself, of like, knowing what I know about not only the climate crisis but the power behind keeping the planet on the path to full destruction, I don’t feel optimistic that that shit’s going to change. Where is my power? Where is my hope? What do I look for? What do I lean on? It’s that conversation that fascinates me right now, because it is the twin sister to grief. Looking at what is and telling the truth about it together.
TS: What do you mean by the phrase you introduced, “functional hope.” What is that functional hope?
MD: I love functional hope. So I pit functional hope against transactional hope. Transactional hope is the hope that we have, right? That hoping for the best, things will work out the way that they’re meant to, I hope you have a great day. This vending machine sort of thing, that if we think the right thoughts and do the right things, things will work out. It’s not logical. It’s not telling the truth. It’s not actionable. Like I hope that I will be reunited with this person again. So therefore I shouldn’t feel the way that I feel now, because don’t behave, don’t live as those who have no hope, right? There’s no action to take in that sort of transactional hope.
In functional hope, that’s the name that I’ve given it, and the way that I think about it, functional hope is logical. It tells the truth about the situation at hand. It doesn’t bypass the present moment in favor of some rosier future that isn’t here. It’s logical. It tells the truth about the situation. It is actionable. There is something you can do not necessarily to change the situation, but to connect or to work towards the outcome you want. There’s something actionable in that. It’s not a passive giving up and hoping that some force larger than you will fix it, right? Actionable, logical. What was the other one? I should know this, but there’s a third one.
TS: Inhabitable. Inhabitable.
MD: Inhabitable.
TS: Yeah.
MD: Thank you. It has to work in the world as it is. It has to work in the body as it is. It has to work in the community that you want for yourself, right? It has to be a world we can live in. It can’t be unrealistic in a way. I don’t use the word realistic, unrealistic because then we get stuck in like, whose reality are we talking about? But it has to be inhabitable in that this needs to be something we can live in. A way you can think about that is, it can’t be in the service of something that is so far beyond where we are that it is not logical, realistic, or actionable. This has to be something that we live.
I think the word inhabitable got really underscored for me. I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people with chronic illnesses and with other disabilities. And I’m thinking about Sarah Ramey, who wrote this amazing book called The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness. I’m pretty sure that’s the title. Everybody should read it. It is amazing. She has multiple chronic illnesses. Her body is severely limited in what she can and cannot do, and she said, “I’m one of the most optimistic hope-filled people I know. And I know how much this body can do, and I have built my hope to suit it.” There is something visceral and intimate about creating, defining a hope that is inhabitable as our own visceral, sometimes limited bodies, as our communal body, as our global body. What is inhabitable? What body do we live in and what truth do we tell in there? And what action do we take in there? And how willing are we to tell the truth about how dangerous this moment is?
TS: Just to really make sure I’m understanding you, what is your functional hope about the environment right now?
MD: I don’t know that I have one yet. I don’t know that I have one yet. This is something that is a work in progress for me. There is so much going against us right now. If I can move towards hope, it is when I am watching the people who are turning the lights on, when I’m watching the people who are doing sit-ins.
The climate activist, Bill McKibben, also fascinating, amazing human being, he has a movement, I believe it’s called Third Act, where he encourages people over 60 or over 65 to do rockings. He’s like, my generation has a lot of wealth and we have a lot of responsibility for the state of the environment, the policies that we’ve put in place. So let’s marry our wealth with the activism and the energy and the drive of the younger generation. How do we use what we’ve created to amplify their voices so that we can make change together.
For me, I don’t know that I have a functional hope yet or a solid hope that we’re going to be able to act in time, that we can overthrow the misguided powers that believe that their safety only exists in the destruction of the world as we know it. Where I don’t collapse into despair is watching the work that’s happening, being part of the work that’s happening, seeing the truth that is coming out. There is something very powerful for me in that. And when I am despairing for this world, which happens a lot, I look at how different this world is than it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago when there was no space to talk about this, where there wasn’t a way to learn the things that we’ve learned, to be able to use our knowledge of what is actually happening and the people and the corporations who are making it happen. None of that was available to us.
We have a lot more information, a lot more power, a lot more tools, a lot more ways to link up and joint forces and to make political change happen by the strength of our numbers than we ever have before. I don’t know that I have hope that things will get fixed, but I absolutely have hope in the evidence that I see of us working together to make a damn solid effort.
I don’t know. I think that hope is also not a once and you’re done thing. To me, arriving at a final version of hope belongs in the box of you, all things. That is very “if these conditions are met, then this hope is correct.” I think we need to let hope breathe a little bit more. I think that we need to talk about what it means and do we need it. And if we do need it, what does it look like? How does it serve us? How do we use it to create the world we long for? I don’t know.
TS: Megan, you’re such a direct truth teller and so truthful with your own emotional experience. And as we end our conversation, I’d love to know why that’s so important to you. How would you name like, why is this so important to me?
MD: It damages my chill if I lie. I think some of that is just the wiring that I came in with. I have always said what’s on my mind. And I have always advocated for others, since I was a wee, little one. So some of that is wiring, some of that is personality. Nothing makes me more ferocious than seeing people cause harm, than seeing people not be kind, than seeing people harm humans, animals, environment, gorgeous buildings, landscapes. I will come out swinging, and my weapon is my voice. And I am very, very good at what my brain does.
I can’t not say it. I think what’s happened over the years is that I’ve become more skillful in my delivery of the truth, in the directness of it. I would say that in my 20s, I was not super-skilled with it, I’m sure. I’m sure. But to me, it causes me stress and headaches and other things if I am not telling the truth. Whether personally or professionally or globally, I kind of need to for my own health. And the other thing is that life is short. We tiptoe around so many things that it is not efficient and it’s not effective and I hate it. And, I am not going to get in trouble, largely speaking, for telling the truth, for saying what other people wish they could say. To me, there’s a responsibility in there, right? I say things, and that helps to give other people permission or bravery or an example or role modeling so that they experiment with telling the truth for themselves.
This one of the things about being really visible and saying the things that people are thinking but not saying. The more we do that, the more permission we give to other people to use their voices and to tell the truth and to be brave about things. Not to be perfect at it, but to be awkward and do it anyway.
I will add, I mean, I am very awkward. I am a very awkward person when I say things, and the benefit of being direct and saying what I’m thinking, saying what I see, asking the questions that I have of things, the payoff for that is immense. So some of my habit, willingness, I don’t know, to say exactly what needs to be said, is that I’ve had that reinforced by better relationships, by half a million books sold, by people calling, DMing, commenting, messaging, leaving reviews, saying, “Thank you for saying that.” I have been far more rewarded for speaking the way that I speak than I have been scolded, yelled at, shamed for it. That’s relational biofeedback to me.
TS: Brave and truthful. I’ve been speaking with Megan Devine, grief expert, author of the book It’s OK That You’re Not OK, and a new grief companion journal. It’s called How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed. And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
