The Grief Carousel (Mind Change Monday)

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren,

and it is Mind Change Monday.

I'm excited and honored to be with you today, and I hope that you're ready for

a little self-brain surgery.

We had some incredible, incredible episodes last week. Last week was one of

my favorite podcast weeks ever.

On Friday, I recorded three interviews. You already heard, or I hope you heard, Dr.

Tabitha Barber, the gutsy gynecologist who played her on Self-Brain Surgery

Saturday. Saturday, but we also recorded Dr.

David Carrion, a Stanford-trained psychiatrist who has written one of the most

beautiful and important books I have ever read.

It's called The Opposite of Depression, and it's not coming out until April,

so I can't share the episode with you just yet, but trust me,

that episode is going to be a game changer for you if you've dealt with depression

or grief or you felt stuck or if you've just felt like you were so weary that

you didn't know what what to do.

Dr. David Carrion and I had an incredible conversation, and I'm certain that

he's going to be back on the show, hopefully more than once.

We've got a lot to talk about, and he's going to help you change your mind and

change your life. And that was an incredible talk. We also had Dr.

John Lennox, who is an Oxford mathematician. He's a world-famous Christian scientist and apologist.

I don't mean Christian scientist like the Christian scientist's religion.

I mean, he is a Christian who is also a scientist, and he is a world-renowned

on apologists for the Christian faith, and he's had widely publicized debates

with some of the media darling,

New York Times bestselling new atheists, so-called new atheists like Christopher

Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and has just basically been standing up for faith

forever and has written some incredible books.

And Dr. Lennox gave us his time. He's been on Jordan Peterson.

He's been on Eric Metaxas. He's been everybody that's anybody,

it seems like, has interviewed Dr. Lennox at some point.

And he took the time to be with us. So you get to hear Dr.

Lennox pretty soon. I'm going to hold that episode for probably a self-brain

surgery Saturday episode.

We talked about his book, Can Science Explain Everything?

But today on Mind Change Monday, I just want to give you a little bit of insight

and information about grief. I had a conversation with Jenny Allen the other

day on her show, and we found ourselves talking about grief, and it came up again.

I'm constantly shocked how everybody thinks that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's Five

Stages of Grief, everybody still thinks that model explains any type of human grief.

I'm constantly amazed at how widely that model has worked its way into pop psychology,

into the media, in our classrooms, and just even everyday conversation.

We think that denial, anger, bargaining, sadness or depression,

and acceptance are the ways that humans grieve.

I don't know how many more times I need to say it to make sure that you hear me.

Today, if you're going through something hard or you've been through something

hard and you found it hard to understand what you're going through and how to

process your grief, and especially if you, like Lisa and I did,

find yourselves noticing that your family all seems to be going through a different

process and at different times.

You all seem to be at different places in the process and you don't know how

to explain or even understand what you're going through.

I want to give you a different way to look at grief today, and I

want to just make sure that you understand that Elizabeth

Kubler-Ross's model was never intended to give you a tool to understand how

you grieve if you lost your husband to glioblastoma or if you lost your son

to a terrible stabbing or drowning or if your daughter died or your marriage

dissolved or your business bankrupted after 10 generations in your family and COVID wiped it out.

Now, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's work was never intended to give you a tool to understand

that type of grief, and it doesn't apply well.

We're going to talk about what Kubler-Ross's work actually did and what it's

for and where it works and where it doesn't work.

I'm going to give you one mental picture. I was flipping through some old notebooks

that I found the other day, and there was a piece of paper that I had stuck

in this notebook and forgotten completely about.

I had one sentence written on it, and that one sentence was an idea that I wanted to share.

I think I intended for it to be in my book, but I never got it out,

and I forgot to share it. And in my mind, it's a perfect image that will help you understand grief.

If somebody you love is going through it, or if you're going through it,

or if you and somebody you love are all going through it at the same time,

it's a great way to think about the process of grief and to give yourself some

grace in grief because it's a carousel and you never know when you're going

to get off of it. And I'm going to help you with that today.

I've talked about it in two books.

I've talked about it on innumerable podcasts.

And today I'm going to give it to you one more time. And I hope that it helps

you because it really was a game changer for me when I made this one particular

realization about the stages of grief and what they are and what they're not.

And before I tell you about that on Mind Change Monday, I just have one question for you, my friend.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind

works smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.

Are you ready to change your life? Well, this is the place. Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.

Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become

healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? this is your podcast this is your

place this is your time my friend let's get after it.

Music.

Let's get after it. Hey, Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross achieved international fame.

She published a book in 1969 called On Death and Dying.

Now, Dr. Kubler-Ross's work was specifically looking at what happens when an

individual finds out that they're dying, that they have a terminal illness.

She described a process of people that she worked with that had developed cancer

or had some other type of terminal diagnosis. And she studied them to try to

describe the process that they use or go through to handle the news that they're dying.

Now, Dr. Kubler-Ross was very specific and in public forums many times told

people that that model was not intended to describe what happens when your wife

gets hit by a bus in front of you, or your husband is gunned down in a drive-by shooting,

or your child dies tragically, or your spouse cheats on you and your marriage

falls apart and you weren't expecting that. Dr.

Kubler-Ross didn't intend and didn't research or study those types of deaths.

And furthermore, her work was somehow one of these psychological ideas that

gets picked up and becomes popular culture.

It's something that newscasters talk about and reporters talk about and psychology

101 professors talk about and high school teachers talk about.

And everybody somehow, at least in the United States and really around the world,

developed this idea that that's how humans grieve.

Now, in two of my books, and I've seen the interview, I said this,

I said, the grief one feels over losing a spouse, sibling, or child is a loose

mold filled with wet cement, runny and slow to set.

It is ill-defined and poorly explained and different for everyone encountering it.

And although you inevitably will pass through something that looks like denial,

anger, bargaining, depression,

and acceptance, as soon as you think you've moved from one to To the other,

you'll find yourself hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of a prior stage and wondering

whether you'll ever get out.

Dr. Kubler-Ross's famous five stages of grief were outlined to explain how people

cope with the news that they are dying.

They were not defined within the context of how people handle great loss in

their lives, although they are commonly used in that way.

God forbid you ever have to face such a time, but if you do,

do not look for sense or order in the process because none shall be found.

I wrote that in my book, I've Seen the End of You. In my new book,

Hope is the First Dose, I say it this way.

Warren's law of suffering is that we may suffer together, but we grieve alone.

Everybody's grief process is different. Okay, so I've laid the groundwork here.

I've tried to make the point, and I've talked about this on the Bevere's podcast.

I talked about it on Theology in the Raw. I talked about it with Jenny Allen.

I've talked about it on probably a hundred podcasts.

And I just want to make sure that you, my daily people, my friend who listens

to my podcast, I want to make sure that even if somehow you missed me talking

about this in many other places, that you hear me say it today.

Because one thing that happens when you're going through grief,

especially in the context of a family.

One thing that happens is that you start to feel some pressure,

or sometimes maybe you start to put some pressure on others,

but you start to feel some pressure that maybe you're not getting through it,

quote unquote, fast enough.

Maybe your spouse seems to be doing better than you're doing.

Maybe it's taking you longer or too long.

Maybe people at church are sort of starting to act like, you know,

geez, that thing didn't seem that bad to me. Maybe you should have moved on by now.

You know what I'm saying? If you have lost somebody or if you've been through

some major trauma or tragedy or other massive thing, I want you to hear from

me that you have permission for this process to be different for you than it is for other people.

Not just permission, and you don't need my permission, by the way.

You don't need my permission.

But the fact is, you will need to recognize that your grief is going to take

on a form of its own, and it might not look like everybody else's does.

Us. Okay. And that's okay.

So don't start thinking just because somebody wrote a book in 1969.

The year I was born, that somebody wrote a book that said there's five stages

of grief and people progress through them and ended up accepting it and moving on.

That just because somebody said that, and just because a bunch of people picked

that up and started using it as a tool, because it's easy to remember,

doesn't mean that that's how it's going to happen for you. Okay.

Now I I found this notebook and in the notebook, there's a piece of paper.

And on that piece of paper, I found in my own handwriting, something that I

had written and I completely forgot about. And here's what I said.

Grief is an emotional carousel. Sorrow, anger, happy memories.

The problem is we're all on different horses and that creates issues.

And I want you to think about that. You go to the fair, you go to the carnival,

and there's a carousel with all the pretty horses.

And in the old days, there used to be the brass ring that if you reached out

and you were able to grab the brass ring, you could win a prize, right?

And when you're on a carousel, there's crazy music. And sometimes it's sort of creepy music.

And then you're riding and the horses are going up and down and spinning around and around.

And if you're relaxed and in the moment, it may be kind of enjoyable.

You may be relaxed in it. And you may be reaching for the brass ring and trying to win the prize, right?

And that can be fun. But the truth is, if you're in grief, you may recognize...

That you and your spouse and your kids and your parents and the other people

in your life are all on the carousel together. Sure you are.

You're all grieving at the same time and you're suffering in the same house

with the same problem and you've all gone through the same TMT.

But guess what? You all have different backgrounds.

You all have different experiences. You all have different psychological makeups.

You all have different levels of relationship with the Lord and everybody's

going to be be suffering and grieving in a different way, even though you're doing it together.

So you're on the carousel and you're on a horse and you're next to your beloved

and they're on a horse, or maybe the person you lost isn't there and you're

next to the other people in your life, but you can't reach them.

And every time you feel like you may be a little bit higher,

like maybe you're feeling good, maybe the music is relaxing,

maybe you're starting to heal, you'll look around and everybody else will be down.

Or maybe you're at the lowest point, the scariest moment when the music is at

the weirdest and creepiest and you're not sure you can even stand to be on this

thing any longer, but you can't get off.

Everybody else seems like they're up and they're higher than you and they seem

to be maybe okay in that moment.

And then you start beating yourself up because if they're up,

you don't want them to feel down.

You don't want to say something or do something or remember something or be

the one to point out that it's the anniversary or the birthday or that it's

been six months or it's been a year or this is the first Valentine's Day since the thing happened.

You don't want to be the one to point it out. And so you're afraid all the time

that you might hurt somebody that's finally having a good day or you might be

the one to mess up and make somebody else come down to where you are.

So that carousel metaphor feels kind of solid to me.

And there were times when Lisa would have a smile on her face and I would think,

gosh, I'm really sad right now.

I don't want to make her feel bad. So I just won't say anything.

And she would do the same thing. We've talked about this a lot.

Like there were moments where she really wanted to talk about something,

but she didn't because she thought maybe finally I was getting a good night's

sleep or maybe it would hurt me in that moment.

And I know our kids all experienced similar things with us and with each other

and now Now with their spouses, you know, when we have these big events,

10 years or this birthday or that anniversary or this Christmas or whatever, after Mitch died,

we've all had those experiences because grief, my friend, is not a formula and

it's not a pattern and it's not a stage that you're going to progress through.

Now, can you get stuck? Absolutely. We've talked about that.

The subgenual anterior cingulate seems to get stuck in people with complex grief

or major depression. There are ways that it can become pathological.

And there are times when you need help. There might be times when you need a

therapist or a doctor or some medicine or a support group or to talk out loud

about what you're feeling.

There might be times when you get stuck and when it becomes unhealthy.

And if it's been 45 years since your cat died and you're still stuck and can't

get out of bed and can't take a shower because you're so depressed about your

cat, that's probably an abnormal grief response. response, okay?

Not to belittle pet deaths. That's a legitimate form of grief,

as we experienced in September when we lost Harvey and Lewis,

our incredible German short-haired pointers.

The coyotes. So there is a real grief process.

I'm not trying to belittle that. But my point is, if you had a thing that for

most people would be something from which you could recover that happened a time period ago,

after which most people would have made a more healthy response by now,

then maybe you can say, well, I probably need some help.

And especially if your grieving process is promoting you doing things that are

harmful to your body or to your

life and keeping you stuck, like you're numbing yourself with alcohol,

you're numbing yourself with drugs, you're numbing yourself with shopping or

sex or online gambling or something that is making you not have to feel it right

now, but you're having to pay a tomorrow tax.

You're violating one of the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery that you need

to love tomorrow more than you hate what you're feeling right now.

You're using a bad operation to treat a bad feeling and that never pays off.

Okay. So maybe look at your life and zoom out a little bit and examine the ways

in which you're grieving and ask yourself honest questions. Is God with me in this process?

Have I allowed him to try to heal me, to keep that Psalm 34,

18 promise that he will be close to me when I'm brokenhearted?

Have I allowed other people in the community?

Remember the treatment plan from Hope is the First Dose involves community,

involves allowing other people to come alongside you and help strengthen and

encouraging you. That's what the Bible says.

Cast your cares on him and let other people help you, okay?

Let other people help you. So what I am saying is.

There's not a five-stage model that you need to feel guilty about if you don't

seem to be managing it well or don't seem to be progressing through it like everybody else does.

It's not a five-step, easy-peasy process.

Don't expect anybody else to grieve like you do or on the same timetable that

you do because you're on a carousel.

And if you've ever been on a carousel you know that no

two horses are at the same point or at

the same height or at the same depth or hearing

the same doppler effect from that creepy music that they

play at the same time and maybe you keep reaching for that brass ring thinking

if you finally get it you'll get off this crazy carousel and you miss it again

and you find out that you're still in it and you wonder how long it's going

to take and you wonder when you're ever going to get off and you're afraid to

make somebody else experience it like you are, just remember you have permission.

In fact, demand it. Give yourself some grace and give yourself some space and

allow yourself the opportunity to heal.

And don't let anybody else make

you think that you're going too slowly or that they need to go faster.

And don't make anybody else feel that they're doing it wrong because grief is not a pattern.

It's not a stage. It's a process.

And it's a process that will happen. And Lord willing, He will come alongside

you if you allow Him to, and He'll be kind to you when you're brokenhearted.

He'll keep that promise. He did for me. He did for Lisa. He did for our family.

It took us changing the way we thought about it. It took us changing the way

we thought about our future and how we were so angry that our son died He was

supposed to bury us. We weren't supposed to bury him.

And having to understand that you can have an abundant life and a hard life

at the same time, that was a big decision for us to be willing to accept that duality.

And we've talked a lot on this show about quantum physics and quantum Zeno effect

and how when you change your position of observing a reality,

you can influence the outcome of that reality.

And I'm just asking you to shift your gaze just a little bit today.

I'm asking you to be kind to yourself and to those around you who may be grieving.

And understand that there's not a stage that you need to identify that you're in.

There's not a timetable. There's not an orderly path for this.

And also, there's nobody that's grieving with you.

Because you're suffering together, but you're grieving alone.

And that process, you don't have to be alone because the Lord is with you in it.

But that process is individual to you.

If you're stuck, you need help. Okay? If you're choosing numbing behaviors or

harmful things, you need help.

You need to change your mind about that. It's Mind Change Monday.

And I just wanted to make this point. If you know somebody who's stuck in grief,

if you know somebody who's suffering, If you know somebody who's in it or you

are yourself, share this podcast with them, okay?

Don't think that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages apply to the type of grief

that you're experiencing because they do not.

I don't think they actually apply to anybody's grief, but the model was never

intended for you after your massive thing.

But I'm happy to tell you today that there's good news.

And the good news is that once you change your mind and once you decide that

you can absorb that trauma and you can learn to respond to it in a healthier way,

that the trauma doesn't define you anymore, that the massive thing doesn't get

to be God in your eyes. It's not bigger than God's ability to heal you.

Your body and your mind are designed to heal.

And you have to be willing to say, okay, I'm ready to have the surgery that

I need to change my mind and change my life. And friend, you can do it.

You don't have to be stuck anymore in grief.

You just have to be willing to start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,

check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

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And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries

around the world. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your

life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.