Grief &Loss Healing from Life's Most Tragic Moments: Glen Holman, LCSW

hello everyone welcome to tonight's program tonight is going welcome to tonight's uh program let's get real with coach banacham tonight is our 53rd chair and um we're all thankful we're here again i want to thank everybody who uh is part of this platform and part of this program we have our weeklies and people are you know keep on calling me all week and they're posting on the what's up and they're emailing people not telling people about it and this is growing to a very uh large powerful platform and um every week to keep on hearing more and more amazing stories so i want to again thank everybody who comes on every week and people that email us and people that participate it's really we're doing it together we're doing some grassroots movements over here and we're really growing and i want to thank you personally well those who are watching this later on youtube please click on the like button and click on the subscribe button to coach menachem i want to first start off with our advertising sponsors to thank them the lakewood scoop here on lakewood i want to thank robbie and from kazakh for promoting us on all the kazakh platforms a special thank you to kyla kaufman and from jcn the jewish content network for always promoting us across all the jewish platforms again for all those people that are here for the first time every sunday night at 10 o'clock on this zoom id we have a share different topics different speakers rabbanim therapists so please let everybody know about that next sunday may 9th we're going to have an amazing program with actually the person who started the program the first year mordecai weinberger very good friend of miami who's a big therapist and we're going to be discussing dealing with difficult people family members personality disorders and how we could you know i'm sure we could all relate to that family member that person that we have to deal with in our life that's complicated um he's actually writing a book about it so it's going to be an amazing program it's pretty much relevant to everybody so please come and join let people know about it uh the coach for not control collaborating with okay clarity it's a greater health and wellness the jewish community around the globe okay clarity is the online platform for mental health in the jewish community they have a platform they find therapists coaches nutritionists engage in forms they stay inspired links will be sent out after the show let's again we have this host tonight and the honor of having uh such a special person come on uh and i have a tremendous respect for him we're gonna get into it soon glenn holman lcsw the therapist from fire rockaway thank you so much for agreeing to come on and give physic in some uh difficult times when we're gonna get him we have a lot to get into we're just gonna start off first with our host coach menachem opening words thank you welcome everyone to another sheer another show let's get rid of coach monachem and i want to thank all of you again for the feedback whatever the feedback is um helping us grow helping us um get to greater heights over here so tonight's topic is a little bit um something that the whole college role is is wants to hear a little bit but the truth is we we had we had plans to have glenn holman already a while this week really to discuss grief and loss on a personal level but unfortunately clyde israel is going through now grief and loss on a global level and many families on a personal level hashem should help an akama and a foolish lame for all those that need it but in a way it's it's still too fresh too new to come and sit down and talk when when when it's it's actually just happened and and people are really having a hard time and sometimes it's hard to hear these concepts right away it sometimes can be counterproductive to talk while you you can sometimes feel that you can relate because it's really something that you feel and uh like we discussed many times the talking is the logic it it takes time it takes it is a process i'm sure we'll hear about it tonight the process the griefing process and the sometimes there are no words simply no no words like we see when a hearing lost his two sons pasha vagida maharan this is the difference if he had thoughts he didn't have thoughts but it was nothing you can say and the truth is the griefing process everybody is different two people can see the same story go through the same thing and they experience different feelings it could be two family members same parents they have different feelings and the way they react and uh personally what i speaking to people now some people they don't want to hear anything that happens some people need to know exactly what happens some people start blaming making analyzing why maybe maybe this maybe that's talking about it and talking about it these are all forms of what a person does when you hear and experience these things now again there's no right and wrong the first thing is just to to be aware this is this is what happens this is what we do okay but eventually it there's a process that we'll hear more tonight so on the one hand we believe that hashem runs the world and the good things and the things the things that don't seem so good but on the other hand we can't deny our humanity and it's painful it's a real pain you can't just say i'm going i'm continuing i don't have any pain it's sometimes it gets suppressed but what we need to do is create this a space that we should know that sometimes we just don't we just don't know and the things that we just we love to make sense our human brain needs to make sense of what's going on until we see things that just don't make sense and then we understand that we us little people over here cannot understand what's going on so at hashem we should get the physic that we need the midshipmen tonight who should be able to listen and pick up just by getting together tonight call your soul gets together and to be much hazard ourselves this itself should be a big um and we should be housing yourself with in a moon and with hashem tonight we'll we'll hear a little bit from glenn holman i believe he's helping many many many people the experience from other people and his own experience in which she will be able to take out uh some physic um and before we start i want to be muhammad about which you can say a capital tillem for the holy m and for claudius yeah we're going to say 130 capital koflammed on a trade everybody will put on the screen and we can all say together this is for all the people that are still in the hospital and for the families this is by request of mr glenn holman and let's all try to say it together [Music] you know [Music] is we have a lot to say here tonight so uh i'll get started we'll get a little warmed up here tonight uh again opened up i just i'm just a little bit blown away and i have to share this with everybody tonight's share was pre-planned a long time ago um glenn holman was supposed to come on actually last week and uh by request i had the roshiva was available or charlemagne just last sunday and i really actually pushed him a little bit forced him to switch and uh it worked out last second and uh this topic in the fire was already all pre-planned uh this was not because of what happened in the tragedy so um as we all know shem runs the show but you can definitely see hashem runs the show and uh it's really it's it's impeccable timing that we're here and just everybody keep in mind we are going to discuss a little bit we're going to open up with iran but we're really focusing on personal loss um losses you know it's a big word and we're going to get into that with glenn and uh tonight's going to be a vulnerable program we're going to be we're going to be as let's get real as it can get and let's start off with that um tonight's share is being learned first of all very young age of 49 i was only 20 years old and uh it was a tremendous tremendous hard time for me personally and this is the hundreds of people here mention the thousand people that watch this it should biscuits foreign um tonight also also impeccable timing is my father-in-law's second yard site he was killed in a horrific car crash two years ago and my wife made a thing in his house put on the flyer please i'm going to read what she meant what she made for everybody could read it together with me but it's just interesting she started last year it's basically a shaytan slash exchange people that have shades i'll read it the way my wife wrote it my father oliver shalom was lifted two years ago today last year i launched this initiative as an aliyah for my fathers in the show many shaitals have already been proudly worn by the new owners i've been ashaytan not for over 20 years and over the time i've seen many women have shadows sitting around that they don't see themselves wearing anymore i arrange a system that enables those shades to be refurbished and worn by somebody in need once i receive the shade tools i fix them up and make them feel look brand new at a very low cost to the new owner this way women who can't afford a brand new shaytal walkway feeling confident and beautiful and the footnote is illness of my father was your side is monday night my father always said that he wanted to be a business partner with me through this project i'm finally making the dream come true so management will send out the the email with the flyer anybody who has a sheitel or you know knows anybody wherever you live um you could text my wife or call her 414-687-8462 and um one second and he's also his second daughter whose name is miriam zelikshaw miriam and glenn's family started an incredible organization called meirim which helps bereaving siblings deal with loss of you know of losing a sibling they have retreats weekend getaways and glen could talk about a little bit if anybody has any meister money or anything you could give can go to the the website mayhem is m-a-y-r-i-m that org i mean i wanted to play the video but i'm not gonna play it but it's an amazing organization and uh glenn's you know glenn is absolutely unbelievable again tonight we're talking about a very sensitive topic i'm going to try to discuss grief and loss experience more in the personal life again we're going to touch upon them around tragedy a little bit but we're trying to really focus on personal losses uh you know everybody has personal wills in life even without death we'll get to that also but obviously death you know sicknesses and other things i'm going to read glenn holman's bio first and then i'm going to read a bio that i wrote about him glenn holman is a licensed clinical worker who works with adults and couples he has a private practice in five towns glenn is the founder and executive director of meirim an organization that offers events and services for families who have experienced loss of a child the lens area of expertise includes grief crisis and trauma therapy my bio is glenn glenn holman i just heard this from so many people i you know i got calls actually today glenn holman and his wife are both amazing and incredible people i've heard this from multiple his colleagues and friends they call him just a simple guy he's not a rush of shiva he's not this dynamic guy who comes out and is going to blow everybody away just to call him a simple joe but they call him he's an admiral amongst admirals his life challenges not only does he stand up to them and his wife they grow from them and they do the ultimate with their challenges that hopefully one day could all do that is really help other people that and people in need it's a big success for me to really have them tonight i'm really honored glenn holman floor is yours thank you very much usher and menachem first i just wanted to commend you and tell you what an amazing thing that you're doing i think that the world is yearning there's a hunger for real talk people who can get real who could be real so i think that this is such an important platform and such an incredible thing that you're doing for claudius and i i i'm sure everyone shares with me that it should be a slush for your families for you and your families should have knockouts and simcha and health and all good things because it's really truly incredible what you're doing and i'm honored to have a small part for tonight and being a part of that so usher asked me to spend a few minutes sharing my personal story um we wrote a written an article recently in the spoken magazine but this is probably my first uh forum sharing this story in such a public way so you bear with me i i remember as a young boy growing up there was a popular question that my parents generation that people asked and they asked where were you when john f kennedy was shot and everyone seemed to know everyone around always knew exactly where they were when president kennedy was shot they would say i was in this park i was in this building i was at work everyone knew but it's something i think that people in my generation really didn't understand the magnitude we didn't understand why everyone had understood or everyone knew and remembered exactly where they were until until september 11th till 9 11 when now in our generation and people who are were born then if you ask them where were you when the planes hit the world trade center everyone knows everyone's aware of exactly where where they were in that moment and what i see is like this there are moments in time they're moments in our lives in everyone's lives where something will happen that's so transformative that's so significant to our entire lives that we will never forget where we were i will never forget what we're doing and those are positive moments like when you get engaged or might be when you get married it might be when you give birth to a baby i remember when my daughter nakama was born our first child and i looked at her and i held this newborn baby and i said i said i'm gonna protect you i'm gonna take care of you i'm going to make sure nothing bad happens to you and that's a moment that i'll never forget that's the moment that that lives with me and stays with me and there are other moments not so pleasant moments i remember another moment in my life about five years after that when a doctor told me that my daughter nakamura was very ill she was a terminally ill had a terminally ill disease and the same thing i remember looking at her and i said with my eyes now with my mouth i said i'm going to take care of you i'm going to protect you i want to make sure nothing happens to you and you fast forward six years later and my daughter had been sick for six years in a very difficult circumstance she was very ill and her care was very consuming all-consuming and she had been in a coma for around six weeks and and she one day they reduced her medication and she woke up and i hadn't seen her for about six weeks i mean i had seen her but i hadn't spoke with her in about six weeks and i remember she said i remember i looked at her because she finally had woke up for a few moments and i looked at it and i said you know i'm going to take care of you i'm going to protect you i want to make sure nothing happens to you and she nodded and she looked at me and she understood right man and about 24 hours later she passed away and that was my first real experience with the significant with death my first real experience with losing someone that i loved and that was that was incredibly painful and it was shocking i remember it was so shocking at the time that i even turned to a doctor and i knew well i was very involved in medical care and i i looked at her i said to the doctor she's not alive right like she's like really not alive and it took me a while it took me time to to really connect to that to understand that and we went through our journey we decided around some sometime in the next few months we decided that we would start an informal organization to help families to help families who who had a child loss because we saw that there was a need for it they were fun of course they were very involved we felt that for for an extended period of time afterwards and also for the siblings we felt it was a great need and we started holding a shabbaton and we held the shabbaton for since around 2005. and it was a family thing it was part of our family everyone our family was involved in this organization it was mostly regular uh mostly retreats we did some other small things but mostly it was the yearly retreats a group tool last year there were 400 people who came and the person who mostly was involved was my daughter mary daughter miriam was really at the forefront of this organization and she felt that it wasn't enough she felt that we need to do more and i had another moment i got a call that my daughter miriam was sick we weren't expecting it and she was sick and we knew that we knew sort of what we were up against and for a few years around three years we did everything in our power everything that we could to to help her and there's a lot of stories a lot of public stories about her life at the time and things that we accomplished which are online newspapers legal journals all different things we did to to help her and sometime in around it's around three years now she decided that she said we weren't doing enough and she wanted to really formalize the organization she went through a lot more she wanted to get much more involved she wanted to hold weekly and monthly events and meetings for mothers her fathers her siblings and we started the planning stages and shortly after that her the condition could decline significantly and she passed away and when she passed away she was 21 years old my daughter was 10 when she passed away miriam was was 21. and when she passed away it was very clear to us what we need to do we knew what she would have wanted there was no question so we we went and we we formalized organization called the merin mei rin to lift up from the word miriam named after mariam and we decided that we were going to [Music] immerse ourselves in helping other families in miriam's memory because even when she those three years when she was very very sick and people didn't know nobody knew i remember even when she passed away we got calls from people from they they were shocked someone got a call that we formalized the organization we called it mehrim after miriam and they thought we had there was a mistake and they called us up they said not miriam you mean but unfortunately the truth was that it was uh it was miriam had passed and we we spent a lot of the last year uh last actually three years but last year has been more difficult because of covert but the last few years really reaching out holding events doing what we could so that because we found that people and you'll find yourselves probably that when you go through it sarah you go through difficulty that having someone who understands that particulate sorrow is different than anything else if there's some kind of something bond there's some kind of bond there's something a connection that we get when we see somebody when we meet somebody it's like a almost instant connection when someone has that sorrow that's that's similar to ours so i've together with my family this has been a a primary focus of ours an important focus together with my practice and i hope tonight we'll use this as an opportunity to use our experiences and my professional experience and personal experience to help others obviously with what's happened recently in mayron it's uh it's a global everyone's grieving because nobody's not grieving the whole world is grieving oh clyde you suppose grieving that's something we could talk about so i hope i hope it's hashem will use this opportunity to get a better sense of the type of questions and we'll do what we can together bianca to try to to talk about what are some of the ways that we people grieve and how to handle grief so thank you usher for the opportunity to introduce myself thank you glenn wow it's just one one more thing i want to add it's material.com yeah hello m-a-y-r-i-m dot c-o-m it's mayroom.com so you'll see a little bit over there the mishpock article if you want to see more details about our life story miriam's story okay um let's let's let's start with this because we wanna we got a lot of emails about this and obviously this is the big topic right now and uh let's start with that i'm not even gonna do a poll tonight let's just get straight into it um one of the questions that came in i'll read this question but then we'll just globalize the question a teacher wrote me this question i have fire before the share um my 14 year old student lost her brother in the tragic event on thursday i don't know how to deal with my eighth grade class i don't know how i will face my morning student when she returns to school i feel broken for her for her family for all those who've lost the ones in the tragic event i don't know what we should do or should say let's just globalize that just in general you know we're here tonight i got a bunch of different questions you know why where what when and how just glenn this is your forte how to how do us as and a global we all feel a certain type of pain it's not it's the most i'm assuming most people are it's kind of personal they don't lose their sibling here but you know we all feel it how do we how do we go about that yeah okay so the first uh lifeline you know especially to have a farm and dr fox they have amazing people if you have specifically the person's question about how they should do the classroom i would say that it's outside the scope of what we're going to accomplish here so i would say reach out to kai lifeline they're unbelievable this is they do is unfortunately they do this uh enough and they have great expertise in it so i wanted to share a little bit obviously this topic you know we had talked about me coming on before before this tragedy happened and we you know we discussed we felt we couldn't ignore the topic i want to share a few a few points of that one is it's a very unique tragedy it's a first law is a totally different scale i mean 45 from people to pass away in one in one event it's like it's on i don't remember anything in recent history where such a thing has happened like in our days such a such a scale that that it's it's like overwhelming and the other aspect is this it wasn't like an external threat you know unfortunately we've had clients still have had experiences where through terrorist attacks or other things where there's an external threat so this is also unique the fact that it was just a tragic accident the other aspect that's really really interesting uh is that this event happened at a time when the work from the digital perspective the world is connected the social media exposure i say social media i mean all kinds of technology could be whatsapp could be text text messages even phone calls our ability to get information across the other side of the world is is unprecedented it's never been what you have today has never happened in the history of the world where you could find where something can happen on the other side of the world and to degree that that information both in pictures and information could be disseminated in such a rapid and such rapid fire and the extent that we're going to get overwhelmed by it is going to be somewhat commensurate or can be commensurate with how much exposure we have to that event so the fourth thing that makes this unique this tragedy unique is that it's coming at a time when we've just experienced a year of cohort the whole year of covet i mean you know everybody's gone through i remember in the beginning kovit actually i was ill myself right to being a covet and it was a daily roll call you're hearing about people passing away it was it was so tragic and terrible and here we are it's a year later and things are starting to turn around we're starting to feel hopeful well some of the restrictions are starting to be lifted there's a lot at the end of the tunnel people are getting vaccinated there's all these experiences all these things going on in our lives we're starting to feel like hey things a things are going to be different now and then this happens yeah i watched i watched you know the videos and and and saw you know what happened right before and it's just it's heartbreaking to see that the khloe show was sitting together standing together however it was all together singing anima like right before it happened it's just it's it's something that it's so overwhelming it's hard to really put your hands around and grief or loss tragedy so it's it's a reminder that we can't control the world it's a reminder that our our level of control is very significant and our we have illusion of control and that's something that is pervasive and grief and especially with death or other types of loss also they can help us realize that we're fragile we're vulnerable and it's natural for people to start to blame right what you find very commonly is the following you find that people will try to blame others that happens a lot they'll try to blame it on the this authority or the police or the government or somebody or in jews or minham and halakha try anything in the world to blame it or they'll blame it on some lack of of conformity to or adherence so it's very very popular that people try to come try to blame someone or something and that largely is it comes to an emotional place it comes from our fear or recognition of the lack of control that we have so that's one really common thing that's what we're hearing someone's made a joke they said i never knew so many people in my life were were experts in traffic control or large crowd control because everyone's that's all my own talks about but really it's just there's just grief it really is just sad so one of the things we could that might be helpful is just to acknowledge that we we do have a lack of control in the world and maybe if we focus on thinking about what i could do right that's helpful because this happened how can i improve myself as a person how can i find meaning in the accident this tragedy how can i find meaning for myself and for my family for my school for my community finding meaning could be a positive looking for her to blame it's a unfulfilling a perpetually unfulfilling process because it never really answers the question never really addresses the truth this is that we don't have control so trying to find control in a place where we don't have control this leads to a very unfortunate question i just want to mention a few other points then we you know there's so much to cover i don't want to dominate the conversation around this one piece but this the next aspect i want to mention is universal to all the grief we'll talk about tonight unless everyone grieves differently there's no one right way to grieve and even though many of us didn't have a direct connection to that it's kind of built into jewish dna to care about other jews when we hear one person pass away a neighbor someone community someone not in the community some passes away we feel it so something like this with 45 jews in one day young children sometimes young kids all everything in between innocent people it's natural that we're going to feel it so we have to acknowledge that's okay i'm grieving because this is something that affects clients affects clydesdale affects me and i and i agree differently to everybody else every person just like every face is different every thought process is different every person grieves differently the last aspect i wanted was also universal which is trauma the way i described trauma i heard it from somewhere where i don't remember where which is that trauma is 10 gallons of emotion like a 10 gallons of water in a 3 gallon bucket we've got more water than capacity to hold so i imagine and a lot of the work that i do is we try one of the things that you can do and this is why i go back to social media exposure is that you don't have to we don't have to we don't have to relate to this as someone who's actually experienced this loss we don't this is an addictive feeling that we have to watch every image watch every video go to every levia and we don't now it's great if a person finds that comforting well i'm all you know of course there's nothing against it but for many people it's just too much so i i imagine and this is why i do a lot with my clients imagine a ceo who has the head of a very large corporation and someone comes in with a problem with hr then someone else comes into the prominent operations finance team comes in product you know warehouse shipping everyone and people are coming as a ceo and he says wait a second i can't work like this i can't function i can't address everything at once he says listen it's a gorgeous waiting out room outside every you seven sit outside you two can say the line in front and he addresses the problem one at a time and that's one of the things with grief and with trauma is that we have to find ways to kind of manage the influx of of grief of trauma of emotion and try to deal with it you know one part at a time and that's something we'll talk about more so i think if we could kind of recognize that it is overwhelming and try to regulate it to some degree that's those are some helpful aspects for for toronto okay there's a question that came in i know there are five stages of grief and i've been reading about it since i lost my mother for some reason i can't get myself out of the depression stage i can't seem to move forward in life do i do i wait till it happens naturally so i think maybe glenn if you can uh not everybody is aware of the five stages of grief so maybe you can start with that okay so so there are something seven but the standard is this is five stages of grief right and and i i wanna just say something before i get to stages which is before we get the stages and and david kessler is a great book uh i don't get a commission for the book i'll tell you it's a great book called um the the sixth the sixth stage meaning finding meaning very very interesting book i started reading it i can't say i read all the way through it but it's kind of whatever i read i found very fascinating and also very in line with the way that i approach it and one of the things that david kessler has said which also i've shared was this idea that people feel that that there's this very rigid five-step course like denial anger bargaining depression and acceptance that there's this five stages that are very rigid and and everyone's okay so i went through stage one okay now i'm in stage two then i go to stage three and what he says and what i've also shared with many people is that one it's not linear you could go in any direction person could skip okay they could go to one and then go to go from one to two back to one back they'll go skip over go to three they could start with three go back to two so really the idea of the stages and i think this was the intention of the stages was was to help people understand where they're coming from it was saying oh that because you can call it phases i think they could be called um you know different types of maybe expressions or feelings that people have it's not a rigid linear process and i think that that's really really important because some people say well i don't understand i went through the first two stages and so i thought i'd be at the third stage but now i'm back at the first or i skipped over to the fifth or i skipped everything i went to the fifth and now i'm at the first so i think to a large degree the stages can be very much misunderstood what you kind of see is if you look at the stages is a a range and the range goes for a lot of times from places a place of this is shock the system denial like they can't believe it right kind of like i described earlier with my daughter and okay passed away like this is just too much i can't i can't relate to this he says wow you know i i can't believe it just happened to me it's just it's a shock and a lot of times it's a shock even when people knew about it like let's say someone was sick for a long time even under those circumstances it still could be a shock to the system it's not it's it's so ironic it's those natural things there's nothing more natural than life and birth but they're both on some level of shock and certainly death is a shock to people it's just it's otherworldly it's not something that we can relate to this idea that you're here and you're gone so because of that it becomes very difficult for people to to to relate to so what i want to share about depression about that piece is a very strong feeling among people that we need to pathologize we need to like make them like something's wrong with them which is i'm depressed so well it's understandable that you're sad you lost your mother so losing a parent is very is a very difficult thing it's a very sad thing so the idea that you're depressed because you lost your mother is something i think that's very normal and so that's that's an understandable reaction the question becomes when does it become a scenario where you need to get external help so if a person there's no timeline to grief we talked about i've talked about that many times there's no timeline if a person feels like the they're not able to process the grief or the grief is interfering with their their personal relationships or their ability to work or their ability to function or they feel like they're overwhelmed all the time so that that's a good sign that to consider getting external help getting professional help because it says that you've got 10 gallons of water in a 3 gallon bucket so we either have to make the bucket bigger or we have to uh make you know reduce the amount of water so it's really important that i think one we don't pathologize and two i think that people um you know they this is a process grief is hard it's painful it's extremely extremely painful and hard and i think that people as they go through it if they can recognize yeah that's a normal reaction then then i think it could help it be a little more manageable and when it becomes not manageable when they can't find their coping skills they they reach out to friends it's not working they reach out to this person's network when they realize at a certain point that it's not helpful that their these tools they have are not helpful and the impact on their functioning is is so much more significant well then i think that that's a good sign okay glenn let's get into some more questions a lot of questions here people don't want to ask live again every night you know you're here turn on your camera you have glenn holman he's he's the best of the best of this and there's nothing you know we could be all open this is uh this is this is real life it's not uh you know nothing to be ashamed of this is what we live with and uh if you have something please feel free to ask a lot of people are texting so let's let's go and let's let's really break it down we're gonna get deep over here after losing a child three years ago i'm having a very hard time just going on in my life is there really anything that can give me hope i'm not sure what kind of hope there is i usually don't like to hear all the stuff that people tell me glenn okay so the first thing is like this i think that often the loss especially the loss of a child which i have a lot of experience with my personal experience and professional experience and through my work with my room um it's it's it's very very difficult i mean what's worse than that you know it's a very very painful process i think as we there's this idea that time heals and we look for that and everybody wants to know this hope so i i think i think the idea is that we find we find that people who [Music] as you go through this process they get stronger i mean we see that people as you surround yourselves as you find tools maybe it's like what we talked about where people are connecting to other people who have had a similar laws or people are working with others working with a therapist or maybe they're just able to find some meaning a different way starting an organization right like the shackles or doing something that you could find meaning in i think that as people find meaning and people look to to carry the laws the carrier the grief so there's hope in that people do get better people do move on if you're getting stuck in a way where you feel so hopeless so that you know that's time to to look at your coping skills look what you have available to you but you know it's when when you first suffer a loss it's hard it's hard to see the light end of the tunnel it's hard to see hope it's hard to feel connected it's hard to see that that things will get better and i think that every one of us we wanted we were sort of like sort of built into us as jews that we wanted we want to we want to move forward we want to believe we want things to get better and there's nothing wrong with with with that desire that's a good thing that's a good motivator and at the same time sometimes it's hard it's okay to recognize that this is a hard process and i think when when we allow ourselves both things the desire for hope the desire for things to get better and we also let us have our own feelings we allow ourselves to have our feelings we allow ourselves to feel how we feel and grieve how we grieve and i think when you allow yourself to have both things it makes it a lot easier it makes it possible to move forward and to find hope okay glenn somebody uh jumped over here texted the question i'm going to read it and i'm going to i'm going to read two questions with it because we're going to go a little bit off the topic you know loss is not only death it's a lot of losses somebody texted can you speak about losing a relationship a divorce broken engagement dating and we got another question over here somebody wrote they used to have all the money family they used to be on top of the world they recently also got divorced they lost their money and their families in shambles they say i feel the same loss as if someone i loved died my life died how do i continue with my life yeah that's hard um i think when you talk about death there's always multiple losses it's never just the loss of a person there's always something there's always always some other laws that's there it might be the loss example someone loses a parent might be that parent was the greatest cheerleader in the world that was the person who motivated you that was the person who encouraged you that's the person who was always supported you and it's not enough just to look at the loss of of the actual person but also part of what holds people back is not looking at the loss of of what the relationship meant and that's true with everything that's true with any type of loss divorce is a terrible loss losing a person's finances is a terrible loss these are all incredibly difficult losses so we have to look at i think you have to look at what did that mean for you what did it mean to lose money what did it mean to lose your spouse even if it was to divorce supposed to death what did it mean to lose moving lose your house you know even when you move that's a loss imagine you tell your kids you're moving that's tough it's benign it might be somebody that's there's something happy about it but it's also a loss loss of a job and all these losses are are just shocks to the system they can be traumatic and i think the one thing to look at in every loss is what did this loss mean to me maybe it meant loss of respect maybe a loss of stature maybe loss of feeling like someone cared about me even if it wasn't so all the time so looking at every type of looking at loss in terms of what it meant to you i think is also a significant aspect it's not just the actual loss itself the sad thing is that when somebody and we talk about this a lot other losses like death is very sort of has a prescription about how things should go there's a prescription around shiva and then shlosham and and so on but when it comes to loss like a divorce where's the support there's no prescription for the support when you lose a job there's no prescription of that support so it could really be challenging in the fact that you don't really have the same support system and that's that can make it a lot harder you know shiv is hard solution's hard first year of available heart but there is a support system people recognize it people are aware people acknowledge it hopefully hopefully in a good way but if you if you if there's other type of losses if you don't have the right support system it could be really hard mental health issues when people have some in their family who has a mental health issue they're all alone very isolating so i think when you experience these other losses one it's important for you for the person themselves to acknowledge they suffered a loss to allow themselves to feel the laws allow them some permission to feel the laws it's to find the right support system the people around them what they can reach out to and say this is what's going on find the right maybe it's right friends maybe it's uh some of the family maybe it's a therapist maybe it's other tools but to give yourself permission that because they're real losses also and and i think that it's something that unfortunately is not recognized as such people when you get divorced they'll say mazel azov or they say okay bet you're better off but but even in the worst relationship and that's true of of death also even people who lose parents you know i i it could be someone loses as our parents who were estranged from for many years is still a loss because every loss represents well not every loss loss could be could be more than just what we typically think about we always think of loss in terms of i lost what i had how about i lost the possibility of what i had that it was never going to turn to anything of that was never going to turn into anything else like in the case an example i said an estranged parent i lost the possibility that this prayer that my parents was ever going to validate me or recognize me or be proud of me so i think that that that's also a big thing there's a story about someone who lost uh this started about somebody who was um he's a very wealthy guy he's like in his i think his 70s at the time very wealthy he checked all the boxes all the things he talked about earlier this person he had money and he had a perfect family wild life and a wife and kids who were a students and he had success in every area there's no area that didn't have successful and his mother who was you know late into her 90s she was ill at the end of her life and she told him i'm proud of you and he said that that when she said i'm proud of you like it outweighed everything it was more important than anything that happened because the loss always represents something else so in his case he was lucky right at the end of his life at least he got that validation he was looking for her so when he look when when his parent passed away he was able to say well i lost i lost my mom saying i'm um how great i am how proud she is i mean would it be true if she had passed away without saying it he had lost the opportunity for harvard to say so when you have a divorce the loss of of this ever turning into what a dream no one sits under the hoop and thinks maybe this won't work out maybe this will be a disaster everyone thinks under the cupboard you look at your spouse you think this is gonna last forever it's amazing and when it doesn't turn into that that's a loss also it's a loss that all that potential all that what i thought was gonna be will never be not with this person anyway and that's a painful loss okay um the next question here is my sister lost her husband recently and i want to reach out and help her how soon is the appropriate time to do so and how to go about it okay so okay there's two there's a couple of different components here one is our desire to see someone else who's suffering and who's a loss and wanting to impose on them to go about things in a certain way that we want to do and that's tough because our level of control is is somewhat limited our ability to say i want this person to get remarried i want this person to move on and they may or may not be on this on the same page as that so i think one of the things that that is very painful for people and i could say that i see this a lot with family members say a scenario where someone has a child i you know i knew somebody who lost a one one day old baby and there was so much pressure on this person to move on it was incredible pressure for this individual to get on with their lives get past it enough already stop staying in the past it was a one day old baby how much could you how much connected how connected could you have felt and i think that's it's really difficult when other people are pushing you to do something when you're not ready in a certain way it's really it's one of the most painful things in the world is to not let a person have their feelings to deny a person permission to have their feelings and by converse perhaps the greatest pain is someone denying you having your feelings and the greatest gift is is giving them permission to have their feelings so trying to get somebody to do to move on pressuring them to move on and getting them to do what you want them to do when they're not ready is um it's a champ it's a challenge and it may not be appropriate and it could probably in some many cases it can cause a lot of pain and a lot of harm so i think that's that's one piece of this of this question and the other question is somebody says i have this experience i've suffered this loss and i want to move on but i don't know how that's a totally different question about how do i move on from from grief how do i move on from laws so does that answer the question or do you want me to maybe you could help um the person the sister that lost the husband when she does get that phone call how can she tell her sister thank you well wait give her the word the words to what i'm not i'm not sure i can get the question her sister wants to help her and it's pressure for her so i think the the the how does the sister tell so is the sister who who's not the who didn't have to suffer the loss i think what they what she can do is just um accept that where her sister's at and let her be where she's at and even though it's difficult it's a challenge to to see somebody going a direction where you feel like they should go in a different direction that's a challenge so i think the degree that she could accept that without saying anything i think what you could say is um i i get you know i respect your process i and and vice versa you know when a person's in a situation where they don't want they don't want that external pressure it's let me have my process okay go on let's go to the live question now okay let's let's take some live anybody wants that slide let me know now because we're we're putting uh they know an order okay you're on hi good evening thank you so much for coming on tonight um my question was about a subject that you touched upon before which is loss of a dream um i don't think people recognize what that could actually mean to a person whether it's the loss of a potential relationship it's the loss of a certain career path the loss of let's say not being being told that a person cannot have kids or whatever it may be but how can we be more empathetic when someone has a loss that is maybe less tangible and more spiritual like they they always thought their life would go a certain way and it's not turning out that way yeah so i i think the question is how do i support somebody who's who's who an experience let's say experience a spiritual experience for a spiritual limitation have that how that affects you right and how do i sort of relate to that person is that it yeah yeah okay so my approach to that is i um in my in my practice sometimes people come to me and they will experience some sort of loss i'm trying to be very careful because i don't want to offend anybody they'll experience a loss that um other people won't relate to okay let's say for example let's take an example that a single girl is dating a boy and he is she perceives him as the best thing that's ever happened in the world she is by far the most incredible person he is by far the most incredible person she's ever met and they're gonna have this wonderful marriage and they get engaged and and he breaks it off and this girl is totally distraught her life's over she's never gonna be it's never gonna be what she wanted to be and everyone's telling her don't worry about it that's the natural one the natural feeling is don't worry about it you're gonna find something else you dodge that bullet you're so lucky you're lucky this guy wasn't worthy of you you're better than him so everyone sort of a natural inclination is to say that and it might be it might be true in the objective world if there is one that she'll find someone else and she'll be happier and she was she's lucky that she didn't marry somebody who wasn't interested in her it's largely unhelpful it's invalidating she's going to feel totally validated and all the efforts that people try to [Music] to make to help her fall short one of the reasons to fall short is that it's an emotional issue not not a problem but it's an emotional issue and we're trying to find a logical solution to an emotional problem so that it doesn't really work great you need to if you want to have if you have an emotional problem you need an emotional solution so i think when people feel validated there's something about that that creates a connection when people feel that what they're feeling it goes back to what i said earlier that giving them permission to feel it's okay that you see that the way you see it is is hurtful to you and and you're in pain and to the degree that you can allow them to have their feelings it kind of helps them to feel connected and they're able to move on and all the efforts to continue to push them to see it your way that they're wrong right you hear it in the words you have no reason to be to be up this upset because you're gonna find someone else you're the reason to feel this way because he was the wrong guy for you and and you hear it and if you're hearing your voice when you're saying to someone that you're really telling them that they're feeling is wrong you're gonna you're gonna experience a lot of resistance and i think that's a degree that you can feel that the person feels that yeah you understand them and we don't always we don't always see things the same way and we don't always understand them so that's our job is to get curious like if our goal is to help them give them permission and if in order for me able to do that i need to ask questions ask questions well what's so hard you know well so you know i i see it's so hard for you help me understand what's what's so hard and that's okay although i think if we just allow people to have have their feelings one i think it's the greatest gift you can give to a person at an emotional level and two it's the thing that almost ironically in that case when you actually allow them to experience it the way they experience it it kind of helps them to move on in a way that may never happen if you keep telling them you're wrong so in a certain way that's that's empathy that's that's true empathy and i think that it um it gives people a lot of strength to move on and to um you know to get to that next step and it may not they make it may stay stuck in it however that's that's true empathy that's we're looking to give right can i ask one more um if you can explain one more concept they know the concept of like the bell curve that in order to um overcome an emotion you actually have to go through it and feel it um i i i'm not going to address it now okay no problem yeah that's okay don't mind but you could you could reach out to me afterwards i'm not sure for this forum it's uh particularly uh you know valuable but you know welcome to each after me afterwards and i'll uh go through it let's jump into the next topic over here it's a little bit different twist people want to you know they go through hard things and sometimes they try to go back into life questions very interesting since i lost my child my friends and neighbors seem to stay away from me since they are not comfortable around me when they are talking about their kids or family vacations i come near them and they slowly undercover conversation saying oh so nice to see you i gotta go or squeeze my arm it's making me feel like why am i losing everything how do i show people i want to be treated just like a regular person yeah yeah well that's that's really painful because it was suffered a loss often a you know traumatic or complex love and and now like the way you described it now i've lost everything i don't have the support i'm friends i remember uh after our first loss there was a person who used to cross the street when they'd see us and and that was hurtful and i i think it goes back to the idea that people many people aren't comfortable with grief they're uncomfortable with death they're uncomfortable with loss so for them it's easier for them when they when they see us across the street it's like i don't have to deal with that possibility that reality like that isn't there's a reality that that challenges their own perspective their own sense of reality their life that i guess either doesn't have lost or doesn't have the type of loss that you have it's much easier for them to kind of just ignore it so one of the things i think that's really um second i think monopoly is he frozen yep let's give him a minute let's give him a minute to get back up glad you're frozen if you go back in or out or um you answer the question i'm not sure you can do that hold on sit around the table discuss it with them these questions right these questions are tough questions about the process let the process happen oh my let's go back on yeah now i read you know let's play the video you know something let's play the mirror he's out in the video take a deep breath okay i'm gonna play after the video from the earring you're okay let's take a pull while he gets back on let's take a pull okay oh he's on he's on so anyway what is the let's ask everybody the question over here and let's let's do this while he gets back on what what's the way of you're dealing with the tragic news from iran it's four options either i can't stop sitting in the pain b i cry for a while and then go on see i keep myself busy and try not to think about it or d i shut down and i can't continue when you think about which which one is you second question in your personal life have you had a major tragedy or a loss it doesn't want to be specifically death it could be obviously other things we spoke about but um so please answer both of those polls while glenn is getting reset up i just had a loss i lost glenn i am back can you hear me yeah we're just doing a poll now it's very interesting paul he said what was the way that what of what way of were you dealing with the tragic news from around either i can't stop sitting in the pain they're just 24 7 thinking about it i cry for a while and go on okay let's let's end it and let's share the answers okay so again 22 percent of people said i can't stop sitting in the page 49 of people said i cried for a while then go on which was most people 26 percent of people said i keep myself busy and trying not to think about it and three percent of people said i shut down and i can't continue second question was in your personal life have you had a major loss or tragedy like i said before it wasn't only specifically death but a major loss glenn 63 of people over here on tonight's chair feel they had a major loss and tragedy in their lives so i guess i guess we definitely hit the right crowd wow that is uh that is um uh wow yeah i mean it's it's there's so much loss there's so much pain out there there's so much struggle it's it's overwhelming it's overwhelming and every one of us is known let's go back to the question so the bottom line is the person has the neighbor and you know you know i have to be honest i know this in other things in life my own personal stuff and people when they go through a hard time in life people go through a traumatic thing you know i'm sure everybody means well and everybody wants to be there for them but for the person going through it it just seems like people run away from them they try to avoid it so let's let's go back to that yeah yeah oh sorry for the technical not sure what happened so one of the things another loss yeah so one is the idea that people you know as i was saying one of the one of the things that's hard is when people you know they run away from you because they don't want to they don't want your reality challenges their reality which is that the world is uh more fragile than we think it's more vulnerable than we think the other aspect i think which i referenced was a lot of times i said especially with kids they want to be treated normal and the irony is that that people run away they're very it's and it's natural we're not sure when somebody especially a complex loss or it could be something when someone gets it could be divorced it could be death it could be a child loss it could be a spouse's loss it could be that he's lost all his money it could be any number of things so p we don't know how to react to it we're not sure how to treat them so what we end up doing is more often than we wish we would is that we tend to like run away we avoid and in reality the two things that people wanted to happen is one they want to feel like they're normal and the other thing is that people who suffer a loss like grief more often than not appreciate almost like a gift when someone comes over to them and says i remember your child i remember your husband wow i remember your dad and when you suffered a loss it's not you forget about it it's not like you don't remember it so when we when other other people avoid you it's they're not sparing you from anything they're not sparing you from like oh i've forgotten about this loss so now that you brought it up you hurt me it's the opposite people perceive when someone comes over to them as a gift and that's a really a tremendous gift that you can give to someone who suffered a loss so i think that that it's very normal to want to be treated normal i i spoke to someone recently and they were suffering so badly because everybody in their family was kind of ignoring them they didn't include them they said we can't include you in what's going on almost as if they said we can't include what's going on because you're different we have to there's someone who lost a spouse and they said well we weren't invited to the other things that everyone else was invited to so it was really really hurtful to them so i think treat them normal too if you have a story people who have suffered a loss greatly appreciate um when when others are you know bring up the topic or share memory and running away uh can cause a lot of a lot of pain okay we're getting a lot of versions of this question i think it's a very standard question i think we should really get on that topic people texting me let's let's let's go with this question but i lost my mother 10 years ago i get these strong emotional feelings and sometimes even burst out in tears is it normal i see that some people get over losing parents much quicker than i yeah what's what's what's the the textbook time that you cry in the textbook time that you go you you move on like is it 36 hours how does it work yeah yeah so you know this is uh look at this like i shared earlier there's a greater amount of pressure to move on i think a lot of times people the desire to move on is dictated by other people's need for you to move on like it again it challenges their reality as long as you're stuck in this grief they have to remember and be aware of the fact that the world is vulnerable so therefore they're just desperate for you to move on because they don't know how to deal with the grief they don't know how to deal with your loss so so there's a great pressure sometimes for for you to to move on so there's no timeline to grief it's actually very painful i think that people feel so much pressure people who have lost losses that they feel great pressure there's no timeline i think it's more about looking at the specific uh you know lack of function in your life or how it's affecting your ability to function is more you know that's when it might be time to say well i need extra help but i don't think that there's a specific timeline that anybody should be held to or it says well you know other people they grieve this way and you grieve differently some people don't get over grief very quickly seemingly and then it hits them later on and some people grab sort of having intense tense episodes of episodes or tense um feeling of grief in the beginning and then and then it dissipates and then it comes back so just like there's no specific timeline or specific stages that you have to follow these rigid stages that you have to follow there's no rigid timeline the person has to follow it's it's very individualistic except when you when you're having struggling to function it's over at some point you might consider to get additional help okay let's go to a live question one second hi you're on i am um i'm muted okay great hi thank you so much i wanted to talk about a topic that's actually a little bit not spoken about much more miscarriages and stillborns um when i had i had a miscarriage this year and i actually got to meet a lot like i got in touch with a group of other women that had also gone through miscarriages many much worse than my own um many actually that had stillborns and the grief and the suffering and the loss is like like i felt so lucky that i was not feeling it as much as they were um but so much of the discussion that they had was that it's so unspoken about it's so hidden nobody knows many people don't know when the person has either the miscarriage they don't know that they were expecting and sometimes people are at the end let's say towards the end of their pregnancy and they they lose everyone does know and people just don't know how to approach them they're in so much pain and there's so much loss but the response that people give them is like come on it's normal to have a miscarriage or everyone in four or everybody has their piece of advice of what it is and it's not it's like it's not a real child and to all of the women that that had these these dreams on these the the baby that that they never got to know it is a real child so i'm not sure how much it's if it's so much a question or just like if you could address um either the women themselves that are grieving from the loss of the the unborn child or the everyone else how they can and should react and help and help them understand that it is a real loss to these people as well yeah thank you for that that question and i'm sorry for your loss and it's not uh it's a great organization kind of i am i just wanted to say that that deals with that uh i think you know i've i've um you know have had clients who have experienced that and i could tell you that the pain is is unbearable from to go through that and this is what i was sort of those in line with what i said earlier i mean you expressed it so beautifully this is a real real loss and and the women who go through it it's so painful and so hard and and that the idea that someone who has gone through a pregnancy whether it's a partial pregnancy or a full pregnancy and and and lost and had this pregnancy loss that is so painful and and it adds back to that point of giving people permission to to to feel how saying move on saying it didn't happen it's it's so painful it's it's it's it's it's it's something that you express it so beautifully i wish people would understand that we don't get to decide for other people how deep that pain is some people have a pregnancy loss and it's not as painful for them some of them are pregnant celeste and it's tremendously painful so the idea that a third party could decide for for this this mother who lost her her pregnancy it's it's it's it's all it's like it breaks it breaks my heart i mean it's just so heartbreaking that they should they should experience that i wish people and i hope people hear the message that you just shared i hope just this group even could understand that a loss of any sort it's it's the individual's decision about how painful it is so to speak or how much it means to them i'll say and not anyone else's decision right i mean the person could choose to have their pain or not i didn't necessarily mean that but i just meant that it's not someone else's choice to tell them this you shouldn't have this pain or you should have this pain i think that's really really unfair and and it just it just increases their pain so you said it beautifully and i hope people will take your message and and keep it into practice hey glenn let's let's go further with so many more questions and a lot of live questions i want to put a little speed on it if that's okay my father died seven years ago my mother since has always been depressed and not getting out of bed she basically fell into a state of being lost and completely uncapable of anything while my father was alive she was a very capable person i've been doing all her stuff such as taking care of everything and shopping for et cetera but how could i help her move on and maybe even get remarried she's only 57 years old yeah so i think you know i'll go quickly for that question because i think we kind of addressed it you know i think we sort of addressed that question it's it's difficult as children to see our parents or to see as parents to see our children not doing or going in the path that we want them to go they're not proceeding in life they're not moving on they're not being they're not conducting their lives the way they want them to that's hard especially for people we love we want them to do what we think is best and it's the challenge there is probably more for those kids to come to acceptance about where their mom is i also think that these people who are describing or asking the question they're looking at their mother and they're just saying they're deciding what the relationship meant to them and they don't they don't know what it was they don't know how their mom looked at their dad they don't know what the loss of that relationship meant like i shared earlier there's meaning in that loss and this dual meaning it's not just for multiple meanings it's not just the loss of her husband it's what that relationship meant to her maybe he was behind the scenes he was her the wind behind her wings so i think the challenge there is more about supporting her i think to the degree that they could support her and let her have her feelings and talk about the dad and talk about the loss that probably have a better chance of helping her to process the pain of what she's going through versus trying to change her i want to ask another question interesting it's coming from a widower i lost my wife a few years ago and i'm still just processing it i'm getting comments from my kids and friends going to therapy get to get remarried move on already i'm making it worse i'm just sitting in the depression they're just not understanding me how do i explain them just leave me alone let me grieve yeah so you know he's this is the same question he's on the other side of this question he's looking for people to understand him people don't understand how how much pain he is and much like we described it's go you know this thing's full of you started to see these patterns that a person who's experiencing this level of pain this level of loss and the world is telling them to grieve you see how much you see from the question how much pain they're in they see how hard it is for them and to the degree that the pain the people around them would support him and try to let him have his pain to the degree that they're capable of that i think you'll find that there'll be more people who who are able to to move on from that than trying to it's almost like counterproductive the more they're pushing him the more they're pushing him to to take a different step to to move in different direction the more depressed he's getting the more frustrated he's getting the more isolated the more alone he's he's getting and the more that happens it's probably the less it's probably the less chance that he's going to go and do uh take a different step they're just pushing him further into isolation and that's super painful okay um let's put on a live question you're on really yep you're on hi okay okay yes thanks you may have mentioned this already i'm sorry for any repetition i came in late i stepped back from work but i was wondering like um you know with the depression often there's like an accompanying anger i i don't know if you discussed this and i find various at least in my own experiences there were several types of anger there might have been a like you lose a loved one and you had a lot of unresolved issues um i you know i know unfortunately i went through that with my my mother but sometimes you have a situation you're just ain't i don't even say angry in the world or um maybe you know somebody god probably got killed by a drunk driver you can get it you're angry you know be angry at the drive i mean do we have a right to be that angry i should put it that way or even which is what happened recently in the maroon i went through the initial belief in shock like everyone else but then i thought well well where was the crowd control what i mean i i personally don't have any relatives i mean who you know of who were there but i'm you know so but i'm just wondering if these people that are grieving uh i mean i mean what point do you do you have i mean should a or is the anger justified or how do you deal with that kind of uh uh how do you deal with it yeah yeah i get it okay so that's a great question that's a great great question and obviously uh i just want to first i'm sorry for the loss of your mom i'm sorry for that and i wanted to just share anger is one of those you know stages of grief it's very common it's very normal people to be feel anger that's that's that's the idea of the stages it's to say these are typical the idea of the stages is not that they're linear steps it's just that these are the types of of common reactions that people have and anger is a very common one when you think of it the idea if you if you if you look at these stages and you think of which is which is a more manageable emotion [Music] the motion of sadness the motion of feeling permanent loss the emotion of feeling like this they're never coming back is that a more matte if you take that on one hand which is a more powerful or stronger you know a more empowering emotion when you look at a bear right when your person is in a fa in a forest and and they see a bear so i learned this once that what you do when you see a bear is supposed to raise your hands all the way above your head as high up stand in the tippy toes and raise your hands above you and that's very intimidating to a bear bear looks at that and he says this is uh you know some big creature i gotta run away anger makes us feel powerful anger makes us feel in control sadness is sort of like a precursor to [Music] to acceptance that's the sort of the sadness piece what i call the cold depression or sadness piece it's like i've kind of come to a place where i see that i don't have control and that's kind of the range that you tend to see with the the stages of of grief is from a place of feeling control like denial is a sense of control i'm actually controlling the reality bargaining anger these are all efforts to control the situation to try to change what's there to control the environment and the further side of the other spectrum is acceptance it's recognizing that we don't have a sense of control over the situation that we are sad the sadness comes from kind of that their recognition that we don't have so and then this you know so the fifth one we talked about meaning the sixth one which is meaning which we sort of take control again of our lives in a different way we take and we manage the relationship in a different way in a meaningful way so what i think you know so my response is that anger's very normal it's very typical and it's it's it's okay i think when we get bad news it's very it's common yes they have a right to be angry of course they're right-handed angry everyone's right to their feelings they have a right to feel what it is and the idea that you can be angry at this the whatever authority that was supposed to be responsible for the safety of the individuals it's normal it's a sense of control because if we can fix that then we're safe if we could fix the crowd control issue then the world is it's a safer world than if we recognize that this was to imagine accepting this was a tragic accident i'm not saying we shouldn't fix the problem that's not my point i'm not a crowd control person i would never suggest that we shouldn't make things better i'm just saying that if we were to accept for a moment that sometimes matter despite our best efforts tragic things happen that's a scarier place to be that's a more that's in a certain way more difficult so anger yes the other right and two it's it's it's besides that it's common it's it's something we expect and something that we we allow people to have and we also recognize it with what it is very good i have a question for a person that has a loss and he the other way he doesn't want to feel the emotions because it's too hard so they keep being busy and trying to continue because it's too hard and then when they uh i don't know after a while they just break down and they don't want to feel it it's it's okay my approach generally to these things is that whatever works my my clients will always hear me say that people may remember hear me say oh whatever works so people say i'm in denial i had some recently tell me they had us a loss and it was very traumatic to them and they said i can't accept it i said okay don't why do you have to accept the right way that's that's the assistant saying i'm not ready to accept it i think what happens to some people is that and there's a fear of this that if i don't address it at all one time it's gonna it's gonna kind of like hit me like you know it's gonna hit me much later on in a way i won't be able to control it i think that to the degree that we can uh be self-aware of our emotions be aware of how things feel and how we feel and how we're reacting to things i think that to the degree that we can to take grief and manage it in chunks right manageable chunks right so we could you know and sometimes that's that requires a third party that requires professional help to be able to a lot of the work that i do you know i do a lot of emdr work a lot of the work that i do is helping people to manage process emotion process trauma in a way that's manageable that we we you know you got the three gallon bucket 10 gallons of water it's like okay we're gonna we're gonna add on a little bit we're gonna take we could take a little bit more we'll add on to the bucket take a little more water add on you know add a couple more increase the capacity increase the tools and and then and add a little more so degree that you can do that that's okay i think that sometimes it's just that's the best they can do because we need to survive so there's like almost like this uh there's pressure the other way you got to feel it you got to get into it you got to accept it and we try to pressure people to feel it it happens with kids when you when kids suffer i mean we see this a lot with kids who um you know when there's a loss of child loss and so the siblings don't want to go to therapy because they just want to have like what we like like usher's question earlier they just want a normal life they don't want to work with it and the parents and they hear the whole time we got to get into therapy we got to push them and it backfires we have to let people have their process and sometimes that that's them not dealing with it is the best that the system can do and the system is saying let's survive let me get back to reality let me go back to real life so sometimes the best you could do is look for signs later on at some point if it's going to catch up with them if you can catch it early enough and say i'm starting to notice so and so either about a kid or about yourself i'm starting to notice it's affecting you in a in a difficult way so then maybe it's time to you know add tools to toolbox see professional help whatever it is deal with it talk about it so i think that's that's kind of how i approach that particular question okay we have some live questions glenn let's get to it okay you're on me you okay first of all um i would just like to comment that what you said about not forcing kids into therapy which i thought was a like a really great idea because i think conventional idea is that if a kid goes through some kind of trauma you have to force them into therapy at least that used to be my idea so that was very enlightening um number one the other question the question that i had i don't know if this is an anxiety issue or not how do you deal with the fear of loss not god forbid that you had the loss let's say for example my mother is elderly she should be live and be well and i'm an only daughter and i live far away from her the fear god forbid of losing her which god forbid if mashiach doesn't come soon is something that you know is on my mind and it's very very scary or even you know the situation with uh you know what happened in mehron sending your children to eretz israel now we know that the person could walk out into the street and god forbid get hit by a car but the fear of loss of like when you have other people that have lost and you're afraid how can it may happen to me it may happen to my child it may happen to my parents how do you deal with that fear or is that anxiety whatever it is but yeah okay great great question first of all you know your mom showed you unfortunate she should live 120 and she should be healthy and you shouldn't suffer any any loss or any difficulty i i it's a very common theme and it makes sense so the first thing is is it anxiety or is it like almost like you're like is it anxiety or is it legitimate so i think you know going back to the earlier comment i made about our there was a great uh inclination to to pathologize everything it's normal that someone who suffered a loss it's normal this is the way that the the body was made it's the way god made our system that when we experience a uh it learns it evolves it adapts okay so somebody's walking down the street god forbid gets mugged and then the system is very is has some anxiety around walking down the street so first we have to acknowledge that the system's trying to help us it's learning it's recognizing that the world is not safe as safely as we thought it was so i think this is a part of that is just you know acknowledging that a system is trying to help us to look at our system not as an enemy our anxiety is not our enemy in that in that case it's it's trying to be your friends now sometimes we get our internal system gets uncalibrated as i say and that's when the anxiety as they call it is unhelpful and it's it's sort of because it takes us to a place that's not we're not able to function okay sometimes the idea that uh that anxiety is is our friends and perhaps somebody if someone has suffered a loss and then they're afraid of suffering another loss it might lead them to better things the anxiety might say well i'm going to make the best out of a time i have with my with my parents they might use that anxiety recognizing as a kind of a sign to to make to make that relationship more meaningful or to be more careful and i think what happens is that there's a balance in life the balance in life is that idea of being safe and being and being also taking risk because if we if we're too concerned of being safe like people who um stay in the house all the time right there some people have a phobia and they'll stay in the house all the time and those people suffer quite a bit because they're kind of they're not calibrated or balanced in the way that they can say i recognize that the world is not as safe as i wish it were but i also know that if i if i don't take certain risks in life certain calculated risks then i'm gonna be losing out a lot so someone might say well the fear of losing a parent means i'm gonna just i'm gonna sort of disassociate myself from that parent and have nothing to do with them because i can't deal with the laws another person might say well the anxiety around losing this parent means i'm going to spend more time with my parents i'm never going to leave a conversation without saying i love you or i'm going to do things that my parents enjoys i'm gonna spend that time with them and and take them on trips and so on and so forth so it's kind of about one finding balance and two trying to harness whatever that anxiety friend is trying to tell us in a positive way if it becomes unmanageable in our daily life where like i said a person disassociates from the parent or they are so consumed by the anxiety that they can't function in certain ways so that's it goes back to that earlier point that's when you start to look at maybe some external help might be worthwhile to look at well thank you glenn um let's go to another live question you're on okay um i lost my mother one and a half years ago i was one of the poas and when she was dying i had to deal with every pessimism and the doctor doctors alone not only that but my four siblings don't really miss her like i do only one brother thanked me for keeping her alive so long and the rest of my siblings were just happy to get her money now i'm cleaning out her house alone also it's very sad and taxing how do i deal with it all yeah oh well i could i mean i hear your voice the pain you know the pain of i'm sorry for your loss and and there's such a i mean you can hear your voice and what you know how much you're going through and it's so much harder because it's like no one else cares you're carrying it alone which makes it so much more difficult when you when when there's people involved when a couple loses a child or or the siblings who lose who lose a parent or you know children who you know children child siblings lose their parent and they're able to kind of support each other everybody's together in the loss we're carrying together so it's it makes it more manageable and for you not only is there a sense that you're alone but it's also this is an invalidation of of the pain that you're feeling and this invalidation of the effort that you made to keep her to keep her alive and to keep her happy and functioning so that's that's also painful because you invested so much in that relationship and it's like no one's acknowledging it so i think one of the things that could be helpful is to this is tough sometimes it's tough to do it alone and sometimes it's all you've got so recognizing for yourself allowing yourself giving yourself permission to have the pain giving yourself permission to to feel that loss and feel that sense of of loss because your mom's not with you in that way and the grief could be debilitating this the sixth stage i just wanted to bring that out because i think it might be one of the challenges the great challenge that we have and we see that with some of the questions that were asked tonight is that people are kind of stuck with this conundrum if i forget my mom in your case if you forget the person who you lost so there's a big advantage that you don't feel the pain but the relationship's done and if you remember the pain so the big advantage is that you have the relationship but the big disadvantages you have to paint the stages the the sixth stage as david custer talks calls it and it's a big part of my practice is finding other ways finding meaningful ways to maintain the relationship between your mother and you to find meaning in that loss in what you did and if you could find other ways to find meaning it kind of helps to build a relationship even though your mom is not with us in the physical sense but it still builds out that connection to her to her essence now i think the first step would be to allow yourself to to to even though and this is so hard even though people other people in your family are not appreciating not just what you did but they're not appreciating what you lost it's recognizing for yourself that that what you did was was incredible how much harder is that it's so much more difficult that you did it alone you didn't let your your spouse's influence you you didn't let your the people in your life change what you were doing you didn't let them change how you're feeling so i think that's really incredible everything you did for your mom is makes it that much more amazing because you did it alone and i think the other part of it is that try to find ways to connect to your mother's essence try to find ways to connect to who she was and what was important to her for me mayrim is is a part of that being part of my rim is i know that my daughter miriam this is what her life's mission she made her life's mission and so when i'm involved in my room then i know that i'm connecting to her so it doesn't completely uh obliterate the pain you know uh removes the pain but allows me to have another aspect of her of connection to her that isn't purely based on pain and that allows it so it gives us permission to not to not always have to feel this thing so i think that's something that might be you might consider and i give you a tremendous amount of credit for doing this alone if you could find other people in your life who were connected to your mom i don't know if you had siblings or or who the other people were in your family if you could connect to them about your mom maybe that would be you know uh uh valuable to you or helpful to you and support us today well i got a few versions of this question i was going to punch you in the face already i know mr helmet i know mr holman you're not a rabbi but how do i lose a child and still believe that hashem loves us okay so now i'm getting all the easy all the easy questions okay uh one this is the same question like you know we talked about people said about marone and the holocaust and all the other losses and the pain so one one thing that i could say is that people you know mosh robeno asked hashem why why do good people suffer and he didn't get an answer i don't think any of us are going to figure the answer out if moshe banner didn't have it so one i think it's an unanswerable question in this world i think for whatever reason god has put us in a situation where that question is unanswered two i think whenever we suffer a significant loss like a child lost there's a certain part of every single action that we do that's that's the shma because every time you dive and it's i'm diving to you even though you took my child or you took my husband you took my parent i think this truth in every single every single time we do a mitzvah every time we do a something a dvar toe it's always we're doing this even though there's an aspect of ishmael in everything we do people who don't have a muna people who don't have bataclan they don't have yiddish kites you know hashem i think they tend to suffer more than people who don't and the problem with with this question or the difficulty in this question is because we're stuck in another one of these conundrums which is i believe in god then i don't understand how a god could take away my child and take away my spouse or take away my parents and if i don't believe in god then i'm stuck in a world that's chaotic that has no meaning that has no purpose no structure so we're stuck kind of in this in this scenario of of not really knowing which way to turn the only thing that maybe will give some people some solace is the idea and people ask me this how do you do it how do you and your wife do it how do other people in the mailroom do it how do people who have suffered other losses do it and what i think in my head it's not part of my practice per se that's what i think of my head sometimes right is that people say that god doesn't give you more than you can handle it's such a concept and i told somebody i told a rabbit once that there's a certain fear in that there's a certain sense in that that's that's that's epicurus because it suggests that there's such an idea that a person has a limited capacity and god looks at a person and says okay you have a limited capacity and therefore i can't give you more than you can hand but the truth is that god really really works the other way around god recognizes missionaries difficulties this is just what works for me i'm not saying this is absolute i'm just telling you what helps me sleep at night so everyone has their own way of of dealing with these things the idea is that a person is given the capacity they need to deal with initiatives and i think you see that right sometimes you'll see a person who has a difficulty and you can't imagine how are they able to do it how is this person capable of handling the situation i could never handle that situation and that could be true if someone has said seemingly worse or seemingly better this year messiah hashem i believe that some gives person a capacity to handle what they have to handle that's one aspect the second thing is that that imo nokia but sarah this idea that if that no matter how bad your situation is it could always be worse and i don't mean that in the way normal people normally mean it like so you should appreciate the pain i don't mean that i mean that if god wanted to make it all god wanted to do was inflict pain on you he would make it worse so it must be that god has a certain husband and what in the things he gives and this is and therefore there must be something some there must be some calculation there must be some love there are other areas of ammuna there are other areas of understanding about this but as you look to god i think the idea to summarize the idea that we're going to understand why he why he does the things that he does i i don't think that i certainly don't have the answer that i think oh i don't think any of us human beings have the answer to that i think it's one of the things that we await from we understand that i think we could hope that we could see that we could find the positives in what hashem does and the purpose of that is to help us believe that that this is not to hurt us this is somehow this is part of a hajj man that what hashem does so i don't know if that works for everybody i'm sure it does and i'm not saying it that it needs to i'm just saying it's something that sometimes i think about and those type of things are helpful to me okay this is a question of uh someone i said i lost my father two years ago and i actually have moved on but that bothers me i feel like i'm forgetting him how do i hold on to the feeling and uh i guess i shouldn't feel bad of the way i feel yeah yeah so we adjust that a little bit i think there's a there's a great sense that people have that if i move on this is a betrayal to the person who who's who they've lost it's a very common thing a theme is people sometimes they hold on to the pain they hold on to the to that difficulty because to move on and be happy with my life you see it with all different types of lawsuits not just i mean certainly that's a complication when someone is married and they they lost their spouse and marry a new spouse that's that's true but it's true even other type of losses i just lost this parent and how could i go to and get on with my life how could i feel good so i think one of the things you know they talk about as a betrayal i think one of the things that makes it potentially easier or leaves you to understand is is to try to look at like what would that person want would this person who we lost would they want me to to be stuck in it would they want me to not move on would they want me to be unhappy so that's one thing that it's helpful to some people although not to everyone i think that the other aspect to that is allowing ourselves that we're in this world we're the ones here we we owe it to ourselves and we owe it to the people in our lives here and also the people we've lost that if it's if we decide that we want to move on and that's we're ready for that so we have to give ourselves permission to say that's where we are in life and the last thing that helps with that is what i talked about that six stage of meaning when you connect to them in other ways so then it's okay to move on and keep the relationship if you can find new ways to keep the relationship going even after the loss then it allows us to move on and not have to feel that stinging pain and i think it goes back to that same fundamental that we have to give other people permission to to to feel what they feel and we have to give ourselves permission to feel what we feel if we're ready to move on we have to look at ourselves and say i give myself permission to move on because that's that's where i'm at that's what i need that's the greatest gift we can give to ourselves and to the person we lost wow glenn too powerful i'm gonna ask you the last question somebody says instead of saying move on i learned to live on this concept is helpful just thought you might want to share that i love it i love it yeah the best okay great last question and then we're gonna go to closing if that's okay okay yeah last question is coming from a friend of yours that knows you for 30 years he called me today he said i should ask you a question and not use his name he says he knows you for 30 years he knows everything about your life he happens with you and joel he says he wants to know what's the magic secret how he sees you go through this you and your wife and not only go through it and you've went through nissinis that are unimaginable but you do basically and you're smiling and you're happy and you're like he doesn't know how you do it he wants to know where he could buy the recipe i think it goes back to uh i didn't realize doing such a great job but thank you and i think that there's two points to it one where everyone struggles everybody's struggling there's a constant there's a constant need to to grow and there's a constant desire to come better and there's no there's no there's no magic recipe this it's just my family you know we want to get better we we use our nacionas like i described with anxiety and we say we're going to use that to to propel us to to do good things to and that that provides meaning in our lives and i think at the end of the day even though everyone struggles we struggle i think it goes back to what i said earlier that for me the way i understand it is that hashem gives a certain capacity to people that whenever an asylum they're going to go through that hashem's going to give you some kind of tools to be able to handle it in a way that someone who doesn't have the messiah hashem doesn't give him the tools there's no purpose to them so that's what i believe i don't know any other way to answer that question but uh i hope that's uh that's just the way i i i perceive it or approach it wow okay let's go to closing again i want to first thank glenn holman for coming on tonight and be my kazakh so much of us there's literally thousands of people that came here tonight the next 7000 will watch it physical inspiration and good down-to-earth advice and um really really thank you again glenn appreciate it um again for anybody who came the first time we have to share every sunday night 10 o'clock it's the same zoom id please come and let everybody know about the share next sunday five nine we're gonna have an amazing program with the one who did our first year a good friend of mine menachems mordechai weinberger we're discussing dealing with difficult people family members personality disorders i'm sure we could all relate to this topic and it's going to be an amazing program so please come and it should be amazing again tonight's share was learned and anybody who could donate to meirim.com it's m-a-y-r-i-m right um please go to the website you know it's glenn's organization and um glenn is an amazing person inspiring helping so many people um in the trenches as we could say it's um again everything is recorded tonight it's going to be on monacomberenfeld.com any questions please email coachmen gmail.com glenn do you want to give out your email address people are texting me they want to know how they can contact you um holmen therapy it's h-o-l-m-a-n therapy therapy gmail.com okay so anybody who wants to reach out to glenn personally please reach out to him if you need any advice or anything just reach out to him he's there for you again i want to thank again tonight shares number 53 and it's all pre it's all recorded if you want to call tomorrow be on the phone number 848 777 grow i want to thank all our advertising sponsors liquid scoop robbie and if hazak kyla kaplan from jcn and again glenn really amazing and let's go to closing coach menachem wrap it up i want to thank you glenn i think tonight it was a real vulnerable discussion again talking about emotions for many people is hard and just to feel those emotions can be very painful and you got to be vulnerable for that and like we heard the theme all across to give yourself permission to feel whatever you feel interesting if you feel you want you have to continue you can't stop i guess as of now that's that's where you are and if you need to do this you need to feel this and you feel that whatever it is this is how you feel so i guess if that's that's the way you feel then that's the way you feel just to give ourselves the mission is very very very powerful and uh then like like we heard to create that space that sometimes we just don't understand and i think in these times that everybody you know whoever's whoever has that painful feelings whatever it is the the negative emotions or i wouldn't say negative just the emotions whatever emotions they have is and and now with claustro whatever is going on whatever you feel we don't understand we just don't and and this is the time i believe this is the time that we have to hold on strong with the moon and and this is where we look up to hashem and he's running his world and we just sometimes don't understand and we don't always like it and then we see some people have questions and i guess i guess this is part of it you know the feelings the questions just you gotta accept and give yourself permission so thank you very much for that and uh mitch shem hopefully everybody take out the physic that they needed for their individual personal life thank you coach monaco beautiful glenn harald glenn rabbi glenn please give us some different physics some some some some something to go home with something to go to sleep with yeah yeah okay so i wanted to just you know i talked a lot about this uh six stage meaning it's a very important part i mean of my life for my practice i want to give you a good example when my daughter miriam was in the hospital she was on ecmo you know every machine in the book she was on and one of the things she was uh that was that she struggled with was being in the hospital she was she didn't have a chance to feel shabbos she she was in a hospital gown that was not you know it was all machines it was hard to feel shabbos so my son he decided that he's going to make a gown for her he see what a dress he's in fashion and he reconstructed the dress into a hospital gown it was a beautiful beautiful dress and so she stood there she looked like with her hair hair done something like with ecmo ecmo is but all kinds of machines connected and tubes and she's sitting there in chadwick's dress it was very meaningful talk about meaning after she passed away my son has been working for quite a long time and he he very creative person and he built uh hospital gowns he reconstructed and designed haskell gowns they look like dresses they look like jerseys they're gorgeous beautiful things called the heel because the slippers so h-e-e-l called heal and uh i think the website is working on it so the idea is that this way what he wants to do is he wants to give out to the kids and to teen girls and teen boys whatever old teens he wants to give them out gowns they shouldn't feel like in these uncomfortable it's brilliant the way it's made uncomfortable gowns that deals that's for him that's the way he made meaning that's how he found a way to connect to miriam through the gowns and that's really what one of the things that's helped me a lot is finding ways to find meaning that the relationship is not just limited to the pain but it also could be something that mattered so he knew she doesn't matter to her so he did that and that's the he sees the word he'll h-e-e-h-e-e-l heel gowns but it's heal right he's helping the people to heal so not only is it helping the people to heal the kids you know because of me happy i mean gorgeous the beautiful gowns but also uncomfortable but also it's healing for him this is the way he this is the way he he sort of goes with the loss this is what he brings carries the laws that's why he brings meaning to the lost so i think what we wanted one of the things that's helpful is whenever someone loses someone is to look at their essence what was important to them what mattered to them who were they and you could figure that out and then you could find something that's connected to that that's another way to create that connection to create that relationship even though they're not here but it's to bring them into this world to bring their essence into the world and i think that's something that is so powerful and it's so necessary especially in today's times to bring meaning so i wish everyone should know should know only simcoe should never have any tsar shouldn't have any pain shouldn't have lost and those who have suffered loss hashem should help you to find ways a path forward as someone just said to live on to live on not just move on but live on so beautifully put and that its hashem we should see mashiach i was at a a safa torah today someone wrote for the child so they lost and it was i was standing next to him and they were singing and then she should come and that's what we wish for so we should all be reunited with the people we lost thank you so much usher and menachem for giving this opportunity and we shall only share some questions thank you so much for coming thank you everybody for coming here tonight we'll see you next week sunday night 10 p.m same time same place glenn i love you thank you