What is compounded grief

[Intro] Hello, and welcome to my podcast, Empowered to Thrive. I'm your host, Corinne Powell, and I'm the owner of Change Radically. 

In this space, we'll talk all things inner wellness, and parenting will certainly come up too, because I'm a mom to four kids, so parenting is a huge part of my life. This space is designed for safety. Your inner child is welcome. Your past self is invited to listen as well. 

And no matter what type of day you're having, I want you to know I'm glad to be with you. I live out of vulnerability and transparency, so come and be. Be yourself. Be messy. Invite a friend, and please stay a while. Keep coming back. I want you around. Now, let's jump into today's episode. 

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Corinne Powell: Hi friends, I'm glad to have you here with me. And were you able to listen to last week's episode on supporting yourself while grieving? If not, that's okay. You can listen to today's and it'll be helpful in and of itself. Or you can go back and listen to last week's if you'd like. Today we're gonna touch on a different element of grief, the aspect of compounded grief. And before we jump into that, how has your week been? And how are you doing? I hope all is well, but I also know that the way life goes, there's so many ups and downs that I'm certain you've all had your share of struggles as I have. 

And in this moment, as much as we can, let's put that to the side and let's just focus in on ourself. Focus on yourself, focus on supporting yourself in this moment in absorbing whatever is meant for you in this episode. And I truly am glad you're here.

So I want to begin by sharing a personal story, how compounded grief manifested in my life. About nine years ago, I discovered I was pregnant with my third child. At the time, I had two other young children. They were only 17 months apart. So my oldest daughter was two and a half. And my son had just turned a year old and I discovered I was pregnant a third time. In addition to that, I was taking care of my nephew. I was his daycare provider, so he was with me all day, every day. And I was stretched. The hardest part about discovering I was pregnant was that I also was feeling very sick. I've discovered now after having four children, three of them being girls and one of them being a boy, that every time I'm pregnant with a girl, I am extremely sick. I am...Nauseous all day every day, all night long. I have to eat to just survive. 

If I don't have enough protein in me, the nausea amps up where it is awful. Imagine having a stomach bug all day every day, and maybe you can understand what I was feeling. Physically exhausted and just doing the best I could to manage what I needed to every day. Taking care of three little kids is demanding. Three, two and a half and under.

And I was struggling. This pregnancy spiled me into a two to three-year depression. You see, I was on a birth control that was 99 % effective, but I fell into that small category of people that get pregnant while on it. So I was doing what I could to prevent a pregnancy because I actually knew I wasn't ready to be pregnant again. I wanted to have more children down the road, but I knew when I got pregnant with my second that I needed a break. So this was especially hard for me.

It never helps to feel sick. And that made it even harder. But what I didn't realize until further down the road is part of what was adding to all this was the compounded level of grief. I was grieving because at this point in my life now, nine years ago, I felt like I didn't have what I needed to keep up with everything. But I would figure it out somehow. I would do it somehow. And you see, that's how I felt years previous when my parents divorced. I was a 14, 15 year old taking care of her younger siblings and supporting the siblings that were older than her, helping to run a household, and then at the other household, still helping to take care of siblings. When I should have been able to just focus on my education, spend time with friends, yes, help out my family, but not to the degree that I was. 

I was a parentified child. I was a surrogate caregiver. And I felt very similarly on a subconscious level. My body felt the effect very similarly. That here I was presented with another situation that felt out of my control, but somehow I was going to figure it out. And I was going to continue to take care of everything that needed to be taken care of. I was going to continue to juggle all the walls. Even though I actually needed to be taken care of myself.

You see, that's how codependency shows up. We have needs, but we're not able to focus on our own needs. We don't make space and time for ourself. We just start to look at everyone else and try to ensure their happiness and their sense of safety. And we start to feel a sense of safety in knowing that we're keeping the balls juggling and we're not dropping any of them.

But the goal isn't that we feel safety only when we feel in control. Because control is a perceived idea of safety. We don't truly ever have control. And so I felt like I was managing and I was keeping up with my household and I was keeping the children fed and safe and healthy. My husband was able to work. But all the while. I, in my body, was feeling out of control. Very depressed and wishing I had a way out, but feeling powerless to it all. Now I chose, I chose into that pregnancy in the sense that once I discovered I was pregnant, I determined that I was going to carry to term. That was my personal decision and my heart was invested in it. I chose into that.

There were other things I was choosing into. I chose to continue to take care of my nephew when his mother was willing to find a different daycare provider. I chose into continuing to keep up my house in the way that I thought was most presentable. I was pretty anal about cleaning it. I've learned over the years that it's okay to let things go. I chose to continue to push down my own needs because I didn't know how else to manage. And in all of that, the younger parts of me were aching for a relief. They were aching for me to recognize that my needs did matter, that I was important, that other people could figure out other ways to manage if I wasn't able to keep up with it all. But none of that felt true to me.

And so I just kept going day in and day out. But within myself, I felt such despair. And when my third born was born, precious little girl, so grateful to have her. I physically felt better because I was no longer sick, but emotionally I was still reeling. Now I had four children, three and under. My oldest had just turned three two months before my youngest was born.

And I was still saying, I'll take care of my nephew when his mother was open to finding a different daycare provider. I was still trying to keep up with everything. And I continue to do that. Until certain things got taken off my plate without me choosing. And in that, I felt heartache. Because remember, I was trying to keep everything the way I wanted it to be. Because that's how I felt safe. I didn't really want things to change. Because change can be hard. Change can be painful. But the truth is I needed things to change and I'm glad for the people that decided things out of my control because it's what I needed. I needed to stop doing as much. I needed to stop taking care of everyone else. And I needed to start creating space and time for me.

And sometimes we're going to experience people outside of ourselves making decisions that we initially kick and scream at and we get angry about. But in the end, in the long run, it's for our benefit. It's actually serving us. So in hindsight, I'm thankful for it, even though in the moment it was heart-wrenching. Time passed. I started to feel a little bit more stable within as I started to get in a groove. I started to recognize that my own needs mattered. And it took a really long time. It took a long time for me to start implementing change. But I did it. And the longer I did it, the better off I was.

That's how compounded grief shows up. It manifests in the present, but it's rooted in the past. And there is a level of grief in the present. I was grieving over the fact that I was pregnant when I had actually been taking preventative measures to avoid a pregnancy at that time. But there was another level of grief layered in the past, layered in the experiences that were so similar to the present experiences that my mind and my body made the connection.

Having to keep it all together when I felt like crumbling. Taking it all on when other people weren't asking that of me. They were willing to take part of it off my plate but I wouldn't let him. I actually couldn't even see it. I thought what I was doing was normal, just holding it all together, keeping up with it all. It's all I had ever known. Ask for help?  Allow help in? How do we do that? That's something we have to learn if it wasn't modeled for us.

It also felt really painful to express how I was really feeling and to not feel understood. Even that was rooted in previous experiences. When I truly didn't have parental figures who could emotionally attune to me, I was truly not being validated, empathized with and understood. So when your sadness, your heartache isn't understood in your earliest days, it can be very easy to start to perceive the world through a lens of not being understood. And our subconscious beliefs are worth looking at because they're affecting the ways that we interact with others. They're affecting the ways that we respond.

It actually starts to change the way that we look at situations. It changes the way we hear things. So how is it for you? Are there times where you recognize, sure, a level of sadness is legitimate, but it feels more than sad. It feels devastating. It feels overwhelming. And perhaps you even question why does this feel so hard? And it may or may not be a compounded level of pain. It may not be compounded grief for you. I bring up my story though to illuminate what is possibility.

And the more that I was able to understand that there was a past part of myself that was still hurting in the present day, the more I was able to offer self-compassion and reparent that past part of myself. And that translated into the present and helping me to feel more stable. It helped me to heal. And has it taken years? Is there still layers to it? Definitely. But over time, the grief has lessened as I have been able to offer healing and compassion and care to those younger parts of myself. 

I've learned how to ask for help and how to receive help. I've learned how to let some of the balls drop. I've learned that there are times when you are not going to be able to keep up with it all, and that's okay. That there's so much of life that is meant for the receiving. Giving is wonderful and receiving is also wonderful. Both are necessary to sustainable living.

So as you've heard my story today, I hope that you'll reflect on it for yourself. And if this is an area that you'd like to look into more deeply and you want support in, I would be glad to come alongside you and help you process your pain and your grief, help you to release some of the stored trauma that your body is holding onto so that you are able to thrive in the present, so that you're able to enjoy your present life. And maybe some of the grief you're presently feeling, you're not going to be able to bypass. And that's all right. But if there's a past layer of grief that you're able to heal from, the present grief will feel less painful because you won't have the compounded emotion.

I say that knowing it's possible, having experienced it myself and having walked other people through it. Know you are deserving of loving support. You are deserving of care. It's okay to not be able to keep the balls all up in the air. It's okay to let some of them drop. It's going to feel uncomfortable. It's gonna be really hard to not keep juggling it all. But your job is not to juggle it all. Your job is to receive and to give. To give and to receive. Who can you allow in to catch some of those balls as you drop them? Consider that person and maybe take the first step in initiating the receiving.

Thank you for listening to a bit of my story. And if there's any way I can support you, please don't hesitate to reach out. Go to my website, changeradically.com, if you'd like to take steps to set up a discovery call. I'm wishing you well and I hope to see you back here next week.

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[Ending] Here we are. We've come to the end of another episode. Sit back and reflect on what you heard. What's the one thing that resonates with you that you can take away and do something with? Let's not just listen. Let's listen and take action. Now action may look very different for us. But it's not. But it's doing something with what we hear. 

I hope that you'll share today's episode with a friend that you think would also enjoy it. And please come back next week. I hope that you have a fabulous week and that you remember when you pillow your head at night, when you're going through your days, that who you are is good. And I'm glad that you're alive.