 Welcome to my program, Elderhood, Aging Gracefully. I'm Larry Grimm. I'm a personal coach that specializes in people going into and moving through Elderhood so that they can make their elder years wonderful and real. I extend to you a gentle welcome of aloha spirit. We in Hawaii love to share the love of aloha and it's there for everybody and I extend it to you around the world here today. William Butler Yates once said, there are no strangers here. Only friends. We haven't yet met. And that's the way I consider you. Friends, online friends that I haven't yet met and look forward to. I am so grateful to Think Tech Hawaii for their partnership because they have offered this opportunity for me to use this show as an opportunity to just share with you the foundational thinking insights and about the spiritual tasks of Elderhood. You had a childhood, you had an adult life, excuse me, you had a childhood, you had an adolescence, you had an adulthood and it's time for Elderhood. Thinking about this stage of life as being a stage gives us some new insight into what the tasks are that we need to take on. Now these tasks just emerge and we find ourselves doing them or not doing them. But my belief is that if we do them intentionally, respond with resources, respond with genuine experience of wrestling sometimes with them, then it will indeed make our Elderhood an experience that is real and wonderful. The five spiritual tasks that I use and that I identify are the five tasks of grieving, sorting out, forgiving and letting go. These are all major tasks that we and I'm structuring my program around those tasks. And today we are most fortunate to have Crystal Bettenhausen to be a part of this show with her experience in grief recovery as a grief recovery specialist. Crystal works as one of my cohorts and my colleagues at Bristol Hospice Hawaii. Crystal, I am so grateful you're here. Thank you so much for being a part of this broadcast. Thank you so much, Larry, for having me. Would you introduce yourself a little bit and share with us what you do at Bristol Hospice Hawaii? Certainly. Well, first off, Aloha. Thank you for having me. This is such a fantastic experience. So I am a gerontological social worker. My background is really working with older adults. And at Bristol Hospice, I am one of the bereavement coordinators. And you're, but you are specializing in interest in grief recovery. Absolutely. How has that come apart of your life? Well, I have been a grief recovery specialist since 2013 and had the amazing opportunity to be trained by the founders. I was trained by Russell Friedman, who is the co-author of the book, The Grief Recovery Method, and was able to really study under him as a mentor in healing from grief. Something that we oftentimes don't put together. We don't put grief and recovery in the same sentence. That is so insightful. And I have many people on Facebook who say, does this grief ever end? Is there a way to end this grief? So I'm really looking forward to talking some more with you today about that. It seems to me that when we get into elderhood, we find ourselves grieving. I have one person say, aging is just accumulating a series of losses. And it struck me that, of course, grief is not just a nice decline, a peak and then decline. Grief has a lot of variance within a year experience. Would you pull up that circle of grief, Rob? I suggest that grief is like this. In the center point is denial. Of course, we like to deny that we have any problems. But once we move through the denial, we have a range of emotions, as you can see, in this circle of grief. I won't mention all of them, but anxiety, anger, rage, jealousy. All these seem to emerge in the grief experience. And the first thing that I always do as a counselor or as a coach is say, what grief are you still moving through? What is it that you're dealing with? What loss are you dealing with? And that's the beginning point for a sense of freedom and release. What do you think about that? I think it's so important to put grief into an individual feeling. And I think that display that you showed, the graphic that you just had up is pretty much sums up everybody that I've ever talked to within grief, you know, all of those emotions. So it really is really an interesting graphic because grief is so emotional. You talked about how it seems to increase later in life. Part of the study of gerontology really is looking at birth to the end of life. But when we really look at grief timelines, we go into an even further in-depth conversation of how we handle grief and how that grief impacts us and how we handle that next loss. And then it goes into even relationships. So it is so individual and is defined so differently by so many different people. So it is a fantastic conversation starter in what is grief and where are you in grief and what are you grieving? When I found that graphic I said, oh my gosh, this looks like standing in front of one of those dryers at the laundromat. And you put your clothes in the dryer and you look in the window and it's just this huge tumbling, tumbling, tumbling, tumbling. That's what it experiences, the experiences like. It's just a huge onslaught of a variety of emotions. Absolutely. That's a great, I like that visual. I looked at it and I saw gray matter. I saw a different, you know, just different emotions and where those emotions are at. They really are a range of them. What are some of the triggers for grief? You know, I define, I mean, I look at grief as the actual feeling. You know, that is the feeling, that is the emotion. So I think triggers for grief are losses. So and what is a loss? You know, again, that's very individual. We look at loss of confidence, loss of trust. Now those are not solid, tangible things. Those are concepts. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then we can look at losses into, you know, divorces, loss of a pet, loss of a job. There's this rainbow bridge. Yes. Something about people who lose their pets and go to grief support groups, rainbow, rainbow bridge. Yes. And actually the Grief Recovery Institute has their own text on pet loss. And we have our own program that we offer as well through the grief recovery method. So the thing about losing a pet is oftentimes, you know, we lose people and we lose, like you said, kind of the confidence and the trust. You know, those are a little bit different, but pets are even more tricky because they give such unconditional love. Oftentimes, you know, you have, you maybe have lost a spouse or a partner, a parent. And again, we never compare grief. But you always have dynamic relationships with those people where pets, you know, it's hard to say a bad thing about a pet, right? And they just give such amazing unconditional love. Yeah. I love that meme on Facebook. May I be the person my dog already thinks I am? Oh, yes, yes, yeah. Pets are amazing. But you know, we, and again, we don't compare grief. So you know, how somebody handles the loss of a dog to how somebody handles the loss of of a mother or a spouse is, you know, so unique to that individual that we can never really compare it. And we have to approach it with with the same heart that we approach all of our griefers. What has been your observation, though, in terms of, for instance, in our society, work is so important, such an identity thing. My work. And do you see a difference between the way men in general and women in general experience the loss of their location? I think that that is one of the hardest things for people as they enter into retirement. And I think there's a difference between how men and how women approach that, you know, a lot of maybe our retirees right now in our 65 and older group, a lot of women didn't have professions that are entering into retirement their entire life. You know, maybe they stayed at home with their children. They were the homemaker. That was very common. You know, now we're moving into a different era where women are working their entire adulthood lives. So it's interesting to see that grief that goes on when somebody retires. And then a lot of times people are coming out of retirement to go work again, because it was just not wasn't the right fit. Retirement wasn't what they thought it was going to be. So I'm sure a lot of viewers in our audience have I'm sure a lot of you have done that too. Yeah, it's very much a wonderful experience. I when I retired, I was as a Presbyterian minister in my, in my service to congregations, I said to my group, I said, Yeah, I believe in retirement retire, retire young and retire often. So I think it gives a chance to a new look on life and new experience. What, what about this identity issue? Who do you see people at this elder age, dealing with issues around identity and grief involved in that? Absolutely, I think, you know, as people approach a different stage of life, they often are questioning their own mortality, you know, they're questioning their past relationships. And some of the losses maybe that they've had with adult children or ex spouses or colleagues, just all kinds of different emotions that kind of come out when you're evaluating growing older, right? And I think people do go through and, you know, we're meaning making machines as human beings say that again, meaning making machines. It's lovely. You know, we're constantly trying to make meaning out of everything. And it's hard. It's hard not to go through and kind of evaluate you know what I think the word reconciliation comes up a lot. Which one? Reconciliation. Excuse my accent. Thank you. And, you know, and I think just again trying to you know, what legacy am I leaving? And in that, there's a lot of identity that comes out in what you know, what am I leaving behind? And I think there's also I see this a lot in older adult men. Well, my father left this legacy. What am I going to leave? Which is really can be a lot of pressure for a lot of people as they get a little bit older. Sometimes you'll see people just start with new hobbies or, you know, at 60, I'm going to start training for a marathon because I need to I need to have something, you know, some meaning, which is great. It just shows that we're, you know, living longer, healthier, intent for lives. Yes, yes, definitely so. So there's there's grief after a loss. And part of what I'm hearing you talk say is that there's some and some anticipatory or some anticipation of loss as we reach into elder years. Now, we said 65 and older is somewhat of a somewhat of a marker. But I like to think that we enter into elderhood when we start doing these things, we find ourselves losing much more and we find ourselves dealing with the sadness that we suddenly have. And how do we deal with that? And, and is there anybody I can talk this over with? I think it's one of the questions that may come up. But you're, you're mentioning that, and perhaps one of the hidden griefs is that we anticipate, we grieve an anticipation of something happened. Some loss. Say a little bit more about this anticipatory grief. Do you see it? What does it look like? Um, you'll like, I think it's, I think it can be, you know, I oftentimes compare, I don't compare grief. You know, looking at, you know, grief can be something really positive to some people. And they've made it into something positive, you know, because they're not afraid of it. They're not afraid of that sadness. They've made into more of a positive memory. And that's what they have just signed is their grief. But I think unresolved grief can often be kind of an ugly beast. And you don't ever know when it's going to be coming up. And what I tell families all the time is, just so you know, this current loss might ignite grief from a previous loss. We're gonna take a minute break here. And then when we come back, I'd like to talk about recovery. Yeah, absolutely. That'd be great. Thank you. Thanks, Crystal. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to join us on Wednesdays at one o'clock for cannabis chronicles, the 10,000 year odyssey, where we take a look at cannabis as food, cannabis as medicine, cannabis and religion, cannabis and your old uncle's family. So please join us to learn all about cannabis. Again, Wednesdays at one o'clock. Thank you. Hello. Welcome back to Elderhood, aging gracefully. I'm Larry Larry Grimm. And today we are having the great experience of having a Crystal Bettenhauser, housing from Hospice Hawaii speak with us, a Bristol Hospice Hawaii, I'm sorry, speak with us about grief. And I'm so grateful for Think Tank Hawaii and all that they've done to make this broadcast possible. This one and the many broadcasts yet to come in which I will unpack some of the foundational work, foundational thinking about my work as a professional, professional life coach in elderhood. So Crystal, what's today? Today is what day? It is National Day of Grieving. Isn't that amazing? Isn't that amazing? Yes. It's amazing that I am here today talking about grief on the National Awareness Day of Grief. Excellent. So just a day to set aside maybe some time to think about what you're grieving. It's a good point. And I think it's also a good time to just kind of give some grace, you know, if you are grieving and to know that it's not, there's no timeline for grieving. You used the phrase earlier that families have asked, when is this over? When is this grieving over? I don't think that, you know, it's over until you recover from it. Recover. So I'd like to explore what, how is recovery? What are the dynamics of recovering from grief? You did so well. This is a great day. You suggest it for us to think about what we may be grieving. What is the loss, a dominant loss in your life that that you still hold on to or your grief is still fresh and new? What does recovery look like for a person like that? I think recovery is restoring the sense of well-being. And that is, that is what we, we hope for within the Grief Recovery Institute. And that's what the method really is to support, is how can we move on in a way that's healthy and positive and allowing us to still live and have well-being? Is this best done one-on-one or in a group or we're getting into comparing griefs? No, yeah. And there's, you know, there's so much, you know, one, I will say that, you know, if you just go on to the Grief Recovery Institute's website, Grief Recovery Method, you can actually download the book for free. That's how powerful the book is in itself. But, you know, we offer different programs. One is just the grief recovery method, which is typically eight weeks. And you can do it in a group, you know, it's usually in a group of four to eight. It's a good group setting, but it can also be done individually with a grief recovery specialist. And then there's, again, our program on pet loss. We also have moving on, which is really focused on relationship, which is, again, another big kind of a hole in that's left in people's when they lose a relationship, whether it be from death or divorce or splitting up or just, you know, bad dynamics. How do we move on in those relationships? And then our last program is helping children grieve or helping children work through grief. So that's really kind of training adults how to be a little bit more aware of what children go through when they're grieving. So, so good, because it is a difficult, difficult. We project on to our kids what we think they're doing it and their process. And they don't always think in terms of adult concepts and built phrases. And that would be excellent. Well, in my personal coaching, I do those one on one work with people as they're going through grief. But I can also refer to these wonderful resources. Yeah, you've presented here. We'll do that in my personal coaching for life and faith. Absolutely. That would be wonderful. And what's great about the Grief Recovery Institute is they are worldwide. So we have, you know, grief recovery specialists in Vancouver, we have them in England, we have them in Australia, and those programs are really strong. So really wherever you go in the world, you can, you know, type in your location and it'll pop up with the grief recovery specialists in that area. And you can contact them. I have another image I work with about grief. And I call it the Mount St. Helens factor. Because Mount St. Helens, as you know, Mount St. Helens was building up its magnum. It built up a dome in the center. This is a few years ago, folks, you may not be, you probably can remember this and built up a dome at the top. And we were watching the dome. And as the dome built up, it tricked us it blew out to the side. Mount St. Helens blew out to the side. And that's where it erupted. So I think sometimes people we experience this pressure build up of the grief and the loss at the top. But it shoots off to the side. And who does it hit? Anyone who's close. I remember I was a child when Mount St. Helens erupted. I was living in North Dakota and we had ash on our cars that morning, you know, cuz you're just kind of straight, you know, this power, strength of emotion almost takes over the person and strikes out and then we end up striking out at people that we love. We said, if we think about it, we wonder, why would I do that? Why did I do that? This not not having dealt with or moved towards recovery, the initial pressure, we are likely to do, I think, likely to strike out in other ways. Bristol Hospice, they didn't do they didn't get their medicine here in time. Or the facility is so bad. And of course, the food is always terrible. Absolutely. We look for the nearest person or thing to blame when we are when we're in that anger. And it's so common. It's so common, which is why it's so helpful to have trained professionals in end of life that know how to really work with these family members and give grace to the family members that you know, this isn't personal. This is this is grief. And we need to remind our colleagues of that all the time, you know. So some of the triggers that we're talking about our loss of job loss of family, friends, loss of identity, loss of confidence, loss of purposefulness, loss, of course, loss of family members, these, these all can create grief. And each of us experiences it differently. So one of the triggers is to or one of the helpful things is to be aware of those possibilities when you're going through this that you're going to experience grief, that tumultuous wheel of grief. And you to watch also of ways you may strike out at somebody else. And if you're striking out at someone else, it may be an indication that in a baseless kind of way that you're, you're really experiencing sorrow and sadness at a deep level. Well, and being aware of, you know, any kind of substance use, you know, say some more about, you know, all of a sudden, you know, that one glass of wine is turning into a couple glasses of wine, you know, increase in, you know, any kind of, any kind of substances, really, you know, whether it be, you know, a lot of people will go through grief and challenging times in life and start smoking, you know, of course, we see increase in drug use and and alcohol use. And those are not healthy. But we also see a lot of people that go right back to work, and get buried into work projects, and feel like they're coping okay, because they're at work and they're functioning. But again, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are at that state of well being. They're just coping in a different way. So there's avoidance and there's what avoidance and somewhat self medicating that you're talking about. And in between that is achieving well being, often with the help of others who can intervene, bring interventions that are meaningful into your life. This is so helpful. And I hope everybody who knows about International Day of Grieving Awareness is is watching and enjoying this and finding some help in these very practical ways of addressing powerful, powerful emotion in our lives. Again, when I go into a relationship that's a helping relationship, one of the first things I ask, and this is even with Bristol Hospice Hawaii, a chaplain is to ask what's going on with what grief do you bring into this situation? And as you mentioned, when you go through the grief of this new loss, is it bringing up the grief before that's maybe still lingering and not resolve? Sometimes, I can remember losing my Saint Bernard of our family, you know, when I was in high school, and it's just like yesterday. And it does feel imminent. It does feel like it's right now. If I if I dwell with it. So those things do linger on and they do have absolutely good to take care of ourselves. So there are 250,000 residents of Hawaii over 65 years of aid. Wow. That's about a quarter of our state population, which puts us in seventh rank. In the states, I think it's seventh and the number of elder population. Again, I think it's important to think of this as elderhood, time in our life where we're meeting the kinds of tasks, spiritual tasks that come up and that are challenging us. And I think think tech Hawaii for giving me this opportunity to over the next next weeks and months, so hopeful, I'm hopeful, to bring in experts in various stages of these these five, these five spiritual tasks. We've dealt with grieving. It won't be the last time we talked about grieving. We will look at storytelling, sorting out our stories. We'll look at preparing, we'll look at forgiving, we'll look at letting go and those five spiritual tasks, there may be others, but those are the ones I've identified. And I welcome you back when you come again to be a part of this program and the show. If you want to send me any message Larry G at live dash connections.com. I will welcome having a communication from you. Thanks again, think tech Hawaii. Thank you, Crystal. Really appreciate your help. Thank you.