The Adventure of Grief: Dr Geoff Warburton at TEDxBrighton

I was fortunate to be taught about living after loss by two grandmothers in my childhood both of them had experienced great loss in their lives one of them had lost two brothers in the first world war and then lost a young husband to heart disease the other grandmother lost two infant children due to lack of medical care which in effect was due to poverty and then later lost her husband to lung disease through coal mining they were living in a time in the UK when death and loss was part of everyday living now they both had very different approaches to life after loss one of my grandmother's regularly said to me I'm ready for box Jeffery meaning she was world-weary ready to die and to be placed in a coffin the story she told me would more often than not be about her suffering and if she wasn't suffering sometimes she'd make it up I mean I remember one lunchtime when she said to me all Jeffrey had an operation last week they plucked me out and it was sitting on my cheek and I could see the doctors and what they were doing my other grandmother when faced with difficulty would more often than not say to me it's all part of the game Jeffrey meaning that pain and suffering was part of everyday life now the story she told me more often than not would be about fun and more often than not she filled her days with activities knitting cooking for others being in her kitchen as she buttered bread and giggled was my favorite place to be to grandmother's same generation two completely different approaches to loss one about surviving the other about thriving I didn't realize actually just what a lesson my grandmother had taught me until I completed 25 years of intense study about loss I'm not so sure I needed the 25 years to get to that point but anyway it was officially verified the research I did was listening to hundreds of stories from people about their grief and identifying what it was that made people thrive after loss incidentally this is just a little aside in a way what that research showed was absolutely no correlation at all between ones generation and ability to deal with loss but that's not what my grandmother's knock me back to the grandmothers okay and that to me here just in case you in any depth so this is what they taught me even if you've lost the love of your life you've not been cheated by life no matter how tragic the circumstances but we cheat life we cheat life if we close our hearts after we lost someone this grammar over here she believed that having lost loved one's life had cheated her and she believed that throughout her life so that she was living a life where everything was gloomy and she was missing something the other grandma she embraced life she didn't deny the pain of grief she embraced it as part of life and living so one grandma embodied the question why me the other why not me my grandmother's died was in my twenties and this threw me into a very strange place I became very emotionally numb and in an effort really to get my emotional life back on track I began my personal study of loss now at the time the death was very much on the minds of people in the Western world particularly in the UK this slogan some of you who were around in the 80s may remember this don't die of ignorance this was posted through the letterbox of every single person in the UK it was part of the UK's government campaign to prevent the spread of HIV nobody knows if it actually worked but what we do know is it frightened the living daylights out of most people including me I was so curious and so driven to find out about loss that even though I was terrified I put myself right at the center of the AIDS epidemic by joining a group of innovators to build a center for people with HIV and AIDS at my first meeting with this group I nearly passed out partly through fear but mainly because I was holding my breath I was trying to stop myself from catching aids anyway despite my reluctance to breathe around these people their loving nature actually crashed through my barriers and they they gave me some knowledge about loss vital knowledge know most of that original group of people have since died of AIDS so I pay tribute to them today in passing some of that knowledge on to you this wasn't just any group of people this was a group of people who believed that embracing your emotions kept you alive and loving that's how they roll that's how they said they continued to function despite being in an environment that was hostile to them their emotions now how many of you have said if I let myself feel my emotions I won't be able to function the thing is were much more likely to not function actually if we block our emotions research shows that we're much more likely to get anxiety depression eating disorders even become violent if we suppress our emotions now I'm not saying that we need to act on our emotions absolutely not certainly when it comes to hostile feelings and I'm not saying that we should focus on emotions otherwise you might get lost in them and then our lives become like some soap opera like standards or Dallas or something I'm not saying that at all I'm just saying that if we let them our emotions can be the fuel for our life and our living that's what these people attributed to their ability to walk out the door and face that hostile world not only that together we built the first residential Support Center in the country for people with HIV and AIDS call London lighthouse now the ability to do that the creativity was certainly attributed to this ability to embrace our emotions so successful was this adventure that actually the original advertising agency that had developed that slogan don't die of ignorant came to us and said look we know we got it wrong this is Ted children watching we know get it wrong we want to get it right this time will you show us how to do it so we did and there helps to promote our work and we came up with a slogan which was quite different which was together we can make a difference so the power of emotion the power of emotion it sounds good sounds quite simple turns out it's not quite so simple which is what I discovered further along my journey turns out that those people who really thrive after lot embrace more than just their emotions they embrace what ever grief brings them turns out that if you want to do this which is basically milk life you need to embrace everything that grief brings you so let me take you through grief okay and I'm going to give you a safety instruction before I do that just keep your heart open and how you do that is just stay with your experience whatever it is that's it nothing else okay so in grief you're going to meet hate you're going to meet anger you're going to meet emotional pain you're going to meet rage you're going to meet terror if you get through that you're probably going to feel torn to pieces you might feel crazy you might end up in a total emotional abyss you're probably very likely to end up in an emotional abyss you need to feel that emotional this you need to let that abyss swallow you now you can see why I don't get invited to parties very much so may feel that in that abyss a part of you is dying and maybe a part of you needs to die close off your experience of the abyss and you close off the flow of life here's the thing block that anger and you'll block your vitality block that fear and you'll block your excitement block that deep emotional pain and you'll block your access to compassion even block your hatred and you'll block your access to peace block your experience of that abyss and you will block access to the depth of who you really are and the energy that's going to take you forward right in the center of that abyss in that silence you'll find your liberation even if you've lost love of your life now we do that not to get away from what's hurting us or not to move away from what's making us unhappy we do that we embrace all that all those emotions to connect to the flow of life connecting to the flow of life is what will ultimately make us happy happiness for the people I came across in my journey was about the way they traveled wasn't some end destination it wasn't some place they reach when they got over grief it was about how they continued to be open to their experience now if we closed our experience yeah we're more likely actually to feel or become depressed how many of you here maybe even when you're coming here today for okay there's a talk about loss and grief how many of you associate grief and loss with gloominess and depression the thing is grief is not depression and it can't be treated as such and here's an example maybe is gloomy which is antidepressants I never met anybody who ever found a solution to grief through antidepressants now I'm not saying antidepressants are wrong and sometimes people need them and sometimes we need them if we're not functioning and we need something to get us through that period but it's no solution to grief antidepressants as is in the public domain we most of us know this will increase the levels of serotonin in the brain what they also do most of them is suppress something in the brain which is the dopamine system the dopamine system is involved with pleasure excitement and our connection to the world and to each other so if you think about that the research is only just scratching the surface of what it really means to dampen a dopamine system you know a life without dopamine is a dead life gives a whole different meaning to this phrase here so speaking of dying as the talk is about when I was preparing this talk I just went through the themes with my boyfriend as you do and he pointed out that I'd skimmed over my own grief so my thoughts immediately went to my brother who died in a car crash at several years ago but when he asked me this question I felt dead I felt numb my heart felt so closed so I thought about this for a moment because when he had died I'd felt pain I'd felt anger I'd felt rage I felt terror but at this moment I just felt emotionally numb so I thought I better not skim over my experience and if I was to practice what I preach I needed to just stay with whatever grief was bringing me so I stayed with this experience and I noticed I felt really guilty I felt guilty that he was in that car crash not me and then when I noticed that guilt I so sensed into it and it was sort of heavy and I felt burdened and I felt anxious and I felt grim and I felt gloomy and so I imagined I was looking at Chris and I say look look at me and I looked at him and I imagined what would he say to me and this is what I got you stupid thing don't be so daft I'm assuming you know what gate means but for those not familiar with the dome DAF means if you're take crazy or ignorant so that word again ignorance chasing me so it was a kind of wake-up call and I stopped and I thought about and it sort of hit me it was obvious from all those years of doing that research we honor their dead more by choosing to live well this guilt I felt it was burdening it was closing my heart it was a kind of it wasn't a healthy kind of guilt where I'd turns aggress some boundary it was actually survival guilt that was closing my heart so then I thought well I'll go back and I will imagine my brother Chris so I looked at him and I said I will live well for the both of us and when I did that my heart came back online I feel lighter I felt still her I felt this piece and the heart was alive and this is what happens if we let that love be there for the ones we've lost we settle we find peace scintillating beautiful peace and if we let it we let grief run its course it will open our hearts it will liberate us to knit to cook to pass on knowledge to be creative to come here and do a TED talk to really be alive this is an idea about what can happen if we just let grief open our hearts grief can illuminate your life loss can be a life adventure so here's another slogan scrap the don't die of ignorance let loss be a life adventure and the way to do that just stay with it breathe and let your inner experience guide you thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 209,092

Rating: 4.8781891 out of 5

Keywords: England, ted talk, English, Activism, ted x, United Kingdom, ted talks, community, health, tedx, tedx talk, culture, tedx talks, education, TEDxBrighton, ted, psychology

Id: juET61B1P98

Length: 20min 38sec (1238 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 15 2012