- Hi, this is Marisa Peer.
I'm the creator and founder
of Rapid Transformational Therapy®,
an amazing therapy that's really taking the world by storm.
We're training many people.
One of the things we're doing is training
grief counselors to do RTT, because I see so many people
with grief, years of grief or sometimes symptoms they have
like headaches or skin conditions, and they don't know
that the cause of them is unexpressed grief.
So I always tell my clients the truth,
the significance of an event tends to be linked
to how effectively it was mourned.
Many many years ago, we were much smarter
in terms of our emotions.
If someone died, we wore black,
we went into a period of mourning
and we understood at some level that we had to feel
these feelings of sadness and loss and grief
until they no longer required to be felt.
And actually, that's the same with everything.
Your feelings are the most real thing you have.
They always tell you what's going on in you,
and you must feel your feelings until they're no longer
required to be felt.
And the better you get at going,
"What am I feeling?
"I'm feeling tremendous sadness.
"Okay, I'm going to be aware of that feeling.
"I'm going to accept it because what else can I do?
"And I'm going to articulate it, say I'm feeling so sad."
Sometimes we're aware of our feelings,
we get to the first one, but we don't accept them.
"Oh I shouldn't feel that.
"I don't want to upset people by talking about my pain.
"I don't want to cry in front of anyone
"so what I'm going to do
"is I'm going to push that feeling down."
And there are so many ways to do that.
"I'm going to eat that feeling.
"I'm going to push that feeling down with cake or pizza.
"I'm going to drink that feeling into oblivion.
"I'm going to medicate that feeling and just feel numb.
"I'm going to shop that feeling.
"I'm going to Netflix that feeling."
So when you push the feeling down, it goes,
"Oh, you didn't get me.
"I'm going to have to regroup now
"and come back stronger than ever until you feel me."
So if you are aware of your feeling but you don't accept it,
it doesn't go away, it comes back stronger than ever.
And a lot of people say,
"You know, my dad died and I went straight back to work.
"I just got on with everything
"and I went straight back to the office.
"I didn't even really cry.
"And then three years later, I had some kind of breakdown.
"What was that all about?"
Or they might say, which I hear a lot,
"My partner died and I just carried on
"and I didn't really cry,
"and now I've got this terrible skin condition
"or this awful headache."
Or "I've got this back pain."
And when you track it back, it's unexpressed pain
and it has to come out.
I love this expression,
"The feeling that cannot find its expression in tears
"might cause other organs to weep."
What does that mean?
"The feeling that cannot find its expression in tears
"may cause other organs to weep", it means exactly that.
"I'm feeling grief but I'm pushing it down.
"I'm not going to feel it, and so my body is crying for me.
"I've got conjunctivitis, I've got a weeping sore."
Maybe it's not actual weeping, maybe it's something else.
But I had a girl I worked with who had terrible periods
and she bled all the time.
And when I was working with her, I said,
"I know this sounds really weird, a little bit,
"but I feel like your womb is weeping."
She said, "So do I.
"This happened when my dad died.
"I started to get bleeding all the time."
And she said the classic thing, "I never cried, you know,
"because he wouldn't have wanted that.
"I just got on with it."
And so sometimes, we have afflictions.
We might have runny eyes, runny nose, a constant cold.
We might have headaches, we might have skin conditions,
and often that is because you are not connecting
to your feelings and the feeling has to come out
somewhere else.
You can't stop yourself feeling.
You can push it down, but it comes out somewhere else.
And how do you stop that?
Well, you do the Triple A.
Whatever you're doing in your life,
especially when you have gone through grief,
say to yourself, "What am I feeling right now?
"I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling lost.
"I feel like I want to cry."
And then accept it.
It's okay to cry.
I loved my mom, I can cry.
And articulate it to yourself.
"I really feel like I want to cry."
Then you might go, "Oh you've got this."
You're really in touch with your feelings,
and I say it a lot and forgive me for repeating it,
but you must feel your feelings.
They are the most real thing you have.
They're giving you a message, and when you feel them,
they go away faster.
When you push them away,
they actually come back stronger than ever.
So always remember, feel the feeling until it no longer
requires to be felt.
Now grief has five stages.
The first stage is complete denial and we all feel that.
"I just, I can't believe my partner's dead.
"I keep expecting them to come through the front door.
"I can't part with their possessions.
"I've still got their number on my mobile phone.
"Any minute, I expect to hear them."
And that's normal.
You see, there's stages of grief and you shouldn't rush them
and you shouldn't pretend they're not there.
And the best way to deal with grief is to go,
"Oh, I'm in stage one.
"I'm in denial.
"This is completely normal.
"I keep pretending it hasn't happened.
"I keep imagining any minute, they'll come back.
"I keep thinking 'I wish I could just rewind the last month
"when they were still here.'"
And I lost both my parents, one of my very dear friends,
all in a three month period, so I know what that's like.
I lost my best friend to cancer when she was only 21
and then another friend of mine
died almost at the same time.
I know that feeling.
And then my grandma, who I loved so much,
also died in that same period of time.
Denial is normal.
If you're new to grief and you're in denial, don't fight it.
Don't think you're crazy.
Just accept that is the first part of grief.
The second part of grief is often anger.
Not always but often anger.
Anger at that person for leaving you.
Anger at the world for taking them away.
And again, you have to accept that.
I was working with a girl whose mother had died
and she was so furious.
She'd come to see me, she was really angry with the hospital
that had not helped her mother live and she believed
it contributed to her death.
And I said, "You know, you're in a normal stage of grief.
"Anger is a part of the grieving process.
"Don't fight it, don't deny it.
"Just go, 'I'm feeling angry, it's part of grief'
"and it will go away."
The third stage is the pain, and sometimes these stages
get very mixed up, so although I'm laying them out here,
they don't always come in that order.
Stage three, but it can be stage two, is pain.
Finally feeling the pain.
Crying, feeling immensely sad.
Finding the slightest thing will set you off.
I might get into the terrible pain first,
and then denial, and then anger.
I might get denial first, then anger, then pain.
So there's no set way, but each stage must be mourned.
So you're going to feel denial, completely normal.
You're going to feel anger, even outrage, rage coming out.
When you feel that anger, do not push it down.
Do not medicate it, speak it out.
"I'm so angry with my husband for leaving me."
"I'm so angry that my dad left when I needed him."
"I'm so angry that this has happened."
And then the pain, and again, the pain is horrible
but it gets better.
Waves of pain will hit you, but then they'll recede
and then they'll come less and less.
And then when that happens, you go on to the next stage,
which is acceptance.
You start to accept what's happened.
You start to believe, "Okay, I can be happy again."
And then you finally go into moving on.
And when people come to see me and say,
"You know, my child died, my only child."
I never go, "Well, you'll get over it"
because that's not true.
I tell them the truth.
"Look, your life will never be quite the same again,
"but you also have a good life.
"You will still have moments of happiness,
"but it won't be the same."
It can't be the same,
but that doesn't mean you can't get over it.
So if you're going through grief,
if you know anyone in your life who's going through grief,
don't go around and go, "Look, come on.
"It's been six weeks, snap out of it.
"This isn't fair for other people.
"You have to get over it now."
Shakespeare said something like,
"grief is the enemy of the dead
"but excessive mourning is the enemy of the living."
And he knew what he was talking about.
So when you mourn excessively, that's not good.
But if you can accept these stages, accept,
"I'm going to feel denial.
"I'm going to keep imagining,
"'Oh I picked up the phone to ring my mum
"'and I suddenly forgot for one minute
"'that she's no longer here.'"
You're going to feel anger.
You're going to feel tremendous sadness
and a need to cry, and you should cry.
Never stop yourself crying.
I'm a great believer that where tears flow,
energy and healing begins.
And then you're going to come into acceptance
and finally, you're going to come into moving on.
And then you may feel able to part with their stuff,
to take their number out of your phone.
When my beautiful friend died, I had her face
on my Facebook page for about a year
and I didn't think I would ever take that down.
And then one of my staff said,
"We've got to put a different picture up now
"because we've got to advertise the course."
And so I took that picture down, but I was ready then.
I'd had it there for a year, I looked at her.
We often have this feeling,
"If I forget the person, I'm betraying them."
When my lovely friend at college died of cancer
and she was 21 and I started to laugh, I thought,
"Oh my God, I feel so bad.
"I've just been out and had fun.
"I feel disloyal to my friend.
"I shouldn't be laughing."
But that's not true.
That's the "enemy of the living" piece.
So accept the five stages, in any order.
Denial, anger, pain, acceptance, moving on.
Whatever feelings you are feeling, feel those feelings
until they no longer need to be felt
and please don't even try to drink those feelings away,
to push them down with food,
to do anything but not feel.
You're a human being.
Your feelings are part of you.
I do understand sometimes when something so bad happens
that people say,
"I just had to take medication to feel numb to get over it."
But when you come off the medication,
you still have to feel those feelings.
I hope that helps you, and please remember,
it's okay to cry.
Crying is a good thing.
And if you're going through grief,
do not go through it alone.
If you feel, "I can't burden my friends anymore
"with the story of losing my child."
Or, "People now cross the road
"because they don't even know how to deal with me."
That's not right, but there are many many support groups.
You can always find someone who will listen to you
and you need to be heard.
So if you feel that you cannot share your grief
with your family, and that happens a lot with parents.
Each one tries to prop the other up.
"I don't want them to see I'm upset.
"I'm going to hide that.
"I've got to be strong for my partner.
"I've got to be strong for my children."
But if you need someone,
there are lots of support groups out there
who'll listen to you.
So I really hope that helps you accept that grief is normal.
Remember the significance of an event comes down
to how effectively you mourn it.
If you love someone, then you're supposed to feel sad.
You're supposed to cry.
When my mum died, I used to hear that Abba song
all the time, 'Super Trooper', and so many songs
that she loved, and I went out and bought the flowers
on the first Mother's Day without her, the first birthday,
the first Christmas, and same thing with my father.
But now, I'm okay.
It was hard, and now it's okay.
I just feel so glad I had them for such a long time,
I was so lucky.
When my friend died, that was much harder
because she was young, but I still think I'm glad I had her
and now I can talk about her without crying,
without welling up.
In the beginning, every time someone said her name,
my chin would wobble, my eyes would fill with tears,
my voice would break and I couldn't even say her name.
And now I can say her name, I can look at her picture.
The other day, she came up in a picture and I go,
"You silly girl, why aren't you still here with us?"
But I didn't cry because I felt those feelings
and now I'm okay, and I promise you, you can be too.
So there are a lot of people here for you,
you don't have to be alone.
Grief is a stage.
Just like that song, "You can't hurry love",
you can't hurry grief, but you can see it as a process.
Go through it and you'll get through it,
you'll get past it.
Your life may not ever be the same,
but you can still have a great life where you laugh,
you smile, you find love again.
I worked with a beautiful girl and her husband died
and all her friends kept saying to her,
"You'll find someone else, you'll find someone else."
She said, "I'm so angry", there's the anger.
"How dare they say that to me, I'll find someone else.
"Don't they understand how much I loved him,
"how much he loved me?"
And he was young.
Actually what happened to her, amazingly,
was she did find someone else.
She got married within a year, and I said,
"You know, when people say mean things
"or hurtful things or stupid things,
"try to remember what they mean, not what they say.
"When your friends say to you, 'You'll find someone else',
"what they mean is, 'You're so lovable,
"'you had a template for love
"'and because you had this template for love,
"'you will recreate it'.
"They didn't say, 'Oh, you'll get over him.
"'You'll forget about him.
"'You'll move on, he'll just be history.
"'You'll replace him.'"
That's what she heard.
What they said was,
"You are so lovable, you'll find someone else."
And she did.
And I was in Jamaica a couple of years ago
and this girl knocked on my door in the middle of the night
and said, "My husband's just died."
I was at a convention.
She was like, "I don't know what to do, I'm devastated."
And I sat her down and I talked to her and I said,
"It sounds like you had a beautiful relationship."
"We did."
I said, "You know what?
"You're going to find someone else.
"I know that's a crazy thing to say
"right in the middle of this grief
"because you loved your husband and he loved you
"and he loved your children.
"But the love you had means that one day, when you're ready,
"you will have great love again
"because you've got a template in you for great love again.
"You're going to mourn him,
"you're going to go through these stages,
"it's going to be painful and sad.
"But one day, you'll get past it,
"and if you go through these stages the way I recommend,
"you'll get past it quicker."
And I've seen her many times.
I saw her two weeks ago with her new guy.
She said, "You were the only one who told me that,
"that I would find love again
"if I went through these stages."
And she said, "And I love two men.
"I love my husband who died, and I love this new man."
And another of my clients
said the same thing at her wedding.
She said, "One of the reasons I love this man so much
"is that he allows me to talk about my dead husband.
"He allows me to feel all my feelings of grief.
"He doesn't fel threatened."
And then a woman I worked with, she married someone
whose wife had died and he had children,
and they created a room where they had all the pictures
of the first wife, so the children could go there
and she could go there, and she was able to understand
that she wasn't replacing his first wife
and he could understand that they moved on.
They moved on because they all understood their feelings,
accepted them, articulated or verbalized them
and didn't try to rush grief.
I hope that helps you.
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