Welcome And Introducing Rachel

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Philosophy of Life podcast. Today, I'm honored to be joined by Rachel S. Hesling. Rachel has been fascinated by the psychology of identity and human experience for over 40 years. She is the author of Navigating Life: Eight Different Strategies to Guide Your Way and Rituals of Release. How to make room for your new life, both available in multiple languages. Her newest book, are meant to be broken. Explores one of the most universal and most difficult parts of being human. She is also the speaker behind the TEDx talk A Defense of Victim Mentality, where she invites us to rethink condemnation and replace it with compassion. Without further ado, let's begin.

Why She Wrote A Grief Book

SPEAKER_00 1:21

I am delighted to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Today we want to talk about your upcoming book. It is a fascinating title. Hearts are not meant to be broken. And they I think it's a new approach. The subtitle is a new approach of grief. Is that correct, the title?

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Actually, the title is Hearts Are Meant to Be Broken. A new approach to grief.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Okay. I'm looking forward to this for this conversation. And to begin, what inspired you to write this book?

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Oh my goodness. My my background is psychology. My dad's a clinical psychologist, and one of the ways that he learned things when he was a grad student and newly licensed is he would come home and teach them to me. This meant that I was introduced to things like parts work and uh neurolinguistic programming when I was nine. This makes for a really unusual way of looking at the world. I was constantly evaluating and looking at what I was doing, why I was doing it, why were people doing things differently? And I was always curious, especially when I would do things that didn't seem to be in my best interests, but it really instilled that desire to understand. Some years back, I had met someone who I thought was really neat. He was a musician, and I was really looking forward to bringing my parents and my husband to go to his concerts, and he was killed. He died very suddenly under really difficult circumstances, and I was devastated, but I was also confused. Because the truth is I had only met him once. It wasn't even that, I mean, some of it was I didn't know why I was grieving, but it's like I didn't have a right. I wanted to understand why. What was it that I was actually grieving? And I realized it was everything that I thought might happen. I was hoping to see him again. I expected to be able to share his music with others. I thought that our meeting was the beginning of a friendship that never happened. This was back in 2015. I started writing a book back then, but there was only so much I could write at the time. Some of it I just didn't have the it wasn't like sinking in right. A lot of it is just there were some things I hadn't experienced. Then we had the pandemic, which everything shut down and so much was torn away. And I started writing again, but it was still not quite there. And then in August of 22, my husband died, and all of a sudden I had all this personal experience to process. It has taken me a few years of going through and finding out what it's like on the inside to navigate the loss, to really understand what it is that I have lost, and try to build anew. It's been percolating for a very long time, but looking at what's going on in the world right now, it really feels like this is the time. This is something the world needs.

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Yeah. Um it it makes me wonder because um I think we we also live in a world that um tries to really, really prevent us from pain, right? I think billions of dollars are spent every year to keep us from pain and you know, get through it kind of thing, and or almost like rush through it, you know, get over it. Um what would you say uh to that about grief?

SPEAKER_00 5:48

I think there are two things that show up, especially on a societal level. On an individual level, it makes sense that we would want to avoid pain because we associate pain with damage. It's like the fires hurt, you don't the fire hurts, you don't want to touch it because you don't want to get burnt. However, a lot of the time the pain that we are experiencing is telling us the damage has already been done.

SPEAKER_02 6:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

It's not necessarily, it's like just because we're ignoring the hurt doesn't mean there isn't damage. And by ignoring the hurt, we can actually cause

Why We Try To Avoid Pain

SPEAKER_00 6:30

damage. If we feel the pain from the fire and we don't react to it, we will get burned. Another thing on a societal level, which is associated with that, the well, you shouldn't feel that you should just like pick up and move on and get over it and just be happy, is that pain is vulnerable. Allowing yourself to feel hurt can be scary because it is opening us ourselves up. You know, it's almost like exposing ourselves. And that's really scary because we don't know whether we might be damaged further because of that.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

So uh the the inspiration I understand and it's perfectly I know where why are you coming writing this about about this book or write this book. But what the message is to bring them to third party or to other other people who wants to read this book.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

The primary message of the book is that grief is not something to be avoided or drowned in or even gotten through, but it is actually an intrinsic part of being human. I believe grief has a purpose. If you look at people, we've got two different things that are pulling at us. One of them is that in order to really thrive, we need to have something we're moving towards. We need to be inspired, we need to dream, we have to have that future pulling us forward. And yet, on the other side, that doesn't always happen. People die, plans fall through, the company downsizes, there's a hurricane, and the entire block is wiped out. Things happen that are part of life because life is uncertain. There are different ways that people can respond to this dichotomy. They can pretend it doesn't hurt when they lose things and just push forward. They can decide, no, I'm not going to push forward because it hurts too much and I don't want to lose anything. But neither of these are really healthy. I think we need to have some sort of process to reconcile these two things in our lives. And the good news is I believe we do have a process, and that process is grief. The purpose of grief is to allow us to acknowledge that that which we have lost has meaning. It matters, and it is okay to move on. We integrate that loss into who we are. It gives a richness to life. In some ways, it actually deepens the meaning of our aspirations because they can be so fleeting. I remember my husband and I took our biological and our adopted kids to Hawaii. Our adopted kid came to us right before the pandemic, and there were a whole lot of things that my husband wanted to do with him that we couldn't because of the shutdown. Now, the kids had graduated high school, and our adopted kid had enlisted in the army, so we were trying to get as many things as possible done during the summer. And there was a moment where the kids were each doing their own things, and my husband and I went off by ourselves, kind of running errands, kind of just seeing where the day took us. And I remember driving down this road along the coast of Kona and looking at the ocean, and the lava was stark but so beautiful. And we were listening to a song by a band called Rush. And it was saying, Time stand still. And the whole part, the whole point of the song is realizing we rushed through our lives, never really seeing things because we're so

Grief As A Human Process

SPEAKER_00 11:30

busy doing. And it reminded me, I wanted to soak up this moment. Just being in this car, in this beautiful place with my husband, not really doing anything important, but just being together. And I wanted to hold on to that. Six weeks later, he was gone. The phrase life is short. It can be used as a cliche. But it is true. What can we do to deepen our experience of every moment that we are gifted in this life? That's a question that I try to answer every day.

SPEAKER_02 12:37

Yeah, so what what I'm hearing also in in what you've just talked about is that we although we do associate grief with with death, um, it isn't always the case, right? So you were experiencing a couple of things. The kids were leaving, you know, um obviously you had no idea what was gonna happen six weeks later, when you were in the car listening to the song, you know, trying to kind of live in the more moment. Um so there are all kinds of different grief. Can you talk a little bit more about that and then possibly the stages of grief and whether they apply equally to those different types of grief?

SPEAKER_00 13:31

I've got another really personal one. I mentioned we've got the biological kid and the adopted one. My husband and I had wanted lots of kids, and after I gave birth, I hemorrhaged. I had so much grief attached to knowing I would never again create life. In a way, I was grieving the death of children that would never be. Yeah. Now, as it was, in addition to the adopted kid, uh, we've got like three more bonus ones that we just kind of took under our wing because they needed more support than their families of origin could give them. And it's been wonderful. And if I had allowed myself to be stuck in the idea that parenthood only mattered if it were biological, I would have missed out on the joy that these kids bring me. Yeah, that's right. And that's that's like uh the one that really comes to mind. As far as the stages of grief, I actually like talk referring to them as different expressions of grief because they're not really chronological. But it's interesting when you look at it, four out of the five expressions, just to go over talk, I'm assuming we're talking about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's um denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and uh acceptance. It's like four of the five are about avoiding grief. They're all different ways of refusing to acknowledge that things have changed. Having said that, I believe this paradigm can be very useful in normalizing different people's reactions. A lot of what gets us stuck in grief is thinking that we shouldn't feel what we feel or that we're doing it wrong, or those different types of things. By looking at, here are all these different ways that people respond, it helps us realize: you know what, there is no right way to grieve. Everybody goes through so many different experiences. Everybody has their own way of dealing with things. There are some people that feel guilty because they aren't grieving. And that itself isn't necessarily a problem. If you think if you look at my proposal, that the purpose of grief is to help us recognize, process, and integrate our losses so that we can move forward and create a

Grief Beyond Death And Loss

SPEAKER_00 16:30

new future. If you lose something that wasn't actually intrinsically tied into your pictures of your future, you don't really need to grieve. I find this comes up a lot when people feel guilty because they're not sad enough because somebody dies, as if they're somehow devaluing the person. But that's not how it works. People's value is intrinsic. They are who they are. Each of us has humanity, and that is valued in and of itself. Other people's reaction to their humanity is about the other people, not about them. I mean, I talk about in the book when my grandma passed, I was sad, and I did have moments of grief, but it was mostly love. I was so, I mean, the experience was wonderful, and I was so grateful for the time we had together that I'll be honest, I had a bigger experience of grief when I thought about selling her house. Now that was another one of the ones that really confused me, and I had to look into. But that's an example of how looking at what it is we are actually grieving says a lot more about the stories than what other things we might think.

SPEAKER_01 18:44

So is a grief then simply a prize we pay for love?

SPEAKER_00 18:56

In a lot of ways, yes, it it is. It is intrinsically linked. One of my favorite quotes from Khalil Gabron is the deeper that sorrow carves into my soul, the greater my capacity for joy. If you love deeply, the odds are very good that you will lose that love at some point, or lose what you love. The love itself is eternal. In fact, I had forgotten about this. When my biological child was about three, they started having worries about death and if something would happen to me. A lot of parents say things like, I will always be there. I did not want to make promises I could not keep. There are so many things we don't have control over. But what I did tell them is that regardless of what might or might not happen, I would always love them. And they would always be loved. And yes, in a way, grief is the price we pay for pain. I don't when people talk about healing and the healing journey and healing from loss, it's not like it goes back to normal. I mean, in some cases, depending on what the loss is, it's possible that what comes out of it is even more expansive than what was before. I mean, we talk about post-traumatic growth. But that doesn't mean that the loss never happened or that it goes away. Instead, it becomes woven into who we are. Like I often say, if we think of ourselves as trees, our dreams are our branches reaching to the sky, but it's our sorrows that give us roots. And we need both. It's we don't want to get rid of the grief, and we don't want to pretend the loss never happened, but we can live our lives as if our future is larger than our past and continue to live and grow and evolve and move forward. I not even in spite of, but because of our losses. When we know we can survive our hearts being broken, it is easier to live.

SPEAKER_02 22:01

Yeah. Do you think you can walk us through how letting ourselves be completely altered by a loss actually makes us stronger and more resilient rather than weaker?

SPEAKER_00 22:19

Oh my goodness. A lot of it has to do with acknowledging the truth of loss. If we put a lot of energy into avoiding loss, into pretending that it won't happen, that is taking energy away from our ability to live. I believe that once we make our peace with a possibility, it no longer has power over us. When we say, yeah, I don't want this thing to happen, but it could, then we can make choices from possibility. I went through this with my husband. I think one of the reasons why it may have been easier for me to move through the grief process than a lot of people is because on some level I had made my peace with the possibility that I might lose him early. Did I want to? No. Would I rather

Love, Roots, And Resilience

SPEAKER_00 23:30

he were still here? Yes. But it was things like he never went to the doctor to have the moles on his back checked. And even though I kept bugging him about it, he refused. So I thought, well, maybe he will get melanoma. Maybe something will happen. He was also, he was the type of person who was kind of a white knight. He intrinsically had to help others. And I could envision a situation where something was happening and he stepped in to protect someone and ended up sacrificing himself instead. I spent a lot of preemptive tears crying over that. But once I accepted, yeah, it could happen. I was filled with a sense of I think serenity. I felt stronger because I wasn't avoiding it. When we avoid things, they seem so much bigger than they actually are. We give them so much weight. This doesn't mean that the grief process was easy. We had just gotten to a point where, okay, the kids are moving out, we've started dating and dating again, and then he drops dead of a heart attack. I think that was rude. That was just not not what I wanted. And it was so unfair. And it's what happened. Going back to my childhood and the learning to be watching things and being curious, this book that's going to be coming out, it's kind of a lifeline for me. The reason is because as I was going through all this, I was looking at what I was doing. I was making note of it. And you know there's actually a sixth stage of grief that David Kessler, who was the the partner in of Kubler Ross doing this, came out with another way that deal people deal with grief called making meaning. If there were a way that I could transmute my own pain, my own journey into something that could help others with theirs, that in a way gave my husband's death more meaning. And that was one of the ways that I helped process my own grief.

SPEAKER_01 26:44

But grief is difficult. When I remember when I lost my dog, I was broken. I was broken deeply. It took me still broken, to be honest. It's two years past. But grief is difficult to pass on. And um but again, um kinda bring wisdom to you that is not replaceable with anything else. And that is because of you love so much a dog or something or someone, that wisdom you gather through all these years sticks with you somehow. And it's just it changes you. It changes you fundamentally.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

Oh yes. There's a poignancy to it. This ache that lives inside you and becomes part of who you are.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

Yes. So the philosopher saying that that suffering could help you gather more wisdom. Do you think is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 27:55

It can help you find your way to wisdom. I don't think some of it is also differentiating between pain versus suffering. Pain is incredibly valuable. I mentioned as it's a gives us information, tells us when something is when we're hurt, something's hurt. Suffering can be a tool for gaining wisdom. Unfortunately, some people either don't know how to get out of it once they've gained the wisdom, or they're afraid of. It's like we have so many stories. The stories around suffering. There is the idea of noble suffering, where the suffering becomes an end unto itself instead of a process to help us evolve. We can bring unnecessary suffering when we get caught up in the shoulds of a situation. This is what I was talking about earlier, where people are afraid, am I doing it wrong? I shouldn't be feeling this, I should be feeling something different. The problem with shoulds is they are a denial of reality. We can have desires and wants and preferences, but at the point we say should, we're blocking ourselves off from the flow of life. And I think a lot of suffering is when we're blocked from the flow of life. If we can recognize how much of the suffering is self-induced and learn to move our way through and out of it, then yes, the suffering can bring great wisdom. But I don't think it's a given.

SPEAKER_02 29:57

Yeah, and I think maybe a lot of people actually run away from that. You know, we we um it, you know, we they they run away from the reality of of the suffering, whether it's grief or or something else, just any sort of pain. Yeah, it hurts. Yeah, absolutely. And but would you agree that it it therefore shrinks our ability to then experience joy? Because in order for us to reach joy, we'd have to go through the suffering or through the grief.

SPEAKER_00 30:33

Yeah, it's like when you start to dampen one, it dampens the other. And I I

Pain Versus Suffering And Joy

SPEAKER_00 30:40

have been guilty of this myself. Often it's easier to seek distraction and not go there. What I've noticed for myself, one of the biggest things that I shy away from are when I'm afraid that the pain is indicative of something that is wrong with me. Where I have failed, where I'm not capable of doing something, where I have caused harm to others. These are situations that are very difficult to face because they force me to face myself.

SPEAKER_02 31:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:29

And yeah, it's um not fun. But I don't know that I mean, I I'm a big advocate of fun. I believe that joy is a wonderful compass for deciding how to live your life. And like we mentioned earlier, if you try to ignore the other side of the pendulum, eventually everything just goes flat.

SPEAKER_01 31:59

Rachel, I know you study a lot, uh, maybe more than 40 years, and I'm guessing a lot more. What idea completely changed your mind?

SPEAKER_00 32:10

Oh my goodness. Um a pivotal thing. Um do you do you have like a a specific area? Because I have had so many oh, I didn't think about that over the course of my life.

SPEAKER_01 32:30

Well, um for me it happened actually a lot. A few times. Um last ten years um I changed completely. I was thinking I was hurt. And I was thinking somebody else outside of me hurt me, heard my future, heard what happened to me. And then I came to the conclusion it wasn't outside me, it was me all along. So that realization of that was not outside, that was me, it changed me completely. And that was actually philosophy. I was reading philosophy and then understood what happened. Oh, that's not true. It's not psychology, I should have started psychology first and then philosophy. This is actually my next question to you. What what do you think? Um uh it's it's I know the psychology is is and I didn't even explain it to the first person. Let's let's go back to the my first question. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

So the I think the idea that had one of the biggest impacts on my life after I became an adult was realizing that what I do isn't as important as who I am. I had been very stuck on competence and trying to prove to people that I could do things and getting them to see me a certain way. And some things were happening. It was actually my husband that helped me understand this. I have a lot of what I call chameleon energy. It is very easy for me to match other people. It is easy for me to act in ways that other people expect. In some ways, this is excellent for building rapport and relationships, but it also made it difficult sometimes figuring out where they ended and I began. When I met my husband, it was very difficult for me because I couldn't figure out who he wanted me to be or how he wanted me to act. And long story short, there came a point when I realized the reason that I couldn't figure out who he wanted me to act like or be like is because he wanted me to be myself. And that was such a foreign concept to me. It's like, what do you mean you just like me for me? I said, But it's really I had not realized how much of my life I'd been pouring into being who everybody else wanted me to be. And he encouraged me to be me. And it was huge. That is huge. You were talking about philosophy versus psychology? Is that the Yes.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

I would love to know what do you think about it as a psychology or philosophy?

SPEAKER_00 35:40

One of my very like foundational premises that comes under the heading of philosophy is I believe that as human beings, we are not capable of fully comprehending capital T truth. It's just too complex. There are too many factors at play. Therefore, I choose to believe things which are consistent, which match my other observations, and which are useful. Does believing this get me where I want to go?

Identity, Chameleon Energy, And Truth

SPEAKER_00 36:20

I use psychology as a language for how people figure stuff out in their heads and why people do what they do, with the understanding that it's a model. It's not truth. And there are a multitude of models. Back to the philosophy thing, all models are wrong, but some of them are useful. At the point that a model conflicts with you lived experience, it's no longer useful. So either I set it aside because it may be useful for other people, or how do I change it so that it helps me move forward? Does that answer the question? Yes. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 37:15

Yeah, I actually want to go back to what you were saying about uh the chameleon energy uh that you mentioned. Um, I think a lot of people also uh grieve or feel guilty for not grieving um based on what other people think they should grieve like. Um or it's almost like a competition, right? Um, because oh, so and so is grieving a lot more than I am, and so you know, there's guilt, and and what will they think of me if I don't grieve the way they do, or to the extent um that they do? Um what do you think about that? Like that energy. I think because it I think it exists in a lot more people than we think and in ourselves too, right? Um we match that energy even in grief.

SPEAKER_00 38:09

Yeah, it it is definitely related to what I was referring to. The the chameleon energy, people have it in different levels, but part of being human includes the fact that we're social. We instinctively, speaking in very broad terms, measure and match ourselves to groups because that's how we've evolved. There is safety in numbers. You want to belong, you want to be part of the community. Where it becomes less useful is when, like you said, it becomes almost like performative, where we're pretending to or thinking we should do what others are doing, even though it's not our authentic experience. This can actually swing different ways. Some people respond by pretending that they're more invested or they're they're more grieving. Some start blaming other people for grieving too much or too little. Instead of taking responsibility for their own experience, they this actually goes back to um what you were talking about of blaming other people for feeling hurt, where we blame other people for making us feel guilty because we're not responding the same way that they are, even though they have their response and we have our response. And sometimes it's okay if they're different. We're not really trained in that though.

SPEAKER_02 39:56

Yeah. What me what do you think makes people different? What makes them grieve differently? Why does somebody grieve in one way and more or less, and then someone in another way?

SPEAKER_00 40:08

There are so many factors. Some of it is where we are wired in different ways. Uh the Myers-Briggs typologies have gotten a lot of bad press because people were using them prescriptively. It's like if you answer these questions, then you are this type of person, which when they're used that way, yeah, not very useful. The way that what I've learned from it is that people do have some level of wiring that has different set points. Some people are intrinsically more drawn to wanting to finish things. Some people like things open-ended, they like exploring. We're learning so much more about neurodivergence that I sometimes wonder if we're all neurodivergent from one level or another. We just don't realize it because of the way things are grouped and we're all good at blending in. There's also the nurture factor. What went on in your life? What have your relationships been like? What traumas did your grandparents experience that affected your parents that affected how they raised you? What is going on in society that may not feel safe? Who do you identify with and model yourself after? And what is it about those people that you want to emulate? There are so many different factors. I mean, I've got, here's one that's wild. For me, there are environmental factors because I have sensitivities to things that a lot of people don't have. Growing up, if I were expole exposed to mold, I would start crying. Everything would just be awful. And I'd have this deep emotional reaction to mold. And that's just it that also made for an interesting childhood. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:17

So we're coming to our closing question. So I would like to know what do you hope that reader could understand the grief

Why Everyone Grieves Differently

SPEAKER_01 42:30

the way the society gets it wrong.

SPEAKER_00 42:36

I want the readers to come away from the book feeling encouraged, knowing that they are stronger than they realize, that they do have a future, that there is nothing wrong with them for how they are dealing with loss, that it's all part of life, and that they are so much more resilient than they give themselves credit for.

SPEAKER_02 43:18

Yeah, me too. I'm um I can't wait. Thank you, Rachel. It's been wonderful speaking with you. And um, I know that the listeners are also gonna agree that it just from just listening to your perspective, it does open up a lot of things and you know, it makes me wonder about a lot of things. It's I know this is something I'm gonna keep thinking about. So uh thank you for that. Uh, we really, really enjoyed having you.

SPEAKER_00 43:46

Thank you so much for inviting me. I I have enjoyed this immensely as well.

SPEAKER_02 43:52

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 44:02

Rachel, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. This has been a thoughtful and meaningful conversation. I think one of the biggest takeaways is that grief isn't something we need to avoid or fix. It's something we can learn to understand and move through with compassion. Thank you again for joining us and for sharing the ideas behind Hearts Are Meant to Be Broken. A new approach to grief. I wish you great success with the book and I hope it reaches everyone who needs it. And to all of our listeners, thank you for spending this time with us. Even though you found this conversation valuable, please consider subscribing. Sharing it with someone who may benefit from it and leaving us a review. It really helps us continue bringing thoughtful conversations to you. Life doesn't ask whether we're ready for loss, it simply places it in our path. The real question is not whether grief will visit us. It will. The question is what kind of person will we become because of it? That's something worth thinking about.