Using the 5 stages of grief to conquer chronic stress

Grief and stress are part of the human condition. We don’t need to live very long before we experience either one. What’s interesting is the recovery process for each can be remarkably similar. Chronic long term stress can feel remarkably like grief. Our Work IN today is a look at how we can use the 5 stages of grief as a framework to better understand and conquer chronic stress for long term resilience. 

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I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a resilience coach and fit-preneur offering an authentic, actionable realistic approach to personal and professional balance for coaches in any format.

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Transcript

Using the 5 stages of grief as a framework to understand and conquer chronic stress

Grief and stress are part of the human condition. We don’t need to live very long before we experience either one. What’s interesting is the recovery process for each can be remarkably similar. Chronic long term stress can feel remarkably like grief. Our Work IN today is a look at how we can use the 5 stages of grief as a framework to better understand and conquer chronic stress for long term resilience. 

In my own trauma release process using trauma release exercise there was a lot of grief that came out. It was the strangest sensation to feel sadness in my bones. Particularly my arm bones and my right shoulder. Trauma release is a body process from David Berceli, that allows the body to shake, tremor, releasing deep tension from the muscles, joints, connective tissues. Sometimes not always, in this process stories and memories can come up in the mind. Sometimes it is emotional memories or  impressions of memories. That is after all how the brain creates meaning from our experiences and makes it easier to keep us safe.

For me as I progressed through my practice, what started as physical tremor only, slowly opened up, emotional tremors as well. There were a few explicit memories and stories of things that I had forgotten that happened to me in the past that came up along with emotions but the more curious parts were the emotions that were literally shaking out of me that seemed unconnected with any one particular event. 

I suspect that they were the result of many events, many ways that I dealt with things at the time.  In trauma release the story isn’t the important part because chronic stress isn’t rooted in the cognitive story or in our rational thinking brain. It’s rooted in the body. And so my body felt like it was grieving. 

People navigate both grief and stress in many different ways. Both states exist on a kind of spectrum of intensity and while with grief and loss there is an expectation that we will at some point move through it and move on there doesn’t seem to be the same social understanding when it comes to chronic  stress. In fact we’re typically socialized into some level of culturally acceptable stress without our permission or any kind of understanding of what healthy self regulation looks like. We’re taught from a very young age to override the messages our body sends us in favor of conventional norms in order to fit in. Be nice, be polite, don’t brag, don’t stand out, be humble, don’t be rude, work hard, put others before you, etc. 

It’s that culturally acceptable disconnection between mind and body that leads to suffering and grief. It’s not too big of a leap that at some point the body would also start to grieve. So why not use what we know about grief to help us make our way back to who we’re really supposed to be without the conventional social masks.

5 stages of grief

Most of us have some kind of understanding about the 5 stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  As with many things like this it’s easy to take it at face value as a linear process and maybe for some it is but I doubt that there are any rules about the order or intensity of any of these. I know I have bounced back and forth between a few in my day. I’m sure you have too.

Chronic stress follows these stages as well. With some subtle differences in how they show up.

Denial -

I’m not stressed. I hear this from time to time. I was one of the people who said it at one time. When we believe in our social conditioning and conventional rules about who we are and how we’re supposed to behave in this crazy modern world, the over committed perfectionist, that overwhelming intensity that we live in feels normal. We might even start to like it. To strive for those stress chemicals and the self righteous victimhood high that they come with. After all, it’s all we’ve known. It’s how we define ourselves from the ground up. 

Acknowledging that stress levels are too high can seem like weakness. And especially for women we are expected to keep our shit together denying ourselves in favor of the good of everyone else. We’re always last on the list. When time is short we are the one that gets cut. We become really good at suffering.

Our rational mind can deny all it wants but the body never will. 

Responding to this denial takes directed attention and awareness. An acknowledgment that hey, I don’t like this feeling all the time and I want something better. I deserve to feel better. Even when we don’t know how to make it happen right away. Nothing can change until we pay attention to how we feel in the body, become aware of what is happening and then we can look for ways to change it.

Anger -

In the stages of stress can be actual outright anger and emotional dysregulation. This is a nervous system response that comes directly from the sympathetic fight or flight activation. When we are very stressed our temper gets very short. But anger is a surface emotion. It’s actually the most socially acceptable emotion to show under stress because we can justify it. There can be a lot of other emotions underneath it. Hurt, shame, guilt, grief and my personal favorite,  resentment. This particular stage is where we start to see what Martha Beck Author of Finding Your Own North Star calls the essential self vs social self. These underlying emotions like resentment are coming from our essential self. The part of us that has been suppressed and repressed and overridden in favor of the social self for most of our lives. The rational part of the brain that keeps us out of jail. 

So where anger in grief is an often externalized anger at injustice or unfairness or whatever, in stress this kind of anger can be deeply self directed. It is an internal temper tantrum that bubbles up onto the surface and bleeds out all over our lives. Sadly when we live unexamined lives it can be mistaken for part of our personality.

Responding to stress and anger requires curiosity and courage to actually acknowledge what we really want and don’t want to feel, be, do and have. Coming to a compromise that includes both selves and boundary setting so both selves, social and essential, get what they want.

Bargaining -

 In grief we tend to try to bargain with god. Promising that we’ll change in return for a different outcome. Bargaining under stress is more subtle. We say things like I just have to make it till June then I’ll get a break, take a vacation, or the ever elusive after this project “things will calm down” But months come and go and nothing calms down because we haven’t struck a bargain with the person who counts. That’s our essential self. Perfectionism/people pleasing and temporary external regulation like eating our feelings, drinking or drug use can drive a wedge deeper between the body and the mind,and simply override the nervous system which is exactly the opposite of what we really want to do.

Responding in this stage, along with building awareness, setting boundaries  requires us to repair that internal relationship between the body and mind. To reconnect and find ways to be present in the body without judgment, comfortable in our own skin. To begin to love who we are- including the parts we don’t like. Reframing how and why we do the things we do, maybe finding permission (from ourselves) to change the things we do, actually becoming the person we need to be and ultimately want to be, in order to take care of ourselves, and actually taking care of ourselves, Learning what that means for us,  lets the body start to trust the mind and vice versa.

It’s a big experiential and experimental learning process. But it’s worth it.

Depression/ Anxiety -

This stage can be extraordinarily debilitating. Many of us blow past the first 3 stages and end up here in either depression or anxiety or both before we realize there’s a problem.  Depression and anxiety are energetically  2 sides of the same coin. They are nervous system responses on the polyvagal chart that occur in a sympathetic state and in the freeze state. Essentially we get stuck in responses (feelings in the body) that don’t match the environment we’re in. Body and mind become disconnected. 

If you find yourself here, you aren’t alone. I think most modern adults have suffered with depression and or anxiety at some point in their lives whether they choose to acknowledge it or not. I just want to say that seeking professional help is always a good idea. I am not a therapist, I am a bodyworker. And as such I will remind us all that we can’t have a body without a mind and we aren’t a mind without our body. There is a connection between the two and we can optimize it. Please don’t hesitate to seek out a mental professional for help if you reach this stage and are overwhelmed.

Along with mental health support or if your experience doesn’t seem to rise to the level of a clinical diagnosis there is no harm in exploring some mind body/ body mind integration exercises that build awareness and reset the nervous system response. Those exercises might look like trauma release or trauma release yoga with a trained provider, or maybe tapping or breathwork, mood shifting meditations and mindfulness practices or one of my newest approaches for myself, journaling Byron Katy’s “The Work” questions to reframe some of those habitual thought triggers. 

Certain thoughts and thought patterns that we carry around for a lifetime can actually trigger anxiety and panic attacks. Martha Beck would say that might be our essential selves saying no to a particular thought or activity or environment. Because let's face it we spend most of our lives overriding what we really want to do in favor of what’s socially acceptable. And then wonder why we feel exhausted, sick and resentful all the time. Well our true self can only take so much before she lashes out.  Can we really blame her? I think not.

Those Byron Katy questions are 

Is that thought true?

Can you know it’s absolutely true?

What happens (how do you react) when you believe it?

Who are you without that thought?

Answer those questions honestly, sit with the feelings they inspire and then create a new replacement thought that is the exact opposite of it. Then use that new thought,  bring it up everytime the old thought shows itself.

Acceptance and Reconnection or - Collapse & Burnout 

The final stage of grief is acceptance. When we grieve a loss this is important because what we have lost may never be coming back. In the stages of stress though this stage is a bit different. Here we find a fork in the road. One fork takes us back to denial. Eventually leading to collapse or in modern language burnout. It shows up physically in all kinds of illnesses because long term chronic stress depresses our immune system. 

The other fork is acceptance in that we are accepting that we and our body need something different.An acknowledge that we can’t live like this anymore.

When we do the work to find a new connection between the mind and body, finding a compromise between our social self and our essential self there is a level of surrender on an energetic level that allows us to make different choices that are in alignment with who we are and how we want to feel. 

Ideally the essential self + social self reach an agreement that makes both sides happy and fulfilled. 

I’m not sure anyone else has drawn the connection between grief and chronic stress. I just know that it has shown up that way in my own experience. I see a lot of faces of grief in both my trauma release and yoga students. We’re socialized out of feeling powerful emotions like grief for “too long” as if it’s shameful and weak and those are the same kinds of social blocks that keep people stuck in the “hair on fire” stress state so popular in modern culture.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There is a healthy balance. We can learn or relearn resilience through movement. The body is a great teacher.

Thanks for listening!   

 If you're looking for ways to handle the effects of stress, physically, mentally and emotionally through the body head over to savagegracecoaching.com/theworkin you’ll find all the show notes for this and other episodes plus lots of free resources. And if you’re in a place where you are ready for more and you live in the Dayton Ohio area I’m taking private clients for trauma informed yoga and trauma release exercise in person and online. So you can book a discovery call and we can have a real life conversation. And of course I’d be ever so grateful if you would take a moment to like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening. 

Thanks again everyone and as always stop working out and start working IN.   

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