Heart of Relationships: Grief

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

This podcast is brought to you by Sage Hill, a social impact organization. Our mission is to help people be who they're made to be so that they can do what they're made to do. Find more resources to live fully, love deeply, and lead well at sagehillresources.com. Literally, you and I have a need to grieve. It's not like something that we just do occasionally, but I want you to know that if you care about life, it's guaranteed that you're going to lose in life. The more you love, the more pain you have. I have noticed that with my own life as my world has gotten bigger. The more I care, the more I hurt, the more I ache, the more I'm sad. Okay. So grief is a feeling you have from caring about life. The one thing that's most significant, most, repetitive, the most what's it? The, The most experienced experience of our lives. I can't think of another way to say it, but most experienced experience of our life is loss. If you came from a perfect family where Christmas is just sweetness and light every year, well guess what? You don't live there anymore. Loss. And I'm saying that when a child is born with the image of God within them, picturing how life is made to be and then they get slammed into how life is, if they're not supported in grieving, they will not be able to live fully. Because the the the I say there are two markers of full success in life. And at first, they don't have anything to do with God, but they had to do with being God made. The two markers that make a successful life, number one, if you're capable of grieving, you'll be successful, and if you keep no secrets, you'll always be joined. Secrets isolate us from being known, and grief allows us to continue to care. If you can grieve well and you keep no secrets, you will live well. To absorb and speak and hurt and ache related to loss, letting life matter to you, and facing when the needs aren't met, when that which you wish didn't happen. You take time to say your sorrows about that, your aches about that. Because if you don't do that, you'll defend yourself from caring. Remember Tennyson? My son said, if that's what it means to have a pet, I don't want one. And he's best buddies with our dog. Now, this dog's crazy, but he said, this dog's not crazy about me. This dog just instinct. I scratch the dog. Okay? So he's minimizing, but saying like, Loves that dog and the dog loves him. By the way, dogs are capable of that from what science has shown us. They have in love chemistry in their brains, believe it or not. So the need to grieve, if you don't grieve, everything that you have not let go of is still in you, and it's blocking you from reattaching. Let's say you had this great wound from a girlfriend, hypothetically, a boyfriend. And it's gonna make you be careful again to the point of being cautious again. And it's going to make you hesitant to enter a relationship, which means you're not going to give yourself to it out of the fear that it'll happen again. So your past is controlling your ability to receive today because you didn't grieve fully yesterday. So once you're if you don't deal with the loss of life through the need to grieve, and grieving allows you to reenter life and care again. My freedom today is directly related to grieving the yesterdays. Let's say, for example, you were raised in a world where y'all did not do affection, you didn't do touch, and you didn't do encouragement. You came from a a a mother and father who were look. I told you I loved you when you were little. You're grown now. Move on. Yeah. You know I still love you, but I won't go up you. Go on. Move on. Of course, you're seven at the time. No. You're Oh. So then you do not want to have to face that that's not okay for your parents to do that. Correct? So you marry. You get married, and your wife says, you don't tell me that you love me. I want to hear that you love me every day. I want to be chosen every day. Have you noticed that there are people who that that they really want to know that they're daily chosen, lot of times our spouses, you, yourself, women, women, you want to know that you're chosen, that you're valued by that person. You'd like to hear I thought of you today. I missed you. That's what emoticons are about. You know, it's like that they're telling you messages like, hey, I'm thinking of you. But then you came from that family and you marry this woman, me woman or you man, and he wants to hear tenderness or she wants to hear tenderness. Well, you come from a world where you had to block your need for tenderness. So you got a question to ask yourself. Who am I gonna be? Am I gonna give her tenderness, or am I going to protect my parents? You got it? Am I gonna defend my parents? Hey, we don't do that. That's not where I come from. You don't need that. Quit being a baby. I told you I loved you when we got married. I told you that I cared. So, I mean, you have a lack of faith, sweetheart. I think you take this to God or get a psychologist. It doesn't care about me which one you do, but you need to do something. I'm gonna read some books about you, help you. And then all of a sudden she starts backing away and she starts telling you more. Good god. She's going crazy. Like, what's wrong with you? And And then she starts wondering, what's wrong with me? So she tries not to be so needy. You follow? So she tries to be more like you because she wouldn't have married you unless she was looking for somebody to kind of be incentive to her, but we won't get into that. But and then she starts to try and then she finally goes, it blows up at him. He said, well, good god. It's like this is becoming a nuthouse, and he's gonna become more insensitive. Because truth is, he's defending his parents because he didn't wanna have to grieve that they never really did meet the needs he was made to have to to make him prepared to love a woman. Y'all get that? So this need to grieve is big.