Some endings are hard because the person is still alive, but the relationship you had with them is gone. This week, I answer a Coaching Hotline question from a listener who is grieving a friendship that has faded and struggling to find acceptance. I talk about why grief cannot be bypassed with the “right” thought and how allowing yourself to feel the loss is part of moving through it. You’ll hear why the goal is not to eliminate sadness or anger, but to stop fighting the emotions that are keeping you stuck.
Welcome to UnF*ck Your Brain. I’m your host, Kara Loewentheil, Master Certified Coach and founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. I’m here to help you turn down your anxiety, turn up your confidence, and create a life on your own terms, one that you’re truly excited to live. Let’s go.
Welcome to this week’s Coaching Hotline episode where I answer real questions from real listeners and coach you from afar. If you want to submit your question for consideration, go to unfuckyourbrain.com/coachinghotline, all one word, or text your email to +1 347-997-1784. And when you get prompted for the code word, it’s coaching hotline, all one word. Let’s get into this week’s questions.
Here’s this week’s question. “I’ve been doing thought work on a friendship that has faded significantly over the past nine months. We went from talking every day to barely texting. I can find thoughts to accept the change, but I can’t seem to land on anything that doesn’t lead to sadness or anger. How do I move toward acceptance without bypassing the grief?”
So, the way that we move towards acceptance is actually allowing the emotion. So, when you say I can find thoughts to accept the change, but I can’t seem to land on anything that doesn’t lead to sadness or anger, it sounds to me like you maybe need to feel that sadness or anger. So if you are really stuck in it, it probably is either that you are not really allowing the emotion. And you should listen to the episode I just did recently on the Coaching Hotline called, How Do I Know if I’m Indulging in Negative Emotion? That’ll help with that. So you’re either not really allowing that emotion. So you’re trying to thought work yourself out of having those feelings, which isn’t going to work long-term.
Or you’re still stuck and you’re consistently recreating those emotions with your thoughts over and over again because you are giving the situation or the circumstance power over you. You’re believing that what’s causing your feelings is really the situation as opposed to your thoughts, and then you’re trying to use thought work to get over it. So whenever we have the agenda like that, where we are giving something else power over us or we don’t want to have an emotion or whatever else, it messes with the thought work, right? And we can’t really find something that feels better.
The third thing I’d recommend looking at is whether you are trying to feel too much better right away. So when we are using the thought ladder and trying to change our thoughts step-by-step, we got to be happy with 10% less shitty. So if you currently have a lot of thoughts that create a lot of anger and sadness and you’re trying to believe everything’s for the best and it’s all great, it’s too far, right? And so you’re not getting any buy-in from your brain, you’re not getting any relief in your emotions in your body. And so you may need to really reduce the gap that you’re trying to cross by changing your thoughts.
Fundamentally, the way that we don’t bypass the grief is we have to actually allow it. So my hunch just from reading this is that when you say, I can’t land on anything that doesn’t lead to sadness or anger, you think you’re supposed to be able to. That you should be able to thought work yourself out of having the sadness and the anger. But anytime that we’re trying to thought work our way out of an emotion, we are just going to land ourselves right back in that emotion. Because we are trying to get away from it, so we’re giving it power over us, and then we can’t really think clearly and we can’t get free of it.
So what I would recommend for you is number one, practice actually allowing those emotions, not trying to thought work your way out of it. And two, when you are allowing the emotion and then you want to do a little bit of thought work, try to scale down the jump you’re trying to make and look for that thought that just feels like 10% less shitty as opposed to trying to feel amazing about it right away.