Our entire planet for the very first time in recorded human history, is simultaneously going through a process of grief.
We are all in grief, knowingly or unknowingly, consciously or subconsciously, and whether we acknowledge it or not.
We are all in grief, and the question is, what are we grieving? The answer to that surprises a lot of people. We are grieving the loss of a way of life. The way that we were living our lives just a few weeks ago has been lost. It’s been taken from us.
Listen to this interview excerpt with Gregg Braden on the current pandemic situation. He perfectly explained what and why we are experiencing and feeling right now.
If you are a Reflexologist or health care practitioner, this affects you, your families and clients.
Learn how to make a life affirming positive impact with your clients physical and emotional health when you return to your practice.
Here is a 10 minute excerpt.
Excerpt of Gregg Braden interview with Brian Rose of London Real.
For those who prefer to read I am including a full transcript below
TRANSCRIPT
Gregg Braden: This is a really interesting point, and I don’t hear the media talking about this. I don’t hear many people talking about this at all, Brian. We’re talking about the virus, the logistics, the physical impact, mitigation, vaccines, medicines, all of that.
What I don’t see anyone talking about is what’s happening to us emotionally. What I’ve seen in my own community and I’ve seen it in my physical community and I’ve seen that in my digital community online is there’s a lot of anger. There is resentment. There’s confusion. There is frustration. There is depression.
And what I want to say to our viewing audience right now is that our entire planet for the very first time… I don’t think we’ve ever had this in recorded human history, for the first time we are simultaneously going through a process of grief. We are all in grief, knowingly or unknowingly, consciously or subconsciously, and whether we acknowledge it or not. We are all in grief, and the question is, what are we grieving? The answer to that surprises a lot of people. We are grieving the loss of a way of life. The way that we were living our lives three weeks ago, four weeks ago, we’ve lost that. It’s been taken from us.
We’re social beings and we are no longer able to gather together the way that we have in the past, conferences, social gatherings, meals and restaurants, athletic events, concerts, all of the movies, all of those kinds of things. And that loss to us is like any other loss, and in the process of grief... And I can’t do a better job than Elisabeth Kubler-Ross did talking about the grief cycle. I’m going to hold this up. The grief cycle often is we hear about in terms of death, when someone dies, the five stages of accepting that death. The death is a form of loss. We are experiencing another kind of loss, but the five stages still apply, so very quickly, those five stages.
The first one is denial, the second one is anger, the third is depression, the fourth is bargaining and the fifth is acceptance. The characteristics of denial is fear, so many people are in fear, shock, confusion, avoidance. The characteristics of the anger, anxiety and we’re having a lot of people saying they’re dealing with anxiety issues, problems sleeping, frustration, they’re irritable. Depression, the characteristics of that being feeling overwhelmed, helpless, wanting to just run away.
So we are as a planet, we’re dealing with us, and I think it’s important to acknowledge this, Brian, so that we can move through, it gives a structure. First of all, acknowledging these stages of grief, it gives us a structure within which to view what’s happening to us right now. So it’s not just like coming at us from all over for no apparent reason. There is a reason. We’re in grief. We’re in grief because we’d lost a way of life. When we go through those stages, we can go through these stages relatively quickly if we acknowledge and embrace them, or we can drag them out by refusing to acknowledge what’s happening.
The denial, the anger, the depression is pretty much, I think where most people somewhere in there right now. We’re trying to get to the bargaining and the acceptance. Some people are in the bargaining stage right now where we’re looking for meaning, we’re reaching out to others. The acceptance is where we begin looking beyond what’s happening now. We accept it, we embrace it, and we say, “Okay, what’s next? Where do we go?” And I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that this is happening to us. Number one, how can we deal with the problem unless we’re honest with ourselves about the problem? So, honestly, acknowledging that this is what’s happening. We’re going through these stages.
There’s something called normalcy bias in psychological terms. Normalcy bias is where we attempt to live life as normal as we always have in the presence of circumstances that are anything but normal. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s our way of dealing. It’s a form of denial and I’m experiencing this now with people I work with. As you know, I travel the world. I do live events, and I have producers who are asking me to make commitments for events in the near future as if nothing has happened, believing that when the isolation is over, everything goes back to normal.
We can’t go back, Brian, to the world that we knew three or four weeks ago because that world no longer exists. We’re entering into a new normal, and the question is, what does that new normal look like? The answer is we don’t know because we’re determining it right now. The choices we make right now are determining the world that is emerging.
So how we deal with those five stages, how healthy we can allow ourselves… This is the key. We’re going to go through this. We want to go through it in a healthy way and by embracing where we are and then doing what we need to do to get through those stages. Grief counseling is important. We all deal with grief in different ways. So the unresolved grief is what’s hurting a lot of people. A lot of people have a mental idea, mental picture of the world that we had a month ago, and they’re hanging on to that picture. And that is the frustration, that is the struggle, that’s the suffering because that world is not present right now. If we can let go of our idea of what should be in the past, the world that we’ve had that served us all, be present with what it is that we’re dealing with now and do what we need to get through this in a healthy way, that will inform the future.
I am optimistic about the future. I think… I believe, more than think. I believe we’re going to be better people. I believe we’re going to have a better world because of what we’ve just gone through because it has exposed the cracks in the foundation of society, the cracks in the foundation of our systems that we rely upon, what’s sustainable, what’s not. What works, what doesn’t work. So that’s the reason for my optimism. My realism comes from knowing where we are right now and that we’ve got to acknowledge and embrace this in a healthy way. I just covered a lot of ground.
Brian: No, that’s great. That’s great. That’s great ground. I mean and the thing about those five steps, as I understand them, is there’s no way to shortcut them, right? I mean, these are natural human steps, but what you can do is understand them, be aware of them and move through them quicker and with more ease and understanding.
Gregg Braden: Yeah. Brian, to the best of my understanding, and again, I’m not a psychologist. I’ve had to come to understand these in my own life for the grief that I’ve had in the loss of parents and the loss of jobs and ways of life. So, as soon as I saw this unfolding in the world, I immediately went to this model because I recognized that we have just lost something. We’re all in grief over our loss. Like you, my understanding is that we cannot bypass the steps; however, we can really condense the time that it takes to go through the steps. It doesn’t have to take weeks and months. It’s our willingness to open ourselves to embrace the fact that we are in grief, number one, and that we have lost something.
When I say, it doesn’t have to be big tears, alligator tears sobbing. It simply is maybe even vocalizing, “Yes, I have lost something in my life. I’ve lost something, a way of life that I really enjoyed and appreciated, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next.” I think that’s one of the hardest things, Brian, is acknowledging there are things that cannot be known right now because we like to live in a world of certainty. And the reality is that we have an uncertain future because we’re creating it now. It doesn’t already exist. We’re creating it based upon what we know. So as we go into, we can begin talking about this a little bit, the world that’s emerging, it’s going to be a very different world socially, economically. It’s going to be a different world in terms of the way we go about our daily lives.