Why is it When I Am UP, She is Down? Personality Aspects of Grief – Dr. David Daniels

HEALING THE GRIEVING HEART
Why Is It When I Am Up, She is Down?
Personality Aspects of Grief
Host: Dr. Gloria Horsley
With guest: Dr. David Daniels
July 21, 2005

G: Hello. I’m Dr. Gloria Horsley. Welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart. There are no simple or quick solutions to dealing with the death of a child. Each of us has a unique pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. These patterns of behavior impact our relationships and our responses to loss. We are sometimes surprised at our own behavior after the traumatic loss of a child. We may have bouts of depression, anger, or feelings of going crazy that raise havoc with our personal relationships. How many times have we felt annoyed thinking that our partner or family members were pulling us down when we were trying to keep our energy up? How many times have our partners felt that we were pulling them down? Today my guests and I are going to help you to identify your personality pattern. The patterns that trigger your individual response to stress, and I don’t need to tell you that there is a huge amount of stress in living through the loss of your special child. We hope today to help you feel some control in an uncontrollable situation. Remember, the heart will heal. It’s a matter of letting it happen. Healing the Grieving Heart is about nourishing the heart, taking care of yourself, and removing the blocks that slow the miracle of renewal. I know you hurt. I’ve been there. Have faith. The heart always heals. You may think you will never be able to function again, but my guests and I will be here every week to tell you that you will survive, live, and can even thrive. You will make it. Even after a devastating death, all is possible. You can love, open your heart, and be happy again. Please join us on the show by calling our toll free number 1-866-369-3742 or email me at gchorsley@aol.com with questions or comments regarding the losses in your life. Today, I’m honored to have as my special guest, Dr. David Daniels, physician and clinical professor of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford Medical School, Palo Alto, California. Dr. Daniels is a leading expert on the enneagram, a nine-point personality typing system. It is a system that I came across several years after my son, Scott, was killed. I have found it immensely helpful to myself and my family. If nothing else, it has taught me that my loved ones have a natural response to loss that at times is very different from mine. Dr. Daniels gives enneagram seminars and workshops throughout the world. He is the co-author of The Essential Enneagram, which includes a test that helps determine your personality type and your responses to loss. He also hosts the VoiceAmerica show, Empowering your Life with the Enneagram. Dr. Daniels is the bereaved parent of David. Given his professional as well as his personal experience, Dr. Daniels is going to share with us his insights on why individuals experience grief so differently. Dr. Daniels is my teacher, mentor, and friend. Good morning, David. Welcome to Healing the Grieving Heart.
D: Good morning, Gloria. It’s good to be here with you and share what I know and hopefully be of some assistance to others as they go through this process that both you and I have been through of losing a child suddenly in an accident. I just wanted to piggyback on what you said about the enneagram. Why another personality system? There are many out there that are of usefulness. I want to just say to our audience that the enneagram is very powerful because it gets right down to our basic motivation. That thriving energy we have and how we organize attention. It’s all very important. And it shows us that there are these different styles, ways of reacting, ways of organizing the world from the inside, that make our behavior in all kinds of situations differ from one another so that none of us grieve in exactly the same way. It’s often based upon the way our personality is structured on our particular type, our particular way of coping with the world, approaching the world, dealing with things that go, what happened to us?
G: I certainly know that when my son, Scott, was killed, I found that my husband dealt with it very differently than I did and he would want maybe to talk about it with me privately but I wanted to talk to the world about it and when I was up, he was down, or vice versa. I think sometimes we just practically drove each other crazy.
D: Well, in our family with our two remaining children and my wife, Judy, and myself, we certainly all had different reactions. Judy is a 9 on the enneagram. One of the body types. There are three basic centers of intelligence, intelligence of instinct in the body, intelligence of the heart, and intelligence of the mind.
G: So there would be people who would be more in their head with the mind, and then people more in their body. And then people more in their heart.
D: Right. Exactly. But that doesn’t mean that everybody doesn’t have a heart. Everybody does have a heart. Everybody does have a mind but there’s different ways of reacting. She’s a mediator on the enneagram and intends to get pulled by all the things in the world that make claims upon her and her experience after the initial shock was just to get through life as it were. And the sadness that she just would experience was not hidden in any way. Where myself as a mental type, as a 6, which would be the mental head type, the loyal skeptic that has issues around security and trusting the world, I just felt I had to be strong in some way. I couldn’t let this overwhelm me. I needed to believe I could cope with the whole thing. Inside it was devastating. I felt the loss like I’d never felt before and I needed to build up some sense of faith in the world. So we had really quite different reactions and our being able to understand each other made it a much, much better process. I can’t say easier process, but better process.
G: At least you understood you didn’t expect that they were out to get you. Sometimes, you feel like people are out to get you or bringing you down or whatever at those times.
D: It wasn’t so much people getting out to get me but believing in myself, believing that I could certainly come through this, not just survive but ultimately thrive in the world and to be strong. There would be periods of times when I would just weep and I would get the feeling like goodness, will I ever stop weeping?
G: Now how many years has it been for you?
D: It’s been 15 years.
G: And do you remember that first year? Would you say it’s in the first year that you’re feeling the weeping?
D: I feel really strongly that what I’ve come to understand in the grief process is that first of all there’s no one right way to grieve. If you want to learn nothing else from the enneagram, it’s that people are different. One size does not fit all so people will grieve in different ways and go through different stages, in different order, and so forth. So it was a huge lesson to me that we grieve differently. And then the other thing is the grief would come in waves and kind of hit you all of a sudden. Just a piece of music or little memory or dream that you might have or somebody you saw that you have a talk with. So these waves were very important to understand that that’s the way the grief process is.
G: And feeling like they were a normal response?
D: A normal thing. It’s not continuous and I know of people from my clinical practice who have actually come in saying things like I’m not grieving all the time. I’m actually feeling happy and that makes me feel guilty. Like I should grieve and grieve and grieve steady. So I learned a third thing in this process and that is life and grief go together. They’re not sequential. You don’t just grieve and then come back to life. Grief is not something pathological. It’s not the same as depression. That sense of loss that lets you know how much you cared about the person.
G: And this is wonderful to hear from a psychiatrist because sometimes I know when you go to the Compassionate Friends and people talk about the fact that their therapist did not understand that they were in a normal space given the circumstance.
D: I think grief in that sense is not something “to get over” like an illness. It’s an experience of loss of someone dear to you, something that matters to you, lets you know you care. So I think for everybody here’s a universal regard of the particular personality structure or particularly any grand type is that life and grief have to go together not in sequence and, of course, as time passes and as you work through this and as you appreciate the person that you’ve experienced the loss with, deeply in your own heart and your own being, it lightens things up.
G: Now do you think the enneagram, knowing the personality types, helps give space to other people in a way?
D: Absolutely. Our daughter, a 3 on the enneagram, one of the heart types, the achiever or performer, and also has a huge amount of feeling that’s not very far from the surface so she would be out there wanting to make contact, which is the heart type, and she would talk freely about her reaction and her sadness and her loss and she connected people and she would want to do the things that would help everybody heal. Be sure that there is a good memory book, things of that nature.
G: So all of the different points have not only a different response but also something to give and learn from. We’re coming up on a break and we have a couple of emails that I would like to deal with after break so please stay tuned to hear more from Dr. Gloria and Dr. David Daniels on the personality aspects of grief. If you would like to join our show, our toll free number is 1-866-369-3742. You may also email me at gchorsley@aol.com. Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host Dr. Gloria and my guest today is Dr. David Daniels, bereaved parent of David, psychiatrist and clinical professor, Stanford Medical School. Dr. Daniels is a leading expert on the enneagram, a nine point personality typing system, and co-author of The Essential Enneagram. He hosts Empowering your Life with the Enneagram on VoiceAmerica. You can hear these shows by going to VoiceAmerica Health & Wellness channel or to David’s website, www.authenticenneagram.com. Well, David, we’re back on the show and I believe we might want to take a call from Susie in Arlington.
S: Hi. I appreciate you taking my call. I’m a little nervous. I had my brother die when I was in high school and I’m kind of a middle-aged woman now. And I actually had a son who almost died of a heart complication. And I’ve done a little bit of reading on the enneagram and my family has done a lot. I am a six on the enneagram and what I understand of that is that I think from my head and I’m a fear-based person and that fits in with my personality. But I’m kind of wondering, I don’t really like being that way. Can I change who I am on the enneagram?
G: David, that’s a good question for you.
D: That’s a great question. So we’re fellow travelers. I’m also a 6 or loyal skeptic and, of course, fear has a positive function. Its positive function is to point to real danger and the trouble with us sixes is that we imagine a lot more things that aren’t really dangerous. With our imagination, we magnify things in the world out of proportion so the task of reducing the fear is like coming back and using it, befriending it, saying oh here it is again. Can I breeze myself back? I need to have a little more faith. I don’t know what your grief process was, but mine was with the terrible loss and the pain that goes with it and the activation of fear was to be strong and to reclaim a kind of sense of faith and I think that helped transform me, and I just wonder what your reaction has been over the years if you recall some of that?
S: Well, I don’t know if it’s a conditioning of my life, but now I’m hypersensitive when it comes to fear in creating that false fear, it’s not really real and I have been working trying to get to the safe part of it because I do find that I don’t get caught up in the
D: When your brother died, how did you react? I know you were just a teenager then, it may be hard to recall it.
S: I was a teenager. A lot of disbelief and then I think it was just more realization that bad things really can happen to me. And I don’t know how that is. I think teenagers have this sense of being invincible, that can’t happen to them. And when that happened to me, it was like, wow, things can happen to me. So I think that was part of it. And then when my son almost died, I really jumped into that hypersensitivity, especially toward fear. If my kids come and say, oh, I’ve got a sore throat then I think, oh, what do they have? I’ve got to run up to the emergency room. But I am working with this and trying to not let it take over my life.
D: That’s really important. And of course when we lose a loved one, whether it’s a partner or a sibling, someone particularly when it’s not their time, if you have a 90-year-old grandparent who has lived their life, still there’s grief. But I think it’s very important and you seem to me to be right on in understanding yourself and your type and it’s a path. It has to do with realizing, of course, bad things can happen but I’m not going to let them dominate my life. I’m not going to let them own me. The fear will come up but my path is to reclaim a better sense of trust in myself and in my life and have more faith in myself.
S: On the enneagram, we can’t really change who are, say I want to be a 9.
D: No. You’re sort of wired in. But the thing is, it can soften and you can actually let the fear – Like, oh, okay. I just need to let this come back and breath myself back and get centered and remind myself that I need more faith in my life. I need to become or act as though I had faith and welcome more faith into yourself.
G: And, Susie, you might want to get David’s book, The Essential Enneagram. I think you can probably get that off Google or something, David?
D: Yes, you certainly can. Go to Amazon or go to our website and you can get it, www.authenticenneagram.com.
G: And I know David has some wonderful exercises in the book to center yourself.
S: And this is a good book for a beginning enneagram. I’m familiar with it. I’ve read some things, but I’m not
D: Yes, it’s very good. It’s not long. We wanted to make a book that’s only a little over a hundred pages.
S: Okay, good. Well, I appreciate you taking my call.
G: Thanks, Susie.
D: And you sound like you’re gaining quite a bit of faith in yourself.
S: Thank you. You just have to practice.
D: That’s it. It’s a journey.
G: Do you have any other thoughts about Susie?
D: I think what she’s saying is universal that life is a process and our gaining more insight, more well-being if you will, more clarity about life takes time and it takes practice. It doesn’t matter what your type is.
G: One thing I also forgot to say to Susie is a wonderful place to study the enneagram, too, is to go to your shows. You have your shows archived on VoiceAmerica and also on your website.
D: Yes, we do.
G: And people can hear about the types from your shows. That’s great. Do you have any thoughts about partners and families studying the enneagram? Do you think that’s a helpful thing?
D: The enneagram is probably ultimately the most helpful with relationships because when you understand how you’re contributing to difficulty as well as to good things, you can do something about it. If you don’t have any understanding, it’s very hard. Often when there’s a conflict, we see what the other person’s part is but we don’t see our own. The enneagram helps you so much with self-awareness, with mindfulness.
G: And what do you mean exactly by mindfulness?
D: Well, that you’re aware. That you’re awake and aware. You can experience your own reactions of head, heart, and body, your own thoughts and the repetition of them or the pattern of them so that by paying enough attention to where your attention is going, you can actually do something to change or move attention to something just like Susie was saying, I’m trying to move my attention from fear more to get settled and be more faithful. I think it’s really, really important with partners and then to realize that you need to come to understand with some mind sight so it would be to understand your partner or your close relationship from their point of view, not from your point of view. Their strength as well as their natural difficulty.
G: I think we have time to do just one email now. It says:
Dr. Horsley and Dr. Daniels,
My wife goes to the Compassionate Friends and suggested that I email you. She has studied the enneagram and says that I’m a number 8, the boss. We had a baby die in a neighbor’s hot tub last year. I’m so angry with my neighbors that I can’t even look that way when I walk out of the house. My wife says that I have to forgive them or I’m going to have a stroke. Do you have any suggestions for me?
Rod from Ketchum, Idaho
D: Wow, that’s really a big. First of all, it seems like it’s really quite recent. And secondly, the energy of the boss tends to be a kind of big energy that goes to that you want a sense of truth and justice about things in a kind of all or nothing way. Some eights actually tell me it’s my way or the highway. So you focus on the injustice of the whole thing and it keeps you riveted. It keeps you prisoner. And the process of forgiveness here is in a way going to be freeing you. If I don’t forgive somebody, the one that suffers the most is me, not the person I’m not forgiving. So I think, if you understand that tendency of the eight to be way out there, all or nothing, and my sense of truth and justice, it’ll help you to forgive the person and in a sense maybe to even forgive yourself for holding this grudge this way, and to soften the way you’re reacting because eights don’t like to be prisoner of anything and when you’re holding a grudge, a grievance, and a resentment and the unforgiven, you’re really being a hostage, and if you realize that, you can go on this path of freedom and also allow yourself then to have just the pain, the vulnerability inside of losing that little one, and then your life can go on.
G: Well, Rod, I hope you’ve tuned in to hear that because I think for the eight, you are holding yourself hostage and there’s a certain amount of freedom that I’m sure you desire, so maybe you ought to listen to your wife and also go to David’s website. It sounds like you might be interested in the enneagram and studying it more and understanding a little more about your responses.
D: Right. Because they believe that they’ve just got to be strong and powerful. It’s difficult sometimes for 8s to feel the pain, the loss, the suffering because there’s this vulnerability underneath and they don’t want to lose their strength and power.
G: And he’s losing it by being so angry. It sounds like his wife saying he might have a stroke means he may lose his health, too. So, listen up, Rod. We’re coming up on a break now so please stay tuned to hear more from Dr. Gloria and Dr. David Daniels on the personality aspects of grief. If you would like to join our show, our toll free number is 1-866-369-3742. You may also email me at gchorsley@aol.com. Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria, and my guest today is Dr. David Daniels, bereaved parent of David, psychiatrist and clinical professor, Stanford Medical School. Dr. Daniels is the leading expert on the enneagram, a nine-point personality typing system, and co-author of The Essential Enneagram. He hosts “Empowering your Life with the Enneagram” on VoiceAmerica. You can hear these shows by going to the VoiceAmerica Health & Wellness channel or David’s website, www.authenticenneagram.com. Well, David, we’re back from our break and I wanted to cover another email that we got. I got an email that says:
Dear Dr. Gloria and Dr. Daniels,
I’m from Dorchester, England, and have studied the enneagram with Helen and David in England. I also attend the Compassionate Friends group. I am a head based type 5, the observer. My problem is that two years ago while I was walking my son Derek to school, a car ran up on the sidewalk, hit and killed him. My problem is that I keep running the event through my head. Every night when I go to bed, I just keep playing the tape of the car hitting him. I would appreciate any ideas you might have to stop or change that tape.
Very truly, Eleanor.
D: It’s one thing to suffer these horrible losses, but it’s also magnified when you’re right there present to it so that the image of it is there. It sounds almost like post-traumatic shock syndrome and maybe it would be good to work with someone around that theme. But I think with a 5, it’s like the image. The 5 is the observer type that believes you’ve got to protect yourself from a world that will intrude and take too much of you. You have to seek self-sufficiency and it becomes almost like your whole thing and be analytical and be thoughtful and figure things out. My suggestion would be when you get this mental image that keeps coming back and replaying, is that you try to befriend it a little more and go like okay, what I need to do is try to let go of that and come down and see what my heart feels, see what my feelings are because the observer type tends to move or detach themselves from the feeling. I notice in your email, there’s not something about the feeling. So my suggestion is you may have been having lots of feeling if I don’t know this, but it’s like, oh, it’s a substitute or replacement in a sense for just letting your heart ache and remembering that grief and life go together, it’s not sequential.
G: All right, Eleanor. Maybe you can try some of those and thanks for sending that email. David, I wanted to ask you now, given your family, what helped your family when David was killed?
D: I think first of all we have a pretty strong family and to begin with it was helpful because we all had a good relationship with David. I think the thing that’s very painful is when families don’t have a strong love bond that’s open. We were fortunate to have that with David and so there wasn’t a lot of unfinished business in that regard.
G: Ambivalence, anger is a strong connector. If you’ve had angry words with people or something, if people like our friend Eleanor keep running those tapes.
D: I think the second piece was we really organized a memorial service with his friends and the family and we contributed to that and we spoke our heart and we had our own ritual procedure.
G: What exactly did you do?
D: The most important thing was that there was a great community outpouring. He was very loved and he was a wonderful young man and consequently there was a nature center built by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District up in the Skyline, up in the mountains where there are trails and beautiful vistas and there’s a lovely little nature center in his memory that says to all who pass this way, hope comes, because he was full of hope that he gave everybody. We felt we needed to honor that and so we always every year we have a little ceremony. We go back and celebrate it and we visit the nature center and my wife, Judy, gives talks there, taught classes there to children. So it’s been a memorial for us to have that. We’re very fortunate in that regard. The other thing that we did do since our other son, Dr. J. D. Daniels, and myself are both therapists, we, the four of us remaining all got into counseling and we went every week for a year because I didn’t feel in control of it. I didn’t want to feel like I had to do anything. I wanted to feel that I could just join with the family and spend time together with someone with some guidance. And I think that helped us heal, too.
G: Well, of course, you’re a psychiatrist, so you knew who to find but one of the problems that I hear from many listeners is it’s difficult to find a therapist who really understands the grieving process. How did you find the person you found?
D: We just checked around. I think that’s what you have to do. You check around with people that you know that have been through some counseling, that have lost somebody. In time, you do find some people, but it’s a bit like doing investigative work. Call somebody you know that’s a good therapist and you find out who would you go to if you lost somebody?
G: That’s a good question: who would you go to if you lost somebody? That’s an excellent question.
D: You start to find out that there are people that understand the process, work with the process, and can hold the space, hold the field, be present to you, is a better way to put it.
G: When my son was killed, I was back in New York and I was actually working in a hospital as a psychiatric nursing consultant to the surgical service and believe it or not I could not find anybody to work with our family. We went to one therapist and it was a disaster. So you know there are good experiences and bad. And my kids went to therapy by themselves. Now I think you went as a family, which is a great thing. I got my kids to go but it didn’t work for them. They went once and the therapist said, that’s really sad. They were like, well, what are we going to do with that? As teens do, they decided that they wanted to go on their way and be normal and live their life or whatever, but they didn’t, I think, get the support they could have used.
D: You don’t necessarily have to go for a year or six months or some particular period of time but it is very useful to have someone that’s knowledgeable, that is caring, to help guide you through some of the processes because lots of people think that it shouldn’t come in waves like it does. Why does it just seem to come out of nowhere? and yet that’s the natural process. To have someone reassuring you, someone empathizing with you, someone helping you with your own particular personality reaction.
G: Well, that’s one of the things that the Compassionate Friends does offer, a group of people who some of them are further along the grieving process. Some of them are newly bereaved, and we just had a national conference so there were many workshops and things people could go to so that is an alternative also. And, although, as a therapist, I sometimes feel like other therapists think that groups like Compassionate Friends are in competition and they’re really not. I think you can do both. I think your idea of people going maybe for counseling but also Compassionate Friends can be a good support with it, also.
D: We have a local organization. I don’t know how nationwide. But Kara.
G: I believe that is nationwide. I was talking to someone in Boston about it.
D: Where you can seek counseling from someone who has gone through a loss and, Judy, my partner now for 50 years, actually, she was a counselor and she did that for several years and because she was so empathetic, so good they tend to give her all the people that had lost children, she finally said it’s time for me to stop doing this. But that’s another resource.
G: I think my friend whose child died, Joan Belden, I think you know her. She did a widow’s thing for them.
D: I also mention that your own family can be a resource, too. If you don’t hide it all and you can be supportive of each other because not everybody is grieving the same at the same moment. So I felt a lot of support from the people in my life. My friends, my loved ones. And I think some people tend to stay away if you don’t as the grieving person let them know it’s okay to talk about it. It’s okay to be present. It’s okay to cry. So those would be my suggestions just in a general way.
G: Do you have any special advice for people who have lost a child?
D: I feel like I’ve been giving that. The most special thing to me is coming to the realization that what grief is letting you see is how much you cared. If you didn’t care about something, you don’t grieve. It lets you know that your heart is really present and that you love the person. When I really got that, it was as helpful as anything could be. I knew also that our son would want us to go on and live a rich and full life, so to speak. A rich life meaning a complete life. That it would have been a tragedy in a way to just stay stuck in suffering.
G: How about you and your wife? You’ve been married for 50 years. I know there’s a thought out there, and you and I have talked about it a little bit, that there’s a high divorce rate among bereaved parents, but I’ve been married for 45 years and you’ve been married for 50, so I’m kind of wondering about your thoughts on that.
D: I don’t know the actual – I’ve read that there’s a higher divorce rate. Certainly there’s a lot of stress and we know that stress taxes relationship. But stress is also a challenge so it can be a positive as well as a negative experience, bringing people together as well as apart. But I think it’s really important to try your best to support each other going through this process and to understand differences because they’re a different type. I hope people will want to study this enneagram more so they can understand themselves and their partners not just for this issue but in helping the relationship flourish in general.
G: It’s been very good for my relationship with Phil. He’s a perfectionist and I’m the giver so it’s a very interesting point. I sometimes felt he was a little perfectionistic, I guess that’s what I want to say, more so than I, but I understand something now about when he does see error. It’s a gift. We’re coming up on our final break. After break, I’d like to ask you, David, if you feel there’s anything we haven’t covered and we have another email so please stay tuned to hear about next week’s very special topic and guest and for more call-ins and comments and advice form Dr. David Daniels, bereaved parent of David, psychiatrist and clinical professor, Stanford Medical School. A co-author of The Essential Enneagram. If you want to learn more about the enneagram, tune in to Dr. Daniels’ show, Empowering your Life with the Enneagram heard on VoiceAmerica. Welcome back to Healing the Grieving Heart. I’m your host, Dr. Gloria. My guest today is Dr. David Daniels, bereaved parent of David, psychiatrist and clinical professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford Medical School, and co-author of The Essential Enneagram, host of Empowering your Life with the Enneagram heard on VoiceAmerica and archived on www.authenticenneagram.com. Well, David, it sounds like we have a call in from a Dr. McCartney.
F: Hi Gloria. This is Dr. Francesca McCartney. I’m calling in to praise you and also to ask a question to you and Dr. Daniels. First of all, I want to say to your listeners that I have known you for a quite awhile now and I find you to be a great therapist and healer, a brilliant teacher, and a warm-hearted woman, and I’m really proud to have you as a friend and also have you as an advisory board member of my Academy of Intuition Medicine. So wonderful to hear you live on the radio. I experienced a sudden death in my twenties, it wasn’t of a child, it was of my mother, who committed suicide, and I cried every day for nine months, and I had a very strong reaction physically to my health. The impact of the grieving really created a detrimental effect to my physical health which wasn’t taken care of until I sought nutritional therapy and some alternative medicine. So I wonder if you and Dr. Daniels might have something to say about the impact of grieving on physical health and what you might suggest that people do about that.
G: Well, I’ll tell you, it sounds very simple when I tell people to make sure they drink and eat and sleep, the very basic things, and go for a walk, particularly early on. What are your thoughts, David?
D: Well, I concur with all of that. Sometimes if we don’t pay attention to the obvious, like we have to do those very basic survival needs and be encouraged in it. That would be number one. I don’t know your history at all, but to cry every day for nine months and to get debilitated, it’s like somebody wasn’t helping you at the time or you hadn’t realized at the time that grief and life go together. It sounds like grief, and again I’m just conjecturing so correct me, just swallowed you up for that period of time.
F: Well, there was no support in my family for this occurrence.
D: You need support. You need somebody saying look, grief and life go together. You need to live and grieve and it’s not sequential. So you grieved so continuously, it ended up devastating your body, your physical well being until somehow it sounds like you woke up and said, I’ve got to live. Does that ring any bells or make any sense?
F: Yes. My family split emotionally after my mother’s sudden death so I had no support with family members and that was critical to my well being and my health. I actually did wake up one day, I was crying in a friend’s garden and someone heard me. I usually cried alone. Someone, who was a physician, walked into the garden who I didn’t know and asked me why I was crying and then suggested that he had some ways of helping me. And that was the turning point for me.
D: Right, someone reaching out. Someone supporting you so you didn’t feel completely alone in this process. That there’s life and somebody could care about you.
G: Francesca we are going to do a show on August 4 called Suicide Changes Heart, and I hope that you will tune in to that show and give us some comments then because I think there are some issues about suicide involved with the stigma, involved with the issues of people don’t want to talk about it, some family members feel there’s a lot of guilt involved, could I have helped, there’s a lot of other things going on with it too that make it really dramatic.
F: Yes. All of that occurred in my family and with extended family as well and I will call in on August 4.
G: I think we have another call, David, from Monica from Virginia.
M: I’m so grateful you both took my call. I’ve been following you. My 17-year-old son was killed 7 years ago and I’m a four so you can know that my grief was pretty griefy. Anyway, I had a really difficult time and then my father died.
D: If I could just interrupt briefly to let people know that the type four who we call sometimes the individualist or artist, but we call it the romantic, is a very deep feeling type, one of the heart center types who tends to want to understand life deeply, that wants to have ideal relationships and long for wholeness and completeness. So fours are often hit really hard with their idealism and their empathy, their need for authenticity. They’re really hit hard by loss. So I don’t know if that fits for you but that’s often true of the four or romantic.
M: It was certainly hard and it was topped off with a divorce one year after the son was killed, and the four thing has been quite an interesting journey for me to look at. When my father died three years ago, because the of the trauma in our family, I was really falling apart with my siblings. I was given the gift of the enneagram during that crisis. Somebody said I want you to read these numbers and see if you notice what’s going on. It saved my relationship with my siblings. I’m really grateful for that.
D: Well, I’m glad the enneagram could be a gift but you see the attention of a four tends to go to the loss to what’s missing and in the process, a four doesn’t tend to see what is good about themselves or what is good about their life, or what is okay. What is there that’s present that is supportive because attention tends to get focused on what the loss is about and what the long for is and a kind of awful sense of abandon in the world. The enneagram can really help you see oh, what is there?
M: I’m glad you remind me of that. It’s funny I have to be reminded almost every day.
D: Well, I have to be reminded almost every day about not going to the worst case so you bring up something that’s really important and I want to thank you for that which is this is all a process. A habit of mine that we have just keeps coming back and we go, oh my gosh, thank you for reminding me.
G: On that note, thank you for calling in, Monica, from Virginia, and it’s time to close our show for today. David, did you have any quick wrap-up comments that you want to make?
D: I just want to thank Monica for her contribution, for all the guests for their contributions and just to come back very briefly to there’s no one right way to grieve and a lot of it depends upon the structure of our personality and the kind of type of structure we have, so people grieve much differently from other people. We need to appreciate and understand that. Life and grief go together. They’re not sequential.
G: Thank you for being on our show today, Dr. David Daniels, author of Empowering your Life with the Enneagram and with VoiceAmerica show Empowering your Life with the Enneagram. Please tune in again next week to hear bereaved sibling, author, researcher and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, New York City, Dr. Heidi Horsley. Dr. Horsley will discuss her research and give important information on dealing with bereaved adolescents. She has co-authored Making the Best of the Worst, A Message of Hope for Grieving Teens. This show is archived on www.Health.VoiceAmerica.com as well as the Compassionate Friends website. Please email me with comments or questions at gchorsley@aol.com. This is Dr. Gloria. Please tune in again next Thursday at 9:00 a.m. Pacific for more of Healing the Grieving Heart, a show of hope, renewal and support. Remember, you need not walk alone.