I dedicate this post to Brittany Del Toro. I wanted you to know how much you have been in our families, thoughts, and prayers and how much our hearts ache for you during this time. Brittany recently suffered a loss of an infant. Her son Zepplin was only two and a half months old. When he was found in his crib not breathing, they rushed him to the hospital. He was kept alive on machines. When he did not have brain activity, they decided to let him go.
Now, as I said, you've been in my heart and on my mind. I am a person who is acquainted with grief. My first real experience with it was at 10 years old. My three-and-a-half-year-old brother died from cancer. We knew of his illness. It was a little different in that it wasn't a shock or a surprise, but nevertheless, it was grief, and it was a loss. A little later, maybe two years later, I had a brother who was in an accident where he was suffocated. he probably had the consciousness of a six-month-old baby and ended up living for about four more years after that accident. And then he passed away suddenly.So those are just a few of the experiences that I've had with grief. Also, my mother passed away a couple of years ago, which was sudden and unexpected. I bring that up not to say that I know how you feel because I do not know how you think, and no one can really understand how you feel unless they are in your exact shoes.
But I do bring that up because there are some things that I have learned over time about grief from experiencing it and from observing other people experiencing it, also from my study and my curiosity about it and trying to understand it better. I found a book called option B by Sheryl Sandberg. She wrote this book when her husband passed away suddenly. They were on vacation in Mexico. He went to the gym, and he never came back. He had a heart attack and ended up passing away. And so, she wrote a whole book about her journey with grief. In that book, she talks about something called the three P's of emotional resilience. Now I had never heard of this principle or this framework. When she explained it, just light bulbs went off in my head, and I thought it would be something that could really help you.
Now you are an influencer on social media, and I follow your accounts. I have noticed some things you have written about your grief and some of your thoughts. I think that this so. Good to do that, to get it out, and to grieve in the way that you need to grieve. One of your posts reminded me of this principle of the three PS of emotional resilience.
Now the first P is called personalization. Now that is when we are in our grief and our loss. I do want to say to those of you that this goes for any loss. We have so many losses in our life. It's not just when a loved one dies, but it could be losing a job. It could be moving is a loss in a lot of ways.
It could be just something you thought was gonna happen. And then it didn't happen. That is a loss also. So back to the three P's now, the three P's are things that can hold us back in our transition, in our grief that can hold us back from just moving forward. So the first one is called personalization, and that is when.
We see the events that happen. We somehow think that they are our fault. Now I'm not talking about responsibility. Personal responsibility is great. We should take personal responsibility, but there's a difference between personal responsibility and thinking that everything is our fault that we somehow caused it. I know this can be very real when it comes to trauma. So watch out for that when you start to think that if you did something different or if you had just said something or done something, things would be different.
Now, Cheryl, in her book, said that her mind just poured over this for months and months. She even got all of the. Medical records of her husband and looked over. If there was anything, she could have done and come to find out that he died within seconds. There was nothing that anyone could have done even if she had been right there, knowing that gave her a sense of peace. But if you can, if that's what it takes to get to that, then, by all means, do that. But if you can just give yourself the grace to know that it's not your fault and that sometimes these things just happen.
Number two is pervasiveness. This is when the feeling of despair seeps into everything in your life that everything just becomes discolored. Everything becomes hopeless, and you just feel swallowed up in it.
Number three Permanence. Permanence is the thinking that this will last forever. We tend to project our current feelings onto the future. I remember feeling like this when I had morning sickness, my morning sickness lasted about six months, and it wasn't just in the morning. I. I felt like I would feel like that forever in my mind, intellectually knowing that pregnancies have to end and they can't go on forever.I just felt like it was going to go on forever. I felt like that song, you know, "Everything is awesome". I felt like the flip side of that, like everything is awful. It felt permanent. It felt like it was going to last forever.
Some words that can be a red flag to notice if you are falling into the trap of permanence are if you use the words like never, I will never be happy again.I will always be sad. Watch out for the words you use because they affect. The way you think affects the way you feel, which affects your action, which affects the result you get. So maybe instead of never, and always, maybe try on, I will sometimes feel this awful and see how that feels to you.
Now I know sometimes when we go to a funeral and try to console the person there, we might say things like this too shall pass or some lovely sentiments and nice words. Those are there for a reason. People are offering you thoughts, hoping that it will help you to feel better. Now you need to try that thought on and see if it helps. The reason that that might feel better to you is because it's addressing that permanence.
It addresses the fact that this is temporary and that it won't last forever. Now I'm not saying that your grief and sadness and your pain will completely go away. I don't believe that. I feel like it changes you as a person and, it will always be with you. But I do believe that it will be less acute over time. So the pain will not be as sharp as it is right now. Hanging on to that and believing that can help lessen the pain. Remember that humans are hard-wired for both connection and grief. We naturally have the tools to recover from loss and trauma.
You have it within you. Your body knows how to handle this. There is an end in sight. Another thing to caution you is to not layer the suffering. And what I mean by that is to not feel bad about feeling bad because then we lay here. Negative emotion on top of negative emotion. So allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling whenever you are feeling it.
In the funeral for baby Zepplin, a speaker talked about when she had lost her three-week-old daughter and how she cried every day for a year. I thought that that was just beautiful, that she allowed herself to do that. She gave herself permission to feel what she was feeling. Honor that, remember to respect your feelings, whatever you are feeling respected, and allow it. In her book, Sheryl Sandberg says she calls this a leaning into the suck that sometimes life sucks, and you just lean into it. And as you do, it will shorten the time.
So, Brittany, I hope. Sometime in the future, when you are in a state of mind, you can read this and understand some of the things that I was trying to say to you, that you will be able to apply this to your situation that it will lessen some of your sufferings.
Ethan and his buds
