134. What Part of You or Your Relationship is it Time to Grieve

This week, Kate and Eric delve into the concept of Grieving as a Growth Strategy.

Topics:
➡️ The significance of grieving in personal growth and relationship evolution.
➡️ Why it's essential to let go of the past in order to embrace the present and future.
➡️ Embracing change and transformation in your relationship journey.
➡️ Recognizing the beauty in experiencing new firsts as a couple.
➡️ Shifting the perspective on grieving from a negative to a positive and transformative process.

Tune in to gain insights on how grieving can be a powerful tool for personal and relational development, and how it can help you evolve in your marriage.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Kate MacDougall
We're talking about grieving today, but not in, you know, we have this idea that grieving is this process in northern culture connected to death. And usually in our culture, a lot of cultures celebrate the life of the person when they die, right? So grieving is very different from culture to culture, but in our own personal culture, which is more like North American culture. It's very sad. It's a very sad moment of saying goodbye to somebody forever. And it's, so we think of grieving as this very, like sad, morbid, like, heavy moment in our lives. But we want to invite you to see grieving differently, in this sense, in today's episode, and the way we're going to talk about it. Yeah, and

Eric MacDougall
Grief, and feeling grief is an intense feeling, right. And oftentimes, we talk about grieving, that's what we associate the feeling of grief. And what we want to talk about in terms of this episode today is really this idea of grieving in terms of like, action, acceptance, transformation, right, and all that stuff, and seeing grieving as almost kind of an action, or like a way of life, if you will, in order to continue to evolve, right? Because a lot of times, you know, we're constantly grieving things in our lives. And I think our inability to grieve our inability to let go or inability to appreciate and let it go. Yeah, exactly, is often what keeps us stuck. And people experience this at all kinds of levels, right in terms of not wanting to let go of material possession, because it means something and that that means they're gonna have to let go and grieve the loss of that thing, who owned that thing, what that thing means to you, etc. I think there's stages of life as well, that we grieve, right? One of the ones for men especially, is when we become fathers, and, or even when become married, and the grieving of bachelorhood, the grieving of what it means to be a either a single man or even a man without children. Right and the freedom that we have,

Kate MacDougall
yet for women, it's grieving your body after a child. Yep, you know, the, I'm never gonna have my body back. Never gonna have a body that looks the same as it used to. And we gotta grieve that. 

Eric MacDougall
And I think a lot of times we see this as like a negative way, like, oh, it sucks, and it's horrible. But, you know, by grieving, releasing and kind of letting go of the past, you're able to really focus on transformation and what you want to move towards and what you want to create.

Kate MacDougall
Right, and, you know, loving that past accepting it and seeing it as a beautiful part that yes, you've gone through that. And yes, you've, you know, you've lived through that and how wonderful was it in the time that you had it. But now you're about to move to something better and bigger and you know, because of your past you you've brought during that time you'll learn so much and you You were able to live so many different things that now you're able to take that baggage that you learnt and that you now carry with you into this new part, this new season of your life. And take those lessons, as I'm going to keep doing that and do it in a more intense better way, or I'm going to let that go because it's not serving me anymore. And I'm going to, you know, move forward with that. Yeah,

Eric MacDougall
and a lot of it is, is a state of mind, right in terms of this process. Because if you believe that, you know that we talked a lot about this in terms of relationships. But if you believe that your best years are behind you, I speak to a lot of men. And one of the big things that I hear all the time is, I want to go back to the way it was wish we could just go back, go back there, I just want to go back before all this happened and before. And that is their inability to evolve and transform, right? You're trying to live in the past or trying to capture, for lack of a better term, like a snapshot, or a moment in time that they believe was the best. And because they're they're so focused on that. And that's what they're trying to recreate. That's where they're trying to hold on to. They're not able to live in the present. And they're certainly not able to create a future that they want. And so for us, you know, a big part of the podcast and what we share, and what we talked about in terms of our relationship is we firmly believe that the best years of our relationship are ahead of us.

Kate MacDougall
Yeah, we don't even know. It's funny because our wedding song. Yeah, wedding song was about this. It's Brad Paisley that I was gonna say, Padley. But I was like, No, it's Paisley. It's called Ben. And that's what it says is I thought I loved you, then, you know, he talks about something and I thought I loved you then But then this thing happened. And I thought I loved you then But then this thing happened. And I thought I loved you then. And so he's going forward in the relationship. You know, like, I got down on one knee and I asked you to marry me and I thought I loved you then then you had a baby on the way and I thought I loved you then But then now we're old and gray. And I thought I loved you that of love. Yeah, and I can fit it, the more you evolve and grow in your marriage, the more life experience you have behind the two of you. And the more you live things together, the deeper your connection becomes, the stronger your bond becomes. And the more connected you feel, because one or not, you're living tons of different experiences together, whether those experiences are positive experiences, negative experiences, experiences that are easy, hard, whatever you want to however you want to see these experiences, all of them have a deep impact on your past. And by grieving your past, accepting it, loving it for what it was, and letting it go. You're leaving room for growth, you're leaving opportunity for new in your life and in your relationship. If you keep wanting to go back to how things were and back to where you were, you're gonna miss a lot like, there are some times where I'm like, oh, man, I wish we could go back to the days where we didn't have kids and we could party all the time. I think it's quite normal, to grieve those parts of yourself and to grieve the past a lot, right?

Eric MacDougall
I'm like, remember, you could go anywhere. Yeah, it's totally normal.

Kate MacDougall
And now you go anywhere. It looks like you're moving your entire house out. And it's like, man, remember when we used to be able to to go out and it's okay to reminisce about it. It's okay to to grieve it and to be like, ah,

Eric MacDougall
it was so nice. 10pm Like, that's awesome. Yeah. Or

Kate MacDougall
forget to have dinner and then just have a slice of bread with some ketchup on it. Sure, sure. Wow. I don't know why I just had the hot like, who ate a slice of bread with ketchup? It was more like Kraft dinner. It is definitely in somebody's like, that's amazing. Dinner. Yeah, well, you know, not far from it. slice of bread with peanut butter is what I meant to say. But anyway, all that to say, It's okay to grieve your past. It's okay to miss it. And to think about it and to be like, wow, it was so nice. When well,

Eric MacDougall
I'll even go one step further. Sorry, interrupt. But I think it's actually you have to grieve your past. You know, and I think about so one of the big things in relationship, we kind of bring it back to this topic here is grieving the loss of romantic love. And this is a big part of what is wrong. Again, in my opinion, what is wrong with a lot of our, you know, connections in relationship is that, you know, first we start into this infatuation phase, and we grow into romantic love, and we feel really connected, all the feelings are coming out of the fireworks, then we've all been to attachment and have kids. And then, you know, a lot of people are trying to reconnect to that feeling, again, of romantic love, like I want the butterflies, I want the excitement. And like they're just like, I can't feel that way anymore. And so what they do, they think they can go into another relationship and recreate that they think there's something wrong with their marriage, because that feeling of butterflies and romantic love is gone. And the reality is, is that if you keep chasing that you will probably just go to the next relationship and you will experience that you will experience the novelty, the newness of a new relationship. It's not gonna get much more complex because now you might have to co parent with kids, you're gonna have different schedules to work around, et cetera, et cetera. But you will experience a new sign of romantic love until inevitably you get to the exact same spot. And this is a big part of the problem and relationships we have this side Do like this infatuation phase, this super exciting romantic love phase that is sold to us in fairy tales that is sold to us in social media and all that stuff. Like somehow it lasts forever, like get real. That's not how it works. Yes, there's still plenty of romance in the marriage can I have? Yes, we recreate these moments of connection. But will the feeling ever be the same of like the first time you had sex for the first time you were deeply attracted your partner? Of course not. You've evolved, you have way more responsibilities. Now you have to think about kids, you have to think about others, kid and I have, you know, shared more with each other than we have ever shared with anybody else. Right? Not only as Kate seen me, in my deepest, darkest place, when I was crying on the floor, almost debilitated, you know, talking about all the challenges I had. But you've also seen me, you know, fart and poop and pee, and all these other things. I'm not interested in seeing that. But so again, I'm kind of on a rant here. But it's just to really understand that you have to go beyond this idea of this infatuation phase, a romantic love. And if you're constantly say, like trying to hold on to that, well, it's just going to become more and more fragile, and you're living more and more of a fake life. Exactly.

Kate MacDougall
And I'm, it's exactly kind of where I was going with this. That point was to say that, the more you hold on to it, the less you give yourself opportunity and chance to create these new memories, and to create new opportunities of firsts, right? The first time you see your kids go off to college, the first time you go skiing together as a couple. There are many things despite us being around and around each other dating married for over 20 years, or close to 20 years, we have some things that we have never experienced together, we've never gone to Europe, we've never flown to Greece, there's some parts of the world we haven't seen yet. There's even experiences in our own city we haven't done yet. And you know that these are all first that are yet to come. And we have to give ourselves the opportunity to go towards those firsts. And to experience those firsts instead of grieving what we used to have. And wanting those back and wanting to relive those moments and those for those firsts. We're holding on so tightly to that, that we're forgetting that there's all of these first that are ahead of us, all of these things that we still haven't experienced, together with our kids, in our lives, in our personal lives. There's so much room for opportunity and different experiences still, at the age we're at now with the, you know, length of our relationship. And the beauty of it is because we're so much more connected than we were in our first days of infatuation and love and you know, yes, okay, the butterflies were so much fun. And you know, that feeling of being wooed every day, and like, oh, my gosh, he's just so romantic all the time. Like, yeah, you were trying to catch me like, of course, you're gonna be romantic every single day. And now you got me so well, less romantic, but it's still there. But it just makes that that much more that it just makes it that much more special when you are romantic, because it doesn't happen every day. If it was happening every day, I want something different, like, the grass is always greener, right? You always want what you don't have. And when you have it, you don't want it anymore. You want something else like

Eric MacDougall
you have you take for granted, too, right? And I think that's kind of what we realize, through our own relationship is, you know, instead of thinking back on the past, is that what you're saying, and I encourage every listener here, if you're listening or watching this, you know, think about some of the things in your life that you're not letting go of that are in the past, that it's time for you to grieve and say goodbye to so you can evolve and really create a new opportunity for yourself. Now in your current life or in the future, right? If you're just like, oh, like, you know, and this is for everyone. Like if you think that your kids are just a burden, who are a time suck and you wish that you could go hang out with the boys more and all that stuff? Well, you're losing a huge opportunity here to connect with one of like the miracles of the world, which is young kids, right? And so again, no judgment here. Like I get it, we all have to grieve things. I mean, I'm grieving my 20 year old body, you know what I mean? That's kind of a reality. And as you're getting older, I'm sure when people get into, you know, erectile dysfunction and stuff like that they're grieving a heart erection like, this is real topics that we're talking about, that you need to grieve in order to learn and grow. If you want to learn to have and grow and have great sex into your 90s till you're 100 you have to grieve the sex you used to have in your 20s and figure out how to have different sex now you're in. If you're looking for that intimate connection with your partner that romance? Well, you need to grieve what it was like to not have kids and just at the drop of a hat be able to create a romantic connection and run out to do something extremely fun. And start to think about how you can create romance in the current life that you have. And so that's the idea here the idea is to grieve and let go of what was honor it Think it, understand that you are where you're at because of it. But instead, stop trying to live in the past. Come to your present moment right now think about what you can do differently. And think about moving to the future, and what you want to create.