because we're going to be talking about when it's great complicated and this has been a big question that's been going on around in the grief and loss world and we've got a couple of very parents today who are going to shed some light on this topic for our audience  really love this mom because like you said it's a very controversial question and among parents some of them wonder you know is there even such a thing as complicated grief i guess i want to say before we even start very a very small percentage of the my golf partner and good friend and her son terence died six years ago wrecked and then we have laura sullivan hi laura laura and laura lost her son heigho also six years ago and we just found out about he was very very special from the time he was born he belonged to the neighborhood and the world and to give you a little example at the age of three and a half he was already being asked to dinner with into the two black square radius and he just he had an interviewing personality and that's and he was a wonderful and then if you know about multiple sclerosis it disintegrates the wraps around all your nerves so then the pain started and it really took him down and through all of this he did some specialty and medical school well yes he was a st year surgical resident at mercy hospital in pittsburgh and he married and he married a nurse in the hospital who had a little boy he had a stepson and and they had their own baby and yes they did have their own baby and parents devoted the years that he was laying infirm in bed he devoted those to homeschooling doug who had that time was three by the time do was five he knew multiplication division and he was starting out approx characters poured everything i had in the so we kept living his life fully yes even when he got so yes he  was we were playing golf together yes yes go back when he when he would be hospitalized for some infections and i would go back and make sure that the doctors were washing their hands and the nurses because he didn't trust anybody but as we are as a family we get together not you know on our birthdays or easter or christmas thanksgiving whatever anniversaries and we are we always talk a little bit about terr talk about terrence mostly among themselves they don't really talk to me about because that makes a they're trying to be good kids i was never sure what that was about but yeah well i can say one thing about that i do want to speak for the civil because oftentimes and i can't speak for your kids in general but from what i see in my own experience we know that our parents have been through so much and we've seen how much they've been through and we don't want to cause them any more pain so off to we will hide our grief from them and talk amongst ourselves and not to our parents yes i suppose just that of being we want to be good which i know you have you know his five children including teren of twins and their twin men a twin when a man now i don't know if you know you've got one daughter one daughter and how many grandkids at thirteen there will soon be thirteen wow and where is doug children now where you therapist when your son died i was not i was working in special ed and doing case management and his death this is what propelled me to go and become a therapist so that i could give back and really have a purpose for his loss and so how long did you wait before you did it was a little over a year and i knew you know shortly after his death i knew i wanted to do something to make meaning i just didn't some different things and i think it might be a good time now to look at complicated grief because i think that sometimes it can be a long term loss and sometimes it can be sudden people think sometimes that well it's a long term so it's a lot easier for those people you know it's not the case because you've been taking care of them worrying about him you know they've been there your number one thing and sometimes you're almost   even though people told me i didn't believe it until they actually took their last breath yeah so it was still sudden some ways so what so when we talk about complicated grief it's not so much how they die although that does impact it but how it impacts yes right right so let's talk about we've got a flight coming up now let's talk about calm the indicators the complicated grief if we could get that flight up and could you go over those who are us and then we're going to talk about them a little bit and get your tooth and yeah sure so these are our five a list of ten but these are the strongest by the st one would be strong feelings of and then the rd would be isolation and not wanting to communicate with anyone another one the th one here we have a difficult time and it can actually become an inability to really trust other people and the th most significant is there is an extreme level of avoiding anything to do with the loss or the loss loved one ok yeah well let's out a little bit and what comes up for you most in that length i guess one thing that comes up for me is that most of us in fact i think almost everybody has strong feelings of disbelief yeah even if you're not complicated that's right and i was thinking of that with you where somebody doesn't live with you all the time sometimes people can kind of ignore it and let it didn't really happen right you know and getting into that developing awareness can be hard right right well well i remember when scott died i was away at college and i went home you know for the funeral but then i left again and when i went home for christmas i honestly expected to see him yeah even though i knew he was gone i still didn't believe i was still in disbelief i really did think that he was going to be there when i open the door yeah so yeah i experienced that with kyle as well i had for a long time told myself he was just a way to call it right and so i think that is really normal with grief this would be an extreme level of that where after a significant amount to talk i and inability to accept the loss and to believe or even hear from others and when you see a time tell me about that what is there a time frame where people have to start looking and saying ok wait a minute maybe i do have complicated grief yeah it's a really tricky question and ok really controversy all ok so the complicated grief center has given a six month timeframe ok all of us on this now that six months we're you know we're really in that beginning maze so d it it can be i think it needs to be where it's actually causing functional impairment it goes on for a length of time and depending on the and there's a reason people see bodies it's called seeing is believing right and the research i've seen on it shows that it doesn't matter probably six months or a year out whether you saw them or not but a lot of people believe that actually seeing them can help you to move into the developing awareness where you know you know that you had a loss let's talk a little bit about obsessive thoughts you know what about those i mean i remember the monkey mind where  you think about nothing else for a while and you know if you've got thoughts about you know some some of the examples with obsessive thoughts would be that in in how do you mention a really important point that it's an extreme you know extreme situations a very small percentage of people but they become actually obsessed about kind of living the steps of their loved one doing what they would do only eating what they would eat or in a situation where it's an ambiguous staff really going to extremes to try to get answers so these are kind of some examples where it would show up what about being stuck in the trauma narrative in other words reliving over and over and over the way that they died  and not running in your head and not being able to get out of that process without the considered to say it can be and sometimes what happens is the trauma narrative becomes the new narrative and a sense of identity for the person and state of their own sense of identity so they become a mash to that trauma i remember alphabetizing every card i received and i did go through months all hit all of his pictures it's life are categorized yet really talk about isolating behaviors because i think that is a really huge yairi large yes if you are not able to some people can't leave the house or writer or don't want to see anybody and writing the problems of isolating i think is that you don't  start to think you're not normal and i think when you reach out with other people who have had similar losses yeah and you say things like i can't believe this happened or i feel like i'm going crazy other people can say that's normal i felt the same way right and then you can say ok and that helps you really feel better but if you isolate you don't get that feed you get any feedback from anybody or any support and a lot of you are a perfect example of somebody who doesn't do that and didn't and you know you were amazing riding around on the golf car it was a but you were with other people you know you really i think that's one of the your biggest strengths that i see is your ability to move about well i think i i can keep people away from me also  this little club i belong to she said you know you're not i think it had been about six weeks she says you can't just stay home and i thought to myself well you're wrong i can do that you know i want to i can i do yeah yeah look at interventions because i know people are really going to want to know some of the things they do so let's move on to the slide on interventions so i think while they're coming up with that slide i think there it is ok yeah so one of the things is receiving therapy in this is with dealing with again complicated grief so somebody's trained and that ideally and then talking about loss over and over is really important and so one of the things that we found is that people sometimes even therapy don't talk about the loss and so like you said that hope of having people connect with you defying support people is huge and you talked about that lonnie with the support of your family getting together for terrence some really big piece to helping in an intervention and then this one that folks are seeing on the screen probably wouldn't mean anything the empty chair technique to that would be what it would be so that would be a little tricky to explain here but the last one is probably my favorite and the most important in my opinion is the  y support groups or safe people to where you can get that feeling of hope and universality and that you're not allowed let's talk about a couple more and then then when that's really move into that support group  what i know people are wondering ok the st one you said receiving traumatic grief therapy if i really feel like you know it's been a or six months i mean in if people are a danger to themselves or others looking for complicated grief treatment in particular they would look on the website of complicated grief conflict go to complicated grief and there's some real research and everything and yeah there are bits that are being trained in that al south going and they will let you know look you're not in the right place right and there have been people like that who have then been said to me you know more and other therapists out there so you don't have to worry about it if you're not sure they'll tell you if that's a really good  think that's really important and when i do therapy i have people come in all the time that say heidi i know you've heard the story i'm just going to say you know we've heard this before i said yes but every time you tell me you might tell me in a little different way that's right so i'm looking for a little significant shifts that are being made yeah and you need to keep telling it because the reality is as you all know society interrupts our story that's right a lot because you don't want to hear sometimes all of it so they'll change the subject and leave us in different directions so he talked about that yes yeah that's really true and and i think you mentioned compassionate friends and actually compassionate friends does naturally really everything that would be in the complicated curriculum just my nature of what they're offering  yeah and and did you get a did you feel that you had enough support in your community to talk about it early on what was your thought about the yes i do of course it's hard to have a little bit hard to go back but i have most the biggest gift to me and i go to mass three times a week and after mass we say the rosary where i belong with these with these elderly people they're just wonderful there you they do in you if you do your hope yeah yeah and i think it's important that you know we're talking about compassionate friends but sometimes there aren't a group in your community or maybe it's another you're watching a show and you've had a parent loss it's not a  loss and i think people are great places to go are your local hospice called and asked them who they use and call your hospital and ask who who cut what kind of people you know who they can recommend for  groups or whatever and find out what's right for you and i do talk about if you don't like it they're just i always say where is the camera there i always say shopper right use your st therapy session to find out if you are a good fit with that there because you're interviewing a therapist and if they have a problem with that then you're not a good fit with them so that's the way i look at my for all my st session i've been doing this work for many many years that's to see if we're good fit together as you rightly comfortable with me go out and get some when you're comfortable with because there be the very intimate thing at in your nose and we tell our deepest darkest things to our therapist he wanted to really really be a good fit and i love  had a wonderful guy john romano who's a professor emeritus at the university of rochester i always used to say gloria if you had three good friends that you could talk to you wouldn't need a therapist that's what happened to me  opportunity to drink every night because i find out you're an alcoholic and you can't relax doing that anymore you know there are all sorts of losses that we happen and being able to talk about them but i also want to mention  other way too i was thinking of psychology today and they put and there's that code and then a couple of key words like grief in particular types of bereavement that can be a really good way as well yes it is it is a specialty because to thank you guys so much for being on and sharing all this and you're amazing and the importance of this whole thing is that people see you and they you know see you're willing to talk about it i mean it's bad thing else we're talking about a topic mine is a really bad idea of finding a support person and i like your three friends or d you know your set church or compassionate friends somewhere where you feel accepted and loved and they can like you say h i hold hope for you until you can hold it i think that's huge made a huge difference in my life and yeah that would be so much and i think you know i have a new best friend  we want to thank you for watching the open to hope show and we always want to remind you and i'm sure these guys too if you've lost hope please lean on ours until you find your own and god bless you know we're g