Jayne: Season 3, Episode 11, Grief and Burnout, with Jess Goyder. Jess is a licensed and certified grief recovery therapist and a volunteer bereavement counsellor for a leading UK charity. However much you usually love this time of year, Christmas can be especially challenging when you're feeling bereaved or going through a breakup, an estrangement, or managing chronic illness, burnout or redundancy. Everything can feel especially raw at this time of year. We hope this episode will shed a light on grief and the connection it has with burnout and in particular a little nod to the holiday season ahead. I hope you enjoy.
So I've been really looking forward to speaking with you today, Jess, on this particular topic, because it's a topic I think especially at this time of year can be really significantly more at the forefront of our experience.
And I would love to hear a little bit about why grief is something that's particularly drawn you in as a practitioner that's specialised in this area. If we maybe begin with a bit of your story.
Jess: So I'm a, I'm a certified grief recovery specialist. I never ever imagined I would go into this work.
 I was studying to become a psychotherapist. I was on that track. It was a passion for a very long time. And then I happened to be doing some Cruse work. I'm a volunteer bereavement counsellor for Cruse, and I was just getting more counselling experience. And then we had this exercise where we had to list our losses in life.
And this was all our losses, not just bereavement. And then that exercise turned my world upside down. They took me aside and said, Jess, this is a lot of loss. And I think from that moment, the realisation that grief is not only bereavement, a huge part of it and a huge part of my work. In fact, I'll give you a definition that I find really helpful because it reminds us that we're all grieving all of the time.
And the grief is the conflicting feelings caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behaviour. But it's that ordinary. You know, the feelings of grief are conflicting and they're caused by any ending or change. So it's just an aspect of life that we're not really equipped for. We're not given the tools to process loss or live with loss or walk alongside loss. We're taught how to accumulate things rather than lose them.
Jayne: Yes.
Jess: And rather than what to do when we lose them, I should say. And then I just started researching. I was researching palliative care, completely fascinated, thinking, what am I doing?
Where am I going with this? And it was felt like a real calling. And then I found the grief recovery method, which is an evidence based programme of support that I wish was widely available across the UK and widely known, but I became certified as a practitioner in that and I work with clients now, I run a private practice, I run workshops and talks and work in organisations and all sorts of different things. So yeah that's who I've become and what I do.
Jayne: Yeah. With a lot of the topics that we touch on this podcast, often there's this sense of how is it that this knowing that we stumble upon perhaps later in life wasn't there in childhood?
And how is it that it's not in our education and part of what our children learn so that they have those skills and they have that bigger picture and understanding and I guess that's part of the work that we do is in changing that as well through the talk through the workshops through inputting into society, and the information that we give so that that filters through and starts to change things.
Jess: Jayne, I think it's so important. And I think there is something shifting. I feel that we are on the cusp of a wave. And there's historical reason why we don't have these skills and tools. Grieving is a skill, in fact. Yes. It's but yeah, there's a whole historical backstory to do with the First World War, a global pandemic where millions of young men died, the Second World War, the advancement of medicine, capitalism, we could go into that, but there is a reason for it.
But no, I think things are changing. I think there's beginning to be a new understanding of things and you're right, it's education, really. It's like literacy training and I've developed the term lost literacy. Yeah. It's lost literacy for me. That's something I'm developing, just this idea of literacy knowing, and that's very low bar.
But if we all jumped over that low bar, the world would be transformed.
Jayne: I would be really interested to hear a little bit more actually from what your research and learnings have led you to understand of the reasons why we maybe didn't continue with what was, it may be more instinctively there as part of our cultural ways and maybe how that's been lost because I think that sometimes understanding that can help with the retrieval of it and the acknowledgement that actually it's somewhere there internally to be rediscovered and found again and brought back.
Yeah. And imagine it varies as well from culture to culture. Because very much, we're speaking with a kind of a European or a British lens. And of course in some cultures, it hasn't been lost and it's been preserved and maybe there's learnings there for us as well.
Jess: Exactly, we've got to be very culturally aware when we talk about this.
I'm talking about European Western developed world in a sense. But yes, Queen Victoria wore black for however many years it was to all of her children's weddings. She, that was, the Victorians did grief and dying and death in quite a big way. It's always. I think I think the first world war was such a tragedy and actually that pandemic where millions of young men died internationally, globally. And then it was quite shortly after, followed by the Second World War. And it was just too much. People weren't even able to grieve privately, let alone publicly. And that keep calm and carry on , people had to get through. People did get through. And and then I think there was a lot of reliance on medicine, this idea that medicine can save us.
This white clinical, we put so much hope in medicine, almost became a new religion and capitalism almost became a new religion. And we had technology and progress and through progress, we will work our way out of this. And we lost ritual. Ritual became capitalised in a sense.
And so I think we need to reclaim ritual. We've lost so many rituals of initiation, all over the world, culturally, there's such a rich depth in our history and our Celtic culture or all sorts of other cultural histories in Great Britain. So many ritual processes that are shared, collective experiences shared by a tribe and our lives have become very atomised.
And we live in the separate self psychology now where we're very atomised and isolated. And that's not a great concoction for dealing with the reality of death or loss. Just the fact that you want everything you have. And that's part of the contract of this amazing gift of life on planet earth.
You've won the lottery and there's just a catch. This is the way it's going to work. Sorry, it's the only way it can work, here you go...
Jayne: Yeah. It's really like hitting me, hearing you speak, how that sense of community and sharing in loss or grief and the loneliness of that being a missing element of many of our lives that just that link between loneliness and burnout, because quite often people presume that burnout is solely because of the pressures that somebody's maybe been under or the choices that they've made or the kind of internal stresses coupled with external stresses and studies actually show that loneliness is one of the key contributing factors to burnout, but it's not often spoken about or connected.
The dots aren't necessarily connected between those two things. So I'm just, I'm wondering in terms of bringing back ritual and people learning to lose again in the way that we maybe would have done before we were conditioned to keep calm and carry on and prosper through progress and all of that. Yeah, I'm wondering what's occurring to you in terms of of the connection.
Jess: I think there's also a connection there between support, the support of a community and then there's people's emotional needs not being met. And that is a huge aspect of burnout, isn't it? That's absolutely true.
Jayne: Yeah.
Jess: And firstly, you know, we're we're all responsible when we burn out.
And I know , I'm speaking as somebody who has burnt out at different times of my own life, and, has lived the connection between burnout and grief. But I know that a lot of my driving behaviours before I burned out, sometimes a burnout hit actually through no fault of my own at all. There are many, life happened and life happens.
But part of that mix were also driving behaviours where I was very driven very committed, almost a little bit obsessed with an aspect of my life and didn't stop. And actually that in itself was me working really hard to keep busy away from the grief and the trauma that I was carrying.
That's the connection often that the behaviours that kind of lead us to over function are actually masking grief itself. Yes. So yeah, I've taken it slightly sideways from you talking about community and, but yes, I think intergenerational living is a part of that too, all the elderly in one area over there and people are just incredibly stretched.
There's so much pressure on one family and I think it's just a bit of a lose game. I think we have so much . We live the life of kings and queens for the majority of the world's population. We're so privileged and yet we still live feeling that we're playing a game we can't win whatever we do.
And I think it's getting worse because we have access to so much. Everything's at our fingertips. Everything's in our phones. There's so much possibility. And there's so much to do. And there's so much distraction. Where are we going to put ourselves? How can we concentrate and be present enough to even be with our loved ones and feel the benefits of actually connecting with each other in the way we might need to?
Jayne: Yes. And I think that the kind of normalisation of busyness, which I think is the biggest distraction from sitting with what we're actually feeling and noticing what's going on at the level of our body and the striving and the pushing and the things that would have us keep on that conditioned pathway forward, that progression. Often if we were actually listening underneath it all, our internal wisdom would be saying something else, right? That, that there's the whisper of you've just lost your job. Or this person's no longer in your life, and not necessarily because they've passed away, but it could just be that they've moved country and you are just not in contact with them anymore.
Or, they're the smaller losses that we maybe distract ourselves from by just, Oh I'll just get on with this and think about it. No,
Jess: Then there's nuance here, the times when it's, we need to really throw ourselves into something and push and bounce our boundaries and, have a big, few weeks where it's all a bit crazy.
And that is part of life. It's just, yeah, I think it's just, the difference between a few years of that would start to have consequences. And I think you're right. I think actually understanding that when we're grieving, our brain is trying to come to terms with the reality it doesn't want to be true.
And that's taking up a huge amount of emotional and physiological bandwidth. Yeah. And that actually, perhaps we need to just ease back a little bit.
Jayne: Yeah.
Jess: And that also we need to learn how to navigate. When you're grieving, you're also pulled between two poles, which actually applies for all of us in life.
That one pole is I'm using the word pole, but it's actually, it's called the dual process model, but one aspect of grieving is more regenerative. It's more looking forwards, moving on, maybe distracting yourself as well, keeping busy, thinking about the future, feeling a bit better.
And then the other grief work is more feeling awful, feeling sad, feeling you can't go on, deciding actually you're not going to put your house on the market, you're not ready, you can't sort out those clothes, you just want to hide under a duvet but we oscillate between those two poles of being all the time, and we do that when we're grieving, and we also do that in life. But you can lean into both those directions.
Okay, now I need to rest, and I'm just going to let myself feel sad. Okay, I'm noticing I'm feeling sad. Oh, now I'm feeling more hopeful. Okay. Oh, and, but you will, you'll ping pong between those two poles all the time. Yeah.
Jayne: And as you described that, I noticed your body swaying in a way like, it just reminds me of if we are nature and the metaphor of a wave or a tree in the breeze, or, there's a gentle noticing and adjusting and allowing for movements. I think sometimes we forget that there are opportunities within ourselves to embrace, the natural movement that we would make if we weren't being forced by external circumstances to do something other than what we instinctively feel.
Jess: You're right, Jayne.
Jayne: Yeah. Yeah. I was also thinking about like the seasons of nature, and loss and sort of metaphor of a tree, for example, when it drops its leaves in the autumn, and then we move into the winter as we are now. And the forgetting, I think sometimes that we also need to hibernate, that we do sometimes need to cocoon, go into that duvet.
But we do come back out again in the spring. We don't need to stay there just because we visited it.
Jess: No. What you are making me think of is, there are lot, lots of things I could I feel in resonance to that, I think, I call my company, grief is natural.
Grief is a natural response to loss. And I think grief isn't a problem to be fixed. It's a natural process to be supported. That's the first thing.
Jayne: That's beautiful.
Jess: And then I'd also, I also feel, when I've been in my very darkest moments when you hit deepest, darkest bottom, which I have, when you're in those moments, that it's from that place that completes the cycle.
 It's as if in the cycle of life, in this natural cycle of life, we've got quite stuck. And if we don't acknowledge the descent, then we can't allow a new ascent. The circle of life can't complete itself. And so I think, yes, it's learning to be, learning to dance more.
We have to walk alongside grief, learning to dance with it more seeing it less as something to fight and control and more as something to respect, honour and live with. And acknowledge that life won't be perfect. And even in managing our burnout and in managing our grief, there will be grief.
Jayne: Yes.
Jess: Life is full of tough choices and if you're managing burnout or even this Christmas, you might have to choose whether you're going to go out or stay at home and there'll be loss if you don't go. Even if you're doing the right thing, or you might go and not have a great time, but you might feel awful the next day.
It's as if sometimes we need to remember that there's no great choice here. Sometimes we have to choose between two less than ideals, but we just do our best. And sometimes we choose to bounce in one direction and another time we bounce in the other, and the most important thing is to remove that second arrow where we blame ourselves.
We need to learn, do an after action review and learn, but, you know, we're dealing with processes that are forever changing and circumstances are changing and all we can do is our best and be as compassionate as we can be.
Jayne: That was exactly the word that was coming to me really this sense of self compassion in the process and process of life, grief being part of that feels so strong in what you're sharing. And I often feel in the process of burnout with the clients I work with quite often self taught can be quite cruel and unkind and maybe sometimes not having a choice that was going to offer an easy way forward, and that being the reality that there was no right or wrong and it was just about moving forward, one foot in front of the other. And as you said, sometimes burnouts can happen to you. A lot of onus is often placed on the individual, especially in organisational settings where they haven't quite appreciated the part that they have also got to take ownership of that they've played in somebody's burnout. And I think sometimes people can experience burnout and feel as if it's their fault, as if they could have made a different choice or done something better or different. And that can, I think, lead to someone being stuck actually in a place where the finding of hope or feeling that they can get back up again, it just isn't accessible to them.
But through that compassion, it somehow that feels like that opens something else.
Jess: Yeah, I think it's so true. We carry so much shame around all negative emotion. And in fact, one of the biggest myths around grief, which is very, this is in the grief recovery method, but one of the myths we have culturally around grief, we have to do a lot of unlearning before we can actually do the learning need. And one of the greatest myths is don't feel bad. And that sounds very "Oh nobody says don't feel bad", but if you just think of the things people say when something awful is happening he had a long and wonderful life, or he wouldn't want you to be sad or, at least, anything that could begin with at least, or you could actually, end almost everything with don't feel bad.
And so that's very true. We feel bad about feeling bad. So can we actually just allow ourselves to feel what we're feeling, to be what we're feeling? And if you can, I find I move through feelings quite fluidly. So when I do allow myself to really sit with the loss, and I think I had no choice and many times when I've been grieving, I couldn't just distract myself.
But I feel actually I was lucky in some funny kind of way, because I find the more I'm able to really lean into the pain of loss, the better I'm then able to go out and live and do the other side of everything else, so the more I rest. Actually, the more able I am to cry and be with my sadness, the more capacity I have for joy.
And that's the difference. We don't want to live this flatline existence, we want to live a rich life, full of experience and full of love. So I have a life full of grief and I intend to keep having a life full of grief and loss because I've got a lot to lose and a lot of people to love.
So that's going to be a part of my life.
Jayne: Yeah. I love the way you frame that. There's an old saying that you can't really know love unless you've lost. There's this sort of sense that actually you realise how dear something was to you because it's not there anymore.
And in that you then recognise more easily and capably the things that actually are precious and matter to you that sometimes maybe you weren't able to be present. You said earlier about, sometimes it's difficult for us to be present with our families and those that we know we do care about because of the busyness.
And sometimes it's not till something is no longer there in our lives that we then realise, oh yeah, the reason this is so painful is because I really loved this thing, whether it could have been a career that somebody's lost. And again, thinking on burnout, there's huge losses that come through burnout, professionally, personally, in terms of health and relationships and all sorts that people lose because of that experience.
And yet also that in that loss, the beauty of seeing what they have to live for and how, if they live in a different way and with appreciation for what they've learned through that, then that coming back to life and the hope for something different.
And just before we hit record, we were speaking to how the very thing that's been so difficult in our life or so challenging or life changing has been the thing that we then felt was our purpose to, to work in, and that's not always the case for everybody, but I wonder if it might feel appropriate to share a little bit of that.
Jess: Yeah, sure.
Yeah. And I'm also really interested to hear from you what all your clients who've gone through burnout, what the most valuable lessons they've learned have been too, because you've met so many people in your work. But the greatest loss of my life, and I used to feel quite ashamed at this because I used to work with people who were bereaved and everything else and I've had multiple bereavements, but the most difficult loss of my life was my singing voice, was my career.
Jayne: Wow.
Jess: I was a professional singer, songwriter, a musician, and I played at 10 Glastonburys, I'd worked on main stages after Jools Holland and, played many major festivals. Yes, there was that whole egoic part of it, but actually it was more that I was born to sing.
It was like a bird, I was born to sing. I was born to write songs, I'd channel them. They'd come through me. I'd play piano and guitar. It was just such a huge part of who I was in all aspects. And I made so many sacrifices to follow that bliss. I'd lived a path that was so different to everybody else and just lived that life, performed with a band, was always rehearsing, recording.
I was training with a top vocal coach. I was on a music industry training programme, mentoring programme. I had my dream songwriters giving me feedback and working with Aretha Franklin's producer. I could go on and on and it wasn't that it was easy or that I was a big star. It was just the love of my life.
And I didn't even need to be that famous, but I wanted it to be my life and I wanted to work with the best people. And that came with certain, I needed to be in a certain place. And in the course of three weeks, I completely lost my physical functioning and my singing voice. I developed CFS and I could barely move around my flat.
And in that time, three people died. So it was a very dark time. So yes, and in that time I had a horrific bereavement and then two other people died. And so I lost everything. And then for many years, I physically couldn't sing. And I kept trying, but I would sit at the piano and no sound would come out. I could start a song feeling quite hopeful, but within a few seconds, within about 30 seconds, I couldn't make noise.
And I was told it was the last thing I'd get back. So I had to let all of that part of myself die, which sounds very extreme. But I just knew I was not going to return to walking normally, making, cooking meals, all of everything else that I'd taken for granted. And there was so much to grieve.
There was everything, my whole life, my whole functioning, everything I used to do and love and all my dance classes and all sorts of things. But I knew the pact I knew I had to make, which sounds so extreme, was that I had to accept that this part of myself was going to have to go. And it was a very driven, passionate part of myself.
And with that were maybe quite unhealthy behaviours where I drove myself too much. Because actually I learned to sing when I had become permanently deaf in one ear. Actually, singing had been the way I'd processed my grief in a way. A difficult childhood in Ethiopia, not difficult, but I grew up in an Ethiopian famine, which had its own. So there was a lot, there's a lot of backstory for what made me become a singer. So actually, as I lost my voice, I also had to face all the other losses that had preceded, that my singing had helped me process, and almost mask in a way.
So yes, it's been a long journey and chronic illness is an ongoing lived grief and loss really. It hasn't been a clear path through, but I've carved out a life I really love and adore and I have got my voice back. But I've got a very different relationship with it now.
And my voice is more this kind of sharing. I love working with people. I love my client work. I love the connection that brings. I yeah, I love what I do. I think I've carved out something else that I love to do is the answer. Yeah. Gosh.
Jayne: Wow. It really comes through as well. That deep passion. Oh my goodness me, what a journey! Like really? Yeah, I think you touched on something about the clients and the experiences and before you shared your story I think there's something about a loss of identity actually, that's quite often part of the experience in burnout as a loss that is there and whether it's because of an aspect of oneself that maybe was a gift that was overplayed and then it's just not possible for that person to engage in that way anymore with whatever that pursuit was.
Or, ironically also sometimes clients will have worked in something that didn't really light them up at all. And they either fell into it or ended up pursuing a career or vocation that was somebody else's dream of them. And it never really belonged to them. And then when they burn out and they can't go back to that, they wonder, Who am I if I'm not doing that?
And actually, they don't want to do that anymore. That becomes clear. But then what do they really want and igniting their own voice, their own passion and really finding who they are, is quite a significant part of the work.
Jess: I think identity is so important, isn't it? Yeah. I also think almost back to what you were saying about what people learn through burnout, I think what my experience taught me was that what really mattered to me when my relationships, my family and friends, I appreciated all the tiny things so much.
Maybe I had to because I was in recovery, but once I had really gone through a lot of the grieving process of watching my life fall away, I just would sit and watch the birds or, had a lot of neurological challenges. So I would just sit and watch the birds, just go on little walks if I could, or just do all the tiny things.
So yeah, back to what I really appreciate were family and friends, my health. And then actually nature, to be honest, it was nature that was my healer and the thing I loved the most and valued the most and good food and so other things became more important, and then I think maybe then there's a challenge of actually finding your own way.
Jayne: Yes.
Jess: Finding something else finding a balance, your company's called Balanceology, but yes, it is. And balance doesn't mean being in perfect balance all the time, but it's about the architecture of your life. And life has a beautiful architecture that's full of support and structure and joy and, it may have grey corners, but the overall architecture, the whole building is fabulous.
That's what you can create for yourself.
Jayne: Yeah.
Jess: That's like a new analogy, but I know I used that term before, but yeah, I guess you can restructure your life.
Jayne: Yeah. Yeah. And that picture that paints for me in my head is of so much hope and with possibility. And for me this work, it's feel so important because so many people I think lose the hope of something different.
And being able to be created because we're often so caged in. The way in which we've, as societies, set things up so that it feels as though there aren't many options and that we can't say no to these things and, that would have otherwise led us to doing too much or giving too much of ourselves away.
And there's something about building that architecture and support and finding the strength and the voice to be able to actually say no and push back a bit in this system aren't actually supportive and are a big part of the problem. Because it's a global pandemic again of a different kind than the kind that was experienced by generations ago. And so many people I think are burning out and a contributing factor of that obviously being unprocessed and unacknowledged grief and emotions in general, not even, even happiness. So many people I work with and they feel they've had to rein in happiness because that might be too much for someone else.
Jess: But also if we go back to my definition, grief isn't one emotion. Grief is the conflicting feelings. So your grief might be huge relief, joy, sadness, guilt about the joy, moments of despair. So remember that grief is all feelings, all the feelings. And actually that might be why Christmas is hard, because you're suddenly, I'm feeling happy, and then you feel awful about feeling happy.
And then, so yeah, grief is all of those feelings. Yeah.
Jayne: Yeah.
I think that's a really lovely way of actually supporting those who do feel a bit uncomfortable and confused and not sure how to navigate Christmas because of all of those different emotions that will be coming up for different reasons.
And making sense of that in a way that helps them to move through, going back to what we were saying earlier about nature and the name of your business and, with appreciation for what they need, and the compassion.
Jess: I think that's right. And I think saying about architecture, also we have to acknowledge that our choices are limited, parenthood is really tough.
 I'll just give you examples. My Wednesdays is a no client day, and I, and that's when I have my therapy and I don't do any work if I can. And I've always got that buffer. And actually any time I've pushed that or seen a client that day, it's gone terribly.
And so actually it is any moment where you can carve out. And self-compassion isn't just soft and fluffy. Self compassion requires us to be fierce sometimes. It requires us to be brave. It requires us to be strong, and so actually to actually say, no, actually on Thursdays I do X, actually at two o'clock I do this.
I go and do a yoga nidra, which is something I talk about all the time, which you might talk about all the time with people too, a sleep meditation or whatever it is, I do one of those every day. And I have all these practices and patterns, and I've now developed a pattern of life that's full of ebbs and flows.
So it's back to that again, but it's moments of rest and recharge and regeneration. Then we look at nature, animals do. Birds, they'll be in the nest, they'll be all huddled and then I'll do a big swoop and get exactly what they need and then huddle down again. Moments of great exertion and performance or, a great chase and then I'll just go back to sleep.
Jayne: I love that. All of that. Literally I got goosebumps as you were saying about the need for the fierceness and the compassion as well . And I think that might be a nice note to close with actually, because maybe an invitation to those listening what do they really need this Christmas? What do they need to honour for themselves that they maybe need to be a little bit fierce about putting boundaries around and being able to ask for and have that honoured. Yeah.
Jess: And it can be really loving fierceness, and it's fierce about the boundary, not even fierce with other people. But actually, the more you hold that boundary, and grief itself needs containers even if you're grieving. But when you can be firmer about that boundary, there's less chance that you're going to leak out and snap and get things wrong.
And yeah so I think it's really looking at what you can carve out for yourself that will support you in a way you really need.
Jayne: Wow. Thank you. I feel beautifully filled up from our conversation. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for your time, Jess.
Merry Christmas.
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