Episode 10
· 15:49
Hello, and welcome to Moving Minds Forward. Today, we're talking about grief and loss. People aren't broken, and whatever they're carrying, there's always a way forward. I didn't come to that belief through a textbook. I came to it through my own life and through years of sitting with people who thought they were stuck for good and found out they weren't.
Gary Johannes:I'm Gary Johannes, solution focused hypotherapist, founder of Inspired to Change, and a lecturer. And that belief that people aren't broken, and there's always a way forward, runs through everything on this podcast. One condition per episode. What's going on? What's keeping it going?
Gary Johannes:And what actually helps? As a hypnotherapist, grief is something I see often. And if you're getting value from Moving Minds Forward, hit subscribe or follow wherever you're listening. Let's get into it. So grief.
Gary Johannes:And if someone's listening to this because they're right in the middle of it, I see you. This episode is for you. I've lost people I loved and faced serious illness myself, So I'm not speaking about this from the outside. Grief is deeply personal. There's no set path, but healing is possible, and that's what we're here to talk about today.
Gary Johannes:We're gonna cover what grief actually is, what's happening in the brain when loss hits, why some people get stuck, what keeps it going, and what actually helps. And I'll leave you with one thing you can take away today. If you find this useful, hit subscribe wherever you're listening. There's a lot more to come. Let's get into it.
Gary Johannes:So what is grief really? Most people, when they hear the word, they think death. And, yes, losing someone you love is at the center of it, but grief is bigger than that. You can grieve at the end of a relationship. A job you built your identity around, a home you had to leave, a version of your life that you'd planned for that isn't now gonna happen, the loss of your health, or someone else's, a miscarriage, a pet, financial security, the future you thought you had.
Gary Johannes:Grief is a response to loss, any significant loss, and the brain doesn't really distinguish between them as neatly as society does. We're much more comfortable telling someone they're allowed to fall apart when a parent dies than when a marriage ends. But the brain's response to profound loss is the same process regardless of what triggered it, and that matters because a lot of people minimize their own grief. They tell themselves they don't have the right to feel bad, that other people have it worse. They should be over it by now, and minimizing that pressure makes everything harder.
Gary Johannes:So what actually is happening in the brain? When we lose someone or something deeply significant, the brain goes into a state that has a lot in common with threat response. The amygdala, the brain's alarm system, fires up. The stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, flood the body. The nervous system goes on high alert.
Gary Johannes:This is why grief feels physical. The tight chest, the heaviness, the exhaustion that doesn't lift even when you sleep, the way food loses its taste, the way sounds seem different. That's not weakness. That's your nervous system in a state of profound disruption. The brain is also doing something very specific.
Gary Johannes:It has built over years and years a model of the world that includes this person, this relationship, this future, every interaction, every expectation, every plan. The brain has woven them in, and now that model doesn't match reality anymore. The brain has to rebuild. It has to update the entire picture of the world. And that process, that painful, disorienting, exhausting process, is what grief actually is.
Gary Johannes:It's not just sadness. It's the brain trying to make sense of a world that no longer looks the way it expected. This is why grief can feel so confusing, where you can be functional one moment and completely flawed the next, why a song, a smell, a particular time of year can bring it rushing back. The brain keeps encountering things that don't match the updated reality yet. And each time it does, it has to process the loss again, which causes some people to struggle more than others.
Gary Johannes:There's no formula for this. Grief is not proportional. It's not about how much someone loved the person or how prepared they were or how strong they are. It's more complex than that. The nature of the relationship matters.
Gary Johannes:A sudden unexpected loss hits differently from one that came after a long illness, though both are devastating in their own ways. An ambiguous loss, a relationship that ends badly, or a family member lost to estrangement or dementia can be particularly hard to process because there's no clear moment of goodbye. Previous experiences with loss shape it too. If you've learned to suppress grief, to put on a brave face, to keep moving, the feelings don't go away. They wait, and they often come back harder.
Gary Johannes:Your support network makes a significant difference. And it's worth saying plainly, seventy four percent of bereaved people with high or severe vulnerability aren't accessing any formal support. That's not because they don't need it. It's because reaching out is hard. And because our culture is really bad at sitting with grief, people don't know what to say.
Gary Johannes:So they say nothing, or they say the wrong thing, and the bereaved person ends up feeling more alone than before. And then there's what sometimes called complicated grief, when grief doesn't move, when it stays as raw and all consuming a year or two in as it was in the first weeks, when a person can't imagine life with this absence at the center of it. That's not weakness either. It's a sign that the brain has got stuck in a loop of processing and can't find a way through. However, it responds very well to the right kind of support.
Gary Johannes:So what keeps it going? Avoidance is a big one. The instinct to not think about it, to not talk about it, to keep busy so it doesn't catch up with you. And I understand the instinct completely. The pain of grief is extraordinary.
Gary Johannes:Of course, the brain wants to find a way around it, but grief that isn't processed doesn't disappear. It goes underground. It tends to show up as anxiety or anger or a kind of low level depression that doesn't have any obvious cause because the cause is buried. Isolation maintains it. When Grief cut somebody off from the people and the activities that would normally nourish them, the brain gets less of what it needs, less serotonin, less connection, less sense of meaning.
Gary Johannes:Rumination plays a role. Going over and over the last conversation, the last day, the last what ifs, and the if onlys. The brain thinks it's trying to solve something, trying to find a way to make sense of it, but there's often no sense to be found, and a loop just keeps the pain alive without moving anything forward. Grief is one of the most corrosive things grief can carry. The feeling that you should have done more, said something different, been there in a different way, and it's almost always unfair.
Gary Johannes:People do their best. They almost always do their best, but grief has a way of turning that into evidence of failure. So what actually helps? The first thing, and I mean this, is permission. Permission to grieve in the way that's right for you, not the way that's expected or convenient for the people around you, there is no timeline.
Gary Johannes:There's no correct set of emotions. Grief is not linear. You do not move through stages in order to come out the other side healed. You move around. You have good days and then terrible days.
Gary Johannes:You laugh, and then you feel guilty for laughing. All that is part of it. Connection is one of the most powerful things. Not being told the right thing, just not being alone with it. It doesn't have to be a formal support group, though those can be enormously valuable.
Gary Johannes:It can be a person who will sit with you without trying to fix it. Talking about the person who has gone matters. So many bereaved people feel pressure not to mention their name, not to bring them up, because they don't want to make others uncomfortable. But talking about them, telling stories, keeping them present, That's part of how the brain interrogates the loss. It's not wallowing.
Gary Johannes:It's processing. Physical health is truly part of grief recovery. Sleep is disrupted. Appetite goes. The immune system takes a hit.
Gary Johannes:This is all real and documented. Looking after the basics, sleep, food, some movement, even just getting outside, isn't separate from emotional healing. It creates the neurochemical foundation that makes healing more possible, and this is where solution focused hypnotherapy can do something specific. We don't push people back into the pain. We don't require you to relive it in detail.
Gary Johannes:We work with the subconscious to help the nervous system calm down, to reduce the intensity of the threat response that keeps grief active. They help people find access to memories of the person they've lost that aren't purely agonizing. The warmth, the humor, the love, those memories are in there. Grief can make them feel impossible to reach. Hypnotherapy can help, and we work on the future carefully at the person's pace, not dismissing the loss, never that.
Gary Johannes:Gradually, at your own pace, find a way to live alongside it and discover that healing is possible. The three pillars matter here too. Positive interaction, even small moments of genuine connection start to restore what grief depletes. Positive actions to engagement with life, one small step at a time, begins to rebuild the sense that there is still something to move towards, and positive thinking, not forced optimism, but deliberately, gently noticing moments of warmth and meaning still exist, even in the middle of the pain. Think of a memory of the person or the thing you've lost that makes you smile.
Gary Johannes:Not the last, the person, the moment, a joke, something they said, something you did together, just one. Grief can narrow our access to everything except the pain of the absence. This isn't about bypassing the grief. It's about reminding the brain that alongside the loss, there was also this, a life that was real and full and worth the grief it left behind. Hold that memory for a moment.
Gary Johannes:Let it be there alongside everything else. That's not moving on. That's honoring them properly. If you're listening to this because grief is part of your life right now, I want to say something clearly. Whoever you're doing it, however messy it looks, however much it doesn't match what you thought grief was supposed to look like, you're not doing it wrong.
Gary Johannes:There is no wrong. There's just you and this loss and the completely human process of learning to live with it. And you don't have to do it alone. Understanding what's going on is where it starts. You've just done that, and quietly, it's a step forward.
Gary Johannes:If this episode has been useful, hit subscribe wherever you're listening. Every episode, one condition, the same lens, what's going on, what's keeping it going, and what actually helps. There's a lot more to come. See you on the next one.
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