Jul 9, 2018
Lydia Lombardi Good is a licensed clinical social worker. She
shares the importance of self-compassion, what it is, and how to
get comfortable with it and how it helps the grieving process.
Note: A Life and Death Conversation is produced for the ear. The
optimal experience will come from listening to it. We provide the
transcript as a way to easily navigate to a particular section and
for those who would like to follow along using the text. We
strongly encourage you to listen to the audio which allows you to
hear the full emotional impact of the show. A combination of speech
recognition software and human transcribers generates transcripts
which may contain errors. The corresponding audio should be checked
before quoting in print. Contact Lydia Lombardi Good, Pier View Counseling
Transcript
How Self-Compassion Helps The Grieving Process
Dr. Bob: Yeah. That's my pleasure. This is a Life and Death
Conversation, and we talk about things that we can do to enhance
life and bring more joy and peace to life, and of course, we talk
about death. We don't shy away from the topic of death. We always
explore a bit about how our guests feel about the whole end of
life, death and dying, what experiences they've had, how the
awareness of death seems to show up in your life. For people who
come on and have these conversations, most of the time they're
pretty comfortable speaking about death and sharing their
experiences and thoughts about it. I'm just going to open it up and
let you share a little bit. I know that you do a lot of work in
grief and loss, and you've been in hospice, and have a lot of
experience. So share a little bit about what the idea of death and
dying means to you, and how it shows up in your life. Lydia
Lombardi Good: What I learned from my experience with death and
dying, working with clients, having my own personal experience
losing close loved ones, is the more we think about death and
understand that it is inevitable, and we are all dying a little bit
every day, I think the richer a life we are able to live, and we
are more mindful of the choices we make, and the people we choose
to surround ourselves with, and the life we want to live, knowing
that nothing is permanent. Everything is impermanent. And if we
live a life without regrets and can be more present to our lives
instead of staying maybe stuck in the past, or focused too much on
the future, we can look back and say, "You know, I fully
experienced all that. I don't wish to be back there again. I wish
to be right here, right now, to live my life fully," knowing that
we really only have one shot at that. So that's how it's changed me
a lot in terms of my own choices, the way I live my life, the way I
try to stay compassionate. A lot of it's talked today, and what I
really am passionate about is teaching people to embody
self-compassion and treat yourself kindly, the way you would treat
a close friend. And the more we can do that, the better life we can
have. The more chances we take, the more we can just fix up things
as they are, instead of always wishing things to be another way, or
for us to be another way. And when we do that, we're missing what's
happening right now. Dr. Bob: Yeah. That's beautiful. And I think
it's pretty common to hear people share that when they contemplate
death, when they recognize, like you say, the impermanence of
everything, it really allows us to stay more focused on what's
happening right now, and feel gratitude, and just feel very
present. I want to talk about the mindfulness, the self-compassion,
and the mindfulness, because mindfulness meditation,
self-compassion have figured prominently in my life and I've done
my work there, I've gone through courses in mindfulness. And it's
so interesting what you said, to treat yourself the way that you
would treat a close friend. Do we do that? I mean, do we really do
that? The stuff that we lay on ourselves, and the way that we diss
ourselves, which is so common. Like, if we were doing that to a
friend, would they stick around? Would we still- Lydia Lombardi
Good: We wouldn't have any. Dr. Bob: We wouldn't have any friends.
Share a little bit more about that, about how you came to that,
what your journey has been to become a teacher of self-compassion
and mindfulness. Lydia Lombardi Good: Yes. Yeah. So, I was working
in hospice since about 2007, 2008. Right out of graduate school I
started this work, and I think I understood it to the best of my
knowledge. I'd had a lot of loss in my past, and a lot of trauma
that I thought I had worked through and had done a lot of healing
around and was in this work. And I think I had as much compassion
for the experiences of my clients and patients as I could have at
the time, for that point I was in my life where I was at and what
experiences I had been a part of at that point. And then it was
2012; I lost my dad to cancer. He died of prostate cancer and
endocrine cancer. So the three years prior to that, we were taking
care of him, and it was a real aggressive form, so it was a really
difficult dying process. So that following year I was in charge of
settling what I call closing out someone's life. That process of
closing up his home, preparing it for the next chapter, getting his
belongings and setting up beneficiaries, that kind of thing, and
doing my grief as best as I could, as much as I knew how at that
time. And then, shortly before the one year anniversary, I got a
call from the medical examiner's office that my uncle, who was one
of my father's primary caregivers aside from myself, had taken his
life. So then I embarked on that next journey. I was his only
family here, so helping to then close out another person's life.
And then two months later, I get a call. My husband's out of state
at a bachelor party. And I get a call that he's had an accident and
I need to fly out immediately to Arizona and be with him because
he's had a traumatic brain injury. So I fly out there and spend 10
days in ICU with him until we were basically told that we need to
consider letting him go because he was not going to recover at that
point. So my real journey I think began there. I could make sense
that my dad was in his late 70's, although for some that is still
young, but he had lived a really full life. My uncle, I wasn't as
close with. It was a different type of grief, but losing my own
husband was a total ... knocked me off my feet. It was a total
life-changer. So basically, learning about self-compassion and
mindfulness started the year before, when my dad was going through
his dying process, but really kicked into high gear after I lost my
husband, simply for just survival. I was in survival mode- Dr. Bob:
Yeah, self-preservation. Lydia Lombardi Good: ... trying to figure
out, yeah, how do I survive all this. Three in a row, I'm totally
alone, feeling like I'm totally alone. How do I keep going? How do
I keep going? How do I make sense of ... if this can happen to my
32-year-old husband, what's going to happen to me? This feeling of
just total lack of safety and security and anything that I once
knew. So that's when things really, really kicked into high gear
for me. And a couple of years later I ended up leaving hospice. I
was working out as a bereavement manager, and I decided to start my
own practice, focusing on grief and trauma. A lot of it because of
all the work I did with amazing clinicians, and spiritual healers,
and energy healers, and the amazing, amazing people that supported
me through my past, inspired me so much that I felt I really needed
to do this myself and work with individuals again, and step away
from the program planning and go back to pure clinical work. And
it's been amazing. Dr. Bob: I bet. Wow. And like many people, your
journey has taken you someplace because of your own personal
experience. I mean, you have the training, you have the structure
of having worked in a company, but once you had your own personal
experience and were down in the depths, and then figured out what
you needed to do to survive, and then I'm assuming beyond
surviving, starting to thrive again, you recognized that you needed
to be in a position to share that on a deeper level. Lydia Lombardi
Good: Yeah. It's been tremendously healing, although I didn't jump
into it necessarily to do it for my own healing. I wanted to make
sure that was taken care of on its own, so I wasn't coming to work
with clients doing my own work. But feeling complete and on a
really steady path with my own healing empowered me to know the
tools that work for people, and to empower others to consider some
of these healing modalities. And mindfulness and self-compassion
were right up there. They were the primary methods for me in terms
of my healing. A lot of people as what does that mean. When I
heard, "Self-compassion," I frankly, four, five, or six years ago I
never knew what that even meant. It's not a term a lot of people in
western culture understand or use. So really learning what that
meant, and practicing it for myself, so I could know how to show
others to do that. Dr. Bob: So why don't you try to explain it and
let people know, because there's probably a lot of people here who
... you know, the self-compassionate conjures up some images and
some thoughts, but I think you could probably do a really good job
of helping people see what it really is to learn self-compassion.
Lydia Lombardi Good: Yeah. So, self-compassion defined more is
bringing yourself to the same attitude and understanding that you
would do for others, or a beloved friend. So asking, how can I care
for and comfort myself at this moment, instead of judging and
criticizing. How can I bring kindness and understanding, and
patience, when I'm confronted with a personal feeling or loss,
instead of beating myself up. And then honoring and accepting your
humanness. And with grief, I think where I see a lot of people, and
I did this myself, we put ourselves in a timeline immediately. I
was talking to a woman the other day, and she said to me she just
lost her fiance a week ago. And she said, "I'm trying to be happy.
I know I need to be happy, so I'm just going to be happy, and I cry
when I need to, but I just want to be happy." And I said, "You
know, why do you have to be happy? You just lost your fiance. Can
you just honor what's really happening with you? You're sad, you're
angry, you're all these feelings ..." that she was telling me
before she said she felt she had to be happy. We try to pressure
ourselves to move faster than we actually it's reasonable for our
healing. And this is actually what stuns our healing when we try to
pretend it's another way. We try to pretend that ... you know,
you'll hear people saying, "In a year you should be better. Just
give yourself that year." Well, for some people a year it's just
begun. The trauma is just starting to settle, and now all of the
sudden there is space for grief. Or the realization or the
beginnings of acceptance begin to occur after a year, for some
people longer. None of that's wrong; it's just is. But with
self-compassion, we can give ourselves that space to say,
"Whatever's happening is just right for me. As long as I'm not
hurting myself or I'm hurting another person, this is what I need
to do in order to move forward and to heal, step by step." Dr. Bob:
So how does that happen? How does somebody learn self-compassion?
How do you go from having the normal chatter, the typical berating
and judging that most people have ... has become sort of their
pattern, to having this self-compassion, and what's the process?
Lydia Lombardi: I think the first part is learning you're being
able to become aware of the voice inside you and what it's saying,
so really listening to that. So if you start to notice your pattern
of self-deprecation, or being really hard and punitive with
yourself in difficult times, starting to become an observer of
those thoughts instead of allowing yourself to become hooked to
them. The problem is, a lot of us, me included again, we get so
used to those thoughts, they just become ... we get on autopilot
with them, which becomes kind of a way of being. But by practicing
things like mindfulness, or meditation, we allow ourselves to slow
down a little bit, take a breath in between thoughts, and start to
notice the thoughts instead of getting hooked. For example, I used
to notice I would get really frustrated with myself when I would
get really, really down. Like, a year or two after my husband had
died, I would all of a sudden have a really bad day, a really bad
grief day, and I used to think to myself, "Gosh, where is this
coming from? What's going on? Why am I feeling this? Gosh, I've
done all this healing, and I've done all this work. Why am I
sobbing now? Something must be wrong with me. Maybe I'm just not
doing enough work to heal." And all these questions, instead of
just catching the thought and saying, "You know what? There I go
again. Can I just have the feeling that I'm feeling and let it rise
and fall naturally, instead of resisting?" Because we find, when we
push against it, and we create this resistance, we actually create
more suffering for ourselves. And this is a real Buddhist concept
as well, that pain is inevitable, but pain with resistance equals
the suffering. When we can just settle into the pain and just feel
it, it's like when we have a good cry. When you're stuffing it
down, and it's that nod in your throat, it hurts so bad, it's so
uncomfortable, but then when we just let ourselves ball, all of a
sudden you notice you come out of it and it's like, wow, I feel so
much better. Why didn't I just let myself do that before? Dr. Bob:
It's a catharsis, yeah. Lydia Lombardi Good: Yeah. Dr. Bob: I think
we need to allow for more of that. So, a big thing that's coming up
for me as you're describing this process is awareness,
self-awareness. That's the first step, right? Because if you're not
aware, if you don't have an awareness of what's truly taking place,
there's no way that you can influence it, or impact it. Lydia
Lombardi Good: Exactly. Dr. Bob: And again, going back to this,
sort of the analogy of treating yourself like you would treat a
friend, imagine if you were with somebody and they said something
just kind of off the cuff, and your response was, "Well, you're an
idiot. Like, what a stupid thing to say." Or, "There you go again,
making a fool of yourself," those kinds of things that people are
so comfortable saying to themselves, thinking to themselves, that
if they were being said out loud to a friend, they would never
tolerate that. Lydia Lombardi Good: That's right. That's right.
That's exactly right. Why is that okay to do to ourselves? Dr. Bob:
Yeah. It's not, but we do it, and we keep doing it. And I think we
just believe that this is the way that it is. People become so
accustomed, and I think it deflates you just like if you have a
teacher who's always telling you how stupid you are, or a parent
who's always telling you how disobedient you are, or sloppy, or
whatever. That has an impact, and it will keep us from really
feeling the depth of I guess the beauty and the magic of life.
Lydia Lombardi Good: Yes. And it holds you back from that
experience that you deserve to grief. And sometimes that sounds
really strange when I say that to people, the love you had for that
person needs to be expressed through your grieving process. Someone
told me years ago grief is the twin of love. You can't have one
without the other. So, why are we suppressing this grief expression
if it's simply an expression of our love? And whatever that grief
presentation looks like. For some it's crying, for some it's
sharing stories with family, or memories, or whatever that looks
like, memorializing, ritualizing the person. But you're entitled to
that experience. That's how we're able to move forward. But when
you don't allow that experience to yourself, it's still there; it's
still going to be there. A lot of people will say time heals
everything. It's actually time and attention. Time alone doesn't do
a thing if we're not giving it the attention that it needs to do
the healing that we deserve. Dr. Bob: Time can actually just cause
more festering and the wounds to deepen. Lydia Lombardi Good:
Right. Dr. Bob: Yeah, if you think about it kind of like an
infection in your system, yes, there are some self-limited
infections that will get better over time, but there are some that
if they're not addressed, if you're not aware of them, and deal
with them, they'll eventually cause incredible suffering and
ultimately kill you. Lydia Lombardi Good: Exactly. Exactly. I use
that wound example a lot. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Interesting. And one of
the other things that came up, and I'm sure that this is something
that's very much in your awareness and in some of what you teach,
is the concept of the gap, the space, that most people just remain
unaware of. So we go back to awareness. And I think it was Victor
Frankl who originally made this quote. I actually saw it in one of
Steven Covey's books, but it's a quote about between stimulus and
response, there is a gap, there's a space. And it's within that
space that our freedom and our power come from. And the fact that
we have that space to choose what to do with, how to respond, if
we're going to respond, what to do with that stimulus, that feeling
that came, the words that someone spoke, if we recognize that we
have this power, everybody has this power to take a space, take
some time, and choose what to do with it, it is too incredibly
empowering. Most of us are just reacting all the time without
giving any honor to that space. Lydia Lombardi Good: You're right,
you're right, and that space is where all the magic happens ... Dr.
Bob: That's where all the magic happens. Lydia Lombardi Good: ...
where physiologically we can settle our nervous system, we can move
into a more parasympathetic nervous system and really think
critically, shift those thoughts to a different part of the brain
and be more skillful in our actions, exactly. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Lydia
Lombardi Good: And maybe that just means that we still don't know
what to do, and maybe skillful means stepping away and just taking
a break and thinking more about what to do next, instead of jumping
right in and just making a reactionary decision that could actually
lead to more harm. Dr. Bob: Right. Yeah. That awareness, and it's
something that I've tried to teach with my children, with others,
and of course I forget. I still at times react ... Lydia Lombardi
Good: Sure. Dr. Bob: ... and then when I realize that I've given up
my power, I'm giving up my power to choose a response, then I
actually exaggerate it, where I start ... I'll give it a full two
or three seconds, when somebody says something, rather than having
an immediate response prepared and going right into it, I will
exaggerate the space. And sometimes it can almost be a little
awkward. People wonder what you're doing and why you're not
answering, but it just kind of reminds me and allows me to feel
empowered and to feel a sense of peace and control again. That's a
really great exercise. Lydia Lombardi Good: Absolutely. Absolutely.
We're not used to that in our culture. You're very right. We always
feel like we need to fill the space. And I think that's a big part
of the problem too; even when we're consoling a person who's
grieving, we have a hard time just sitting with their raw emotion
or the feeling, or just saying nothing and just being present to
their experience. We have a hard time with that. We feel like we
have to say the right thing, or jump in and fix it, or push the
tissue box to them real quick, to make sure their tears don't get
out of control. We can be messy and just sit with snout rolling
down our face. Just say it's okay. This is what's happening right
now; it's okay. We don't have to fix it; we don't have to talk over
it and make it pretty, put a bow on it. Dr. Bob: That's one of the
things that's been such a gift for me, working with people,
especially at end of life, people who are approaching the last days
or weeks of life, is I get to visit them in their homes and spend
time with the patient, the family, the person. And sometimes I will
just be there. The conversation will stop, and as you say, so many
people want just to fill the... it's uncomfortable, so they just
want to fill it and find something to say, and think that that's
going to make it better. But what I'm recognizing is, people will
want to know that you're comfortable just being present, and just
holding that space, maybe holding their hand, having a head on the
shoulder, or just being in that space so you can feel what it is
that's happening, and maybe reflect back just some concerns, some
love and support. As an ER doc, for the 20+ years, I was an ER doc,
you don't have much time to do that. But now being in people's own
home, it has been such a gift. And it's a gift for me, and I think
it's a gift for them to know that there's a certain comfort with
just being present. Lydia Lombardi Good: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
And it's so humbling for you as the individual, to just allow
yourself that humility to know that you don't have the right
answer. And people really respect that I find. They can tell when
you're just trying to fill the space, or trying to fix it. But when
you have enough humility just to say, "You know what? God, I don't
have the answer to this. Maybe there isn't an answer to this." Dr.
Bob: Right. So let's just be together for a moment. Lydia Lombardi
Good: I'll just be here. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Let's just be. Lydia
Lombardi Good: Yeah. Dr. Bob: Yeah. That's powerful. Lydia Lombardi
Good: Yeah. I'll tell you just a quick story. My husband died in
November, and a month after I was [inaudible 00:25:17] mother and
it was Christmas night. And my neighbor comes. This is a neighbor
who I grew up on that street with for my whole life, and he had a
son who had died. I think five years prior, in a really tragic
accident. And he showed up at the door, and I open the door, and I
said, "Paul, what are you doing here?" And he opens his arms, and
he said, "There are no words. There are no words." He says, "I just
came here to give you a hug." And every time I tell this story I
get teary-eyed again because I just think, I'll never forget that.
I'll never forget that. Tons of people told me all sorts of stuff,
but that simple act of just, listen, I'm just here to give you a
hug and to hold you. I don't have answers; I don't have anything to
tell you what to do or not to do. I just want to be here, was so
profound and I'll never forget that. I try to remember that very
clearly, to remember of my own action, how to be with others, how
important that was. We forget. We forget the importance of that
simplicity, that human connection. We're looking for the next
intervention. Dr. Bob: Yeah. And that goes back to a little bit of
that self-talk. It's like, "I don't know enough words. I can't be
consoling or comforting. My presence isn't ... that's just not
enough." So it's complex, and I think it takes time for someone to
learn this too. It's not innate. For some people maybe it is, but
for most of us, it's learned over time. And sometimes it's through
those personal experiences as well. Lydia Lombardi Good: Right.
Right. And what we do know is that actually the more we practice
it, it actually can restructure parts of our limbic system in our
brain and help us ... it's like building a muscle. The more we
practice, the better we get at it. Or we're making new neural
connections, and over time it becomes easier to tap into. But
you're right. It takes time. It's a skill. It's a skill. Dr. Bob:
It's an interesting thing. I was just realizing that some of what
has changed for me, some of the learning that I've had through
being with people in this state, in this condition, it spills over
into other parts of your life, where I now feel more comfortable in
other relationships with silence, with just being present and not
always thinking that I have to fill the space with my wife, or with
my children, that there's a deeper connection that can exist just
by sharing a space together, which is interesting because a lot of
time I'm someone who has kind of felt like if we're together, we
should be talking. Like, we should be communicating about something
in some way, and if not, then it's because we don't have anything
to say. Lydia Lombardi Good: Right. Right. Dr. Bob: So I'd become
much more comfortable, which is nice. Lydia Lombardi Good: Yes.
Yeah. It's so beautiful that when we get better at this in our
work, it does spill over and makes all of our relationships and
experiences, as I said in the beginning, so much richer. Yeah. Dr.
Bob: So you're in San Diego, right? Or in San Diego County. Do you
have an office where people come to see you? Or do you go- Lydia
Lombardi: Yes. Dr. Bob: ... see people at home? How does your
practice work? Lydia Lombardi Good: I have a practice in Vista,
North County San Diego, Pier View Counseling. Pier like the pier in
the ocean. And I specialize in supporting people who are
experiencing grief, trauma. And my subspecialty is really working
with partner loss. But all ages. I actually have a group as well in
Vista, at Vista Library, the second Saturday of every month. It's a
grief support group. Anyone's welcome to come. We've been going on
for about almost three years now, and people come and go and use
the space as needed, and it's a really nice complement to some of
the individual work I do, where people either who just aren't
interested in individual work right now, or just looking for others
who are going through a same life transition they are and are just,
again, wanting to tap into that common humanity, which is part of
that self-compassion piece, knowing others are experiencing what
you're experiencing too, although it looks a little different,
we're all going through something. So yes. People come to me at my
practice. And I do some Saturday hours at another office in
Oceanside, but mostly Vista. Dr. Bob: All right. Great. And I'm
assuming that you have some resources for people on your website,
that can help them get a little more information about you, and a
little bit about some of the topics that we've been covering? Lydia
Lombardi Good: Yes. PierViewCounseling.com. Dr. Bob: We'll have
links for that on the podcast as well, integratedmdcare.com. So
there are lots of ways for people to find you, which is wonderful.
Lydia Lombardi Good: Great. Dr. Bob: I have a feeling, now that
we've had a chance to connect, for me to learn more about your
background and how you approach things, I certainly feel that there
will be opportunities for us to collaborate with some of the
patients and families that we're supporting as well. Lydia Lombardi
Good: Well, I'd be honored. Dr. Bob: Yeah. I look forward to that.
I really, really appreciate you taking the time and sharing some of
your experience and your wisdom with our listeners, and I'm hopeful
that maybe there will be another opportunity to bring you back on
and revisit some of this in the future. Lydia Lombardi: Thank you.
And thank you for everything you do. So important. I could say that
from working in the field, but then when you actually have it, when
my dad was dying, having that experience in our home, it changed
everything. I saw it from a whole another light, how critical that
support is when a family member is dying. So thank you for what you
do. Dr. Bob: It's my honor, and I imagine having you there for your
father who was an incredible gift for him. So he was very fortunate
in that. Lydia Lombardi Good: Yeah. Grateful. Dr. Bob: Yeah.
Thanks, everybody for tuning in, and we'll talk with you very soon.
Have a great day.