00:00:01 Maria

First of all, let me say I’m a strong, firm believer in the power and the gift of the shared story. I think we all benefit from each other by hearing our stories. And to some extent, someone shared something with me months prior to me going through what I’m about to share, which unknowingly helped me a lot in my grieving process.

00:00:31 Ellie

Well, you know, honestly, it was my own grief, my own grieving process that even made it possible to begin to open myself to working with other people in their grief. So I recognized really that a big part of what I can offer is this disenfranchised grief. And I was so heartened when I learned that term disenfranchised grief.

00:01:01 Rosemary

This is the Gifts of Trauma Podcast. Stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry. 

Welcome everybody to the Gifts of Trauma podcast by Compassionate Inquiry. I’m Rosemary Davies-Janes, and today we are honored to welcome Dr. Kenneth Doka to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.

00:01:34 Dr Doka

I’m delighted and honored. Thank you.

00:01:36 Rosemary

I would also like to welcome two Compassionate Inquiry colleagues to this conversation. Maria de Los Angeles Estrada is a licensed registered nurse, Compassionate Inquiry practitioner, trauma recovery coach, and life coach. Welcome to the podcast, Maria.

00:01:54 Maria

Thank you, Rosemary.

00:01:56 Rosemary

We are also joined today by Ellie Davis, who is a Compassionate Inquiry trained Chi​ Nei Tsang.practitioner. Did I say that right?

00:02:05 Ellie

So close. Chi​ Nei Tsang.

00:02:07 Rosemary

Thank you. It’s great to have you. Now, Dr. Doka, you are a leading expert on grief counseling and therapy, and your full bio is in the show notes and it’s extensive. So what I’d like to do right now is introduce you by the dominant themes of the roles you play in your work. I counted over 40 titles in the list of books in your bio, but I think I have a sense that you’re an educator first, then an author, editor, mental health counselor, speaker, consultant, and Lutheran minister. And you currently serve as the Senior Vice president for grief programs for the Hospice Foundation of America.

00:02:47 Dr Doka

Yes.

00:02:47 Rosemary

Yeah. What would you like to add that perhaps isn’t included in your extensive bio? Who is the man behind this important body of work?

00:02:57 Dr Doka

Oh, I don’t know… Beyond that, I pride myself in my relationship with my children and godchildren and sons, son and daughter in law and grandchildren. Family is very important to me.

00:03:07 Rosemary

Beautiful. Thank you.  Maria, I would love to extend the same invitation to you I did to Dr. Doka. Is there anything not included in your bio, which is also in the show notes, that you’d like to share with our listeners?

00:03:20 Maria

I resonated with the comment that Dr. Doka made about the importance of family. First and foremost, I see myself as a mother, a grandmother and a wife, and then the rest that you mentioned first. Yeah.

00:03:37 Rosemary

Thank you, Maria. That’s beautiful. You’re also a resilience coach and a grief educator. And thank you also so much for joining us today. Ellie, your bio is also in the show notes. Is there anything you’d like to add?

00:03:49 Ellie

Thank you. First of all, thank you for inviting me to be part of this. Rosemary, I’m really touched by Dr. Doka’s work. I have an interestingly opposite experience with family, and I have… maybe I shouldn’t say opposite… but my family is less what’s expected than people who came later in life. Those friendships and close relationships that mean something to me for real actually came about because I was able to start dealing with grief.

00:04:21 Rosemary

Thank you so much for sharing that, Ellie.

00:04:23 Ellie

Yeah, thank you.

00:04:25 Rosemary

Now, Dr. Doka, I was so happy that you were willing to join us for this conversation. You answered a lot of questions that were raised in a plant medicine ceremony several years ago where the person conducting the ceremony advised me to step out, until I healed the deep well of grief I was carrying. And I did not realize I was carrying a deep well of grief because so much of it was disenfranchised. It was under the rug, and I’m very curious, how did you come to focus so deeply on loss and grief? Is there a personal motivation? Did something happen to you? Were you exposed to it young, or is it just a genuine interest?

00:05:10 Dr Doka

I guess the best way to describe it is, it was an accident. And what I mean by that is when I first started graduate school, my focus was on juvenile delinquency. And my plan was to… I was doing seminary and I was doing graduate school at the same time. So I had to carefully put the pieces together so I could do both. And probably one of the most interesting decisions I made in my life – and in some ways a very good one, in some ways not so… you know, it led to four years of trying to do being a full time student at two schools. You had to coordinate things very carefully, what courses you took, when and where. And part of my training was –  as a seminary student was – I had to do a CPA, what’s called a Clinical Pastoral Experience, which was a wonderful program. And I wanted it in a to do it in a way that would also benefit my sociological. I was getting a degree in clinical sociology. So I ended up finding an internship at Spofford Center. Spofford Center in New York City is a jail for juveniles, or was. It’s closed now. But in those days, these were kids who’d been arrested for delinquent behavior, hadn’t been tried yet, but couldn’t be released to their parents, either because their families were so dysfunctional, or because their crimes were so heinous that the community would just not tolerate them coming back until they were adjudicated. So if you’re interested in delinquency, that’s the creme de la creme of delinquency. So it was a perfect internship. And I actually applied this September, before I was taking it in the summer session and in March, when my friends were scurrying around looking for a site, I could be very superior and say, oh, you should have done this six months ago. I had this all done by December. I started in September. I had my acceptance by Christmas. And in May of that year, right before, literally three days before I was leaving, I was coordinating final papers at one school, and finals at the other. And I got a letter from Sparfield Centre. I didn’t even open it the first day because I figured this is one of those letters that say, come to this room on this day. Bring these documents and bring these supplies and stuff like that. So I didn’t even think about opening it, I was just too busy. And then when I opened it the next day, it. The letter said, basically, “Guess what?” That was my supervisor. “You can join me at Sloan Kettering, [which is a cancer hospital in New York, a major cancer center still exists] or you can be released from your obligation.” I had no interest in going to Sloan Kettering. On the other hand, I really felt I didn’t have an option. I. As I said, in this putting together of pieces, it seemed to me that applying to another place would be absurd at this point in time, I just wouldn’t get anything for the summer. And I needed that piece to be done during the summer. So I figured, let me just grin and bear it. It wasn’t what I wanted. And I was consoling myself as I was driving from St. Louis back to my home in New York. St. Louis is where I was going to seminary and graduate school. And I thought, well, I’ve worked a lot with kids and adolescents. This will give me a chance to work with adults. Of course, when he looked at my prior experience, I was assigned to the adolescent and pediatric units. So kids dying for cancer. And that’s how I ended up getting involved in it. And now this was in 1971. I tend to intellectualize experiences a little bit. So I learned everything I could about coping with dying and coping with grief, which in 1971, took about a good solid afternoon, to hit the literature, because the field was just beginning in those days. And then I had to do a thesis the next year in each of my programs. And I ended up doing one on pastoral care to the dying child and his family. And the other one was a sociological study of terminal care in two pediatric hospitals. And they both got published. And I found myself really sort of in the second generation of people who were doing research in the field. So that’s how I got involved in that. 

And then disenfranchised grief was also an accident. I was teaching courses on grief counseling in graduate school. This was in the 80s. I had an appointment at the Graduate School of the College of New Rochelle. But this was actually a family course in gerontology. And we were talking about widowhood. And one of the women in the class said, “if you think widows have a toe, you ought to see what happens when your ex spouse dies.” And I had never, never thought about that, never thought about grieving an ex spouse. And this was in, as I said, the early 80s. And I said, “Are you’re willing to talk about it? And she talked about it. I thought, this is interesting. Let me do a research piece on this. And two things came out of that. One is that the subjects we studied, most of whom were women, there was one man who had outlived his ex spouse, but most of them were women who had outlived their ex spouse. And some of them had more intense grief, some of them didn’t. But one of the things that was interesting about that study is that they compared the grief at the time of the death to the grief at the time of the divorce. And if you looked at grief and divorce in the 1980s, you wouldn’t have found anything. You would have found stuff on the psychological and social sequelae of divorce. But you would have never found anybody identifying it as grief. But the people who were going through it recognized it as grief. So I thought, that’s really interesting. And I thought, where can I find this again? And I said, well, suppose I go on the other side of that. Suppose you’re involved in an extramarital affair and your spouse dies. What do you experience then? Seemed to be similar to me. You’d be on the other end of that side. Well, it won’t surprise you to find. It was hard to find that sample. We did find some people who were involved in extramarital affairs. And they’re… So we expanded, I expanded the pool to people who were involved in an intimate relationship without benefit of marriage. So it include gay and straight. And in those days, same sex marriage was legal nowhere in the United States. And we looked at people who had longtime dating relationships and never married, people who were engaged but hadn’t, hadn’t had the opportunity to get married yet, or people who were living together without being married, again, gay and straight. And one of the women said, I’m not a widow. Her husband died a week before they were to be married. Her fiance, she says, “it’s like I don’t have a right to grieve.” And that’s when I started using the term disenfranchised. And I was surprised when I first presented and first used that term. I was presenting a paper at a conference and people lined up after to talk about this is like when… This is like when my high school coach died. This is like when. And they really just expanded the concept and they’re still expanding the concept amazingly. So it’s been a very rich and interesting line of research that I’m still doing.

00:11:51 Rosemary

Thank you. Oh, I’m so glad I asked that question. And I can relate to your dual focus with awe in your university days. I worked full time while I was in university, but I can’t quite get my head around two different lines of study together.

00:12:09 Dr Doka

I had a hard time getting my head around it when I was doing it. And then I also had work to support it.

00:12:15 Rosemary

Oh my goodness. Yes, you must have tremendous bandwidth. But just to reference back what you wrapped up with the lineup of people who waited to speak with you after you presented your first presentation on disenfranchised grief. That was my experience going through the research. It’s like as a 10 year old, I was subject to a huge global relocation that was disenfranchised grief. In my 20s, I had a split with my parents based on who I chose to marry. That was disenfranchised grief. I was going through all of these boxes, check, check. And my ex husband, I chose the split. He recently passed away and it’s… yeah, everything you’ve said resonates so much and it’s so helpful to have those answers. However, I would like to frame up this conversation today by speaking a little bit at the beginning about just the general function of grief. In Compassionate Inquiry, we explore the functions of coping strategies and beliefs. For example, Gabor Maté explains addiction as a coping mechanism to manage intolerable stress that provides temporary relief from emotional pain. So from your perspective what is the function of grief?

00:13:31 Dr Doka

I define grief as the energy generated, or… you can do it a lot of ways, the energy generated by a significant loss. And then how do you cope with that stress? And of course some of my work with Terry Martin has been to expand and to really bring it into the coping literature and to really point out that what I call ‘the great myth of grief’ was that you had to emotionally validate. And what we say is that there’s just like there are many ways of coping, some dysfunctional certainly, and certainly we see addictive behaviors coming out of grief as a dysfunctional way of coping. But there are legitimate ways of coping. Some people have what we would call affective based coping. We call these intuitive grievers where they experience grief and it comes as waves of emotion. And you say, how did you express it? And they say, “Well I needed to, you know, I screamed, I shouted, I, I, I did all these emotional things, cried.” And then that’s what helps, that they need to explore their emotions. But on the other end of the continuum, Terry Martin and I also defined what we called instrumental grievers. And these are people who use a more problem focused way of coping and again, they’re equally legitimate. So if you ask them, how did they experience grief, they’ll often talk not in emotional terms, but in cognitive or physical terms. ‘I felt like somebody punched me in the stomach. I just felt very restless. I kept thinking about the person.’ And when you say what helps, it was often doing. One of my favorite stories that we talk about in the book was a client of Terry Martin’s whose 17 year old daughter died in a car crash. New driver coming home on a snowy Maryland evening and not being used to driving in snow and ice and maybe took her turn to her street a little bit too fast and the car turned over, she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and she crashed through a neighbor’s fence and was killed instantly. Four days later when they buried her, they had a funeral, they buried her. That very same day that they buried her. He was out there fixing the neighbor’s fence and the neighbor came out and said, “John, you don’t have to do this. It’s okay, I’ll take care of it. You’ve got enough on your plate.” He said, “No, I really need to do this.” And he told us later as we interviewed him, “That was the only part of the accident I could fix and I needed to fix it. Couldn’t fix the car, couldn’t fix my daughter, but I could fix the damn fence.”

00:15:50 Rosemary

Beautiful story. So many of us deal with grief in that way. Those of us who tend to intellectualize,

00:15:56 Dr Doka

It’s not a bad way of doing it. It’s just a different way of doing it.

00:15:59 Rosemary

Yeah, yeah. Because as Gabor recognizes the function of addiction, there’s also the dark underside where it’s temporary relief and it helps until it causes its own problems. So I think that was a very good distinction. You brought up dysfunctional versus functional.

00:16:18 Dr Doka

Yeah, yeah. And what we say about instrumental grieving and intuitive grieving or anywhere along this continuum is you can deal it dysfunctionally or you can deal with it functionally, but neither is dysfunctional by its nature. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with intellectualizing if it works.

00:16:34 Rosemary

I love that you are so clear in your definitions, because one thing I also found much of in my research was misunderstandings, misconceptions and myths. There are so many myths about what grief is, how we should grieve, when we should grieve, how long it should take. Can you perhaps offer some clarity to our listeners who are perhaps caught up in that morass of misinformation? How can they replace those myths with useful insights?

00:17:08 Dr Doka

Again, there are some wonderful books that are out that really can be extremely good for self help and clarifying it. I guess a couple of points I would want to make is that we often look at grief as affecting us emotionally. And it does. We have any range of emotions from relief to sadness, sometimes positive emotions. I remember when a good friend of mine died, I was godfather to his three year old son. His son was just, actually just turned four the day after he died. October 9th was his death and his son’s birthday was October 10th. And I remember looking at this kid at the funeral and thinking, ‘You don’t know it, kid, but we’re going to work well together.’ And we have. And he’s now 43 and we still have a regular Sunday phone call and contact. And he’s like a second son to me. So sometimes it involves commitment and sometimes it involves all kinds of things. And of course it has horrible feelings too, like guilt and anger. But the other thing to remember is it also affects us physically. We can have aches and pains. Cognitively, we can be unfocused, confused. Spiritually. It can distress our beliefs and or sometimes empower our beliefs, and it affects our behavior. Some of us avoid reminders of the deceased, some of us seek them. I remember one time. I’m not a country music fan, so I don’t want to insult any of your listeners, but I remember one day I was driving in Kansas, and the only stations were country music. And I get about two of them. This was really rural Kansas. And I remember thinking that one song was, don’t play this song on the jukebox, because it reminds me of my ex lover. And the other song was, play that because it brings me back to him. He died, you know, And I thought, yeah, you know, those are all different ways we cope behaviorally. I think the important thing to remember… I like to describe grief, and I do this carefully when I’m with clients. So if you were my client, I’d say, have you ever ridden a roller coaster? And if you said, yeah, I used to ride them a lot when I was a kid, I’d say, you’re on one now. You want to be careful, because if you said, no, I’m terrified of them. You don’t want to stand and say, now you’re on another roller coaster. So you have to be careful with your metaphors. You have to make sure your metaphors are therapeutic. But we have ups and downs. We have highs and lows. We have good days and bad days. But of course, the one place where the rollercoaster analogy breaks down is that we live with a loss. And what I mean by that is, even years later, you can have surges of grief. When my grandson was born, the first thing I tried to do… I literally started dialing my dad, realizing that, no, he had died 10 years before, but my grandson was named after me, and… And I know my father would have been so pleased with his grandson for doing that. I really missed that fact. As happy as I was at that moment and as proud as I was, because I didn’t know that was going to happen, there was also sadness, and we often have that, those bittersweet moments even years later, when we wish that person could have been with us to see this.

00:20:08 Rosemary

Yeah, you’re reminding me. I was at my daughter’s wedding in November, and her father’s been gone for just two years, and it was bittersweet. He could not be there. Yeah. You spoke about how our clinical perception of grief has changed over the years from a process of detachment from a relationship, which is how it used to be perceived, to adjusting to a changed and continued bond, a new and different relationship. What jumped out at me from that quote was, people don’t really detach. I wonder if you can explain that a little bit, and speak about that evolution of process with that realization that we don’t detach, as humans.

00:20:50 Dr Doka

Sure. I remember years ago, one of my favorite colleagues And a very productive author in the field is Dr. Therese Rando. We’re old and good friends. We actually took a class together in 1975. So we know each other’s work and have really grown in the field together. And I remember having a conversation with her at the time that we were questioning the Freudian paradigm because of our own clinical work, that people don’t necessarily detach. And that’s been a clear understanding. Probably one of the most significant people who… and influential people in the field of grief is a psychologist by the name of William Worden. J. William Worden, for those in your audience who are clinicians, I would say one of the books that has to be on your shelf is J. William Worden’s Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy. It was the text that I required from my students and the model that we used to train them in counseling, along with Disenfranchised Grief, of course. But if you’re buying one book, I’d say buy Worden’s, to be honest with you, because it’s a phenomenal book. And Warden’s kind of my model. He’s in his 90s. He’s still active. We’re going to be presenting at a conference together, and I want to be that 20 years from now, still vital and still doing good work. And so Bill’s not only a good friend, but a model for me. But one of the things that was interesting is when Wardon’s model is what he calls four tasks of grief, that to get through the grieving process, you have to fulfill these tasks, and the last, not in any order. They’re not linear. But one of the tasks was very much out of Freud, which was the beginning of grief studies over a century ago, Freud’s article on mourning and melancholia. And Freud said – and Worden paraphrased Freud in one of his tasks – he said, you have to withdraw emotional energy from the deceased and reinvest it in others. And then some interesting research came out by, particularly, Dennis Klaas about what he called continuing bonds. And Dennis is interesting himself. Dennis is. Dennis was a professor, not of psychology or sociology, but religious studies. And his focus was Asian culture. And he said, if we take Freud seriously, that means half the people in the world are doing this wrong, because they’re still remembering. And it’s not unusual if you walk into a traditional Chinese home. Well, not just Chinese, many Asian cultures. I did an interview with a Filipino family, and there’s a table with pictures and maybe a votive candle for lost relatives, the relatives who have died. And so he began to question that and ultimately developed what we call the concept of continuing bonds, as you called it. And we realized that’s the case. We may retain a bond with the person in our memories and in our biography. Parts of me, of my father and me, and parts of my mother in me. My sister and I joke about that all the time, about the mixed set of genes we got in terms of not physical characteristics. But my mother was the adventurer, I’m the adventurer. My father was the cautious one. My sister’s the cautious one. But my mother was always the person who would forget unpleasant things that happened earlier in her life. She just wouldn’t pay any attention to those. And my sister’s that now. So a reminder. You remember when that happened? I don’t remember that. So they’re part of our biography, they’re part of our memory. We constantly have connections with them, and we recognize that now. And that’s a big change in the paradigm from Freud.

00:24:09 Rosemary

Yeah. I think Ellie has a question for you.

00:24:11 Ellie

Sure, I do. Thank you so much. It’s actually this allowing the bond, or love, whichever word, is more comfortable. It seems like the more that we allow the. The love or the bond to be present, as we move forward, maybe the pain lessens more easily. Is that… Have you found that?

00:24:36 Dr Doka

I think, yeah. I think there’s some viability to that, but I’d make it a point. Bonds and love are not the same.

00:24:42 Ellie

Ah, thank you.

00:24:44 Dr Doka

Sometimes the bond can be a chain. When you think about all the dysfunctional things that we may carry from our families of origin, or the negativity we may carry from people, not necessarily in our family, who we were connected to. So bonds are not always… I wouldn’t identify them with love. Certainly. I would say some bonds are very loving, but not all bonds are that positive. And one of the things I talk about when I do counseling with people is,What are the legacies that these people left you?  But also, What are the liabilities they’ve left you? But I think whenever we have these things and because of that, these surges where we remember them can sometimes be very comforting, but sometimes be, sometimes just even with a positive bond can remind us of how much we miss that person and can be painful in that way, how much we would have wanted that person with us to share this with. And sometimes they can be very comforting.

00:25:41 Ellie

Thank you for that distinction. That’s really amazing.

00:25:44 Dr Doka

I always liked when Freud would talk about the people in our past. He’d always talked about the loved, hated one. And it just reminds us that any significant relationship in our life carries with it a certain amount of ambivalence. And part of grief is acknowledging that ambivalence when it exists. I had a wonderful relationship with my father. I love him deeply, but nobody could piss me off like my dad. I often would think about this when I was at the college, even on a cold day. I don’t know. Where are you calling from?

00:26:15 Ellie

I just moved back to Des Moines, Iowa, from Greece, of all places.

00:26:20 Dr Doka

Okay. Oh, I’m going to Greece this year.

00:26:22 Maria

Oh, cool.

00:26:24 Ellie

That’s where I was. I’ll give you some good tips after we’re done.

00:26:29 Dr Doka

Yeah, okay. I’d like that, but. And now in Des Moines, I’m one of those people who run around and in the cold..  if I’m going from my car to a store, I keep my jacket in case I ever get stuck and don’t want to freeze to death. But most of the time I just wear what I’m wearing now and I’ll run from that car to the store. I don’t like driving with a big, bulky winter jacket. And there was this older security guard at the college when I. Before I retired. Lovely guy. And he would yell at me whenever he saw me running across campus without a jacket. “Dr. Doka, you’re supposed to be so smart. Wear a jacket.” And I think, oh, how sweet it is, and how nice the sky is and how cute in some ways. But my father would say, “Why aren’t you wearing a jacket?” And I’d get furious at him and say, “Dad, if I needed a jacket, I’d put it on.” And I became very aware of that. You know, in our relationships, the people we love also know how to push our buttons in ways that are unique. I mentioned my godson. He was struggling with a relationship. He’s now in his 40s and a number of months ago, a number of years ago, probably. And his mother said, you gotta call Keith now weekly, because he needs to vent to you. And the problem that she was very aware of is that Keith and her were the same person. They both had short fuses and as deep as their love was – and she, remember, she raised that child from… She remarried when he was 13, but for 10 years she was a single parent to that kid. And they could get at each other in ways. And again, deep love between the two of them. But my relationship with him wasn’t… Didn’t have that same intensity. And she was smart enough, you know, it was always a joke between us, ‘cause sometimes I’d get a call from Keith when he was like 10 years old, and he’d say, if you’re home this weekend, I’m coming over. She’s driving me crazy. And then five minutes later, I get a call from the mother, if you’re around, can you take Keith? You know, but again, it’s in those close relationships that we often have the most ambivalence. And ambivalence can be a complicating factor in grief.

00:28:23 Ellie

I see that. Thank you.

00:28:25 Rosemary

Thank you so much. I’d like to hone in on disenfranchised grief from a particular perspective, like how we all ended up here… Maria mentioned to me something very personal that she went through that would, I think, be appropriately classified as disenfranchised grief. And then Ellie was speaking about her specialty in that same area. So I’m wondering, Maria, would you like to share your story?

00:28:54 Maria

Well, thank you, doctor, for everything that you are sharing. So amazing to listen to your wisdom and your knowledge and experience. So thank you. Thank you very much. And I loved when you named… and actually it’s the first time that I hear that expression, but it gave a name to my grieving style, which you called intuitive breathing. So to answer your question, Rosemary,, to share with everyone, first of all, let me say I’m a strong, firm believer in the power, in the gift of the shared story. I think we all benefit from each other by hearing our stories. And to some extent, someone shared something with me months prior to me going through what I’m about to share, which unknowingly, helped me a lot in my grieving process. So what happened to me was that I was pregnant with a very much wanted child. It was planned. The pregnancy was planned. And at about 19 weeks of gestation, through the routine testing, we found out that this child had Downs Syndrome and a very severe heart defect. And it took us a few weeks of going to one doctor, to the next, to second opinions, to cardiologists, and we had to make the unimaginable choice of deciding not to bring this child into the world. And thank you. Thank you. We already had two other children. I’m not going to go through the whole process of the decision making because I could keep everyone here for hours. But needless to say that it was world shattering for me. And I could also see my husband in the other description of grieving, which was very much being proactive and doing, and, which at the time, without me knowing everything that I’m learning now, and I know now, I interpreted his way as, he doesn’t care, doesn’t face him, he’s just… And I remember Gabor brought David Kessler as a guest one time for the Compassionate Inquiry Community and someone… they were talking about these differences in grief and within spouses, right? And they ended up being divorced because they couldn’t, because the grief broke them apart, basically. And David Kessler said, grief doesn’t bring people apart. It’s the judgment of the grieving style that brings people apart. And I thought that was really interesting. I’m happy to report my husband and I are still married after 31 years. So we… we overcame our differences, but at the moment, it was very difficult to not see each other eye to eye. And I’m a highly sensitive person, and I grieved hard, but I did have that intuition of doing little rituals that helped me inhabit my pain and be with it. And slowly, somehow, with just, I guess, life calling for my attention to step up to the plate and keep raising my other children and keep doing things like the grief got intertwined with life and the energies just flowed. But I… I didn’t want the experience of that life having gone through me for however short a period of time, turning me into a bitter person or angry or, you know, so I found… I looked for ways in which the passing of this life through me, enriched me, which people came to me whom otherwise wouldn’t… I would have never met. And there are people that are still in my life today, 25 years later. So using those things as ways of honoring his life and gratitude towards him for bringing those people to me. And I’m also a very spiritual person. And when I face… When I’m facing with the unknown and I have choices to think, you know, what do I want to believe? What do I want? I would choose to believe what brings me peace of mind. So needless to say, there was a lot of guilt in me for a long time about the decision that we made. And I had a dream with him a few months after the event of us letting him go. In the dream, he was a teenager, and I saw him walking through a stage holding a diploma rolled up in his hand. And he looked out in the audience and looked at me, raised the diploma, and he said, “I wouldn’t have been able to do this without you, Mom. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without you, Mom.” And I was, like, taken aback by that. But in my spirituality, I chose to believe that he had chosen me as his mother because he needed to go through that experience, and he knew that I will be the person helping him do that. Whether it’s true or not, I will never know. Maybe when I go to the other side, I can confirm with him.

00:33:59 Dr Doka

Yeah, it’s true for you. That’s the important part.

00:34:01 Maria

It was true for me. That’s the meaning I gave to that dream. And I feel him very close to me. He’s very much a part of our family. But it was very, very lonely, even though I did have support from family. But it’s just, I don’t know, it’s many friends, I couldn’t talk to them about it. They would shut me up. Tell me, “Oh, don’t talk about that. It’s in the past. It makes me…” It makes them too sad. “So stop talking. It makes me too sad.” So there was no. There were no spaces to really talk about that. And then I was very lucky to found a support group online called A Heartbreaking Choice. And that was a lifeline also.

00:34:41 Dr Doka

Beautiful. There’s so much I appreciate you for sharing your story. There’s so much there to resonate with the importance of social support, finding the right support group, which again, a good example of continuing bonds, a good example, unfortunately, of disenfranchised grief. And you know, in my work with perinatal loss, we hear that a lot, people who just say, well, you made the right decision, you need to move on. And then the importance of ritual. But there’s one other piece too, which I think you talked about a little bit, which is another change in the way we’re looking at grief. And that’s what we call post traumatic growth. And that’s that some people really, despite the pain of grief or sometimes because of the pain of grief, they grow in ways. They gain new insights, they gain new strengths. Their spirituality becomes more complicated, I think. You know, I’ve spent over 50 years in this field. And I always tell people when you ask, “Why did God allow this to happen?” I knew the answer to that 50 years ago. I don’t know it now. You know, because you realize things aren’t always as easy as you like. But I think my theology has grown. I think my compassion has grown from my personal losses and my work in the field. I think my openness to the range of experiences that people have, like dreams, has grown. There’s a great cartoon I used to show in my class with this little boy, in a math class. And there’s this very complicated formula. And you can see the teacher’s been having a hard time explaining it to this boy. And she says, “There, Skyler, do you understand it now?” And his response is, “No, but I’m confused on a much higher level. 50 years in the field has made me confused on a much higher level.”

00:36:20 Rosemary

What a beautiful explanation. Thank you so much. Thank you, Maria, for sharing that story. It’s so obviously still very close to your heart.

00:36:29 Dr Doka

Yeah.

00:36:29 Rosemary

Dr. Doka, it seems like this would be a great time for you to share the model of disenfranchised grief that you have created. It’s got four components, and I think it helps make this rather nuanced topic make so much sense.

00:36:46 Dr Doka

Yeah. Actually, now we’ve added a fifth component. Okay. So we talk about disenfranchised as relationships that are not always acknowledged, like an ex spouse. We talk about losses that are not always recognized, like a perinatal loss. We talk about stigmatizing deaths. The problem with homicide, for example, is that you’re likely to know both people involved in it. You have a much higher chance of being killed by someone you have an association with than by an absolute stranger. And think about what that means for mourning. You’re mourning both victim and perpetrator many times. And then, we’ve talked about, for example, grieving styles. Chuck Core, one of my mentors, once said, we disenfranchise instrumental grievers early in the process. ‘What’s wrong with this person? He’s not crying.’ And then intuitive grievers later in the process, “What’s wrong with her? She’s still crying.” Rather than acknowledge that. And then. And sometimes because of cultural reasons, too. I grew up in a family that’s bicultural. My mother’s Hispanic, my father’s Hungarian Protestant. You don’t need a genogram at a family funeral. Because my Hispanic uncles would pick me up as a little boy and say, “It’s okay to cry, Konito.” It means little Ken. “It’s okay to cry. Kenito. It just means you love the person.” They put me down. And my Hungarian Protestant uncles, a very stoic group, would say, “Be strong.” So, you know, so some cultural reasons. And then the last category we’ve added is what we call disenfranchised trauma, which are traumatic events that disenfranchise grief. A good example of that is my aunt died on September 12, 2001, right after the… Literally the day after… And you say to somebody, “I’m going to a funeral.” “They died on 9/11?” “No, the 12th, she died in our home, 96 years old, surrounded by family.” “Oh.” And then people would lose interest. It’s not one of those really important deaths. So there are a lot of reasons. And then the other thing that is, trauma is inevitably involved in legal affairs. I remember talking to somebody who was driving a car and his friend died when they got into a crash. And the first thing the lawyer said to him is, “Don’t go to the funeral.” And the family had made it clear he wasn’t welcome at the funeral. Again, this was one of his close friends. “And never say you’re sorry to the family because that can be interpreted as an admission of guilt.” So there are legal factors that disenfranchise trauma.

00:39:07 Rosemary

Thank you for that very clear, concise explanation. And I think the work that Ellie is doing circles back to that story you told about the cartoon of the little boy who was confused on a whole different level, because. Ellie, can you talk a little bit about the work you’re doing around abortion and pro choice?

00:39:27 Ellie

Sure. Thank you. Yes, I am profoundly confused on a whole new level since I’ve really been learning more about… Well, you know, honestly, it was my own grief, my own grieving process that even made it possible to begin to open myself to working with other people in their grief. Because I grew up super religious, not very loving and spiritual, but very religious. Lots and lots of rules. And… and I did eventually have to make the choice about an abortion, too, actually. And I knew… I knew my state of my heart. I deeply believe that children deserve a safe and loving parent. And I really knew that I was not. And so I never allowed myself any grief. I didn’t think I deserved it, which I think is a part of the disenfranchisement, is you don’t deserve it because you made your bed, now you gotta lie in it, you know? And when I started to understand, my own judgment was keeping me from being able to grieve, and start to. What’s the word? Like, tickle apart all these different levels that were happening inside of me, and let myself soften towards myself. I started to recognize that I’m not the only woman who’s ever gone through this. And so I moved back to Iowa after 31 years away, not really knowing why I was moving back. I had some… I had some ideas about what’s going on here. The political landscape in the US and then Iowa. And what’s come about is I did this grief education recently, and I understood even more the women in Iowa, the… The restrictive abortion laws that have been made here are making it – first of all, we have e have a healthcare desert for women. Yeah. Which causes more grief with the infant mortality rates rising. So I recognized, really, that a big part of what I can offer is this disenfranchised grief? And I was so heartened when I learned that term, disenfranchised grief.

00:41:47 Rosemary

We’re taking a brief pause to share what’s on offer in the compassionate inquiry community. Stay with us, we’ll be right back.

00:41:55 Kevin

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00:43:00 Ellie

So I recognized really that a big part of what I can offer is this disenfranchised grief. And I was so heartened when I learned that term, disenfranchised grief.

00:43:11 Dr Doka

Yeah. And I think abortion really creates… Because it’s such a politicized issue, I often say it creates a paradox for many times people who are pro choice don’t acknowledge the grief end of it because you, you did what you needed to do. And then people who are against it don’t support you in your grief.

00:43:29 Ellie

Exactly. And oftentimes they actually, I think they also confuse grief with regret.

00:43:35 Dr Doka

Yeah, yeah. It’s two different things. And.

00:43:37 Ellie

Absolutely.

00:43:38 Dr Doka

Yeah. And so we’ve often talked about the paradox and you know, and I think there’s a lot of myths also, as you look at people who make choices for abortion, those are the same difficult choices.

00:43:48 Ellie

Yes.

00:43:49 Dr Doka

And yet there’s this myth of this, oh, I’m gonna get pregnant, I’m gonna run out and get an abortion. That’ll be my way of solving.

00:43:55 Ellie

Yeah.

00:43:55 Dr Doka

In all my years of counseling, including as a pastor, you know, with people who are struggling with that choice, in my congregation, people make that choice and it’s not an easy choice. And sometimes for all kinds of reasons. And as I said, I don’t try to judge that choice. I try to have them clarify. “What’s important for you? What are you thinking about?” And it really is a tremendous struggle that’s not always acknowledged on either side.

00:44:19 Ellie

Exactly, exactly. It’s really true. It’s really a gift that you’ve given to open the two views, or probably more than that with the disenfranchised. Yeah. Thank you.

00:44:31 Rosemary

Thank you, Ellie. And I will drop one more perspective in since we’ve been talking about abortion. I was adopted as a three week old infant and I found myself in a situation similar to Ellie when I was 21. And I… having grown up wondering who I was and why I was so different from my adoptive family, there was no big decision for me. I knew for sure I did not want to subject another child to that. That’s where the trauma comes in. And my choice was very easy. So there are layers upon layers upon layers. I salute you, Dr. Doka in having been able to create such clear definitions and concepts and models out of something that is so extremely nuanced. Now you have written so many books. I was being that little boy at a new level of overwhelm, trying to just take in the topics all of your books address. You’ve already offered one book, which will be in the show notes, one of your own and one of your mentor’s. And I’m wondering if you could pick one or two of the books you’ve written that listeners could dive into to begin their exploration of grief. Where would you suggest they begin?

00:45:46 Dr Doka

Okay, let me deal with it on two levels, if I could. Okay. I would say if you’re a clinician, I’d certainly recommend Disenfranchised Grief. Any of the three books written on disenfranchised grief, particularly the middle one, the last one was written primarily for clergy, but from research pressed it called just Disenfranchised Grief, New Strategies, Implications, something like that. You’ll see it. The second one I would recommend for clinicians is the book that Terry Martin and I did on grieving styles, Grieving Beyond Gender, because, you know, we often… One of the things we wanted to strike out was, and it was the notion that men grieve differently from women and women grieve much more effectively than men. And that’s where we developed this notion of grieving styles. And… And again, while men are more likely to have an instrumental style, not necessarily. And probably one of the most disenfranchised grievers are women with an instrumental style. I always think men have the advantage. They’re either stoic or sensitive. Women are just cold, which is not what I’m saying, obviously. And then if you’re coming more from a trade perspective, from a lay perspective, one of the books I’m most proud of is a book that was written for a trade audience called Grief is a Journey, which is written for people who are grieving. And then the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book is a book that just came out a few years ago called When We Die, which talks about extraordinary experiences around death and dying, from near death experiences to coincidences, some of which just fascinated me. I just, I loved researching that book and loved writing that book. You want, you want two quick examples from that – just all coincidences which were just fun to me. 

Lincoln had one son. He had one son who survived really into adulthood called Robert Lincoln. And Robert Lincoln almost had a death experience. He was pushed in front of a train in Baltimore while he was waiting to come back from college to the White House during his father’s presidency. And as the train pulled up, somebody inadvertently, not purposely, but just accidentally, as the crowd surged forward, pushed him on the track and a hand reached out and pulled him back quickly. The hand that reached back and pulled him quickly, he immediately recognized because he was a famous actor by the name of Edwin Booth, of course, John Wilkes Booth’s brother, who was a unionist, by the way, and who once wrote, “I took comfort from the fact that I had done that.” Now, Robert Lincoln also had a series of experiences. He was present either at or near or soon after the assassination of all three presidents during the 1900s. He became a public official and a prominent businessman. So he was there, immediately came when Lincoln was shot, wasn’t a witness of it, but immediately came right after and of course, ministered to his father. He was there during McKinley’s assassination and Garfield’s assassination. Teddy Roosevelt invited him to the White House. He said, “President Roosevelt, please understand. I’m declining because bad things happen when I’m around presidents.”

00:48:44 Rosemary

Wow. Truth can be stranger than fiction, for sure.

00:48:48 Dr Doka

I mean, and there are so many little anecdotes about different kinds of things that happened. And all of those, that’s just the chapter on coincidences around death.

00:48:56 Rosemary

Wow.

00:48:56 Dr Doka

That was. As I said, I think there’s no book I had more fun writing than that one.

00:49:00 Rosemary

And I’m sure it comes through to the reader. It always does. So, I will be listing all of those books you mentioned in the show notes in case listeners weren’t able to keep up with the flow. We’re coming toward the end of our time together. We always like to end this podcast with a question. And I don’t want to put you on the spot, Dr. Dhoka, but considering you have the ear of thousands of people listening to this podcast, is there a thought or a quote or something you’d like to leave them with on this far ranging topic we’ve explored today of disenfranchised grief.

00:49:39 Dr Doka

I guess I would say, acknowledge loss certainly in your life, the many losses we have, including the non death losses. But acknowledge life even with grief. There’s lots to live for, lots to learn, lots to know. And I hope I’m around to do an interview with you in another 20 years.

00:49:57 Rosemary

I would love that. Dr. Kenneth Doka, Maria de Los Angeles Estrada, Ellie Davis thank you all so much for being here with us today.

00:50:07 Ellie

Thank you, thank you.

00:50:08 Maria

It’s been a pleasure. Very enriching. Thank you.

00:50:11 Rosemary

And a note to our listeners if you found this conversation helpful. Please subscribe to, rate and review our podcast. It really makes a huge difference.

00:50:22 Kevin

If you’re not a therapist or a healer, but you heard our guest describe the personal transformations they experienced during their compassionate inquiry journeys and wonder what might that be like for me? There is a program that is offered to anyone who wants to experience the power of Gabor Mate’s approach to trauma healing. I’m Kevin Young and I’ve been facilitating CI circles since 2022. I’ve seen people transform in many ways. I’ve seen people change beliefs, relationships. I’ve seen people change how they show up in the world. I have seen people literally change how they look in front of my very eyes. There are many, many ways that people change during compassionate Inquiry Circles. Circles is a 10 week small group experience. Click the link in the show Notes that’ll bring you to a web page that gives you all you’ll need to figure out if this is for you.

00:51:32 Rosemary

The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma healing, transformation and and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen on Apple, Spotify, all podcast platforms. Rate, review and share it with your clients, colleagues and family. Subscribe and you won’t miss an episode. Please note this podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for personal therapy or a DIY formula for self therapy.

00:52:05 Dr Doka

Sam.