The Lost Art of Emotional Resilience with author John Tsilimparis
This is Wendy Halley, and you're listening to Lucid Cafe. Hello and thanks for joining me for another episode of Lucid Cafe. A podcast exploring healing, consciousness and the complexities of being human. Well, in today's episode, my guest John Tsilimparis talks about how we can flip the script on the pain in our lives so we can cultivate resilience. His new book, The Magic in the Tragic outlines concrete ways to build resilience so we can bounce back from adversity and go from being victims of our circumstances to designers of our destiny.
Wendy:John is an esteemed psychotherapist and bereavement counselor with more than three decades of experience helping people who suffer from severe anxiety disorders, depression and debilitating grief and trauma. He's also the host of the podcast Mindfulness for the Soul. After being featured on the A and E reality show Obsessed, John was also featured on John Mulaney Presents Everybody's in LA, Chloe and Lamar, how about that?! Collection Intervention and In the Name of Science. In the past twenty years he has been a go to media therapist called on by many news programs to comment on a variety of psychological subjects like The View and Larry King Live.
Wendy:So please enjoy my conversation with John Tsilimparis. So, John, thank you so much for joining me.
John:Thanks for having me.
Wendy:Yeah. You've released a new book on processing grief. It's called the magic in the tragic, rewriting the script on grief and discovering happiness in our darkest days, which is not something we tend to do in our culture, is it?
John:It's not. We are the be strong and move on culture. We are certainly a culture that seems to fear feeling bad and negativity and maybe even embracing sometimes our suffering. But it's kind of a crazy time these days. You're a psychotherapist, you've probably heard this too, but you know people are going through a difficult new kind of uncertainty with everything that's been happening and I think that anxiety levels and depression levels are high.
John:And even the CDC came out with a stat last month that in the past ten years depression has been up sixty percent, which is a pretty, pretty high number for three forty million people.
Wendy:Pretty high. I'd say that's significantly high.
John:And many people are stuck in a kind of state of prolonged kind of unease, worry and grief. So, you know, self care is key here and The Magic and the Tragic, the title is based on trying to help people to find purpose in their pain and finding some beauty in the suffering. And by doing that, we not only dignify it, but we reduce it as well.
Wendy:Yes, and I mean, one of the things about our culture is that we don't seem to really address death as a topic. It's not something we just avoided.
John:We do. In other cultures, you know, they are a little more open minded about it and they take their time to grieve. But yeah, we have kind of an allergic reaction to it. You know, laugh in the world, laugh laughs with you, cry and you cry alone. And that's how that's how I was raised.
John:My parents were very loving. I always felt connected and like I belonged and stuff, but you were to be seen, not heard. And if you had issues, especially if they were the negative kind, you kinda kept them to yourself and you just worked them out on your own. But this book is saying, wait a second. If I can find ways to hold my suffering in high regard, I will traverse through difficult times a little bit easier.
John:It's to associate, to re associate pain with things like curiosity and personal growth and maybe even spirituality. You know, for some people it's how the divine or God or the universe or whatever you want to say speaks to us. And if that does that for you, it's an easier way to get through grief. So the book is sort of a step by step guide to do that.
Wendy:Right, right. Yeah. And I want to dive into some of what you just talked or just mentioned a little bit. But I'd like to go a little bit back in time and hear your origin story for writing this book. You had a pretty tragic loss yourself.
Wendy:So do you mind sharing a little bit about how how that kind of led you to look at grief and loss in this other way?
John:I feel I was very lucky in many ways because I developed a curious relationship with some of my aesthetics and one was music, even the sad kind. And I always knew that whenever I was going through a difficult time and I accessed my aesthetic and it doesn't have to be music for everybody, it could be almost anything. We can talk about that later. But there was tragedy in my family. One of my siblings died very young.
John:I was young and it kind of broke my family up and I didn't want it to take me down. And I found ways, not unbeknownst to me at the time, I realized that you know if I could pair my sadness with some of my aesthetics, I was creating something different. I was reassociating it. I was recontextualizing it to be something that I could be honoring instead of something avoiding. And I was never born with good temperance.
John:I was always an edgy kid and still am an edgy person and I need that. So I was lucky that I found it early and that's why I tried to translate that into the book. And then there were other issues that I dealt with like anybody else. I mean, I've had difficult times like most people have had, but yes, so the tragedy came early. I was 14 and we were living in Europe at the time.
John:So it was 1975. It's a long time ago, where therapy and you know looking for ways to soothe yourself in positive ways was not available. It was really more about you need to move on type thing.
Wendy:Right, kind of pick yourself up by the bootstraps and carry on.
John:Exactly. If you think about it for my parents, the words depression and anxiety were imports. They had no concept of that. They both grew up poor and to them, you know, you just got up every morning and you went to work and that was it. And so, you know, when we were living in the Upper East Side Of Manhattan, it was easy for my parents to say, well intentioned for them to say, you know, you go to a good school, you got a roof over your head and you live in New York City and you're safe, you're fine, you have nothing to be worried But it didn't always work for me.
Wendy:But the context is totally different. Right? Because your upbringing was different than theirs.
John:It was, and they knew that, but still for them, Yeah. These were Yeah. Yeah. These were not words that they understood.
Wendy:I really liked your reference to forbidden suffering. Can you talk a little bit about that?
John:Do you mean, like, positive wounding?
Wendy:Well, you had referenced it in your book, and you said
John:Oh yes, yes, Yes, Yeah, it's a term that Alice Miller uses where, you know, children again doesn't necessarily mean the parents were cruel or abusive, but it's just the ethos. It's the culture of the family that, you know, if you suffer too much and you allow it to overwhelm you, you immerse yourself in it. One, it can get worse and two, you're going to make everybody else around you miserable. So it's kind of a forbidden thing. You just don't do it.
John:And, you know, again, I love my parents, but that's what I grew up in. I don't think that that's a healthy way to go through grief. I think that's going against the natural order of things, is to not allow yourself to have grief. Because if you believe in natural selection and you believe in evolution, if grief and the way how badly we feel when we have a loss, if that didn't have a purpose, evolution would have eliminated it a long time ago. But it didn't.
John:It's still there. So it's serving a purpose and it's better to engage in it and not look at it as something you move on from, but something that you move through.
Wendy:Okay. So it's serving a purpose in your own life or in your practice. Have you been able to kind of figure out what that purpose might be?
John:Yes. The purpose is it builds emotional resilience. Now emotional resilience is not about grit and being strong. Emotional resilience is not about emotional intelligence. That's about having an understanding of your thoughts and feelings and being able to communicate them.
John:But emotional resilience is the benefit, which is I can take adversity, loss, pain, anything bad that's happening to me. It doesn't have to be the loss of a loved one. It could be loss of a career, faded dreams, it can be financial So when I can build emotional resilience, can take those situations in my life that stress me out and I convert them into thriving. I start to contextualize them, to see them in different ways. And that's what gives me strength because things are not gonna bad things are not gonna stop happening to us.
John:They're always going to come, especially if we love others. They're gonna get sick. You know, you have to move, you have to sell your house, you don't like the current administration, or you don't like the new laws, or it's it's never going to stop. So resilience is about turning that into thriving. Does that make sense?
Wendy:Yeah, it makes great sense. Have you noticed any trends in your practice? I imagine you're still practicing, yeah?
John:Yes, I do practice. Trends have been spikes in anxiety much more than I've seen in the past. It's pretty intense these days.
Wendy:Well, meant trends as far as emotional resilience. Like are you noticing a decrease in it or that?
John:Oh, I see what you're saying. No, I see an increase in resilience. I see people understanding that it's less the context and it's more the way I'm relating to things. You know, it's like the old cliche, I can't change the world, but I can change my reaction to the world. So that's the code.
John:That's what it is about, is not to run from the emotions, but to move towards them. You know, the reflex is to move away. But I'm saying let's keep talking about it. Bring me some examples. Show me some photos.
John:Let's talk a lot deeper about this. And the book has many exercises where you access the things that you fear the most or that you avoid the most and you talk about them with me in a safe environment.
Wendy:Right. Right. I actually noticed the opposite with younger people that there seems to be less emotional resilience and a tremendous amount of anxiety as a result of it.
John:I have seen that as well too, and I think that has a lot to do with doomscrolling and social media. Now
Wendy:Yeah.
John:I try to tell people of all ages, but especially the young ones, and it's a hard sell sometimes, is that because loneliness and isolation have been a big problem, because that's been going on even before the pandemic, To try to seek out live in person human connections in real time, like activities with friends that you do physically together. But most importantly, to try to limit screen time on your smartphone, tablet or laptop, because excessive screen time drains the brain of energy. And also here's the important one is it decreases your ability to concentrate on important things. So that means your anxiety is going to go up because you're not spending time with people. You can't put your phone down.
John:So I think that's what you're seeing.
Wendy:Right, right. Yeah, no, exactly. Now I did a whole episode with a woman whose doctoral research was on the impact of social media and influencer culture and reality TV on the developing brain.
John:Yes.
Wendy:And it wasn't good.
John:No, it's not good at all. Yeah. I know that I used to be a voracious reader. I used to read anything and everything that piqued my interest. But I've noticed that because I opened to promote my book, opened Instagram and TikTok and I really dislike TikTok.
John:I check those every now and then and I noticed that when I check them and I'm on them for a little bit longer than I should be, I don't concentrate on things as well. I tend to end movies that I'm watching a lot quicker and I tend to give up on books a lot. And I believe that's from that.
Wendy:Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Absolutely. Yeah. So getting back to emotional resilience. Mhmm.
Wendy:This this might be a weird question. I'm known for them. But what do you think the dangers of not having it or not allowing yourself to develop resilience would be?
John:Because then you are a victim of your thoughts instead of being an observer of your thoughts. You are always believing every negative thought that you have, like I'm never going to survive without this person or I'm never going to be able to make money again or I'm never going to be able to take care of my family. Pushing those thoughts away aren't going to make them go away. Talking about those things and again pairing them with inspiring things like the book describes, that gives you what I call habituation. You habituate to the pain so that you are not so afraid of it and that you're also not so surprised when it comes.
John:It's kind of like you don't want to wake up in the morning and say, if you're going through a difficult time, let's say, and you're in your darkest moments, you don't want to wake up and say, man, I hope I have a perfect day today and I hope nothing bad happens because this has been such a difficult time. I say to people, why not wake up in the morning and say, happens today, I'm going to have an okay day. It may not be a perfect day, but I'm going to have an okay day. You're not going to get through life better by avoiding your grief. It's better to talk about it and open it up and examine it and look at all of the angles in a safe environment where you don't feel pressured to do so.
Wendy:And I suspect you're, I mean, can apply these principles to any loss. Correct?
John:Oh absolutely, yes. I should say, yes. This is not just about losing a loved one. It is any kind of adversity that you're going through, which I call loss. Usually adversity is loss.
John:You've lost something, even if it's a dream. But that doesn't mean you can't redefine it in different ways. But avoiding talking about the loss, we know, does not work. That's why there's psychotherapy.
Wendy:Yes, indeed. Alright, so let's talk about some of the practices that you suggest, like the magic of delving into creative arts.
John:Yeah. Yeah, so I call it inspiration exposure. So in chapter one, I ask people to make a list of your favorite song, your favorite passage in a book, a favorite place in nature, almost anything that moves you, a philosophical quote that you love. And then I have them describe why each one moves them.
John:What is it about that that's so special to them? Either it's the words or the intonation of the chords, it doesn't really matter what it is. And then when people are in their darkest moments, you want to refer to those, you want to pair your dark moments with those aesthetics that you have pointed out. And the action of doing that again starts to redefine your negativity around that feeling. It starts to give you a different kind of reaction to it.
John:So in other words, you yourself, Wendy, I'm sure there are things that when you read a great passage in a book or you listen to one of your favorite songs at the right time, you get chills, right? You sometimes get chills?
Wendy:Absolutely.
John:Okay, so the idea is you want to learn how to give yourself chills as often as possible. There are studies out there, they're called nano aesthetics and these studies reveal that marveling at beauty and bathing in awe of any kind is essential to help you improve brain functioning. It helps you forge new pathways in your mental health. So bottom line is when we are exposed to awe, the neurotransmitters in our brains that make us feel good, oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, all those chemicals are released when we are in awe and when we are inspired. We have that moment of elation and euphoria.
John:So those happy chemicals are the ones you want to get going. Awe does that for you, but it has to be specific to you. And if you do that during your dark times, little by little, you'll start to see changes.
Wendy:Yes. Beautiful. Music like you, music is a big one for me. And I imagine that's true for a lot of people. But I'm I mean, since I was a child, I've been-- music has been my medicine.
Wendy:I was home from school with some stomach issues for a long time when I was at Mhmm. Like, 11, 12. Missed a lot of school, and I would listen to Beethoven's sixth and seventh symphonies over and over and over again. And it was yeah. It just it just I don't know why.
Wendy:It just helped. It helped. Yes. And and a lot of Beatles.
John:I'm with you. You know, in classical music they say you have to worship the three B's. It's Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. But since I'm not a huge Brahms fan, I am Bach, Beethoven and the Beatles.
John:So I'm with you on that
John:and I love Beethoven's sixth and seventh. I like all of Beethoven. He's probably my favorite. I mentioned him several times in the book. So yeah, so see, you kind of drank your own Kool Aid there.
John:You did something there that worked for you.
Wendy:Unintentionally it wasn't a conscious decision. It was just the way it made me feel like the chill factor you're talking about. Felt
John:But Wendy try to describe
Wendy:it. Yeah.
John:But what was it? Why do you think you got chills? And if you can give me five adjectives to describe what the chills felt like at the time.
Wendy:Let's see. Let me go back, way back in time. I would say that it was it was like escaping into the soundscape.
John:Mhmm. There was relief.
Wendy:With movement of each symphony, it was kind of like taking me on a journey. And I imagine it was one that felt kind of complete because of the way classical music is structured. Right? I'm not an expert or anything.
John:But No. But I mean, so it it it it transported you somewhere. It gave you relief by taking you somewhere and listening to the music. Right?
Wendy:Yeah. Yeah. I didn't do a good job with just giving you one word. But
John:It's okay.
Wendy:I I felt deeply. I've I felt comfort.
John:Okay. So it was comforting?
Wendy:Mhmm. I don't know what else. Anything else? Let's see.
John:No. No. You're doing fine. We have
Wendy:I mean, just the there's certain chord progressions that
John:Mhmm.
Wendy:Just were like emotive.
John:Just Yes.
Wendy:Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I can't recall the actual emotions. I just remember feeling like everything will be okay.
John:Very good. So it gave you hope, right? It gave you transportation to transport you, gave you some relief and it just comforted you and made you feel good. That's a lot right there, especially the hope one. So again, you could be in your darkest place, you put on some music and it gives you a little bit of hope.
John:So if somebody does that on a consistent basis, then again, you're associating hope with beautiful music. You're associating maybe the darkness that you're in with beautiful music, which can give you hope too. So it's kind of like when they say that, you know, any person can experience as much sanity or insanity throughout a whole day. Like you can feel, you know, like you've got your head together and everything's fine and sometimes you feel like your mind's out of control. Well, you want to try to do that with grief, where you can feel very sad one minute, but another minute you can also feel honorable about that sadness.
John:You can see it differently. You can dignify it in some way. And that's what you did by listening to Beethoven sixth and seventh. You gave it a different meaning. So you became less a victim of your thoughts and more an observer of your thoughts.
Wendy:Correct. Yeah. That makes perfect sense. Yeah. I I was just thinking too that my husband has a a playlist for every dog we've lost.
John:Oh, beautiful. I love that.
Wendy:Yeah. Yeah. So there's, like or or I shouldn't say a playlist. He has one piece of music that he associates with that dog friend, and he'll listen to it and go right back into the grief. It's yeah.
Wendy:We both like really melancholy minor chord music.
John:That's beautiful. Well, remember, it's all in the deliberate intention right there, which slowly transforms our struggles into grief empowerment instead of grief avoidance. Think about what an inflection point that is. You're feeling sad about something and you may have different aesthetics now, but you turn to something and then all of a sudden you're still in the grief, but it's not regrettable grief. It doesn't even have to be a happy grief, but it's a dignified grief, You know?
John:I always give this example. One of the best examples I give is that the ancient Greeks had a in their culture they had a nobility of suffering. They believed in that. And the nobility of suffering was that it was the kind of nobility where you took pride in having suffered. In other words, it was a way to mature it.
John:It was a way to be vetted that you've been wounded and now that's going to make you possibly a kinder person to other people. It's going to make you more compassionate with yourself. It's going to leave you better prepared for the next adversity that comes. So I like that and that's in the first chapter. The nobility of suffering.
John:The Greeks had it down three thousand years ago. I think it deepens the sensitivity of your heart. I think that you understand others better, you understand your place in the world better And I think that it makes you want to be a better person. And it's not like you have to go out there and be like Beethoven and all these other people that had mental health conditions and suffered and created great things. Maybe that kind of honoring of your suffering makes you want to be a better podcast host or a better mom or a better dad or better at your job.
John:Awe inducement does that. It just makes us want to be better. And dark times make us forget about all those things. Most people that come to me who are dealing with some kind of grief have stopped doing all the things that they love to do because they don't feel it's worth it. And I say that's one of your problems right there.
John:Let's talk about how we can get you back into a rhythm of doing things that usually inspire you.
Wendy:There there's also the I get this feedback from clients on occasion too is that I feel guilty if I were to allow myself to be to enjoy anything.
John:Yes. Right. That's the
Wendy:kind of I have to stay in the suffering.
John:Right. That's an organizing principle that I would try to help them to break down and to try to reframe because that's something that's made up. I don't think that there's any truth to that. Think that think that's
Wendy:not helpful. No, no.
John:Yes. I think it's a superpower to be able to see it in a different way. To convert it regardless of what your family culture says. And that sometimes takes work. It's a hard sell.
John:It's a hard sell. People will say, I don't want to feel bad. Why do you want me to feel bad?
Wendy:But if you think about it, the undercarriage of that is like also kind of an an avoidance of sorts. If you think about the idea of, like, well, I I don't wanna if I actually move through my grief, then it'll be behind me. I don't know if that makes any sense.
John:Yeah, no. For some people that's probably worked, but I have seen that if you can open up a portal of inspiration for yourself around your grief and start coupling it with beautiful things, you won't want to avoid it as much. But no, bottom line is there are very few absolutes in the world, but one of them is if you avoid grief, it's going to extend your grieving.
Wendy:Yeah.
John:We know that. We just know that. I mean remember years ago you probably read tons of books where in villages and towns people used to gather in these places to talk about the deceased. They would gather there just to tell each other how much the person's death meant to them. You know, in the Jewish faith they sit Shiva.
John:It's a week, two weeks, sometimes it's longer. That's kind of healthy. I kind of like that.
Wendy:Well and there's a reverence too.
John:Is important. Mean a reverence as in respecting the grief itself?
Wendy:Yes, exactly.
John:Yes, it's holding it in high regard. Very important to the person or the thing that I lost. So another exercise that I love in the book, I forgot what chapter it is, it's where I ask people to write themselves a sympathy letter for anything. It doesn't have to be the loss of a person. And in this letter, without offering solutions or fixes, you are giving yourself what you've been struggling to give yourself, which is all of the love and empathy and compassion and all of the time to grieve and to be as sad as long as you want.
John:And you give yourself that. Now it's probably the kind of thing that you give others freely, but you don't always give it to yourself. So writing yourself a letter like that is very powerful. People like that one.
Wendy:Yeah. No. I could see how that would be very powerful. I usually recommend writing a letter to their loved one or to this the situation that they lost. And
John:That's beautiful too. That's similar similar concept.
Wendy:Yeah. Yeah. What about your reducing worry practice? Because I think this is kind of universal anyway, whether you're going through a loss or not.
John:Yes.
Wendy:Can you talk a little bit about that?
John:Yeah. So no human being does something all the time for no reason at all. Even the foods you eat, you don't eat foods that you don't like, even though they're good for you. You may sometimes. But everybody does something compulsively for a reason.
John:And worry is the same. So it's accepting that worry is going to be part of your life and worry will always say, well, if I worry enough about something, things won't happen. You know, let me preempt disaster by always worrying. So then people beat themselves up that oh, I can't stop worrying and everyone else tells me I should stop worrying, but I can't. So what I say in the book is try to embrace that as an adversity, that your worry is something that you want to try to honor and accept.
John:And there are exercises where you start to log in all of your worried thoughts and then you replace them with more positive thoughts. Very, very typical CBT. But I just look at worry in a different way that it's there for a reason. It's it's assisting you. It's trying to protect you.
John:It's trying to tell you that, you know, you want to be a prediction making machine. And so if I worry enough about, you know, the coming winter, I will be safer. If I worry enough about the economy, I'll be safer, but not to the point where it takes away from being present.
Wendy:Right.
John:So that's an important distinction to make.
Wendy:Yeah. I've always also looked at worry and anything on the anxiety spectrum as having to do with your relationship with control too, like your desire to to want to control the outcome, the potential outcome of some disaster.
John:Exactly. Right.
Wendy:Trying to avert.
John:So in the chapter that I have about why we worry, I believe that's the name of the chapter, I talk about the three pillars of thinking styles that I have seen as a therapist over the last thirty years. And they're pretty consistent with the anxious mind. One of them is the one you just mentioned. It's an excessive need for control. And I don't mean that in a critical way.
John:I'm not saying that if someone thinks that way that they're a controlling person because that has a little bit of stigma to it. No, I mean that I'm attached to guarantees and I have an aversion to any kind of uncertainty. Now that may be the way I've always operated in my life and maybe that has brought me good results. But if you really think about it, there is much more benefit to understanding that I have very little control of things as opposed to thinking I can have control of things. It's tricky.
John:But that helps people a lot because they start to discover and make distinctions between, you know what, I don't have control over my neighbor or that person or whatever, And I'm not going to make myself crazy worrying about that. All I can do is focus on myself. So that's one of them. The second one is perfectionism or seeing things in all or nothing terms. You know, I succeeded a 100%, but I fail at 95.
John:It's all black and white. I'm strong or I'm weak, I'm good or I'm bad. We know that life doesn't work that way. So I help people try to find the gray area in every extreme thought that they have because that's what life is, is a bunch of gray areas. You can't compare kids to each other in every area.
John:Every kid is different. Every brain is different. Every central nervous system is different. And then the third one is a reliance on others for approval. When I am a people pleaser and I make others the keepers of my self esteem, that's going to create anxiety for myself.
John:So there's your three: control, perfectionism and people pleasing. Those things I have seen, those styles of thinking have caused people a lot of anxiety over the years. So I help them to try to reduce that and notice it.
Wendy:Yeah. Okay. So then we've talked about do you wanna do you wanna dive in into the creative expression anymore? Sure. Was there anything that we we didn't cover that you would like to cover about that?
John:Well, I wanted to also say too that when you kindly asked me about the origin about all of this, I wanted to say too that, you know, what I discovered too, and I still do that now, and I'm 64 years old, and I still need to do it, is that whenever I am going through a difficult time and I'm in a dark place and I do access my aesthetics and for me it's mostly music. It's a way for me to legitimize my pain. It's a way for me to validate it. It's a way for me to feel my feelings in a safe environment. It's a way for me to feel like, you know what, Beethoven knew exactly what I was feeling and I feel less alone.
John:And again, it doesn't have to be Beethoven, it could be anybody or anything. It could be John Lennon, it could be your favorite architect. It could be your garden. It could be your career. It could be anything.
John:Anything that lets you immerse yourself in something that's a little more than just the dread of feeling your feelings. And that's that worked for me. I pass that on to people as much as possible. So that helps me to be less afraid of my pain. I might be afraid of things that might happen in the world, but I'm less afraid of how I'm going to feel afterwards because of my ability to find the magic in my tragic.
Wendy:Yeah. So kind of like that. It sounds almost like the common denominator is connection of some sort. It doesn't necessarily have to be with another physical person in front of you, but just connection with something of import.
John:Yes. So learn to find, and again, it doesn't have to be music, learn to find your aesthetic mindset and that that involves making a list. When you have an aesthetic mindset, it means you have the ability to find beauty, meaning and emotional depth in little things, everyday things, gardening for the day, you know, taking a walk, spending time with your kids or spending time with children or whatever that is. So it's important because sometimes, you know, beauty can blossom out of complicated things. But you have to set the intention.
John:So the book is the inducer. To me, the book is like it's it's my it's my musher. It's my musher that pulls the sled. I have to always remember that I have to think of it in that way. Otherwise, you know, I I will forget and then I'll start believing all of my negative thoughts all day long unless I pull back and I say, you know what?
John:What's something good that I can do for myself? Oh, yeah. You know what? The best thing I can do for myself despite what's going on is to try to inspire myself today. How am I gonna do that?
John:There's a lot of ways to do that.
Wendy:Right. And so what if somebody is struggling to even ask that question?
John:You mean if I ask that question and they say there's no way I can inspire myself at all? Have to go through this.
Wendy:I I was thinking more if they're on their own, not in your not in your office.
John:If they're by themselves and they don't know and they're struggling with their grief?
Wendy:Yeah. And they can't quite get to the point of, like, well, I'm not in the mood to or I don't deserve to whatever. Yeah. I guess some of the the more worried
John:thoughts. I would tell them that, you know, again, and loneliness is going to exacerbate your depression even though your depression is telling you stay in bed and don't read a book or don't talk to anybody. But I would first say to somebody that, you know, it's always easier to prevent a mental health crisis than it is to repair one. So cut yourself some slack and remind yourself that it's very natural to feel fearful, sad, depressed during this unprecedented time. You know, you're not alone.
John:It's going around. Right. And that talking to people and reaching out is important. Now if I heard them say things like I don't deserve to be happy and all that stuff, clearly as a therapist I'm going to ask them to elaborate on that and I'm going to help them to try to see that a little bit differently by the end of the session. But I never get deterred with somebody that is in so much depression that they can't see anything.
John:They can't see it because they're depressed. It's not that their world is horrible. Something happened to them and they're in the trauma of the sadness and it's hard to see through that, but I'm not deterred by that.
Wendy:Gotcha. Okay. So why don't you talk about I'd love to hear your thoughts on the myth of closure.
John:Yeah. So I don't believe that there is closure. I think that I called it a myth because I think it's a way that people try to compartmentalize a difficult time. And I personally don't think that there is closure for anybody who goes through a really difficult time. I think you take it with you, but over time it changes.
John:It converts into something and hopefully it will convert into something that has a good memory as opposed to a bad memory. I lost my brother when I was 14. I will always have that melancholy with me. I carry it around with me all the time. I don't necessarily think of him every single day but songs, places, movies, things we did together are always there with me And I know that it's better for me to think about it and to talk about it than it is to try to push it away.
John:So I don't think that anybody ever gets closure if it's if you're looking at closure as forgetting. I think closure means you might have a different energy around it and a different interpretation of it, which is healthy. But the classic closure of forgetting and moving on, I don't think exists. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think people get scared when they hear, Oh my God, I'm always going to be sad about this.
John:Well, you lost something that was really meaningful to you. You took a risk and you loved something and someone and it's gone now and that does happen in life. Hopefully you'll do it again. That's all about what life is, is taking risks and enjoying those beautiful things that yes, if you lose them they hurt, but it's more important for us to try to find that closeness and that beauty than to not.
Wendy:Yeah, absolutely. I was just also thinking about the idea that I mean, in essence, kind of what you're suggesting is to make friends with your grief.
John:Yes. I like that too. Yeah. Yeah. Make friends with it.
John:Make peace with it. Call it whatever you want. Learn to coexist with it. Yeah. I think that depression and anxiety can trick you into thinking that well, it can over magnify your grief in a way that makes it seem like you overestimate things.
John:Like I'm never going to be happy. You know, you can always hear a lot of absolutes in their words. I'm never going to be happy again. I'm always going to be alone. So depression makes you overestimate your sad feelings and it makes you underestimate your ability to handle it.
John:People are afraid to feel bad, but people have been handling grief and loss for years. Not everybody commits suicide. Some people go through it.
Wendy:It's interesting that you're afraid to feel bad while you're feeling bad.
John:Yeah, right.
Wendy:Don't you think? I mean, it's kind of ironic.
John:Well, I'm sure you said this to clients too before too, but I have often said to clients, and I don't say this a fresh or funny way, I say, well, so what if you're going to feel bad this week? What's wrong with that? How long will it last? Three days? One week?
John:A month? They say, oh, but it'll overwhelm me. I won't be able to work. Maybe. But you might feel shitty, excuse my French, for a couple of days or for a couple of weeks.
John:What's wrong with that? And then all of that cultural stuff comes out. Well, I don't want people to see me this way and I won't be able to go to work because I'll be so emotional or I won't be able to sleep and I just shouldn't feel this way. I should just get over it quickly. And that's not how it works.
John:It doesn't work that way. You want to rewire yourself. You want to rewire yourself to be inspired and moved by your grief, not to be afraid of it.
Wendy:And that's one of the beautiful things about allowing yourself to actually move through it. Right? Is that Yeah. You find that you do survive.
John:Yes.
Wendy:And that's the resilience you're talking about. And that Exactly. And that you it it is it's a perspective building experience when you go through grief. It it it that the whole mortality thing is right in your face.
John:Exactly.
Wendy:That's not a bad thing. It's I think it's a good thing for us to think about or meditate on our own death to give our life more meaning, right?
John:Yes, I like what you just said. It's perspective building. Correct. It's changing the dictionary you have around your grief and saying, okay, I'm going to feel grief. So what?
John:I mean, don't, I want people to walk away from the session or from the book feeling like, okay, I don't have to be afraid of grief. You know, there's nothing wrong with feeling it. I think grief is as natural as feeling love and it's as natural as laughter. It's there for a reason. So I tell people be patient, stay hopeful.
John:Building emotional resilience as I mentioned before is not about grit. It's allowing yourself to feel the totality of being human. If you avoid it, you're going to extend your your grief process, and it's gonna be harder. We've seen this across the board.
Wendy:Well said. Alright. So you you don't have any kind of practice where you're working with people individually. I mean, as far as do do you are you I mean, what's the best way to word this? Are you seeing people beyond I mean, specifically around grief and if someone no?
Wendy:Okay.
John:No, no, no. I've been practicing for over thirty years, so I see people with anxiety disorders, depression, addictions. I've worked at several clinics. I worked at Kaiser Permanente years ago. I worked at Cedars Sinai.
John:So grief is something that I also treat. It's one of my specialties. But no, it's just one sort of area psychotherapy that I work at. But usually they all kind of dovetail together because people that are depressed and or anxious are usually dealing with some kind of loss or the fear of a loss. So all of this is to help people to be a little bit more comfortable with, like I said before, the totality of being yourself and allowing yourself to be a little more fluid with your emotions.
John:Now sometimes that's hard to find. You know, you don't have friends that speak that language or you it's hard to find a therapist that you feel safe with, but I think that's part of, you know, being human is finding those important people in your life that are going to be there for you. You know?
Wendy:Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Alright. So is there a way people can learn more about you and your work?
John:Sure. They can always go to my website, which is johntsilimparis.com. They can find me on Instagram, which would be the letter j and then my last name. And then on TikTok, which I don't enjoy going on, is John is the full name John Tsilimparis. So @ John Tsilimparis.
John:Alright. Well.
Wendy:Thank you so much, John.
John:Thanks for having me, Wendy.
Wendy:Well, if you'd like to build up your reserves of emotional resilience, please visit johntsilimparis.com. So his last name starts with a T, which is obviously silent. So to make life easier, I've included a link to his website in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Our next episode will help guide you within using shamanic technique to help you find the answers you seek.
Wendy:I didn't mean to make that rhyme. I guess it's kinda cool it did. Maybe. Maybe not. Alright.
Wendy:Until next time.
