Grief is one of the toughest emotions that most of us have to feel and work through. In our culture we seem to have lost our way when it comes to expressing grief. We have really narrowed our understanding of what being human really means and that includes the emotions we let ourselves feel. Establishing a relationship with our grief and being able to stay present with it in our adult selves is one of the learning challenges of working with sorrow, sadness and grief. It is part of our maturation into our elderhood that we learn to befriend and express grief. To develop structures that support us to hold it and work with it in the community.

In this episode my friend and colleague Ellen Clarke and I talk through all the ways that grief can come into our lives and the challenges we have in being able to let ourselves fall into the belly of it.

In this podcast you will hear us talk about:

Death and how in the western world we expect to wake up and be alive each day;

Grief is part of our transition through our rites of passage in life that the expression of it helps us let go of parts of ourselves that we don’t need anymore and birth new parts of ourselves. That in midlife learning to connect with our emotions allows us to transition into our emotional adulthood;
We can experience grief after severe illness or life threatening experiences in conjunction with gratitude and this can be a lonely and confusing experience;
Without any structures, supports or containers to hold us, it feels too wieldy and scary to let it flow. If we had someone who is a non-griever shepherding us through it how might that be for us?;
If we got good at letting ourselves feeling the little moments of sadness and disappointment each day this might help us deal with the bigger feelings of grief and it might actually be a highly connected experience for us;
Grief can feel like an emotional rollercoaster (we both hate rollercoasters by the way) and pinging all over the place in our nervous system can feel like we have no foundations;
There is often fear and shame wrapped over the top of those emotions that we stuff under our proverbial rug and this can make what we are feeling feel really murky and hard to connect with.

You can find Ellen at her website www.ellenmay.com.au on instagram at @ellenismagic or on facebook

Becoming a parent is a huge transition for all of us one that is often poorly supported in terms of the identity change in the transition and how it impacts on our relationship with our partner. Women receive quite a bit of support in terms of the aspects of being a mother that involve the physical care of the baby, not so much in terms of the challenges of becoming a mother. However they have a support structure in place that can support that. Men receive very little if any support in their transition to becoming a father.

In this episode I talk with Carla Crivaro, a sex, love and relationship coach, who works with women and men to achieve their goals in delicious sex, profound love and authentic relationships. Carla creates awareness around men’s transition into parenthood where they can feel isolated, rejected and miss intimacy with their partner. She has named this phenomenon, The Forgotten Father.

This episode is centred in the dynamic of cis gender, heterosexual relationships. However, as we discuss dynamics in family systems, roles that we may be playing and patterns of interaction you may find this useful information regardless of your sexual or gender orientation. In this episode we talk about:

The journey of parenthood for men and what some of the patterns can be when they are not coping,
How they can get into a really unhealthy systemic dynamic with their female partner where she takes on a role of mothering and they the son in their relationship dynamic and the repercussions of this,
That men’s hormones do change when a new baby arrives so that they can bond with the baby and provide support and love to their partner,
That men can also experience birth trauma and how this can impact on them,
What inner work is helpful to men to participate in to shift relationship dynamics that are not supportive of their transition to fatherhood and learning to co-parent with their partner.

You can find Carla at her website www.carlacrivaro.com or on instagram @the.forgotten.father

Ep 27 Feeling the wild belly of grief with Ellen Clarke

Ep 26 The Forgotten Father with Carla Crivaro