Foreign to another edition of Unscripted, the Collected wisdom of Life, Living and sorrow.

I'm Dr.

Ray Mitch, your host and I am posting this podcast in memory of a dear friend who died passed away a year ago today.

And it is fitting for the kinds of things that I'm going to be talking about today.

I want to make you aware that the upcoming podcast is going to be a long form podcast.

It is a recorded presentation I did for Focus on the Family and it gives you an opportunity to listen in to this presentation which is a full explanation and a connection even with how loss actually opens a window for us to be able to talk to and connect with Gen Z, who has some interesting characteristics that I think provide us with a basis of conversation around this issue of grief and loss.

I know for myself in teaching the course at CCU that this particular class is one that has a direct impact on the students.

And so with that I want to introduce it and give you an opportunity.

To listen in in talking to students and who they are and how they approach things.

And I have been increasingly exposed to what is now labeled as Gen Z.

And that's some of what I want to kind of connect to.

Partly because the whole ideas around grief and loss I think opens a window to Gen Z that other connection opportunities don't exist.

And so as a result of that I started doing the grief and loss and then I branched out to doing a class on shame and grace.

And both of those have a component to it that are they have a group and students say wait a minute, I didn't bargain for this.

I just wanted to hear something and walk away and forget it.

But groups don't let you do that, as we all well know and interacting with each other and about the stuff that I talk about or I bring up and I am often reminded and I remind my students of this is just a quote from Elizabeth Kubler Ross.

I think that's going to come up.

It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives.

For when you live as if you live forever, it becomes way too easy to postpone what you know you must do.

And this is a quote from her.

Not long before she died she did one book, I think we all probably know all about it, on death and dying.

And she did a second book besides other writings of course, on grief and grieving.

And she joked with her co author Kessler.

I think it's Daniel Kessler, David.

Sorry.

And what she said was maybe I should have done one on life and Living.

And that would have been very appropriate, I think, partly because loss has a way of focusing our attention on living, not dying.

And I think that's where a lot of our effort is in even sitting and talking to people.

We tend to take a fairly myopic view of loss and grief.

We think of it only in terms of someone dying, as most of my students do.

And when we broaden it out, it begins to kind of shape itself into this subtext of our lives that we're always waning and waxing through losses and gains and investment and a loss of that investment.

So I think if not all of us have looked for opportunities to look at grief and loss in a bigger context so that we can then explain or at least help people understand what they're going through.

The tendency or the question I think we have to ask is, how do I organize it?

How do I say it in such a way that the client I'm talking to can access it and understand it?

I think that's some of what we get tempted by with stages, because stages seem to be very orderly.

It does tempt us into thinking very linearly, which is a problem.

Or do we think in terms of phases or seasons, as I'm going to propose this morning?

And ultimately, I think in a lot of ways.

And my daughter, my oldest daughter is also a counselor.

So the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree.

And I heard her talking to somebody in my family, which is always dangerous.

And she was talking about stages.

And I said, you lead my groups.

What is wrong with you?

Right.

Yeah, the will.

But it is easy to talk about.

And what ends up happening with that is that we take what Gubler Ross was talking about in terms of death and dying into grief and grieving.

Now she brings it over into that, but it broadens, I think, ultimately with the things that we talk about.

And I see this with my students that whenever I'm talking about, they rehearse it with each other.

And that same thing is true with a lot of the stages and the way that we kind of approach loss and our experiences in it.

And so what I want to do is describe a little bit different landscape.

It's the same landscape, but we look at it, maybe a different way of looking at it that I think, to some degree makes more sense.

Now, I arrived at this not so much based on all the reading I've done, which is plenty over the years.

You do that, you accumulate knowledge and you put things together and things like that.

But it's also from my own experiences.

And one of the books over there that I brought with me was Grieving the Loss of Someone youe Love.

It came out of my own experience of having my dad pass away when I was 12, which is ancient history now.

And so I think I want to look at that landscape a little bit differently.

And then I want to kind of pivot as best I can with the time I have to understand why this.

This topic is so powerful, I think, in talking to and connecting with Gen Z, because a lot of their lives are spent fleeing loss.

And by doing so, as Kubler Ross would suggest, they are fleeing meaning in a lot of ways.

And so before I go on, I want to recognize the work of Dr.

William Worden.

His book is Grief Counseling and Therapy.

And he went into looking at grief from a developmental point of view, which I think makes a lot more sense depending on not only lifespan development, but also just development in how we process and go through the grief we experience.

So the one thing that I am mindful of is when we're talking about grief, I think the well, yeah, I would get ahead of myself, but sometimes it feels like we're trying to describe the indescribable because it's such a unique human experience.

And yet at the same time, it is also general.

We share the experience of loss.

And so I began to be reminded of the six blind men of I don't know if you've ever heard this before, but I think this describes a lot of our approaches even to grief.

And in this case, the elephant is the grief.

So I thought I'd read this to you just to set the context.

And it goes this way.

The six men of Indostan to learning much inclined who went to see the elephant, though all of them were blind, that each by observation might satisfy his mind.

The first approached the elephant, happening to fall, and his broad and sturdy side at once began to bawl, God bless me.

But the elephant is like a wall.

The second feeling of the tusk cried, ho.

What have we here?

So very round and smooth and sharp to me tis mighty clear.

This wonder of an elephant is very like a spear.

The third approached the animal and happening to take the squirming trunk within his hands, thus boldly up he spake.

I see, quoth he, the elephant is very like a snake.

The fourth reached out an eager hand and felt about the knee.

What must this wondrous beast be as clear enough to see is like a tree.

The fifth, who touched the ear, said, e'en the blindest man can tell what this resembles the most.

Deny the fact, you who can.

This marvel of an elephant is very like a fan.

The six no sooner had begun began about the beast to grope, than seizing on the swinging tail that fell within his scope.

I see, quoth he, the elephant is very like a rope.

So these men of Indostan disputed loud and long, each in his own opinion exceeding stiff and strong, though each was partly in the right and all were in the wrong.

And the elephant is grief.

If you've ever heard the phrase the elephant in the room, it's grief and loss.

And there are many different ways of approaching this.

I want to highlight a couple of them.

First is phases that.

That you might hear.

Ultimately, the challenge and the dissatisfaction for me about talking about phases is kind of a passivity.

I pass through it somehow and I just wait for it to get over.

And we've talked to plenty of people like that, I'm sure, where it's like, will this be over anytime soon?

Just let me know, and then I can get back to life.

And then the other one is tasks, which Warden suggests.

And it fits into a developmental process that ultimately we think in terms of.

I think generally, whenever whomever we're talking to, where they are in life, not only the issues that they bring with them.

So that's very much a part of what Wharton brings to the table and kind of captured my attention because even my own grief that I went through and I continue to go through is, in a variety of ways, is it's not quite as linear as stages would suggest.

It's more circular, and I would suggest even seasonal in our experiences of it.

So what I want to propose is kind of an interactive or a combination model of seasons of grief.

And there are tasks to be done, but there are phases to experience, and those phases are seasons.

And again, it's accessible.

We're in the middle of starting into spring.

And the funny thing about seasons is they're never safe.

Right?

I mean, I was going to come here and wow you with all my eloquence in November, but winter intruded, and it almost intruded this week, too.

I was watching and saying, jeremy, what do I do?

And so the seasons, the thing that we know about seasons is we have the experience of the season itself, but also we have different tools for different seasons.

I don't use my snow blower to move my leaves, although some people I see do.

But we don't do that.

We use rakes, right?

Or I don't use my lawn mower to remove the snow.

And so there are tools that are specific to the seasons.

And not only do we go through them, but we also have things to do in them.

And I think anybody that's done any kind of grief work with people will use that word.

It's grief work.

It is not easy stuff to move into because it tends to reveal things about our relationships.

So what I want to do is I want to start and to walk through the seasons and you will know where we are.

That's the beauty of doing seasons, is you know what's coming next.

The thing is, is that they mix each other up and they intrude on each other in a variety of ways.

And winter is the first one where everything is dead or at least looks dead.

And in grief, the emotions shut down.

You hear people say all the time, I feel numb.

There's a slowing down of thinking and feeling and a spiritual disengagement.

And ultimately the task here is accepting the reality of the loss.

That's the thing to do.

And we go in and out of that in various ways throughout it.

The thing to keep in mind is acceptance does not mean it is okay.

Okay.

Somewhere along the way, we have gotten the notion that accepting something means I condone its existence.

And acceptance is not that.

The reality is, is that when I go about accepting something, the beginning of healing occurs.

I can't begin the healing until I accept what is.

And that's very much a part of what we experience.

So most people will experience numbness.

It's a little bit like searing of a nerve.

And when you first get it burned, you don't feel anything.

And then suddenly it wakes up and you're sure that you're not going to sleep that night because of whatever the burn is.

And so it allows people that are going through grief to deal with the flurry of all the activity, particularly with the loss of someone, the flurry of activities.

And a lot of times people will look at them and say, hey, they seem to be getting along pretty well.

I mean, they're getting things done and getting the funeral, getting through the funeral and engaging people.

But it also can create a sense of confidence or fear.

I don't know what I got up here.

The confidence is, maybe I'll get through this.

This won't be so bad.

And the fear is, did the person mean so little to me that I feel so little?

So you have this complex kind of mixing together of hope, maybe this is going to get better, and then what's wrong with me?

And I think in a lot of ways, working with people that are going through, it's like, am I crazy?

And I end up saying, no, you're just human.

And they don't find that very comforting, unfortunately.

But, see, there are three different strategies we use to deal with denial, which is the first season or first part of the season of winter.

And there are a variety of ways we use to really kind of thwart it.

And the thwarting of it is managing to get through it in a lot of ways.

And all of us have some strategy in getting through it.

Even when David experienced the news of Absalom, you see, he started shaking, and he said, oh, if I could have only traded places with my son.

And that's all very much a part of that.

But there's three things I want to mention.

First is we deny the facts of the loss.

I got to keep moving here.

We deny the facts of the loss.

The famous story is told of Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert.

And when he died, she refused to absorb the reality of him being gone.

And so every morning, she instructed his butler to go to his chambers, lay out his shaving equipment, lay out all of his bathing materials, and then every evening, pick it up and bring it back.

And she was reported to have been seen walking through the palace talking to Prince Albert.

And so we try to keep everything intact.

After my dad's death.

My mom.

My dad was a World War II vet, and he was a veteran of the Marine Corps, and he was in some of the bloodier battles within the South Pacific.

And after he died, we had a cedar closet.

Y'all remember those?

And she kept all of his uniforms in there, his dress blues, his other.

The various other outfits that they use for PT and other things.

And she kept it all the same.

And it was like it was just waiting for him to return.

And so we tend to mummify the reality of what's going on.

It's almost like we're waiting for them to come back, and we expect them fully to come back.

And so we deny the facts of the loss, and we mummify and try to keep everything the same.

The other part of this is the idea that we deny the meaning of the loss.

And the meaning of the loss.

Is that up there?

Yeah.

The meaning of the loss.

I can give you a very good example.

I'm coming up on a year anniversary of a friend of mine that we've been friends for 32 years.

And he passed into Abba's arms a year ago.

And when he broke the news to me that he had cancer he had bladder cancer.

And we talked and he knew my background and the stuff that I had done with grief and things like that.

And he said, you know, I'm not in denial, I know I have cancer.

And I said, okay.

And then the next question was, yeah, but what does it mean to you, to your family, to what it means for their future, to the impact on your wife of 50 years?

What does it mean?

And our tendency is to deny the meaning of it.

And so it's not as big deal as we think it is.

Or somebody had a very complicated relationship with the person that is gone or any number of things.

And that can be even broken relationships too, that you see the same thing happening.

So there is a tendency in denying the meaning of the loss is to kind of a selective forgetting.

And then there's also just ridding oneself of all remembrances, things that would remind me.

A few years back, my father in law, his wife died his bride of 52 years.

And within six months he had liquidated all of her clothing, all of where they lived, and was gone from where they lived.

Six months later he was living somewhere else.

And it was really a diminishment of all that they had because the house they were in breathed memories and he didn't want that and he moved on.

So the last one we do is we tend to deny that death is irreversible.

Now, the interesting twist here is for us people of faith, we understand that death is not the end.

But boy, grief and loss and the things that we experience during winter has a way of spawning some alternate spiritualities.

And people coming up to my old mentor mentioned that he was talking to, he was doing spiritual direction with a young woman that mentioned that somebody came up to her at church at the memorial service of her little boy that had died from cancer and said, well, now you have your own angel in heaven.

And all she could taste is dust.

Because it was not.

It was just this alternate thing that we seem oftentimes to be bent on.

I want to help, but I have no words to do that other than stuff like that, which is mild way of describing it.

And it never really seems to occur that we enter in instead because that's the thing that it's begging for in so many ways.

So there's a variety of spiritualities and even spiritualism.

You can think of the story that is told of Saul and losing his dear mentor of Samuel.

When everything went south, he went looking for the witch of Endor so that he could start talking to Samuel again.

And so there Are those things even in the Christian world?

There are those things that stretch theology for sure, and yet they end up being a part of this winter.

Now, what about the tools?

The tools?

One of the things that is constant all the way through here.

I gotta keep moving here.

One of the things that's constant all the way through, the tools of the trade, if you will, the tools of each season.

The one thing you will always see consistently is journaling.

And there's a reason people don't like journaling.

Not because we recommend it, which is partly that, but also because if I write it down, it becomes real and I don't want it to become real.

And so journaling is an important aspect.

If you read the introduction on my first book of grief, I make mention of the fact that in the old days when people had burns, they had to scrub the wounds in order for them to actually heal.

We have all the beauty, wonder of modern science and artificial skin and all that.

That wasn't what they did 75, 100 years ago.

They would take the person in the morning, they would scrub all the wounds, they would shoot them full of Demerol, put them in a whirlpool and scrub all the wounds and then get them out again and put them to rest again.

And even through all the Demerol they were still screaming.

But they knew that if they didn't scrub the wound, all that would incubate underneath that would be disease and death.

Ultimately, grief is no different.

We have to find a way to scrub the wound.

And journaling is one of those ways.

Visiting the grave, looking at old pictures, listening to music that you shared, revisiting places that you were together and a variety of other things that I have mentioned here.

Self caring activities.

Sometimes we just kind of forget when we're in the winter to do anything for ourselves and appetite plummets and you don't really see much use for eating and things like that.

That goes on around this winter and everything.

Just like we have, right?

I mean, when winter hits.

I used to live in the U.P.

of Michigan and we got 350 inches of snow every year.

And the only way that I could walk my golden retriever was with snowshoes, which she thought was great.

I was doing all the work.

But you hunker down for those years, for those months.

You just wait it out really, and just keep doing the best you can.

And that's what winter is like.

Now.

Winter intrudes on spring, which is the next one.

And it's a whiteout.

Spring comes and a Lot of times, people end up having spring come and they wish for winter again, because everything wakes up.

Everything wakes up.

The emotions, the thoughts, all of those things.

And the task here is to begin the process of looking at and experiencing and understanding the pain that I'm experiencing.

And this is oftentimes the active healing process, if you will, in spring.

And it's not something that.

That people look forward to.

They'd rather be back in winter when I'm not feeling all this stuff.

And so the onset of spring, everything emerges.

Plants emerge, temperatures get better.

There's hope for a new beginning, if you will.

And that same thing occurs even in grief.

And people aren't, like I said, aren't real sure that they're all too keen on the idea of the spring, of their grief.

But spring gets intruded by winter, and it also gets intruded by summer.

And that's the strange thing of this, because you can't.

How do you develop a strategy for things that are always mixed up in the middle somehow?

And so the things that show up during this time are probably more of our wheelhouse as counselors.

The feelings that we have of anger and frustration and.

And blame and guilt, the what ifs and the if onlys and I should haves, all of those.

It borders on, and oftentimes takes people into shame.

It's like, if I had been a better dad or a mom, if I had done this, if I had done that, that is all very actively a part of spring, the physical sensations.

And this is, again, one of these things that.

That mixes things up, because people start thinking, I'm having a heart attack, and they go into the er and the doctor gently says, it's not a heart attack, it's anxiety.

It's like, what's wrong with you, Doc?

I know what this is.

And so you have hollowness in stomach and tightening of the throat and oversensitivity to noise and derealization.

I had one person say, I walked down the street, and nothing feels real, even me.

And so there's this alternate reality it feels like you're living in.

And then cognitions is even more of it.

And again, this is our wheelhouse, right?

The confusion, the disbelief, the sense of presence.

A lot of times people will report phantom experiences like they see the person.

And even on the extreme end, you'll see some mild hallucinations that show up.

And so there's that.

And then also in behaviors, you have sleeping and eating disturbances.

You have a variety of distracted behaviors or absentminded behaviors.

You know, the keys show up in the refrigerator someday and you wonder why.

And you're kicking the kid because they hit him on you, that kind of thing.

I wouldn't know about that.

Of course, in idealizing the deceased, my father in law is a very good example of geographic cures.

I leave the area and so the thing that we have to turn to again, what are the tools?

What are the tools for spring?

And some of them include journaling.

Sometimes some structure comes in handy in journaling that helps organize it.

You know, I always remind people, look, I'm not asking you to be Hemingway.

I'm asking you to describe the real contours of your own heart rather than something else.

And so the journaling continues.

Sorting belongings, allowing other people to talk about the deceased.

If any of you have seen or read Tuesdays with Maury, Maury reports that his dad, when his mom died, banned him from talking about his mom.

And it was something he had a very hard time forgiving his dad for taking the time to deal with guilt and with the shame.

Messages that crop up within our conclusions because they're searching for a conclusion.

There's so much about grief and loss that is trying to contain the pain.

We're not trying to engage the pain, we're trying to contain it.

And so we seek out or can be going to support groups.

That's a constant, ongoing kind of suggestion I make is it doesn't have to be a support, even a support group.

It can be any kind of group of people that have experience life.

Loss comes with it.

And so any kind of support goes a long way to create the environment in which we can begin the healing process.

And so spring.

Yes, ma'am.

Oh, sorry.

Oh, yeah, I'm sorry.

Yeah, I did this really well in November.

I already mentioned those.

I think there's more tools.

Yeah.

And the support groups are part of that.

So it is very much the tools.

There are some constants.

Shovel.

You use a shovel for dirt, you use it for snow.

And so there's some constants, but there are others that are very unique to that.

And sorting belongings is a good example of that.

And the emotional purges, again, people's perspective on purges.

I show any emotions and I'm becoming emotional rather than experiencing the emotions for what they are.

And then the next one, like I said, the beauty of this is people know where you're heading.

I already mentioned some of these.

The emotional purging, miniature challenges, those are all very much a part of it.

And then I'll make these slides available so that you can take a look at it.

We get into summer in summer.

This is kind of the consolidation period of time where we begin to work through and adjust to life without the loved one in our lives anymore.

And we begin to discover in a lot of ways, not only the skills that I never really bothered developing or the roles that they have played, they begin to show up in this place.

And maybe I take a new course to learn some of those skills.

Those are all part of the challenges of summer.

But the beauty of this is I've worked through the springtime of my grief.

Now I'm in the summer.

I've got a little bit of that behind me, and I've worked through it, and I understand it, and I understand what's coming and what is going to be there for any period of time.

And that's okay.

As Megan Devine put on the front of her book, it's okay to not be okay.

And that captures it.

It's the permission to be where I am rather than where I should be.

And so summer, we have to adjust to life without the loved one in it.

And there are lots of ways to abort this.

Promoting helplessness.

There's things about our grief and the things that we experience that prompt people's compassion, understandably.

But when we're in the summer, it's try some things, try anything, really, because it's encouraging people to realize that they have some measure of agency in the world around them, and they're not a victim to the loss that occurs.

They're now a participant with it.

And by doing so, they begin to reweave the fabric of their lives.

I often use the metaphor of you have a house and you have a very nice Persian rug on the wall, and thieves come in and just out of spite, they shoot it with a shotgun just to leave their calling card.

And you say, what am I going to do?

How am I going to fix this thing?

And so I find an artisan in the community to fix it.

I.

I take it to them.

They do their job.

It looks like nothing is wrong until you turn it over and you see what's happened to it.

And that's a lot of times what people are doing in summer is they're reweaving the fabric of their lives.

The person's still in it.

There's still a thread that runs through it.

But they're really easy for me to say, reweaving a lot of that.

So the tools that we have within this, and there are some of the features that I already Mentioned withdrawing from the world helplessness, the opportunity that we have to try things out new and what that actually means to us.

The tools of summer are different.

Like I mentioned, I start doing miniature challenges that continues.

But if I'm identifying now the roles that the person played that now I have to do myself, then I got to build some skills of my own.

And so the tools here include taking a course, community college course on budgeting or on finance or any number of things that might be a part of that.

The continued engagement with support groups of people and the encouragement from others that have also had this.

The other one, which is always fascinating in a lot of ways, and I don't think my father in law would have done this even if he had stayed in his home.

But is to reshape the home environment to what I need.

And I had one lady I worked with many years ago and she decided that as part of the saying goodbye, she wrote a note to her husband, who had died about a year before, explaining to him why she was reshaping the house to fit her needs now.

And those little rituals go a long way.

They mark time for us and they mark importance and significance for us.

And those things we've kind of lost that in the world of grief and loss is the kind of rituals that I think are very important engage in in one fashion or another.

And so writing the letter of goodbye, explaining where I'm at, what I'm feeling, how I'm experiencing life now you see a lot of these things.

The interesting thing between men and women is they do these rituals differently.

Men will do them privately and women will do them in community in a lot of cases.

Good example, some of you will remember is George Burns and Gracie died and he had a ritual every week to go out to the cemetery to sit by her grave and to tell her about the kids and life and everything else.

And that was part of that little ritual, actually.

It's captured in.

And I'm enough of a movie geek that you find that out of me eventually is the final Rocky film.

And he actually stores a chair in the tree by Adrian's grave so he could go there and spend time with her and see.

These things tend to mark time and importance for us and are important for all of us in a lot of ways.

And then finally the last one, which I think we can anticipate, of course, is fall.

And in fall the colors come back.

A lot of times that's exactly a direct quote is up until this time that all the color has washed out of My life.

And now it feels like that I am seeing colors again.

And the key task here is to remember the one that has been lost while embarking on the rest of the person's life.

And it's not ever forgetting.

It's not ever forgetting.

As a psychologist, I remind people we were not designed to forget, we were designed to remember.

All you have to do is read through the Old Testament.

And God counts on people remembering because it marks time and importance again, so.

So the colors return and remembering the person who's been lost while embarking on life itself.

Some of the features here include feelings of dishonoring or disloyalty.

I engage a new relationship.

I had a young lady who I was talking to many years ago, and her mom had died and her dad was in another relationship.

And she said, I don't want to connect with this person because I feel like I'm being disloyal to my mom.

And so we end up kind of regressing in our understanding of what love is, that it multiplies instead of is addition in some fashion.

And once I lose something, then I don't have anything to give, or I give to someone else and I have nothing to give to anyone else.

So the frightened of the prospect of reinvesting in life, it's like, what do I do?

How do I do this relationship thing again?

I kind of had it so easy, quote, unquote.

And so there are people that never choose to love again.

My mom was very much of a case study in that she never remarried.

And it was the disloyalty, I'm convinced it was very much a part of.

Of the way that she did it.

So she hangs on to past attachments.

The interesting thing about it is we have tokens of past attachment.

I wear one around my neck.

It's the dog tag from my dad, but it's a token of remembrance, not anything else.

And then.

So the features here are important to keep in mind.

And then, of course, when we get to the tools, writing a letter or saying of goodbye.

In a lot of cases, the letter of goodbye has multiple iterations over the process of grieving.

It will change because I change as I engage this process, continuing to journal, of course.

And a lot of times by this stage in the seasons of their grief, they get more and more comfortable of taking the thoughts that they have and putting them on paper and being able to see them.

And so they're comforted by what they see instead of threatened by what they see.

Allowing new relationships, counseling if necessary, of course and developing a healthy spiritual perspective on this.

And that's there's so much contained in each one.

As you can tell.

I do a class in 16 weeks on this.

So yeah, I don't think we have 30 hours to do this too.

So that's the flyover of, of the seasons.

The question of course becomes is what does this have to do with the next generation?

And like I said at the very beginning, it kind of opens a window of conversation that we wouldn't otherwise have because this generation is fleeing connection, even though they long for connection, which is ironic really, because the connection between loss and Gen Z.

I can tell you I never thought I had a lot of students when I first offered this class.

They would come in and I'd have them write journals.

Go figure, right?

And a lot of them will put in there.

I don't know why I'm taking this class.

This is going to be the most depressing class I've ever taken in my life.

And it's like, okay, that tells me through everything about how you see grief.

But it opened a window that I couldn't have if I were talking about relationships even it's the losses that do that.

And so research tells us that Gen Z is less likely to read the Bible than previous generations.

They're also more likely to go to college, believe the government should do more and have a TikTok account, hence why it's so popular.

And we were on the verge of rebellion when a president decided to ban it.

So there are five key characteristics I want to mention to you just to provide some context for this and where there's an interplay between the losses and this is always an avenue I keep open when I'm sitting and talking to my students because sooner or later I have ears for loss, apparently.

And so the first feature or characteristic is that the research, I think I've mentioned this already.

The first characteristic is they are atheistic, sort of.

They're less religious than any other generation on record.

Now again, we have to define our terms as far as what religiousness means to them because it's very different than what it means to most of us.

Their faith connection is to their grandparents, not their parents.

And it's an important connection to keep in mind.

They're more actually agnostic when you move in far and ask more questions.

They don't know about God and they're not real sure it's worth the energy to get to know them.

They really are about conservation of energy in spite of the fact that they spend a lot of energy, a lot of energy.

Doom scrolling and all the other things they tend to do.

But that's different.

That's different.

So they are less likely than previous generations to be familiar with the Bible, how to use, use it, believe the Bible contains everything that's necessary for living life.

And the remarkable thing I teach students in a subset, all right, Christian students coming from Christian homes.

I still see this.

They have very loose grip.

Now our bib studies students, they're all in.

Okay.

But at the same time there's two different levels, and I was talking about this with Ken before we started.

There are two different levels of knowledge that they have.

They have explicit knowledge about God, but then they have implicit relational knowledge of God and that's very, very different.

So they'll say I know everything there is about God, but I don't feel close to him.

And that's that implicit knowledge that we don't really do much to identify oftentimes.

So they are atheistic, sort of.

They're more agnostic.

They don't believe.

If you've ever, and I'll just mention this in passing, but if you ever have an opportunity to look up mtd, Moralistic therapeutic deism.

It is a trademark of a lot of our students and not just at ccu, but I think anywhere else.

The second one is they're looking for community.

Even before COVID Gen Z was labeled the loneliest generation on record.

Now it's remarkable because I've had plenty of people of my generation looking.

Huh?

How could they be lonely?

They're on constantly.

But connection is not mediated through a screen.

And we all remember back in pandemic days and zoom doom because we did not.

We couldn't flourish without the interpersonal cues like breathing.

We take in breath when we're going to talk and it becomes a sharing activity.

And when we talk that way, that wasn't there with that and that's their lives.

It's little wonder if they're not connected.

They are now alone.

There seems to be almost an emotional object permanence that is lacking in this generation.

So they are very much enveloped in an idealistic portrayal of relationships.

I can't imagine where that comes from because everybody's sharing their highlight reel, they're not their real reel.

And so their desire is for relationship, but they don't have the first clue how to connect.

That is why my groups are so threatening.

But it's also why our groups, by the time we get to the end of the semester, they are weeping that they can't continue and begging for more.

I've had so many groups that still are connecting with one another through various means because of that connection.

And that was a time when I was doing grief and loss in a week, which is frightening.

Talk about a fire hose.

And so they're still looking for community, even though they don't know about relationship very much.

And I think there lies an opportunity.

They may flee the church and walk into our offices and we can't be a community, we can be part of one.

But that's one of my commitments has been groups bring something new to the table, a dynamic that you can't have with a therapist.

Not diminishing.

I've been doing this for a long time, so I'm not diminishing its value, but I sure can in a variety of ways and create a space for them to connect that they learn on the fly with one another.

And so the third characteristic is they are anxiously digital.

The minute they are disconnected.

One author said the level of panic is high.

Everything is out there in social media.

And ultimately they are living a double bind.

The double bind, of course, is when they disengage from it.

They feel disconnected, but they get connected to it and they feel diminished.

And so oftentimes what you find is they have multiple times of getting on and getting off and getting on and getting off time and time again, over and over again.

And so they are anxiously digital.

The fourth one is that they are fervently principled.

Now, the principal, we might have questions about what those principles are, but Gen Z feels strongly about some principles, not challenging someone's beliefs, for example, and less strongly about others, like lying.

The moral principles, they don't believe.

The moral principles don't change with the society that they're in.

And so value for them is actions and words have to match, which is essentially applied to the people that they interact with as well, is they have to match.

A lot of times you find their disenchantment with the church is because leaders don't relate the way they talk from the pulpit.

And so there's a lack of consistency between those things and they walk out.

And there's a sensitivity to making a difference in the world.

If they get onto something, there is no stopping them.

They are a walking tipping point once they get going on something.

And their standards, though, are always idealistic because it's not realism requires the topic we're talking about.

You know, we got to lose something to be realistic, and we got to accept the reality of that in order to have that be part of our relationship with people.

And so they are fervently principled and they can be exceedingly passionate, Talking to a number of leaders across the country that work with Gen Z, whether in the inner city or other universities, and they will say, once they're in, you cannot get them stopped.

And then the last one I'd mention is living a curated life.

Their life is curated, they show, and they bend their life experience to happiness and comfort.

I had one student a couple years back that was part of my men's group and also part of my.

One of my groups, of my classes.

And he said, we're addicted to happiness, any, anything now.

Remember, happiness, not joy, but happiness.

We're addicted to that because anything that hints at interfering with it or intruding on it were fleeing immediately.

And I thought, holy cow, somebody has just caught the holy grail of the nature of relationships.

They show only what they want to be seen, and in so doing, they become unseen.

And so they are committed to having a controlling life rather than actually living it.

The thing I would highlight, and one of the things that tends to be the most convicting to my students about the things that I talk about, is that control and trust cannot coexist.

And so if they're committed to controlling people's perceptions of them, how they are viewed about safety in relationships, controlling everything about it, it is exhausting.

And they think that is all their life, all that life is.

And they also wonder, why can't I connect to people when I'm so busy trying to control them?

I can't connect.

I can't connect.

And so the whole idea of the nature of relationships and curated actually led into what?

The last kind of pitch I have for you is the window of opportunity that I think we have with this generation.

I think the role of loss and grief in their lives is consistently there.

Stained Glass International I formed two years ago, actually, the insistence, prompting and harassing of a number of students because I talk about a concept in my classes, particularly shame and grace, about something that I call the stained glass self.

And it really creates this image.

It's the curated life, essentially.

It creates the image or appearance of being Christian, of being accepting, being connected, but then I am safely behind it without anybody knowing who I really am.

And again, the double bind.

I invite people with the appearance I show, but I can't really be in it with them.

And so stained glass self, I spend time in one of my classes talking about it from all the way from infancy to young adulthood and beyond.

And what do we show Are we WYSIWYG people?

Some of you might understand that term.

What you see is what you get, which is what pure glass is about.

And so the window of opportunity we took advantage of and put together and created an organization called Stained Glass International.

There were three different things that I emphasized is the retreats.

Now, this is different.

This is not more teaching retreats.

I actually introduce the young people to silence and solitude.

And it strips away.

It strips away a lot of this stuff.

I'm firmly convinced that God reveals himself in our silence in remarkable ways.

I had a good friend of mine, he is the voice of Daily Audio Bible.

And he came and actually visited and was part of our silent retreats and was blown away by the students in simply two and a half days.

What happened in that amount of time?

Because we leave on a Thursday night, we come back on Sunday after lunch, and they are in silence 22 hours of the day.

The one thing that we add to it, because it's got to be stylized to this generation, is is we do a debrief at the end of every day.

So there's a connection piece.

And they're talking about their experiences with God and my friend.

And that's what I was getting to.

What my friend said was, and he's been a Christian all of his life, grew up in a church.

And he said, nobody ever told me that silence is inhabited.

Someone is waiting for us there.

And that's what's so unnerving, I think.

And so the retreats are not teaching retreats.

They're connecting retreats, connecting with God and with each other.

And they're in silence during all of that time.

And it's remarkable what happens.

And one of the biggest challenges we have is Gen Z doesn't have a lot of money.

And so it's raising the funds to be able to have a scholarship fund that allows me to bring students on these retreats and make it possible to them for them to be a part of it.

Because otherwise they wouldn't go.

If their friend said, this is amazing.

There's that word again.

They'll go.

They'll go in a heartbeat.

But if it's silence, oh, no, I could never do that.

I've had a lot of students say that, and somebody leaned on them and they went.

And it's like, now they're my greatest evangelists for the silent retreats.

And we've been doing those.

I started those 14 years ago.

We started with five students and one retreat, and now we're up to two a year.

And 10 students each.

I serve as a spiritual director for them.

So sometimes I'll meet individually, sometimes I won't.

And I equip them with two things, or they equip themselves a journal.

Surprise of surprise.

You might notice the theme and their Bible, if they so choose.

I have a particular book that sometimes I will have them work their way through if they want to, during the time they're there.

It's called the center of quiet, and it is a little bit more structured.

That's what they come into most of the time.

When they come into the retreats, we'll sit down for the very first session and start talking about, you know, what's.

What's to be expected and things like that.

And one of the first questions I'll get is, so what do I do?

I said, nothing.

It's like, uh, oh, okay, what do I do?

It's like, no assignments, just you and God.

Take the time to spend time with him and see what he has to say to you.

So there's that.

And then, of course, as it mentions up up here, what I'm talking about is outpost groups, and I call it outpost because it's outposts for the heart.

And the nature of what it is about is creating that space that is not necessarily connected to a church, where they can connect and begin to discover actually the embodiment of truth in their relationships.

Because it's in relationships that implicit knowledge is contained, and it's in relationships that it can be changed.

And I've seen it happen too many times.

And of course, the last one, I think, is Relationship Resources.

Within the next month, I'll be releasing an E course on shame and grace.

And that E course is for groups, it is for individuals, and it allows anybody that is interested to see my contention.

I have a bone to pick with Brene Brown.

I know that's kind of David and Goliath, but the bone to pick is that the solution for shame is not just connection.

It's learning the full understanding of what grace means.

Not just grace to save us, but grace to live in.

And that is what that course is about.

16 weeks.

I can bore you in half that time if you want to pay half price.

And that's really what the resources are.

There are a variety of other resources.

We release a newsletter every couple of months, whatever I can put together, the next one coming out is actually about journaling and a structure for journaling.

So sign up.

It's sgi-net.org I think I may have put this up there.

Yeah, it's there it is.

And I brought a couple books with me.

Grieving the Loss of Someone youe Love.

That little book has absolutely stunned me.

I wrote that book in 1993.

I was 12.

And it's remarkable lifespan.

It really is.

And so there's that one.

And then my newly released book in January, which I also brought along is the Seasons of Our Grief, which I basically introduced to you.

The thing is, it is not a didactic book.

I wrote it for Gen Z.

And so they follow two people's journey through grief and they tell their stories in fiction, but there's teaching and that's, that's a way of connecting with them.

I wrote it for that express purpose.

So that brings us to the end.

I'm getting circled out here.

So do we have time for questions?

Okay, thank you.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that talk that I gave.

It was to a group of counselors in Colorado Springs Christian Counselor Fellowship that I was asked to present to.

They were a great group and we had a great time answering lots of questions on the backside of it.

So I hope you enjoyed it.

I hope it gave you some plenty to think about.

And thanks for joining me.

SGI-net.org that's the home for the SGI community and you can follow us on three different social media channels.

Instagram, GIInternational, Facebook, Stained Glass International, all one word, and LinkedIn Stained Glass International as well.

You can find wherever you consume podcasts, you can find us.

So wherever you might look, you can listen either into the Outpost podcast, which is part of SGI Media, but also this unscripted, which I started off a year ago at the prompting of saying goodbye to a dear friend.

And I have spent the year talking about various aspects of the grieving process and what it looks like and including the seasons of grief and including a number of different topics.

This is episode 19, so there are 18 different episodes to catch up on if you're so inclined.

And so if you're looking for the books themselves, there are two different books I wrote on grief.

One's called Grieving the Loss of someone you Love.

And the newest one is the Seasons of Our Grief, which can also be found@seasonsofargrief.com on that webpage you will see not only the presentation if you'd like to watch it on video and a variety of items that give you some background about the book itself and what is significant about it.

You can subscribe to our online community as soon as you hit sgi-net.org you will be invited to become part of it.

If you do so, we will not send you any spam, but there will be an occasional email newsletter coming out to inform you of some of the retreats that are coming up, opportunities for groups and other opportunities.

I generally have been writing an article in there for Thought and Challenge and that would be a place for you to keep up with what's going on in the community itself.

If you are interested in partnering with us, we would be ever so grateful to continue to develop the Ministry of SGI which you now have a little bit of an understanding based on the presentation I gave.

SGI Media is a tax deductible organization, so all of your gifts are tax deductible as well.

And and you can give that to support our silent retreats, our groups and funding and supporting training for our leaders in the groups and also other materials and resources.

Before too long we will have a brand new E course that I will be announcing here on the podcast for people to engage in.

It will be designed not only for groups but also for individuals that you might find interesting as well.

So if you would rather send us a check, you're welcome to do that as well.

Physical check.

Just make it out to SGI and send it to P.O.

box 322, Eastlake, Colorado 80614.

And that's it for tonight.

Blessings to you all and until next time, love you later.

Bye.

SA.