I have been overwhelmed by grief the last few days—so many layers of it:
~My job in which I see so much animal pain and suffering
~my state which is on fire right now and simply won’t ever be the way it was when I was growing up— my daughter won’t know the Colorado of my own youth
~the absolute farce of America’s 250th birthday
I could go on but this is so heavy already.
When I’m done ministering to the 4-leggeds, I’ll sit with this awhile and grieve
Debby...this one stopped me, so I'm going to answer it straight...no showmanship.
First...what you do for the four-leggeds is ministry in the truest sense.
You stand in a river of suffering...most people couldn't look at for TEN minutes...and you do it daily...on PURPOSE.
That grief is NOT a malfunction. It's the receipt for a working heart...in a hard job. I hope you never lose it entirely... just its weight.
Second...I want to hand you one distinction before you sit down with this tonight... because it matters for someone in your position:
Some of what you're carrying isn't pre-grief. The animals...the fires...the Colorado your daughter won't inherit...that's not an imagined future. That's real loss...ALREADY here...and it doesn't need a rehearsal.
Jack, some good advice on this Independence Day eve…and as I do have hope for the midterms, the reality of what may happen has been lurking in the back of my mind for a while now. All we can do is to prepare in every way we can for the possibility of the direst of outcomes, and then move forward from there. For years, with colon cancer in my maternal family, I’d wondered what I would do if I should be diagnosed. 23 years ago I found out, Stage III, felt the bottom of my world fall out that March afternoon…grieved myself, grieved for my husband and our children over the next week…it took about that long for me to say HELL NO…I was not going to let cancer destroy my world, and so I worked to do everything I could do to treasure every moment I had and to fight! I will take the same approach to what we may face come November. I hope that everyone will join together and continue to do what we can to salvage what we may have left and to continue to pushback!
Tomorrow we are not celebrating this country…instead we are celebrating our granddaughter’s birthdays, which should have happened last month but they were sick and so the celebration was delayed. We will celebrate them, our family and simply being together!! Thank you for the wisdom and thought provoking words you share with us…so glad you are here!
Christie...you just did something I want every reader in this comment section to notice.
I wrote eleven hundred words explaining a technique. You lived it...23 years ago...in a single week in March...with the stakes as REAL as stakes get. Bottom falls out. Grief comes...yours...your husband's...your children's...and...instead of fighting the wave... you let it complete.
Roughly seven days later...right on schedule...the wave turned and something UNDERNEATH it stood up and said HELL NO!
That's the ENTIRE pattern. Steps one through six.
You didn't learn it from a newsletter. You learned it from the hardest teacher there is... and you PASSED.
And...notice what the grief did NOT do: it did NOT make you passive. That's the misunderstanding I fight every time I write about this. People think grieving something means surrendering to it. You're proof of the opposite...the grief was the IGNITION... not the EXIT.
A week of honest mourning bought you 23 years of fighting and treasuring at FULL strength. That's the trade. It's the best deal on the market...and almost nobody takes it.
So...when you say you'll take the same approach come November...I damn sure believe you...and I'd add only this: you're not preparing to use the pattern. You're a VETERAN of it. November should be nervous.
Tomorrow sounds exactly right. Two granddaughters...a delayed celebration...a family in one room. You've been treasuring the moments...for 23 years on PURPOSE; no wonder you know PRECISELY which thing to celebrate...when the calendar gets complicated.
So happy every day I am here…not that every day is great, some are going to be better than others, always glad to be here!!
PS…a little postscript…I couldn’t metabolise my chemo protocol and by the second round my hair was coming out…one nice May afternoon my dearest friend came by to take me for a ride in her car…she put the top down and as we were driving my hair was blowing off my head…she thought I was crying, but I was laughing…trying to imagine what the drivers behind us thought of all that hair coming towards them!
Due to prior trauma I had to confront my mortality (I was around 40 at the time). Since then I have encountered challenges (fears) but they had little power over me because I'd already had a stare-down with death and I won! Now in my 70s, I'm still ready to weather whatever storm might come ... bring it on!
Jack is correct that fear is a crop, and someone is always tending the field. History records the specific mechanism he’s describing without naming it: the manufactured emergency, the citizen kept perpetually bracing, never once allowed to exhale long enough to think clearly.
File the date: every regime that consolidated power quickly did so against a population that had not yet grieved the thing it feared, because ungrieved fear is malleable fear. It can be pointed. It can be sold a savior. A population that has already sat with the worst outcome and mapped its own response is a population that cannot be stampeded, because stampeding requires an unanswered question, and Jack is describing exactly how to answer it in advance.
Note which figures in history moved fastest and met the least resistance: not the ones facing the boldest opposition, but the ones facing the most exhausted one. Exhaustion was never a side effect of their methods. It was the objective. A citizen too spent to grieve properly is a citizen who reacts instead of decides, and a nation of reactors does not hold its ground.
File the date more precisely: February 27, 1933. The Reichstag burns, and within twenty-four hours Hindenburg issues an emergency decree suspending nearly every civil liberty in the Weimar Constitution — speech, assembly, press, privacy, all of it, gone overnight, justified as defense against a communist uprising that never materialized as described. SA stormtroopers rounded up roughly 4,000 people that same night, many tortured as well as jailed. The population wasn’t defeated by argument. It was exhausted first — years of hyperinflation, street violence, and cabinet turnover behind it — and an exhausted population signs away its rights faster than a rested one ever would.
Note what came next. On March 23, the Enabling Act passed 444 to 94, with Communist deputies already barred from the chamber and Social Democratic deputies detained under the decree Hitler had just extracted. SA troops surrounded the building on the day of the vote. This is the mechanism in full: manufacture the emergency, exploit the exhaustion, remove the opposition through the emergency itself, then legislate the permanent power while the country is still catching its breath.
Jack is correct twice over, then: once on the psychology, once on the historical record. Weimar’s tragedy wasn’t that Germans failed to see the danger. It’s that by February 1933, they had no reserve left to meet it with anything but relief that the chaos, at least, might finally stop. A rested, unspookable citizen, pointed at a real problem, has always outlasted the men counting on his panic.
It is eerie how your timing is always spot on. As an early “communications” major, NLP fascinated me to the study but Nonverbal was my jam. A few years later, when Tony Robbins popped up with his mishmash of all the theorists work and called it his own, I was disgusted. Albeit, he was able to reach those who wouldn’t have had the exposure to the concept.
I’m at the point in life where using the funeral is perfect. Thanks, Jack! I truly appreciate you & wish you and all your readers the freedom from worry this Independence holiday.
Interesting concept here, Jack. I'm of the age where I don't get to emotional over feelings I may have with regards to Politics. However, this would be helpful for the frequent deaths of friends and family members, that happen a lot more when you're of e curtain age. TGIF to you and All of your readers. Here's hoping you have a good, Safe 4th of July weekend, and will reStack ASAP 💯👍
This works. And for after funeral care, look around yourself this weekend at the people at your block party or the friend group who always shows up for you and realize that they will be the ones there when the world goes sideways or you have a catastrophic worry actually come true.
There are two comments her and I will separate them into two postings. This first one deals with inoculation training. The Navy submarine force has been doing this for years. I can personally attest to its effectiveness.
Naval Submarine School in Groton Ct has several trainers that are used to train submarine crews on actions to take when everything goes south. The first is their ship’s diving simulators. These are recreations of a submarine’s diving stations on gimbals that allow the crew to experience how a ship will respond to actions the crew takes in emergency situations. The ship’s attitude, pitch and roll responses are very realistic and prepare the crew for the worst possible ship control casualties. While I never actually experienced one of these casualties at sea, all the trained crews knew they could handle the real thing if it occurred. The confidence this gave the crew was noticeable.
The second trainer type were fire control trainers that were actual setups of the ship’s sonar system and control room tracking and weapons launch stations. Training scenarios could be input into the simulator computers and the crew could train on solving the tactical picture of the enemy and deploy simulated weapons. I have been through countless hours in these trainers, and they were particularly beneficial for me as it gave me hands on experience with digital fire control system, something none of the submarines I was stations were equipped with them. The crew’s ability to analyze the sonar inputs and translate them into a clear tactical picture was invaluable. When on one deployment when I was in command, we experienced a sonar display we did not expect. The crew was able to calmly analyze the situation and take necessary actions that allowed the mission to continue. We proceeded to have one of the fleet’s most successful submarine deployments, one where I was asked to debrief the President of the United States and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Thanks for the process. When something goes sideways or this farcical political climate infringes, I give it 5 minutes, mutter, stomp, and have my hissy fit. then, I do something very active or creative. So much talk was given lately to democrats and independents not celebrating the 4th. I was determined not on my watch. So I bought new bunting, an America 250 ( no freedom 😡), Marine Flag, got out my American flags, and Army flag and proudly built a display for my house. Trump may have disasterized the National State Fair and tried to usurp our symbols. I dissent. When questios flew from some magas on a post. I stood up to them.
In the Fire Service we prepare for what we think is the worst. But training and reality are different experiences. Reality is not the same as training. HOWEVER, without the training, we'd never be able to handle the reality. That makes this posting so very important.
The steps you gave us lead to the best possible outcome because you are showing how to be in the reality and training for it at the same time. Expect emotional reactions throughout the training because that will be the reality and for a time afterward. Notice and acknowledge them rather than invalidate them. Let yourself be human.
“Only when you’ve lost everything are you free to do anything.”
- Tyler Durden, Fight Club
When I was in my late teens/early twenties, I went through a very deep and introspective period. During that period, I became aware of two primal fears:
- The fear of death (the cessation of life)
- The fear of dying (the process to achieve death)
During that period, I overcame the fear of my own death. I accepted and came to respect death.
It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I began to have health issues. (It’s hell getting old! 😉) I felt things I’d never felt before. I’d felt really, really bad. Not that I actually was, but it was then that I understood and learned to respect the process of dying.
Once I overcame those two fears, my worldview changed. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted from me. I will still have times of anxiety and stress, but not fearing death and dying really takes the edge off.
Anticipatory grief. When I worked as a hospice nurse we saw a lot of that. It's real and it's hard to deal with. But there it is. And this may sound loony tunes, but when my beloved dog Gus was nearing the end I experienced it so severely I thought I was going to die. When I finally said good bye it was every bit as bad as I knew it would be. Now, living on this timeline, I can easily identify the EVENT that will cause my funeral. And everyone has his or her very own scenario. However, at my age, chances are my real funeral will come before the one I DREAD. Thank you for this, Jack. And I will certainly ponder all this. Have the very best FOURTH you can have. And, to all my fellow commenters, YOU TOO!
Someone else mentioned how your timing is spot on, and I agree. You practice from NLP daily and were trained by its creators. I believe your mind is strong. I know I need to play the grief tape through and come back more frequently now, using your techniques and suggestions. I laughed out loud about saying I am attending my own funeral. Grief is action as you said. I need to take it more and not stuff it. I also like that it is short. No lengthy sessions. Thank you!
takes anticipation. Slow your ‘space in time’ while you inwardly focus and practice your forward future movements. NLP is a powerful change that takes courage to address your fears as you remain calm in the face of a storm, either real or imagined. Practice is key, perfection is a goal. Thank you Jack. Steady as we go.
Definitely what I needed today.
I have been overwhelmed by grief the last few days—so many layers of it:
~My job in which I see so much animal pain and suffering
~my state which is on fire right now and simply won’t ever be the way it was when I was growing up— my daughter won’t know the Colorado of my own youth
~the absolute farce of America’s 250th birthday
I could go on but this is so heavy already.
When I’m done ministering to the 4-leggeds, I’ll sit with this awhile and grieve
Debby...this one stopped me, so I'm going to answer it straight...no showmanship.
First...what you do for the four-leggeds is ministry in the truest sense.
You stand in a river of suffering...most people couldn't look at for TEN minutes...and you do it daily...on PURPOSE.
That grief is NOT a malfunction. It's the receipt for a working heart...in a hard job. I hope you never lose it entirely... just its weight.
Second...I want to hand you one distinction before you sit down with this tonight... because it matters for someone in your position:
Some of what you're carrying isn't pre-grief. The animals...the fires...the Colorado your daughter won't inherit...that's not an imagined future. That's real loss...ALREADY here...and it doesn't need a rehearsal.
Glad you're here, Debby.
-Jack
Jack, some good advice on this Independence Day eve…and as I do have hope for the midterms, the reality of what may happen has been lurking in the back of my mind for a while now. All we can do is to prepare in every way we can for the possibility of the direst of outcomes, and then move forward from there. For years, with colon cancer in my maternal family, I’d wondered what I would do if I should be diagnosed. 23 years ago I found out, Stage III, felt the bottom of my world fall out that March afternoon…grieved myself, grieved for my husband and our children over the next week…it took about that long for me to say HELL NO…I was not going to let cancer destroy my world, and so I worked to do everything I could do to treasure every moment I had and to fight! I will take the same approach to what we may face come November. I hope that everyone will join together and continue to do what we can to salvage what we may have left and to continue to pushback!
Tomorrow we are not celebrating this country…instead we are celebrating our granddaughter’s birthdays, which should have happened last month but they were sick and so the celebration was delayed. We will celebrate them, our family and simply being together!! Thank you for the wisdom and thought provoking words you share with us…so glad you are here!
Christie...you just did something I want every reader in this comment section to notice.
I wrote eleven hundred words explaining a technique. You lived it...23 years ago...in a single week in March...with the stakes as REAL as stakes get. Bottom falls out. Grief comes...yours...your husband's...your children's...and...instead of fighting the wave... you let it complete.
Roughly seven days later...right on schedule...the wave turned and something UNDERNEATH it stood up and said HELL NO!
That's the ENTIRE pattern. Steps one through six.
You didn't learn it from a newsletter. You learned it from the hardest teacher there is... and you PASSED.
And...notice what the grief did NOT do: it did NOT make you passive. That's the misunderstanding I fight every time I write about this. People think grieving something means surrendering to it. You're proof of the opposite...the grief was the IGNITION... not the EXIT.
A week of honest mourning bought you 23 years of fighting and treasuring at FULL strength. That's the trade. It's the best deal on the market...and almost nobody takes it.
So...when you say you'll take the same approach come November...I damn sure believe you...and I'd add only this: you're not preparing to use the pattern. You're a VETERAN of it. November should be nervous.
Tomorrow sounds exactly right. Two granddaughters...a delayed celebration...a family in one room. You've been treasuring the moments...for 23 years on PURPOSE; no wonder you know PRECISELY which thing to celebrate...when the calendar gets complicated.
Happy birthday to the girls!
Glad you're here...23 extra years' worth of glad.
-Jack
So happy every day I am here…not that every day is great, some are going to be better than others, always glad to be here!!
PS…a little postscript…I couldn’t metabolise my chemo protocol and by the second round my hair was coming out…one nice May afternoon my dearest friend came by to take me for a ride in her car…she put the top down and as we were driving my hair was blowing off my head…she thought I was crying, but I was laughing…trying to imagine what the drivers behind us thought of all that hair coming towards them!
Thank so much for your kind words, Jack!
Due to prior trauma I had to confront my mortality (I was around 40 at the time). Since then I have encountered challenges (fears) but they had little power over me because I'd already had a stare-down with death and I won! Now in my 70s, I'm still ready to weather whatever storm might come ... bring it on!
Jack is correct that fear is a crop, and someone is always tending the field. History records the specific mechanism he’s describing without naming it: the manufactured emergency, the citizen kept perpetually bracing, never once allowed to exhale long enough to think clearly.
File the date: every regime that consolidated power quickly did so against a population that had not yet grieved the thing it feared, because ungrieved fear is malleable fear. It can be pointed. It can be sold a savior. A population that has already sat with the worst outcome and mapped its own response is a population that cannot be stampeded, because stampeding requires an unanswered question, and Jack is describing exactly how to answer it in advance.
Note which figures in history moved fastest and met the least resistance: not the ones facing the boldest opposition, but the ones facing the most exhausted one. Exhaustion was never a side effect of their methods. It was the objective. A citizen too spent to grieve properly is a citizen who reacts instead of decides, and a nation of reactors does not hold its ground.
File the date more precisely: February 27, 1933. The Reichstag burns, and within twenty-four hours Hindenburg issues an emergency decree suspending nearly every civil liberty in the Weimar Constitution — speech, assembly, press, privacy, all of it, gone overnight, justified as defense against a communist uprising that never materialized as described. SA stormtroopers rounded up roughly 4,000 people that same night, many tortured as well as jailed. The population wasn’t defeated by argument. It was exhausted first — years of hyperinflation, street violence, and cabinet turnover behind it — and an exhausted population signs away its rights faster than a rested one ever would.
Note what came next. On March 23, the Enabling Act passed 444 to 94, with Communist deputies already barred from the chamber and Social Democratic deputies detained under the decree Hitler had just extracted. SA troops surrounded the building on the day of the vote. This is the mechanism in full: manufacture the emergency, exploit the exhaustion, remove the opposition through the emergency itself, then legislate the permanent power while the country is still catching its breath.
Jack is correct twice over, then: once on the psychology, once on the historical record. Weimar’s tragedy wasn’t that Germans failed to see the danger. It’s that by February 1933, they had no reserve left to meet it with anything but relief that the chaos, at least, might finally stop. A rested, unspookable citizen, pointed at a real problem, has always outlasted the men counting on his panic.
It is eerie how your timing is always spot on. As an early “communications” major, NLP fascinated me to the study but Nonverbal was my jam. A few years later, when Tony Robbins popped up with his mishmash of all the theorists work and called it his own, I was disgusted. Albeit, he was able to reach those who wouldn’t have had the exposure to the concept.
I’m at the point in life where using the funeral is perfect. Thanks, Jack! I truly appreciate you & wish you and all your readers the freedom from worry this Independence holiday.
Interesting concept here, Jack. I'm of the age where I don't get to emotional over feelings I may have with regards to Politics. However, this would be helpful for the frequent deaths of friends and family members, that happen a lot more when you're of e curtain age. TGIF to you and All of your readers. Here's hoping you have a good, Safe 4th of July weekend, and will reStack ASAP 💯👍
This works. And for after funeral care, look around yourself this weekend at the people at your block party or the friend group who always shows up for you and realize that they will be the ones there when the world goes sideways or you have a catastrophic worry actually come true.
There are two comments her and I will separate them into two postings. This first one deals with inoculation training. The Navy submarine force has been doing this for years. I can personally attest to its effectiveness.
Naval Submarine School in Groton Ct has several trainers that are used to train submarine crews on actions to take when everything goes south. The first is their ship’s diving simulators. These are recreations of a submarine’s diving stations on gimbals that allow the crew to experience how a ship will respond to actions the crew takes in emergency situations. The ship’s attitude, pitch and roll responses are very realistic and prepare the crew for the worst possible ship control casualties. While I never actually experienced one of these casualties at sea, all the trained crews knew they could handle the real thing if it occurred. The confidence this gave the crew was noticeable.
The second trainer type were fire control trainers that were actual setups of the ship’s sonar system and control room tracking and weapons launch stations. Training scenarios could be input into the simulator computers and the crew could train on solving the tactical picture of the enemy and deploy simulated weapons. I have been through countless hours in these trainers, and they were particularly beneficial for me as it gave me hands on experience with digital fire control system, something none of the submarines I was stations were equipped with them. The crew’s ability to analyze the sonar inputs and translate them into a clear tactical picture was invaluable. When on one deployment when I was in command, we experienced a sonar display we did not expect. The crew was able to calmly analyze the situation and take necessary actions that allowed the mission to continue. We proceeded to have one of the fleet’s most successful submarine deployments, one where I was asked to debrief the President of the United States and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Inoculation training works if done properly.
Thanks for the process. When something goes sideways or this farcical political climate infringes, I give it 5 minutes, mutter, stomp, and have my hissy fit. then, I do something very active or creative. So much talk was given lately to democrats and independents not celebrating the 4th. I was determined not on my watch. So I bought new bunting, an America 250 ( no freedom 😡), Marine Flag, got out my American flags, and Army flag and proudly built a display for my house. Trump may have disasterized the National State Fair and tried to usurp our symbols. I dissent. When questios flew from some magas on a post. I stood up to them.
❤️🤍💙🇺🇸
#HoldFast
WOW.!! Thank you.
In the Fire Service we prepare for what we think is the worst. But training and reality are different experiences. Reality is not the same as training. HOWEVER, without the training, we'd never be able to handle the reality. That makes this posting so very important.
The steps you gave us lead to the best possible outcome because you are showing how to be in the reality and training for it at the same time. Expect emotional reactions throughout the training because that will be the reality and for a time afterward. Notice and acknowledge them rather than invalidate them. Let yourself be human.
The way out is through.
Thanks for your constant high level teaching.
“Only when you’ve lost everything are you free to do anything.”
- Tyler Durden, Fight Club
When I was in my late teens/early twenties, I went through a very deep and introspective period. During that period, I became aware of two primal fears:
- The fear of death (the cessation of life)
- The fear of dying (the process to achieve death)
During that period, I overcame the fear of my own death. I accepted and came to respect death.
It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I began to have health issues. (It’s hell getting old! 😉) I felt things I’d never felt before. I’d felt really, really bad. Not that I actually was, but it was then that I understood and learned to respect the process of dying.
Once I overcame those two fears, my worldview changed. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted from me. I will still have times of anxiety and stress, but not fearing death and dying really takes the edge off.
Anticipatory grief. When I worked as a hospice nurse we saw a lot of that. It's real and it's hard to deal with. But there it is. And this may sound loony tunes, but when my beloved dog Gus was nearing the end I experienced it so severely I thought I was going to die. When I finally said good bye it was every bit as bad as I knew it would be. Now, living on this timeline, I can easily identify the EVENT that will cause my funeral. And everyone has his or her very own scenario. However, at my age, chances are my real funeral will come before the one I DREAD. Thank you for this, Jack. And I will certainly ponder all this. Have the very best FOURTH you can have. And, to all my fellow commenters, YOU TOO!
Someone else mentioned how your timing is spot on, and I agree. You practice from NLP daily and were trained by its creators. I believe your mind is strong. I know I need to play the grief tape through and come back more frequently now, using your techniques and suggestions. I laughed out loud about saying I am attending my own funeral. Grief is action as you said. I need to take it more and not stuff it. I also like that it is short. No lengthy sessions. Thank you!
Clear and subtle daily conscious awareness
takes anticipation. Slow your ‘space in time’ while you inwardly focus and practice your forward future movements. NLP is a powerful change that takes courage to address your fears as you remain calm in the face of a storm, either real or imagined. Practice is key, perfection is a goal. Thank you Jack. Steady as we go.
Great advice Jack. A fleshed out way to "live in the moment."