Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It's a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners just like you. I'm Dr. James Dobson and I'm thrilled that you've joined us.

Roger Marsh: Well, welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marsh and today on the program we have a profound topic to discuss that I know everyone of our listeners have walked through, and that is the topic of grief. But did you know that grieving is not only reserved for if you've lost a friend or a loved one? Uh there's a lot more to grief than the common descriptions will often apply. And to help us delve into this subject is Nicole Langman. Nicole is a writer, a speaker, and a social worker in private practice in Ontario, Canada.

Her work lives at the intersection of spiritual formation and personal growth, and her heart is to see women radically transformed by the love of Jesus Christ. She's written a fascinating new book that has a title that it will certainly get your attention, and that is this isn't the story I wanted, grieving the life you lost and trusting the God who stays. And we have a link for that book up at drjamesdobson.org. There's a lot to get into. So, Nicole Langman, welcome to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. Uh we're glad to have you here even though this topic is one that uh will probably turn a few people sideways before we get to the good news part of it.

So, thank you for addressing this topic and joining us today here on the program.

Nicole Langman: Thanks so much, Roger. I am delighted to be with you today.

Roger Marsh: Is this a topic for you as a counselor that really kind of I I'll say energizes I don't want to say it lights you up, but I mean it really energizes you in the sense that you see so many people wrestling with it and you realize there is help, there is hope, but a lot of people just can't find it yet.

Nicole Langman: Yes, and I think that does it does light me up partly because over the years, women I work predominantly with women, they come through my door and they they share a story that is unbelievably heavy, life rearranging, relationship wounds, whatever trauma historical trauma they might be carrying into the session, and they don't have words for it. They just know that it's coming with them. And so I have said countless times, my goodness, this sounds to me like you're grieving. And the overwhelming emotional response that continues to happen when women find words for what it is they are carrying, it just it's just liberating having a word for it.

And then we can do that work cuz grief is heavy lifting. It's it's heavy work. And so until you actually know maybe what it is that you're carrying or what it is that you're doing, I think sometimes we can get lost in just this this feeling. And we also spend a lot of time comparing loss. So, we figure how can I be grieving if nobody died? And uh and so there's a confusion there. I think people um maybe get hung up on that a little bit. So, when when we can put a word to it, it can liberate people.

Roger Marsh: Well, you mentioned a phrase, Nicole, that I want you to circle back around to because as a guy who talks for a living, I realize I'm kind of the anomaly in the room. Men don't usually talk about things as much as women do, but you talked about how important it is when a woman goes through a season of grief or a experience of grief that she is able to have words to describe it, to work through it, or whatever. Talk about why that's more important for women than men because it sounds like it is.

Nicole Langman: And we have a lot of words to use up. And it's interesting that you said that, Roger, because you're right. We have like four times more words to use up in a day. And we we there's actually therapy and talking it out for us. Some of us are internal processors and we do a lot of our internal work and and then we can kind of come to our own conclusions, but for many of us chatting it out, talking it out is really really important. And that's where therapy comes in as well is that sometimes chatting it out with someone who's outside of the situation is uh especially important because our friends can maybe not invite the words uh as clearly or as as freely as maybe a trained professional or someone outside of the circle can.

But using our words is actually a therapeutic thing that God's given us. God has given us the ability to talk things through. He's created emotion. He's given us a wide spectrum of emotions and the good, the bad, and the ugly emotions are available to us. So, as we learn to chat that out, there's actually a retraining of our brain that happens from a psychology perspective. And I'm not a I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a brain expert necessarily, but I can definitely say that we know that we can create neuro neural pathways. The more we talk about something, the neural pathways get kind of embedded, so to speak, maybe not so clinical.

So, what we want to be doing as an overcomer is we want to be allowing ourselves to hold the grief, to hold the loss, to hold the experience that we're feeling, talk it out. And also that whole kind of redirection um can help with some of the healing work that needs to be done. And that's other kind of conversation, the positive more healing focused conversations.

Roger Marsh: Nicole, you've kind of alluded to this, but I'd like to get down into some specifics here for just a moment because often times when you say grief, the first thing thing you think of is someone died. You know it maybe it's a spouse, maybe it's a parent, maybe it's a child. I mean God forbid, but I mean I realize that uh that that's where we typically grief means the grieving widow, the grieving widower, that type of thing. In your book this isn't the story I wanted, though you kind of expand the definition a little bit.

And I'm sure it's a real eye opener to a lot of the women that you counsel when they discover that grief is not just about loved ones, but it's about any kind of loss. Take us through some of those different types of losses and and kind of maybe give an example of of of some of those so we can kind of get a better framework for what you're talking about here.

Nicole Langman: Yeah, so grief is that ache, it's that internal ache, it's the emotional response we have to broken dreams and life rearranging losses. And so it does nobody has to die in order for there to be grief. We've often long held death as the high watermark of loss and measured all other losses up against it. And that's that's actually not fair or accurate. Um we grieve a lot of things that are unrelated to death. And and the story the as the book shows up in my life is it was several years ago my husband of almost 20 years walked away from our relationship and that launched me into the deepest grief valley of my life.

Roger Marsh: Oh my.

Nicole Langman: And it was through that valley that I realized that it was kind of cricket. So, people didn't really know how to do that. Camps were built and people took sides and stories were generated, but nobody knew really what to do. Fast forward several years and and just a few years ago my precious mom passed of cancer and the absolute outpouring of love that were given to our family was I think we know what to do when someone dies, but we don't necessarily know what to do when someone's spouse has walked away or there's infidelity or there's a disability in the family or there is mental health or uh new diagnosis.

I don't know that we necessarily know how to handle someone who's living through on ongoing experiences of infertility or who had a traumatic birth experience or struggling in the adoption area or there's children are estranged from them or they're feeling disconnected or the relationships have broken down or they 've experienced a really traumatic um life rearranging move that they've had to go through for reasons of financial breakdown. So, it's really important that we allow people that we hold space for people in those areas.

Roger Marsh: You have a quote in your book um that I I really loved and I love you to kind of uh drill down on a little bit where you write grief is a placeholder for what was. We do not grieve what we do not love. Talk about why that is so important for people to kind of give themselves permission to say look, okay, maybe it was a house to you, but it was a home to me or whatever it was as we're going through the grieving process.

Nicole Langman: Yes. Grief is a sacred honoring. And I think that that is uh God's given us the ability to love. He has built that into us. He is love. We are built to love. And within that the risk of love is loss. And uh and and I really find that actually that grief is a sacred action of love. I was saying to my dad recently, I said, you know, this is how you can continue to love mom even past death is you can carry the pain of missing her. You can carry can carry the grief for her well because you've in a sense saved her from having to do this.

It's a way that you can honor what was. It's an honoring, it's a sacred act of honoring. We don't grieve what we don't love. We don't grieve what we don't what we don't miss. What wasn't important.

Roger Marsh: Talk about the fact that there are some griefs that uh some grief does arise because of situational uh circumstances and other is like they're more long-term like you're talking about. I mean that there there there's got to be a difference, I would imagine, between what you you describe as temporary disappointment and something that is an actual grief moment that really needs to be acknowledged and then processed.

Nicole Langman: Um hm. Yeah, the big D and the little D disappointment some of them are dig the little disappointments that they don't really they don't really grab a foothold. They they'll sit with us maybe for a day or a week or month or or a few months. There's a disappointment that that didn't happen. I pitch a book to a publisher and they don't pick it up and that's disappointing. I don't need to grieve that necessarily. Um that's not a grief for the disappointment. It is what it is. We we we face several disappointments. You know, I was disappointed yesterday when I pulled into Starbucks and someone you know the the person ahead of me had 20 items at the I was disappointed.

I was going to be late for my meeting. But you know that's those disappointments that's not what we 're talking about here. It's the big D life rearranging disappointments that sink in and actually can can impact our mental health and they can impact how we see the world and they can impact how we view relationships and God and etc because they tend to linger long and they can impact our filter, how we filter our lives. And so those are the ones that we need to do some of the heavy lifting around is noticing the impact of that big D disappointment in our lives.

And uh that the longer that lingers in us, the deeper it can it can find its home in us. And we need to do heavier lifting.

Roger Marsh: You have a chapter in the book called Pit and where you talk about Joseph's story and the fact that you know a lot of times we will go right from Joseph and his brothers and the coat of many colors to Joseph welcomes them all back in Pharaoh's court and we jump right through there. We forget there's two decades you know where Joseph is in prison and he's being sold and he's being accused. Talk about why Joseph's story helps us understand maybe a pit of grief that we find ourselves in in that moment.

Nicole Langman: Yeah, the thing that leaps out of the Bible for me is that God was with Joseph in the pit. And it wasn't a rescue. It was not a rescue right away. God we so first of all we only rescue what we value. We know that Jesus himself was the rescue, right? And so um and so he comes and he rescues, but often times God lets uh God God visits us in the pit. He spends time with us in the pit. He's close to the brokenhearted. And and so the rescue wasn't immediate. I mean Joseph had to go from the pit to Potiphar's house to prison before he got to the palace.

And again 20 years passed between the two. And and so this is it's very important for us to remember that God is outside of our timeline. It's not our timeline doesn't look like God's timeline. And so for Joseph in not pit, those were long hours, moments, days. He was terrified. God was with him in the pit. And then he gets to Potiphar's house and all that that happens there and he's the victim of you know lies and deception and all the things. And where was God in that? God was with Joseph in that. And all of this was a growth pattern towards what God had for him.

He didn't necessarily know that know that at the time. He's forgotten by the baker in the in the prison. He's you know what happened there. Like he's been through so much his but God was working him out. He's working it out, growing him up for the palace. And so we must trust God's timing in that all things he's working all things together for those of us who love him. And so even in the pit that we're in, God is with us in it and he has not put down his pen. And he's going to be moving us through whatever that looks like.

It might not look like the palace. My marriage did not reconcile. I am happily married to my high school sweetheart. It's a beautiful story I love to tell. I'm remarried back to this this uh in in another marriage with this incredible man, but God did not reconcile my marriage. He did not rescue me from that pit. But he did something more beautiful than I could have ever imagined. He was working it out all the way along just like he did with Joseph.

Roger Marsh: Yes. Yeah, that's encouraging. And as someone who's also been in that club as well, you find that you're going through that season and you're like, wait, 25 years of what the heck? And then it just kind of blows up and then God has something better for you on the other end and you begin to realize, okay, but I still have to grieve what I went through. You know and I don't think I love the fact that you know when people will talk about the the so-called five stages of grief, you've actually added a step. And it talks about gratitude.

We talk about why gratitude is so important because I know there are a lot of people who will say I don't like what I 'm going through right now, Nicole. This this isn't a lot of fun. Why should I be grateful for it? Talk about why we should.

Nicole Langman: Yeah, I think gratitude is the is the answer to a lot of the struggles that we have this tension between I'm in pain and struggles are happening and I don't know what to be grateful for. And gratitude says, yes, this is true and also. So, it's not a I don't have to be necessarily grateful for the pain or grateful for the loss or the you know the trauma that I'm facing, but I can have both in the same place. We there is a tension. We you know gratitude and and sorrow can can coexist in the same place.

And so we want to where we fix our muscles of cognitive behavior therapy idea is that where we fix our focus, where we fix our mind is going to inform how we feel. So, if I'm focused on the pain and the trauma and the loss and all this happened, I'm going to miss a lot of other things that are going on. I tell a story in my book around sitting on a beach in Mexico when I was enjoying the sunrise with my devotions and and God had painted this beautiful sunrise for me, oranges and purples and pinks.

It was just absolutely beautiful. And I looked down the beach and there's a storm happening over the resorts down the beach. I looked back and and I 'm still looking at the sunrise. The storm is they exist at the same time. The same is true at the same time. And where we put our focus is going to inform how we feel. And so when I'm looking for things to be grateful for because God is always working, there's always something to be grateful for. If I'm looking for things to be grateful for, they're everywhere. We just have to be intentional about where we put our focus.

Roger Marsh: Talk about what it means to to really work through grief when you know it's going to unearth certain feelings of maybe bitterness that could keep you from properly grieving and moving forward the way God wants you to.

Nicole Langman: Yeah, we have a long history of trying to stay away from the discomfort from uncomfortable feelings. And so if I can just like especially high achievers of amongst us who are just like well I'm just going to go on with my thing I'm going to but meanwhile there's uh you know I often say like grief will follow us into our life. It will find us. It will you know will show up and there have there are hateful things that happen in our lives, right? I hate divorce. God hates divorce. I hate that that you know that there was infidelity and etc in my life.

I I hate cancer. You know there are things that we can actively say that are hateful and and um but we have to be so careful because we can't heal and hate at the same time. I can't wish ill on someone and and trust that God is going to heal me and move me into his purpose and calling in my life. So, so much of the work is around forgiveness. And I struggle with the big that big word because that is a hard one to just say out there. Have you thought about forgiveness? We struggle with that because there's been an injustice.

Something very bad has happened. It's hard to forgive when we have been so terribly wounded. But in every sense uh I really do believe that forgiveness is a gateway to healing. And so much of that work is around I don't forgive necessarily to let someone else off the hook. I forgive because I love Jesus and I know it hurts him when I don't. And I want to honor him and our relationship. So, I can forgive someone without being in buddy buddy relationship with them. The forgiveness is a way that I can do my own healing.

And that's about um that's about letting go of some of that that hateful feelings. I'll be honest, I spun in rage fantasies and and revenge fantasies, but it's hard to hold those rage and revenge fantasies and also heal and and follow Jesus into his plan and his assignment in my life. So, I had to choose. I had to choose. And that's sometimes a difficult choice when the when the world and some of the injustice can pull us back into that other piece.

Roger Marsh: Yeah, I'm I'm glad you said that, Nicole, because we we've all been there. I mean whether we want to be honest about it or not, we've all been there in terms of saying this person did me wrong and I want something to happen now. Vengeance is mine, Lord. You know just let me help you out here. And and and God doesn't work like that. But another quote from your book where you say look unforgiveness is not only a barrier to peace, it's an emotional burden that compounds grief. And I thought wow, boy that I mean grief is a heavy enough load to carry, but then when you throw unforgiveness on top of it, you might think I'm working through something here and I I just have to process this and let me be angry for a couple more years and I'll be okay.

And you're thinking and you what you're telling us is no you really have to lay that at the foot of the cross. That the only place that currency will spend. And then then you can move forward. And and and that that's got to be a huge moment of clarity and even healing for people who are processing all this.

Nicole Langman: Definitely. And I think the the thing that we that we sometimes forget is that forgiveness and healing is a process. Just like grief isn't linear and our experience with healing isn't linear. It has to be there has to be grace for ourselves around our process. There are times that we will try to maybe steal back some of the things that we have put down at the cross, right? I don't know about you, but I've kind of like inched my way trying to in like the cloak of darkness to steal some things back from the foot of the cross, right?

Like all right right. Like I think it's okay to have that honest conversation with God. This is hard to turn this over, God. I don't actually know what this looks like. Those face on the floor prayers um to him, he hears them and he wants to walk us through that. It's it's not linear. It's going to be sometimes you take something back and you're going to feel like you've gone backwards a little bit. Just continue to turning turn that over. I don't know what to do with this Lord. Here it is again. Here it is again.

Here it is again. Um it's a process and it's going to take time. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Roger Marsh: Amen to that. Uh talk to that person, Nicole, who is just now realizing I didn't realize there's been as much grief in my life as there really has been, but I want to take some practical steps to acknowledge it, to grief through it. I don't want to get stuck on God, why did you why is this happening to me? You know why why am I stuck in this pit? I want to move forward, but I don't want to blow over something that I could be missing a a lesson in. How how what are the words some first steps to take?

Nicole Langman: Um hm. It's a great question. Um the first step is just naming it, absolutely saying, okay, this is what I'm noticing in myself. This is what I'm grieving this. I 'm grieving this in my relationship. I'm grieving that this isn't the way that I wanted it to look. I'm grieving. And I would really encourage someone to even write that down. There's a lot of therapy and just cursive writing. Type it out for us, but if you could just write it out is really helpful just to revisit back to Joseph 20 years after when he sees his brothers, he goes away and he weeps.

This is an important part of the grief process. So, allow yourself the emotional outlet of weeping for what has been lost. It's okay to grief the thing you didn't choose or the story you didn't want or the sorrow that is might be lingering. Unresolved anger can turn into depression and and in marriage is the thing that I see the most and you've probably talked about this so much, Roger, in your program is that bitterness and resentment is poison in relationship.

Roger Marsh: Yes.

Nicole Langman: And so if we're not doing the healing work and and by the way, we love to find a spot to locate blame and that will end that will absolutely um impact and exacerbate the the uh the bitterness and the resentment. But but if we are not if we do the healing work, that will quiet and heal some of that bitterness and resentment because the healing work and the grief work can can take the edge off some of those other sharp age areas because unresolved grief can be sharp in our marriages. And it can show up um as we can become more irritable, combatative, uh argumentative, and um certainly unforgiving.

And so and so I think that the healing work in our marriage is really really important to address that and to do the grief work with somebody outside of your marriage is even really important.

Roger Marsh: That's very helpful. And I think too about the the situation we find ourselves in culturally right now where you have a generation of young people who are very very aware of their emotional well-being. Mental health days are very common. They really want to be healthy and they want to be good spouses and parents to their own children. And yet they're looking at what happened to them. And whereas generations past just said, well, that was my dad, that was my grandpa, that was my whatever. You just kind of you know suck it up and keep going.

The generation seems like that put more of themselves into their kids when the kids were younger are now kind of on the receiving end of, hey, you didn't do this for me and that and there's just all sorts of miscommunication going on. What do you say to the parent who is looking at their adult child who says, hey, you know what, I need a minute or a month or maybe I need a few years away from you while I'm processing stuff. And they want to try to rebuild and they realize there's some heartbreak, you know maybe somebody was what they brought into it, maybe it's the way it's being perceived, but they're maybe making things worse by trying to come chase after their adult children instead of letting them grieve what it whatever it is they're grieving.

That's a really giant question to try to answer in a couple of minutes, but what are some what are some ways that we as adults who are looking at our kids of that certain age saying I I don't know what I did wrong, but I want to try to make things right?

Nicole Langman: Yeah, you know I think the first place to start is prayer and um on your knees on your face with pastoral team. I love the idea of having a prayer team for your family. There's so much estrangement right now there are we are seeing this so much we we are an emotionally saturated generation that is uh in my opinion emotions are a terrible compass. And so there's a lot of that. And and so we see this great divide because there's a lot of knowledge without a lot of wisdom. And so we struggle with that a little bit, right?

And that knowledge without wisdom is is uh that this can be really damaging. And so what we're seeing is we're seeing a lot of this disconnect between parents and their children because there is a very huge cultural divide, obviously, but there is this kind of like emotional like you shared earlier emotional emotional management is different. I will always start with prayer. Also I would also encourage parents to respect the boundaries of your children, your adult children, and pray for them from a distance. If every once in a while you want to send them a note to not take your hands off them from a distance is okay, but I would really encourage the that the parents to allow yourself to respect the boundaries.

We want to I've often heard we're only as well as our most unwell child. And if we are in conflict or there's a disconnect, our hearts are broken, we need to be praying about it, but we also need to be praying from a distance because too much pressure on them does cause them to to kind of like maybe back off even more. So, that would be my initial depending on the situation. I don't know the situation necessarily, but to be prayerful and to have a team of people who can pray for your family. Here's the other thing.

God lives through this type of disconnection with his kids all the time. And he understands as a good parent what it feels like to have his kids turn their backs on him. He knows what it's like. And I think we can find so much comfort and compassion and just remembering that he's aligned with us and he understands what we're going through. And so reading his word, listening to his voice, being in prayer with him continually around where can I find reconciliation? What do I need to own that's mine to own? And what can I let um not be mine just because it's been placed on my shoulders?

Just cuz someone's upset at me doesn't mean I've done something wrong. So, it's uh it's something to kind of be humbly looking at our own at what we can own and then not owning what isn't ours.

Roger Marsh: Nicole Langman has been our guest today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. Her brand new book is called This Isn't the Story I Wanted. And we have a link for the book up at drjamesdobson.org. Nicole, thank you for your work that you have done, your transparency and vulnerability with dealing with the grief that you have experienced, but I think you're going to help a lot of people uh whether they are dealing with uh the life that didn't turn out the way they wanted to or just plans, hopes, goals, expectations, whatever they are um that are legitimate sources of grief.

And uh we appreciate you giving us a primer for dealing with that. Thanks so much for being with us today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.

Nicole Langman: Thank you so much, Roger. What a treat.

Roger Marsh: You know grief doesn't always follow a funeral. Sometimes we grieve a relationship or a broken dream, simply the life that we thought we would have. And as Nicole Langman has reminded us today here on Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, acknowledging that loss can be an important step toward healing. By the way, Nicole's new book is called This Isn't the Story I Wanted. And you can find that along with today's conversation at drjamesdobson.org. If it's easier, just go to jdfi.org. Those links are one and the same. Also an announcement here about a special opportunity for you if you're a pastor, a church staff member, or lay leader and how you can help bring the chosen to your church absolutely free.

Season 6 episode 1 will soon be streaming on Prime Video, but you can bring it to your congregation prior to that release date at no cost to your church. To learn how, go to drjamesdobson.org, look for the link for the chosen, and click onto it right there. That's drjamesdobson.org and look for the chosen link. The ministry of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute is made possible through the generous support of friends like you who believe in the mission of the JDFI. Every day we work to strengthen marriages, to equip parents, and to point families to the hope that's only found in Jesus Christ.

And your gift of any amount helps us to keep that message on the air and within reach of families who need it most. To make a secure donation, visit our website at drjamesdobson.org or write to us. Our ministry mailing address is the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, PO Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado, the zip code 80949. I'm Roger Marsh. Be sure to tune in again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.