Well hello there and welcome to this episode of The Terri Cole Show that I wanna start
with a question. How do you feel if they discontinue your favorite shampoo or your breakfast cereal?
Or if you work out at a gym and you go to classes and you walk in and someone is standing
in your spot, so to speak. How do you feel? How do you feel about change? Because that
is what I am covering in this episode. Does it make you anxious? Does it make you nervous?
Does it make you uncomfortable? I'm gonna be walking you through how to navigate change
and growth because even positive change, as human beings, creates anxiety for us. Even
the most exciting things in the world, from getting married to buying a home, are anxiety
provoking because they create change in our lives. That even if it's change we want, we
need to sort of mourn the loss of the way life was.
So that's all the things that we're gonna be covering in today's episode. But before
we get into it, if you happen to be new to my YouTube channel, well hello and welcome.
I'm so happy that you are here. So please introduce yourself in the comments cuz we
are friendly. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon so that you get notified
every time I roll out something new, which is every Tuesday and every Thursday. And I
wouldn't want you to miss a thing. So if you don't know me cuz you are new here, my name
is Terri Cole. I'm a licensed psychotherapist, I'm a relationship expert and the author of
Boundary Boss, which you can get at boundarybossbook.com. I love to highlight your questions and your
comments. You guys know I read everything that comes into this YouTube channel cuz I'm
crazy like that. So I wanna say thank you and I want to today shine a light on a comment
from Birdie under the episode called Don't Get Sucked into Conflict.
11 Tips to Handle Difficult People. Birdie says, "Another great video, Terri, thank you.
With the help of your book and videos, I've really set up and upheld my boundaries this
year. It's been so hard to do as I'm a people pleaser and a highly sensitive person, but
I finally realized their issues and misery are not mine to take on, fix, change, etcetera.
I no longer care if they are pissed off at me for setting a boundary, they'll get over
it." Well, isn't that accurate, Birdie? So thank you for taking the time to write a note
because I read 'em all and I really do appreciate you guys being here cuz if it wasn't for you,
there would be no YouTube channel here with me sitting in the middle of it. So thank you,
thank you, thank you. All right, let's move on to today's content.
Part of what inspired me to do this episode is that in my new community right now, we're
calling it TC's VIPs, I have a new, very reasonably priced community where I go live and do a
live Q&A call once a month. And there's a bunch of other benefits that you get for being
in the community, but it's really for people who love the YouTube channel. For people who
love the podcast. If you're interested in checking it out, go to terricole.com/vip to
get all the details. But in the meantime, one of the benefits of being in the community
is that I listen to what it is you have to say about what it is you want to learn. So
someone from the community was generous enough to share the story that she found herself
in a sea of change, which shifted her perception so deeply that almost everything in her life
changed.
So she's happy for the change, it's a positive change. But basically was asking if I could
help her or do an episode on navigating change, like what do we need to do to healthily navigate
change? So that is what we're talking about, which is basically the grief and growth of
navigating change, right? Because what does it really mean to change? It means that something
was one way and now it's going to be different. And we are going through this all throughout
our lives, you guys, right? The life cycles, we call them. Everything changes. As my teacher
and my friend and my soul brother davidji would say, the only thing we can ever count
on is that everything is gonna change because this is life. So from growing up,
things change, from leaving our family homes to being independent, to then potentially
partnering if that's something that you do, to potentially having kids of your own, to
getting into middle age, to getting old and then passing.
I mean, this is the lifecycle, not to be depressing. And it's not depressing. This is what it is,
though. And so when we are really attached to things staying the same, change can be
extremely threatening and really painful. And I feel like part of this story is that
we have to learn how to honor change. And there are many things that happen, not just
the life cycle, of course, of changes. So if I were to say a big change in my life that
happened was after I was diagnosed with cancer, when I was in my early thirties, which was
long ago. But there was a change. My self perception changed from having that experience.
I felt betrayed by my own body. I was a vegetarian. I was very healthy at least, so I thought.
I worked out all the time.
I just couldn't believe it. I was like, what? You've gotta be kidding me. This is like a
cosmic joke that I would get cancer. And it's so , you know, youth is wasted on the
young people cuz it's so sort of funny, not funny, "ha ha." But it never entered my mind
because I was always young and healthy, that anything would happen to me that would make
me not young and healthy . So anyway, after having a cancer experience, I needed
to mourn the loss of my innocence, the loss of my ignorance to a degree of like, never
thinking that it could happen to me. So I did, I had to mourn the way that I felt where
I almost felt invincible before. And now suddenly the truth comes in. And of course none of
us are impervious to anything in life, right?
Anything can happen to any of us. That's the reality of life. It is so uncertain so much
of the time. And I think that it's almost like we have this illusion, that if we can
control things and not let them change, that we'll be safe from those changes. So for me,
when I went through the process, and I was in therapy of course talking about it, but
when I went through the process of dealing with the fact that I did get sick and thank
God I did get better, but these are still traumatizing experiences. You know, I had
the regular trauma response to being diagnosed with cancer and then I had it sort of mismanaged.
So I sort of had a double whammy of having to mourn because after being diagnosed with
cancer on one side of my thyroid, I had a whole long story.
I've told it once or twice before. I don't feel like telling it now and I'm not going
to cuz we don't have enough time. But I ended up having a gut instinct that something was
wrong with the other side of my thyroid. And so I had to really fight to get that looked
at. I left the surgeon who did the initial surgery because he was so condescending and
such a jerk, and so didn't believe me. He didn't care how I felt, like what my intuition
was saying. So I just basically surgeon-shopped until I found a surgeon who did care about
my intuition. And thank god I followed it because after the second surgery, what was
discovered was a completely different kind of cancer on the other side, which was more
dangerous, could move to lungs and bones. Thank God all of that did not happen. But
there was a lot that I needed to mourn in those changes because it didn't just change
my relationship to my health and to my body. It changed
the way I related to the medical community because I realized that I used to have a very
sort of young attitude or maybe like a, almost like a child's attitude where I was like,
well, they're the doctor or they're the surgeon so they know better than me. And it made me
feel sort of taken care of. And yet what I realized in my experience was that my gut
instinct was just as important as their medical training. And that I would never again, and
I never have since, stayed with a doctor who I felt like didn't give a s**t about what
I thought and how I felt, the same way I wouldn't be in a relationship with anyone who didn't
give a s**t about what I thought and what I felt. That's the same exact standard I now
have for the medical community. But again, that change, of course there was growth, of
course something positive came out of those experiences for me where I valued life in
a completely different way.
I mean it was like the biggest wake up call of my life. So as one of my besties, Kris
Carr would say, I won't call cancer a gift cuz I certainly wouldn't wanna give it to
you, but I wouldn't undo it, right? Because it changed the trajectory of my life. But
that growth process required me to grieve, required me to be sad about what I was not
going to experience again, which is just sort of the youthful ignorance, I guess the assumption
that I would always be healthy, that nothing would ever happen to me. And so in the guide,
you can get it at terricole.com/guide, I'm gonna give you some questions to help you
grieve any losses you've experienced. Because here's the thing with change, it's not just
losses, but when things change, we are losing things even though we're gaining things, right?
I gained knowledge about myself, I gained an ability to have way better boundaries with
the medical world, with doctors, with surgeons, with whomever. So of course there's something
to gain. But before I could embrace what that was, I needed to also acknowledge and handle
and process the loss. So grief is really important because the changes that happen in our lives
impact our identity, the way we see ourselves, the way we interact in the world. So that's
important. Of course there are benefits of change and transformation, right? This impacts
our relationships, our mental wellness, how we work, how we walk through the world as
we transform. And so many of you I know are on a transformative path, or you most likely
wouldn't be listening to this podcast or watching this on YouTube right now. So know that this
process of grief and growth, these are intertwined in a way that every next level of your transformation,
there will always be something to grieve.
Because part of it is we are grieving our old selves, we are grieving what we're leaving
behind. And sometimes we're grieving stages of life when our kids are not toddlers anymore.
When kids start going to school, there's grief in that transformation process that needs
to be honored. It doesn't mean we want a kid to stay a three-year-old forever. It just
means that we've loved that phase of development. And anyone who's raised children, you know,
the time goes fast. You know those are beautiful moments in time that, when you're in 'em,
sometimes they can seem like forever. But when you look back, anyone who's raised children
to adulthood, it seems like it went real fast. You know? And it's both, right? It can be
hell when you're trying to potty train a kid, , it feels like it's never gonna happen,
and then they're 18 and graduating high school or going into college or graduating college
and you're like, oh my gosh, how did we get here?
So it's important that we stay mindful and awake in these transformations and that we
honor the grief. So what are we grieving? We're grieving old identities. We're grieving
relationships, we're grieving a moment in time and yet, that is a part of our transformation.
And even when things are what you want them to be... When I fell in love with my husband,
cuz I was always kind of a girl who never thought I'd wanna get married, I didn't wanna
get married in reality because it really seemed to me like, I guess from my parents' story,
right? My parents were high school sweethearts. My father went on to a full ride for a basketball
scholarship, went to Union. My mother worked at the GE factory for two years to save money
cuz both of my parents grew up very poor.
And she gets to school like so exciting. She finally saved the money to go. And she ends
up getting pregnant over Thanksgiving break. And my parents get married in the back office
of the Methodist church in like Glens Falls, New York, over winter break. My mother permanently
quit college. And so for me, you know, there was an unconscious or conscious association,
both, of marriage being the death of my mother's dreams. So that didn't sound great to me,
right? Like I was like, who needs to do that? And my mother's covert and overt message to
me was "get an education girl, make your own money so that maybe one day love could be
a choice and not a need." Cuz my parents got married in the late fifties where, you know,
being an unwed mother was like super bad at that point, which seems so crazy now, right?
With the way that it is. But that was like a social norm, not to mention there was not
abortion. So there you go. That happened. Longest way around the barn you guys, sorry,
that was a long, convoluted story to get to the fact that when Vic and I fell in love
- and I didn't get married until I was like 34 or 35 - I was in my thirties and he's 10
years older than me. So he was in his forties. And so as much as I was so happy, I couldn't
even believe that there was a person who could be my person. And that I found that person.
And Vic had three teenage boys and I was like, yay. My found family. It all worked out for
everybody. But in therapy, I remember going through this process of being sad that he'd
done all these things in life without me that I didn't do.
He'd been married twice, I'd never been married before. He had biological kids. I didn't do
that. It was like all of these different things. And my therapist very astutely was like, "Ter,
you need to mourn the way you thought this was gonna happen for you." And she's like,
"what did you think?" And I was like, "I don't know. I mean, I thought I'd marry someone
the same age as me, maybe have a kid." I mean, it wasn't my identity in the way of biologically
feeling compelled. I mean, these kids now, my found family, are my kids, and I've got
seven grandkids. I mean, so I don't feel like I've lost anything in that way. But I needed
to mourn, you know, according to Bev (therapist), the way that I thought it was gonna be so
that I could be fully present to embrace the wonderful way that it was.
And at first I felt guilty. I was like, what do you want? Like what do you need to be happy,
Terri? Like, do you need everything? Like you found this amazing guy that you wanna
spend the rest of your life with. Like, isn't that enough? And my therapist helped me see
that mourning the way that I thought it would be was not me being ungrateful about what
I had found and about Vic and the boys. That it was a natural part of transformation. So
grieving and growth go together. And I needed to grieve to not just accept the way it was,
right? Grieving that I was never gonna have Vic in his twenties or his thirties. That
was something to grieve, you know, I wanted more, longer life with him. Although it's
been 25 years and it's amazing and we're both perfectly fine.
But the process of grieving is so powerful and it puts us in a position to be more accepting
that of the changes in life and that this is a natural part of life. And that mourning
things doesn't mean you are ungrateful, it means you're processing, right? And this helps
us also learn to embrace like the new identity, the new change, you at the next level, and
to embrace what opportunities that brings. So dealing with change, dealing with growth
is a really important skill. And I've given you a bunch of ideas in the guide. So you
can get that at terricole.com/guide. But I'm curious to know, what is your relationship
with change and transformation? Are you good with it? Is it very difficult for you? And
let me know if this episode was helpful. I really hope that it was. I would love to hear
from you. If you think this episode is something that can help someone else, please share it
with the people in your life. I hope you have an amazing week and as always, take care of
you.