Jeanne talks about her recent devastating house fire and how this shifted her view on gratitude. As a proponent of practicing gratitude she was surprised by her new epiphanies that are not within the norm of the usual conversation around it.
Jeanne talks about her recent devastating house fire and how this shifted her view on gratitude. As a proponent of practicing gratitude she was surprised by her new epiphanies that are not within the norm of the usual conversation around it.
Key Moments:
00:00 Introduction
02:30 What happened on the day of the fire? What caused it?
09:24 The aftermath and assessing the damage.
10:28 On NOT feeling grateful.
11:24 How society has taught us how to offer support and skim over harsh emotions.
12:15 Keeping gratitude in your heart but focus on feeling your feelings.
15:14 Why frustration and feeling anger makes gratitude so much sweeter.
17:30 Conclusion
Dr. Jeanne Retief Links
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00:00:00.170] - Jeanne
Good morning, FIGGI goddess, and welcome to another episode of the My FIGGI Life podcast. Today I'm talking about the day my house burned. Yes, you heard that correctly. And the revelations I had about gratitude following that episode, and it's not what you think. It's not the usual narrative. Actually, it surprised me a lot as well, because I'm a big proponent of practicing gratitude. I have a gratitude journal that I write in every morning. I didn't react or have these revelations about gratitude that I would have thought I had. So if you want to know more about this experience and what it taught me about gratitude, stay tuned.
[00:00:44.670] - Intro
Welcome, goddess, to your sacred space. This is My FIGGI Life podcast, where we openly discuss life's wins and losses on our journeys to self discovery. This is your best life. This is your FIGGI life. And now here is your host, Jeanne.
[00:01:03.910] - Jeanne
Talking about something as traumatizing as seeing your house on fire. You would think if I connected that somehow to gratitude, you would expect this episode to be about celebrating all the small things in your life, cultivating gratitude in your heart, and just basically practicing gratitude during tough times. But major spoiler alert, this is not what I recognized and realized in that day. In fact, it actually changed my entire viewpoint about how we interact with each other as a society and how our code is written to support each other. And this is really from beautiful, amazing people that are coming from a beautiful, amazing place. It's just that the narrative that we hear these days and that we are surrounded with it's so much focus on positivity, on mindfulness, on gratitude. And I think, and I fear that sometimes we are losing the reality of what it means to be alive and what it means to live. Life is not just about all the beautiful things, tough things happen in life. And whether you only choose to see the positive, whether you choose to see the good and the bad, or only the bad, you're still going to go through all of these experiences.
[00:02:29.400] - Jeanne
So let me take you through what happened. Right, so it was really an unassuming Monday afternoon. It was two days before my family in law were said to arrive in Portugal to spend two weeks here on holiday. And we were in a mad scurry to just get everything really nice and situated for them. Cleaning out the guest rooms and making sure all the linen is clean and the house is clean and the car is washed and all of these things that you just kind of want to have in place when loved ones come to visit. And we really want to make this a beautiful experience for them because it was some of their first time in Portugal, and we wanted it to be this wonderful, relaxing, beautiful time. So on this unassuming Monday, I was sitting in my office. I had done everything I usually did. I had my host of morning meetings. My husband was in his office with his assistant, and they had their host of morning meetings, and they were on their way to go and get some supplies for the guests that were coming. And I had just left the house because I just had lunch.
[00:03:38.800] - Jeanne
Everything was fine inside the house. I was literally in the room adjacent to where the fire broke out, literally minutes before I had my lunch. I cleaned up after myself, and I went back to my office, and it probably was maybe ten minutes, maybe ten minutes after I had left and settled myself in my office. And I just heard this kind of slamming noise on the walkway towards my office. And at first I thought it was just the dogs chasing something. And then I realized, oh, no, I think something is wrong. I think somebody is literally running towards me. And as I looked up, I saw my husband, and he just kind of slammed open my office door, and I didn't recognize him. He was completely black from head to toe. From the suit of the fire, I could only see his eyes, the whites of his eyes. He's a super DIY person. So my initial thought was he was working somewhere in the garden or under the car or whatever, and something broke or fell on him, and we need to get to an emergency room. I could tell he was just kind of in a state of disbelief and shock, and he was just like, the house is on fire.
[00:04:53.920] - Jeanne
I'm like what? And it just took me, it felt like, forever to process that. But it was probably a few split seconds. The house is on fire. And then kind of my brain started putting all of these puzzles together. That is why he's all black. He's been inside with the fire. And then I think maybe it was just my response to the shock. It settles in. Oh, okay, it can't be that bad because he's here, and he's telling me that this happened, so everything is probably okay. And then your mind goes into wake up mode, like, no, this is not okay. Look what he looks like. Get up.
[00:05:28.950] - Intro
Go. Move.
[00:05:29.660] - Jeanne
Move. And as I was walking towards the house, I just saw the people that were at our house that day. Everybody was standing outside of the house, and there were these thick, thick black clouds just oozing from every window and every door of the house. And what had happened was one of these standing air conditioners that you put in your home, you know, the ones that you can put ice in the back to cool the water, and then it blows out cold air. It underwent an electrical fault, and it caught fire. And just to explain to you how quickly this happened, as I said, I was having lunch in the room adjacent to where the fire broke out. Nothing was wrong when I was having lunch. So literally, from the time that I had left the kitchen and it took me to walk maybe to my office, that electrical fault occurred. It started a fire. And within ten minutes, that entire part of the house was completely engulfed in smoke and suit in flames. That's how quickly it happened. My husband realized this because they were walking past the house to the car. I mean, if they had left literally three minutes earlier, the entire house would have completely burned down.
[00:06:36.820] - Jeanne
And they were walking to the car and he noticed that everything in the house was black, like dark. And when he looked around, he saw smoke coming from the house. And his first thought was, who would have lit the fireplace in the middle of summer? And then something in him just said, oh, no, something is really, really wrong here. Bravely, or maybe stupidly. So he just went into complete crisis gear and he stormed into the house. He couldn't see anything in front of him. The smoke and the flames were already that bad. Most of the hair on his arms, his eyebrows were burnt by the fire. He had gotten a fire extinguisher and he managed to put the fire out. But by the time he had put the fire out and just to let you know, if you're wondering why, was our first thought not to call the fire department. We live in an extremely, extremely rural, small, small country village. The time it would have took to phone them and for them to get here and to find our property, we would have lost everything. He went in, he had put the fire out.
[00:07:43.000] - Jeanne
As I said, this standing air conditioner, which is made up of a lot of plastic, and as it exploded and made the fire, all of the suit and the black stuff from the fire was this oily, grimy plasticky gunk. The entire floor beneath it was ruined. The ceilings were ruined. We have these beautiful, beautiful wood paneled ceilings, absolutely ruined the wood frames on our walls, completely ruined. The couches, the furniture, the walls. I don't think I realized how bad it was because I think my mind was just saying, no, this cannot be true. And when I walked into the house and I saw it, we had to wait probably 40 minutes before we could enter the house because the smoke and the suit and everything, it was so thick, you could not possibly enter. My husband had bad smoke inhalation and during his stupendous move to go into the house and stole the fire, he found his way in the darkness in this smoke and suit and closed the door to the rest of our house where all of our bedrooms were. So that part of the house was somewhat saved. But the front part of the house was in complete chaos.
[00:08:59.460] - Jeanne
Everything was black, everything. The entire kitchen like I said, the walls, the couches, the TV, everything that you can possibly imagine. I've never in my life seen so much ash and suit and smoke. Our kitchen is white. The cupboards were black. Everything inside of the cupboards of the kitchen, it wasn't even in the kitchen was black. All the glasses, all the plates, all the everything was just this kind of sea of black. Later on, when we went to discover the rest of the house where he had managed to close the door, everything had this thick layer of black suit, all of the bedding, all of my little girl's toys in her room, all the bathrooms, the walls in the bathrooms, the ceilings. Everything in this house was completely black except for the mess of this damage in the rest of the house. It was okay. The front of the house though, I mean, it was a two week process to try and get the house back together. We had to have industrial cleaning crews come in to scrub the walls and the ceiling to try and get the suit off because they couldn't paint before we did that.
[00:10:08.840] - Jeanne
Door frames had to be removed, tiles had to be taken out. The damage was really incredibly extensive. But again, I think the absolute kind of devastation of the situation only hit me when I could enter like I said, when I could enter the house and see that most of the front part of our house was ruined. And I have to tell you, in that moment I did not feel a whole lot of gratitude. Did I have a lot to be grateful for? Yes, absolutely. Somehow my husband managed to put the fire out and stay alive. The rest of the house was reasonably unscathed. We noticed it soon enough to stop it from spreading further and burning down the entire house. And yes, we could have lost everything. All of this was going through my mind and being mirrored back to me through well meaning comments and supportive messages. So what am I saying here? Am I mad at the type of support that was verbalized to us? Am I upset that I could not find gratitude in that moment? Am I confused about the myriad of emotions running havoc in my mind thinking about it?
[00:11:17.680] - Jeanne
None of the above, actually. The supportive messages we received were such a comfort from magnificent human beings. What made me pause though and think was how we have been schooled to give support. Society teaches us that support is pointing out the good things, enforcing the positive and reiterating the lucky or the eternal happy place. We are no longer comfortable working through and dealing with raw and harsh emotions when we see something upsetting or uncomfortable or sad or horrible, how we're trained to deal with that is, okay, look at the positive or say, at least you have this, or you're lucky this didn't happen. Just avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid. Don't go into it. Don't acknowledge the depth of that emotion. Don't acknowledge the depth of that pain. Don't acknowledge how bad that must feel in that moment, because that's not in. Quote. Mark Supportive. And I had an epiphany through this experience which I understand may still be proven wrong. Although I need to cultivate gratitude and keep a conscious place and space for it in my soul, I just can't always look for it in every situation as long as I know it's there, it's part of my life, and it's a permanent companion in my mind.
[00:12:37.010] - Jeanne
Am I not also allowed and encouraged to feel my feelings? In this case, it was feelings of devastation, hurt, heartache, sadness, frustration. And why did this happen to me in that moment? What could I have done differently to avoid this? I was so busy trying to follow the advice of well wishers and calling on my beliefs of gratitude that I didn't allow the darker feelings to bubble up and flow through my body. Days after the fire and countless hours of scrubbing walls, again, like we've been trained to do, see the positive in it, recognize what we can be grateful for, and then immediately jump into the fix.
[00:13:17.870] - Intro
Fix.
[00:13:18.300] - Jeanne
Survive, survive, survive. Let's get to the other side of it. Okay, what do we need? Phone the insurance. Get the industrial cleaning crew, get out your old clothes, start scrubbing walls. Just go. Go. And days after this and these countless hours of scrubbing walls and throwing away precious, precious keepsakes and dealing with insurance quotes, it all caught up to me. And what caught up with me was this still sucks. Yes, I understand the worst didn't happen. But in that moment, it did feel to me like the worst did happen. I felt drained and completely undeserving of such a mess and so unprepared to deal with this kind of destruction. It was only when I fell into bed exhausted and crying that I kind of started to see the light again. When I acknowledged how bad this felt to me, how angry I was, how frustrated I felt, how sad I felt to lose these things that I can't replace, photos that I don't have copies of, I realized that when dramatic things happen in my life, it's naturally accompanied by less than magical feelings. And keeping this all in and denying that I feel this way all in the name of celebrating gratitude and positive energy folds up my proverbial cup with the wrong things.
[00:14:46.890] - Jeanne
If I wanted to make sure I could feel the gratitude, I needed to make space for it. And the only way that worked for me was to feel these feelings so I could pass them through my soul and my system and extinguish them. And only after that I could focus on the gratitude that's always a part of my heart that's always within me. I'm more than just grateful or sad or happy or forever positive at any given moment. I'm just human. And is it not true and is it not possible that I am therefore meant to feel all the feelings? The good ones are so much sweeter and so much more impactful when I understand the bad and the frustration and the heartache and the devastation that came along with it. I had just such an immense degree of frustration in this moment because I just could not comprehend to myself, how can it not be possible that a good way to support somebody in pain could also be, oh, my goodness, I cannot possibly understand what you may be going through right now. Or maybe I can. Maybe you've gone through the same. How can I help you?
[00:15:54.850] - Jeanne
How can I support you? What do you need from me? Can I help you feel your feelings? Can I listen to you while you vent your frustration without reminding you of all the ways that you are feeling this the wrong way? By not being positive, by not celebrating the gratitude in that moment? Now that I've been here for you through that, let's look at what you have to be thankful for, and then it's just so much more profound. I may be completely missing the point here, but if you follow the FIGGI Life, you know how I feel about this myriad of self help advice and how destructive it's been. Yes, helpful, but also destructive. It's been in my healing journey from my past traumas, my panic disorder diagnosis, and now in normal life events. Maybe you have completely different thoughts than I do in this, and I'd love to hear them. What's your take on gratitude? And do you think we should always go back to our blessings despite the circumstances around us? Because to me, it feels like we are so focused on ignoring the circumstances so that we can focus on the gratitude instead of feeling, owning, being the circumstance, so that we may see and understand and truly empower and embrace the gratitude.
[00:17:28.690] - Jeanne
I would love to know your feelings about this. Reach out to me at www.figgilife.com. Comment on the blogs, send me a message. Follow me on instagram jeanne_figilife. Let me know what you feel. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, everyone deserves to celebrate the Goddess within.