Intro: 0:12

Hello and welcome to The Broken Pack, a podcast focused on giving sibling loss survivors a platform to share their stories and to be heard, something that many sibling loss survivors state that they never have had. Sibling loss is misunderstood. The Broken Pack exists to change that and to support survivors. I'm your host, Dr. Angela Dean. In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Ken Doka, who coined the term disenfranchised grief, and whose work has explored a deep understanding of coping with our losses. We talk about why sibling grief and the sibling bond is so often misunderstood, his own experience of sibling loss, and what it means to carry that loss across a lifetime. Take a listen.

Dr. Angela Dean: 1:03

Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview, Dr. Doka. I've been looking forward to this for a while, probably since I first met you at ADEC. It was 2023, and I naively looked at your disenfranchised grief book. I walked up to you at the conference and asked you where the siblings were in the book, which I apologize. I've learned a lot since then, but thank you. You were very gracious and kind in your response. But for our listeners who don't know you and don't know your work, what would you want to say about yourself?

Dr. Ken Doka: 1:37

Okay. Well, I'm Senior Vice President for Grief Programs at the Hospice Foundation of America and really have been studying grief for over 50 years. I got into it quite by accident. I was supposed to be working with juvenile delinquents. And at the last moment, my intern supervisor switched jobs and ended up working with children who were dying of cancer. So I dealt a lot with siblings who had lost somebody.

Dr. Angela Dean: 2:01

Thank you for that. My origin story is also that I worked in psychosocial oncology prior to doing more intentional death grief loss. A lot of our listeners are familiar with the term disenfranchised grief. I also know that a lot of them have latched onto that idea of forgotten mourner. I'm curious what you think of that term because in my opinion, it kind of misses part of what you've written about because you can't be forgotten if you're not acknowledged.

Dr. Ken Doka: 2:29

Forgotten mourner or disenfranchised?

Dr. Angela Dean: 2:30

Forgotten Mourner.

Dr. Ken Doka: 2:31

Okay. Because I think it also depends on where in the life cycle it comes. I think we are very sensitive when a seven-year-old loses his nine-year-old sister. I don't think we are quite as sensitive when a 77-year-old guy loses his 79-year-old sister. The attention focuses elsewhere. And yet the sibling relationship, when you think about it, is one of the most important relationships in a person's life. I'm 78 years old. I've known my sister, who's still living for all 78 of those years. She's known for all of eight of her 84 years. For most people, the sibling relationship is the longest continuous relationship they have in their life. She's outlived my parents. She's outlived my partner. So, again, it's a relationship that's long-lasting. It's a family relationship, but it doesn't tend to have the hierarchy of most family relationships, you know, where we wrestle with our siblings sometimes, both psychologically and physically, where we don't with our parents to the same degree. And it's part of our identity. Part of who I am is Dodd and Frankie's kid brother. That influenced my development, influenced my growing up. So the sibling relationship is a profoundly important relationship, and yet we often ignore it in adulthood as to its importance.

Dr. Angela Dean: 3:49

I wholeheartedly agree with that. And I think I've often said on this podcast and other work that I do, that, Sibling loss is often misunderstood because we don't understand the sibling relationship. Yeah, so thank you for that.

Dr. Ken Doka: 4:08

There's a model. It's not my model. I don't want to take credit for it. And I just can't remember it right now as to who wrote about it. But basically what the author said is look at sibling relationships along two dimensions. One dimension is what we might call the emotional tone of the relationship. And that can go from extremely warm to hostile. And the other is kind of a social dimension, how often you interact. Name came to me. Rosen talked about that. So, for instance, you can have two siblings who are what I would call battling each other constantly. When my godson was younger, he used to have two friends who lived closer to me that whenever he visited with me, he would play with. They had two years difference between them, and he was right in the middle of them in terms of age. So one was a year older, one was a year younger. and the rule of the parents was that one would sleep over at a time because, as she said, I like you too much to have you have two of them. And the kids basically would battle all the time. So you have that very close, physically close, but hostile relationship. And then on the other hand, you have a warm but distant relationship. So this would be kind of the relationship I had with my brother. My brother was 13 years older than me. By the time I was three years old, he was already in the Navy. He just joined the Navy. So I really, you know, didn't have much interaction with him growing up. As adults, we got along, we liked each other, but we never really were particularly close to each other. You know, it was always kind of an enjoyment of family meetings to be together, but there wasn't a strong relationship. And then on the other hand, you can have relationships that are distant and warm, as we said, you know, like my brother, or distant and hostile, you know, two siblings who haven't spoken to each other in years.

Dr. Angela Dean: 5:47

Right.

Dr. Ken Doka: 5:48

So you can have all combinations. If you look at these two dimensions sort of crossing each other, you can sort of figure out the space you're in.

Dr. Angela Dean: 5:55

Mm-hmm. I like that. I think, and I've been doing some training with Bob Niemeyer and mentoring by him, and I know he talks a lot about the unfinished business. And I think, especially in this sibling relationship, when you have those hostile and distant or strange relationships, it's really hard because if you lose them too early, you haven't had that whole lifetime to kind of navigate how siblings normally do. It's also, I'm going to play a clip of this interview for my mother, who was an only child, but at my brother's funeral, when I joked, I said, he was my first friend and my first enemy, and she was like, aghast. Like, I would say that my brother was my first enemy, but she didn't have a sibling, so she couldn't really understand that. Yeah, so thank you for that, Rosen's work. That sibling relationship, I mean, all relationships are complicated, right?

Dr. Ken Doka: 6:48

Some are more complicated than others and no not well some relationships are fairly unambivalent and and close and you know yeah they run the gamut.

Dr. Angela Dean: 6:59

Yeah but we can't put them neatly in boxes is i guess what i meant.

Dr. Ken Doka: 7:02

Yeah no yeah and as i said when i always used to tell my classes when i taught you know models are useful insofar as they are useful right so you don't force models on people But, you know, this is maybe a way to understand your relationship. This is maybe to understand some of the issues. So they're helpful when they're helpful, is what I'm trying to say. You know, when I used to teach my classes in counseling, including family counseling, I always used to talk about what I call the chicken George rule. You always go into battle with a plan. And if the plan doesn't work, get a new plan.

Dr. Angela Dean: 7:35

Yeah.

Dr. Ken Doka: 7:36

And it's the same way with models in psychology and family therapy. They give us some direction. They give us some insight. And if they don't work, let's look at what other models can offer us.

Dr. Angela Dean: 7:47

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's so true. I teach a grief counseling class and I have a lot of practicum students that come through my practice and I hate the question of, what's your theoretical orientation? At this point, I don't know. I would have to say it's integrative because I do what works. So along the lines of models i know you just said they're models that they're only good as good as they, can be from what i've gathered from all of the people i've talked to in the sibling loss realm whether they've been bereaved siblings or other professional individuals as well there's a lot of, expectation especially when parents are still living, that we as bereaved siblings are to take care of our parents, right? There's this assumed hierarchy in grief that the parent loss is worse. And I like to say it's not worse. It's just different.

Dr. Ken Doka: 8:41

Different, yeah.

Dr. Angela Dean: 8:43

Yeah. But I'm curious what you think about this. When someone may be an intuitive griever, But they're being told, take care of your parent and do all of these more instrumental tasks in grieving. The grief can become, as you've called it, dissonant, right? Like I am being forced into grieving in a way that I don't want to. And I think it also crosses over into disenfranchisement of the loss. And I'm curious what you would have to say about all of that.

Dr. Ken Doka: 9:14

I'm not sure if all your listeners understand these concepts, but this is some of the work that I did with Dr. Terry Martin, now deceased. but a wonderful friend and great colleague throughout many, many, many years, almost probably 50. One of the things that Terry and I were talking about was we started talking about how men grieve. Well, let me give you the story. So much of the literature says the only way to deal with grief is to go through the pain of grief. You have to process your emotions and stuff in that line. And we thought about that and we said, well, maybe men process it differently. Maybe men have a more active style of grieving. They grieve less by emoting and more by doing. Terry presented a case, as we did this presentation at ADEC many, many years ago, it was called Take It Like a Man, Male Styles of Grieving. And we talked about the fact, for instance, he told a case anecdote from his case where a man's daughter had died and she had died in a car crash. And in that car crash, she had slid into a neighbor's picket fence and broke the fence. Literally the day they committed her to the ground, the last day of the funeral, he was out there fixing the fence. And the woman came out and said to him, John, you don't have to worry about this. Don't worry. We'll take care of it. You don't have to do this. And he said, no, I really need to do it. He said, it's the only part of the accident I could fix. And I needed to fix it. Couldn't fix the car. Couldn't fix my daughter. I could fix the fence. So the first person who raised her hand, and remember, we're going against, in those days, conventional wisdom. This model was not, we didn't even have a model, really. We were just talking about how men grieve. And the first woman who raised her hand, and we thought we were going to get really, it was going to be a contentious section, was a woman by the name of Jane Nichols. Jane Nichols was also a good colleague of ours and a woman who was highly involved in perinatal loss. Actually, one of the people who enfranchised perinatal loss in American culture. She was really one of the pioneers. And she had come from her own experience where she had had a couple of miscarriages and stillbirths before she had her own child successfully. Jane stood up and I thought, well, this is nice. At least the first brick is going to be thrown by somebody we like and respect. And I got to give you a little history of Jane. Now, remember, Jane had a miscarriage in the early 60s, a series of them in the early 60s, going to around 70. And basically, the physician said that the child was stillborn. And he said, but you're young and healthy. There's no reason you can't have another child. And that was the extent of grief counseling and support. Now, Jane was also at that time the wife of a funeral director. And she said, I want the remains. I want to have a ritual. And the physician was aghast and said, we already discarded the medical waste, it's her baby her stillborn baby yeah. And so he couldn't give her that, but he did give her a psychiatric consult because he thought that was such a weird request. And Jane's way of handling it was, now remember, Jane had graduated from college in humanities. She, you know, had no special notion of behavioral science or anything of that nature. And so she said, well, wait a minute, I wonder if other women feel this way or if I'm really, you know, because I want to grieve and because I want to, if there's something wrong with me. So she self-educated herself to do research. She had never taken a research course. And she said, if I'm going to do research, it has to be done well because I have to go to physicians and I have to get this article printed in a medical journal where that's of some standing to them. And she did. And I forget which journal it was, JAMA or the New England Journal, but one of the prominent journals in the medical field. She did the research and she did it well. She went back to the hospital and said, here's research that you don't do this correctly. And she said, the first thing you need to do is to hire me to support your parents and train your nurses. And much to the credit of Children's Hospital in Akron, Ohio, they did. And later, Jane became head of a whole new division called Bereavement Services because people in other sections of the hospital said, you know, why did perinatal get that and we don't? You know, why do they have bereavement support and we don't? So anyway, so Jane stands up and says, for the first time at this conference ever, I've heard somebody describe my style of grieving. So we said, well, we can't talk about this as male grief anymore. So then we tried masculine, feminine, and that got crazy. And so we just decided, let's make it totally gender neutral. Now, we do think men are more likely, at least in the United States culture and Western culture, more likely to be on the instrumental side, but you'll find people on both sides. And so just to very succinctly put it, you have people who have a more blended style, look at it as a continuum, kind of maybe a normal curve kind of continuum. And then people on the extreme side of instrumental, when you ask them about their grief, they're going to talk about, often to describe it in physical or cognitive terms. I felt like somebody punched me in the stomach. And when you say what helped, they're going to say, I needed to do things. I needed to build that fence. And when you ask how did grief express, they often said, you know, I told a lot of stories about my daughter or my sibling. On the other end are intuitive grievers, and they have a very feeling style. You ask them how to grieve, they'll talk about waves of emotions. I felt anger. I felt sadness. I felt a tremendous sense of loneliness. I was overwhelmed by guilt. And you say, how was it expressed? And it's often, I cried, I screamed, I yelled. And what helped was often going to some kind of support group and process it. And then, of course, dissonant grievers are grievers who are really the intuitive griever who's kind of forced what you were talking about to all of a sudden have to do a whole bunch of things and doesn't really have time to emotionally process their grief. So their style of working with their grief is different from their experience of grief. So that's how we talk about that. But the point is that, yeah, and I think sometimes we disenfranchise intuitive grievers later in the process. It's been six months. It's been two years. She's still grieving. And we often disenfranchise instrumental grievers very early in the process. What's wrong with him? His brother died. He hasn't shed a tear. And again, we have to respect the fact that people grieve in different ways. And one is not necessarily repressing grief. It's just that they're working at it in a slightly different way. And again, and that fits in so well with the coping literature. One of the things that Terry and I was surprised of is when we first started really developing and presenting this model, we weren't getting the brickbats thrown at us. We were getting people say, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And who was it? It's Judy Stillian. And I can't think of who she worked with, but they did research a Delphi study of therapists. And they said most therapists, they found agreement with the model. And they were critics of the model originally. They were saying, not necessarily one of Jetson emotions. But, you know, they came around as their own research said that most therapists said, yeah, that makes sense to me because, you know, I've often had these clients. And a matter of fact, one of the paradoxes is we found that most people who were grief therapists got into grief therapy as a way of intellectualizing and cognitively working through their laws. So here we have these therapists who are at heart instrumental saying, well, tell me about your feelings.

Dr. Angela Dean: 16:29

Right. I've often had that experience myself. Yeah.

Dr. Ken Doka: 16:34

Yeah. And what we would say is when I was teaching counseling, I said, avoid the F word when you're talking about grief. Because the quintessential therapist question is, how did you feel about that? I said, how did you react to that? How did you respond to that? Now, if they start saying, I felt tremendously sad or I felt tremendously guilty, go with that. That's where they're at. But if they're saying, I felt like somebody punched me in the stomach, how did you deal with that? What helped you get through that? You know, so again, it's respecting. And we've always said that people process grief physically, cognitively, emotionally, behaviorally, and spiritually. Let them tell you how they processed it. Don't all of a sudden focus on one of those domains and to the exclusion of the others.

Dr. Angela Dean: 17:17

Absolutely. And we do have a handful of professionals that listen regularly to this podcast. So I think that's a great reminder.

Dr. Ken Doka: 17:25

But the important thing, I think, to the non-professionals who are listening to this is, you know, just own your style of grievance. I'd be worried about someone who's, let's say, his brother or sister died. They didn't want to talk about it. That's a person who's repressing. But, you know, and recognize that, again, depending on where we are on Rosin's topology, you know, I think I would grieve tremendously when my sister died. And I don't mean this with any disrespect to my brother. I love my brother. Didn't really know my brother very well. My brother lived apart from me. The only time we lived together was up until I was three years old. And then he lived out of state for a while, a long time as I grew up. So I didn't have the same emotional investment in him. My sister, on the other hand, practically raised me. There was a period in time where my mother was ill. As my sister would sometimes say, other kids had dolls that would cry or you could feed. She had a little brother you could do all that with. You know, and she would joke about I was being her favorite toy when she was eight years old. But it's again, our relationships are different and we're going to respond differently to different losses. And we respond to them in the ways that they are. So again, one of the things that helped me when my brother died was being there for my brother's obviously adult children. My brother just died a few years ago, kind of helping them get through it. And they had some ambivalent relationships that they had to struggle with. You know, with my sister, I think it would be a very different form of grief.

Dr. Angela Dean: 18:47

Right, because every relationship in the family is different, and so you're going to grieve every one of those people differently.

Dr. Ken Doka: 18:52

Remember what Bowen says about family systems? every sibling grows up in a different family.

Dr. Angela Dean: 18:57

Yeah. Yeah. What was your brother's name?

Dr. Ken Doka: 19:01

Frank.

Dr. Angela Dean: 19:02

Frank.

Dr. Ken Doka: 19:03

My sister's is Dorothy or Dot.

Dr. Angela Dean: 19:05

I know you've talked about them in some presentations and your mother and the whole grief process, so thank you. Recently, I put out a surviving sibling's Bill of Rights, and it's largely based in some of your theories of how to enfranchise your own grief.

Dr. Ken Doka: 19:22

Thank you. I'm honored.

Dr. Angela Dean: 19:25

So, one of the very first ones on here is, as a surviving sibling, I have the right to grieve without being ranked beneath my parents, right? That very much comes from disenfranchisement, but also that I have the right to grieve in my own way is listed there, because I think it, we do feel like we have this pressure to grieve. Yeah. My father's brother was murdered in Italy before they came here. And I mean, our own family just enfranchised that loss for him. It wasn't until my own brother died that I was able to understand how significant that was. That sounds selfish, but how significant that was for my father.

Dr. Ken Doka: 20:05

Yeah. And when did your brother die? How old were you when your brother died?

Dr. Angela Dean: 20:09

I was 44. No, I was 43, almost 44. And he was 46, almost 47.

Dr. Ken Doka: 20:16

And he was older?

Dr. Angela Dean: 20:18

Yeah, he was 22 months older. Yeah.

Dr. Ken Doka: 20:21

And were you close?

Dr. Angela Dean: 20:23

Ironically you asked me that question on the day that i just released an episode of this podcast with an author that wrote the book called were you close, i would say yes and in some ways we didn't i didn't realize how close we were until after he died, we were very close growing up and then life happened and spouses happened and so it changed but, in the two weeks before he died we were talking nearly every day and it was all good so, It was also three weeks before the pandemic shut down the United States. So grieving in the pandemic was a challenging situation. Yeah. I guess for surviving siblings who feel that maybe their loss was not acknowledged or within their own family system, what would you say to them or what would you want them to hear?

Dr. Ken Doka: 21:24

Well, I think the important thing is empower yourself then to grieve it. I've met many siblings who were, you know, particularly in separated families who were not even acknowledged at a sibling's funeral or something. Then do what you need to do. Create your own ritual. Take responsibility. Take control of your own grief. Really think about what it is that you need to do. And again, you know... Both of my sibling relationships were reasonably unambivalent. As I said, my brother's was distant but cordial. And again, just from circumstances that we both acknowledged and recognized. You don't have a lot in common when you're four. You're a 17-year-old brother. And then with my sister, pretty close and very, very warm. But I think the troubling relationships, when there's been a lot of conflict in the past, and of course you see siblings who haven't spoken to each other in years or cannot spend more than a couple hours with each other's company without directing into rage or something. So I think those are the relationships that are the most problematic. Rosin once said the relationships, which she said close to the extremes, the very distant, the very close, the very warm, the very hostile. It's the closer you get to the extremes where the grief becomes more complicated. And so I think it's important for your listeners to say, you know, let me kind of chart out this relationship. Was there a lot of unfinished business? Is there a lot of things I wish I would have said? And how can I find ways to do that? And that'll be different for every person.

Dr. Angela Dean: 22:57

Did you find that you had to navigate that with losing your brother?

Dr. Ken Doka: 23:02

Not so much, no, because I didn't have a lot of unfinished business with my brother. I saw him during the course of his illness. As I said, we didn't have a close relationship, but we didn't have a bad relationship. We just recognized and knew, yeah, we're different people. We grew up in different times. We had different kinds of experiences. He was the first child of two young parents who were struggling to live in those days. They were 18 and 19 years old. I can't envision having a kid at 18 or 19 years old. I was born when they were in their 30s, and they were comfortable financially. It was a whole set of different circumstances. So there wasn't a lot of unfinished business with my brother. We kind of acknowledged where we were. We had cordial conversations, nice conversations, and we could even joke together. We always could. And even my early memories of him, while not particularly close, is he was in the Navy. He was in Korea. He sent me a dragon jacket that I think I wore just about until it had to fall off me. There were good memories that we could build on, not as many as I had with my sister, who would take me to see movies and take me to the pool and do all kinds of other things with me. That was not the relationship I had with my brother, but there wasn't a lot of unspoken anger or anything. We both acknowledged where we were in our family's history.

Dr. Angela Dean: 24:17

You mentioned having worked with siblings when you were working with oncology patients and pediatrics. What would you like to say about that?

Dr. Ken Doka: 24:25

Okay. Well, I think, first of all, I think siblings struggle when another sibling is in the hospital. Because, first of all, as one researcher, Mayra Blubon-Langner, talks about, they live in houses of constant sorrow. You know, there's always this cloud over the house. You know, we have a kid who has cancer. And second, their lives are often contingent. Yeah, we'll go to Disneyland. Well, we had a relapse, so we have to postpone the trip. She uses the term contingent lives, which I think is, you know, you're always contingent on where your brother or sister is in their own health journey or struggle. So I think that's a factor. I think because of that, there's a lot of ambivalence. One sibling is getting all the attention. My sister still teases me about the fact that the week before she was going to get confirmed in a Lutheran church, which is a big event in a Lutheran church, I broke my arm. So I was the focal point of attention at this big event. And in those days, even for broken arms, you tended to have a little bit of a longer hospital stay. Now, they would cast you and send you back to the party.

Dr. Angela Dean: 25:25

Right.

Dr. Ken Doka: 25:26

Pretty much. Now, in those days, they didn't do that. So she always remembers having to visit me in the hospital in her confirmation dress and joking with me about it. And I'm sure there was a little bit of anger and resentment about that. That was her day. And everyone's asking, how's your brother? Can we see him in the hospital? So, yeah, I think when a kid's struggling with illness, it has obviously family dimensions at no matter what age. And, yeah, it enters into the dynamic.

Dr. Angela Dean: 25:50

Yeah. I probably won't say too much about this. I have three cousins that are siblings, and two of them are now deceased, one by suicide and one from a terminal illness. And a surviving sibling is the middle child. I can see that The way the two healthy children Responded to all of the attention, That she had And then when he lost the other two I can see how his grief.

Dr. Ken Doka: 26:15

And you know there's I used to show this in my class on children and deaths There's a wonderful Peanuts cartoon.

Dr. Angela Dean: 26:20

Yeah.

Dr. Ken Doka: 26:22

What is it? You don't have to. No, it's not that one. Anyway, you can find it, but I would show it to my class. And it's a half hour episode of animated cartoon about Charlie Brown and Linus responding to the illness of one of their classmates with leukemia.

Dr. Angela Dean: 26:40

I've never seen that I'm going to.

Dr. Ken Doka: 26:42

Check that out it's really very very powerful and there's a cute little scene in there where, they come to visit her when she gets out of the hospital and they bring her a gift and one of the siblings opens the door she gets so many gifts and you know it really kind of illustrates what it's like you know because again one child is the focal point of a lot of attention and the spotlight is drawing away from you no kid likes that.

Dr. Angela Dean: 27:02

Of course yeah well thank you for all that is there anything else that you'd want to share with our listeners or that we didn't talk.

Dr. Ken Doka: 27:09

About. No, anything that you feel you want to add. I thought this was an interesting conversation.

Dr. Angela Dean: 27:15

Yeah, thank you. I've enjoyed it as well. I guess because we do have a lot of people listening who have sought out grief counseling, what would you say to someone looking for a qualified grief professional?

Dr. Ken Doka: 27:29

Yeah. Well, one of the always kind of ongoing sort of internal debates I have with the American Counseling Association, of which I'm a member, is that they look at grief counseling as a generic skill, you know, that, any qualified counselor should be able to do grief counseling. And that's not the case. There's a body of knowledge there that people should have to master. It's not all just there are underlying models, underlying theories. There's a good body of research about, you know, even about sibling loss. And so I think it's important to get someone who really understands and knows and is current on grief. So I always recommend when somebody says, how do I find a counselor? I always say, well, you know, go to the Association for Death Education and Counseling, ADEC.

Dr. Angela Dean: 28:12

Yes.

Dr. Ken Doka: 28:13

ADEC.org. And then see if you can find somebody in your area who has that expertise. Another source of information is local hospice organizations, and every community has a hospice organization, usually has on staff or knows people who provide effective grief counseling. And then, of course, no national resources, which can recommend. Compassionate Friends, of course, I don't know if you have any relationship with them, but they do a lot of good work on sibling loss as well. So, you know, so these are three, you know, three major resources, ADAC, Compassionate Friends, and your local hospice who can probably guide you to counselors who have more than just a passing expertise with grief.

Dr. Angela Dean: 28:53

Right. And I mean, I met you through ADAC and obviously, so I will put that resource there. I think with Compassionate Friends, at least my experience has been, yes, it's a great organization and there's a lot of resources there. It's so varies by chapter. So our local chapter now supports adults but when i lost tony it wasn't, as a parent so that's always hard to navigate and a lot of therapists and i'm a psychologist a lot of psychologists as well like think you know how to, counsel grief but you don't until the training is limited.

Dr. Ken Doka: 29:28

As i said there is a it's a specialty there's a.

Dr. Angela Dean: 29:30

Body of literature yeah i.

Dr. Ken Doka: 29:32

Want to just go back to something you said And I want to introduce one other area before we.

Dr. Angela Dean: 29:36

Finish. Absolutely.

Dr. Ken Doka: 29:38

One of the things that I think is particularly important is that when you're going for counseling, you have to ask yourself some questions. Do I really fit in with this person? You know, a person can be a very good counselor, but not necessarily your very good counselor. So you have to say, do we click? You know, and always trust your instincts. Give it some time. But if you feel you're not being helped, you feel you're not clicking, so to speak, there's not that rapport that you feel comfortable with. This is sometimes a trial and error kind of thing. You don't always you don't always hit the jackpot on the first on the first spin right yeah and I think one other thing we ought to mention I don't know if you ever dealt with the issue of twin loss.

Dr. Angela Dean: 30:20

Yes not personally obviously.

Dr. Ken Doka: 30:22

Yeah neither have I yeah interesting problems I always remember one twin who said to me there's nothing as surprising as looking in the casket and seeing yourself.

Dr. Angela Dean: 30:31

Right oh identical twins yeah that would be.

Dr. Ken Doka: 30:35

Challenging yeah Yeah.

Dr. Angela Dean: 30:38

And then the whole aging piece, because there's different people have different views on if your person is still aging after they're deceased. But I imagine that's a challenge for a twin.

Dr. Ken Doka: 30:49

Yeah. So.

Dr. Angela Dean: 30:51

Yeah. Thank you for that. Well, again, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to do this.

Dr. Ken Doka: 30:57

I was delighted and honored. And, you know, if you ever want me back, I'll be happy to do it again.

Dr. Angela Dean: 31:01

Absolutely. And I look forward to seeing you at ADEC.

Dr. Ken Doka: 31:04

Look forward to it as well.

Outro: 31:05

Thank you so much for listening. Our theme song was written by Joe Mylward and Brian Dean and performed by Joe Mylward. The Broken Pack is more than a podcast. Visit thebrokenpack.com to sign up for Wild Grief, our newsletter, and to explore everything else we're building. If today's episode resonated, you can send us fan mail or support the show using the links in the show notes. Information on Wild Grief, our social media, resources, and our guests can be found wherever you get your podcasts. Please like, follow, subscribe, and share. Thanks again.