Always At Choice — Coping With Grief and Loss

[Upbeat Guitar Music]

Mike: Welcome everyone. This is Avoiding the Addiction Affliction, brought to you by Westwords Consulting, the Kenosha County Substance Use Disorder Coalition, and by a grant from the State of Wisconsin's Dose of Reality Real Talks reminding you that opioids are powerful drugs and that one pill can kill. I'm Mike McGowan.

Mike: What happens when our life plan comes crashing down around us? What happens when your life partner passes away, leaving you with four young children and then your company eliminates your job? Well, that's a situation. My guest today, Larry Freeborg, faced at age 40. He chronicles his journey in the lessons he learned in his terrific book, "Always At Choice: Strategies for Moving On After the Death of a Spouse or Life Trauma".

Mike: Welcome, Larry. Thanks for joining.

Larry: Thank you Michael. Nice to be here with you.

Larry: I liked your name by the way.

Mike: Yeah, thanks.

Larry: Yeah, that's my son's name. (laughs)

Mike: Oh, that's terrific. Yeah, it was a lot of, it was a popular name back in the day and now it's fallen down the charts like a lot of stuff.

Larry: Yeah.

Mike: Larry, let's start with the introduction.

Mike: I'm gonna let you talk about the confluence of events that occurred around that Christmas time when your first wife Shirley passed away.

Larry: I already knew that she had leukemia and we were treating the leukemia hopeful that perhaps there was gonna be some recovery, we could extend her life.

Larry: But, that was an experience all by itself is to come home from a holiday at Disney World and find out that your wife's got leukemia and it's chronic leukemia and it's gonna move very fast. So what do you do with your four kids? You have to inform them that your mother's not probably gonna make it, but Christmas time has always been a real special time and we always did special things on Christmas Eve.

Larry: So the fact that she passed away on the day after Christmas was really, oh, let's say it was really a touching experience. Plus, my mom had been in the hospital when, at Christmas with a sickness called Guillain-Barré. I didn't realize it at the time, but there's a lot of re-energy that goes on.

Larry: Kind of a post-traumatic stress experience about, okay, so my mom's in the hospital, I don't know if she's ever coming back. Now my wife is in the hospital and I don't know if she's coming back. If that's all I had to deal with, maybe I would've been okay. But 10 days after that, I had to go to the office and terminate 10 people.

Larry: That was tough. And then about five months. Then my job was eliminated at the same day that company president froze all requisitions, and I was told to find a job in a line division, but all the jobs were frozen. And then the job was taken away, and that was in the 1979 recession.

Larry: And so I had no job, no money, no wife.

Mike: And four kids.

Larry: And four kids,

Mike: And your book starts that way and you very accurately, you lost your mental health at that point.

Larry: Eventually, yeah. What I ended up being an overwhelm and I had been very active in my community. I had headed up a Hastings Rivertown days.

Larry: I headed up a Kiwanis club. I had got a new Kiwanis Club, it started in Hastings. I was part of AFS and Foreign exchange students. I was really busy. And I just couldn't keep my promises, and that was bothering me a lot and started breaking down at the office crying and I just realized I needed to have some help.

Larry: So I asked my folks if they'd watched my kids. My dad being really wise, says, is there somebody there at the business that can help you out? So I called the psychiatrist. He heard my story, said, would you put yourself on the psych board? And I said, you bet.

Larry: Now the benefit that I had is I'd already used consultants in my business life.

Larry: If I hadn't done that, I don't know if I would've been so open to using a consultant in my personal life. But I was thinking about why should there be stigma about me using something personally, when I would use it for business if I needed some help.

Larry: So I didn't have any of that stigma that some people have, especially at my age, which was a long time ago now, when the attitude for mental health was really negative. If you had to have mental health, there's something wrong with you. And I just said, Hey, I got a problem, i'm gonna find an expert to help me solve the problem.

Mike: And it somewhat worked, right? You got help there?

Larry: (laughs) I really did. Yeah I was told I needed to grow up. (laughs)

Mike: I love that. You were what? Tell the story. You were cooking a chicken or something?

Larry: Yeah, and I had a French knife in my hand and I was determined I was gonna make my own stuffing, and I just got angrier and angrier with this knife in my hand. Today I would know about post-traumatic stress disorder, but then nobody was even talking about that.

Larry: But I knew it wasn't a good idea for me to be working with a knife in my hand. So I asked to talk to somebody and they put me in my room without the knife. And, this little nurse comes bouncing in and say, Hey, Larry are understanding you hit a kind of a bump in the road. I said, yeah, I've spent two hours on this gal darn chicken, and that's how I'm gonna have to live the rest of my life cooking for my kids.

Larry: And that's when she said, I think you're gonna have to grow up. I said, oh man, I just hit the ceiling. I gave all the reasons why I was mature. I was running these programs that at 3M Company and blah blah, blah. I'm doing this stuff in my neighborhood and. She said I, how are you gonna choose to take care of your kids?

Larry: And I said, it's not a choice. I have to take care of my kids. And that was the way that I, my dad had taken care of myself and my sister and my brother when my mother was in the hospital. So he was my model about how to take care of my four kids, but I just didn't have the capacity to handle all that stuff at that time.

Mike: A little tough love, right?

Larry: Yeah.

Mike: But then that's the beginning of your title, ife of choice. When she said what are your choices for feeding your kids? And she ran through 'em, right?

Larry: She did, yeah. First off, she ran through the choice of who's gonna take care... how are you gonna take care of your kids?

Larry: So she started at a big, high level. And you could take care of your kids, you could have your folks take care of your kids. You could farm your kids out to your relatives. You could have them go to private schools. And I said, I have to do this. I need to do this. She said what I was trying to suggest you, you could choose to do it.

Larry: I, in my exasperated way, I said, alright, I choose to take care of my kids. And she said now you can choose how you wanna feed your kids. You could cook, you could hire somebody to cook. You can go to cooking class with your kids. And I realized that was the step through it is that my choice was.

Larry: What made the difference? Not, I have to. I need to. I got to. But if I chose to, then I was responsible for my own life and it really became a, it's the way I live my life today is that I'm always a choice.

Mike: Talk about those key beliefs.

Larry: After always a choice. The next one that comes up pretty fast is that I'm accountable and responsible for what I create in my life. That I'm not a victim, is that if there's a storm, a snow storm, an ice storm, a leukemia. I'm not in control of those particular things, but I am in control of how I deal with 'em. So that's when I say that accountable and responsible for what I create in my life. And for me, it's pretty important not to live life as a victim. That's why that part from the OZ principle where you can be above the line and below the line in your thinking.

Larry: It took me, I went to a course and I learned about accountability. But I didn't like the way it was defined because it meant that I had to comply with everything. And there are times when you know, you make a promise and you have to break a promise. It's like I, you and I could have scheduled to be here and for some reason I couldn't be here.

Larry: I'd have to break the promise. So I learned that it was about managing my promises that was important. Not necessarily keeping them all the time, which is the way that. This course had defined it. So I found this other definition of accountability, and I like it really well, it works for me. Is that it's my responsibility to manage my accountability, but I am accountable and responsible for what I create in my life.

Mike: And I like that whole above the line, below the line. There are whole, I work a lot in schools, Larry, and there's schools that use that as a behavioral reference as well.

Larry: Yeah, I think that's good.

Mike: Yeah.

Larry: And then the other one that it's evolved over time and it's moving up higher and higher in my list of a belief system is to be an observer of the observer you are.

Larry: Now because I coach people on how to handle transitions, the biggest challenge many times is how to get them to let go of their old belief system and choose a new one like I had to do in order to take care of my kids. And if people are stuck, most of the time they're stuck in your old belief system.

Larry: And then where do you get belief systems from? That was an interesting insight for me. Came, from the church, from my parents, from my school, from my friends. But it really is interesting to know where your belief systems come from. So by being an observer of the observer you are, how you look at the problem, many times is the problem.

Larry: Is that it's, you're trying to solve this problem and you gotta belief system about how you should solve the problem. Maybe that's the problem. Take another look at, look another way. And that's been really helpful for me is to just step back and say, am I solving the right problem here?

Larry: What do I have to do to shift to be different, to get another result?

Mike: There's more than one ways to cook a chicken.

Larry: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. (laughs) Yeah. The thing is the ironic part and the fun part about that whole story, is when you know about cooking, you know that baking a chicken is a pretty easy task.

Mike: But not if you hadn't done it before.

Larry: That's right, the first time about where do you start, you start as a beginner. So that's another belief system. I used to always be afraid of failure, and now I realize that I zig-zagged to success by learning from my failures, and it is a matter of how do I look at failing otherwise.

Larry: Just to even get started, I would anticipate that I wouldn't be successful. That wasn't very successful. So if I just allow myself to make a mistake, I can zigzag to success and eventually get to the result that I want.

Mike: Your book is behind us. If you're watching on YouTube and you put a sailboat on the cover.

Larry: Yes, that was the result of I was in the psych ward and they have a certain part where you can go do some art and craft things. That was a copper rubbing that you used to do for art at that time. And I chose to do this particular ship, and the reason was because for me it was the model of my life.

Larry: As I've depicted that ship, it's like a big ship coming out of a storm. So that's the darkness in the back. And as it's coming into the light. What I like about the model is that it, you don't get out on a with that ship all by yourself. You got a whole bunch of sailors that are helping make that ship go so.

Larry: It was me being willing to use help from others, but realizing that I was going to be on the other side of the dark side and I was going to go to the bright side. And that's what that ship represents for me. And I know it's a crazy thing to put on the front to the self out hook, but it works for me.

Mike: It does work. And a lot of people, Larry, and I know you know this, but a lot of people are afraid of grief.

Larry: Oh yeah.

Mike: And so they don't acknowledge it, they don't work through it. And if they work through it, they think it's a linear process that I'm just gonna get a little bit better every day, like running or something.

Larry: Yeah.

Mike: It doesn't work that way though.

Larry: It doesn't. You're right. It just in fact, I had an experience just yesterday or Sunday. Sunday was the one year anniversary of my second wife's passing. So what I chose to do is I chose to share that day with my kids and so we had a conversation late in the evening.

Larry: We just told stories about Doty and what she was in my life and how she, and of course my kids just love telling the stories is because she really was pretty sassy with me. She kinda moved me. (laughs) She really, let me have it, I guess more than once. My kids love that. They just love the thing.

Mike: Yes, I bet they did.

Larry: And but boy, Sunday came around and I got really slugged with depression.

Mike: Yeah.

Larry: I don't spend a lot of time there, but I knew that something was off because all I wanted to do was sleep on Sunday, after the program on Saturday. The first time with Shirley, that would've really disturbed me.

Larry: But now that I've been there in that journey before, I just know it's gonna happen. So I don't judge it so harshly, I just say it's happening. Let's just let it go. Go through it. The emotions will move the way through. And let's move on. And here I am having a nice conversation with you.

Mike: How long be after Shirley's passing did you meet Doty?

Larry: That was took 15 years.

Larry: But I had several relationships in the middle of that, that didn't work, but that's where I learned that I needed to. That I got a lot of my awareness in adult children of alcoholics.

Larry: It turns out that one of the women that I was dating was basically an alcoholic, and her mother died after being in treatment seven times from alcoholism. Well, when she came back, she left and we were talking on the phone and she talked about Janet Woititz's book about the 12 characteristics of adult children of alcoholics.

Larry: I had her read them to me and I said, my God I've got eight of those, not all of them. I wasn't willing to accept all of them at that time. I really eventually had 'em all. But so I attended Adult Children of Alcoholics for five years and that led me to Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse, who set up the Betty Ford Treatment Center and that led me to onsite. And onsite is where I got some real help with regards to relationships. But up until that time, I was really failing through the process of not being able to find a woman that could work with me.

Mike: Don't you think relationships are a reflection of where you're at that individual time?

Larry: What I did is I did an inventory of all the women that I had dated, and I found out that all of them had been, were adult children of alcoholics. And I said, man, I'm attracting them. It's not their problem, it's my problem and I've gotta find out what my problem is. And so at my onsite experience, I had gone there with the idea that I could trust the women that I loved to leave me. When I came back from onsite, I could trust the women that I loved to love me forever. As if that they never left. They left physically, but I think of them regularly all the time, and it's okay. Like sometimes people say "They died put them outta your mind." Not in my particular case. I'm enjoying their love and they're caring even though they're not here.

Larry: I miss them of course, but I really celebrate that they loved me.

Mike: And so when you finally met Doty, was that a also a reminder to yourself that you were in a better place given where she was at?

Larry: Yes, I was in a better place at that particular time. I had done a lot of, I'm gonna call it my recovery work.

Larry: And but it wasn't a smooth path to have her in my life. I think she resisted me for about three years. And finally I just decided if we bought this house together, maybe that would make a difference. And she agreed and away we went.

Mike: That's great. I'm gonna read this 'cause I love the statement that you made in your book.

Mike: You say, I've been blessed in both my personal life and my income journey by the tragedies and opportunities I've chosen to learn from. That I love that phrase. The choice to learn is improve the lives of my family, my clients, and myself. It's just a, it's a never ending journey.

Larry: It is a never ending journey, but it's amazing how many people aren't committed to be lifelong learners.

Larry: When I went to college, I never thought I was gonna keep learning, but I knew that I didn't know how to raise four kids. That part was pretty obvious. So I began to go on a journey of learning. And what it, what happened, Mike, is I was a really good facilitator. I could facilitate really good strategic planning sessions for corporations and get them really clear about what they wanted to get done. But then sometimes they couldn't take the action to get the results that they wanted. So that's when I began to learn about coaching is. But why is it, I was a sales rep. I tried to sell them on it, that didn't work. I became a consultant, give them advice, that didn't work. So I knew there had to be another way where I could inspire and motivate people to take the action. And that's why I did all those learning courses at coaching schools, is just to try to develop a capacity to help people move past their stuck areas.

Mike: That, oh that's, this is about a two hour podcast now. There's not all, even with awareness Larry, there's not a lot of people that are willing to take the action.

Larry: It's kinda you have to get into the mindset that it's okay to invest in yourself. At one time when I was working at corporations, the corporations would pay for my education.

Larry: But when I became independently employed, which I was for the last 30 years, I had to make the choice about what was I going to expand my knowledge in. And I would always kind of respond to where were the people that I was working with stuck or where was I stuck? And to try to get some help to get past those particular stuck areas and move on.

Mike: Is that where you have a statement in your book about conflict and you say that conflict generally results from the failure to listen, and clearly you're talking about listening a lot. You must be a really good listener.

Larry: I don't know. How am I doing? (laughs)

Mike: Good, I think, yeah.

Larry: But along the way, my last learning course that I'm currently taking is positive intelligence.

Larry: And it's been a fascinating learning journey about learning that I had saboteurs that were dogging at me, and boy, I could recognize those things in a minute of always like feeling like I wasn't good enough to do things. That's like one of the first saboteurs that comes up for me. For some people it's through, they're restless.

Larry: For some people, they're avoiders. For some people, they're pleasers. But what he's done for me is he's helped me learn that there's a judge going on all the time. I'm either judging myself, I'm doing okay or not doing okay. I'm judging others. Or I'm judging the experience. And if you spend a lot of time in negative judgment, you're spending your time in the wrong area 'cause it's pretty hard to do positive things when you're thinking negatively. And so I've really benefited from this at this stage in my life. It's like the last course that I've come up with that I'm learning from. But it's been pretty useful.

Mike: You mentioned asking for help back at a time when that was not the norm to do.

Mike: It's not also the norm for men, especially at that period of time to acknowledge or work on their feelings. Talk about how you regulated and managed your feelings and mood.

Larry: I took a coaching course that said that three ways to intervene with people were through language, through emotions, and through the body.

Larry: He did a really good job of teaching me about language and a really good job about teaching me through emotion, but not the body. So I met this guy that encouraged me to take this course. Maybe about a year later and I said, wow, you really a lot different. He says, yeah. He says, I've been taking this somatics coaching course from Richard Leiter, and it was all about getting in touch with your body and where the emotions. I was thinking emotions in my head, the emotions are in my body.

Larry: So for example, getting in touch with fear is really interesting, because I have fear in my throat, fear in my chest. I had fear so bad that I had like a volleyball in my stomach at one time, and I was cr imped up like a little baby. Leap in fear. So when you're in those moods of where your body is really reacting, it's what do you do with it?

Larry: How do you get rid of it? What, how do you dissipate it? It turns out that it's this one somatics course. It was the first time that I've gotten introduced to equine guided coaching. I was in a group of about maybe 10 or 12 people and I noticed that there were some women that were in my group that had to have struggles in their relationship. You just knew from some of the things that they were sharing, that they were struggling.

Larry: And what happened is when they would go out to work with a horse, the horse would wander in through the area. There wasn't any presence that they had at all that would move the horse to the outside of the line that they were supposed to be going on. And I was fascinated about that.

Larry: And then I started attending some courses on equine guided coaching, and I found out there's a place in Amarillo, Texas that works with abandoned kids.

Larry: And if they work with the boys are many times angry about their situation. The horse just doesn't wanna be around you if you're angry and they let you know they don't wanna be around you.

Larry: So the boy has to learn how to manage his feelings about anger, in order to effectively work with the horse. Now with women, it's not quite the same. Women many times lose their power, let's say their sense of bearing, and so they don't have the ability to really get the horse to move, so they have to learn how to find their personal power in order to extend the energy and get the horse to move.

Mike: That's fascinating. So you have to match, you have to be at peace in order for the horse to respond. As you're talking about that, I don't know that much about equine coaching or therapy, but it reminds me of the TV show where the convicts are working with dogs.

Mike: And very similar.

Mike: And you can see them physically change.

Larry: Yes. And I've watched that movie a couple of times. I know it, I watch a lot of horse movies on... (laughs)

Mike: Yeah.

Larry: Where they're doing equine guided therapy and really achieving some marvelous things. But at that time, there were so many people trying the equine therapy they didn't really have the equine assisted psychotherapy where you had to have a therapist with you when you did the coaching. I have somebody who knows horses that's with me 'cause I don't know horses. I don't know how to watch horses that closely or. But I remember one of my training sessions, I was leading the horse on a line and, the woman who was training me said, now what I'd like you to do is think negative thoughts. Just think negative thoughts. And as I'm walking along the horse's ears go back, in about two to three minutes. It really is amazing. And so the horse was feeding back what was going on for me almost right away.

Larry: And it is, they've just been pretty terrific for me getting in touch with my emotions and that's my source. I wasn't able to do it a hundred percent of my own. I know that the somatic training has been helpful. But working with the horses has been really helpful.

Mike: It would be great if people were like that.

Larry: Yeah.

Mike: What we're reflecting back is reflected back at us.

Larry: Yeah.

Mike: So that we're aware of what we're putting out.

Larry: That's why it's useful to actually have some equine therapy, especially if you wanna be a leader. Because you can begin to realize that what's going on for the person that you're trying to lead, has a lot to do with your ability to communicate with them.

Larry: If you're in an angry mood and you're trying to deal with somebody in an angry mood, guess what? They're gonna react, but now you've got a learning experience.

Mike: Wants any part of it.

Mike: Yeah.

Larry: Yeah.

Mike: I really like also your book just is a, you can stop, think, practice, explore. But I really like how you pull from different resources and I get a, and I'm like that, that, maybe that's why I like it.

Mike: You get a lot of stuff and then you take from all that stuff what you can use, and you don't have to take it all. You don't have to take it all, lock, stock, and barrel.

Larry: That's an excellent point. I call myself a synthesizer.

Larry: Is that what I've really done is blended a lot of things together.

Larry: And you're right, I didn't take it all. If it didn't work for me, I thanked it for being there for me to learn, man, move on to the next film.

Mike: I wanna give you a getaway. I love the phrase you use and I'll let you end it with this. I love the term "gifted years".

Larry: Oh.

Larry: One of my other teachers is Richard Leiter, and he talks about living life on purpose. And that if we live a life on purpose, we can extend our life somewhere between eight and 10 years. So I chose to live my life on purpose. When I'd live my life on purpose, you meet so many people these days that are just excited about retiring. I chose to live in my gifted area. The thing that I enjoy living with. So when I looked at retirement I said, man, I don't wanna retire. I wanna refire. I want to keep doing what I'm doing, 'cause I love it. Why would I stop? Why would I stop doing what I love to do to do nothing? Which is what retirement is. And sure, I could do travel and, but I can do travel today, but I can also help be of service today. So what I did is I decided that at 65, that was the high number of retirement when they first put it in place back in 35 or whenever. And, I just decided that from now on, I was in my gifted years that not everybody gets a chance to live as long as I have.

Larry: I'm even living long at 87. It just amazes me that I'm at this age and I still feel relatively young, and still feel like I can make a difference. So that's why I'm doing these podcasts.

Mike: You have, and your book makes a difference. And I think that makes a difference in how you are.

Mike: I have tomorrow, Larry, I have a dental appointment and the next day I'm speaking to a whole bunch of middle school kids. I much prefer middle school kids to the dentist, right?

Larry: (laughs) Yeah.

Mike: And what you do keeps you young.

Larry: Yeah. I love what you're doing. I think the when I looked at what you were, you labeled your business to be and look at what the service that you're bringing.

Larry: I think it's just wonderful. There's somebody else touting the word. You're doing it much bigger than I'm doing it, but,

Mike: That's nice to say.

Larry: How you're doing it is you're reaching the people that need to be reached.

Mike: Yeah.

Larry: And making a difference. So thank you.

Mike: You're welcome, and thank you for joining us.

Mike: And you all know if you listen regularly, if this is your first time. Thank you. But if you listen regularly, you know that there's links to Larry's contact information and book, terrific book. Please get it.

Mike: For those of you listening, watching, we hope you find hope, insight, courage, support wherever you are is always thanks for listening.

Mike: Be well and every year is a gifted year.

Larry: Thank you. Yes, it is.