Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Coming Home to Yourself After Trauma (Without Losing Who You Are)

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

What if healing isn’t about becoming someone new, but remembering who you were before you learned to silence parts of yourself just to feel safe, loved, or accepted? So many of us move through life disconnected from our bodies, our truth, and even our sense of self. We stay busy. We show up. We hold it together. And yet underneath it all, something feels off. In this episode, I sit down with Thema Bryant, a clinical psychologist, professor, and former president of the American Psychological Association, to explore what it really means to come home to yourself after trauma, grief, or years of putting yourself last. Because even when something is over, it doesn’t always feel over. It lives in your reactions. In the ways you protect yourself before you even realize it. In what you avoid, what you shut down, and what you struggle to receive. Over time, these patterns quietly shape how you see yourself, how you love, and what you believe you’re allowed to need. So what would change if you stopped running and started listening? In this episode, we explore: Why your body can still respond as if you’re in danger long after the moment has passed, and the simple shift that helps your nervous system begin to feel safe again The subtle, everyday ways you disconnect from yourself, even when everything looks fine on the outside A grounding practice to help you return to your body when you feel overwhelmed, numb, or shut down How being “strong,” productive, or constantly busy can quietly keep you stuck in survival mode What it actually looks like to tell yourself the truth in a way that creates relief instead of more overwhelm What “coming home to yourself” means in real life, and how it transforms your relationships How to stay open to love without abandoning yourself Why some endings that feel like failure may actually be the beginning of reclaiming who you are  If you’ve been feeling disconnected, overwhelmed, or like you’ve lost parts of yourself along the way, this conversation will help you understand what’s happening beneath the surface and offer a gentler, more grounded path back. Because healing isn’t about becoming someone else. It’s about remembering who you are and giving yourself permission to come home. Make sure to check out Dr Bryant’s books, Homecoming and Matters of the Heart for a deeper path back to yourself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, and for more than 30 years, I've been helping people learn to love and be loved better across every kind of relationship. My intention on Language of Love Conversations is simple, to help you learn to love and be loved better, deepening your relationships, expanding your capacity for connection, and living with more presence, honesty, and love. Let's get fluent in the language of love together. In this episode of Crying Out Loud, we get to have a beautiful conversation with someone whose work has quietly and profoundly shaped the way many of us understand healing.

Dr. Tama Bryant is a psychologist, minister, professor, best-selling author. She was the president of the American Psychological Association. In her work, Dr. Bryant reminds us that healing is not about fixing ourselves or becoming someone new. It's about remembering who we were before trauma, fear, and survival taught us to shrink, silence, or tuck parts of ourselves away in order to belong or be validated or stay safe. She speaks with rare clarity about trauma as something that lives in the body, about boundaries as sacred, about rest as essential to love and health, and about wholeness that includes grief, anger, tenderness, and joy. Her book, Homecoming, offers a compassionate path back to ourselves. And her newer work, Matters of the Heart, explores how we tend to our fractured hearts,

how we love without self-betrayal, and how we learn to say no as a sacred act. This is a conversation about grief, trauma, faith, the body, love, and what it means to live an honest life. I'm so honored to welcome Dr. Tama Bryant. Dr. Tama, thank you so much for joining us on the Language of Love. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I've been really looking forward to this conversation. I'm such a fan of your work, And you hold so many simultaneous roles, right? You're a psychologist, a minister, a teacher, an activist. I was thinking as I was preparing for this conversation, when you strip all of that away,

what do you feel you're really here to help people remember about themselves or to help teach us or remind us of? Yeah, my umbrella, gifting, calling, purpose is healing. And so there are many different ways to bring about healing. A part of that is in practice as a therapist. A part of that is as an educator. I'm teaching future healers. my work in ministry is about spiritual healing and holistic healing. And my engagement in the arts, especially dance is also to heal. So the message for people really, I would say throughout my work is that we're worthy. Yeah. I think that is such a beautiful theme and we're going to be getting into some of that. Although I do have to ask you, I didn't know about the dance. I've got to check out your thread here. Is that dance as a form of emotional and artistic expression? Is it

dance as a form of healing? Is it all of the above? All of the above. Dance is a language. So it helps us to speak the unspeakable, some of our experiences. And I'm a lover of words. I'm a poet. And yet there are some circumstances that the words don't really capture. And also in terms of our healing, a lot of times in healing, we're stuck in the mind, in our heads, and we could overthink things and think ourselves into a pit. But oftentimes the body is the site of the trauma. trauma happens to the body. And even if it's not physical or sexual, our nervous system gets disrupted. So it affects the body. So in order to heal, we cannot just think our way into healing. We have to bring our bodies along. Amen. You are preaching to the choir with me,

but I'm so glad you were preaching to our peeps here. You know, I always joke that when my kids were growing up, my youngest isn't 20 now, but when they were growing up, they would call me a talking doctor because I was a therapist. So people call me doctor. So they're like, oh, you're a talking doctor. But in truth, I'm a talking doctor who does a lot less talking over the past 10 years. Yeah, you're absolutely right. So much of a trauma is on a continuum. And what is no big deal to one person is totally upending to another. Yeah. And the dance thing. I mean, even for my healing you know people know when they follow me they'll see me I'm a huge fan of ecstatic dance of emotional dance of using dance and movement to like move stuff right and even

just come back into my body yes I love that it's so freeing so another level of us being kindred spirits yeah yeah so we'll have to dance again I'm gonna yes you're dancing stuff I didn't even know that about you. So you say trauma is not what happened. I've heard you speak a lot about trauma and it's what happens inside us. You touched on this a little bit, but I'm wondering if we can dig into this a little bit more around what happens inside us and how that changes the way we should approach healing. Yeah. So trauma overwhelms our usual capacity to cope. All of us face stress and we figure out a way to manage it. So stress is just associated with our various roles and responsibilities. And then there are those experiences that are overwhelming. And

when it is a complex trauma or ongoing trauma, like child abuse or intimate partner violence, John Breer talks about these three different categories that get disrupted. One is it disrupts our identity so our sense of who we are and then it disrupts our emotional regulation so that's how we could feel like we're okay one minute and then the next minute we've totally unfolded or had a huge outburst that doesn't seem to match the moment but it's all of what we've been carrying and the third thing that gets disrupted is our relationships ability capacity even sometimes desire to connect with other people, to be known in a way that requires real intimacy. Yeah. And so when you are healing, you're kind of attending to all of that because

what I find, and I work with a lot of, I've always worked with a lot of trauma in my work, but also, and I've had a lot of trauma in my life, but I would say over the past four or five years since my son died, so much of my work after I really, you know, after a couple of years, after I had started to really, once I had done enough healing to be able to be of service to others, so much of our conversations and so much of what I try to model for people. I mean, that grief is a trauma to me. It doesn't matter who you've lost. It's trauma. Yes. And people in grief, they're either disconnected to their bodies or they're being flooded by sensation. And those three components of grief, I mean, of trauma certainly apply here, right? All of that

changes. So what is like one gentle step that you recommend to people? And this is whether you're struggling with grief or any kind of trauma, maybe even first speak to your understanding of this idea of disconnection or, you know, what we call the clinical world disassociation, but basically disconnection from your body where you're not really in your body. And what are some ways to start to begin to feel safe re-inhabiting your body or even ways to come back to it in a more gentle way? Yeah. So one of the things is, you know, I use the term homecoming, right? To come home to yourself. And one way of defining homecoming is to tell myself the truth and then live based on that truth. So to tell myself the truth means I have to check in with

myself, including my body, because often we're on automatic, right? People say, how are you? You're supposed to say, finding you. Or if you're in the spiritual space, you might say, I'm blessed, but to give an honest answer first to ourselves and then to those we love. So to start by doing an honest, I call it sacred pause of checking in of how am I really, how is my heart? How is my body? How's my sleep? How's my appetite? Where am I feeling tension in my body? And so when I slow down to actually check in with myself, that's a part of creating safety. Because when I'm, and I have done what many people have done, which is coped by staying busy, right? We're busy and distracted. It just looks like excellence. Yeah, we get rewarded for it. Yes, absolutely. So when

we're in that mode, we're not giving our nervous system permission to be present. We're basically sending ourselves the message, I have to keep proving, I have to keep striving, like there's scarcity, there's lack of safety, I am chasing enoughness. So slowing down and telling myself the truth is one way of establishing that sense of safety. The next one is around breathing. Many times, trauma survivors, and I say this both as a psychologist and as a trauma survivor, we often hold our breath. We breathe in a very shallow way because we are vigilant and we are prepared for disaster. So when you are prepared for something to go wrong, you're holding yourself very tight.

Your back is tight. Your jaw is tight. Forehead is, everything is tight and like very small breath. And so in order to tell myself I have me, that I'm showing up for me, for us to just slow down with our inhale, we would just say like take easy breath, even as you all are listening now, easy inhale and easy exhale. And just with the breath, that's a way of coming home to myself. Sometimes when we just do that breathing in session, it can bring us to tears because suddenly we're in our bodies. And then the third one I'll mention, which I love around kind of regulating the nervous

system, this kind of gets back to our dancing, but humming and rocking. And so whether we're like rocking back and forth or swaying side to side, you know, they do these large research studies to look at you know what soothes the nervous system but many of us if we think back can say we saw our grandparents like humming and rocking and so having that cultural wisdom early on and that's retrieving that getting back into the body yeah the humming that activates that vagus nerve or i sometimes do the full breath it sounds like a cow but I love you know what you're saying so much and I think this is so great because these things aren't don't aren't hard and they don't seem hard but we resist it so often because especially the

getting quiet and getting honest with yourself because I know you speak so much and so eloquently and beautifully about the importance of rest and taking pauses and being with yourself and coming home to yourself. And yet when you are struggling emotionally, and certainly if you've had a significant loss or a significant trauma, or even if it was an old trauma that you just, that's coming up because Lord knows there's a million things in the world that are going to trigger that. Yeah. We run from it. And, you know, I've shared this story before I shared in my writings and in my book, but when my mom died, which was my worst, most important, I mean, she was like my soulmate. I know you were really close to your mom as well. And when she died, I was just starting

to film a television show for OWN. I had a five day a week radio show. I could not slow down. And I frankly didn't want to. And I just did it. I stayed busy. I got all kinds of accolades for staying busy. And then with a year of my mother dying of what was essentially breast cancer, me with no genetic risk factors. I didn't, I don't have any of the genetic markers within a year of her death. I had breast cancer in the same breast she did. And that was such a wake up call because I knew even then, and that was only the beginning of my reawakening. This was like 12, 13 years ago that this was unexpressed grief. And that is certainly not to say if you can't be with your feelings, you're going to get cancer. But I do think, and I know you speak to this too,

that that which we can't be with, we'll still run our lives and it causes inflammation. And I got that message very clearly when Sammy died, you're not going to make it unless you, in your words, I didn't think of it this way, but come home to yourself, unless you are willing to go into, to, to be present with these impossible emotions and to let them move, you aren't going to make it. And I see so many, you know, I'm part of this huge grieving community and my husband is a hardcore activist. God bless him. Who's advocate, you know, in Washington all the time. And he's part of this huge community of grieving parents who are accidental activists and they fill their days with doing and fighting and they're making such a difference in the world,

but it is hard for me to be around them because it feels like every cell in their body is clenched. You know that? I don't know. I mean, I can feel that when I'm standing next to them. Yes. And I do think I want them all to thrive and I'm so grateful for what they're doing, but I also want to say. And sometimes I do, whether they want to hear it or not, like, can we pause? Can we be with like what you're running from in such a productive and beautiful way? Like I'm not faulting what they're doing, but I think there has to be a balance. Yeah. I have with two other colleagues at Pepperdine wrote an article about healing and coping as for activists because it is hard to pace or to breathe but it also we can create a rhythm or a pattern that's unsustainable

yeah but I think sometimes we can feel guilty like I can't slow down it's too urgent and what I like to say to activists including to myself like if we could knock this out in the next month like let's do it no sleeping no eating like we're gonna knock it out and it'll be done But the reality, when we study history and study our climate, this will be a lifelong labor of love. And so in order for me to do it in the long run, I have to create a pace and practices that are sustainable. Yeah. Well, I'm going to have to read that article and pass it around because I see that so often this like either that or a version of what I did back when my mom died, which, and I want to get into this because you're someone who I really want to tap into your wisdom around faith and spirituality as well. but we can also spiritually bypass. I mean, I certainly tried, did that. That was one of the ways I tried to cope. I just stayed real busy. I put it in a container that I was supposed to open

later and be with later on, but I never did. I was like, oh, that container worked real well on the set today. I'm just going to keep that closed. You know, my mom's spirit is all around me and everything's fine, you know, but eventually I feel like it comes out one way or another. And so, well, let's wait for faith because there's a few more things I want to ask you about, not only around trauma, but around wounding and love, because I know in matters of the heart, you talk, I mean, it's about love, our relationships with everyone important to us, not just love relationships, but around, I love how you talk about infidelity because I feel like it's a real trauma and you speak about it the same way. And we often get wounded in love. We either get wounded by in our families of origin, and that sets us up to either sabotage love or choose unhealthy partners or make bad decisions or keep repeating those patterns, or we get wounded in love by someone harming us or abusing us or cheating on us. So I'm wondering if you can speak to that and this idea that you teach around distinguishing who we are from what or who wounded us. So a phrase I use is trauma affects us, but it doesn't define us.

And so that is to hold both realities, right? We don't want the bypassing or the denial to say, I don't care, or it doesn't matter, or I just don't even think about it, or I try not to think about it. but to be able to acknowledge its effects and often very devastating effects and also to explore with people, who am I besides what was done to me? Right. And that allows me to paint a full picture of myself. And it also is empowering. So in like feminist psychology or liberation psychology. We talk about not just coping, but empowerment. And so with empowerment, it's to reclaim my voice, reclaim my agency, that there is more to me than what other people have

done. So then what is it that I want to speak? What is it that I want to do? What do I want and need out of life. Another important approach is narrative therapy. And with narrative therapy, we help people to re-story their lives in a way where they become a central character. Because sometimes our abuser or offender has taken center stage and we're in the margins and everything is in response to them. So early on, we would see on those talk shows where people would come and they wanted their bully from middle school to see their makeover yeah everything is about that they're the reference yeah yeah you're like a full-blown adult but need that eighth grader to acknowledge like i'm pretty now do you see me like do you feel bad for how you treated

me and so they have become the center and so inviting us to take our center back inviting us to acknowledge another phrase I use, people have written on the pages of my life and some of them have written things I didn't give them permission to write, but I have a pen now, right? So I get to write some things in my own story and that is healing and empowering. Yeah, absolutely. And I know you speak to this idea because for so many of us, I mean, back to the middle school bully, but it could even be something more recent, like a partner who has betrayed you or a friend who has done you wrong or issues with your family of origin where they just aren't willing or wanting. I mean, there's all of this talk now. I know you've been involved and probably were part of

that big Oprah thing on estranged families, right? But this idea that we can forgive, that forgiveness is really for us, the forgiver, that we can forgive without having closure with the person who harmed us, right? Without having them have to claim what they've done. I'm wondering if you can speak to that a little bit. Sure. I think it's really important for us to unpack what people mean when they say forgive. Yeah. And why they're feeling they need to or want to forgive. You know, one of the myths to remove is forgiving does not equal forgetting. Yeah. Right. Some people, especially around betrayal, they'll say, well, you said you forgave me. How come you're still talking about it?

Not recognizing that if you all are trying to heal your relationship and repair, there's going to need to be some conversations about it. So I can't pretend it didn't happen. It's not healthy for us to pretend it didn't happen. So the assumption that if you remember it, that somehow you didn't quote unquote forgive, it's also important for people to recognize forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation yes I can forgive you and still decide it's not healthy to have you in my life in the same way and some people will say oh well no that sounds like you're holding a grudge well no I can forgive

people who aren't transformed like I can release it but I'm not going to hold them up close where they can continue to do those same behaviors. So reconciliation requires real transformation on the part of the person who has done harm. And that's not just saying, I'm sorry. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. That's really recognizing. I see that in the couples that I counsel all the time. I always call it like repairing after the affair. And what's beautiful about that to me is that if you are both willing to take responsibility and to do the work and to really grow together, you can actually end up, and this is one of the most rewarding parts of it for me as the clinician helping is that you can end up with a better relationship than you ever would

have had ironically, if this breach hadn't happened, but there has to be space for the processing and the healing. And I see it with so many couples where the one who cheated is like, I don't want to hear about, you know, let's just, we can't, we just move on because it's painful for them to have the mirror up and to see the ways. And they don't want to be reminded of how they messed up. They are resistant to that. And the same thing with, I love what you said around, you don't have to reconcile. Like I have family members that I am estranged from because of their mental health and addiction issues are so significant that they do harm to me. And then it's so hard when you, you know, both my parents are gone. I have no real family left.

My friends are my family and my nuclear family of my husband and kids, but extended family, I don't have. And so I'm wondering if you can speak to that kind of, I don't know, inner gaslighting we do to ourselves and sometimes external gaslighting and guilting we do of like, well, like what's the balance. Cause obviously we want to do what we can to repair with our, especially with those that are close to us or have been important to us or our family. But sometimes a certain degree of estrangement, especially if that person is not better,

not taking responsibility, not transformed, as you said, keeping that boundary there? Like, how do you support them in managing that? Yeah. So part of it, you know, we look for the pattern because even if a particular incident was only once, is it a part of a larger matrix that was really about power, abuse, manipulation? so let's say they're like they only punched me once right and that may be true and then as you examine kind of the matrix of the relationship there are all of these ways of invalidating of humiliating or ridiculing that speak to a larger reality that this has not been a healthy place for your heart and sometimes for your body as well. And no real indication of changed

behavior. As you named, people can apologize and that just be a word thing, not a heart because, and some of that gets revealed when people get angry with you because you're hurt, then they're not fully grasping right what has happened and so for us to pay attention both to past pattern but also since they got caught or since it came to light are we seeing a sustained shift and also are they engaging in the blaming right sometimes it's like well I did that because you like you made me do that and so the accountability is another important part and I will say as it relates to those who have done the betraying that some of them will speak to not knowing if they can be faithful that they have not been faithful their whole lives and some people who I've worked with

have said they don't know anyone and particularly when talking gender terms because it can be men or women, but I've particularly had male clients who have said they don't have a friend who's been faithful and they're not sure it's possible. Yeah. They just don't think men are faithful. Yeah. So when, and so then what I, you know, my response to that is we're living in a day in time where you don't have to be deceptive. There are people who will sign up for open relationships. So instead of selecting someone who, you know, want something else, and then knowingly, even on your wedding day you already knew this was already the plan you weren't going to honor it why not choose people who are in agreement with the kind of relationship that you actually want

so living in truth instead of deception amen to that and you talk i know and i love this concept that this idea that ending a relationship people often see as a failure right like well that relationship failed and not all endings are failures how do you help people reframe the ending as a form maybe of success or some cases self-respect or at least the most honest option sometimes to win quote-unquote in the relationship has caused a million deaths of the people involved. So then we're saying, Oh, we've been to get five years, 10 years, 20 years, but miserable and broken hearted and broken spirited, uh, devastated, but still together and giving up so many parts of yourself. Yes. Yes. So to win is to choose wholeness and wellness,

not just the number of years. So then if I'm choosing wellness as I take steps for my wellness and ultimately it may also be for the other person's wellness because staying in a relationship where they are dominating and mistreating is also not healthy for them. So they might not appreciate it at the time, but it is a win when we make the decision that whether together or apart. We want to be well. And so let us make choices that will put us on the path to wellness. Most of us have no idea how to move through loss. There's no roadmap to follow when you're trying to navigate grief. And I realized this when I lost my son three years ago. As a therapist who understood grief, a whole new level of pain opened up to me when I lost my 16-year-old son.

And since then, I have been building resources that have allowed me to navigate through loss, not only in a healthy way, but in a way that has transformed me for the better. We can move through the most terrible loss with grace. And that's why I have created the course, Good Grief, Healing from Loss with Love. You can find it on my website, drlauraberman.com, right there on the homepage, as well as free resources, letting you know how to support others who are going through loss. None of us has to do this alone. Amen. Yeah. I've been married for 25 years and I'm a recovering codependent. I was severely

codependent still when my husband and I got married and probably for the first seven to 10 years of our marriage. And it was really the breast cancer and that big old AFGE, I call it, another fricking growth experience that breaks you open and apart and reconfigures everything that led to a kind of reawakening and a reclamation in the beginning of recovery. And since then, there have been so many times in our relationship, even after our son died, where I am aware that I need something different or I become back then I was becoming aware of parts of myself that I wasn't really honoring or allowing to show up because I didn't think they would be accepted or I'd already been given clues that they wouldn't be accepted or

that they would be honored or I wanted to keep the peace or I wanted to keep the love or all those things I saw modeled growing up and also learned and what has been so beautiful. And this is, I'm mentioning this because I think it's a beautiful example of what can happen. And it's still like even more recently, three years ago, four years ago, whatever that was, I was like, okay, I'm clear about something that really needs to change. And I go into it thinking, all right, this is non-negotiable. Like this need I have, how it gets met, I'm willing to negotiate, right? but I'm clear on this. And I don't know, I don't know if he's going to be willing to hang with this, you know, like he may not, and that has to be okay. So like 10 years again, God bless him.

He keeps rising to the occasion. I keep wondering, and he does, but I started giving him, we started doing this thing, maybe like, I don't know, seven to 10 years ago, where we give each other a 32nd heart to heart hug first thing in the morning, just a silent in my heart and mind. And I hadn't even realized I never said this to him until recently when he was in the audience while I was speaking. And I mentioned that in answering someone's question that I do this and he was like, I didn't realize that's what you do. He loves our hugs even more now. But what I do is I pull love in from spirit, I envision it through the top of my head and the back of my heart. And I circle it around in my heart and fuel my heart up. And then I send it into his heart. And I say to myself,

I choose you today. Because for me as a recovering codependent, and I honestly think for any of us, when you are in choice in love, not that you're ready to walk away and you have a bag packed and you're ever threatening that, but when inside yourself, you know that it would be devastating if this ends, but I can survive that my truth and, you know, my homecoming, my truth is more important when you can claim that and say, I choose you. It's such a powerful reminder to me. It's a way to ground myself in that. And if you aren't in that, I don't know that you can really get your needs met. Yeah. So what was, well, you said the awakening was the sickness. How did the sickness get you there? Well, it was both the death of my mom and the grief and the sickness.

And I think what, well, what happened with the illness is I had a mastectomy and chemotherapy. I had to totally stop my life. Right. And I know you speak to this. And when you speak about rest, like if you're not stopping, eventually you'll be stopped. Yeah. And that's what happened to me. my body was like, hell no, we have had enough. It is time to stop. And I knew that. And at the same time, everything started. I couldn't work. My oldest was in ninth grade and the younger ones were like in third and fourth grade. The ninth grader became suicidal. The third and fourth grader started having these huge anxiety issues, school refusal, panic attacks. And my usual kind of therapy, neuropsych testing, whatever stuff I would have done wasn't working. And this is what

happened out of desperation. I went to a medium that someone had recommended to me. I'd not been to one except as a joke in college. And I said, okay, triage, like we're going to deal with the suicidal one first, you know, help like what's happening here. And she said, well, you know, let me go into his field. And I was thinking, what the hell is this? And she comes back and she's like, oh, he is clairsentient, which means he feels, and I never would have said these words, but I knew exactly what she was talking about. It was basically an empath, right? What we know now is an empath. She said he feels what other people are feeling, but in his case, he doesn't know the difference between what he's feeling and what everyone else is feeling. So he's picking up

everyone else's feeling, and then coming up with the stories to match the feelings he's feeling in his body that aren't even his. And that whole thing led to a whole, I talk about this in my book, Quantum Love, but it basically led me down this rabbit hole where I started getting really, really clear about the emotional states, not just what I was showing on the outside, but what was happening internally inside me. That was when I started to really learn how to self-regulate for him. So before I would go into the room with him, I would move myself into this state, ironically, Tama, but I call home frequency. And I would move myself into home frequency before I went into the room and he would match that. And so then I went out like, what the heck

is happening? That led me to quantum physics. I started applying that to love relationships that led to quantum love, but that was the beginning, me stopping my life. And then out of desperation, in this case, trying to help my kids is where it started, but then it became helping myself, helping my relationship, helping other people's relationships. But I do think that often if we, I mean, the goal is that we rest, we stop, we come home to ourselves before the catastrophe happens. But very often I feel like it's spirit's way and our body's way of saying, okay, I scratched at the door, I tapped, I knocked, the door gets knocked down. Yeah, I'm gonna burn this house down for you to listen. And on the other side, thank you so much for both living it, but

then sharing what you learn sharing what's helpful for you all. That's such a gift. Yeah, well, I know you do the same thing. And you're honest about you know, I like probably the same thing was true in your training. In my training, it was very traditional. My clinical training, you know, you don't, you're a blank slate. You don't say anything about yourself. And I often talk about my lived experience because I think like you, it comes from my clinical training, but it also comes from having lived this stuff, betrayal and trauma and illness and disembodiment and all of those things. Yes, absolutely. I tell our students, if you get to graduation and you have left yourself behind, we have robbed you. Go back and get yourself. Because in addition to like all of the

theories and interventions and the books, like we're the medicine. And so being able to tune into that and to be freed from it. And, and that's where a part of our wisdom comes from, you know, is from the journey. I like to say, pull the wisdom out of your wounds. So that's another way of the wounds, not having the final say, but I get to take some stuff out of there. I love that. I say, you know, heal, learn, teach, but I like pull the wisdom from the wound. Yes. Yeah. Oh, so good. Let's talk about faith a little bit, because for me, that the opening to I grew up in a very I know you grew up, you know, with religious leaders for parents, spiritual leaders. In my case, my dad was God and he was not a very good one. And I had a very, very secular upbringing. And so I didn't even know how to pray when Sammy died. My friend, Catherine Woodward Thomas, who's one of the best prayers I've ever known.

It taught me as I was on my knees. She said, have you prayed? I was like, I don't know how to pray. And she showed me or she prayed for me and with me for the first time. I had a lot of religious trauma being othered as a kid who was Jewish, even though we didn't practice, but I was living on the Bible belt in Southeast Georgia. So I was just rejected all religion. I saw it as an, as a mechanism for othering and women's repression. And I don't didn't want any of it. Right. And so since that really, I mean, it started to some extent,

it started with opening to the quantum field and opening to the universe, you know, after my mom died and all that phase I was just talking about, and that opened me up, but I still didn't really have a relationship with a higher power per se, a benevolent, beautiful, loving, you are so lovable simply because you exist energy, much less a two-way relationship with that until maybe four years ago. So I'm wondering if you can speak to that, especially for those of us who have gone through such painful, I mean, not only just like how your understanding of how to begin to tap in tune into that. But also when horrible things have happened and you feel angry at God or betrayed by faith or spiritually disconnected because of trauma and loss, how do you walk people

back home in that way? Yeah. Yeah. Love those questions and love your, your journey with it. So a part of it is recognizing that God, or however people choose to name God, is not insecure. You know, when we're dealing with insecure people, we censor ourselves. I feel like we can only praise them. We can't say anything else, that they can't really hear us. But just like, you know, when I have like a real best friend, if we have an upset, then I could say what I'm upset about. And it doesn't mean it's the end of the world. And so sometimes for people, when they're upset, then they'll just say, well, I'm not on speaking terms with God because this and this happened or this person died or whatever it is.

as opposed to leaning in even more to say, I don't have to stay away because I'm not allowed to speak my truth, but I can actually speak my truth. And another part of it is making room for the mystery. Yeah. And the mystery is, I think what has turned some people off is people claiming a level of certainty and making up reasons for things when they don't really know the reason. Right. So if someone said, you know, well, I was molested, why did that happen? And someone says, well because god was testing your fate yeah like what or why did they die god needed their voice in the heavenly choir like what i needed another angel if one more person yeah i'm gonna you know we're just making up the face making up stuff literally making it up as opposed to i don't

know why that specifically happened but i do believe that god is with us in it i do believe that God has not stopped loving you. And that sometimes the things that we ask for, we don't get. And there are times that in the fullness of time, some things will later make sense and some things you continue to be puzzled about. So, you know, I'll give a short term, milder example, but my daughter had worked very hard in school, always had good grades, super kind person, came time for her to apply to college her top five schools she didn't get in she was heartbroken and I you know it was like oh you know come on God you know she's just such like a sweet soul and why couldn't she have and if I can tell you within she's only a junior now but by her sophomore

year it became clear we got I won't talk about the other schools but we got some information of why that would have been a terrible place for her right so then we could kind of have peace with like oh that was actually like protection that some detours or some knows like they're the statement of sometimes we don't know what to ask for sometimes we're praying for a toxic person to choose us yes and then they don't choose us and we're like why yeah and it's because we're being protected yeah I really believe that I guess I've I'm friends with enough woo-woo people some might call to me it's not woo-woo but people who have had near-death experiences or or had a glimpse of the other side and one of my favorites is my dear friend Anita Morjani who wrote a book Dying to Be

Me and she's such a beautiful writer she you know the way she explains it's would be impossible to explain like what she experienced, but one of her, the metaphors that she uses, which I think is so beautiful is she said that on the other side, it was like seeing this huge, immense, insanely gorgeous and intricate tapestry. And she could see her one thread and how it moved through and connected to the other threads and changed colors and was all part of the way she affected those other threads and those other pictures and the way they affected her. And it was almost impossible to describe because it's too much for words, but it does give me comfort to imagine that at some point, once I get there, I will all make sense. And I do feel glimpses of that, even when the

most horrible thing happens, like losing my son, I do, I have had experiences with him because I communicate with him all the time. And sometimes on purpose, sometimes when I'm meditating or doing breath work or something else, he'll come in. And there was this moment, I wrote this book, Crying Out Loud. And this is my newest book. And this was before I started writing it. And I was just kind of beginning. And he kind of came in and I said, Sammy, are you supposed to help me write this book? And then he gave me this look because I could see him in my mind's eye. And he gave me this look like he used to give me like, you idiot, you know, like the teenager, like mom, you know, and he said, Mom, I was always supposed to write this book with you. I was always supposed

to help you write this book. Now, that doesn't mean that he died so I could help other people with their grief i'm not saying that but i do believe for me and this is just my belief that we have these kind of soul agreements right where and we don't know how much time we have here and we don't know why people are taken or not taken or why they leave or why they just why horrible things happen and lord knows there's a poop ton of horrible things happening right now yeah so i'm just wondering what you say about that. Not that you have to agree with my beliefs. I don't need you to confirm that or deny that, but just your, what you say to people who are in so much pain right now and so scared about the world and we're all being fed so much division and anger and we're

seeing such horrific things happening. How do you hold on to faith through that? What is your way of understanding at all, if you can? I would say stronger than a believing, a knowing that love is stronger than fear, that love is stronger than hate, that justice is stronger than greed, that truth is stronger than lies. And so those things crumble. How long they take to crumble and the ways in which they crumble vary, but the condition of our hearts do matter and that there are many, many, many more people who are on the side of love than are not. sometimes those are not the people who seem to have the most power and I use the term seem to have the most power but to I think that is one of the gifts that probably your husband gets when he

gathers in DC is they get to see you're not by yourself that there are other people who care and so that's a part of refreshing is finding community with common values and then what we do in therapy I think doing it in the larger world which is training our eyes to notice the winds yes right because you know we quickly share on social media all the the terrible things like and you know it's been a whirlwind did you hear this they're doing this they're doing this they're doing this but then a number of those things then went to court and got turned down like a number of those things like have not gone through or a number of people have stood up so training my eyes to see that is what gives me hope and then I will say as an African-American I look at our

history and you can as well as you know Jewish American looking at your history to know like this is not the first time that oppression, greed, despair, dehumanization has shown up and it was overcome before and we'll overcome it again. Amen. Yeah. I've been having the same thought. I couldn't agree with you more. And I was just having this conversation with this woman. Really, I know through social media, we got to know each other. And, you know, for me, because I'm always training my lens to look, you know, like Mr. Rogers said, his mother would say, look for the helpers, you know, I'm looking for the helpers for the light. You know, there are so many people highlighting the horrible things. Like I want to highlight

the people that are, are helpers, right. Or that are making a difference or showing up with love. And so I posted something like about that. It was a Muslim man who stopped the shooter in Beach. This was after the shooting in Australia, the Hanukkah revelers. And this woman reached out to me and she said that we need gun control. And why aren't you posting about gun control? And why aren't you, you know, this is what the problem is. This is what's going to stop it. And I said, all of that is true. And there are so many people posting about that. And I support that. And what I am interested in amplifying is the love, is the light, is the helpers. And I always think about Maharaji, the guy who started the Raj in the Midwest. He's the one that basically brought

transcendental meditation over to the United States. They did this study where they went to these cities that had these huge crime rates. What they found is just when 1% of the population held what I call home frequency, a state of peace and love and connection and hope. The crime rates went down. The riots went down. Like it really does affect the world. I feel when we can, not that we stick our heads in the sand and pretend everything's roses and light and nothing bad is happening but to hold that and also try to amplify more the love and the connection feels like to me at least for me the right thing to do it is what I like to say is oppression is interdisciplinary so to combat it we need all the different disciplines right we need it all yeah

And I think we get ourselves in trouble when there's like a hierarchy on freedom fighters of like, I'm the real one, you're the fake one. Like, I'm doing it right, you're doing it wrong. Or you're not doing enough. Yeah, we need all of it. We need all of it. And I appreciate you making that distinction because some people do do the bypassing and say, I'm focused on the positive to the ignoring of the issues. And you're like, no, very much posting that this event has happened. And this is my response. This is the medicine I'm pouring out. And you pour the medicine you're pouring and my husband pouring his. And we're doing what we can to shift the tide. Yeah, yeah, which we have to do. And I do think holding on, I love what you said about really remembering, because if once we lose hope, I think that's when things start to get really bad. So to really remember that if we can hold on to, we can see the truth, we can speak

to truth, we can speak truth to power, we can take action and we can hold the higher truth that even if it doesn't happen immediately, that love is more powerful than anything. Absolutely. Yeah. So along those lines, in terms of community, and I know you spoke to this, when we're, you emphasize a lot, and I agree with you that healing is not a purely individual endeavor, right? We can't really, we need community. And I'm wondering if you can speak to that. And also as we are living in a world where everybody has this false connection through social media, but no, but very often, very few connections in real life. One of the things I hear about all the time, especially from grievers, because you are no longer capable of small talk

very often your social network after something really hard happens that kind of changes you in a significant way, or just if you've done some real healing, the way you relate to your prior community may be different and you may have to let people go. And so there's this in-between where so many people are feeling lonely or unmoored from their prior social support system. What wisdom can you share around the importance of having community, but also finding community? So, you know, a lot of people have talked about the importance of self-care, which is very important. And then what we also promote is community care. And across the board, when we think about life challenges, mental health diagnoses, physical health diagnoses, financial stress, that what we would call social support is a protective factor. Yes. when we can feel like it's not us against the world to believe there are people who will jump

in the fight with me, who will show up for me, who will be a soft place for me to land where I can unfold and that I will be there for them. That helps to protect us, whether we're dealing with depression, anxiety, struggling with addiction, post-traumatic stress. And so the importance in terms of our health, of our relationships. And I want to say in particular, reciprocal, mutual relationships. Sometimes we get used to being the strong one in our circle, a strong one for our family, strong one for our friends, even strong one in the romantic relationship that we're not really receiving. So I don't want to just ask, do you have people that you're there for, but do you also allow people to be there for you in an honest way?

and healing the parts of us that isolate when we're struggling. Some of us run and hide when things don't look shiny, right? When it's not good, but to, I like to say, let people love you. Sometimes we're afraid of being a burden that we deny people the opportunity to love us and to show up for us. And as you named, sometimes that is deepening the relationships you already have by being more real. And if you don't really have relationships or you feel like they're surface and they don't really want to go into a deep place with you, opening yourself for new connections. And so going to new places, taking the initiative, sometimes we were waiting for other people to invite us. I had a client who, you know, that they were in this perpetual state of waiting.

so it was like let's take action for you to make the plan for you to invite somebody else to join you so that we can cultivate and create those relationships and I want to say as you're building relationships to allow them to grow over time sometimes as soon as we meet people we want to give them our whole life story and it can be overwhelming depending on what our life story has been. So allowing it to bloom and, you know, so we share some, have some good times and then continue to let it evolve in a natural way. Yeah. I think that's great advice and so important. I mean, I remember a group of my friends got together after Sammy died on Zoom and they were just there to support me. And they said, we're going to be here every Friday for the indefinite

future at 2 p.m. Not all of us will make it every time, but some of us or all of us are here every single Friday. And my immediate reaction was like, oh, no, oh, no, no, no. Because I was such a I will be a burden if people take care of me person. And it was my friend who said, Laura, we feel helpless. Let us help you. And a light bulb really went off that like people it's not just being a helper. You know, many of us learned that that's how you get love and approval is if you need me, you won't leave me, you know? And I definitely was, you know, had that story unconsciously. And it really is true that you have to not only give all the time, but receive and receiving can be really tough. You know, it can be tough for us when we are scared of being a burden or we're

taught that we were too much or not allowed to have needs or our needs were never met. So we don't want to expect them to be mad. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So it's at, you know, am I willing to write a new story? Yeah. And for many of us, then that also is, am I willing to risk disappointment? Yeah. It may not turn out all roses, but it definitely won't be any piece of a garden. If I don't allow the soil to be turned up, if I don't allow myself to enter into those messy places for the possibility. Yes. Yes. Beautiful. So you may have already done this, but let's just end with this question. If you could leave my peeps here with one permission that they may not even know or be aware that they are allowed to claim, what would it be? I invite you to give yourself

permission to stop standing on your wings to allow yourself to live a bigger life to not shrink or feel like you have to fit into other people's expectations but to soar it's in you to soar it's a wide walk when you can fly do not stand on those wings i love that and i love you dr tama i love you too thank you so much I'm too shy. I can't fall asleep without your arms around me. I guess I'm falling in love. Baby, you're my rock star, smashing all my guitars. One day I will charge you for breaking my heart. You're just like my sport.