Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Conscious Grieving with Claire Bidwell Smith

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

Grief, in its myriad of forms, touches us all at some point in our lives. And when it comes, it can often bring along an uninvited guest: anxiety. In this Language of Love Conversation, I talk with author and grief therapist Claire Bidwell Smith. When Claire was in her early twenties, she lost her parents, which deeply impacted her life. After her she began having panic attacks, Claire decided to learn more about grief-related anxiety. In fact, we now know that the kind of anxiety experienced with grief is a very unique sort.    In this conversation, Claire and I unpack:  Grief-related anxiety, its unique manifestations, and how it differs from typical anxiety  The different ways different cultures create space for grief  Why it is important to allow oneself to fully experience and release emotions in the grieving process The transformative nature of grief and the ways it can impact on every aspect of a person's being Different kinds of losses and their ability to change us and lead to a pared-down version of ourselves The importance of being present for someone in their pain without needing to have all the right words or solutions How to maintain a strong connection to loved ones who have passed away and find ways to honor their memory If you or someone you love is going through grief right now, or you've been there before, you're going to find this conversation really eye-opening. So, let's dive in! Remember to check out Claire Bidwell Smith's website to learn more about her work, especially her online support group retreats and podcast. You can also connect with her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Don't forget to preorder her new book, “Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief,” and grab her other titles like “The Rules of Inheritance” and “After This: When Life is Over, Where Do We Go?” Plus, stay tuned for her upcoming release, “Conscious Grieving: A Transformative Approach to Healing from Loss.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the past 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Here on the Language of Love Conversations, I'm talking to some of the world's most influential and revolutionary experts, thought leaders, spiritual teachers, and celebrities about love, sex, and relationships from a mind, body, and spirit perspective. And that way, my goal is to awaken your mind, body, and soul. It's time to become fluent in the language of love.

Claire Bidwell-Smith is a therapist and a well-renowned grief expert. She's also the author of three books of nonfiction, The Rules of Inheritance, After This, When Life is Over, Where Do We Go? And her latest book, Anxiety, The Missing Stage of Grief. And so I'm getting into with Claire today, not only this issue of a unique brand, as she says, of anxiety when we are grieving versus other kinds of anxiety, what that looks like, especially if you have lost someone, how to recognize and also how to move through some of the anxiety that comes along with loss.

And we also talk about other aspects of healing from grief, of using grief as a portal to a newer, more self-actualized version of yourself, and also what's going on in the world today in the Middle East and the collective grief that we've all been experiencing over the past several weeks around Israel and Gaza and all that comes with that, not only for the innocence lost there, but also for the conflict and around the conflict that's been created around the rest of us. So I hope you enjoy this episode of The Language of Love. Claire Bidwell-Smith, thank you so much for joining us on The Language of Love. Thank you for having me.

So your book, Anxiety, The Missing Stage of Grief, something that I think is absolutely universal for anyone who's experienced a tremendous loss. And I like that you were, you know, you give a lot of theory, but you always give a lot of practical advice in the book. But you talk about how the kind of anxiety that someone experiences around grief is really a unique brand of anxiety, grief-related anxiety versus, let's say, generalized anxiety. So I was wondering if we could start there, what the difference is. Yeah. You know, it's something I have been studying for a long time. Personally, I went through it after the loss of my parents, when I was in my early twenties, that was my predominant response was anxiety with my grief.

And then I've now been studying it in private practice as a therapist for years and years, and it is different from general anxiety. It can present in similar ways, similar symptomology and similar responses. But for some people, they go through a big loss and they may have never been anxious in their entire lives. And suddenly they're experiencing tremendous anxiety. Others who have grappled with anxiety in the past will see an uptick in their anxiety or new manifestations of it. And often a lot of it is directly connected to the loss itself. Either the death was traumatic in many different ways, or the loss was so immense that their life changes that they're going through are, you know, all the secondary losses are so unsettling and their whole floors

dropped out. And then there's also the aspect of just the huge realization and reminder of our mortality and that itself, that reminder that nothing is really certain as much as we want to plan for things and think we can control outcomes in life. You go through a big loss and that reminder that we cannot do that is pretty anxiety provoking. Yeah, it definitely is. When you lose someone, especially if you, I mean, I think even after a prolonged illness where you were prepared, that is still true. But certainly with a sudden death, it really hits home how we all know it in theory, but when you viscerally understand how fragile life is and how everything can change in a millisecond, and we'll get to in a minute what's happening, the collective grief around, or not a

minute, but in a little bit, we're going to get into the collective grief around the Middle East and what's happening there. Because at the time of this recording, it's only, it's been less than a week since all of this went down with Israel and Hamas and Gaza and everything with that. And Lord knows there's a lot of collective anxiety around that and a lot of awareness building around how fragile life is and how horrifically it can be taken from us. The other thing that you spoke about and wrote about in the book. And you may have touched on this in your description of kind of the sources of anxiety. I know you write about it a lot in the book, but it's something that I'm really passionate about is this idea of the anxiety that can grow out of pushing away emotions,

which we all, listen, we all want to do. Nobody wants to feel the crappy feelings or the painful feelings or the scary feelings. And I didn't, I mean, I knew this and I worked with this around trauma and whatever, my own trauma and with my clients, but it wasn't until my son died and the grief was so much wider and deeper and more crazy intense than I ever could have imagined that I didn't have, at least in my mind, I've since learned that that's not universal, But in my mind, like I was like, there's no way I can push this away. Like it's so big, it can't be pushed away. So I had no choice.

And I also knew and got very clear messages that I was not going to make it literally. Not that I would kill myself, but I would basically lose myself, crumble. Yeah. And maybe inadvertently get sick. And because that happens with intense pain. I've certainly seen it with my other grieving mom of friends. And so out of necessity, I started really letting myself feel it and really leaning into somatic experiencing, as these guys know I'm always talking about.

And then that's when I suddenly had this really personal experience of how much that alleviates the anxiety. And so I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to that about how common it is and just any thoughts you have about this whole idea of pushing away or not being with stuff and what comes up when we aren't able or willing to do that. Absolutely. I think you touched on a lot of really important things here. I think that most people are surprised by the enormity of the experience of grief, how far reaching it is into your life, how big the emotions are that we experience, how unexpected they can be. You know, you suddenly can't rely on yourself anymore. You

don't know when you're going to drop to your knees, walking through a room out of nowhere, you know, grief and that itself can be so unsettling. Just that can cause anxiety, but you're right. Most people at least attempt to push away their grief in some way, whether it's just because it's so big, it's so painful. It's so unwieldy. You know, our natural impulse is I can't do it. I won't do it. I'm going to tamp it down in any way, but there's also other reasons, you know, our communities aren't always supportive of our grief. There's not always space to grieve. We don't always have the resources to grieve. We don't have the time to sit in our grief and find support as we move through that. So there's many, many reasons that

we try to push away the grief, make it go away. And inevitably when we do that, it spills out in every other direction. A lot of anxiety, anger, irritability, substance abuse, all kinds of things. But it's really hard to make space for our grief. I think Western culture doesn't have a lot of great rituals and customs, especially ones that inhabit the length of time we grieve. We've got some in the beginning, but a year in, you're still really grieving. You lose a child, a year is nothing in terms of your grief process. And so there's not a lot that is creating space around that for us. And it's really difficult, but that is one of the big things. Whenever I sit down with somebody who comes to see me, who's experiencing that anxious grief, I want to really

find out what has your grief process been like to date? How supportive have you felt? How much have you been allowed to grieve? How much have you allowed yourself to grieve? Because that's very telling of the anxiety and how it's happening for them. Yeah, that makes total sense to me. And I also think that for so many of us, we, we never even had any kind of vocabulary or strategy for facing emotions and feeling them because we were raised in communities or families where you just didn't talk about stuff. Yeah, we didn't have role models. Exactly. And I know you get into a lot of techniques in the book. And you mentioned something really important is that a lot of us don't have the resources or the time or the space to go to weekly therapy where we can be supported

in that. And I just wanted to kind of pick your brain a little bit and then also share this that I certainly went to a lot of intensive, for instance, somatic, you know, since we're on this topic of feeling your feelings, somatic experiencing in the first year after Sammy died. And you're right that like, I was thinking, okay, I should be better now. It was actually the second year was worse. And I have found that to be true with a lot of the grieving mama, you know, mamas that I've met who are many years out. But one thing that I discovered, and I try to teach this a lot is that if you just give your, you know, a lot of the reason that I think we're scared to feel the depth and breadth of the profound pain of grief, which then of course leads to the anxiety

is because we're anxious about being taken away by that pain. Like if I let that pressure valve open, I will never get up off the floor. But what I quickly learned, and it was only because I was supported at first. And now I try to kind of the opposite, the encouraging tail versus the cautionary tail is that if you allow yourself, first of all, if you really let the emotion pass through you. And the whole thing maybe takes 10 to 15 minutes to really feel whatever feelings are coming up. And then if you let yourself, if you totally surrender to the feeling and you let yourself sob or scream into a pillow or beat the shit out of a bunch of pillows or whatever you're doing to kind of move whatever the body just wants to do to release what's running through it. And

you really stop thinking and let your body do it after like 10 or 15 minutes. And I found this too. I mean, this has been like my mainstay and my, and my, I think really saved my life. You feel so much lighter and clearer and really like a whole bunch of pressure has been released. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's not hard and it doesn't take you over. People are so scared to even crack open that door. They feel like it's this bottomless well of pain that they're going to fall through and never recover from. Yet the truth is it's often 10 to 15 minutes of that intense moving through it.

And then there's a lot of release and catharsis. But I think if you don't have the proper support or you're someone that's caring for a family or has a job, you know, the idea that like, I can't fall apart, you know, I can't let myself fall apart. So we do need that support, whether it's professional support, whether it's family or friends to just hold us through those really big moments and help us understand that they are like, it's like waves in an ocean. You've got to ride this one through and then there's a release. Yeah. Yeah.

It feels like taking a really painful, huge emotional poop. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a great way to look at it. It really is. You feel so much better. Yeah. Yeah. But that fear is so, is so real for so many people. I hear it constantly. I'm afraid if I

start crying, I will never stop. And no one has ever been able to not stop crying. You can't, you literally physically can't forever. So. Yeah. And I found the key for me. I mean, I know it's a lot more complicated than this, but one of the main keys for me and really understanding this and also keeping it fully a release so that I could move through it and out of it is to stop thinking, because you could start thinking like, yeah, they're not here anymore. And all that means and blah, blah, blah, you know, you could like go on and on and on thinking, and there are places and times for that. But in terms of this kind of release of the pain, I found that if you're intentionally releasing it, especially through the body, don't think,

don't, don't go, you know, kind of, that's not the agenda of that 15 minutes. It's really to allow your, there's a place and a time for the brain and the thoughts, but this is about the thinking is what gets us in trouble always with anxiety. You know, when we're grieving, we are spending a lot of time in the past thinking about things that happened, things that didn't things we wish we could have done differently. And we're also spending a lot of time in the future thinking about what things are going to be like or imagining how awful they will be. And we're spending very little time in the present moment in our bodies here and right now. So even just doing small things to bring that back, that experience back into your body in the present

moment and stop thinking. Anxiety is just fear of something real or imagined. That's all it is. When we're grieving, there's both aspects are present, right? Like something really has happened. Something terrible has happened. So that fear is real, but then we're also imagining a lot of other terrible stuff. We're trying to prepare for it. We're trying to get in front of it so that it doesn't happen again, but we're overthinking and we're keeping ourselves in that hypervigilant state. As most of you know, for the past several years, I've been on a pretty intense grief journey and it's been a path of healing. I've shared lots of that healing with you and lots of the healing resources that I found. And I am so thrilled to announce that I

am doing my first ever retreat for grieving mamas. So if you or someone you love is a mama who has lost a child in any way, at any stage, at any age, I would love for you to come join me at 1440 Multiversity in the Redwoods near Santa Cruz, California for four amazing days of beautiful, uplifting community and healing. We've got David Kessler. We've got Paul Selig. We've got Catherine Woodward Thomas. We've got me. We've got body work. We've got organic food, beautiful rooms. Go to 1440.org. Check it out. It's right there on the homepage. I really hope you can join us. Yeah. And what do you say? Because this is something that I need help with because I know what's happening, but I'm also kind of stuck in it a little bit. Speaking of, I call it the

gobsmacking PTSD, right? Like when you've been gobsmacked by a sudden death, especially of someone who wasn't already ill, or a child in my case, or some tragic sudden death. I think that's unique. I've been through prolonged illnesses and death many times with both my parents and many loved ones, but the sudden death, one minute here, the next minute gone, I had never experienced with someone really close to me. And so after, and even still two and a half years out, I am in such, and the other mothers I talk to like me are the same, such agonizing fear, understandably so, that something's going to happen to one of our other kids. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So any advice you have, I'll take and we'll all take.

I mean, so part of it's right there, what you named the trauma, you know, our brain gets rewired when we go through this experience and our brain is, is learning a new world in which someone very close to us can be here one second and gone the next, you know, that's a completely different set of understandings around the world itself. So there's that, that you're grappling with. But then the reason that we continue to come back to that fear and that worry is because we don't want it to happen again. We so desperately want to have that experience again, that we think if we can think through every scenario, that catastrophic thinking, if I can think through every worst case scenario that could happen when my kid goes to ride a bike today or goes to school

or whatever it is, if we can think through all the worst case scenarios, then we're going to be able to control it somehow and get our hands around it. It's really not true. It's just our brain really wanting constantly to prevent another terrible outcome. But when we let ourselves continue to go into that fearful place and continue to indulge those worries, we're just keeping ourselves in that over, over vigilant state that creates so much stress for our bodies. So many more stress hormones, so much rewiring in the brain, your brain starts to route to that place all the time. We have to do things to actively step back from that. And it takes a little work and then it actually is possible to change that. When I first started doing that,

I had a lot of catastrophic thinking and those hyper kind of vigilant states all the time and dwelling in the worst case scenarios. And when I started to really work on that for myself, it took first just noticing every time it happened. So really in the moment, sometimes I wouldn't notice until later, until I'd already spiraled myself into some kind of panic. And then I'd be like, wow, I just followed that worst case scenario thought down a rabbit hole and here I am, a mess. When I started to really pay attention to it, I would be able to catch myself more frequently within the thought. So there would be something that would occur and I would go to the worst case scenario, but before I could really play it out, I would stop. Stop

myself right there and not play it out. Pivot completely, do something physical, take a shower, or talk to somebody, read something, like go in a completely opposite direction and stop indulging myself in those negative fantasies because they were just continuing to take me down those rabbit holes. But the one thing I'll say is that it can feel really scary to do that. It can feel scary not to think through the worst case things all the time. You feel like you're not going to be prepared. Oh my God, I'm going to walk away from this thought. It feels irresponsible sometimes. terrible things happen, whether we worry about them or not. We cannot control them. So really starting to actively work on those pieces and not let yourself go into those avenues anymore.

Yeah, I think that's great advice. And so it's about interrupting the thoughts and doing those kind of shift, those things that help shift you. One of the things that I talk about often, both in my grief experience and just being in and around so many other, especially grieving mamas, but just grieving people in general is that grief. And I love, I don't know that you call it this, but I call it a portal. Like it really is a portal because it's not, there is a bit of an evolution and the grieving process, of course. And with time you continue to evolve from the moment you first experienced the loss to years down the line. But in some ways, and I remember saying this to my husband, within a week of our son dying, you know, we were talking, he's like,

you know, I know a lot of couples don't make it through this kind of thing, but we're going to make it. And I said, Yeah, I'm sure we are. But I also want you to know that I already know that there is not a cell in my body that is going to be the same on the other side of this. Like I And I didn't know how to articulate at the time, but it was like a portal, like every aspect of my being was never going to be the same. And so what you write about in the book and what I totally agree with is that part of that portal, as I would call it, is that everything changes for many of us, especially with a big loss. Is that our loss that deeply impacts us, our motivations, our behaviors, our relationships, the meaning we give life, what's important to us. So I'm wondering, and also the freedom found in that, because when something that horrific has happened to you and you realize nothing really matters and what a gift life is, you just say, fuck it. Yeah. Not in a bad way. Yeah. Not in a bad way, but fuck it. Like none of this bullshit is

important. I don't have time for it. I can't make small talk anymore. Like I meet people at one of my husband's little professional events and they want to make, I'm like, I'm really sorry. I can't do small talk. Can we talk, if you're, you know, any interest in talking about something real, like I've just given up, not in a bad way, but given up trying to play the game. So talk about that. Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think we will never be the same again after we go through certain kinds of losses, many losses, big ones. There are small ones too that irrevocably change us forever. And there is a beauty in that. There's a beauty in being pared down to what we really care about, what really matters to us and being able to discard all kinds of stuff that we've been

putting up with for years, maybe relationships, jobs, all kinds of stuff. But I think that's one of the kind of big secondary losses. When I talk about secondary losses, it's all the ripple effect of one loss, you know, all the different things that change. We lose who we were. And there's a goose that comes with that. We can miss who we used to be. We can miss being more carefree, feeling safe in the world. We can miss being happier and lighter and having different kinds of relationships than we do now. There's a whole process of kind of losing our identity. and that can be really difficult, but yet, like you said, also really beautiful. I lost both of my parents by the time I was 25 with no siblings. And there was so much freedom

in it as well. I was just like, I can do anything I want. I have nobody checking in on me. It was horrible and wonderful at the same time. But I watched a lot of my peers grappling with judgment from their parents or various things. And I was like, I don't care. I'm going to go do this or that and there was a wild kind of freedom in that and so it comes you know it's double-edged yeah it is double-edged and in a weird way it's a huge transformation it is a complete it's the classic example like the perfect example of that whole butterfly metaphor where you go into the pain and you're in the cocoon and you can't function and you turn to mush exactly and every single one of us emerges different, beautiful, profound, more in many ways, I think a more

self-actualized version of ourselves if we allow it, you know, because it kind of calls on you to clean house, even if you don't intend to, because some people can't hang with you and other people are going to show up for you in ways you couldn't imagine. And some people can't deal with you with no BS and other people are attracted to that. And right. So it makes us more compassionate, it more empathic as well. I always think about that scene in the movie American Beauty where the character's filming a trash bag blowing around in the wind and he's so struck by the beauty of it. And that's how I see life all the time now. It makes me weep with beauty and terror and just the fragility of it all. And yet I appreciate that. There's very little I take

for granted. Yeah, me either. And I really love that. Yeah, I appreciate that. Well, so this is a great segue into what's happening in the world. So as I mentioned, you know, at the time we're recording this, we're about five days out from the Hamas invasion of Israel and Israel's retaliation against Gaza. And we are being bombarded by the most horrific images that I at least have ever seen on social media and in the news, things that are going to, indelible in my mind. So there's that, like the horrific PTSD of seeing these evil and hateful and violent acts of desecration and degradation and death and pain and suffering and loss. So there's that, but I want you to comment on if you're willing. And then also just our collective

grief for all of these lives lost. And also that I'm struggling because also I'm having grief, PTSD, like I'm watching it. I'm going to start crying. I'm sure. Cause I, every time it comes out of my mouth, I cry. So apologies in advance, but every time I see a mother, like, oh, I relive, I don't relive losing Sammy, but I relive the pain. It's so profound. And I know not just other mothers, but anyone who's lost someone is having some kind of grief, PTSD right now. How could you not? And then there's the grief of all the people just pretending that nothing's happening, which often happens after you lose someone, but that's happening on a collective level. So I know I've mentioned like 20 things, but dive in here, Claire, while I get myself together.

I'll do my best. Truthfully, I'm overcome with this as well. I'm really struggling with it. And it's one of those times too, when I feel thrust into this position where I'm supposed to be an expert and I'm supposed to be able to provide guidance around this. And yet I'm feeling it just as much as everybody else. and I'm not sleeping at night and the images and the headlines I'm reading are just pounding into me and I'm struggling to carry them. And so the world is feeling very unsafe right now. And that's creating a lot of anxiety. I know we're thousands of miles away from what's going on, but we're also not. It's happening all around us in many different incarnations and it just, everything feels really unsafe. And I think the brutality of what's happening and what has happened is so horrific. It's so beyond, I think, what any of us have even experienced in our current lifetimes. And I think you're really right about the PTSD of it. For so many of us, anyone who's been through

any kind of loss, any kind of trauma, it's absolutely going to be triggered here. You can't not feel what those mamas are feeling. I can't not feel what people are feeling when they're grieving. And then the helplessness of it, the lack of control, you know, the feeling of like this is going on and yet I'm walking around my seemingly safe neighborhood and I'm taking my kids to school. And the feeling that that is what that feels like to carry. I think the collective grief is sometimes helpful and beautiful knowing it's an interesting space to be in. And I've only experienced it, you know, a few times in my life, the pandemic, September 11th, these moments where the entire world is feeling something and there's a power and a profound beauty in that.

But then you are also, you brought up that there's people who are not experiencing it and not acknowledging it. And so that has its own grief. Yeah, that's been the hardest, almost the hardest for me is watching, especially watching people in my so-called spiritual community that have no problem professing the importance of leading with love and leaning on love and moving beyond politics to love until their feet are to the fire, you know, and it's time to speak up because they're so freaking scared of being canceled if they say the wrong thing in either direction. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that

echoes a lot of people's experiences of grief. You know, I think just our regular day-to-day grief and when we get, you know, a loss within our families or our communities, we feel that too. so many people, I was leading a support group for bereaved moms today, and they were just talking about all the people around them who are so afraid to acknowledge their loss. Yeah. And I just had a kind of rapprochement, I guess. I mean, it didn't feel like a conflict, but one of my nearest and dearest friends of like 15 years completely disappeared, like many people did after Sammy died. And I knew in all of those cases, it really didn't have anything to do with me. It was about them not being uncomfortable, bringing up their own pain, not knowing what to say, whatever.

And I also knew it wasn't my job to make it easier or harder or whatever for them. I totally didn't hold a grudge, but I also was like, oh, okay, now I know who you are. There was like a little bit of that in there. Even if I understand why, I know there's a limit to when and how you'll show up for me, which is fine. And so a friend of mine who was in that category of 15 years suddenly showed back up and said, can we go and spend some time together? I'm going to come into town specifically to see you. I really want to talk it through. And she was so filled with guilt and shame. I felt horrible that she'd been carrying that. And she also was able to articulate really the core of it all was a sense of impotence that she had no idea

what to say, what to say to me. And I said, you didn't need to say anything like that. And I want you to speak for a minute about how we can support others in our current collective grief or in grief in general. I said, there's nothing you could have said. There's nothing to say. You just had to be willing to sit next to me in my pain and say, I'm here. I love you. I'm so sorry this is happening. You can even say, I don't know what to say, but I am here holding you and holding space next to you. And I can be with your pain, which is not an easy order. It's hard to be with someone else's pain, especially if you're not used to being with your own. But I'm wondering if you can speak to that part of things, like as for all of us who aren't currently grieving what's

happening in the world or grieving personally, and we know others who do, what advice do you give about how to support others in grief? I mean, I think you said it so beautifully. You don't have to know what to say. You can say that you don't know what to say. What's important is to show up and sit there in it with you. I'm here. I can bear witness to this. I can just be here in any way. And I see you. I acknowledge that this is happening. I go beyond acknowledging it. And I, I want to be here with you, even if I don't know what to do or say. I think that means so much. And I think that applies to right now with what's going on in the police and everyone who is grieving. I think that applies to individual experiences of loss

and grief. You know, we're a fix it culture. We always want a solution. We've always tried to turn towards how can we make this thing better? There are things that we can't always make better. There is grief is something that you can't fix. Grief is important. We have to feel it. We have to feel it right now. What is going on? We have to feel it in our individual losses. And that's a very uncomfortable space for so many of us. It's uncomfortable for us who are grieving. We want to fix it too. Trust me. We would love to be able to fix it and we can't, but just because we can't fix it doesn't mean we shouldn't be here in it. Oh my gosh. One of the moms in my bereavement group today said most amazing thing. When we were kind of talking on this subject, she said that

people, there are people who don't want her to be sad or to cry. She said, if you don't let me cry when I talk about it, then I won't ever be able to talk about it. So you have to just show up. And even though we are in pain, bear witness to it, sit with us in it, allow space for it, allow us to have this grief. One of the things that I see on social media all the time, and I know it's happening right now. I saw it a lot during the pandemic is this kind of grief shaming and this toxic positivity where someone will go and express grief that they're feeling right now. And someone else will come on and say, oh, well, you have it so good. You shouldn't, shouldn't be feeling. You have so much to be thankful for. Yeah. And there's other people

who really are going through much worse things and you let them have the grief, not you. And that's so unfair. There's no grief Olympics. We all get to grieve, you know? Yeah. And I think it's on the spirit as well of what we were talking about before and how the importance of allowing to me. Honestly, there are many qualities of a really beautiful soul friend. But one of the key qualities in my mind and something that I really try to embody for the people who are close to me is that I don't need you to be okay. It's okay not to be okay. I'll do my best to support you. And if you want my advice or guidance or reframing, I'm happy to offer that, but I don't have an agenda other than to follow your lead and feeling whatever you're feeling. Right. Right. And it's amazing how few of us can do that for each other. But it's no wonder we have anxiety after a loss, right? Because there's just, all of this is going on. We don't even feel allowed to grieve, space to grieve,

people who can sit with us in our grief how could that not give us anxiety yeah and then you go out in public and i'm sure you hear this from the people that you counsel and i certainly hear it from my my grieving mamas at our meetups it's universal that especially i think because we're women and used to being caretakers that we end up taking care like we tell someone what we don't want to tell people what happened or we don't want to bring it up because then they get uncomfortable Either they start crying, which is fine, or they get really, really dramatic about it, or they start turning around, making it positive. Right. But we in none of those cases, does it pay off to talk about it? And then there's the expectation, because your grief makes other people uncomfortable, that after a few months you should be fine.

And so, of course, you're going to isolate and squelch, both of which does not help anxiety, right? Does not help anxiety at all. And it just doesn't help any of our lives. Collectively, it doesn't help. We've got to change this culture around grief. We've got to allow more space for it, more time for it, more variations of it. Is there bereavement leave in most businesses? I mean, I worked for myself and I took my own leave for a year.

I know there's like mental health, I forget what they call it, but I remember when my oldest, I was first, I just gotten a job running this, launching a new sexual health clinic at UCLA. It's like this huge job. And then my son, my only one at the time was diagnosed with leukemia and was about to go through intensive treatment. and they said to me, do you want to take, what do they call it? Personal leave, I guess it is, but do you want to take leave? And in those days, I didn't like to feel my feelings. So I was like,

nope, just give me a week or two to try to get this all going. And then I'm not going to let this go. Also, I was a single earning household and I felt like I really needed to make a go of this. But in that case, it was on me, not UCLA. UCLA was offering me the personal leave, but I didn't even ask how long that leave could be. So I'm wondering from you if those, I know in most businesses, there ain't no, you're lucky if you get maternity leave. You're lucky if you get paternity leave. It's practically non-existent. It's usually a few days at most. It's usually right around the time of the loss when sometimes we really need that bereavement leave like six months later. That's when we're feeling it. So it's practically non-existent. It's also

limited to certain kinds of losses, certain people in our lives. Fortunately, I think I've heard a lot of good heartening stories of coworkers being PTO to someone who's bereaved, various things around that. But then there's all kinds of workers. Think about like Uber drivers or people who work at Starbucks or they don't get any leave. They don't get part PTO. So there's just, it's, it's really heartbreaking. And that the thing about it though, is that it sends another message. If we don't have bereavement leave, that's important that we don't need it. And so there's someone out there who's struggling and needing time off work. They're going to feel like they shouldn't be struggling, that they should be more capable when the truth is, of course not,

they should have bereavement leave. Do you know if any other countries have bereavement leave for that kind of thing? I bet you some of the Nordic Scandinavian countries. Those are the ones who We really have it. They've got that organized. There have been some strides since the pandemic. There's been a lot more talk about grief and bereavement since the pandemic. There's a great organization called Evermore. It's evermore.org. And they are working really hard on policy change around bereavement. I follow what they're doing. Nothing concrete has really happened yet, but there's people who are desperately working on it. Well, we'll put that in the show notes along, of course, with all Claire's information. So

So one of the final things I wanted to talk to you about, and I think this is a positive note to kind of begin to close our conversation, is, you know, you write in the book that as a therapist, you've come to understand, and I believe this too, not just as a therapist, but as someone who's going through it, that those of us who can maintain a really strong sense of connection to our loved ones who have crossed over have a much easier time with the grief process and with moving. Not that you don't go through hell, but like even for those people I know in my life who have had similar losses, who really and truly believe that when you die, that's it. Like you cease to exist on every possible level. You have disappeared from anything and everything. I can't even imagine how devastating that would be. But I know it's very common as sad as that is. But I also am sort of the opposite because by the time Sammy died, I knew I'd written the book on quantum love.

And I knew from quantum physics, they were all vibrating atoms, energy and energy can't be created or destroyed. It just changes form. So his energy is still available and around and able to be communicated with in my experience. But I know that's not universal. So I wanted to say, even, even for people who, who believe that there is nothing after someone is gone, that doesn't mean you can't still have a connection with them. Now. It doesn't mean you can't have an internal relationship. It's true that if you have spiritual or religious beliefs

that can help you think about an afterlife or some kind of version of something beyond what our human experience is, that's incredibly helpful and healing and comforting. However, even for those who don't believe anything like that or have any source of faith, you can still have an internal relationship. I knew my mother so well, even though she's been gone for almost 27 years. I knew her so well that I could ask her right now, would you like the outfit I'm wearing? And I know what her answer would be. It would be no. Try a little harder, Claire. And I have that connection to her. And so rather than trying to move on from the people that we've lost. Bring them with us. Find those ways to connect with them. Lean into them. Lean

towards them. Talk to them for guidance. Talk to your people. Find ways to honor them. Find ways to say their name. Do things that embody their values and their gifts to the world. I spoke with a rabbi for about a year once when I was working on a book, and he said the most beautiful thing about the afterlife to me. He said, in Judaism, there's not a big emphasis on the afterlife being some kind of place that we go to the afterlife is what we leave behind in terms of who we were and how we touched people and the gifts we brought into the world and the values we embodied. And so keep those up, you know, continue those in honor of your person. And that's an afterlife. And I just think that that's so comforting and beautiful.

It is. That's a really beautiful message. And also, and your compadre or your co-grief expert david kessler talks about this a lot and when he focuses on helping people you know in his book it is about making meaning right which is not something you do soon in the grief process but but as you make meaning and i see so many people you know whether it's that you create something in your loved one's name or you take on something that they were really passionate about and carry forward or you do something charitable or healing or inspiring in their memory, when you make meaning out of it, that is also not only healing in and of itself, but it is a way to stay connected to them, which I think is really beautiful. It really is. Yeah.

Deep breath. I know. I mean, it's a journey, you know, and it's one that we will all go on in so many variations throughout our lives. We're always grieving. We're always experiencing loss, whether it's illness, world events, whether it's losing a job, whether it's losing a child, none of us are ever going to escape loss and grief. And so leaning into it, finding the right support, recognizing it, calling it out as grief. We have to do these things. It's not easy. It requires some size sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. It really does, but it's well worth it. And so if people want to learn more, I know, well, there's obviously the book, which the link to that will be in the show notes, Anxiety, the Missing Stage of Grief, a Revolutionary Approach to Understanding and Healing the Impact of Loss. That is Claire's book.

And then you also have, it's available for pre-order right now. You have an accompanying workbook, right? That one's called Anxious Grief, and that's coming out very soon. And then I have another book coming out next spring called Conscious Grieving, which is about the very same thing that we've been talking about, leaning into it. And on my website, I offer lots of online support groups, retreats, ClaireBidwellSmith.com. Okay. So we're going to put the links to all of that in the show notes as well, guys.

So you can go and get those links so you don't have to try to understand how to spell anything. Claire Bidwell Smith, thank you so much for who you are, the work you do in the world and for joining us for this episode of The Language of Love. Thank you, Laura. I am so grateful to people like you who keep expanding this conversation. Thank you.