Crying Out Loud: What Losing My Son Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and Choosing Life
00:00 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. This is a special episode of the podcast because I am talking about a very special endeavor that has been almost six years in the making, even if I haven't been writing it all of that time. And that's my new book, Crying Out Loud, A Path Through Grief into a Life Reimagined.
00:54 And I want to share with you not only a little more about my grief journey, but about all that I've learned, which has been a tremendous amount, not only as a therapist of 30 years who has helped people through the most painful points of their lives and the most painful losses, not only as a daughter and who has been by both her parents' side as they took their last breaths and a granddaughter who did the same with both grandmothers and sons. so many other losses, but also a grieving mother. When my son Sammy died, I just kept asking myself again and again, like not only how I could take my next breath, because I couldn't even figure out how to do that, but what am I supposed to do with all of this pain? And I was coming at that question from those two different places, right? So I was a mother in more pain than I knew was, even humanly possible. But I was also this therapist who had been spending 30 years helping people heal. And I understood trauma. And I understood the nervous system. And I understood attachment and relationships and how we make meaning out of the things that happened to us. And suddenly,
02:10 I was the one who really needed all of it and couldn't access it. So I started trying things. Some came from what I already knew professionally. Some came from research and neuroscience. Some came from spiritual traditions. Some I stumbled onto because I was desperate and my body seemed to know what I needed even when my mind didn't. And little by little, I started to figure out what actually helped me. And then when I was ready, after about three years, I started teaching people, first other mothers and then all sorts of grievers about what helped me,
02:55 and it helped them too. How to move grief through the body instead of just thinking about it. What to do with the rage and the guilt and the thoughts that don't stop looping. How to survive the friendships that changed. How to let little sips of joy back in without feeling like I was betraying my son and my loss, how to stay in relationship with him, even though he's no longer physically here. But I think the moment that I realized that there really was something here
03:31 was when I started sharing and what I was doing and how I was helping other grieving people. And as I began teaching these practices and bringing grieving mothers together and then other grievers together, talking about the things that were helping me, teaching them, and then watching what happened in them. I watched people who had felt completely stuck, begin to move again.
03:58 I watched women who thought they were losing their minds, understand what was actually happening in their brains, in their bodies. I watched people find ways to release what they had been carrying, find their people, find their village, reconnect with someone they had. had lost and eventually begin to feel some life coming back into them. And that's when I began to understand that what I'd been doing all along had become something bigger than my own surviving. It was a way of grieving, and then it became a system, a system I call crying out loud. And crying out loud is about a lot more than crying, although I highly encourage that. It means grieving with
04:49 your whole self, your mind, your body, your relationship, your spirit. It means telling the truth about grief, letting your body have a voice, allowing relationships to change because they will, finding your way back to joy, staying connected to the person you love on the other side, and slowly discovering who you are becoming on the other side of loss and because of what you that becomes the heart of my book, Crying Out Loud. And in this episode, I want to tell you what it really means to cry out loud. what I've learned from living it and watching other people live it and why I believe it can become a path through grief into a life reimagined. Because the truth is what I have learned is that grief is a profound portal of transformation if you're willing to go into it.
05:50 It will burn away everything that doesn't matter. It will change you in ways you can't imagine. It will transform you in beautiful ways so that you become a more empowered, more attuned, more self-actualized version of yourself. Now listen, I would give it all back at a hot second to have my son back, but this version of me, I enjoy so much more than the version I was before my son died, even though I really enjoyed her too. And I'm so excited to share this offering with you, not only to share the book, but what I'm going to share in this episode, because I really do believe, and now I've helped thousands of other grievers do the same. I really do believe there is a path through. It's not a path that ever ends, but there is a way to move through grief with grace in a way that is empowering, transforming, and truly beautiful.
06:52 I love using metaphors in nature. And it wasn't until adulthood that I learned that the caterpillar doesn't go into the cocoon and grow wings. That's what I thought. But actually, it goes into the cocoon and it completely decompensates to mush, to a soup. There's nothing left of the caterpillar but soup. And inside that soup is what scientists call the imaginal cells are there. Those have the DNA of the butterfly. And slowly in the cocoon, it reconfigures.
07:29 It rebuilds into this magical new being that is the butterfly. And there's even new research that's come out more recently. There's a big study being done at Georgetown that was actually originally, the first study was done by a little 10-year-old savant and a brilliant little boy who did an experiment and was able to prove. And now they're doing on mass scale. that butterflies have memories from when they were a caterpillar. Things they learned, they still remember when they are butterflies. So even though they turn to complete mush, somehow the awareness and the memories of the lessons they've learned remain. And I think that makes the metaphor even more beautiful, because that's really what grief does. It can transform us into a new, beautiful version of
08:18 ourselves, even if we have to go into the cocoon of grief and turn to mush for a little while and be in the undoing and be in the unknowing. And that can feel scary and griefy in and of itself. But if you stick with it and you stay brave and you keep tending your grief and you get the support you need, you will transform into your version of a beautiful butterfly as well that carries everything with you, including your loved one. So let's start with one of the first premises of what I call crying out loud, which is living your truth, stopping the performance of being okay. You know, we say, griever say, oh, I'm fine because we know our pain can make other people uncomfortable, or we apologize when we cry. Have you ever noticed why we do that? You start crying and then you
09:13 immediately say, I'm sorry. I'm so adamant that we shouldn't apologize for. our pain or our tears. Sometimes we don't even tell ourselves the truth. We decide we shouldn't be this angry or this devastated or this jealous of people who haven't had the loss we have or whatever that feeling happens to be. And we have to be honest in our loss. You know, for me, anger was really big. Anger can be frightening and it's so normal in grief, but it can feel enormous. But I learned to listen to it and give it somewhere to go that wasn't bleeding out on other people or the guy in traffic who cut me off. And we'll get to that in a minute, how to move your feelings. But I spend a lot of time in the book on anger and the ways to work with anger rather than exploding with it or
10:06 swallowing it because anger turned inward becomes depression. And I give you lots of practices for releasing it and working with your anger. But crying out loud means grief gets to tell. the truth. The second piece, I would say, that we get into and crying out loud, is this idea of choosing life. Now, this may be probably the hardest one for a lot of us, because there were times after my son died where I could understand that I needed to live, but I could not understand how I was supposed to live the rest of my life without him. And I hear from grievers all the time. I mean, sometimes people want to harm themselves. But even if we don't want to harm ourselves, we can live like we're dying. We can live waiting to die. One grieving mama said to me not long ago that she
10:58 wakes up every morning, feeling grateful that she figures she's one day closer to being with her son on the other side. And that's no way to live. That is not choosing life. And eventually, if healing is going to be possible. There is that strange task of learning how to live forward while carrying the person you love with you. It doesn't mean leaving them behind. It doesn't mean that what happened is okay. Sometimes choosing life is incredibly small, getting out of bed, going outside, making a plan, allowing yourself to imagine that there might be someday you want to live again, even if you're not exactly sure how. And in the book, I give you so many practices. For those days, you can't get out of bed or when the future feels impossible to imagine. Because you don't have to know what your reimagined
11:58 life looks like yet. You can just begin by saying yes to it, even if you don't know how to move forward with that. Another important part of crying out loud is letting your body grieve. This became honestly one of the biggest revelations for me. I could not, and I'm a big thinker, I could not think my way through something my entire nervous system was experiencing. Brief is physical. It shows up as agitation, exhaustion, heaviness, numbness, tightness, restlessness, physical pain. Sometimes there aren't even words for what is happening. It feels like you're crawling out of your skin. My body often knew what I needed before my mind did. So I began with somatic releasing, moving, shaking,
12:55 crying, walking, feeding the crap out of a bunch of pillows, screaming into a bowl of ice water, spending time in nature, sometimes making sounds, moaning and groaning, moving with the pain. And I started to feel a difference between understanding my grief and actually moving some of it through me. This is a huge part of crying out loud. And in the book, I give you so many exercises because I didn't want to read a book that you just read and put back on a shelf.
13:33 I want you to be able to open it on a terrible day and have something you can actually try to move some of the pain through. to get yourself unstuck and to tend to the grief in your body so it doesn't make you sick. I explain a lot in the book. I won't get into here about what grief is doing to your brain and your nervous system and give you all sorts of ways to work with your body when words and thoughts aren't enough and they often aren't. Another piece of crying out loud has to do with your village. Letting some people in and maybe letting some people go. And that was something that nobody prepared me for. How much grief would change my relationships.
14:25 I mean, there were people that had been my ride or die for 30 years or longer who disappeared or who showed up in the most destructive ways that weren't helpful. Some people who I barely knew showed up in ways I'll never forget. get simple ways. You know, I had a colleague from work who sent me a green heart via text every single day for a year. I had a woman I'd met in the carpool line one day. I barely knew her. She became one of my dearest friends because of the way that she just consistently showed up. 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.
15:17 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, Dr. Laura Berman.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. So lots of people I thought would be there, couldn't be.
16:09 Our pain will often is a mirror for other people's pain. So the people who are going to be able to show up for you are going to be people who have tended their own pain, usually, who have been through things. And I find that more often than not people run from you because they can't handle your pain because it reminds them or touches into pain that they aren't ready to feel or can't feel or won't feel. And it does often feel like an abandonment. Because there's like another kind of grief and realizing that a relationship, you thought would carry you through may not be able to do so. And I eventually had to stop asking certain people to be something they weren't capable of being. Like one of my favorite Al-Anon quotes, you can't buy milk in a hardware store, right? Like some people are a hardware store and you aren't going to be able to get milk from them. But I also began to find a new village. And that sometimes means creating space by letting people go who can't be there for you for you. That doesn't mean you make them wrong or evil or get into some huge fight with them, but you can let them go,
17:18 right? You can release them a little bit. You can pull back a little bit, create space. And as I did that, people started to show up who understood this version of me, who I didn't have to protect from my grief, who could sit with the pain, and eventually celebrate when some joy came back. And I had many dear friends who were able to do that. I'm not saying all of my close friends were not. I mean, I write in the book about many of my relationships. Several of them, I talk about often my dear friend Tina Cameron, who was already a close friend, but is one of like the best holders of big stuff I've ever known. And she was there on day one, taking me out into the Redwoods when I took the call, you know, and I needed to go do that and go all the way into my
18:13 pain, which is a really profound story. I share in the book. And I think I shared in one of the Losing Sammy episodes on the Crying Out Loud podcast. But she was amazing and has been an amazing support and actually now helps me co-produce most of my grief offerings. And then there was my friend Maria Gonzalez Terrace, who lives in New York City. And because Sammy died during the pandemic, she was working from home, she relocated for six months from New York to Los Angeles to walk by my side. So many others. There's many. I mean, I don't want to sit here listing all of my dear friends who have shown up, but there are many amazing friends. who stuck by me and many new friends, including in the grief community, seeking other people
19:06 who intimately understand your pain. I have a whole community of other mamas who are like my soul sisters now because words aren't necessary, you know, and that's one place where you can really find your tribe is seeking out other groups. And your relationship and your family will change. And I share a lot in the book not only about my own story with my kids and my husband, but other stories as well of how to navigate your relationship on grief. But crying out loud means allowing your relationships to change instead of spending all your energy trying to force them back to where they were. Crying out loud also means welcoming little sips of joy, Just little sips. Joy didn't come roaring back into my life. It came in sips. A laugh I didn't expect. Music. Being outside. A moment with someone I loved. 30 seconds where I realized, oh, I actually felt okay just now. And sometimes that feels terrible too because joy can bring guilt with it. How can I be laughing when my child is dead? So I had to learn that feeling joy is not betraying.
20:22 my son or anyone else I've lost. You know, at first, you may only be able to tolerate a little sip of joy and eventually there may be room for more. In crying out loud, I talk about how we begin making room for those moments without demanding happiness from ourselves. And there are practices around noticing glimmers, allowing pleasure, working with the guilt that can come when life begins to feel good again because we can hold grief and joy at the same time. And that is so important. The other thing that is a really important piece of crying out loud is this idea of turning pain into purpose. And let me explain what I mean because this one needs to be handled carefully because I never want someone grieving to hear, you know, something terrible happened
21:19 to you so now go make something meaningful. with it. You don't owe anyone an inspiring ending to your loss. For me, though, eventually some of my pain needed somewhere to go, some of my healing. I mean, I'm sort of, that's my makeup. He'll learn, teach in every aspect of my life. So I started automatically just because of what happened to my son, and I share this in, you know, the episodes of losing Sammy, all the details I won't get into hear of what happened to him, but because he died due to online harms and fentanyl poisoning, I did go deep into advocacy for a while, but only for a while. I very quickly let my husband take the reins of that because I found it so angering and disheartening to be trying to get
22:07 indifferent lawmakers who are in the pockets of so many social media companies to care. And I'm so grateful to him and so many of the other parents that work with him for making all the effort that they are making and they really are slowly creating change that hopefully through Sammy's law and other legislation will make the world safer for our children so that other families don't, we're not there yet, but that's the dream that we will get to a place that other families don't have to suffer our fate. For me, what it became was helping other grievers. And so I started the grief healing collective, the online membership where we do all kinds of amazing grief healing events. I do retreats, not only for grieving mamas, but for all kinds of
22:59 grievers. And now we have the book crying out loud. So purpose doesn't have to mean starting some big foundation or organization or changing a law or writing a book. It might just be changing how to how you parent, how you love people, how you show up for people, what you no longer take for granted, or what you choose to do with your time. In the book, I help you explore what purpose might mean for you without turning it into another thing in grief that you have to accomplish. And sometimes purpose is just deciding that the person you lost will continue to have an impact on the way you live. Another piece of crying out loud is letting the love continue. This has probably been one of the most profound parts of my own grief
23:53 because I very quickly began to understand that my relationship with my son did not end when his physical life ended. I had to learn a different language for the relationship. Dreams, signs, visitations in my life. meditation, talking to him, asking questions, listening for the answer, learning what his presence feels like to be. And I know not everyone listening believes what I believe. You don't have to, but there are many ways to create a continuing bond with someone who has died. And I devote a significant part of the book to this because, and I back it all up with research about who they are now,
24:38 where they are now, and how, if you want to, you can continue that relationship. So there are practices for how to ask for sign, how to connect with them through meditation, through automatic writing, through playing games with them. There are so many cool games that you can play and beginning to feel what connection is like with them. And it's one of my favorite things to teach because I feel like it's such a crucial part of healing and the ongoing relationship. So you can just, you know, approach all of it with curiosity, including doubt. But for me, learning that love and the relationship doesn't end and it could continue has changed my grief enormously. Sammy helped me write this book. So many times he came to me through meditation. or even as I was just stuck in a section and I would feel words flowing into me.
25:42 I've had so many profound experiences with him that can't be explained. And at this point, I have met and have been close to so many real deal mediums and guides and people who have died and gone to the other side and come back through near-death experiences. I've experienced too much to believe it's not true. And even in science, you know, in quantum physics, we know that energy, we are pure energy, right? Everything is, including us. If we were to look at
26:20 ourselves through an atomic microscope, we are not solid. We are pure vibrating atoms. We are vibration. We are energy. And energy can't be created or destroyed. It can only change form. So when we die, the body goes, the form changes. But the energy of which we were made can be accessed and never dies. It just changes form. And when you think about the fact that scientists have shown also that we take in, depending on which research study you read, anywhere between 11 and 40 billion bits, 11 to 40 billion bits of information every millisecond, every millisecond into our brains, 11 to 40 billion bits, but we only consciously process about 2,000 of them. So there's a whole universe happening beyond our five senses. So I say, think curious and be open to it and explore all that I'm
27:24 teaching you to try in the book when it comes to connecting to the other side. Another big piece of crying out loud is allowing grief to change you. One of the, that first like 10 days after Sammy died, once he died, the news went viral because I was a public figure. I wasn't expecting that, but the next day moving forward, you name the news outlet, the show, the talk show, the news show, the magazine, whatever it was, they were all calling. And I wasn't going to say yes because I couldn't even complete a sentence, but I started to become obsessed with the idea that if I didn't speak, another child was going to die. I just couldn't stop thinking about that. So I started saying yes to all the interviews. And I don't know, during a period of 10 days, and then I said, Uncle,
28:16 and now I got to go into healing. But for a period of 10 days, name the show, I went on it. And at one point during that week, I was on the Dr. Phil show, which was still on the air at the time. And we were on a commercial break. And Dr. Phil turned to me and he's like, oh, I'm so sorry. I don't know how you're surviving this. If this happened to me, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't survive. Now, since then, probably a thousand people have said that same thing to me. If you're a griever of experienced a severe, profound loss, you probably heard it too from people, especially child loss. I don't know how you're surviving it. And at the time, I didn't know what to say. I was like, I don't know how I'm surviving it either. I don't really have a choice.
29:01 But now when someone says that to me, which they still do, I say, I didn't survive it. The woman I was on February 6, 2021, died with my son when I found him gone in his room on February 7th. That woman is gone. And there's grief in that too, right? Because you go through a period where you're like, I wish I could be back to who I was, that innocence, that joy, that aliveness, you know, whatever those things were that in the soup of grief, right, in the mush, you don't know who you're becoming and you're no longer who you were. And that can be griefy in and of itself and scary. And it's also here where all the pieces eventually come together. We talk about healing so often is someday we're going to get back to ourselves. We don't go back. But eventually, the question
30:01 needs to change from how do I get myself back to who am I becoming now? And I love the Japanese art of Kinsugi. It's hard to say Kinsugi, right? I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's where they take broken pottery and they repair it the cracks with gold. So the cracks are now infused with gold and become part of the beauty of the object rather than something that has to be hidden. And that image means so much to me because grief really did crack me open. It broke me open. I would have never chosen that breaking. And I would give anything for my son to be here instead of having learned any of this. But I do have some say in what I build with what remains. and we may not have chosen the breaking,
30:57 but we do get to choose what we build with what remains. And this is what I mean by a life reimagined, because the book walks you through that process, not toward becoming some improved and enlightened version of yourself, but toward discovering how to fully inhabit the person and the life emerging now. That ultimately is what I mean by crying out loud. It's living with the truth of your grief and choosing life, even if you don't know how, and letting your body process the grief along with your mind and navigating and allowing your
31:36 relationships to change, welcoming sips of joy or at least opening to the possibility of joy, exploring new purpose if and when it comes, continuing your relationship with the the person you love on the other side and allowing yourself to become the version of the butterfly you are becoming. You know, I wrote crying out loud because I wanted to create the book that I so desperately needed and was searching for after my son died. And there are nearly 100 practices and resources between the book and the companion materials I provide because I learned very quickly there's no single thing that heals grief. And in each chapter, actually at the end of each chapter, I give you three exercises or activities you can try based on what I teach you in the chapter.
32:34 And one is if you can't even get out of bed, you have no energy today. The second one is if you're feeling like a little bit of energy. And the third one is if you're feeling like you could do more today. And I think that's really important, too, because it's not just on any given Tuesday or Thursday or Sunday, we're going to feel differently, but our energy is constantly changing as well. So I really wanted you to have choices. In addition, choices for your brain when you need to understand, some things for your body, when you need to process or release, something for your spirit, when you're seeking that connection, something for days, you just need help making it through and you don't have to do all of it, right? You're going to find the things that speak to you.
33:22 My hope is that somewhere in those pages, you begin finding your own way of crying out loud. Because it's not a detour around grief, it's a path through it. But through it, you will discover your new version of yourself. And my guess is, just like me, You'd be willing to give it all back to have your loved one back, but you're going to enjoy this version a lot more. I'm so grateful to you for being on this journey with me, for listening to the show, for being by my side as I have gone through the darkest nights and days of this journey. And I'm so excited to share, buying out loud with you, a path through green into a life reimagined. I hope you like it. Make sure to let me know what you think. It's from my heart to yours. Thanks for listening.
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