Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - From Grief to Healing: Staying Connected with Those We’ve Lost with Meghan Riordan Jarvis

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

What if grief isn’t just about loss, but about staying connected to those who’ve passed on? Have you ever wondered if your loved ones are still with you after they’ve gone? What if there’s a way to feel their presence and find healing through that connection? Grief can be a painful, overwhelming journey, but it’s also one that can offer profound moments of connection across the divide between this world and the next. So, how do we bridge that gap and keep the bond alive? In this heart-to-heart conversation on The Language of Love, I’m joined by Meghan Riordan Jarvis, a trauma therapist and author of Can Anyone Tell Me?. Meghan shares her own transformative experiences with grief, including the loss of her parents, and how these personal moments of sorrow shaped her work as a therapist. Together, we dive into grief from a holistic perspective—exploring how it affects us emotionally, physically, and spiritually, and how we can stay connected to those we’ve lost, even beyond this life. In this episode, we cover: Grief and Afterlife Connections: What if grief doesn’t have to mean letting go? Spiritual Practices for Healing The role of trauma therapy in processing grief The impact of unresolved childhood trauma on adult grief Differences in grieving processes based on the nature of loss Why does grief feel so heavy, both emotionally and physically?  How do we build resilience when grief feels overwhelming? Why is it so important to talk about grief openly?  Remember, healing through grief is a personal journey, and there’s always more to learn and explore. For deeper insights and ongoing support, be sure to connect with Meghan Riordan Jarvis on her website and LinkedIn, where she shares more about her work and offers valuable resources for navigating grief and trauma. If you're looking for guidance, Megan's book Can Anyone Tell Me? answers some of the most frequently asked questions about grief. Also, if you’re looking for more guidance on your own grief journey, check out my Good Grief Course on my website. It’s designed to help you process loss and find healing through practical steps and spiritual connection.  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 life megan reardon jarvis is a podcast host tedx speaker trauma trained psychotherapist specializing in grief and loss with 20 years of experience and she speaks to the importance of understanding grief and supporting grievers she has had all of this experience but really her world opened up in around 2017 when her mother passed and she became the patient with post

traumatic stress disorder, struggling with many of the symptoms she'd been counseling clients through for so many years. She ended up putting herself inpatient where she had sent so many other clients and trauma survivors in her work. And she came out the other end to write a memoir, The End of the Hour. It's a memoir of trauma, loss and healing. This latest book she's created is really cool. It's called Can Anyone Tell Me? Essential Questions About Grief and Loss just came out recently. And it's really cool because the whole book is comprised of all of these really common and crucial questions that most of us don't get the answers to, like, why do I have no memory? How come I can't move on? Why do I hate all my friends? You know,

these common questions that we think no one else is experiencing, but in fact are pretty universal to grief. So we are getting into the ways that trauma and past trauma may play a role in the way you move through loss, whether it's loss through death or loss of a job or loss of a relationship and what you can do, what you can understand about how the brain and body processes loss and what you can do to move with that. It helps you heal. That's what we're getting into in this episode of The Language of Love. Megan Reardon Jarvis, I am so excited to have you on The Language of Love. You are such a saint to have me here. I am so grateful for this conversation and we've only just begun it. Yeah, we've only just begun it. It's already fabulous. So your

new book is Can Anyone Tell Me? And you and I have connected in recent months through our mutual friends and colleagues as two people who are navigating grief therapy and education. And you've been in this a lot longer than, I mean, I've always addressed grief, but that hasn't been the focus of my practice. You've been in this for a lot longer, both as a trauma therapist and on your own personal grief journey. So I want to talk about the book in particular, some things I found really interesting and important in my opinion about it. But I thought we could start just with your journey as a clinician, but also someone... It feels to me like, well, I know you haven't always done this kind of work. You've done trauma work for many,

many years, but like me, and you probably came up against grief and dealt with grief as part of that practice, but really the focus on grief started with your personal journey. So I'm wondering if we can talk about that and what brought you to start diving so deeply into grief. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I mean that you already gave a really great summary. I've been a trauma therapist for a little over 20 years. And, you know, sort of describing yourself as any kind of therapist really just is pointing the direction towards who is it that you're working with. And I think what distinguishes a trauma therapist or someone who specializes in trauma is that you're trained in treatment modalities. So it's not just shifting thought patterns,

it's actually moving energy through the body. And so those kinds of treatment modalities are things like EMDR, which uses the optic nerve and bilateral stimulation to shift how the brain is formulating and maintaining memories. Sensory motor psychotherapy, which is like the energy that's inside your body that has sort of been residing there since you went through a traumatic event, figuring out ways, different tools and techniques to help that energy shift through the body. And when I'm talking about energy, what I really mean is emotions. So emotions are those little electrical currents that run through the body. We turn them into feelings when we end up being able to sort of identify words. The reason I became a trauma

therapist is that when I was in my early twenties, I went through, I think what people would describe as like a standard everyday breakup. But I am not joking, Laura, my experience with this breakup was like, it was the world was ending. There was no safe place to hide. I couldn't really understand why people didn't look at me as though I had just been torn apart by a leopard. That's what it felt like. And I was in my early twenties. I was new to Washington and I had new, a new group of friends. And I was starting to have that experience where like, you're talking about something and people are stopping making eye contact and they're kind of looking over your shoulder and you know they are glazing over they're bored of what you're talking about and

i'm like how can you be bored i'm not even like remote and i think every griever will tell you that they know the brutality of that experience and i think what it does to us in general often is it creates isolation we just understand that like how we feel and the depth of how we feel it and the intensity and the perpetuity of it is not welcome so i didn't look at those friends and think you guys are jerks. I just was like, oh, I'm going to destroy these friendships, these burgeoning friendships. If I don't figure out another way to be in these feelings and process these feelings. So that was, you know, a colleague slipped me the name of her therapist when I was crying yet again in the bathroom and I went into therapy and it was my first time

walking in. I had all the experiences that so many other people do. Like I thought I should keep it private. I wasn't going to tell my parents. I wasn't even sure I believed in it. And I went in and I cried for 46 minutes straight, you know, and just told this lovely woman how this was the worst breakup anyone had ever had. We got to the end of the session and she just said, Hey, just out of curiosity, did anything bad ever happen in your childhood? Right. And I'm like, lady, were you listening? This is all about the love that's been lost and a broken hearted. And I actually answered and said, no, I was like, no, I had a great childhood, walked out, went back to my job. I was going to sleep that night and was like, well, you know,

that teenager that we sort of considered a family member did die, did drown while my entire extended family was on the beach and didn't notice. And then we never talked about that again because it was during the summer and we left that summer community and went back to our normal community and nobody knew there. So no one ever talked to me about it. In fact, I've never talked about it ever to anyone I wonder if that's what she means maybe right and so then I got into therapy and was like oh this is therapy is not what it looks like on tv she was really educating me like oh listen you have all the hallmarks of a person who has lived with unresolved trauma and I was like what just what are you saying to me like what it's like she had found a mass

in my colon or something. You know what I mean? I was like, what are you talking about? So she really educated me, really gave me information, books to read about what happens when something that overwhelms our system is too scary for us to process is too much. And I was nine when this happened, really the meaning that it ends up creating inside your system that you're not even aware of, you know, that you're not at all. You know, I had all of these sort of stories about how like I was kind of a weird kid and you know what it is really weird at nine to know that children die that is weird for kids so like I had a really intense hard experience that did separate me from my peers but the way that I thought I was separated from my

peers was like I was chubbier than they were or I didn't shop at the same stores that they did like I was nine I was ten I was trying to come up with an explanation that was above my capacity That could explain your sense of isolation and difference. Yeah. I felt that a lot as a kid, too, mostly because and I think a lot of kids feel this way when there's a lot of trauma or abuse or difficulties or experiences that they're having that either they don't know is strange, you know, because that's just their reality. And that's right. So much later that it's not OK that your father was doing this or it's not OK that this happened or this isn't normal to never talk about the poor child who drowned, you know. But also, I talk a lot about how grief loves an open door. So when you're grieving anything, even if you're sad for something happening to some other family, you know, all your other griefs will come. You know, it's like your system is like, well, the door is open. Let's bring it all out. And the same thing is true for trauma. I find trauma loves an open door, too. So what I think you're saying is that when where a lot of people might go through a breakup and be really sad, go through a period of like curling up into a ball or going into a puddle, but like they'd eventually pick themselves up, shake themselves off and move on when you've had unresolved trauma. Yeah. I couldn't do that. Yeah. The trauma of the breakup just triggers. It's that open door.

That's right. And I could sort of see that, right? Like I had enough sort of metacognition to be like, damn, I'm taking this really hard. I've seen other people go through breakups and like they're dating somebody two weeks later. Like what is going on here? Right. Sort of fast forward. I fell in love with therapy. I went back to school. I became a therapist. Every training I could possibly get my hands on. I did those trainings, whether they were five years long or I had to wait on a waiting list. The harder it was, the more challenging it was, the more exciting that was. And I was working with really clients who were really motivated and making profound change. So it was just so totally rewarding. And I don't think I realized this at the time,

but I did so much of my own grief work. I went back and processed this grief work from my childhood, other losses, because grief really is the energy that's created on account of loss. And that means all the losses. When my brother went to boarding school and I wasn't ready for him to leave the home, like that's a loss. So I did exactly what you're talking about. All the things that were kind of clustered together that all popped up on account of the loss of this relationship. I was like, I was cleaning the closet, like, oh, let's look at that. Let's look at that. And I really felt pretty smug. I was like, I'm trained in all the things I have done all my work, right? Therapists love to talk. I'm all better. Done the work. Not only did I think

I was all better, I also thought like, and I'm inoculated from anything bad happening to me because I know all the tools. Never, ever tempt the universe with that sort of a sentence. So in 2017, my dad died after a year long diagnosis with small cell cancer. So I pretty much knew from the moment he was diagnosed that he had about a year to live. And the way that I describe it is I participated in his death. He was dying. I went to his house from my house on the weekends, saw him. My brain took in the fact that he was less physically able. His body was shrinking. He looked less well. I was just sort of like participating in the loss of my dad. And when he died, it was very sad and it was hard, but it didn't really knock me off my

horse. It was like, I was on this life path and this hard thing happened and maybe I jumped up prepared for it because I just, yeah, I mean, it was what I think we think of when we think of sort of, you know, a typical developmental grief experience. Your parents are meant to die before you. My dad was 80 when he died. He died of something that no, you know, they tried to treat it. It didn't work.

I was like, look, look at me grieving. Look at me doing the things. This is what I've learned to do. This is what I teach other people to do. And then in 2019, my mom died suddenly while I was on vacation with her. And that was like the world, you're nodding, you know, the world split open and I was not the same and have never been the same. And I immediately experienced what I knew to be PTSD symptoms with meaning like, oh,

this is not just about this moment. This is about still some residual trauma that's inside my body. But primarily what I experienced was this profound sense. And it actually showed up as a sentence that I could hear in a voice that was not my own that said, it's your fault that she died. So even though I still had enough of my personality intact to be like, it's obviously not your fault that your mother died of whatever this illness is. I also 100% believed that it was. Well, I know enough about ruminations as a symptom to know, you know, there's a lot of

symptoms that grievers come in with. They're not sleeping and they're not eating and they have brain fog and memory loss. Ruminations are ones that really are a flag for me because I know that what they do is, is they invade your present with this sense of sort of guilt and culpability. And they also tend to sort of predict calamity in the future, which means not only are they making you unwell in the present, they're also really limiting the possibility of, of goodness in the future. And so I knew when I had these ruminations that went from being like once or twice a day to like once or twice a minute that I was really in trouble.

And I ended up having to check myself into the same inpatient facility that I had sent all of my hardest client, you know, the clients that really needed more intense treatment. And when I came out of inpatient, I came out with just this like white hot fury of like, we are not telling the truth. We are not telling the truth. I didn't, I hadn't embodied this kind of profound loss before, but I had worked with so many people who had, I think I did good work with them, but I had different as you know experience is the teacher and I got out and I was like god we we tell so many lies to grievers we we gaslight them they feel like they're failing because they've had no education and there's no safe place to have a conversation with anyone

about the truth of it we don't teach them about their symptoms imagine if we never taught a child that was going to go through puberty about the puberty symptoms yeah they would think they would think they were dying when their voice that's what happened in our grandmother's generation they did i remember my grandmother telling me that when she got her period she literally thought she was dying because great but let's i just want to pause for a minute because everything you're saying i 100 agree with but i just want to also highlight that it's funny it reminds me of david kessler once telling me that after his you know he'd been a grief educator and counselor for many years when his son died. And he often says, you know, I wanted to go back and call every client

and say, I'm sorry. I didn't understand. Yes. Even though his mother had died and he'd been through grief. So I want to ask you just so I understand your experience because, you know, when your dad passed, it was like you said, sort of more of the typical process and you had time to process and you were prepared for it. What was it? Was it the suddenness of your mother dying? What, what, I mean, maybe that there doesn't have to be a why, but what was it about your mother's death that you think triggered that PTSD cascade that happened? God, that's such a good question. And I've talked about this book a lot. Nobody has asked me that question. And I do think I have an answer and it might be, you know, it might be an unsatisfying

answer, but, but I think when my dad died, I think in my childhood, what I had learned in my therapy was that I had become pretty codependent with my mom. She was really impacted by this teenager's death. She was there when they pulled his body out of the water. It was my older brother who found him in the water. And I now understand because she and I talked about it and I know she would be fine with me sharing it, that she had PTSD, that she ran that ticker of those images of going down to the beach, seeing Chris's body come out of the water for about a year. And she really suffered during that year. And I didn't know what was going on, but I knew she wasn't okay.

And so I developed a really, like maybe even one way, like I'm not even sure she was well enough to see what I was doing, codependent relationship. I was doing things to take care of my mother and look out for my mother in that little nine-year-old way, like putting kids shoes at the, at the door, washing dishes, things that likely she wouldn't have even noticed because she had six kids and a million things going on. You took responsibility for her wellbeing. Yeah. And you know, my own therapist was sort of like, well, and kids can't do that. And if you had stopped doing it, it would have been fine. And I got to tell you, even at 50, I do think I was really actually helping my mom. I do think

she was just about to go under some of that time. I think there were too many kids and too much being asked of her. And I think she was really unwell. Yeah. So, so I think what happened is when my dad died, I slipped back into a codependent relationship with my mom without noticing. I don't think I realized I was doing it, but I was calling to check up on her. I was visiting to make sure she was okay. I was, you know, she needed to buy a new like dishwasher and a refrigerator because all your appliances always break all at once.

And that was really overwhelming to her. And I was encouraging her and doing research with her. I was helping. I was helping in a way that I hadn't helped her in decades. And then she died. And I think I had put back on this apron. I don't look out at the world from my own perspective. I look to my mom first.

And so when she died, it felt like, like I was on this vacation with her when she died that really was for her because she had made a comment that she hadn't, she didn't expect to do any more traveling since my dad died. My mom was only 75. And I was like, what if we do something small?

And we ended up taking this trip to Maine, but I didn't notice that I was doing it because it didn't make me feel bad the way that it had when I was a kid, but I was doing it. And then when she died, really what it felt like was I had no idea who I was. and I would say that out loud to like my sister or my best friend or my husband or am I if I'm

not my mother's caretaker yeah there was a just or or who am I if I'm not my parents daughter and and they would reflect things back like you're your children's mother or you are you you know your client but but it felt like my mother was the center pole inside the tent and she fell down and everything was in darkness. And it was terrifying and really a secondary kind of like pain because a lot of my childhood, I had felt lonely and I had felt other and unhappy. And then through my therapy, I had, you know, I'm happy all the time. I love my life. I love the people who are in my life. I live very deliberately and intentionally and I couldn't, all the lights went out. All of them went out. I think I had worked with clients for decades who had been telling me

that. And what it felt like was the equivalent of like reading and studying about France and them being like fresh pastries and, you know, whole milk cream. And then you go and you're like, oh my God, salted butter on a baguette is, you know, the five senses experience of it is totally different. And when I came out of treatment, I was like, I think I can tell more of the truth from the perspective of someone who educates in trauma. I think I can take some of the language that we talk about as a trauma therapist, because for trauma therapists, our job is to find out what was the terrible event? Was it a single event or were you sort of developmentally not supported enough as a child? And then how do we take a tattoo of that

meaning and push it through so that you don't have to live with the understanding that that limitation of that event has hindered your life. How can we help you move that through? And the reality is when we're in the world of grief and loss, there's a precipitating event, the death of my mother, the death of your son, those are the precipitating events, but we still have the job of becoming people who have to figure out how to move that energy through the body. So I got out and was like, I just feel like I need to write this down. Well, first I read 188 books on grief and loss to see if anybody, because I was not trying to write a book, Laura, that was not what I was trying to do. And I just thought, let's see if somebody-

And what was missing? What was missing from all this? You know, I really think, I mean, there are some folks who do this. Mary Frances O'Connor, who wrote The Grieving Brain is a genius in this space, but she is also not a clinician. So there's still some ways that I interpret, but I really think there's a lot of noise about how grief is personal and grief is specific. And we can't, you know, it's too individual and it's too personal and each person has to do it on their own. And that is true, but also we grieve with our bodies. Yeah. There's a common denominator. And we can talk about bodies. We can teach about bodies. I mean, the number of clients that I saw that were coming in after having memory loss and brain fog

for upwards of a year, not sleeping for a year, having gotten divorced because their spouse was like, I don't know who you are since your dad died, lost jobs, irritable, angry, started drinking, just so many things. One, because to cope with, and they were, they were telling themselves the story that they were just doing really badly at grief and loss. And so it was like double, you know, they were shaming themselves for having a hard time with something that is next to impossible that they've had no education on. Yeah. I always say like, take that shitter and shove it up someone's ass because there's so many, we get really, you know, I hear that all the time. I should be doing better. I should be grateful. I should not be having such a hard time three

years out. And I'm like, fuck that. Who fucking says, who says, I don't know the people around who are uncomfortable with it. 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. so the new book is can anyone tell me and it's a series of questions the most common questions that come up in your clients and the people that i work with around loss and grief so it's questions like why does my brain feel broken why does my body feel out of whack why am i so angry which we got to talk about what's happening in my relationships, right? Like all of a sudden, you're not capable of small talk anymore. There are people that you no longer are interested in the same things as the people that you maybe had in your life before. There's, you know,

people who were your ride or die end up totally not showing up for you. And then people who were not even in your inner circle end up being your ride or die. You know, there's so many shifts. so wild. Yeah, that's right. So each chapter is like another question and then you get into the answer. And I want to dive into some of those questions, but you mentioned this earlier. So I want to unpack this a little bit too. What a couple of themes that just kept coming up in different ways in the different chapters. And you alluded to this as part of your focus is the unique things that happen to the brain and to the body that are pretty universal when there's been an extreme loss and, you know, how it manifests is obviously unique to each person.

And a lot of it has to do with how much unresolved trauma you have that may be coming back up. And there are all these different variables and how sensitive you are and what your thresholds are and all of those things. So, you know, we're not generalizing to everyone here, but I do think this piece is not talked about enough and you're kind of a science geek like I am. So let's dive into that part around the brain, your brain and body on grief. Yeah. Thank you. Yes. And the 12 year old me always laughs because I barely passed sciences. And the idea yesterday, somebody was like, well, she has a specialty in neuroscience. And I was like, oh my God, that 12 year old right now. Why would my fifth grade teacher laugh at that? Losing her mind. So essentially what I

think I would say about this is that there are some people that have had real terror in their lives. They were in a car accident. They were mugged that, you know, and so when we talk about trauma, that's where they go in their minds. Like, Oh, when that terrifying thing happened. And for some trauma therapists, they define trauma in a concrete way saying when you feared for your life, I don't define trauma that way. I think trauma actually is just an overwhelming, something that's overwhelming to the central nervous system. So it has more energy in it you can process in the moment. And so it activates your fight, flight, and freeze responses, which are your instinctive responses that the body uses essentially to protect you. And we've been using

them since, you know, the dawn of the age of man. And they're very crude and they're located in the very back of your brain, which we call the reptilian brain. It doesn't have a lot of functioning. It sort of can code information as like zero being neutral and one being threat. That's kind of all it can do. And so when you get a phone call that your dad died, or when a doctor tells you that your child has cancer, it lands in your system, in your brain as the ultimate threat, because it's talking about death, which is the ultimate, it's the highest level. When it's a bear that runs into your office and you go into a fight, flight, freeze reaction,

you can run away from the bear. So fight the bear, run away from the bear. That's what we're hoping we'll be able to do. And then you get safe. The problem with death is you don't get to get safe. There's nowhere to run. There's no fighting. There's no run.

Yeah, exactly. So we most often end up in a sort of a freeze state. And fight, flight, and freeze are actually progressive. So we always fight first, then we flee, then we freeze. Every time I teach this, somebody raises their hand and says, no, Megan, I never fight. That was conditioned. If you don't fight, it's because you learned it didn't work and you skip it and you go. But as instincts inside our brain, we fight, flight, freeze.

Freeze is a different part of our system. Fight and flight are the active part of the brain. And freeze is the parasympathetic nervous system, the calming part of our brain. And we go into freeze when we just want it to end. That's how we survive. I call that immobilized, right? Exactly. Right?

And there's high freeze and there's collapse freeze. We don't need to go into all the little details of it, but what, what we do know is people are more susceptible to becoming traumatized when they are in freeze without support. So when, when you couldn't fight and you couldn't flee and you got stuck and you were right there and nobody helped you and your central nervous system took on the energy, like being pummeled by waves. And what happens is, you know, the amygdala, those tiny little almond shaped things in the back of the brain that activate the fight, flight, and freeze, that process when the limbic brain is lit up, it swells, those amygdalas swell, and they cut off the communication,

the actual sort of messaging that goes from the base of the brain to our prefrontal cortex, which is where our thinking happens, which is at our forehead. So the way that I always say it is like in a trauma, it's as though your brain has a little mailman that is doing his mail route all day long, the trauma happens and the bridge that he takes with the little messages, the little electrical currents to all the normal parts of the brain, the bridge gets swept out and he can't do it. He can't get to the mailboxes. So he's kind of like throwing the mail in these little electrical currents, hoping it gets in the general. So what people experience is their hippocampus, which is responsible for formulating

memory, isn't getting the electrical circuitry that it would normally get. So you are not formulating memory properly. Or your hypothalamus, which tells you that you're hungry or it tells you that you're overly hot. It does a whole bunch of internal body regulations. That isn't getting the right mail. And so suddenly you're not getting hunger cues or you're feeling overly hungry or you're sweating all the time.

And so these are totally normal responses, but because we don't talk about them, people think, oh my God, I'm all, I probably have cancer because I'm having all these strange biophysical reactions. The most important thing about knowing that these things happen, the brain fog, which is a, is a direct result, right? To, to some, to some of this, it's a tool that our brain uses to sort of navigate the fact that we don't have the electrical currency working. And it's a tool that helps us not formulate really painful memories during this time. And also maybe not stay in a conversation

that's too overwhelming. But people who have brain fog that have never had brain fog before, because this is the first trauma they've ever been in, it is freaking terrifying. And they feel like they're going crazy. It's important for us to teach about it because there are things we can do to help regulate it. That's the most important piece is I'm not trying to take anyone's grief away. You can't do that. But the way in which that grief dysregulates the system, also, we can't really stop that necessarily from happening, but we can create some resilience and some recovery so that you get your central nervous system sort of back to a neutral faster, or maybe not neutral, but like not at an eight, maybe at a four. And that's what I define as grief work,

creating a grief practice so that we can show up for those inevitable physical responses, because what ends up happening is people will be, you know, not sleeping, not eating, have brain fog, memory loss, difficulty with multi-stepped instructions for upwards of a year. And now all we're doing is talking about the symptoms and we're going to doctor, doctor, your doctor? More than a year. Yeah. Upwards of a year. So what typically happens at me too. So I'm five years out of my mom's. I feel like my brain is just now three and a half years out, starting to come back online. But I, and I can't wait to see what we talk about in a year from now, because I would tell you every year that goes by, I'm like, wow, I was still not really well.

And I thought I was doing okay. Like I was still, when I look back at my memoir, when I read my memoir, I'm like, man, I was not well in some of these chapters. So I want to get into things you can do for resilience and recovery. But I do want to highlight because when we talk about the uniqueness, there are these standard things that happen. But like those symptoms you're talking about, the brain fog, freezing, the isolation, the exhaustion, the lack of hunger. Is it worse? do you find that it's worse in people who have compounded trauma, meaning they've had a lot of trauma already in their lives? I can see when I meet someone and I meet a lot of grievers and work with a lot of grievers now, I can automatically see by how they're doing to an extent. I was like,

oh, this one has had a lot of trauma. Yeah. And I think this is actually, I mean, one of my bones to pick sort of with the field of grief and loss is, you know, there are some percentages that are out there about who is it that has more trauma around their loss and therefore is probably going to need treatment. And the percentage is really low. It's like less than 10%. And that has never been my experience. It hasn't been my personal experience. It hasn't been my professional experience. And, you know, it's based on people sort of asking, like, did do need more help. Well, that's like asking me if I wanted pineapple juice when I didn't even know the pineapple juice existed. So saying, could I have used more help? If I don't know

what the help looks like, I'm probably going to say no, because I didn't even know what was possible. And I'm okay now. Yeah. And, or, or, you know, again, I think I would have told you I'm okay now and I wasn't as okay as I am now. So, you know, it's all kind of like in perspective wise, but yes, I really do think that there are people that still have energy inside their system. And the way we talk about it is the window of tolerance, meaning like how much you can take on before you get overwhelmed is pretty small. And so I do think people who have more trauma in their system that has been unresolved of which I would put myself in that category do have a harder time with whatever it is they are being presented with in the present. I do. And I think it's

important for people to be aware, you know, one way to look at that is ACEs scores. So you go and you look up the ACEs scores, which is Kaiser Permanente. You can go look it up online. And it says, when you've had these past experiences, you are more susceptible to trauma, any kind of trauma in your adult life. And I just think that's a good thing to know. I think it's really important Because that that actually helps us if we were to screen people with ACEs when they came into all of the places that we see people. So every kind of doctor or community or church or whatever environment, if we were to screen them, then we would know who we should be really looking towards first, who might need help when we have. I forget what it stands for, ACEs. Do you remember? The First Childhood Experiences.

OK, thank you. All right. So for someone listening, obviously this isn't going to be, this is to sort of give some guidance and, and open your eyes guys to the ideas that we're talking about here, because there isn't one of us who hasn't experienced a loss, maybe not like the death of a child, but it doesn't matter because like Megan was saying, you know, it could be a breakup. And if you are really struggling with that breakup, that doesn't mean that something is quote unquote wrong with you. So I'm hoping that if you're listening to this, you're getting a sense of like, oh, like a little light bulb maybe going off both maybe for you or for someone you

love or care about or know that this idea of compounded trauma of, and also just to understand the grievers in your life and be able to support them, whether you're a griever or not. But let's talk about this idea of resilience and recovery, and maybe a couple of things that do work to help support the brain and body through grief. So, and I want to be really clear because I think grief is sacred and I think grief is lifelong. And I think it doesn't always hurt in the same way,

but I think it is a definitive characteristic of who you are forever and ever. So when I'm talking about recovery, I'm talking about central nervous system recovery. I'm not talking about recovery like, oh, you're over. Yeah. And resilience, it's one of those words that like, I sort of hate it sometimes because we're always looking to people who have, you know, there's 90

people, 85 of them didn't make it. And we're looking to the, like the five that somehow survived and saying like, what is it that you have about you that was, you were able to survive instead of maybe looking and being like, what did the 85 need that they didn't get that would have helped them survive? So I like to define resilience as just like how quickly you're able to recover, how quickly you're able to get back into a state of connection with your energy so that you're not overwhelmed. And there are, you know, so I do distinguish early grief from sort of grief over time. And I, when I say I distinguish it, I distinguish it by you tell me what your symptoms are. And then I'll tell you those sound like early grief symptoms. You could be in early grief

symptoms 15 years after your mother died. Right? So I'm not here to talk about a timeline or any of those things, I'm saying almost like immature grief symptoms, meaning they haven't had a lot of time to develop. And those are the ones that I think are the most physical and can be the most in your mind and ruminating and really anxious and isolating. You're just, you know, like 23 to 24 hours of the day, you're thinking about your loss and you're experiencing your loss. I mean, everybody who has had profound loss knows what that is. And then over time you learn to carry it and it's less dysregulating. And so it'd be, it's still a part of your day. There are still days where it takes up your whole day, but it isn't, you know, you also have some periods of

time where you are living forward with your loss instead of just living in the experience of your loss. So when you're in the experience of your loss, which I say is similar to you were thrown out of the boat, right? You fell off the cruise ship and now you're trying not to drown that really what we're trying to do is get you to the shore and dried off. We're not trying to talk to you about your stroke and whether or not you're a good swimmer and like whether or not you were hanging over the railing. That's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to keep you alive. And so the regulation tools that we use here are really simple. They're like what you use with a baby. So one is we make sure that you are fed, that you have some macronutrients inside your

system that your body needs, like including protein and fat and carbs, that's what macronutrients are. So you're not just eating banana bread every day, which is what I did when my dad died. I just ate banana bread. I couldn't palette protein, but if I had really understood how important the amino acids are in protein, and we need to get them from food to create some of the soothing elements that your body then generates in order to put you to sleep. And in order for you to feel back in regulation. I swear if I had understood that as well as I do now, I would have eaten. You would have forced yourself. I would have eaten some turkey. I would have done it, right? So there's the making sure that you are eating food that has nutrients. You can still eat banana

bread. You just also have to have a food that has nutrients that you are able to get some movement into your body. Again, when my mom died, I sat on my porch swing for like a month because I don't think I fully understood that the movement is actually shifting the energy through your body. And everybody knows this when you're in a bad mood and you go for a run or you go dancing and your mood shifts. That's because that energy, that energy that was part of your emotions has shifted through your system. And we have to do that in grief because it's going to come back. Which is the irony. You feel like doing it, like you've just become immobilized, but it's so true. But you have to do it, right? It's the worst thing in the world, these profound losses. And the idea that we're asking grievers to do anything other than exactly what they want to do is totally unfair, except we are responsible for our health, mental health and physical health.

So walking. So I always say, just walk, walk around your block, walk for 10 minutes, walk for three minutes, walk for one minute, just 2% more than whatever movement you're doing today. And if you can add a friend in real life, that also brings connection in, right? Which is how we break through some of that isolation. Even if that friend is walking behind you and not talking to you, even if you just have them on the phone and because you can't tolerate being with someone else, still to have some element of connection is like an awesome extra credit. And I say to griever people who are

supporting grievers offer to take them for a walk, offer to take them in a car and then walk them to the lake and then walk them back from the lake and then go back something where they get outside and they get a little bit of movement in their body is really incredibly important. So those connection nerves and movement is where I always start. And those are, you know, once, once you are able to do a little bit of movement and folks do that. They, you know, they go into the grocery store and they get triggered because they see their, their grandson's favorite cereal. And now they're sobbing in the grocery store, which is like the most common thing I hear all the time. The grocery store is just laden with triggers, right? And we've all had it also being able to,

you know, we get on board other things that help right in that moment, which is like some breathwork techniques, some cross boxing or movement that is goes across the meridian line, which we know helps balance the energy across the two different systems inside the brain. And so there's a lot at the end of each chapter, you have recommendations of things you can do. One of the things you touched on that I found really interesting, because I was not this way, my mother's death, I was extremely codependent with my mother. She was my soulmate. She died about 11 years before Sammy. And that was like my worst, most impossible death, possible loss. I moved through it. Okay. I ended up with breast cancer mostly, I think, because it was sort of

grief. I wasn't processing, at least in my case, that's not to say you get cancer if you don't process your grief. But in my case, I feel like it was connected and caused just my inability to be with it, caused a lot of inflammation. But what I noticed after Sammy's death, which was really different for me, this piece, I mean, a lot was really different, but this piece is that I absolutely could not and would not talk to anyone. Oh me. Oh yeah. My husband and my son, but like my nearest and dearest were like, let me come over. They wanted to talk on the phone. I was like, no fricking way. No. Like I could not, I refused to see anyone to speak to anyone. I just, I literally felt like I was physically and emotionally in capable of it. And they would

come and just like leave a coffee on my porch, you know, just like whatever, because hoping that I would maybe open the door, but for probably a month at least, if not longer, I would not speak to anyone. What is that? Cause that is all day long. I really relate to that. And I, I don't know, but I will tell you. So I, I had a very similar experience, although I was super sneaky. So people would be like, can I come over? And I would say yes. And then I would cancel. So people didn't notice.

I mean, I knew what I was doing. They didn't notice because I would be like, oh, I woke up with a headache. I knew the moment they said, let me take you to lunch. I was not going to lunch with them, but they were not going to see me. But they a little bit sort of thought like they had a plan with me because I made it sound like it was maybe going to happen. So I do think I hid a little bit more. but so I can only answer this question for myself. And, and I do talk a lot about this and I talk a

lot about how I hated everyone, how I was just like angry at everyone and angry, angry, angry the whole time. And I'm, I'm not a particularly angry person. So that was a little bit scary to me, but my problem was I still had all my limbs. Like, even though I wasn't eating, I didn't like drop 70 pounds, even though I wasn't sleeping, I didn't have like giant bags under my eyes. I vaguely resembled the person that they knew and I was not the person that they knew. I wrote about this a lot in end of the hour in my memoir, which was like, I couldn't fucking tolerate people looking at me with the same old face as if they knew me when I was nothing like the person that they knew.

It just made me want to light myself on fire. It made me hate them. it made me feel terrified inside my own skin when people would be like, yeah, I get it. And I'm like, you don't get it. You've never even met me before. And I, the only time Laura, so my youngest son, who is a giant, he was 10 pounds when he was born, was invited to like be on a soccer team that was, I don't know, two grades older in one town over and in September. And my husband was like, oh, I don't think we can do it. We, you know, my mama died in August. It was like too much. And I was like, nope, I will take them to the soccer practices because I didn't know a soul

there. And not a single person looked at me like they knew me. And they didn't know what happened over the summer. And so people would be like, oh, you have a nice tan. Did you have a good summer? I'm like, yeah, I wrote a lot. I read a lot of books because I couldn't be anything. I couldn't be anything that made sense. So I might as well be a liar. I just like lied. And then actually the jig was up at some point, either my son told someone or the coach knew somebody and I could just see on his face like, oh, he was like, oh, she's the woman that's really struggling. And I was like, shit, it's broken. This like imaginary world that I don't know if that resonates with you, but that was no, it was partially true. I will say that it felt like and I said this to

everyone at the time, especially my husband. I was like every cell of my body has changed. I don't know what I'm becoming or who I'm going to be on the other side of this, but I'm not going to be the same person. So, you know, I hope you like her. Yeah. I hope it works out. I hope it works. I mean, I had so much anger. I was terrified that like, I was going to be angry forever. And well, let's talk about that. Cause that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about too, as women in particular, I think it's really, you know, we're not usually accustomed to anger. We have a lot of trauma around anger. We weren't allowed to be angry. Nice girls don't get angry, blah, blah, blah. No one likes an angry woman. So we don't have most of us haven't had a lot of

comfort already with anger. But, you know, and it certainly goes hand in hand with grief. If you have had a tremendous loss, you're going to be angry at some point and many points and whatever. But there is that question and there's a whole chapter on why am I so angry? And I thought it might be interesting. I mean, obviously, part of the reason you're angry is because something so important to your heart has been taken from you. Yeah. So obviously you're going to be angry, but I was wondering if you could speak to like the neurochemical piece of that as well. Well, I think it goes back to what the brain does in response to trauma. So I actually, I actually think, and this is coming from someone who I didn't, I was raised with zero anger. I

spent a lot of time in therapy, touching and getting to know my anger. And I'm great with anger. I love anger. I am irrationally angry in appropriate ways with people who are dear to me. And I can say like, I know this is petty or I know this is bad, or, you know, this is how I feel about this. And I think they did it this way. And even though a part of me is like, Megan, no one would do that. That's not real. I keep that contained and then I move through it. And then I respond to whatever made me angry with some anger. I don't respond from a place of anger, but I don't, I always acknowledge that the anger is there. I'm frustrated. I'm disappointed. I'm angry. It's in there. So I feel good about my capacity to tell the truth. I think anger is an,

is an honest emotion. I think it can be a real tool. What I think happens when we're grieving is that we are in this state again, that window of what we can tolerate. Like think about when you're driving home in traffic and you're like whistling to Mariah Carey and you know, it's annoying but like you're fine and then the next day same amount of traffic and you want to drive your car off the road it's not about the traffic it's about whatever's going on inside your system and so grief particularly sudden profound loss puts so much energy inside your system that you're like short-circuiting and i think anger is a fight response i am against you and what you're saying and this reality and the fact that I have to integrate this and this new life

that I absolutely don't want. And I think the fight response is good for us. So I, when a client comes in and they're angry, when I'm talking to a friend and they're pissed, I feel safer and more okay in that than I would if they said nothing. Yeah. But what about like, I, and this isn't making anger wrong. Cause I agree that anger is definitely our friend, but, but I do see a lot of people consciously, not only lashing out, but avoiding their sadness. Yeah. So staying accidentally stuck because they are so, and this isn't conscious, but there is so like uncomfortable and afraid of the depth of their grief and their sadness, anger is a lot more empowering, a lot more activating, and for many, a lot less scary than profound sadness. So

often what is underneath the anger is the profound sadness. And I always think about that when I see someone in the supermarket or on the street or whatever, like raging, I think, God, there must be something really soft and sad underneath there for them to be totally. But I do think that people often stay stuck in anger so that they don't have to feel the sadness. Yeah. No, I think you're totally right. And in, in, in IFS therapy, we would talk about this as a part, right? There's this internal family systems that yes. Yeah. That it's, and everybody knows this from the movie inside out, but, but the idea that like anger comes in to protect you and it's protecting the part of you that is devastated. And that actually your brain has sort of done an assessment. Like

I can be angry. I know how to do that. That's not going to destroy me, but this sadness that I have might, cause I've never done that before. Cause this is the first time I've lost a child and I'm not really sure I'm going to survive it. I mean, that's what most grievers say about profound loss. Like, I don't know how I'm going to do this. I don't think I'm going to survive it. Right. And so I hear what you're saying, which is like that angry part is usually a cover story. Right. It's like the look over here, the, you know, the tap dancer to distract you from this sadness. What, what I talk to folks about as a trauma therapist, because a lot of them will come in with some judgment. Like I should be talking about my sadness, but I'm just so angry.

We want to bring them to an awareness, right? So like bring you to the insight that often when you're angry it's a good question to wonder yeah is it maybe sadness that's that's being protected like just basic education about that but also what i say to grievers is well maybe being angry is pretty wise right now maybe what your system can handle is telling everybody to fuck off and pushing people away which yes you know what that's not a great outcome but maybe if you were to go near that deep sadness, that would be more than you can handle at this moment. And that would be a more negative outcome. So when I'm working with people in therapy, and this is often sort of a constellation in the story is I'm trying to get them to just like do 2% less of the anger

and 2% more of the sadness. So that because anything that you experience, right? I don't know that I can jump out of an airplane until I jump out of an airplane. And then when I've done it, I'm like, well, that's something I can do, but to get myself to jump out of an airplane. I mean, that could take, you know, that could take months of preparation in this work. I think it's the same, which is being able to say like, I know you need your anger. I get it. But also can we just, can we dial 2% down and dial up maybe the sadness so we can just touch it because without the skillset, without the tools, you know, we've built this curriculum that really is designed to help people every day to just have some bites, some little morsels of anger. I mean,

little morsels of grief that might include anger. We're trying to help you sort of navigate how you're going to build the muscles to carry the loss. And we're doing that by having it be a daily practice. So one of the questions, one of the prompts often is where do I feel energy in my body? How would I identify that, that energy? Right. And so if somebody really understand what you're feeling when this weekend I have these grieving mama meetups once a month and we're having a special field trip to the rage room. Um, and we're going to beat the crap out of cars and plates. And what I have found almost every time is when we move that anger, not only does it increase the dopamine levels and, you know, create this huge release, but I am also anticipating

that there's going to be a lot of tears. I mean, every time I move, it breaks through. Yeah. Tears break through. I also find, and I, and I came upon this, I share this in the podcast up at the latest Sammy update that I did a few months, I guess it was in April or May that I did of 2024. So not too long ago, uh, an episode kind of updating about Sammy. And I shared some of the things I haven't really shared before about the early days after he died. And I I've shared this with you, Megan, but I went through this whole series of metaphysical crazy things that happened. I was led to basically leave my family a week after he died and go into the Redwoods. And I was instructed that I had to go all the way into my grief or I was going to die. This is what this voice told me.

You can listen to the podcast to hear the story. And I was scared shitless of doing that. But what I discovered when I did is, and this is why I think a lot of people aren't willing to go and me too, at the time to go all the way in and to let ourselves feel is that we feel like there's not going to be a bottom. Yeah. A hundred percent. That's what everybody said. There is a bottom. There is a bottom when you let yourself feel it. And of course you need support to know how to re-regulate yourself and how to resource yourself. Not because you'll be a puddle on the floor for the rest of your life, but just for your nervous systems sake. But I do think that in some ways, you know, we definitely have to create those guardrails and make sure people have support,

but I feel like we're a little too scared of going into the pain and that it's actually by going into the pain that we are fully set free. Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the neuroscience things that I teach people, which again, this is not a, this is not a truism. Like even a rage room is not a truism or cold plunging is not a truism or therapy is not a truism nothing works perfectly for any one griever we just give a million examples of things that help in grief and the one that seems like it would be possible or appealing to you that's the one you start with but what we teach people is you have a vagus nerve the vagus nerve's job is to turn on and send out a whole series of distress signals,

which essentially sedates the body. It's the nerve that develops, fully develops around four months, which is why babies can cry out they're sleeping. They cry so loud that the vagus nerve turns on and sends in all this dopamine and all these neurochemicals and it makes the baby kind of stoned and falls asleep.

So when people are doing those cold plunges and they're feeling stoned, that's your vagal response. And so when you want that, when you want to sort of tone out the system, but it's what I say to people, I know you think you're going to cry and never stop, but you have this thing called the Vegas nerve. And what's going to happen is you're going to cry so hard that it's going to wake up, turn on and make you fall asleep. I love it. I love it. And it also raises your frequency. I think it does. All right. So there's, we could talk about this for hours. We've talked about it for an hour. We have, I know. Is there anything you want to, I mean, obviously we're going to put the book and any other resources you want us to share in the show notes, but is there anything you want to share just in closing

that I haven't asked you about that is you think is important for us? Well, you know, one of the things that I really, because I knew your story before I knew you, which I imagine is true for lots of people who are listening. One of the things that I think has been like a beautiful piece of learning to me, even what you just said about going to the Redwoods is that we are instinctively wired to figure out how to grieve. And so that even if we didn't sit here and give people the benefit of all of this education, I think people find their way to their own grief process. And for some people that's going to be the Redwoods and for other people, that's going to be starting a foundation. And for other people, I wrote three books in my grief, you know,

there's no right way, but to trust that the energy is going to move and do something you will learn from yourself in a way that's not conscious. And to allow that maybe, you know, that's really at the heart of, can anyone tell me is sort of like, look, we can do this. And I want people to find hope in that, right? Like, I don't know how anyone couldn't find it hopeful that we are on a pod. I checked myself into a mental health hospital because I was so ill after my mom died. You have shared so openly what the impact of Sammy's death was and continues to be. We're not here to tell people what to do. We're just here to sort of extend a hand and say, I know it's, it's impossible when people say to me, I can't do it. I'm like, I know you can't. I absolutely know you. And I

know you will because on how we all fucking do it. Come to my Instagram account. I'm always teaching classes. This year is going to be a big year. We're doing things at Kripalu and Omega and I'm teaching in the Cape Cod Institute in the summer. There are going to be so many opportunities to sit in conversation with me. And that's what I want. I want people who, you know, want a high touch experience of learning and, you know, on our, on my website, you can just sign up and you'll get all the newsletter letters and all those things. We really rely on hearing from other people. Our entire curriculum, the grief mentor method is built off of things that people told us help them in their grief. And every time we teach it just recently, we taught it. And somebody

said, you know, my meditation is riding my motorcycle. I've never been on a motorcycle, but as soon as they said it, I was like, oh, I'll add that to the list. Yeah. It's totally meditative. Yeah. Thanks. And so then we just keep expanding what we define as sort of the capacities that that are part of our grief practices and grief is part of our everyday experience it is whether or not we identify it as such or not but imagine if we lived in a culture where everybody was like oh well i'm i spent 30 minutes grieving this morning and then i went to the gym and then i like just imagine if people were able to not only identify the energy in their life, but also describe how they attended to it. That's my dream. Yeah. Amen. I have that

dream too. So we'll put all of that, your social media stuff, your website, the book link. We'll put all of that in the show notes, guys. Thank you, Megan, for all the work you're doing in the world and for coming on. I'm so grateful to you and the invitation to come on here and this conversation. I know you and I are going to keep up this conversation both for our platforms, but also just for us. And I know we're going to do some stuff together in the future and I can't wait. Thank you, friend.