Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - How to Live and Love Again After Loss

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

When someone you love dies, people tell you to “move on,” but what does that even mean? How do you move forward when your heart still feels stuck in yesterday?  In this Language of Love session, I answer a question from Susan, who lost her partner a year ago and still feels like she’s just going through the motions. We talk about why grief has no timeline, why some hearts feel it more deeply than others, and how to begin healing not by letting go, but by learning to hold love differently. Because grief isn’t something to get over, it’s something to move through. We explore:  Why there’s no “right time” to stop grieving How to move through pain without getting lost in it Why feeling your feelings is the only way to release them The six pillars of grief healing and how they can support you in your journey Why your loved one’s energy never disappears, it simply changes form How to stay connected to someone you’ve lost through love, not longing What it means to become a more awakened version of yourself through grief If you’ve ever felt pressure to “get over it,” this episode will remind you that healing is not about forgetting. It’s about remembering differently. Remember to visit my website and explore The Grief Healing Collective, a community designed to support your healing with resources, practices, and connection. You can also check out my Good Grief Course for deeper guidance on navigating loss with compassion and understanding. And if you’d like to send your questions or join a future Language of Love session, reach out at [e-mail],  I’d love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman, and for the last 30 years, I've been helping people learn to love and be loved better. Welcome to the Language of Love Sessions. This is where I get to work with you one-on-one, on air. You, my listeners, my goal in these sessions is to empower you to enjoy better relationships, both with others and with yourself, and to help you embrace how precious and sacred your body, your love life, and your sexuality really is. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Welcome to Language of Love Sessions, where I get to your specific issues, questions, concerns

around sex, love, relationships, grief, trauma, anything to do with helping you love and be loved better and heal. I am here for. So remember, if you have a question you want answered, you can always email me at languageoflovepod at gmail.com. You can email your question or you can even ask it on Zoom with me. We'll have a face-to-face, which I always love. I love meeting you and connecting with you that way. Susan emailed a question. She says, Dr. Berman, I lost my partner a year ago, and I still feel like I'm just going through the motions. People tell me to move on, but I don't even know what that looks like. How do you begin to live and love again after that kind of loss? Susan, I'm so sorry for your loss, and it drives me crazy when people say

it's time to move on. First of all, there is no timeline in grief. There's so many variables that go into it, how many other losses you have, whether you have a history of trauma, how the loss happened, how traumatic it was, how close you were to that person, how long an illness was. There's so many different variables, plus just your general personality and constitution. Some of us are a lot more sensitive. There's a theory in the therapeutic world, which I think is really beautiful, called dandelions and orchids. And it's really about our basic constitution. And some of us are dandelions, which means that we tend to be take things on the chin. We tend to just naturally be a lot more resilient. It's really a lot of it

is how we're born and our nervous system. And a lot of it is what we've been through in our life and how much support we've gotten or not. But the dandelions, not that they don't feel pain and go through loss and grief and everything else, but they tend to kind of bounce back a little easier or smoother than the orchids who just are more sensitive. These tend to be empaths. These tend to be people who feel things very, very deeply and who have very sensitive nervous systems. And there are wonderful gifts in that,

but it does mean that these upheavals and painful things that happen, especially grief and loss, can be really hard to move through. The most important thing I can tell you is do not try to do this alone. None of us are meant to grieve alone. We are meant to grieve in community.

We were designed to grieve in our tribe, with our whole tribe surrounding us and holding us through it, with others who have gone through it, shepherding us through it. And so, Susan, if you haven't joined a widow's group, I really encourage you to do that. And I also would love for you to join us

on the Grief Healing Collective. So if you go to drlauraberman.com forward slash grief healing, you can learn all about it. It's a beautiful community with so many resources. And what I do on that membership platform is a whole community of grievers. So you find people and you connect to people who really understand loss.

Is that I give you so many tools for moving in a healthy, integrated way through grief. For instance, one of the biggest thing that I see that keeps people kind of stuck in the grief process is not being willing because of fear and because you natural and the natural fear that you won't come out of it, right? If you open that Pandora's box, but to allow yourself to feel some of the pain, to really go all the way in to the bottom. 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. Now, what that looks like in action,

and I have lots of resources on the Grief Healing Collective to support you through this, but what it looks like in action is really making a safe spot for you in your home or in private to allow yourself to really scan your body and go into where the pain or the sadness or the loss is being held and to allow yourself to fully express it

in whatever way it wants to move for you in the moment. So it may be screaming into a pillow, it may be wailing, it may be crying hysterically. Now the fear is, hey, I need to function. I'm afraid that if I really let myself feel the depth and breadth of what I'm feeling right now, the pain, that I won't come out of it, that I'll be carried away,

that there won't be a bottom in this ocean of pain. And what I can promise you is that if you allow yourself to feel it and just let your body move it, that doesn't mean you're thinking and analyzing and remembering and beating yourself up and everything else. You're just, even without thought, letting your body feel it. Then it lasts 10 to 15 minutes. You do hit a bottom. It's like a sandbar, right? And you end up feeling so much lighter and so much clearer because the key with grief is not only to address guilt issues and what ifs, but to do the things that heal the mind,

body, and spirit. So what I teach you and teach grievers, whether I'm working with them as a therapist or whether we're working together in the Grief Healing Collective, is I talk about these six pillars of grief healing. And they involve spending time in nature, which is unbelievably healing and will raise your vibration and improve your mood automatically. to engage in creative pursuits, whatever they are, painting, pottery, writing, whatever, that will move you into flow and out of your thinking brain. To certainly, with regard to the thinking brain, talk and understand the cognitive aspects of grief, the way that your brain is changing, at least temporarily, as your brain tries to adjust to this person who's been so integral to your life, no longer being there, right? And the guilt that so many of us feel and

the what ifs and the shoulda, woulda, couldas, and all of those things are really important to address. As is your community. That's the fifth pillar, really making sure that you are surrounded by people who are not telling you to move on, but who are supporting you and walking by your side in grief. And we talk about how to build that community, how to recognize the friends that maybe you don't necessarily have to let go of completely, but maybe go to your outer circle and how to find people who are really can be in your inner circle. And one of the places you're going to find those is in those widows groups and or in the grief healing collective. And the final pillar is the spiritual piece. And that I don't mean in a religious sense. I mean understanding

and learning about how we are all pure energy. When we look at us, if we were to look at ourselves through an atomic microscope, we would see that we aren't solid. We are vibrating atoms. We are vibrating atomic energy. We are made of energy.

And energy, and this is scientifically proven, it's quantum physics, it is the truth. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change form. So when our loved ones die, they don't really die. They transition into another form. And one of the things I love teaching people, and I bring on so many teachers and amazing mediums and other kinds of teachers to help explain this, but you can have a continued

relationship with your partner on the other side. And once you understand that and start tapping into that, does that move your healing so much further and it makes it so much easier to hold. So all of this is to say there is nothing wrong with you and the way per your question you begin to live and love again after this kind of loss is by allowing yourself to heal with the right kind of support and with the right kind of community. I hope that helps.

I'm sending you so much love, Susan. And you know that I know and understand grief. And I can tell you, you absolutely can move through this and become a more empowered, tapped and tuned in version of yourself. Love again, live again. Absolutely, without a doubt.

You just have to be willing to go into healing. Thanks for listening to the Language of Love sessions. And remember, I'm here for you always, helping you love and be loved better. Oh, my God.