Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Losing Sammy

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

In today’s very raw but very necessary episode, Dr. Berman discusses the recent passing of her 16-year-old son Sammy. She explains what happened that tragic night, why she decided to share it with the media, and how she has been coping during this whirlwind. She also reveals how the outpouring of support from her family and friends and even strangers have caused her to confront one of her core childhood wounds: Her inability to accept help or emotional caretaking from others due to a subconscious fear of being a burden.  But she says she has discovered: “Letting others help me helps them. When I allow myself to be comforted and supported, I offer my loved ones the opportunity to be comforting and supportive. And that truly is a gift...for both of us.”  Please join Dr. Berman’s Facebook group Parents for Safer Children or help spread her fundraiser for the Organization for Social Media Safety. This national nonprofit is the first consumer protection organization solely focused on making social media a safer place for everyone, especially for the most vulnerable like our kids. Full Link to the Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/parentsunitedagainstdrugadditctiondeath/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, a sex and relationship therapist. And for more than two decades, I've been helping people learn how to love and be loved better. And now I am so excited to introduce my new podcast, The Language of Love, a safe and inspiring space where I'm going to be answering all your calls and email questions from people just like you. My goal with the language of love, to give you all the wisdom you need to create more meaningful intimacy and lasting sexual pleasure. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Hey, this is Dr. Laura Berman on the language of love.

And I am going to try to get through this. I feel like I can finally talk to you without totally breaking down. And this podcast launch, which my team and I have been planning for so long to launch on Valentine's Day, was obviously interrupted by a huge tragedy in my life. And we decided to go ahead and launch because it was my decision because I knew, you know, I just felt like it wasn't right after everyone had bent over backwards and worked so hard to release and launch on the 14th. We just went ahead. But at the same time, even though I have four episodes ready to go and we'll be releasing those as time goes on, I felt like I needed to do

something about my boy, Sammy. And you probably have heard on the news or on social media about what went down with my son. I'm not going to spend a lot of time just because it's still so raw getting into the details of what happened, but I just want to talk a little bit about what I'm learning and what's happened since. So long and the short of it, my son, Sammy, who was 16 years old, sheltering at home with us, passed away tragically and suddenly on February 7th from a really murder is what the police are calling it. He took something that was laced with fentanyl. It only takes a few little seeds smaller than the tip of your pinky to kill you. And he had connected with a drug dealer on Snapchat. I had no idea until that point that drug dealers were

on Snapchat. And we're still waiting for the toxicology reports. But basically, what we've been able to piece together from his friends, what he's told his friends, and what the police believe is that he took either a Percocet or a Xanax that had been laced with fentanyl, and that is what killed him. And unfortunately, I've learned more about fentanyl than I ever wanted to know over the past week or so. And the drug dealers, you know, it is from China. It's synthetic. It's a synthetic opioid. Like I said, it just takes a teeny tiny, teeny little fingernail tip, two little seeds of fentanyl to kill you. It is twice as addictive as heroin. So if my beautiful boy had lived, he would have been as addicted as a heroin addict times two. And we would have been

fighting that for the rest of our lives. As painful as that would have been, at least he would still be breathing. But unfortunately, by the time we found him, he was gone. This is graphic, but I'll tell you because I think it's important that there's evidently a fentanyl death pose. So, you know, on your back, throw up, heart stops, you suffocate from aspirating your vomit. It's not pretty picture. That's what I walked in on. His brother was right in front of me, unfortunately, and walked in on it first, although I think he didn't see nearly what I did. My husband and I tried to revive him. My husband was doing CPR while I called the ambulance. They got there very quickly, worked on him for 30 minutes, but he was already gone. So that's the summary.

Now, after that, I was beside myself, as you can imagine. So I don't remember much. My youngest son and my husband have filled me in because I was going psycho. I mean, you can imagine I was wailing and screaming and keening and throwing myself around. And the worst thing that I could ever imagine happening had happened. And I was totally unprepared for it because my boy was safe at home in his room, wasn't going out with friends, wasn't going out and about. And I let both he and his younger 15-year-old brother, have a lot more privacy because how much trouble could they get into? We talked a lot through the years, obviously, about drugs. We also talked a lot about social media and responsible social media behavior. And the thing I was most worried about

was probably naked pictures, them sending or getting naked pictures and being charged with child porn, right? Or doing something or posting something that someone took a screen grab of and then it's there for time immemorial and following you around for the rest of your life. So I would have a lot of those conversations with them. And I trusted them in that regard. And both of them, let's just talk about Sammy, really, really invested in his future. He was already working on his college applications, his top choice. He really wanted to go to NYU. He wanted to study international business. He wanted to travel the world. He just asked me that morning before I found him to, which is why I found him, to come up to his room that afternoon and talk about

helping him find an internship for the summer because he thought that that would help his college resume. So he was, I trusted him. What trouble could he get into in his room? So sure, play a little, you know, it's the only way you can connect with your friends. If you want to play more video games and Snapchat and all of that stuff, go ahead, play with your friends, interact, get, you know, I want you to have this social experience given that we're all social distancing and schools closed and everything else, but it didn't occur to me that drugs could get delivered via Snapchat to our house while we were sleeping. You could just slip out of the house, meet the drug dealer. And you can find the story online, what happened and how I found out it was Snapchat

and so forth. So what happened that night as the police were still in my house and I'm just beside myself at what had happened, we now know that he's gone and they weren't able to revive him. And I just was beside myself. And I was aware of like the worst pain of grief I'd ever felt, but just rage and complete helplessness, rage and helplessness. And I don't know what the hell came over me, but it's probably because I tell you guys everything and I'm sort of an open book and I always kind of use myself to teach. You know, I'm not shy about that. And then my first instinct was just like, okay, what can I do? Something I can do to take a little bit of power back in this situation. And the first thing that came to my mind was to post on my Facebook

page because all I could think about is like, okay, maybe I can save a life tonight. I can't save my boy. I can't save myself from this pain, but maybe it will help me hold the pain if I help someone else. And you know, I always tell you that, right? I believe that with every fiber of my being. I have found it to be true for myself and the countless people that I've worked with who are going through depression, grief, whether it's after a breakup or a loss, the best thing you can do for yourself to help your mood, to give you connection, to kind of shift things and find deeper meaning is to be of service. It's one of the best things you can do if you struggle with sadness, grief, depression. So I think that's just built into my

instincts. And I barely remember doing this. I don't even know how I found this picture. I just found a picture. And I don't even remember writing the Facebook post, but I said what happened because I wanted to warn parents, like, this is my son sheltering at home, totally safe, and met up with the dealer on Snapchat. I had no idea he's gone. You know, please watch your kids. That's all I wanted to say. And all of a sudden, the next day, it just was spreading around the country. I mean, I don't know why. People die from fentanyl poisoning every day. Maybe it was because I was Oprah's girl. Maybe it was because I'm a therapist. Maybe it was because my son's a little white boy. And many people have said, and I don't disagree with them, that if it had been

kid of color, maybe there wouldn't have been the same amount. I didn't set off, set out even expecting anyone but my little community of Facebook followers or Instagram followers to get the message. And all of a sudden, every morning show, NBC nightly news, like everyone you can think of was calling and calling and calling. And my first instincts was to say, no, like I can't even talk. I am just like a funnel of tears and snot and I can't go on TV right now. And the calls just kept coming. And all of a sudden I was like, okay, each show I don't do may be one kid or one family that doesn't get the message. So I'm just going to ride this as long as I can, take it. And that's what I did for several days. I did interview, rest, fall apart,

interview, rest, fall apart. I didn't care that I had no makeup, snotting and crying on television. I just wanted to get the message out there. And clearly it needed to be out there because I was being given a platform to get the message out. So I did. And the outpouring of love and connection has been astounding and just heartbreaking and insane how many parents reached out to me. Thousands of parents barreling into my messages and inbox and on my post saying that exactly the same thing happened to them and their kid. Snapchat, drug dealer, good kid, great student, dreams of the future, stupid experimentation with something dumb showing off for their friends, whatever, or trying to be cool or just curious. And it was laced with

fentanyl and they died of fentanyl poisoning. It's not even considered an overdose. It's considered poisoning. So I started a Facebook group called Parents for Safer Children. And like in 48 hours, there were 2000 parents there and advocates sharing their stories and their love and their support. And I could not, like, I can't believe all the beautiful things, all the terrible beautiful things that are coming up as a result of my boy's tragedy and i am still reeling calculating route to avoid seeing poverty turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on the street then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away then take the next exit let's stop looking away and get in the

So, it's happening with me because many of you have been wanting to know. And the one thing I can tell you, and you know this about me if you've listened to my shows or followed me through the years, my mantra is heal, learn, teach. Heal, learn, teach. Heal, learn, teach. For someone else, it may be heal, learn, make art, or heal, learn, create, or something else. For me, it's heal, learn, teach.

It always has been. And when I go through things, I process, I heal, I learn, I work with healers, I open my heart to the process, and then eventually it helps my healing, it integrates my healing when I can bring it back to you. So know that I will be doing that. Not for a while, because I got to get through a little bit more of this first. But I can tell you what I'm learning so far, because I'm learning a lot. I am learning, first of all, that when I let people help me, I'm actually helping them.

And that for me, and I'm not kidding when I say I was conceived by my parents to be a caretaker and a pleaser. My dad was heading off to Vietnam and they decided to get pregnant with me while he was gone so she would have peace of him. My sister was already there, but they wanted two children and she'd have a little baby to cuddle and to sleep with and to nurse. And it would keep her kind of feeling love and affection, you know, because my sister was already four years old and going, you know, she was busy mommy and me stuff and

wasn't a little cuddly baby anymore. And that's what I did. I came out of my mother and I was her little bankie until my dad came back three months later. And then I was their emotional caretaker. And in my family, I just never had a lot of needs. I couldn't because they either wouldn't be met because my mother, bless her heart, was an amazing woman and an amazing mother.

Both of them were amazing parents in many ways. But emotionally, they struggled, each of them in their own ways. And I knew from a very early age that the only way that I could get attention from my mother was by taking care of her and that it was a burden when I was really needy or I was really broken or I was falling apart. They just didn't have the bandwidth to deal with that. And so from the time I was really little, just like, let's look at the bright side, not just the shadow side. That's why I became a healer and a therapist. I'm really good at it because I've spent my whole life in training, being intuitive to what's going on with other people, what would help them feel

better? What is it that they really need to know? You know, my work in the world is around that, but in my personal relationships, you know, friendships, whatever, I really struggle to receive because it's very uncomfortable for me. And the first place my mind goes is, oh, I'm a burden or like, okay, I'll accept this from you and be really gracious if you give me a compliment or a gift or whatever. But like, you know, I don't want to take too much from you because then you'll be sick of me or you'll find me a burden or I'll, you know, just take too much. There's a tipping point where I can take too much. That was sort of the undercurrent.

And it wasn't something I was really conscious of until this. And basically, what I very quickly realized is that people needed to give to me because this is something, unlike the times that I've gone through grief in the past, whether it was my first marriage suddenly ending, or my oldest son who's fine today, but being diagnosed with leukemia at age three, or my mother dying, who was like my soulmate, or my father dying after that, or my second mother or Sasa dying after that, you know, with all of those things, of course I was in the worst grief I could imagine feeling, but, and people were extremely empathetic, but I would say they were more sympathetic, right? Because many of them had

gone through the loss of a parent. It's sort of a rite of passage. It's horrible. Like everybody kind of expects it, even though it's horrible. Right. But it's like every parent in the country, every mother and father feels this so deeply. Maybe some of them because they love me or care about me, but I would say across the board, it's because anyone who's a parent, really anyone who's anyone, but certainly anyone who's a parent feels this extremely personally. It's not just like pain for me. It's like personal pain. And I didn't realize that piece. And so I started letting people give. And it was really uncomfortable and to help. And it was really uncomfortable, but I just surrendered. And all I would say to them is like, yes, I accept your offer.

I surrender to accepting. Thank you. It's been so amazing to me how beautiful, even though it's horrible. I mean, look what happened to my son and there are evildoers out there. I mean, your heart has to be so dark to sell drugs to anyone, much less a child, much less laced with fentanyl so you can make an addict of them if you don't kill them. You have to be so dark to do something like that. And yet there is so much beauty in the world. And there are so many beautiful people. And everyone around me has just, I didn't know I could feel energetically the love to this extent. And that piece has been really beautiful. And that's a big thing for me to learn. And I think something that we all need to learn about surrender

and softening. And I told my husband, we had this conversation. He's like, we're going to get through this. I'm not leaving you. I love you. And I said, I feel the same, but you need to know I'm not going to be the same person on the other side of that. Like I can feel the cells inside me discombobulating and recombobulating, if that makes sense. Like I am not going to be the same person on the other side of this. I don't know where even where the other side is, but I know I will never be the same person. And, you know, I don't know what that means, but I know I love you. And I, you know, I hope that that's okay. And he, you know, we'll see, right? Like he, of course, is like, of course it's okay. I'm not going to be, you know, but, but it is this weird feeling.

like I don't know what I'm gonna who I'm gonna end up still be me but I don't feel the same calculating route to avoid seeing poverty turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on the street then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away then take the next exit let's stop looking away and get in the of rising poverty your donations help the united way fight poverty in thousands of ways like providing food shelter and crisis prevention donate today at unitedwaygt.org and this weekend so there's been so much press i've done every morning show that i did dr oz dr phil tamron hall who else uh dr oz dr phil tamron hall the doctors you name it right

And I'm doing a lot of those over the week. And then I'm stopping. I just can't do anymore. And I've decided that I'm going to go away. I talked to my husband and my son about this. And I'm going to go away by myself with a couple of my very dear soul friends who are also healers, who I don't have to take care of at all, and who can really hold a lot, a lot, a lot of stuff.

And they are going to come with me. We're going to go out into the redwoods and I'm going to spend a week there just off the grid and just howling and birthing my pain into the mother tree's roots and moving this because what I learned already through grief in the past, which was one gajillionth of the grief of losing this child, right? Like I thought losing my mother was the worst thing that had ever happened. But what I learned from that was that I am not someone, in fact, none of us are, but I certainly am not someone who can just hold grief in. I have to be able to be totally present with the pain,

go all the way into it and release it from my body, or I tend to get sick. Those of you who know my story know that I ended up with breast cancer in the same breast my mother died from less than a year after she went. I'm way too empathic. I hold way too much. And if I stay home with my husband and my son, they will say I don't need to be strong, but I do. I can't fall apart. And they would be really scared if I fell apart in the way that I need to. So I'm going to be doing that for a week. And then my hope is that when I come back from that, I'll have a part two for you. I'll have a part two because there will be more in the investigation that will become apparent. They've got his cell phone and his computer and his friend's stuff and codes and

all sorts of things. So there will be more information there. I don't know if we'll have the toxicology reports back. I hope we will. So I'll have more of an understanding of exactly what happened. But I think most of all, I will have fully surrendered. And I can tell you, because even when I had to fully surrender when I had breast cancer 10 years ago, I was also the mother of three young kids and I couldn't totally decompensate. I certainly couldn't leave for a week and go do it. And so I've never done this before. I have never surrendered myself 100% to pain without anything but presence for more than a few hours at a time. So this is going to be deep and I think I'm going to learn a lot and I think I will release

a lot and I will be looking forward to sharing it with you. In the meantime, I'm going to be posting a lot on social media. My team will be while I'm gone about any appearances that are airing or other information, support groups, you know, we'll keep going. I am just going to go on an odyssey, basically, a deep, painful, painful odyssey. And one of the things that I know I have to really go into, among a million others, is just the insurmountable pain and guilt. For the past week since he has died, I have replayed almost every second of this child's

life, thinking about when he was three years old, what if I had taken him out of that school and put him in another one? What if every step of the way, what did I do or not do that might've ultimately led him to make such a dumb, fatal decision? And then at the same time, I think about myself and pretty much everyone I know in high school. Like we experimented with stuff. We did stupid stuff. I did stupid stuff all the time. I mean, I was a good girl. I got good grades, but like I did stuff, you know, and I tried stuff. And every person in my age group that I know almost tried stuff. And we can't do that anymore. These kids cannot do that anymore because these evil drug

dealers all over the country, it's not just in California, hundreds of thousands of deaths from fentanyl laced, you name it. They can lace it into marijuana. They can lace it into Coke. They can lace it into Percocet, Xanax, whatever you're ordering. You do not order street drugs. You do not take street drugs. You do not take anything that anyone gives you. You do not take anything that is not a prescription because chances are it has fentanyl in it. And so I just, I go back and forth in my head, was this just stupid? Because he'd never done hard stuff before. He was bored. He was stuck at home. He had a menu of options that were going to be delivered to his door. Okay, I'll take a Percocet or Xanax, see how that feels. So many kids do that.

Doesn't make it okay. I'm still blaming myself, but please be careful, okay? And please keep the love coming because I can't tell you how much it has meant to me. Not just the love of a community I didn't even realize loved me as much as they did and care as much as they have. But just the wider community of the world and of the country and of you and the response to supporting the podcast, which was a really hard decision to launch in the middle of this. But Sammy was like so into it and I just couldn't do that to my team. And so I thank you for supporting that too. I thank you for supporting me. Just keep the love coming and be careful and use my son. If you have children, use him as a teachable moment because

we know if you look at anyone who has a teenager, we can talk to them till we're blue in the face and they listen, but nothing has the credibility that their peers have. And so if they can look at my boy and see themselves relate to him on some level, maybe the message will get through that this is really serious and really dangerous. And keep watching on the support group because I think once I can talk and walk and think again, you will see me doing a lot more advocacy than ever before to hold social media accountable for helping the police find these killers, for raising awareness around social media safety, educating children, educating families. I mean, I see that somewhere far away, but we all have to do this together. So I thank you from the bottom of my

totally shattered heart. And I remember what I always tell you, that even though it feels like I don't know how I'm going to breathe again and that my heart is like completely destroyed, I know that the heart doesn't break it just bends and I will eventually be okay and when I'm really really quiet and I breathe really deeply and I can loosen the muscles in my chest and I put all of my conscious awareness into the center center center of my heart I can feel him there. I can feel the sweetness. I can feel his energy, the energy that I felt every day when I hugged him when he came down in the morning, even if he just stood there with his arms at his side and tolerated me hugging him, I could feel it. And I feel it in there. And I never

knew that either, that when they say you carry them in your heart, that's literal. You really do. So if you're a mama or a sibling or a papa or somebody who lost someone, whether it was a child to a disaster like this or anyone, just know that as always, we're all in this together and I feel you and I hope you can feel my love back. And we'll just keep the conversation going along with some real advice. I mean, I don't want to stop giving you advice. It's not all about grief, death and dying and me and my son. We're going to keep talking about sex, love and relationships. I have some more episodes that I recorded before this that have some really valuable advice. So we'll keep that going as well. And hopefully you'll keep listening and we'll keep talking

more to come, but I will see you next time on the language of love. Calculating route to avoid seeing poverty. Turn left to bypass the unhoused youth sleeping on the street. Then keep right to skip by the lines of people waiting for food. Steer clear of the crowded shelter turning people away. Then take the next exit. Let's stop looking away and get in the way of rising poverty. Your donations help the United Way fight poverty in thousands of ways.

Like providing food, shelter and crisis prevention. prevention donate today at unitedwaygt.org where some see heroes and others see egos bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes while others follow the noise