Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Losing Sammy: A Very Personal Update on My Grief Journey

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

What if the most impossible loss turns out to set you free in ways you couldn’t imagine?  What if instead of going through loss you could grow through it?  What if you become a more self-actualized, tapped-in and tuned-in empowered version of yourself, because of what you’ve been through (not in spite of it)?  What if love really lives forever and you can learn to continue a relationship with your loved ones on the other side?  What if you didn’t have to go through terrible loss alone or struggle to find the right kind of support or community who understands?  These are questions I couldn’t imagine having, much less answering over three years ago when my son Sammy was killed. Grief became my unwelcome companion, but strangely, it also became my greatest teacher. Healing from loss is messy, unpredictable, and deeply personal. Now, I'm on a mission fueled by passion—to help others like me find their own paths through grief and toward spiritual renewal. Join me as I share my story, the hard-won lessons, and how we can all navigate the stormy seas of grief with grace and resilience. This is what we explore: The transformative power of allowing oneself to fully experience and process pain The interconnectedness of grief and spirituality The importance of embodiment, nature exposure, spirit connection, tribe, creative expression, and cognitive thinking in the grief healing journey The therapeutic value of creative expression and cognitive thinking in understanding the stages of grief My personal journey of grief and the resources and programs I offer for individuals seeking support and guidance For those in need of more support and guidance, check out the Good Grief course on my website along with other resources and programs aimed at assisting individuals through their grief journey. Remember, grief is not merely a destination but a transformative journey. 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 just like you learn to love and be loved better. Welcome to the Language of Love Bites, where I tackle your most asked questions and requested topics. These episodes are designed to be fun, quick and to the point. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. It's been a really long time since I have updated you on my grief journey. I mean, certainly if you follow me on social media, I'm talking about it all the time. And if you get my newsletters, I'm writing about it all the time, but I haven't made a podcast about it. I've realized in two and a half years, it's been almost three and a half years

since losing Sammy and I made those first couple of podcasts not long after he died talking about what happened that a drug dealer had contacted him via snapchat and sent him a colorful menu of drugs to try this is while we were under the stay-at-home order during COVID and he hadn't been in school in a year and my deal with the kids I have my two youngest still living at home, Sammy, who was 16, and his little brother Jackson, who was 15, our rule of thumb was like, look, you can't go out and play. You can't hang with your friends. You can't. Sammy couldn't play football. He was on the football team. He was a straight A student. You can hang on social media because that's your only way to connect as long as you get your schoolwork done and keep your

grades up. And they did. I had no idea at that point, clueless as I was, that drug dealers and pedophiles and all kinds of nefarious doers prey on our kids on social media and are matched with them and sent by the algorithm to them. I had zero idea back then. So the only thing I was worried about is one of them posting naked pictures or saying something inappropriate. So we would talk about those things. I had no idea that a drug dealer could connect with my son, offer him drugs and deliver them to the house as easily as a pizza while we were sleeping, which is what happened because good kids make dumb decisions, especially when they're isolated and bored, which is what happened. Unfortunately, it was counterfeit and it was pure fentanyl,

which I also didn't know about at the time. I didn't even know about fentanyl, which is 30 times more powerful than morphine and just as many times more addictive than heroin. So if he had lived, he would have been a serious addict, but he did not. And I found him dead on the floor in his room on a Super Bowl Sunday in 2021, February 7th. And our entire life, as you can imagine, changed and imploded, at least my life imploded. And the truth is, it created an earthquake through our home, through my heart. Any parent, anyone can imagine that, what it would be to lose a child, especially so suddenly or any way. And I didn't even know. it felt like there was an elephant sitting on my chest. I could barely breathe. I could barely

function. Now, I'm going to share a story with you that I haven't shared publicly before, but I think is really important because this was the beginning of what got me to where I am today. So it had only been a few days after Sammy died, and I was sitting on the beach, which was my healing place, just trying to keep breathing when I heard a voice. Now, that had never happened before. I'd certainly known things. I've always kind of known things and sometimes even seen things when I'm like working with a client and I'm really tapped in and tuned in.

I would see kind of movies almost in my mind's eye of where their wounding started or know things about people that there was no way I could know. But I'd never heard anything, you know, never heard a voice. and this voice which was very booming and male asked me a question and it said and it was like inside my head but it wasn't my voice it was a loud male voice and it said do you want to live or die now that may seem like an obvious question to some but when the worst thing has happened to you it's kind of up for grabs in my case it wasn't even an option that I was going to kill myself I'm not someone who tends to be suicidal.

And also, I had my other two kids and my husband and a beautiful life, and I did not want to kill myself. But I also knew, inherent in the question, was that I could let myself go and let myself get sick. I had already had the experience when my mother died 10 years earlier, which was the worst possible loss I could have ever imagined before Sammy. And it devastated me. but I was filming a show for the Oprah Winfrey network. I had a five day a week live talk radio

show. I had all these things happening and I didn't have time to grieve and I didn't want to grieve. I mean, who the hell wants to? So I just kind of didn't, I just kept moving forward and I sort of bypassed it and I stuffed it down. And within a year of my mother dying of metastasized breast cancer. I had breast cancer with no risk factors, no genetic precursors. I had breast cancer in the same breast she did. And I had to completely stop my life, go through a mastectomy, reconstruction, chemotherapy. It was an extremely aggressive cancer, the whole thing. And I knew even back then, 10 years before, that that was because, and we know this, we know we all have cancer cells in our body this is what the science now understands and it's really the inflammation

in our system that causes you know and there are obviously other factors toxins and and genetic predisposition but but the inflammation is what causes the cancer cells to grow and emotional inflammation emotional discord depression anxiety unexpressed grief causes inflammation and so I knew even back when I was diagnosed with breast cancer that it was in large part because there was no other explanation I didn't have any other risk factors that it was unexpressed grief and I've seen it time and time again through the years and in mass since Sammy died because after he died and I've already shared this in the prior podcast it kind of went viral and the next thing I knew I like forced myself to go on all these news shows for the first week after he died because I

kept thinking like each time will at least save one child. And I just couldn't stop trying to save other families from this fate. I still can't stop trying to save them because it can be stopped. You know, it can. We can. And nobody knew about it. I didn't know about it. So I wanted to spread the word. So after I go on all these news shows, I'm getting thousands upon thousands of parents reaching out to me on social media saying the same thing happened to us, the same thing happened to my child. We had to create a Facebook support group called the Parents Collective that now has, I think, like 13,000 parents on there, all of whom have lost their children to social media, in particular to fentanyl, but all kinds of risks and social media harms. But through that,

I've obviously connected with so many parents and so many of them have ended up with cancers, strokes, heart attacks. You really can. There's all this new research that you can actually die of a broken heart. So I knew that just from my own experience and from my life experience, what this question meant,

that while I wouldn't kill myself, I could let myself die. I could, and I could stop living. And I was in enough pain to do that, but I knew I didn't want to. And so I said, no, I want to live. And when I said that, it's one of those things that was so physical and emotional, it's hard to articulate and put into words.

The only way I can explain it is that my entire body, it felt like a drug rushing through me. My entire body was flooded with love and grace and awareness, the physical sensation of the awareness of what an insanely miraculous priceless gift it is to be here having this human experience now i already knew that we aren't humans having a spiritual experience we're spirits having a human experience i already know knew that souls are eternal and that i and you and all of us are eternal souls and we are inhabiting these bodies for as long as we are here. But I had the physical and emotional experience of it. And it was like, I could see my life, the miracle of my life

flash before my eyes. So what I mean by that is I could see my father's sperm and my mother's egg coming together. I could see, and it was so rapid and so instantaneous, right? But I could see the whole thing and the miracle that it was that that sperm and that egg got together, grew into this embryo that became a fetus and a baby and me and that I survived birth and I survived my insane family and I survived all the hardships I had survived. To be here now is insane. It's insane that any of us are here now. And I really got it on such a visceral level. And so I said it loud as I could on the empty COVID fearful beach where nobody was with seagulls keeping me company. Yes, I want to live. And so then the voice said, well, if you want to live, you need to leave your family

behind. Just basically said, go alone to the woods or somewhere away from your family and feel all of the pain, because if you don't, you're going to die. Now, that was the last thing I wanted to do. I couldn't imagine going all the way into the pain because the pain I was in already was more than I could barely handle, much less just a few days after my son died. Imagine going to my husband and being like, dude, I'm taking off. Bye bye by myself. See ya. Leave him alone with our youngest son who was completely rattled. But when a loud booming male voice tells you you're going to die, if you don't do something, at least I, I had to do it. Like I just didn't have a choice. So I went home to my poor husband. I was like, I need to leave and go away for a week

to feel all of my pain or I'm going to die. And he doesn't believe in any of this metaphysical stuff that I experience and know is true. And we coexist that way and in a beautiful, respectful way, but he didn't even say a word. He, I don't know whether he was just so shell-shocked or he had his own moment of grace, but he just said, okay, you do whatever you need to do. So I left with my dear friend, one of my besties, Tina Cameron, who is my ride or die and just masterful. She can hold so much stuff. She doesn't get affected by like big emotions. She doesn't need to fix things she's just a really good space holder and she was like my grief concierge she came and picked my ass up at my house I just threw I don't even know what I packed I just put like

sweats and a toothbrush in a bag and my weighted blanket and she came and picked me up and I don't even remember the ride and we went to 1440 Multiversity and I shared about that in one of my podcasts about I think it was part two or part three after losing Sammy and I made a video that you can see on YouTube about my journey that week. But I haven't ever talked about what led me to make that journey. And what I found during that week, going all the way in and allowing myself

to completely soften into the pain was life-changing. And I discovered that I, you know, I certainly wasn't healed because I'm still not healed, but I was completely transformed and I could see the path to healing. It was illuminated for me and I knew what I needed to do to heal and heal. I have now, I had no idea at the time that you could not only survive this kind of loss, which is all I was really focused on. you could thrive with this loss. I had no idea that you could live with loss in a way that didn't feel like a burden. I remember I had this great aunt Esther who was my grandmother's sister and

she was, when I was born, by the time I was born, she was a widow and her only son had died at age 25 in a diving accident. And she was the only one I knew at that point and for many years whose child had died. But it was something that the family talked about in hushed tones. And they would say this thing like, you never get over something like that. And that I remember, I can still feel it in my body. I remember that felt so petrifying to be in emotional pain that you could never get over to have like this anvil around your neck of pain that you had to live with and I would look at Ann Esther and just feel such sorrow for her and such fear of like that idea but it's actually not true you absolutely can I mean if you stay stuck and you don't do the

healing you can and you will feel that but you absolutely you don't you can't just get over it but you can absolutely go forward and get to a place where when the memories come, when you suddenly see a picture of that person, when you think about the loss, that you can become, the best way I can describe it, a masterful surfer of the waves of grief, which will come your whole life after this kind of loss. Now, in the beginning, after a huge loss, any kind of huge loss it's like tsunami waves that are one after the other after the other you can barely catch your breath but slowly over time those waves lessen they become less intense and they're further and further apart but they still come and sometimes they're huge sometimes it's

just like a massive wave out of the blue but you know how to surf it and most of the time the waves are like just beautiful visitors that I'm like, oh, hello, I'll just surf this and then go on with my day. 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 I wanted to share with you because what has happened as a result of this now three years out, I can tell you that because of my grief journey, not in spite of it, my life has transformed in the most beautiful ways I could have ever imagined. Now, while I would hand everything back in a split second, if I could have my sweet boy Sammy back and squeeze him again and hug him again and love him again in person, the gifts that I've received as a result of going through this fire,

they're still being unpacked. But I can tell you that I am profoundly more self-actualized, more fulfilled, more authentic, and yes, an even more joy-filled version of myself than I was before losing Sammy. And let me just talk to you for a second about the joy piece, because here's something I had no idea about. The deeper you are willing to go into sadness and fear and loss, the deeper you allow yourself to feel it, the crazy thing is the more joy you can feel as well. It kind of stretches your capacity to feel when you allow yourself to go into the depths of pain. And what I found when I did that week at 1440 Multiversity and have continued to find ever since, not only with myself, but with the hundreds of people

that I've helped move through this process, is that we fear that when we go into the pain, it will take us over and there'll be no bottom. But what I immediately realized when I finally let myself do it was, and granted, I had lots of support at first, but what I learned was that I did hit a bottom. it only lasted the whole thing maybe five to seven minutes of pure emotional release and then I felt lighter it felt like taking the hugest most constipated poop that you've been holding and in pain and then you take it and that relief that happens that's the only thing I can articulate that's similar to the relief of a huge emotional release and it doesn't mean it's all

gone then, right? That's just that part of it is released and you feel lighter and you feel clearer and you've stretched your capacity. That's what I didn't know is that you stretch your capacity. So I have a sense of freedom and even connection to the spirit world that I didn't know was possible. Now I've talked to a lot of and interview a lot of metaphysical people on this show and mediums and psychics and all kinds of people who have helped me connect more deeply with Sammy and help me connect to my own capacity to connect with him. But what I've also learned from them is that very often, and in some ways, the spirit world has said this through people, that that's one of the things that grief and tremendous loss is designed for.

That we experience tremendous loss to break us open and to call us back to spirit because the desire to continue the connection with that loved one who is left is so profound that it will open us up to the possibility of that in a way that we may not have been open before we lost that person. And grief really is a portal. It is a portal that if you are willing to, and it requires a lot of cojones, a lot of courageousness and a lot of willingness to go all the way in. But if you are willing to go all the way in, it is a portal. One of the ways that I just described this to my girlfriend when I was trying to put it into words is that what happens when you go into that portal. So you remember that old, the little children's game, chutes and ladders. And when you would land

on the bottom of the ladder, you would kind of go right up to the next level. This is like a chute That's a ladder. When you go into it, you go in. But it shoots you up to a whole new level of clarity, awareness, attunement, upgrade. It's an upgrade. And it's profound. And it hasn't just been me that this has happened to, you know, and I wasn't sure at first. So one of the things I promised myself after that week at 1440 was that I was going to what it was so profound for me that I was going to one day bring a group of mamas, grieving mamas back to this sacred place. And I encourage you to watch the YouTube video or listen to the podcast I did about it. It was profound that I was going to bring them back to do to have that experience and to help them heal. And I finally did it this past spring. And I had 66 mamas busted our butts raising the money. Tina was helping me co-produce the whole thing and helped me raise the money.

So did so many of my other friends and colleagues. And we were able to give partial or full scholarships to 40 mamas or 50 mamas almost. We had 66 there. And I was just hopeful that what had worked for me, I'm going to tell you in a minute what I created, the different components that I now know are fundamental to not only surviving grief, but thriving through it. I was hopeful that maybe one, two, three, 10 might have the experience. I was beside myself because every one of those 66 mamas, I could visually see an insane difference. The way they looked, the way they carried themselves, the way their bodies were

held, the smiles on their faces. And every single one of them shared how profoundly transformed they felt and how they, you know, I said to them in the beginning, I have only three goals, three very lofty goals, but three goals for this retreat. And it was a four-day retreat at the same place, 1440 Multiversity, who also helped me raise a lot of the money. I said, I want you to be able to see a path to healing, see even just a glimmer of the light at the end of the tunnel and know how to get there

and have the skills and the tools and the techniques and the capacity to do that. That's number one. Number two, I want you to find sisters here because we absolutely unequivocally can't do this alone. It's so hard to grieve alone. everybody expects you to be okay everybody's waiting for you to get over it everyone's trying to fix it I had no idea because I've done a lot of group therapy led a lot of group therapy I

haven't been in a lot I'm not one of those people that does groups very much I'll do friend groups but I don't do group therapy and I had no idea how profoundly important being with others who intimately understand your pain and with whom you don't have to pretend and don't have to be okay how profoundly healing just that is. And that we need those soulmates on our journey. And I said to them, I want you to, my second goal is that you find sisters here, sisters that can profoundly understand your pain and walk this journey with you. And the third goal I had was that I wanted them to begin to feel around the edges of how they actually can continue to have a profound and beautiful relationship with their loved one on the other side. It's

different. In many ways, it's like a very long distance relationship and you can't hug them and smell them and all of that, but you can feel them and you can communicate in a two-way communication with them. And energy, and we are all pure atomic energy. We know that from quantum physics. Energy cannot be created or destroyed we also know that scientifically it's been proven energy cannot be created and it cannot be destroyed it can only be transformed so when we die our bodies go but the energy of us the essence of us is eternal and can be tapped into and tuned into so that was my third goal that they begin to feel that and have that experience and they did all three of those goals the mamas were have stayed in touch they've continued to support each other they've built

friendships for life they are using their tools and techniques they are open and each one of them had an experience of a communication with where they understood that love lives forever and that their children are still right there beyond the veil something that I know so intimately in my experience with Sammy and I'm still learning to have a two-way relationship with him and I'm still learning not to connect with him as my 16-year-old boo-boo that I knew, but as the eternal brilliant soul that is a hundred times more wiser than I am because he's back with holy oneness. He's got access to all of it. But I'm learning and I feel him all the time and I feel his communication and his support and his love all the time. So here are the components that should be part of and

must be part of every grief healing journey, no matter what your loss was. If you've suffered a tremendous loss and you want to heal, here's what you need. These are the ingredients. First, embodiment. What I mean by that is being in the body, which we leave when we have the trauma of loss. I mean, we leave it for a lot of reasons, but this is where the somatic experiencing, the going all the way into your feelings, body work, sound healing, mastering the mind-body connections, processing those emotions so that you don't get the physical ailments. Okay, that's the embodiment piece. The next is one of the most powerful healers, mother nature, exposure and time with her, forest bathing. I've shared with you many times in

different contexts here that there's all of this beautiful evidence, you know, back to us being pure, vibrational, energetic beings. And this is what my book, Quantum Love, was about. I lay out all the science there, that we're like human tuning forks. We are always attuning to each other's energetic frequency. We're vibrating an energetic frequency and we match one another's frequency. Now, nature and the planet hold an extremely high frequency that never changes. So they will never, you go out in the forest or in the woods or on a hike, nature is not entraining to or matching your frequency ever. It is solid and vibrating at that high frequency consistently. You are matching it. So this is why when you spend time in nature,

it feels healing. You feel better after you've been there. And I learned that that first week at 1440, where I sat on the mother tree in the Redwood Forest for hours weeping on her, and she held me. And I would walk through the forest and sit on the ground and walk barefoot and ground myself there. And I've continued to do that in every capacity I can. Nature, nature, nature, such an important part. Third is spirit connection. Now that doesn't mean in the religious sense, although if you're a religious person and you subscribe to an organized religion, amen, go for it. There's no wrong way to do this. I do not subscribe to an organized religion, but I'm extremely spiritual as you know, and as you can tell listening here.

So what I'm talking about when I talk about a spiritual connection is reconnecting with spirit, communicating with the other side, how the longing to connect with our loved ones often becomes the impetus, the inspiration for us learning how to access our unique metaphysical gifts. So talk to mediums. Listen to the podcasts I've done, especially with Susan Grau and Rebecca Rosen. There are many of them that were so beautiful and profound. Get your own mediumship readings. Be open to that and also be open to the signs. They give us signs constantly. And if you don't acknowledge a sign, which you can do, obviously our instinct is like, oh, no, I just made that up. I made it up that I was just thinking about and talking to Sammy in my mind and a monarch butterfly, which was my sign for him, just came and sat on my knee. That was just made up in my mind. Right.

and then what our loved ones on the other side do is like okay she didn't get that sign i won't give it anymore i'll think you know maybe i'll try something else right but when you acknowledge it and say hi sammy thank you for sending that or when he blinks the lights when i'm trying to read sammy quit it i'm trying to read right then he knows that i'm getting it and he gives me more and that i've seen that time and time again not just with me so recognize the signs even if you just do that that's tremendous okay so we have embodiment we have nature we have spirit tribe is the next one and i talked about that a little bit in terms of the sisterhood but that's not just creating a tribe of others who

intimately understand your pain or joining a tribe of others but also navigating the relationship stuff that comes up as a result of the way you and maybe your partner grieve differently or the way that your relationships changed. And I, this certainly happened with me. There were many people who I would have, who I really thought were dear, very close friends who disappeared for their own reasons. I mean, it had nothing to do with me. It had to do with their own grief or inability to be with their grief or whatever, but they disappeared. And it's not that I don't care about them anymore, but they are not in my inner circle anymore. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. Right. And then there were others who I wasn't that close to who, oh my God,

they became my mainstays and are extremely dear friends now, right? So a lot changes and being able to navigate that and attend to that and tend our garden of our tribe is so important. The next important ingredient is the creative expression. It's such a healing element. It gets us out of our left brain and into our creative mind. It allows us to be in flow and have release and relief from the pain. It's a somatic, energetic, emotional, another way to release pain, whether it's painting or writing or anything. There are so many beautiful ways to express the feelings you're having and get them out of you in addition to the physical in the creative. When you're engaging in creative activities, you are also lighting up

your right brain which is the part of the brain that is able to communicate with the other side so you're getting a double whammy when you engage in creative pursuits and it can just be you don't have to make some beautiful work of art when you're feeling like crap it can just be like slapping paint on a canvas and just matching the strokes with how you're feeling even that will be a tremendous cathartic beautiful process and there are so many art therapy programs out there and wish beads does some beautiful stuff with totems they joined our retreat and gave us the supplies to have all the mamas make these beautiful memorial kind of totems with beads and sticks and things they found in the forest and crystals and they took those home with them there's just really

beautiful things that you can do with the creative expression, even if you don't consider yourself a creative person. Now, the final one, we have embodiment, nature, spirit, tribe, creative expression. And the sixth and final component is cognitive thinking, right? Rehabilitating our way of thinking, which let's just face it. I'm putting it last because to me it's important, but it's also the least important. Here I am as a talking doctor, as my kids used to call me, a talk therapist who's putting the talking kind of left brain reasoning part at the bottom of the list because it is the least important with grief, honestly, I find. But it is still very, very important, right? And what I mean by this is understanding the stages of grief, right? So

when we understand the stages of grief and that it doesn't go in a straight line and that it's a big backtracking back and forth mess and that it doesn't go in any one order, but we understand what we're feeling, that can be extremely helpful. When we are addressing the stories we're telling ourselves about the woulda, coulda, shouldas, things that cause us guilt and shame. For me, it's going over every minute of Sammy's life from the time he was conceived and thinking about all the woulda, coulda, shouldas that maybe would have changed the trajectory that landed us with him dying, taking those drugs from that stranger, right? Like there's so many things that you can cognitively go into a rabbit hole around. So attending to those things, getting support for

those things, getting coaching and counseling from a grief coach or counselor or a therapist is super important. And also, and this is really down the road once you've done a lot of healing, because you can rush to this and do what I did with my mom and not feel and heal. You have to feel it to heal it. But at a certain point, one of the most profound things, which is in this category of the cognitive, is finding meaning. It's called post-traumatic growth, where instead of post-traumatic stress or post-traumatic disorder, which a lot of us get, as you move through and heal the trauma in the ways I've been describing, then you grow. You don't just go through tremendous loss. You grow through it and you find a beautiful purpose. Maybe it's helping

other grievers. Maybe, as in my husband's case, it's creating advocacy and organization to stop other children from dying by social media or from fentanyl or from drugs. Maybe it's doing something in your community that your child loved. I've met so many parents who created organizations around basketball or around surfing or around parks and recreation because those things were important to their children who they lost or their loved one who they lost. That's the final piece. Those are the six ingredients that I have found are fundamental to healing from loss. and I am still on this journey. I am still learning. But I thought I would share all of this with you because I often get this question like, how can you be so filled with joy?

How can you have just written a book about sex that I just delivered to my publisher and is going to be out in about, I guess, a year or so? It takes a long time to publish a book. But how can you create? How can you function? How can you see clients? How can you be so full of joy. I am those things because I am a whole new version of myself because of what I've been through. You know, I didn't know until about 10 years ago about what I always thought my whole life. And I'm saying this because my guess is many of you feel this way too or have this belief because we don't necessarily learn it in science class. But I thought when a caterpillar goes into the cocoon or forms the cocoon around them, that eventually they kind of shrink a little bit,

grow wings, and then the butterfly emerges. That is not what happens. That's not what metamorphosis is. Metamorphosis is that the caterpillar turns to complete mush. The caterpillar has inside its DNA something called imaginal cells, which have the blueprint for the butterfly on it. So the caterpillar goes into the cocoon and turns to liquid, completely breaks down, stays inside the cocoon. In other words, the house, the healing community doesn't try to jump out of it, doesn't try to bypass it, doesn't try to rush it, allows itself to completely decompensate, to mush. And then because of the imaginal cells, it reforms into a butterfly. And that is what I feel grief is. It's the total decompensation and reconfiguration of an entirely

new version of yourself, when you are brave enough and courageous enough to go all the way in and not run from your feelings and get the support and the community that you need, you will be transformed. And I know that for a fact now. And I'm so committed to this and so committed to helping others on this path. So if you want to learn more about this, make sure to get on my mailing list at drlauraberman.com or reach out to me on social media. I'm constantly creating programs and I have a digital program. I have a course called Good Grief that you can get on my website as well that will teach you a lot of this stuff. But that's it. Those six components, if you're willing to commit to those things, you will not only survive the most impossible loss, you thrive through it.

The doctor said I'm crazy for your love Wrote me a prescription But there's no cure for a cry