Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Losing Sammy Part 2

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

In Losing Sammy Part 2, Dr. Berman draws back the curtains on her recent ‘grief retreat’ to the redwood forest. Rather than run from the terrifying emotions, Dr. Berman talks about how she intentionally stepped into that darkness and let faith guide her as she went heart-first into that fathomless pain.  From somatic therapy to grief yoga to breathwork, she sunk into her most primal and terrifying feelings about the loss of her son. She talks about how the process not only helped her to start wrapping her arms around some of her grief but also re-introduced her to her childlike connection to the spirit world and the unseen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, a sex and relationship therapist. And for the past three decades, I've been helping people learn how to love and be loved better. That's just what I'm doing here on The Language of Love, where I get to answer your calls and emails and your most important questions. Because my goal here is to help you discover more meaningful emotional and physical intimacy and to also help you build more awareness of how precious and sacred your sexual life really is.

So be sure to email or reach out with your very own love, sex, and relationship questions. And I might just answer them live on the air. Whether you're single, married, gay, straight, cis, transgender, I am here for you. And this is a safe space to ask all the questions you've always wanted to ask your doctor or your friends, but maybe have just been too embarrassed to bring up.

It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Hey, welcome to the show. So I'm excited to be back with you because as promised, I have a part two for you. If you listen to the episode I did on losing Sammy, my beloved son, to fentanyl poisoning, I shared with you what happened. And I also shared with you that I was about to take off for a week away from my husband and my other sons and, you know, really dive deep into the grief. And, you know, I shared some of the initial lessons that I've learned and I promised you a follow up. So here it is. I wanted to share with you what happened because, you know, I know so many people are learning and going through this right along with me.

And obviously, I always use my own journeys to help others. But boy, have I learned a lot and just have been so filled with grace and appreciation and really getting a crash course in receiving. And I shared some of that with you last time. But just to give you an example, here's what happens, OK? I've done several events at a place, a gorgeous place in Santa Cruz called 1440 Multiversity. It's right in the middle of a redwood forest where the mother tree is, and it's a beautiful retreat center. And I've done some events there through the years.

You know, I've met the owners and the manager, but I wouldn't say that, you know, we were close friends or anything. And when all of this happened with Sammy, they reached out to me and they said, listen, you know, we want to be here for you. We want to give you safe harbor if you, you know, we're closed for business. We're not open, you know, and the amenities aren't open. But if you would like to come and stay in one of the faculty houses just to be in the woods and to, you know, kind of heal, we're here for you. And I took them up on that. And so I was just so grateful that they were letting me stay there, you know, and that's all I was expecting. And I called on a couple of friends because, as I've shared with you before, you know, my parents are both gone now.

my spirit mother or my second mother, Sasa, Sandra Flowers, also passed away about a year ago. And other than my husband and children who are going through the same thing, I really don't have family that I can count on anymore. Whatever family I have is either toxic or just ill-equipped to be there for me in the way that I need right now. And at the same time, I have just been so unbelievably blessed with the sisterhood that I have somehow managed to create with amazing women from all over the country who I've been dear friends with, who know my deepest, darkest secrets, and who I've really always been able to lean on. And of course, they've always been able to lean on me. But boy, during this time, have they stepped in, stepped up, and made me

receive. And one of those friends is a beautiful soul friend of mine named Tina Cameron, who I joke with her, but I'm halfway serious. Like she is just mother love incarnate. You know, she's just pure light. And we've only been friends. We only met when I moved out to LA about three years ago through a mutual friend. But boy, do we know each other's souls. I think we've lived many, many lives together. And the other wonderful thing about her is that she's done a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of work on herself. So she's got really clear energy. She doesn't get triggered easily. She is beautiful at holding space. And she was the perfect person for me to take with me on this odyssey into the redwoods. I mean, I couldn't go with my husband and sons because

I really needed to fall apart. And I knew that if I did that in front of them, even if, you know, though they said, of course we, you can, and they wanted me to, I don't think they really knew what they were asking for because, and also for me personally, I just needed to not worry about anyone, but go all the way in. So Tina stepped up and she drove me the five and a half hours to 1440 and we got there the first day and I couldn't believe it. We walked in and there were two guys who work there waiting for us to help with our luggage. That was surprise enough. And then we walk inside and the refrigerator is packed to the rim with homemade lentil soup and homemade vegan dips and all the foods I love just filling the refrigerator. Tina must have told them all

the foods I love and they filled it up. There were cards, books, blankets, gifts, all the people that work at 1440 had signed it with like personal messages. And then I look, this is all sitting on my bed when I go into my room. And then I look and they have framed a picture of Sammy and me and put it by my bed. And that's when I really just broke down with such appreciation and just so much love coming at me from these people who don't even barely know me and who had gone out of their way to just give me this beautiful, comfortable, safe womb to go through this. At the same time, another coincidence, not coincidence, is that a dear friend who I've known for 15 years and who is an amazing coach, turns out, I didn't realize this at the time,

but she lives a mile away from 1440 Multiversity, Diana Chapman. I've written about her and a lot of what I've learned from her in quantum love. She's been an amazing resource, especially around grief for me through the years when I've lost other important people in my life. And there she was a mile away. She also put me in touch with an amazing somatic experiencing therapist. Now I have shared with you and will on other podcasts, how important I think somatic experiencing is for trauma recovery, whether it's sexual abuse and trauma or other kinds of trauma. Basically, especially for someone like me, who tends to be in my head a lot of the time and not in my body, somatic experiencing is a kind of therapy that really goes right to the body. It bypasses the

thinking brain. You're not even supposed to think or have stories or talk about your feelings. You're just supposed to feel what's in your body. And I had done small exercises in that. I'm not an expert in that by any means. I have referred many, many people to somatic experiencing therapists on this show and in my clinical practice, but I'd never really gone through the in-depth process before. And a beautiful person named Kate Hudson from Chicago came to me through Diana Chapman. And she met me every single morning remotely on Zoom and took me all the way in. And when I tell you, like, I was releasing, wailing, writhing, crying, screaming, moaning. I mean, things were coming out of me that I didn't even, sounds that I didn't even

know I could make, tears that I didn't even know I had left. And it was every single day that I was there. Okay. So that was one hour of somatic experiencing. At the same time, two other angels have come into my life. And they are from an organization called grief.com. David Kessler is one of them. He's a well-known grief expert. And he came and made a house call to my house when Sammy first died and that continued to work with us and especially continued to support my husband and sons while I was gone. And when I tried to pay him or, you know, offered to pay him, he said, no, I was trained by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who is the woman, you know, who basically kind of was the first to write about grief. She's the one that kind of characterizes

the five stages of grief. He was trained by her. And as part of his training, in order to train him, she made him promise that he would never charge for the work that he does, which is just astounding and so beautiful to me. His partner, a man named Paul Denniston, is an expert in grief yoga, which I had never done before, which is another form of somatic experiencing. It's basically moving through your feelings through movement. And he had me screaming and pounding pillows and, you know, just stretching into my grief. I didn't know what to expect with grief yoga, but it is profound what was being released. And he also does breath work related to grief. And I, of course, have done a lot of breath work.

I'm a huge fan of breath work. I think it really moves energy and emotions out. But this was different and even more specific to grief. And so we alternated. Every day I was there, one day we would do grief yoga remotely via Zoom, and one day we would do breath work. Now, Tina's there with me the whole time, holding space in her beautiful way. And not interfering, but there if I needed a hug, there if I needed

to just lie down and have my hair played with, like whatever I needed, she was there. And I can ask her, she's so welcoming to anything I need. She's like the easiest person for me to receive from. And so she's going through all of this with me. Now in between, so at least two hours every day of intense somatic experiencing and interspersed with that, I'm taking walks in the woods, which is my favorite place to be. And the mother tree in particular, I don't know if you've ever been to a redwood forest, much less to a mother tree. You know, the mother tree's roots, basically the other trees within 500 feet in all directions grow out of her roots.

And they all kind of, they're very close to just a couple of feet below the surface of the earth, but they all intertwine and like hold hands and hold each other up. And even if a tree is cut down, more trees will grow from its roots, which is so astounding to me. And what I already had realized from my two other visits to 1440 is that this mother tree, I mean, I can't stop hugging her. Like when you hug her, and I don't think it's just me because other people I've talked to feel the same thing.

You feel this pulse of constant peace, loving energy just moving through you. Like she is just over a thousand years old and just so beautiful and such beautiful energy. And one of the reasons I love being in nature, and I talk about this a lot in my book, Quantum Love, but one of the reasons I love being in nature is because it has an energetic frequency that doesn't change. You know, in our normal day-to-day world, we're around lots of different people and we're all, whether we know it or not, matching each other's frequencies, impacting one another's frequencies. So, you know, quantum love, a lot about what it teaches is how to hold your own frequency so that you're not constantly matching other people's often of whom are lower than yours or not supporting yours, but they're all matching yours instead. And it's a really powerful technique in love and in life. But in nature, there's a very high frequency that doesn't change. So you have no choice but to match it.

And so it was such a great relief for me to do what we call forest bathing, walk through the forest and just bathe in the positive frequency and the air and the smells and hug the trees and listen to the streams. And it was just bliss. At the same time on the property, 1440 has this huge, basically hot tub, but it's the size of a swimming pool that's kept it like 100 degrees right in the middle of the Redwoods. So I would intersperse this intensive work I was doing with forest bathing and literal bathing in this beautiful saltwater pool. I mean, talk about bliss and eating this amazing food that had been provided and going on walks and hikes with Diana Chapman. About halfway through the week, another beautiful soul friend came named Catherine Woodward Thomas. She's a well-known therapist. She's written Conscious Uncoupling that Gwyneth Paltrow made really famous.

And she also wrote Calling in the One. And she's a profoundly gifted therapist. I've always had so much respect for her clinical abilities, but I didn't really know her that well personally. I mean, we've worked together. We've been on each other's stuff, but we haven't really spent personal time together. And when she heard what happened to Sammy and also where we were going, and she lives in Berkeley, she asked if she could come.

And boy, was that beautiful. So she came for a few days to join Tina and me and hold space and did the process with me and talked and supported. And it was just perfect. I can't even describe how much grace I received because all of these things just came together perfectly. And it was seven intensive, beautiful releasing profound days on the last day diana chapman took us on a hike it was about a 45 minute hike into the redwoods to a place called the glittering forest where this artist in the middle of what's called a cathedral of redwoods which is a circle when redwoods and they're all over the redwood forest but they're not that frequent it's basically when all the redwoods

grow in a perfect circle. And he had one on his 25 acres of property, and he made a fairyland there. Now, I have a huge affinity for fairies. I always have. And my parents tell me that when I was little, I would talk to them all the time. I'm sure I did. I definitely, I share with you often and talk about this a lot in Quantum Love that in our bodies, all we can really take in as what our five senses can take in, but what's really happening around us is much more than we can take in, you know? And when you see kids that are seeing imaginary friends

or fairies or other things, don't doubt that because it gets conditioned out of us. You know, I was made fun of or told that was silly or whatever. And so eventually I just stopped seeing them, but I've always felt them and I love fairy energy. So, you know, I'm gonna put up a YouTube slideshow of my 1440 experience in the Redwoods.

And you'll see the pictures, but this place was literally glittering. And there were all of these fairy houses and sculptures all made from natural materials and a lot of like silly, cute and playful touches of little, you know, people leave little figurines or little stones or crystals or other things that he incorporates.

And I'm gonna actually send him a whole bunch of things as a thank you for giving me this beautiful experience. It's just there for whoever can find it. It's a secret. Not many people know where it is, but Diana Chapman did. And it's a beautiful, beautiful thing and place and just more grace. And I laid there in the middle of the Cathedral of Redwoods around all these little fairies. And it was just magical and such a beautiful last day as an experience to kind of close up the experience of being there. And I really couldn't believe it. I didn't expect this. I thought it would definitely help. But what I have found is that because I went so, so deep and was so willing

and did it so consistently for seven days straight, that I ended those seven days kind of feeling put back together. Now, I know, and we all know, anyone who's experienced grief knows that it is not a linear process. It's a wiggly, woggly, circling, crazy process. And I by no means think I'm never going to be in the bowels of pain again over losing my beautiful boy. But I feel strong now. I feel clear. I feel lighter. And I feel, most importantly, able to move forward and able to be happy again. And not like with that stomach dropping, oh my gosh, he's gone feeling constantly happening or flashbacks to finding him constantly happening because I really worked through that deeply in this intensive experience. And one of the things

that I got really clear on is how I want to live my life now because that's one of the gifts. I've talked now to thousands of parents. I think there's something like 6,000 or 7,000 people who have joined my Facebook group, Parents for Safer Children, most of whom are grieving parents, although not all. Many of them are just supportive people or advocates. but I'm hearing all of their stories. And so many of them are still stuck in that pain and that trauma years and years out. But also a lot of them have done deep healing. And what they talk about is that losing a child is a certain kind of heart shattering that is like no other. And I know exactly what that means, unfortunately. But what I found with that heart shattering is that once I could really move into it, I could start to think, okay, now how do I want my heart to be moving forward? How open to love and light and power do I want to be? How do I want to use my voice?

And those are the things that I'm starting to really work through now. And I'll keep you posted on all of that. But the other thing that I left this week with is just profound, like immeasurable gratitude for all the angels who came into my life and who supported me and who offered me shelter and food and holding and therapy and support, not only for me, but for my family as well. I mean, it's just astounding. And I shouldn't be the only one that gets to do this. When I look at all these parents who are grieving and in so much pain, they need to do this too, if they're willing. So one of the promises I made myself is that a year from now, when this COVID thing is more under control and I'm more in one piece, I want to raise money to take a group of

mothers into the Redwoods to 1440 and take them through this process. Because I cannot tell you how transformative it is and was. And it's not fair that I'm the only one that gets to do this. We all should be able to do this. And so I'll keep you posted on that, too. But that is my update on Sammy part two. And, you know, it's an evolving story. I am ready now to get back to work, to get back to my clients, to get back to this amazing podcast. I've gotten so many great questions from you about sex and love that I'm going to start tackling as we move forward. And, you know, I'm ready. I'm ready to live. I'm ready to love.

And I'm ready, you know, to fight and to stand for Sammy and all the other kids who are in danger, you know, with these evildoers on social media. And I've got some real ideas. I'm just moving slowly so that I am able to integrate all of this and not rush forward and therefore fall backward, if you know what I'm saying. So, but it's coming and we're all coming together. That's all for now. So I just wanna thank you for caring.

I wanna thank you for all the love. I wanna thank you for caring so much about this story and my family and Sammy. I wanna thank you for sharing it. One little post I put up, I think has been shared over 3 million times. And that means potentially 3 million children at least have been talked to by their parents,

have been able to relate, hopefully, to my boy and see that this is real and this is a real danger. And it's not about drug addiction or not addiction. It is about poisoning and murder, which is what we're talking about. And it has to stop. And the people who are responsible need to be held accountable.

And we're gonna do that. So stay tuned for that and stay tuned for life and love and living like we're dying because that's what I'm committed to doing from now on. I will see you next time on The Language of Love. Make sure to reach out to me. You can email at languageoflovepod at gmail.com. You can also record questions if you go to speakpipe.com backslash languageoflove.

And all of those links you can find on my website, drlauraberman.com. I'll see you next time on The Language of Love. Thank you.