Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Why Is Grief Misunderstood?

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Welcome back to another Language of Love Bite! I'm here to dive into a topic that often gets misunderstood: grief and loss.  The truth is that everyone's grief journey is unique. There's no one-size-fits-all timeline for healing. So, if you're going through it, remember to be gentle with yourself and allow yourself the space to feel and heal. Now, let's talk about the importance of emotional support during this time. It's crucial to have a strong support system in place - friends, family, or even a therapist who can provide that safe space for you to express your emotions. And don't forget about somatic experiencing techniques! These can help you release any trapped emotions in your body and promote healing from within. But, most importantly, here's something interesting to consider: what if our relationships continue even after death? Obviously it’s not the same, and we’d do anything to have our loved ones with us. But wd are all made of pure atomic energy, and energy can’t be created or destroyed. It can only change form. We can learn to connect to our loved ones’ energies, even after their beloved bodies are no longer here.   In this bite, I dive into:  The importance of emotional support and professional help in navigating grief Somatic experiencing techniques like breathwork and grief yoga as tools for healing Incorporating mindfulness practices to rewire the brain and prevent trauma from becoming the default mode The idea that relationships don't end when someone dies, and ways to stay connected with loved ones through energy I encourage you to keep an open mind when it comes to these concepts. It's okay to question and explore new ideas. And if you're interested in diving deeper into this topic, I've got just the thing for you! My course, Good Grief: Healing From Loss with Love, is packed with insights and practical tips to help you navigate the journey of grief and loss. And, on December 2nd, I will be holding a live in-person event that will be uplifting and inspiring, Good Grief Day, at Hermosa Beach, CA along with amazing healers and teachers who will shine a light and guide us on our grieving journey. Tickets are limited so make sure you grab yours! Grief is a natural part of life, and it's okay to feel it. Just know that you're not alone. Take care of yourself, and remember to be kind to yourself throughout this process. 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. So obviously, I have been thinking a lot about grief over the past several years and about loss. And one of the things that has become profoundly apparent to me, certainly several years ago, but even more so today, is that very few people know how to grieve. It's sort of like sex, which is another area that I tend to

explore a lot with you. Sex and death are two things that are really uncomfortable for people to talk about. And grief is something that we aren't taught about, isn't modeled for us, and most of us have no idea how to navigate. So I'm going to share with you some of the things that I have found to support you through grief. But before that, I just want to help you understand something really important about this. That grief, you know, people think of grief and loss as like something horrible, and it is.

It's something painful. It's a tragedy. It's a loss. It's a death. All of that, right? I mean, it's something unbelievably painful, especially if it was a significant loss. But grief is not just something that you can survive.

you certainly can, but you actually can thrive through it. Because here's what I've learned, that grief, loss, is actually an extremely profound, terrible, beautiful portal. It's a doorway. It's a portal that when you are willing to go through it, you can't go around and under it or over it, but when you are willing to go through it, it transforms you. Now, it transforms you in the way a caterpillar transforms to a butterfly, right? So the way that you are transformed through tremendous loss or tragedy and grief. Think about the butterfly, right? A caterpillar does not go into the cocoon, grow wings and come out a butterfly. The caterpillar has the DNA imprint to become the butterfly, gorges itself

on all the food it's going to need, all the nutrients it's going to need, then goes into the cocoon. And what does it do in the cocoon? It turns completely into mush. It completely decompensates. And then it recompensates, it rebuilds into this glorious, magical creature of the butterfly. Now, the portal is the cocoon, right? And the process of going inward, going into the cocoon, turning to mush, decompensating, and then reconfiguring into some newer, more magical, more self-actualized version of yourself. And the same thing happens with grief if you let it. And so people say to me, you know, how can you talk about grief as something that's beautiful, as something that's inspiring? It's unbelievably inspiring to me.

It's unbelievably painful. It can be unbelievably dark. But when you are willing to do the healing, when you are willing to go through it, it will, I can promise you, transform you and bring you to beautiful, beautiful places. So I wanted to talk to you about some of the common, I don't know, things that I think are, or not common, but some of the factors that I think are really key to moving through grief to a thriving version of yourself, a thriving butterfly version of yourself. The first is to understand that there is no one timeline. Every single one of us is going to experience grief and loss differently.

Not only because every loss is different, right? How well you know that person, how close you were to that person or thing, how tragic or sudden it was, were you prepared or not prepared? Was it a really painful relationship or was that person really sick and it was devastating? And so there was some relief when they died or was it all sudden and a ripping away? You know, there's so many different variables just in the loss itself, not to mention all the different variables in each of us. For instance, if you have trauma in your history, any degree of trauma, but certainly a large

degree of trauma, loss is a huge trauma. Grief, going through grief is traumatic. So anytime we go through one trauma, all our other traumas are going to come to the surface, right? So if you have a history of trauma, it's going to be a rockier grief road. If you are just a sensitive person, and some of us are born more sensitively attuned than others, if you are an empath, if you are someone who feels things really deeply, you're going to experience a much deeper grief process than someone who maybe tends to live a little more

on the surface, right? So each of us is so individual. First of all, our losses are so individual, second of all. And so there is no one timeline. Now, time absolutely helps, but there is no expiration date on the grieving process. And I think one of the most painful things for people, and I see this with all the mamas I work with who have lost children, that there's this expectation, okay, it's been a year now. Okay, it's been two years now. Can you get over it already?

Especially in their family or in their communities, you know? And so very often when we're grieving, we will start to kind of squelch our own grief because we imagine, or we're even given the feedback that the people around us can't handle it, right? But that doesn't matter.

It still takes time. And that time that it takes is not linear. We talk about the phases of grief, that five phases, and you don't just go through each phase of anger, denial, sadness, bargaining, whatever those stages are. You don't go through those stages one by one in a linear fashion. It is a wild, curly-cubed, switchback-hiking-crazy trail. And so you can be going, you know, after a certain point, after the initial loss, you could be going for months or maybe even years without tremendous pain. And then something happens or some trigger occurs or for some unknown reason, even, that's unknown to you, all sorts of grief will start coming to the surface.

or as I like to say, grief loves open doorways, right? So let's say that you have been through a tremendous loss and you've been healing over several years and life is pretty much normal. And now when you see something on the news about all of these children dying in the Middle East and you're faced with all the images of these dying children and you're feeling the grief for those mothers

who have lost their children, your own mother loss is gonna come up. right? Or just seeing like a kitten on television and you're touched by the story of this kitten being rescued and you get tearful over that, your little grief bubble, any little piece of unresolved grief that is looking for a good cry will come to the surface as well. So this is all to say that it is a wiggly, wobbly, backtracking road. But what can happen and what we want to happen is to give you the resources that you need so that the grief and the feelings of grief are like waves in the ocean, okay? And they come crashing. And in the beginning, it's like a

tsunami, one tsunami of pain after the other. And over time, and some there are periods where there are storms and the waves are coming frequently again, but usually the waves over time, get less and less intense and less and less frequent. But the key is that if you're going through it and you're willing to go through it, then you learn to surf the waves. You learn to ride the waves. You know that how to ride them. You know that you can ride them successfully. And so when the next wave comes, even if it's two years from now, you know how to move with it. You're not as in resistance to it. You're not as scared of it. It doesn't take you over because you aren't being pounded under the surf. You are riding the wave because you know how to ride it.

And that is why you have to know it takes time and that emotional support and community in particular is really important because it's almost impossible, I feel, to really heal from loss successfully and go, you can survive loss for sure, but you're not going to thrive through loss without the support of some sort of clinical support, right? So that could be a grief counselor. It could be a grief therapist. It could be a grief group. But working with someone who understands not only the phases of grief and what happens with loss, but can work with you around techniques and strategies for surfing the waves, okay? And most of those techniques that I have discovered that I use and that I teach others to use are in the realm of

somatic experiencing. So that could be breath work. That could be grief yoga. That could be grief dance. That could be just somatically processing and feeling your feelings and letting yourself hysterically cry, which would, if you fully let yourself cry, would take about 10 minutes and then you would feel the release or scream out the window on the freeway or beat the crap out of a bunch of pillows with a baseball bat, moving the energy, those somatic experiencing is so important and so crucial to moving through the portal of grief and learning how to ride the waves. The surfboard, so to speak, for riding the waves is, in my experience, the somatic experiencing and the willingness to use those techniques in the moment

And even on a regular maintenance level, especially in the beginning after a loss, usually for a while, you have to do it super regularly. And then over time, it can be less regular because you start to recognize, like for me, I know if I am in a moment or a day or an hour where I am kind of frozen and immobilized and can't seem to get myself off the couch and go do what I plan to do, where I'm just feeling super stuck or just really bummed for some reason. I'm like, oh, okay, there's some energy. There's some grief that wants to move. And I go into my little secret studio and I tune into myself. And I'll tell you in a little bit a way to somatic experience. I also have meditations on my website at drlauraberman.com where you can find meditations. And also in my ebook, You're Not Crazy, You're Just Descending. There are tons of meditations in particular on processing emotions, moving emotions, surfing

emotions. So there's a whole cache of those you can find if you go to drlauraberman.com and get the ebook and the meditations that go with it for you're not crazy, you're just ascending. But somatic experiencing is super important. Also, some kind of mindfulness practice. Now I'll tell you why. First of all, because grief is a kind of trauma. Loss is a kind of trauma. and our brains get affected by the trauma. And when you are engaging in a regular mindfulness process, you are rewiring your brain so that the synapse pathways and connections

that have been rutted through this grieving process and this trauma process don't become your standard operating procedure, right? So that your brain stays flexible, your thoughts stay flexible. So this is extremely helpful, especially if it was a traumatic loss because very often I experienced that's my husband experiences after our son died we both struggled with PTSD with flashbacks of finding him of my

husband of trying to revive him so not only therapy but a mindfulness practice whether that's meditation or guided meditation or breathing or visualizations or prayer whatever it is anything that quiets the mind, allows you to tap in and tune in to the higher power energies all around you, whatever that is, even internally inside yourself, that serves so much not only to keeping your brain and mind flexible so your mind can work. I always say get out of your brain so your mind can work, but also so that you can start to move beyond some of those well-rutted pathways of grief and trauma that gets set when we go through tremendous loss. And obviously, none of these things are in isolation. They're all working with each other. The therapy is

working with the mindfulness and so forth. As most of you know, for the past several years, I've been on a pretty intense grief journey, and it's been a path of healing. I've shared lots of that healing with you and lots of the healing resources that I found. and I am so thrilled to announce that I am doing my first ever retreat for grieving mamas. So if you or someone you love is a mama who has lost a child in any way, at any stage, at any age, I would love for you to come join me

at 1440 Multiversity in the Redwoods near Santa Cruz, California for four amazing days of beautiful, uplifting community and healing. We've got David Kessler. We've got Paul Selig. We've got Catherine Woodward Thomas. We've got me.

We've got body work. We've got organic food, beautiful rooms. Go to 1440.org. Check it out. It's right there on the homepage. I really hope you can join us. And I would say that finally, I mean, there's so much to this. I could talk about this for hours and hours.

But I would say finally, a key to thriving through loss, especially when it's lost through the death of someone you love, is recognizing that the relationship doesn't end when life ends. Because here's the thing. We are all pure, vibrating, atomic energy. If we were to look at ourselves, you and I, through an atomic microscope, we would see that we are not solid. I am not here and you are not there. I mean, we are to a certain extent, according to our five senses. But if we were to look at each other through an atomic microscope, we would see that each of us is pure vibrating energy. We aren't solid, even though we appear so.

And we are all part of the same energetic soup. There isn't a huge, there isn't any separation. It seems like we're separate, but there is no real separation on an atomic level between me and you. That's why, scientifically speaking, we actually are all one. But here's the cool thing. We're all made of energy, pure vibrating energy. And here's the thing about energy.

It cannot be created and it cannot be destroyed. The energy of which you and I are made has been here since the beginning of time. It's just the only thing that can happen to energy is that it changes form. So when we die, our bodies go, our bodies go back to dust, but the energy that enervates us,

that makes us who we are, that enervates the essence of who we are, that remains. and it is possible and I have found it to be true in my life and in the life of hundreds of other people who I've connected with learned from and also taught that we can stay in communion with our loved ones with the energy of them we can feel their unique energetic profile I mean you can do this with your loved ones today it's a really helpful exercise when you're next sitting next to one of your loved ones who are here in form and alive, whether it's a sibling or a kid

or of yours or a partner or whoever, preferably with someone you love because it'll be easier. Just sit next to them, maybe while they're watching TV or you're at dinner, and just kind of ground yourself in your system, close your eyes, and imagine that there is no energetic separation between where you end and they begin and see if you could imagine what the essence, the energy of them feels like. See if you can even feel it. Because I can tell you, I didn't understand this until I lost my son and I started feeling his energy and knew it was his. I thought to myself, how do I know this is him? Because I can tell when he's here versus my mom is here versus my nana is here. It feels different. The energy of each of them feels different when

they visit. I mean, I don't even think they visit. I think they're always here just beyond the veil. And the visitation is because we have opened a doorway or a veil or something that allows them to come through. Because the truth is once we leave our bodies and our pure energy, not limited by the density of form anymore. We are no, and certainly when we leave our human brains, we are no longer about ego, jealousies, fear, loss, pain, insecurities.

All of that is gone. And all we are is back to oneness, back to love, back to connection. And that's all we are. And that's all we want for anyone else. And I've met many people and interviewed many people and have many friends, in fact, who have died and gone to the other side and come back. And that is the report every single time that on the other side is just oneness and love. And that's all our loved ones are. But each of them hold on to their own unique energetic frequency of love. And it is always there. They are always there. But they cannot connect with us because we are, especially if we're in an extremely deep, dark place, the worse we feel emotionally and even physically, the lower our energetic vibration becomes. And when we leave our bodies, our energetic frequency is higher than any human body could

ever meet, right? So our loved ones on the other side are at this extremely high frequency, and we are at a much lower frequency. The point at which we can connect with them is when we are able to raise authentically. I don't mean just like, I'm happy when you feel like crap. But when we are able to raise our own energetic frequency through releasing some pain, movement, shifting our perspectives, all the shift moves that I teach you in Quantum Love to raise your frequency, when we can raise our frequency, which often happens after a big release, your frequency will automatically raise. that's when they can reach us when we're meditating we're raising our frequency that's why many of us have our visitations when we're meditating when we're dreaming many of us have

lucid dreams because we are out of the density of our thoughts and our fears and we are in a higher frequency place so we when we can raise our own frequency that's when they can reach us but the thing to know is that they absolutely can reach us and it's sort of like having a long-distance relationship. I mean, I would give anything to feel my son's little man hands and smell him and hug him and hear his belly laugh and obviously watch him grow. But I mean, in terms of being in relationship with him. But I can be in relationship with him. I can commune with him. I can hear his messages. I can feel his energy. I can feel his love and his support and his encouragement and his connection and his energy. That is possible, but it really requires a

willingness to be with what is happening and a willingness to open your mind and your heart to that which you can't necessarily see with your eyes or prove to anyone else. But it is undeniably real to those of us who do connect with the other side. So all of this is to say, these are just some of the techniques that I like to teach, that life and love and abundance and joy and excitement and beauty is so available to all of us through the portal of grief into the other side. So I'm just going to leave you to chew on that. Encourage you to explore drlauraberman.com where you'll find You're Not Crazy. You're Just Descending, the ebook with all of those meditations and guidance around somatic experiencing, releasing pain, raising

your frequency. Quantum Love is also a beautiful way to do that. The book is on audiobook and regular book and make sure that you follow me on social media and on YouTube because I am going to be doing some events, online digital events and in-person events where we're going to be building out all of these pillars I'm talking about of how to move through the portal of grief to the beautiful butterfly that is emerging, that you can survive but even better thrive through tremendous loss. I went to the doctor, said I'm crazy for your love Wrote me a prescription, but there's no cure for a cry