The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - The Eight Pillars of Grieving

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

Grief is a simple enough word, but the emotional journey it describes is chaotic, messy and unique to each person. Psychotherapist and bereavement expert Julia Samuel (www.grief-works.app) joins Dr Laurie Santos for the second time to describe strategies which we can all use to help us navigate grief more effectively.Julia says there is no right or wrong way to mourn a loss - there is no "normal" way to grieve - but there are very simple things we can do each day to listen to our feelings of grief and process them so that we can carry on with our changed lives. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Walls are crashing down around you. Big life plans may have become uncertain or even impossible. You may have lost some of the people you relied on most for care and support. Experiencing a big loss can make it feel like all that's left around you is chaos and confusion. People feel like there's this internal rubble. The roof and the foundations of their building has been completely obliterated. And so what they need is scaffolding. This is psychotherapist and grief expert Julia Samuel. If you haven't heard part one of our conversation, go back and listen to it now. When we're grieving, cleaning up all that emotional

rubble can feel impossible. But it gets worse, because our minds come up with all kinds of stories about why we shouldn't even try. We might deny what we're feeling and try to power through, pretending that nothing's wrong. We try to block ourselves from experiencing grief, which, as we heard in the last episode, is nearly certain to make the pain worse. The first difficulty people often have is that they turn against themselves when they're grieving. And they attack themselves for doing it wrong or making a fuss or taking too long. What I really believe and I've witnessed thousands of times is that we have a lot more agency when we engage with our grieving process, when we kind of recognize that we can't

fight it, but we can support ourselves in it, that we can allow space for all of those different feelings, that we can find ways of expressing them. Today, we're going to talk about how to build those supports, the ones that can help us hold up the weight of our grief and help us reconstruct everything after a loss. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The word Julia uses for this scaffolding is pillars. Think giant soaring columns that can support super heavy loads. The most crucial of these supports are what she refers to as the eight pillars of strength.

What I loved in that first pillar of your eight pillars for how we can better support ourselves is that you talk about the fact that we need to pay attention to relationships, not just the current relationships we have, but also finding ways to honor the relationship with the person that's died too. One of our misconceptions is, you know, to get over it, we got to like throw away everybody's pictures, like, you know, get rid of the stuff, like pretend it never happened. But to get over it, we really do need a relationship with the person. Completely. But when we are grieving someone that we really love that dies, we have a dual task. One is to face the reality of their death and find a way of living life without them. And recognizing that the love for that person never dies.

The love continues in you and with you for the rest of your life. If you think you have to use all your psychological energy to kind of extricate them out of you, you're using your energy to suppress, which you need to be using for life. But the biggest predictor of outcomes when you are grieving and letting it do its work is the love and support of others. You know, your path to healing and grief should be paved with people, with people who care about you, that you trust in all different areas of your life. That is the single most important thing, that when love dies, it's the love of others that you can take inside you that gives you the strength to do the work of grief.

The second of your pillars, though, is that we also need to focus on the relationship with ourself in order to support ourself. So talk about what that means, in particular with relationship to denial. I mean, I think the first aspect of it is that in extremis, all of us will have a default mode of coping. You know, I tend to shut down. I tend to kind of freeze. And that you can't fight your natural way of coping. You learned it very young. It's in you. It's wired in you. what you naturally do and recognize how useful that is. You know, I'm not against denial. I think we need denial. But if it's all you do, then it's very unhelpful because then you get complex grief. For me, I have denial and I know I need to kind of create ways of allowing myself to feel the pain and support myself. And one of them is by turning to yourself, knowing yourself, not distracting yourself on your phone and to go, oh, you know, what do I need and what do I need to get my needs met? And that idea of self-compassion, I think, connects nicely to the third pillar that you talk about, which is this idea that we need to know and express our emotions. We need to be there with them and find good avenues to express them.

You know, so talk about how people can enact this pillar when they're experiencing grief. I mean, I think it links to the first one of knowing yourself. So knowing what your emotions are and what your different signals are. So people often feel angry when they're grieving, but anger isn't a sort of socially allowed emotion. So they might allow themselves to feel sad, but somehow think that anger isn't okay. Once the more clarity you have on the different hues of your emotions, you may not exactly be able to name them,

but I mean, you would know that naming them is supportive in itself. That if you can even do a kind of collage of, I don't know, blue for sadness, red for rage, purple for confusion, all of those things, you begin to allow those emotions in you. And then once you allow them, then they naturally are free to express themselves. And then you incrementally adjust to the death. This idea that we need some time to kind of categorize and express

our emotions gets to the fourth pillar, which is this idea of time, maybe the hardest thing to allow ourselves. So talk about, you know, the kinds of ways that we might need to give ourselves more time in the context of grief. There's a kind of social context of time, which is, I think, it's set culturally, maybe it's set by employees that we're allowed to grieve for a certain amount of time. You know, a different loss, people allow different legitimacy. So if it's your grandparent, you're probably given three months. If it's your partner, you're probably allowed a year. If it's a child that's died, it may be two years. And of course, human beings are not like that. The time it takes is always much longer than anyone wants or expects. Grief does not have a timeframe. It does not have, you know,

a calendar. And I think the much better way of thinking about it is the Greek two words for time. There's chronos time, which is chronological time, and kairos time, which is felt time, the right time, the right time for you. And if we support ourselves in our grief in kairos time, like allowing ourselves the time that we have that we don't kind of push ourselves down to fit a kind of social calendar, then we are much more likely to fare well. In addition to not giving ourselves enough time, I think another thing we do a lot is to compare our time of recovery with other people. You know, so talk about why this is sort of a problem too.

I mean, in all things of life, comparing yourself to others is a route to misery. But also we want to know that we're normal. If you compare yourself to others, you can feel like they're doing it better than you. They're ahead of you. If your partner died, they may be dating someone else. The idea of that appalls you. And I think what's really much more useful is to support yourself in your kairos time. However that is, you're much more likely to farewell. So those are the first four pillars that Julia has argued can help us deal with grief.

Our external relationships, our internal relationship with ourselves, expressing our emotions, and time. But there are still four more pillars we can use to get through a loss. We'll hear about those remaining pillars when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. I've been chatting with grief expert Julia Samuel about the different ways we can support ourselves through the pain of loss, strategies that she calls the eight pillars of strength. But one of my biggest takeaways from our conversation so far is that grief doesn't often work in the way we think. Now, you may have heard of the so-called five stages of grief. Think denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But as we learned in the last episode, this framework, with one stage leading to the next, it isn't all that reflective of what happens in real life. Julia constantly warns her clients that grieving just doesn't work that way. I've in some ways made it sound simple and straightforward. Just do the pillars.

It's a bit like do the five stages. That isn't what I'm saying. I'm saying this is complicated and influenced by many things that, you know, we haven't talked about that you need to kind of allow and include and acknowledge and name when you use those pillars to support you. Another thing I love about your pillars is that you really get us back to the physiology in a lot of ways. That's what we see in this fifth pillar, which is this idea of mind and body. You talk a little bit about why we need to kind of do things to support our bodies in the context of grieving. Yeah, this comes from neuroscience. So every thought that you have has a physiological component and every feeling that you have gives rise to a thought. And so

when I'm working with people, I often want them to kind of recognize that those two systems operate very closely together. But when you allow them both to have a voice, your mind and your body, and that they both are valid and they both need to be allowed and expressed, then there's a much sort of clearer sense of calm within your mind and your body. And I think that's true for all the aspects of grieving. And another thing you recommend is really that this is a spot where we really can take a lot more control in terms of how our body's reacting. I know you've recommended exercise a lot to help with the grieving process. Talk about why exercise can be so powerful. Because your body goes into fight, flight, or freeze, your

autonomic system goes into kind of code red alert. Exercise tells your body in the most direct, simple, uncomplicated way that you've flown, that you are not being attacked by a tiger. You've raced away, lowers the levels of cortisol and increases your levels of dopamine. So you just feel calmer and your capacity to think, to make decisions and to feel safe is vastly improved. And I think one of the biggest things that I've really learned about the mind and body is that we want to feel safe. We want to feel safe in our bodies, in our minds and in our home. And we feel under threat when we're grieving. Also, when you're thinking about the mind and the body, think about

everything that you're doing, who you're seeing, what you're watching, what you're eating, what you're drinking, whether you move your body or don't move your body, whether you're scrolling Instagram and looking at other people's perfect lives, all of those things will affect your mood and your relationship with yourself and your relationship with your grief and the person that's died. So my kind of message for when you're grieving is do things that balance you. Do things that help you feel safe in your mind and your body and your home so that you have then much more robustness to deal with these storms of grief when they also come through your mind and your body because you're not on code red alert pre-existing before the storm comes you're kind

of calmer you're more robust you're more grounded and then when it comes you can recognize it and go okay here it comes breathe i'm not going and go, okay, here it comes. Breathe. I'm not going to fight it. Breathe in for seven and out for 11. Let it break through me. Let myself cry. And then you feel released. And this idea of finding more ways to get balance kind of connects with the sixth pillar, which is this idea of setting limits. You know, it kind of fits with this idea we talked about before about self-compassion, right? Like this is a time when we might need to say no more often. You know, so any strategies for helping people who are grieving to set more limits? I mean, first of all, to sort of step back and use the mind-body aspect is that when you're

grieving, an image for grief is an iceberg where the third you see on top is only the third. The two thirds underneath is your grief and your feelings and the invisible response to grief. And when you're grieving physiologically, I don't know what percentage, but I would say to people, 90% of you is used up with dealing with this big life event that this person has died. So that you have very little left over that third above the waterline to cope. So you cannot expect yourself to function and to have physically and emotionally and psychologically the strength and the capacity that you had before. So kind of recognize that a lot of you is already used up. And so part of that is one, giving yourself permission to have limits, sort of don't fight it. And because you don't want to be this person. I mean, one of the most difficult things of grieving is you become this person you never wanted to be. You didn't want to be this sad, exhausted, angry person that was frightened about going to the supermarket. You want to be the one that you knew two years ago that could fight the world. But if you can accept that this is you for now and learn what your limits are, learn that your energy and your capacity has changed. And so have a good no. And I think

one of the kind of tips for having a good no is if someone asks you something to say, let me get back to you, because we tend to want to please and say yes, but also to give yourself permission for a no and not beat yourself up that I'm a bad person, I'm useless. But also when you have a good no, then your yes is really good. So that you've decided to go and see a movie with a friend, you really want to. If you've said a proper yes, that is a full yes, you're probably going to have a nice pizza before. You'll probably enjoy the movie, have a nice hug, feel comforted, and then you'll feel better when you go home. Another thing that comes with recognizing your limits is this idea of finding ways to give

yourself some structure. And this gets to your kind of seventh pillar that, you know, this is a time when we need to kind of give ourselves a bit more routine than usual. You know, so talk about why routine can be so helpful for the grieving process. I think often people experience and think about grief like this big black hole that they're terrified that they're going to fall into. And there's this silence and emptiness and loneliness. And structure doesn't take away the whole. The idea of the pillars was that they give you kind of internal structures to manage the pain and the loss. And so structure helps you not have to make a decision. Often you can't make decisions when you're grieving. You procrastinate. You don't know what you want. You feel completely confused. You're in this new alien landscape that you

don't like and you don't want. So having structure and saying to yourself, okay, on Thursdays, I'm going to take a bit of exercise before breakfast. I'm going to give myself a treat, which makes the exercise develop into a good habit by giving myself a treat. I can have a delicious coffee and breakfast. I'm going to do tasks, whether that's work or emails. And so you go through the day and you set that structure. It's sort of set in place. So it holds you in the same way as the therapy 50 minute hour. It's containing and holding emotionally, having a structure that you can rely on. And, you know, as you will know, good habits build good lives, that when we can develop good habits that become ingrained and embodied in us,

we have much more spare energy. But also those habits support our physiology, because if they're good habits, good eating habits, good sleep habits, all of those things, they really support our balance. I mean, I love this tip in particular because it gets at something we've talked about a lot on the podcast, which is this idea of choice overload, right? Even in normal, non-grieving times, having too much choice can kind of exhaust us. So giving yourself routine helps. But during this time when we're feeling incredibly under threat, incredibly fearful, when we just don't have the bandwidth to think, It makes so much sense to kind of limit our choices.

Yeah, it does. And you can spend two hours choosing a movie. If you say to yourself, you know, I'm going to watch this film that I decide at five o'clock and I'm going to watch it at seven o'clock. There's a feeling of satisfaction because it's a task that you chose. You have a sense of agency. You did it. You completed the task. And then it's like, huh, you know, I've done it. And all of the things about structure help you in that. But also forgive yourself the bad day. You know, you may set up on a Thursday morning wanting to do the run and the good breakfast and whatever happens, you stay in bed and you pull the duvet over your head. Don't catastrophize that. Forgive yourself. Friday's a new day. Start again and let that day

go. Don't use it to beat yourself with. This idea of kind of, you know, forgiving yourself gets to our last point, which is this idea of focusing, right? Like taking real time to allow and experience whatever else is going on. And, you know, so talk about what you mean by focusing and why it can be such a powerful eighth step for kind of dealing with this, the sense of grief. I mean, I think that the idea of focusing for me is that it comes in at many different levels. So it can be a spiritual level where you kind of let yourself contemplate the mystery of life and death and your spiritual beliefs and allow that space within yourself. It can be focusing on the body's wisdom. It can be 10 minutes of space and time where you're not actually active, where you just sit and breathe and allow that you're not fighting it, you're not squashing it, you're not in the

terror of it, you're not expressing it, but just being mindful and allowing whatever emerges to emerge. And it can be mindful when you're walking in nature, it can be mindful when you're sitting in a yoga position and oming or lila, it can be any of those things. It allows a kind of freedom of spirit and heart and mind that you give permission for that in your day, I think is incredibly balancing and incredibly supportive. I mean, the focusing idea gets so closely to what the science shows about the power of allowing and mindfulness, right? Where just the simple act of being there with whatever's going on, even if it doesn't feel good, can kind of allow you to get through it. And that ultimately seems to be the goal of so many of these pillars, right, is that the paradox is that to get through grief,

we have to get through grief, you know, we have to kind of allow ourselves to experience it in all of its fullness. Is your sense that with the right strategies, we can kind of come to grief with a different kind of relationship, not running away from it or trying to control it, when we allow it and support ourselves in it and have the courage to endure it, we do let it change us and accommodate us. Now that Julia has walked us through all eight pillars of strength, what the science shows really works for helping us navigate grief. I wanted her to help us figure out how to use these pillars, how to remember we have these strategies when the going gets tough. After the break, Julia will walk us through some ways that her patients have taken these concepts to heart

and put them into practice. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. As I listened to Julia explain each of her eight pillars for navigating grief, I had to admit that some of these sounded kind of daunting. I wanted to know how real people managed to put these strategies into practice, starting with the pillar that seemed most challenging to me personally, becoming a little bit more compassionate with myself. So a client who's given me permission to talk about her, her mother died reasonably young. This young woman was 25 and her mother was 50. So sort of a life cut short. And she was a very successful young woman of 25. She worked as a lawyer. So she'd used her brain to get through life. It had really worked for her. That was her best coping mechanism.

So when it came to grieving, she was completely flawed and she kept trying to think her way out of it. So she read tons of books. She could quote my book back at me. And she kept trying to think her way out of it. So she read tons of books. She could quote my book back at me. And she kind of looked at me with rage, like, give me the recipe, sort me out. And we did a focusing where she used an image of a dream of a kind of explosion. I kind of asked, you know, what the image looked like and what did it say to her? And she had this literally kind of epiphany moment when she said, I'm not in charge. This is an explosion. I can't have a recipe. And just that moment

shifted her perception of what she expected of herself, what she expected of her feelings, and expectations have a huge predictor in your outcomes, what you expect and what you allow. And she suddenly like saw this gateway. And she actually a week later came back and she had this image of this new garden that she kind of described. So she'd go through the gate into this garden where she had a connection with her mom from the past. But also she said, like, I'm a startup. You know, I'm a new entrepreneur within myself as a being. And I can grow now because I can see myself as a startup. I didn't want to be this startup, but I can see what I need. And so she gave herself permission to be close to her friends, to do the things that balanced her and supported her, to feel the pain, to allow pain to be the agent of change.

And once she kind of got it, it liberated her. And I literally, I saw her for eight sessions. So sometimes it happens really quick. We talked about the importance of maintaining relationships, but are there strategies people can use to do that when they're grieving, both with the living people who care about them, but then also the person who's died? I think cooking your mom or dad's favorite recipe and doing it on a particular day. So there may be anniversaries or Christmas or, you know, there are difficult days that making something that

your mum made can be this bittersweet chicken casserole that is never quite the same as your mum's, but imbues your mum. And that can have been passed down from their grandmother so that your mum probably told you this was my grandmother's recipe and she lived in Spain and now we live in New York, but there's a bit of Spain through my grandmother coming into my kitchen and she always put this particular herb in it and that made it hers. You know, when we look at ourselves and our families, we also want to look at multi-generations, you know, where have we come from and what have we learned from them? And that makes who we are. And many of them are dead, but they influence us and shape us as we live our lives. And just to say one more thing is that within families, it may be the

grandfather or the father that's died. Everyone in that family grieves differently. It's a systemic big shift. So one of the images for when someone dies within a family is that, you know, you have a mobile above a bed with a baby. And if you cut off one piece of the mobile, the whole mobile tips. So in a family system, the whole family system is tilted with whoever has died. So it takes a lot of work and honesty. And the key is communication between every family member to recalibrate this family system. And it may be allowing your brother to work really hard. I'm saying, I mean, it could be a sister. This is not gender oriented. That you kind of look at him, how can you work? Like I can barely function. Does that mean you love mom less? Or, you know, another sibling or even your surviving

parent is going out with friends or clubbing or, but all of us have different ways of expressing our grief. And there isn't a right or wrong way to do it. So it's by talking to each other, communicating with each other, honestly, and even saying, I can't believe how you're working or why did you go clubbing? But being told I just really needed to dance because dance, I feel close to my dad and he and I dance together and we always had fun. So music and dance is a lovely way of me remembering him. And then that goes, oh, right. So you're opening your window of understanding. When you open your window of understanding, you open your window of connection and compassion. So a death in a family can cause

a crisis in a family when you use the old coping mechanisms of not talking, not connecting, kind of putting on a stiff upper lip. But when you find ways of connecting and talking, you can build bonds and actually grow stronger. And so if people want to learn more about these eight pillars, I know that you've created this new resource that they can go to. So tell us a little bit about your new app. So my app is like 28 day course. So it's a bit like being in a room with me. So it's very unrobotic. And then also, if you wake up at four in the morning with a pounding heart, there's a sleep meditation. There's a visualization to calm you down. There's exercise apps.

There's yoga and HIT. So it's all in one place because often when you're grieving, you can't remember anything. You forget everything. And I've been so touched and in tears by the reviews. People really love it. I read one yesterday where a man said, I've been struggling with my grief for three years and 10 days, I feel better from your app. And that's like, oh, that's what I wanted it to do. And I'm seeing it actually work

is an amazing, joyous thing. I know you've been very public in some of your writing about the fact that in your own grief, sometimes you haven't used all these stages that you kind of hasn't gone smoothly and stuff. And, you know, so talk about as someone who kind of has to be so close to grief, you know, do you find yourself using these? How do you give yourself self-compassion when you get off track with how you're dealing with your own grief? My default is a critical voice like, you idiot, you've done something wrong. And then this awful kind of toxic sense of shame. And then I want to eat chocolate and drink coffee and not feel any of it. But that isn't where I stay. I know that that's happening. I know I hate it. So this morning I kickbox. So I kickbox every week. And so as a therapist,

you know, I have to, I'm sitting, I'm compassionate. I hear lots of terrible, terrible stories. I often have bad dreams, that kind of thing. So the kickboxing kind of punches out my fury and my powerlessness. And so I have lots of habits that keep me balanced. And often I'm hijacked by what's happening in life and I don't do it. And then I do pick myself up the next day and start again. But this, I think, is the perfect advice, right? Is that we're not going to be perfect at all of these things. Even a, you know, multi-decade grief expert isn't. But the key is to try to bring these things in when we have the bandwidth to do so.

Yeah. And, you know, this idea of a, I mean, I hate the idea of a therapist being a kind of cookie cut perfect person because it's rubbish. You know, it's complete rubbish. I have as many failings, furies, insecurities as everybody else, but I do put them down in the support of the client in front of me. And then they come back and pick me up when I'm back in my kitchen. You know, so it's kind of recognizing when you're working in the service of somebody else or like talking to you today where I, you know, I hope I sound knowledgeable and confident. And I do feel knowledgeable and confident in this. But then I can be sat next to someone who's a brilliant scientist.

And I'm like, oh, I feel like a five year old in class who doesn't isn't good at maths. It's nice. Yeah. The vulnerability, I think, is important. Right. Because I think people can get the sense that like there's a right way to do it. And as soon as you know these strategies, it will be perfect. Right. But that's that's kind of not how it works either. either. No, I don't think you win at life. You navigate life best you can. And you have moments, wonderful moments of wins. Like being asked to come on this podcast was like, wow, I'm so thrilled. I'm delighted, a bit scared, but delighted. But that is a lovely moment. And then something else happens and you go in the puddle and come out again. If the science of loss has shown us anything, it's that grief is unpredictable. It can creep up and grab hold of you anytime, even when you're just trying to buy some yogurt at the store.

But the research shows that if we choose not to avoid our grief, when we decide to face it head on, we can start to make some real progress. We can get to a place where those feelings aren't quite so overwhelming. I know firsthand that hiding from the feeling and reality of grief can be incredibly tempting. But Julia's work has taught me that it's worth it to find a path to the new life that, like it or not, lies ahead of us. Life after a loss is a lot like a tiny, tender seedling.

It might seem fragile at first, but it will grow and thrive if we put the work in to nurture it. I hope you'll join me next week to explore yet another yucky emotion, one that really clobbers me on a daily basis, sometimes to a debilitating degree. Next week, the Happiness Lab will tackle anxiety. And we'll see that the secret to making anxiety less agonizing begins with listening to it. It's so easy to think that our problem is what's going on in the world or our bodies, but the problem is what we think about what's going on in the world or our bodies. Certainly there are real life issues, but when our thinking is clear and present, then the problems lessen and the anxiety really diminishes. We'll see that the science

shows that we might want to commit to making anxiety our friend, or at the very least, our slightly annoying frenemy. You'll learn why on the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, You'll learn why on the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. If you like this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. As a special gift to Pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be sharing a series of six guided meditations to help you practice the lessons we've learned from our experts. To check them out, look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast subscriptions. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughn, and Courtney Guarino.

Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan, Brant Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.