The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - The Paradox of Grief

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

Most of us don't like to think about death - and when we experience a bereavement we're often not prepared for the pain or willing to confront all the feelings grief can bring. Psychotherapist Julia Samuel says the paradox of grief is that we need to let it rage through us with its full force if we are to process it effectively.Julia is the author of two bestselling books about grief: Grief Works, and This Too Shall Pass, and has created www.grief-works.app. She has helped bereaved people for more than 30 years and experienced the personal pain of loss - especially following the shocking death of her close friend Princess Diana. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. like losing your temper in the parking lot while out grocery shopping. But many of us have experienced a bigger, life-changing event that causes us to rethink how to deal with our emotions. In the last episode, we heard from the Harvard psychologist Susan David, who realized she needed to listen to her negative feelings after the death of her father. I felt so untethered from myself and so untethered in this experience of grief. And I started to respond to that as so many people do when they experiencing emotional pain, especially unprocessed emotional pain, which is to, for me, that took the form of binging and purging, refusing to accept the full weight of my grief. In this season of the Happiness Lab, we're going to tackle a whole

range of uncomfortable, painful emotions. And we'll give you strategies to learn from these feelings and respond to them in ways that will make you happier. But I wanted to start with the emotion that caused Susan so much pain, the one that prompted her to suppress her feelings because they hurt so badly. Grief. We live in a kind of age of what I don't think about, what I don't talk about isn't going to hurt me. I'll just turn away. And then when you are grieving and you feel like this, grief often feels like fear and you have all of these competing feelings of angry and sad and confused and lost and all of that at the same time, you think you're somehow doing it wrong. This is psychotherapist Julia Samuel.

Julia is the author of two bestselling books about grief, Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass. With all the difficult feelings that Julia has found can come twisted up with grief, it's no wonder that grieving is so tremendously painful. But as we'll see with so many of the emotions we'll talk about in this season, our instinct to run away from the pain of grief is surprisingly ineffective. The science shows we're best off when we address grief head on. We need to allow the grief to come through us, storm its way, and change us, and sort of come through in this kind of often very chaotic and messy way. It's often the things that you do to block the natural grieving process that in the end do you harm. We're going to devote two whole episodes to the strategies

Julia developed over the last 30 years to help her patients and herself develop a better relationship with grief. And spoiler alert, there are no five stages involved and no euphemisms either. You know, to get over it, we really do need a relationship with the person who's passed away. By the way, I never use the word passed away. Okay, sorry. Because where did they pass to? Okay, fair enough.

It's another kind of thing where you're denying the reality of death. Like they died. I think it's the way we kind of protect ourselves against the reality of it. We can't bear the reality of it. So we try and soften it with words like passed away. Get ready to learn that so many of our instincts about grief are wrong. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. One of the things I love most about Diana was her laugh. She had this incredibly raucous laugh that was really quite loud.

And she often put her hand to her mouth. And it was incredibly infectious. And I really miss her laugh. Coping with grief isn't just a professional pursuit for Julia. It's deeply personal. 25 years ago, Julia's best friend died suddenly in a car crash. That day is still vivid in Julia's memory. And actually, in mine.

If you're old enough, you may remember it too. Because Julia's best friend Diana was Princess Diana. Despite Julia's training as a psychologist, some of the ways she grieved after this tragedy still caught her by surprise. I guess what I was shocked by was my initial response was that I was kind of angry at the huge public response, which of course I now recognize is that people had a relationship with her and they loved her in their own way. But I kind of was sort of outraged at everybody else's loss when mine felt so personal and so deep. She told me about a moment in which she

desperately wanted to look back at her photos of Diana, but then immediately found them really hard to deal with. This is translatable to anyone experiencing loss is that we need to oscillate between the loss orientation and the restoration orientation of being okay. So that when I kind of wanted to connect to her and be close to her, I'd look at her photo and remember the times that we had and feel sad or all the other different feelings I felt. And then at other times, I'd want to get on with my day. So I put the photo in the drawer.

I kind of turned to my day. And she'd be at the back of my mind or other people that have died, you know, that I've loved. And you kind of can choose after the initial months, maybe longer, you can choose to move in and out of it. And so, you know, the love for the person never dies. And what I kind of recognize is that the relationship continues through the love, although the person never dies. And what I kind of recognize is that the relationship continues through the love, although the person is no longer present. And it's having touchstones to that memory. It may be looking at their photo. It may be writing them a postcard that allow you to move in and feel connected to them and feel the love and then moving away and doing something else where you get on with your life and live in love again. It's also one of the reasons I think that grief can stick around

for so long. I mean, in this case, 25 years have gone by, but there's constant reminders. Is that the kind of typical path of grief that it keeps coming back in these ways? Yes. I mean, I think my parents' generation who were children of the First World War and fought in the Second World War, their attitude to grief was very kind of mechanistic, that you forget and move on. What you don't think about, what you don't talk about isn't going to hurt you. And I think what we recognize now from great research, like psychologists like you and others, is that we are not robots. You can't switch somebody off. And so there can be kind of real connections to that person, often through the senses that you don't expect, sight, sound, touch and smell. So seeing a relation or someone or the back of someone's head or

hearing a piece of music or eating a particular dish that reminds you of them, that image of them unexpectedly can come up with video-like recall. And I guess most of those memories later on are quite bittersweet. They're sweet in that, oh, that's so lovely to remember that, you know, if it's a piece of music and you went to a concert together. And then it's accompanied by the sadness, like, oh, I wish you were here and that we could do that again, or I could talk to you about this, or that is lifelong in everybody's kind of experience of grief. I wanted to start off with kind of the broad question, which is just, what is grief? You've been studying this for many decades now. You know, what is this concept? How

should we describe it? You know, bereavement is when a loss has happened to you and it could be the death of someone that is significant to you or it could be a living loss. So it could be the loss of your job or relationship, moving country, living in a global pandemic. And grief is the emotional experience that you feel as a result of the loss. And it's very kind of subjective. It's very uniquely your own. And it's a messy of subjective. It's very uniquely your own. And it's a messy, chaotic, tricky business. And the difficulty of it is that it's also unpredictable. You know, the word grief is such a tidy little word.

And we'd like our experiences and our emotions to match what we want. And that isn't the case with grief. emotions to match what we want. And that isn't the case with grief. It brings up in us a lot of competing and conflicting feelings of anger, sadness, rage, fear, despair. And we find it very hard to hold and endure and let ourselves experience those feelings. And often, because we haven't talked about grief or death, we're ignorant about what is normal and what isn't normal. And so we may turn on ourselves and attack ourselves with how we're feeling. And that, of course, makes the whole process much more complex, much more likely to lead to complicated grieving or prolonged grief, because the purpose of grief is that pain is the agent of change. So the pain of grief, when we allow it to come through our system, forces us to face this reality that we don't want to look at, that this person that I love or this thing in my life

that I was really attached to is no longer here. So it's information. And we are wired to adapt. We are wired to heal and have hope. That's where people can really stay stuck in their grief is when they block the natural grieving process. I mean, I think right now modern culture just assumes we can fix everything, like there's some solution to all these things. But death seems to be this thing that there's just like not a solution for. Is this kind of part of why grief is so hard? a solution for? Is this kind of part of why grief is so hard? Yes, I mean, I think I may be wrong, and maybe your listeners will be angry with me, but I think in the US, there's even greater death denial than in the UK and Europe. And, you know, when I've taught at universities and colleges in the US, the kind of message I've got is that somehow dying is a failure and that winning is when we can use

medicine and technology and man's brilliance to overcome death. And, you know, that is living in death denial and it can often make the dying much more protracted and painful. And this sort of weighing up of choices of quality of life or length of life, you know, is in the actual dying is very, is often ignored. After the break, we'll hear more reasons why grief is so difficult to look at. But we'll also see that knowing more about how this emotion operates, culturally, mentally, and biologically, can help us more effectively face the reality of it, and maybe even to learn from it. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

Death is an inevitable part of existence, but most of us aren't even comfortable thinking about it, let alone talking about it. We worry about the deaths of specific people in our lives and like to completely avoid the idea that all life will come to an end. Psychotherapist and bestselling author Julia Samuel thinks this cultural taboo makes our experiences of grief so much more difficult to handle. Since medicine and basically the First World War, we've kind of denied death. Whereas in the Victorian times, you talked about death, you wore black armbands, you saw death, you'd see a body in your home. Death was very much part of life. There are all these Victorian black and white photographs of the person that died surrounded by their family. And when I suggest to someone now, maybe you'd like to take a photograph

of your father or grandfather or sibling that's died, They're kind of like horrified as if it's kind of disgusting and I'm asking them to dig into their entrails. But actually, the task of mourning is to face the reality of the death. Facing that reality in ourselves and for those that we love is really vital for our mental health, I would say. vital for our mental health, I would say. This idea of not being able to face death, I feel like is particularly bad for people who themselves are alive now, but maybe facing a terminal disease, right? It's really hard for them to embrace it, but it's also really hard for the people around them to talk about it. You know, I know you've talked a lot about how people who are working with somebody who's about to face grief really need to help with this. But, you know, this issue of not wanting to face it, wanting to control it and pretend it's not happening,

this seems to come up a lot for people who are about to face, you know, something that's really grief inducing too. I completely agree. And that grief starts at the point of diagnosis. The moment you have a diagnosis that limits your life, whether it's a few years or months or weeks, your perception of yourself and everyone around you changes. And again, it's a few years or months or weeks, your perception of yourself and everyone around you changes. And again, it's this magical thinking is that sort of, if I love you, and you love me, we have to act like everything's going to be okay, because that's going to make everything be okay. And so you can actually build these walls of kind of miscommunication and protect which which are intended with protection, that mean that you're kind of lonely behind these walls of fear around your own death or survivors of the death and the person facing

death, having it more peaceful and calm is by communicating, having those vital conversations about, am I frightened? What do I believe in? Do I want to be cremated or buried? What are the unanswered questions? And those important conversations and, you know, tender conversations. I love you. For those that survive them are the kind of bedrock of what you go back to and you revisit for the rest of your life. And if you miss that opportunity, if you don't kind of resolve the things or ask the things that you need to, you're then stuck with them and they kind of can ruminate and kind of go round and round in your head endlessly. And so this is, I think, part of the problem when it comes to grief. I mean, grief is painful and

it's hard to get through, but we also have these really bad theories about it, right? I think grief also feels like one of these many emotions that we want to control. And I think that's in part because a lot of people have these theories about how grief is going to work. Kubler-Ross. Yeah. So Kubler-Ross had this idea of these like five stages of grief. I think she listed them as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But this can kind of lead us to think that you're supposed to go through stages in like this perfect order, right? And so talk about why this view is a little bit wrong, according to the science.

I have huge respect for Kubler-Ross. And of course, all of those aspects are important aspects of grief that you can fight it and kind of try and force your will over it. And in the end, you have to come to terms with it or you can kind of feel very depressed. But what I think what it's taken is that people kind of think that they can route march themselves in that order, like it's a step and a path that they can follow. Then if they're not doing bargaining after denial, that somehow they've got it the wrong way around. And of course, we can feel all of those things in a day. You can have moments of acceptance. You can have moments of fury. You can have moments of fury. You can have moments of

denial within half an hour. But I think what's useful about them is recognizing that those feelings we do not naturally befriend. We have a problem with those feelings. And so I think when we think about why grief might be there in the first place, it's helpful to think about what grief is from sort of a biological perspective. So talk kind of go into fourth gear and you can get locked into fourth gear. And of course, if you're in fight, flight or freeze, your capacity to cognate, to make sense of things, to make good decisions goes offline because you're just there kind of looking for survival. Physiologically, your whole body shifts to accommodate that so that you may be very short of breath, you may lose

your appetite, you may not be able to sleep. Some people sleep a lot. Grief often feels like fear. So you feel like, you know, there's this gun or as people talk about this tiger that's just about to come and get you. We know that your heart in the first six weeks after a very significant death is more likely to have a heart attack. So that feeling of being broken hearted isn't just a feeling, it's physiological. And pain hits the same neurotransmitters as physical pain. Emotional pain hits the neuropathogenic pain. So grief is embodied. The mind and the body are completely interconnected. And what clients talk to me about is that they often talk about

their heart hurting, it feels broken, or they put their hands on their chest, this tightness and this kind of frozenness in their chest. So they feel like their capacity is very brittle and kind of locked. I mean, I think this is so powerful because when you recognize it's embodied, when you recognize that grief is your body's reaction to a typical threat like a tiger, it kind of makes so much more sense, especially when you realize that that threat hasn't gone away. You know, every day you wake up and the loss and the threat is still there. And so, you know, have you seen that kind of thinking more about the physiology of this can give people a little bit more patience with their grief? Knowledge is power. their grief? Knowledge is power. You know, one of the things that is the kind of least sexy tip I give people is like, take exercise, move your body around. You will always feel different

if you're kind of in that awful kind of locked, terrorized state and you just can't face the day. Get outside wherever you live. Get outside, move your body, come back and do something that intentionally calms you, that intentionally soothes you. For me, that would be a cup of tea because I'm English. Ideally, get a hug, journal, write down what you're feeling, because then you you've kind of released some of that tightness and you've let your head and your heart kind of connect with each other with your body. And then you're more an integrated, like calmer whole because you've kind of aligned with each other. Otherwise, they're all out of sorts. And you know, grief feels like madness. People often say,

I feel like I'm going mad or I am mad. So the bodily things you do to calm yourself down, and you've done much more research on this than I have, but it is more and more, it's more and more powerful how important our mind and body in exercise is. If grief can feel like madness, facing a loaded gun, or being chased by a tiger, it's no wonder people would rather shove this feeling away. In Julia's experience, even the people who come to her to get help are in a hurry to put grief behind them. You know, very much like you talk about, we want to be happy. We want to be getting on.

And one of the first questions people often say to me as they walk through my door is, how long am I going to feel like this? You know, am I ever going to get better? When am I going to get over it? We'll learn her surprising answer when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Julia Samuel has been counseling people about grief for over 30 years. Her clients often come to her wanting to know when the pain will subside. How soon will they be able to get back to being their old selves? when the pain will subside? How soon will they be able to get back to being their old selves?

The answer is what Julia calls the paradox of grief. To get through the feelings, we have to let them in. It's the paradox. The more you give yourself the courage to face and think about these things and kind of embrace what you most fear, then it's actually liberating. kind of embrace what you most fear, then it's actually liberating. And you engage with the life that you do have, knowing that it is time limited, knowing that the people that you love and care about most are all going to die, and that it's unpredictable, we don't have control. And I think one of the things from the pandemic was we recognised our lack of control over many, many kind of things in life. And I think what has always been true is that the things that we care about most, whether people love us or don't love us, and when we're going to live or die, we can influence, we can shape it by our lifestyle, but we have no control. And it is fascinating how we kid ourselves. Fundamentally, my message is

you don't have control. And this is the paradox, right? Is to get through grief. We need to recognize our lack of control. We need to embrace the fact that we're going to have to feel negative emotions. Can I pause you? Negative. Why are they negative? Who says they're negative? No, totally. Yeah. What makes them bad? Yeah. So talk a little bit about i think this is so important because this is part of what we're doing in this series for the next month is to sort of think about emotions being good and so you know explain a little bit that we don't necessarily have to think of grief as a negative emotion like why is it why can it be a positive signal for us why can

it be helpful for us i don't I wouldn't even frame it as negative or positive. I would frame it as it's important process that we have to paradoxically allow to embrace. If I look at feeling sad as a negative, that that's a bad thing and that it's going to make me miserable, I'm compounding my relationship with sadness and tears. If I think of my sadness as a natural expressive emotion that is actually wired in me to help me feel, and I will feel released and better after I felt sad, certainly after I've cried, I am supporting myself in that feeling of my sadness. But if I come at it like, oh, sadness, oh, that's bad. I only want to feel happy. I'm

kind of stopping myself at the starting block before I even had a moment to let it do its thing. The response we often have to grief is so counterproductive. We try to suppress our grief. You know, we kind of like put the lid on this pressure cooker. So talk about from the perspective of our physiology, why that's so bad, trying to suppress all these emotions, fear, anger, sadness that we're experiencing. I love the image of a pressure cooker because your emotion is evolutionarily, they're wired to tell you something is up. Oi, something has happened. And when you're grieving, those emotions are like tornadoes in your body saying,

wake up, this is bad. This is real. You can't avoid this. So the energy you do to kind of squash them down, You can't avoid this. So the energy you do to kind of squash them down, they stay powerful and live and full of ambition to come and talk to you. And so the more you block them, the more they're going to try and fight your suppression and speak to you so that you hear them. When you allow them to speak to you, if you like, if you think of them as tornadoes and ammunition, if you allow them to speak to you, if you like, if you think of them as tornadoes and ammunition, if you allow the ammunition to come through your system and you kind of surrender to it, you face it, you feel it, you incrementally in that moment adapt a little bit more,

you may incrementally in that moment express your sadness or fear or anger. And as you express it, something shifts that you know a little bit more in a way that you never wanted to know that this was true, that this person has died. And as you shift, it changes you. You know, a typical moment could be you're going to the supermarket and you always bought yogurts with four pots in and someone significant in your family has died. So you're not four, you're three. So in the supermarket, you kind of, you have this burst of feeling and you're in a public place and you don't want to feel it and you have choices. So in a public place, you may just acknowledge, I feel really sad, say it to yourself and take a

breath, but then hold on to that, because if you then compound that by going on suppressing it all day, that sad, difficult image, as it were, grows in force inside you. So that if you can do your shopping, get home, get to a safe place, and then allow, as you unpack the yogurt, say, I've never said this before, and then allow, as you unpack the yogurt, say, I've never said this before, this is just, this has just come out of nowhere. I've never used yogurt in shopping. But anyway, you allow yourself to feel the sadness. The next time you buy yogurt, it's not going to hit you with the same force because you've processed it a little bit until in the end, over time, you've adjusted and adapted and you kind of know that you're three

and you're still buying a yogurt for four. I mean, the irony of this, though, is I feel like this is not necessarily a lot of people's instincts. I know it's not my instinct when I go through grief. Like if I had that moment in the shop where I had the realization of like, wait, I'm not four people buying yogurt. I'm only three. My instant reaction would be like, I'm going to check my email. I'm just going to get busy, like, you know, like stuff that thought down, right? And so, you know, how do we kind of navigate this urge to kind of just not be with our emotions? Like they don't feel fun. And it's hard to realize this paradox that what we need to get through the emotions is to actually be with them. I mean, I think awareness is the first step and busyness is an

anesthetic and it is a natural blocker. And it's probably, along with drug and alcohol, it's probably the most common. Sometimes switching and being busy is useful. No one wants to burst in tears in front of lots of strangers in a supermarket. So it's kind of recognising you feel sad, but also logging that at some point you need to find a way of acknowledging and expressing it. So, you know, I often talk to clients about allowing a space in a day that you have a little kind of cut out time, it may be half an hour where you go to your memory box, where you look at the person that's died, where you have a memory of doing the shopping and avoiding the pain and how painful that is.

That can do it for you so that then you're not so likely to be hijacked by it in other places where you don't want it to happen. You know, I have a client who wears her dad's watch and she's got a little tiny wrist. But and it's a big male watch with a big masculine strap. wrist, but and it's a big male watch with a big masculine strap. And when she's talking to me, when she's talking about him, she strokes the face of the watch. And you feel like she's sort of stroking his face that she can kind of really picture him and kind of embody him. And that's a direct kind of connection with him that she will use forever. And I think in society, we want our friends or our family or ourselves to get over it, get past these difficult feelings. And it's, you know, it's the paradox is by allowing them is how you do over time, heal and recover and have hope again and love again and live again.

But it's allowing them to find their way through you that changes you into your changed kind of new version of yourself once this person has died and i love this idea of the new version of yourself because i think there's this concept that you know once we go through this process we want to be us before we got this bad news but that's also not how grief works it kind of comes with this growth too completely and you, we're never the same. I mean, you're probably a bit different today than you were yesterday or a week ago, that we are, we're wired to evolve and grow. And when we befriend it and don't fight it, it can change us. And there's this idea of post-traumatic growth, that it never denies

the level of the loss or the depth of the pain and the suffering. But what people have found is that when they have found that they can survive what they thought they could never survive, that they would never overcome, they've allowed themselves to feel pain at levels that were beyond their expectation. Their perception of themselves, their resilience, Their perception of themselves, their resilience, their robustness, what matters to them in life, feels like they've been expanded. And they feel changed by it. And they wouldn't want the thing to have happened, but they would term that as internal growth. Paradox of grief is that we could only move through it once we stop fighting it.

But I know firsthand that letting grief in is easier said than done. Thankfully, Julia has come up with a set of strategies for how you can support yourself while experiencing the feelings that come up during the grieving process. You'll hear about all of these strategies in part two of my conversation with Julia Samuel. 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. 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 Marano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, 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.