The Netmums Podcast - S1 Ep56: Julia Samuel on parenting after your own mum or dad has died

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

Parenting while dealing with the loss of your own parent, and parenting while battling anxiety. Neither are easy or straightforward, but are sure to become clearer to understand and deal with, as Annie and Wendy meet psychotherapist Julia Samuel. Julia specialises in grief therapy, was a bestie and confidant of the late Princess Diana, is godmother to Prince George and the author of best selling books ‘Grief Works’ and ‘This Too Shall Pass’. We wanted her to adopt us by the end, and we’re pretty sure you will too! Sponsored by Clairol: Get Feel Good Colour with Clairol Natural Instincts. The natural choice for rich colour and brilliant shine - with no ammonia or harsh scent - that is kinder on your hair. It’ll make you and your hair glow with radiant shine.

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It lasts for 28 washes apparently no way you can tell me more about it later now on with the podcast you're listening to sweat snot and tears brought to you by netmums i'm annie o'leary and i'm wendy college and together we talk about all of this week's sweaty snotty and tearful parenting moments with guests who are far more interesting than we are welcome to another jolly episode of sweat, snot and tears. I hope neither bodily fluid has afflicted any of you so far today. But Wendy, I need your help. I'm failing. It's only the beginning of term and already I can't get up in the morning, which means that my lark child is feeling neglected because I don't get up with her and the owl child is languishing in his pit a bit longer than he probably should so tell me

how the hell can I get up in the morning and be a better parent I don't know why do you ask me these questions you have the answer to everything that's the point of our friendship, isn't it? Well, at the moment, I'm just feeling a little bit sad. Why are you missing them? No, I'm not missing them. Good God. Start of term just always makes me feel a little bit like they're getting bigger and I get a bit wobbly. So I'm not really in the right frame of mind to help you with your sleep issues, my love. You're going to have to ask the guest. well let's go for it so uh let's ask her she is a psychotherapist

specializing in grief uh found a patron of child bereavement UK author of two marvelous books grief works which is about death and how we deal with it and this too shall pass about the life crises we all suffer from and what we can learn from them she has her own podcast which is why our sound producer was very impressed with her technical skills today um and i hope she doesn't mind us mentioning it but it'd be a bit weird if we didn't she's godmother to a certain little prince prince george um and actually last favorite fact about this person is she's quite a big fan of the therapeutic benefits of tea and biscuits, I have heard her say, and I can see her nodding on our

Zoom call. Julia Samuel, welcome to Sweat, Stot and Tears. I have wanted to chat to you for such a long time. Oh my goodness, I'm so surprised and thrilled to hear that and I'm delighted to talk to you both. Great. So we always start the podcast by asking if there has been any sweat, any snot or until two days ago when I went back to work and went into a civilized flat with nobody else apart from my husband. And so it's a joy. I haven't smelt nappies. I haven't heard cries. I haven't heard bangs, but I've heard them a lot in the last month, which is a wonderful thing, but it's also quite nice when I haven't heard bangs, but I've heard them a lot in the last month, which is a wonderful thing, but it's also quite nice when I don't. Yeah, that must be the joy of the grandparent, which is revel in it for a while and then go away and shut the door.

Because, I mean, it's the alwaysness of parenting. Oh, yes, Julia, it is. It is. Can I tell you something else with the 40 or you know my eldest daughter is 40 parenting does not end it just changes yes it's true well i'm 40 something and i'm actually living with my mom again at the moment while our house is being renovated and um i, I'm still very needy of my mum, I think. I mean, one of my big questions to people listening is, as a parent of adult children, I've got four children, is where is the boundary where you're no longer responsible for them, and where you're only responsible to them, where you have to have a no, where they have a problem and you say no, you have to sort it out. Because on the one hand, if you over kind of help them, they don't learn to do it themselves.

But if you step back too far, they feel abandoned. Yeah, I was about to have an abandonment crisis listening to you say that. The thought of my mum saying, no, I'm not going to help you is like... Well, our producer is dad to teenagers so I'll be interested to see where he draws the boundary on telling them no go and sort it out yourself it's a bit tricky with a six-year-old I think I have to help at the moment I'm talking about adults I know I'm joking now another question we always ask early on in the pod is how was your lockdown as a psychotherapist surely you were better prepared than most or did it flummox even the best of us, Julia?

As a psychotherapist, of course, I feel everything the same as everybody else. It doesn't protect me against feeling anxious or waking up at four in the morning with a pounding heart when I heard the sort of news of the first lockdown and the second and the third. So, of course, I'm affected. I think the thing that helps me is that I have quite a good sort of access to my own process. So I know what's going on, I can name it and I can do stuff to try and dial it down. Because it's not about not feeling, it's about how you manage your feelings. And also, if you know about death and you're a therapist and you've read a book about change, I was unbelievably busy. So I mean, I have never worked so hard in my life.

Because people needed to talk to you, you mean? Because people needed to talk to me because I was doing tons of webinars for bereavement organizations because I supported an intensive care unit staff team twice a week. Wow. Because I have a huge load of clients because I was doing a lot of transmitting on sort of radio and stuff. So did you move everything online very quickly? Were you one of the people that managed to get a grip of the change and yeah I did it online I did it more or less overnight I actually really liked that and what I liked was feeling that I was useful you know helping the

hospital which I don't even know that I did but I mean I was present for two hours a week every week felt that I had I was sort of had a part to play and I was present for two hours a week, every week, felt that I was sort of had a part to play. And I think what a lot of people find difficult was they, you know, if they was, you know, comfortable enough that they had a roof over their head and food on the table, they sort of felt powerless. And I didn't feel powerless, which was a very lucky feeling. So did anything else good come out of lockdown for you? Yes, I mean mean lockdowns I know plural plural I I think what happened with me was I learned a lot about myself but also I met

a huge variety of people and I think the intensity of the experience kind of dropped lots of defenses So I felt close to people very quickly. Yeah. Because everybody was, it was a bit like during, were you in London, 7-7 bombs? Yeah, I was. Yes. So, you know, when I walked down the street, everyone was talking to each other or talking, you know, personally, or, you know, saying what they felt. And I felt like that in lockdown, that people were much more open, much less pretending that everything's fine or that I'm cleverer than you or richer than you or, you know, much less competitive. That's really interesting. That's really, really interesting. Now, the reason you're

such an important guest for us and our audience is twofold. One is parenting without a parent is a recurring theme at Netmums, particularly in our forum. Something is something that so many seem to struggle with and and and yet don't feel confident talking about to their friends in real life. So they often turn to Net mums to have that conversation and the other thing is because anxiety seems to be such a huge problem for our users in their lives not necessarily continuously but maybe anxiety in pregnancy or postnatal anxiety or anxiety around like you said some kind of life change so a please can you help tell us and our users how to bear the ache that is parenting after the loss of one of your own parents? And B, how are we

supposed to handle our own anxiety while being the parent that our children need us to be? Two really quick, easy questions for you there, Julia. Yeah, you've really started small there, Annie. I'm sure you just rattle off the answers today. I think, I mean, parenting without a parent, I think it's recognising you have to hold two aspects of yourself sort of emotionally and not try and knock one out with the other. So what matters is that you recognize, acknowledge and allow the pain of the loss of your parent and the dream that you had that they would

be a grandparent that was participating in your life with your children and the sort of image that you have of sort of going to boots together and buying nappies or pushing a street, you know, pushing a baby in the park and the loss that brings. And you can't deny that by kind of only holding onto the good things. So I think with loss, so what people talk about, what I kind of know from practice is grief doesn't end. So the process of grieving is allowing the pain to come through your body, to name it and express it. And in doing that, you release it and you find a way of living with and accommodating the loss. So you can't block it. But at the same time, what we know now in comparison to, say, my parents' generation is that the love for your parent never dies and the relationship continues. I send her to this school? Should she have her vaccine? How am I going to tick her off when I saw her steal sweets from the local sweet shop? And actually, you could probably give yourself

the answer. That's really nice. Yeah, when you know someone really well, you can hear the internal conversation, can't you? But the important thing is that you hold both because often what people want to do is just go for the positive and forget the pain and the comforting feeling but actually you you need to how we healing grief and it's a sort of ongoing process obviously the intensity and the rawness of it changes over time. But you can have a sharp feeling of loss. Like, say your daughter is going to her senior school for the first time. You would want to send your mom a photo or your dad of her new blazer.

So even if she died 10 years before. So you need to say, ow, and sort of feel the pain of it. Allow it. Name it. Have a bit of self-compassion sick oh that hurts rather than often people turn against themselves when they're grieving and they attack themselves and say oh you're making a fuss don't be so wet so they make what's already painful worse by by kind of telling themselves they're being pathetic or all that awful what I call shitty committee that you kind of do to yourself that's such a good phrase so name you know acknowledge it feel it name it be self-compassion breathe and then go kind of hi mom or do something that connects to your mom like put a photo of your daughter next to the photograph

of your mum or wear your mum's bracelet when you take her to school I'm talking about mums but of course it's dads yes where your dad's watch or kind of you have something of his in your pocket or wear his big jersey or sleep with his pajamas made into a pillowcase wherever you kind of because what we talk about in grieving is touchstones to memory. So having kind of resonant objects that keep you in touch with the person that's died. So, I mean, the thing I've done with my parents, my mother was a really, truly appalling cook. But she did make quite a good sort of chicken casserole thing thing that doesn't stand in great stead lovely description julia she called it chicken mess

so that i nearly spat my tea out then listeners so my mom she this was not her her strong suit but i if i want to feel close to her and I'm doing something scary, I will make my version, which is quite a lot nicer. I'm not a great cook either, but it's a bit nicer, of chicken mess. touch and smell the senses are what connects us to our feelings most powerfully so you could you know you could put on some of her perfume or your dad's aftershave and that would take you immediately to connect with them and so it's having little touchstones to memory a lot of people you know their mum make wonderful food and they cook it to remind themselves um and feel close to their dad or their mum. Okay. I think we've got a good grip on that now. It's quite counterintuitive, I think, to say feel the pain because we're so used to, especially, you know,

we were brought up like, oh, come on, cheer up. Don't cry. Stop crying. But that's useful for parenting kids as well, actually, because as a mum, your instinct, or as a dad, your instinct is to try and make it better rather than letting them sit in it and feel it and learn what it feels like and then helping them to learn how to come out of it can i add two more things of course keep adding so your children are grieving too so they're

grieving their grandparents if they knew them or their sort of image of them. And so very much with children, I think adults feel like a child when they're grieving and behave often like a child. You feel very young, you feel raw, you want someone to come and hold you, you want someone to come and make it better. And very much with bereaved children, they do need comforting. But we, as you've just said perfectly, Wendy, we need to allow them to feel their pain. So the metaphor we use for grieving children is to jump in and out of puddles, to jump in the puddle, be very sad. And it could be going to their new school. It could be because their friend went to go and live in Australia.

There are living losses from losses that they have, which is in this too shall pass, and losses from losses that they have, you know, which is in this two shall pass and losses from death, but allow them to feel sad, allow them to cry, and then hop out of the puddle and be a happy child that nicks their siblings toy, that roars with laughter, that kicks a football, and that the grieving process for adults and children is the moving in and out of feeling the sadness, allowing it to come through, and then being happy, getting on with life. And as a child and as an adult, being comforted. So the single biggest kind of predictor of your outcome when you're grieving is the love and connection to others. So if you really miss your mum and your partner isn't really doing the business or your dad, I keep saying mums, it's such a bias parenting isn't it? No, it's fine.

Maybe build a closer relationship with an aunt or with a godparent or with a friend of your parent so that you can have someone you go and have tea with or go for a walk with that you can reminisce about your mum or you can ask their advice for in a kind of parental way. I think the big thing about what you're saying is that we mustn't feel like a failure if we feel sad missing a parent as a parent. What I noticed when people talk about it in our forum is they often say, oh, I should be over this by now. I should be feeling better or I really should have enjoyed Mother's Day and the present my four-year-old made me. I shouldn't have missed my mum. And it's like, you need to stop shoulding, don't we? You need to stop shoulding and you need to stop self-attacking and also there is the as you said there's this

thing of that you should get over or you should should be okay and the paradox of grief is both that when you allow yourself to feel the pain and acknowledge it and express it, you heal. And also, you don't get over it, you find a way of living with it, you find a way of accommodating it. But it isn't something that is like a fixed boundary, like now you weren't okay, and then now you're okay, that you it, it is an iterative process that will can carry on through life. Because, you know, a parental relationship is one of the most significant relationships of of your life and the measure of your loss is the measure of your love so if you really loved someone you're really going to bloody miss them yeah the price we pay yeah for love is

grief and all of that before we tackle the anxiety question that i put on our to-do list for this chat she's like this as a boss sorry sorry i'm very demanding um what you've actually just made me think of something else that people talk about a lot in our forum and that's miscarriage and the grief associated with that and again people are like oh it was only a miscarriage i should be only i know i know How can we make, A, the people suffering the loss and also those helping them and around them more understanding of how big a deal it is? So we can't make them. No. But we could try, Julia.

Once again, listeners, a little insight into Annie there for you. Let me tell you the things that, I mean, I worked in an NHS maternity ward, so I, you know, stillbirth and neonatal death and miscarriage was what I did every day for 25 years. Wow. And the thing, you know, the many, one of the many things I learned is that you can't, the minute you see a blue line on the pregnancy test, you don't see a fetus that's five days old or 10 days old. You imagine yourself as a parent, pushing the pram down the street, how your life is going to change, how, when are you going to stop work? Are you going to, can you afford it? Is it a bad time? Are you going to put, you know, you imagine buying a different car. So what you're grieving is the future that you imagined and had every right to believe you're going to have. So the measure of your loss isn't the number of weeks, whether it's six weeks,

eight weeks, 12 weeks, 20 weeks. It is the emotional investment in the pregnancy. And so of course, there are, you know, everybody is subject to that. And everybody's experience is different. And there isn't a hierarchy of what's worse or better. But, you know, in my experience of working with people, somebody who's had five miscarriages, who is 35, and they their diminishing hopes of getting pregnant is an absolutely unbelievable, tragic loss that, you know, the new miscarriage brings back the losses of all the previous miscarriages. So you kind of have to, because it always goes to the same place and it diminishes their hope for this dream that they want is to have a healthy baby in their arms. And that is a different experience from someone who still has many fertile

years left, whose first miscarriage it is, who may well go on and get pregnant kind of three months later, because one in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage. It is extremely common. And in some ways, the commonness of it makes people denigrate it and use the word only. And I think what I'm saying is, allow yourself to have the feelings, whatever they are. And the big thing is to honour the loss. So it may be that I think often, because it's so invisible, particularly miscarriage, even more than stillbirth, is sometimes you could have a miscarriage and it's like a very bad period. So you have nothing to show for it. You didn't even get an extra size pair, you know, bigger jeans or whatever.

So one of the things that I often did was get people to find a symbol that represented the loss and honor that. So it may be to get something made, it may be to find a stone or to make something from shells, to sew something, make embroidery, but do something that externalizes and something that's tangible that you can hold on to and I think the other thing that really helps is memory boxes so putting the cards in you know from the flowers that people have sent you and often in hospitals they don't do services at St Mary's where I work we always had a service but do have a service of an ending for yourself because I mean one of the terrible things of COVID was not having proper funerals. But we are wild.

You know, we've had funerals and symbols of death for literally thousands, tens of thousands of years. We need a ritual to represent and mark the loss. That was such a long answer. I'm so sorry. No, but we're gripped aren't we wendy i'm blown away actually yes i think what's so interesting about that is i i hope that hospitals have improved since my experience of a miscarriage six seven years ago but one of the things that was so tricky is that you were kind of on a bit of a conveyor belt in the hospital and you

were lumped in with everybody else who was going in for surgery for whatever pregnancy related reason that might be including cesarean births so it's very difficult to kind of rationalize those things when you're being put on a conveyor belt and sent to the other end of the hospital. And I'm hoping things have improved. I don't think from reading our forums, they have in all cases, Annie, but. Me is, I'm so sorry, Wendy, that you had that experience

because it makes what's already really awful just so much worse. I think how you're spoken to in the hospital how you feel you're kind of treated with respect and care and kindness has a huge impact on your capacity to grieve and look after yourself when you leave home because it's your first experience of it it's your first contact with it and it's And it's a complete postcode lottery. I think a lot of hospitals still are really bad. With Child Bereavement UK, the charity,

you know, I'm a founder of Patreon, we did a lot of training. That was the first area we worked in was maternity units. And you may go there and do the training and everybody's on board, but then the sort of staff changes and other things take over and other protocols become more important. And it's so hard to hold on to the high-quality care people need when they're suffering. I agree. And I'm now going to skip you back to the ever-cheerful topic of anxiety. Shall we go back to anxiety now?

I've had that as well. You're so wise, Julia. I just want to get as much of your brain out into our audience's hands as possible. So yeah, so this other thing... We'll do another one with me another time. Yeah, well, we'll just launch a whole new podcast, I think, called Annie, Wendy and Julia.

The other thing we talk about a lot in Netmums is anxiety and how to live with it and how to live with it when you're trying to be this perfect parent and all things to all of your children all at the same time how how are we supposed to do this well the first thing is to is to lower your bloody bar you know for goodness sake perfection doesn't exist but i think as parents and as mums in particular we've kind of led to believe that we should be perfect for our children, shouldn't we?

No, not at all. God, I love you even more now. They don't want to have to live up to a perfect mother. They want a kind of real mother. So, you know, you know all this, the Winnicott good enough parent. Because if you were the perfect mother who had ironed clothes, never lost her temper, remembered everything, did perfect chicken casserole, all of those things, then they'd think that's what they had to be. But by being a mom who is snotty and sweaty and teary, loses her rag,

but then is really loving, that moves in a night of different moods. Children learn by what they observe, not by what you say. So if they see that you are good enough, that you're reliably loving them, so that you're not unpredictable, you don't turn your rage on them for no reason that is nothing to do with them, or even for a reason that you're kind of level enough, that you have enough control, that you kind of lose it, but not in a terrible way that is damaging to them, but that, you know, secure attachment, that you're consistently reliably loving, that they can trust you and they trust that they are lovable and that you imbue them

with a core belief that they are lovable. That is gold for their future. That is what they need. By no means do they need perfection. And I mean, am I allowed to swear? Go for it. What the fuck? If you forget their gym kit, they'll be cross with you. And it's quite good for them to be cross with you. And then you say, sorry, I'll remember next week. And then you better remember next week. or they might remember it themselves don't be don't be ridiculous but i think we do over parent a bit in that in that aim of of being perfect parents so to go

to your question wendy and i i could say a lot more about the perfect thing but evolutionarily as human being i can't say the word, we as human beings are wired to look for danger. So we are born with our amygdala, which is our kind of look for danger binoculars, is switched on to look for danger. So we have a negative bias. So we are always kind of seeing where are the difficult things. And emotion has no logic. You can't put logic through an emotional system. So that if you kind of tell me something that you get anxious about, or that you hear on the forum, somebody gets anxious regularly about. What other people think of them. That's one of the things. So what other parents or mums at school gates or mother-in-law or whoever it might be thinks of a parent.

So, I mean, there are so many aspects of that. But first of all, you are probably projecting onto them your shitty committee that you're turning against yourself. So probably what you're imagining they're saying about you is absolutely nothing to that you're turning against yourself. So probably what you're imagining they're saying about you is absolutely nothing to what they're saying about you, but that you are saying to yourself and thinking that they're saying. So first of all, kind of write down what you're saying about yourself and be aware of what it is so that you can begin to be aware of it. So you can begin to turn the dial down, even switch it off. A. B, the reason why we mind what other people think is because we're tribal beings. We need each other. The biggest single kind of important thing in our life is the quality of our relationships. The quality of our life is valued by the quality of our

relationships. We need people and our path to happiness and success in life has to be paved with people. So it's not like it doesn't matter what other people think, but we need to have honest, loving, connected relationships with other people. But not perfect relationships, human, emotion, honest relationships. But from a kind of evolutionary perspective, if you saw the person as not liking you, you would evolutionarily wise think you're not part of the tribe. And if you're not part of the tribe, you can be left behind to go and die. And that's what triggers your anxiety. So there are lots of physical things. So there's a kind of cognitive understanding that you can begin to say,

oh, God, that's my fear about that, that you can help yourself with. But also little tiny, mini habits. I mean, the single biggest wind or a down of anxiety is exercise. You know, do a 12-minute micro habits tiny habits if you do a 12 minute app where you do ghastly burpee jumps and the worst the squat things get your heart rate up for 10 minutes it reduces the level of cortisol which is the stress hormone in your body and you naturally feel more relaxed you could actually do much better going outside, but you probably can't leave your children. But, you know, being in nature, going outside for even

10 or 12 minutes a day lowers your anxiety levels because it reduces your cortisol and then it raises your dopamine. And then you can think because the trouble is when you're anxious, you go into fear code red, the smoke alarm is going off in your head. And then your capacity to cognate, to think is switched off because you're not meant to be thinking deeply or understanding stuff when you're on higher alert. You're supposed to be running from tigers. Running from tigers or killing them. I think we think that if we're going to use exercise to help us with anxiety, that we need to join some kind of elaborate gym and go for an hour at 6.30 in the morning every week.

And then it becomes the source of your anxiety. Exactly. It's one more thing on the to-do list. You never bloody do. But like you say, starting small, small little things is all it takes often, isn't it? I mean, even five minutes makes a difference. You know, BJ Fogg, tiny habits. Just tiny habits will let you know the breathing.

So if you did a combination of a five-minute ghastly star jump and a five-minute breathing exercise, you would feel better. Right, Wend, we're doing this, OK, from tomorrow. And then, can I just add one more thing? You give yourself a treat. So that's a fantastic cup of coffee. Now you're talking our language, lady. It's your best breakfast, whatever it is. And if you do that, say three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday,

five minutes jumping around, five minutes breathing, and then a treat. The thing that helps you maintain habits isn't willpower. It's feeling good. It's feeling pleased about yourself. So if you've done that and it hasn't cost you that much, it's not too high a bar to have to over time to do it. Yeah, you didn't have to get a babysitter. You just had to buy a sports bra and some oat milk and you were sorted. Or hold them. Or hold them.

Right. Now, back to colouring my hair again. I'm thinking about going darker. What do you think, Wend. Or hold them. Right. Now, back to colouring my hair again. I'm thinking about going darker. What do you think, Wend? And doing it myself with Claral Natural Instincts. All I need to do is to decide which of the 18 shades to pick. Totally agree. Spending hours in a hairdresser would be lovely,

but it just never seems to happen. Exactly, which is why I'm loving the sound of Claral Natural Instincts. Their semi-permanent conditioning colour promises to give me shiny, swooshy hair in just 20 minutes. And it contains coconut oil and it contains aloe vera, so it feels very treat-like and it even works on my crazy curly hair. Exactly. No roots, just shininess and general fabulousness. What's not to love? Consider it a hair win. win now on with the podcast relationships you were talking a moment ago about how we're all social beings and annie and i have been fangirling you and listening to your desert island discs and you said that when you were

younger you felt that only half a dozen people also believed in the you. If that. If that. One of them being your friend Princess Diana. So can we talk about female friendships and how they bolster us, how they knock us down, why they're so valuable? It's what netmums is, in honesty. Sorry net dads, but we're mainly net mums and we'd like more dads so come and be net dads too but in the meantime can you tell us about female friendships please and why they're so cool I think they're our superpower um you know women thrive because of these closest and I think you only need like four or five really good close friends I mean I I think you want a kind of a broader mix for doing other stuff that is so it's not always the same but you can't get your needs met from your partner and your job you can't get them all met you get

some of them met and being a parent so you you need your closest girlfriends. I have, you know, probably four of my closest girlfriends. And they're the ones I'm honest with who I moan about my husband, who I moan about my children, who I tell them why I'm pissed. I mean, I do moaning and then we go and have a lot of fun together. So moaning's allowed. Moaning's a good thing, right? Well, according to the research, venting makes you feel worse. But I mean, personally, I always feel better. So I don't know.

Bugger the research then. Bugger the research. So I think walking, I was in Scotland. I had three really best girlfriends. We walked for miles. They were furious with me dragging them up a hill, wetting and everything. And then we all talked about what had happened in the last sort of three, because I hadn't seen them for months and months and months. So we all kind of gave a download of what drove us nuts. A few nice things, but mainly it was negative. And then we went for a swim in the

lock. And that was like the best day I've had since March 2020. I mean, it was so cleansing, all of it, the walking, the talking and the swim. And we hugged and we had a cup of tea and cake, carrot cake. She remembers the cake. She remembers exactly what the cake was like. See, now I can't go past this without asking you. This is a very ridiculous question but surely if venting with your girlfriends is one of the things that you think is so valuable please tell me that princess di had a rant at you about prince charles at some point along the way do you honestly

honestly think she'd be my friend if I would ever tell you an answer no not in the slightest but I come on I had to ask I'm sure there was venting involved but we don't know who it was about indeed we don't want Julia ending up in the tower anytime soon do you vent with your girlfriend I mean what do you use your girlfriends for we are venting and drinking Wendy and I are actually very good friends, not just colleagues. And we have an ongoing venting situation, don't we, Wendy? Something like that, yes. We think it's what WhatsApp was invented for.

I think talking is much better than WhatsApp in there. Well, this was going to be my next question for you because I heard you say in another interview that digital connection has a value but that you don't think it's as good as face-to-face and actual talking and listening in the same room as one another why is that I mean I think zoom or you know video is as close as you can get and that I've got very had very good deep meaningful conversations with people on zoom so I think it's and we've had to rely on it recently haven't we've had to so it's a different experience slightly different experience I think the thing that you miss is you

do miss the sort of bodily signals I I can't see what you're doing with your feet and I might have, you know, I can't. One's up and one's down. Okay. That's probably your mood. Who knows? Oh, Julia. She's so deep. She's so deep. But, you know, and also we'd have had a hug probably when we met and a cup of tea.

And cake. And cake, definitely, back to cake. The touch really matters i think hugs are curative i think physical contact is curative sometimes words just don't do the business you know i think holding hands not with strangers but you know with with a friend who's really sad sometimes sitting beside them putting your hand on theirs and saying nothing is curative. There's an intimacy in it.

Funny you say that. When Wendy and I see each other, which isn't very often at the moment because of having to work remotely, if we even if we just go for a coffee or to like the photocopier, we link arms, which sometimes I think is quite weird.

But now I'm thinking, actually, we just need it. Yeah, I think that's lovely. But it's one of the reasons why the lockdowns were so hard is that level of connection was just overnight taken away from everybody. I think that was I think you know and from using my term and living loss I think that was a huge living loss, which is invisible again, which had a kind of slow deterioration, you know, because there was this sort of blitz spirit to begin with, like we can get through it, but we thought it was going to last three months. And then there's this slow kind of deterioration and weariness and kind of lack of energy that sometimes, you know, just being with someone

is what you need to feed your body and your soul. I often say to my husband, actually, that if I've been out with a girlfriend or a group of girlfriends, I'll come back and say, I feel almost giddy. I feel more alive. It's a thing, isn't it? It's a real thing. And the excitement of it and the competing to get your voice heard, like, shut up. One of my girlfriends, I was talking so much. Normally, I'm known as a good listener, but I haven't had a chance to talk to them. So I was just, you know, what my mother, again, who's full of expressions, verbal diarrhea, she called it. she just said to me shut up just shut up i have friends who say that to me rather a lot in honesty but there's there's other reasons for that um going back to the touch the importance of touch

thing though how can we is there anything, or even the thing of observing someone else's physical movements when we're listening to them, how can we as parents use that to help our kids emotionally? Is there a way we can? Definitely. I mean, obviously hug them, I get that, but what I mean is should we be looking out for little signs of how they move if they're upset about something or is there a way that we should be looking at them and or listening to them in a way that we're not at the moment definitely I mean children often cannot voice what they're feeling but their bodies will express it so you know just by how they're sitting in a chair you can tell you know whether their shoulders are down whether their eyes are down if they're not looking at you properly their habits are they eating as much are they sleeping as much are

they talking as much I mean their body their kind of behavioral signals you need to really read and asking them how they feel you are never going to get an answer I think the best question and honestly I again it's walking and talking I think the best question, and honestly, again, it's walking and talking, I think as a family, that thing of going outside, being in rhythm together, not eyeballing each other, not looking at them saying, what's wrong with you? But starting with how you're feeling. And the sort of best question is, what are your worries? What's on the top of your worries? What's your top worry? That's a great question.

They may start with something minor and then you can all take it in turns. And then over time, you may get to the real worry that say the grandparent died and worry that you're going to die because they now know that someone they love can die in a way they didn't know before. CNR has the big worry is currently the giants in the BFG. They are scary, though. When you have a big sister listening to BFG and a little sister who happens to be in the room and is now having nightmares about the BFG.

We had that with Mrs Trunchbull in Matilda. She's really scary. She's really scary. He's got a lot to answer for. He was dark, Roald Dahl. He was dark. He was fabulous. Yeah, he was.

I do think stories, you know, like Grimm's, but also Roald Dahl or whoever it is, they are wonderful ways, you know, we're storytelling, meaning-making beings, and children are. So, you know, we're storytelling, meaning making beings and children are. So, you know, your little one being frightened of the giants, that's a brilliant point to sort of talk about what that might be like. What is it that she, you know, she's very small. It's a way of kind of understanding what is, what does that mean to her, rather than just saying that we don't have any giants

and trying to put it in the box. Get her to draw them, draw the giant, draw what she needs to protect herself from the giant. Use her imagination of what can she do to protect herself against the giants. What does she need? What magic powers, what armor, what would help her, all of those things. Watch this space, I shall come back

to you. Now what I was going to ask is what's next for Julia? I'm thinking if you could possibly move in with me that would be good. Wait because she's moving in with me first. I'm in my profession because I want to be wanted, you've made my day. I'm very, very happy. Have we got another book, more pods? Yes, I've just finished another book. It's on families. We need it. It's about, so I've spoken to, I had eight case studies and it's three and four generations of a family

that I work with at the same time, each case study. Wow. So it's what gets passed down from generation to generation. But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. How did you end up working with three or four generations of the same family more than once? Because I posted about it on different websites. So I worked with an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family

and the great-grandmother was a Holocaust survivor. Her daughter, her daughter, and their daughter. So inherited grief and all of that stuff. Inherited trauma. Yeah. But other families, really Afro-Caribbean families. So lots of different families of multi-generations and looking at what is epigenetic,

so what gets passed down kind of through our bodies, but patterns of behaviors. And the big kind of thing is, I'm talking about this too soon, by the way, I'm sure my publisher is going to be furious with me. But anyway, when there's a crisis, families, that's when families are stressed and pre-existing fault lines tend to erupt. And even if there aren't pre-existing fault lines, you know, a child dying, your dad losing the job, living in a global pandemic. Those stressors cause a lot of crises, cause a lot of problems in families through the generations. Can I ask a question about that if let's say in a family there's like a generational recurrent issue how do you and you decide right i'm going to be the generation where the but it stops stops right how do you do that

well in one sentence please julia okay one Okay, one sentence. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Talk for years. I don't mind. So the theory and I think the practice is that until someone's prepared to feel the pain, the pattern and the pain of it, often silent and secret, gets passed down to each generation. So if you are prepared to be the one that is somehow is feeling something, but it's like, did this start with me? Find out and learn your history, find out what happened, and maybe get some therapy. I mean, the ideal would be to have family therapy, you know, the generations as a family, this family systems therapist. But I mean, just doing it yourself, trying to find out the stories, looking back,

doing a genogram helps. Once you have a narrative, you can make sense of the feelings and the behaviours because you have something that can make sense of them for you. We've kind of ended up where we started, haven't we? We were talking at the beginning about how it's really important to feel things and you have to feel them, otherwise they squelch out the sides somehow, don't they? Feelings are there as messengers.

They're there to tell you, oi, something is up. Pay attention. This hurts. That's wrong. This isn't okay. Whatever it is. And the more you ignore it, the louder it gets until you start doing weird stuff to try and block it out and shut it out.

But you can't. You're too wise for me, Julia. I just want you to climb out of your screen and come next to me and keep talking to me. Now, we normally ask at this point of the pod what's for tea but i'm actually more interested having heard you talk about your love of tea and a biscuit what's your biscuit of choice studio it's quite hard i i love a basic chocolate digestive would you go milk or dark because we my husband and i argue about this a lot i say chocolate

digestive needs to be milk he insists it has to be dark no nonsense nonsense i'm with milk but my other one is a kit kat if that counts as a biscuit well no i was given a dark kit kat at the weekend and it was horrible i didn't know they made them it was it blew my mind in the worst possible way kit kats are not dark no i didn't even know they made them they do they're horrible Okay thank you for answering that And putting that issue to rest That's the most important question of the pod

It is and that's what we'll always remember you for No Julia I've asked you some pretty tricky questions Okay She looks nervous now She does, I know I'm the one who asked the naughty princess Di question I'm now going to ask the naughty Princess Di question.

I'm now going to ask you the next question. Imagine that your children are little again or that you've got your grandchildren over to stay and that they can't sleep and sing us your lullaby. Oh my God, I am never going to do that. I was banned from singing at school. But now you could exercise that demon, feel the pain of the being

if they're not singing well, Julia. Not in a million fucking years am I ever going to sing. Well, I think we've been told. That's the best answer to that question that we've ever had. That is the best answer. Oh, Julia, it has been an absolute pleasure thank you for spending the afternoon talking nonsense with us it's been

brilliant well we were talking nonsense she was talking a hell of a lot of sense true um right on that note we're gonna love you and leave you thank you so much for being today's guest you've been fabulous it's been an absolute joy thank you so much and thank you to all your listeners whoever listens net mums is i think the most powerful and best organization for mums to get the information that they know to connect with each other and to normalize what often feels abnormal in themselves so that they can support themselves rather than attack themselves it's an amazing organization oh thank you not as amazing as you um right go and have a lovely day and we will read your new book and hopefully we can talk to you again when it comes out yeah thank you bye bye bye