The One You Feed - How to Navigate the Path of Grief with Dr. Joanne Cacciatore

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

In this Episode, You'll Learn: How there are many different forms of grief Why we need to surrender to our grief and turn toward painful feelings How there are many painful emotions that exist under the "grief umbrella" The challenge of surrendering to grief in a culture that constantly pushes for happiness and avoidance of pain. How we can strengthen our ability to cope with grief by continuing to allow it in The importance of finding emotional support when grieving Why animals provide the best emotional support How providing emotional support to someone grieving includes just being with them and holding space for their grief To learn more, click here!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Whether it's the dopaminergic squirt that comes from a Facebook like, or the dopaminergic squirt that comes from shopping, or from drugs and alcohol, we are a culture that practices avoidance of pain constantly. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. If you've lost track of what's important to you, you're not alone. We often go through phases in life where we feel dissatisfied or disconnected. And when we get off track, it's easy to get stuck in unhelpful patterns like avoidance or perfectionism. It shows up as negative self-talk, breaking your own rules, procrastinating, or struggling to let go of addictive or otherwise harmful behaviors to make space for healthy ones. I want you to know that all of these are struggles I've had too. And if I can turn things around with the challenges I faced deep in heroin addiction and

clinical depression, so can you. What I've learned through experience is that what we know is not as important as what we do consistently. And bridging this gap is the key to feeling fulfilled at a deeper level. Bridging this gap is the foundation of the Spiritual Habits Program, a non-religious mentorship and accountability experience to establish simple daily practices that help you to be more present, compassionate, and connected in your relationships and life. Over eight weeks together, you'll learn how to make small changes that have a big impact. No matter what life is serving up, you'll experience it in a more grounded, loving, strengthening, and creative way.

If anything I've said has resonated with you, go to oneufeed.net slash spiritual habits to learn more and sign up. Enrollment for this year's program is open now through March 13th, and I'd love to meet you in it. That's OneYouFeed.net slash spiritualhabits to learn more and sign up. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500,

a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Joanne Cacciatore,

a professor at Arizona State University, where she runs Graduate Certificate in Trauma and Bereavement. She's also the founder of the MISS Foundation. Since 1996, Dr. Jo has worked with and counseled those affected by traumatic death. therapeutic care farm in the world for traumatic grief based on a framework for incorporating 50 plus domestic and farm animals rescued from abuse, torture, neglect, and homelessness. Her work has been featured on Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry's Apple TV docuseries, The Me You Can't See, and Dr. Joe also served on their mental health advisory board, along with 13 esteemed colleagues as part of the series. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Lancet, Omega Journal of

Death and Dying, The Journal of Mental Health Counseling, Seminars in Fetal and Non-Natal Medicine, and the International Journal of Nursing. Her best-selling book, Bearing the Unbearable, Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief won the Indy's Book of the Year Award. Her subsequent books include Grieving is Loving and an Audible Great Courses series called Understanding and Coping with Grief. Hi, Joanne. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. It's lovely to be here with both of you. I'm so excited to have you on. Jenny is here with us for this interview. Hello, Joanne.

And we're going to be discussing your work around grief, specifically the book Bearing the Unbearable, Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief. But before we get to that, we'll start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says,

the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, it's interesting. You had me on greed and you had me on hate, not so much on fear. And the reason not so much on fear in terms of my work, because I work with people who have experienced traumatic grief, fear is quite a normal, expectable, natural emotion to experience. And I tend not to think about emotions in dichotomous ways. So for me, I certainly wouldn't feed nor withhold feed for whatever emotion there is. For me, I would see emotions as this sort of wellspring of experiences that we

each have, some of which can be more challenging than others. Some of which we tend to want to gravitate toward or experience more of than others. And yet we know from meditative practices, for example, that that which we pursue is more elusive and that which we avoid can be more aggressive toward us, can be more difficult to disavow or to eschew. So I tend to have a much more neutral stance about emotion, though I'm not a big fan of greed or hatred, obviously. An emotion like fear I see as normal. I also think that I like the way the parable uses feeding because I do think we can overly invest in certain emotions and divest investment in certain other emotions. And I think if we could have a more neutral

position about emotions, I think we get to the place where we're a little bit more emotionally intelligent and equanimous, which for me is the goal in my work. So remember that because of the work that I do, I work with people, for example, whose children have been murdered. Why would they not have fear? Why would they not have hatred? Greed, it's not as applicable to the work that I do. But these are so normative in my line of work that I think the parable in general is probably a useful parable, but perhaps not such a great application in the work that I do. Yeah, makes total sense. And every time we go through the parable, I'm always worried about sending the message that emotions are bad, you know, and yet it points to us having choice in,

you know, some degree of where we want to put our attention. I thought maybe we could start by talking a little bit about most of your work is around traumatic grief. Ginny lost her mom in November after a six-year battle with Alzheimer's. So it's a very different type of grief, right? There was a lot of grief along the way, sometimes called the long goodbye type of grief. But I'd love to just talk about grief taking different forms and it showing up differently for different people based on their circumstances. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I write actually a lot about this in my research. I'm a professor at Arizona State University, so I conduct research in this area. And one of the things that we know is that context does matter. So Ginny, you look relatively young and it's hard to lose a parent at a young age when you're young. So that's one of the contexts that, for example, a really good counselor or therapist would consider. Age, circumstances of death, homicide, suicide, violent deaths, death where there is a prolonged illness, six years of Alzheimer's would be a very different thing than, for example, someone who was 98 years old and died as an elder and had a, quote, good death. And by good death, I mean, pain was well controlled. Things

went relatively quickly. The family is highly cohesive. Everyone is at bedside. They're singing grandma's favorite song, grandma and great grandma's favorite songs. Candles are lit, lavender's in the room. And it's a peaceful death without the prolonged suffering. peaceful death without the prolonged suffering. So context in my work matters more than just about any other factor. And that's why it's so important to consider the circumstances, the nature of the relationship, how someone died, the quality of the relationship. And yet it's something that we so rarely take the time to examine deeply in our sort of fast food mental health culture, right? We want everything quickly. We want a quick diagnosis. We want quick treatment. We want simple reductionistic

approaches to how to treat everyone in a protocolized way. And it just doesn't work. Yeah. I think it's an important thing though, to name, Eric, I'm glad you brought it up because one of the things that I've been struck by in my own sort of long arc of grief and my mom being, I'm fortunate to say the first really close person to me that I've lost, and I'm going to be 44 next month. It's a very new journey for me, this grief journey. And I think if we don't name that, like, your own experience is perfectly fine and normal just as it is. You know, as we talk about grief, we could run the risk of alienating people whose grief doesn't match what we describe, right? But I've just noticed that, like, so many things that I thought were perhaps unique to me, then I'll read about them, like, in your work. And I realize how normal they are, you know, which is comforting.

It takes any shame or any, I don't know, doubt about what your grief or lack of acute sadness means about your relationship to your loved one or your love for the loved one or how good of a job you're doing grieving. You know, none of that's helpful, really. It's very helpful to just hold your grief loosely and lovingly, you know, with room to be what it is. Well, that's the key, right? And that's what mindfulness is, right? Being with what is without needing to change it. Yeah. Yeah. Can I ask mom's name? Oh, thank you. Yeah. So she's a unique name, her nickname, and that's what she went by was Ogie. So it was short, a nickname for Olga. So O-G-G-I-E, like Yogi without the Y. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah.

So when Ogi died, I mean, your life, because this is your mom, is irreparably changed. Like you don't get to go back, at least not in this way on this planet in this moment and get Ogi back. You know, the loss of your mom is a forever irreparable loss. And that's the thing that I think people think. I think people mistakenly think, okay, you have this loss and then you're done. You grieve and then you're done. But the reality is 10 years from now, when you're 54, you're going to be grieving for Ogie not being with you at 54. And when you're 64, and then of course, at some point, she would have predated you, we hope, in death had she been here still. But I think that there's

this ongoing grief that you wake up into every single day. Like I'm still missing her today for who she would have been in my life today. And we tend to really miss that piece that it's not just a moment in time you're grieving. It's you grieve for the past and you grieve for the present and you're grieving for the future. Yes. And I grieve the life that she didn't get to have. Yeah. You know, I grieve her missing. I mean, you're so right. I've noticed that.

It's funny. I took the month of December off from work to sort of make some space for what was coming up in me after her death. Kind of thinking like I feel like I've been able to through the support I've had, especially Eric around me, and then my mindfulness practice and meditation practice throughout my mom's illness, I've been able to sort of meet what is as it arises and try and be with it in a healing way. So I thought, well, is there anything left over that I need to sort of tidy up? You know, let's just tidy up and then we'll move on. But I think now what I'm realizing more than ever is there's no like, okay, now I've grieved. So now we will move on with the rest of our life. I mean, it's not

that I'm in a constant state of inconsolable sadness. It's just that, like you said, there's like new old grief that pops up, right? And those moments are to be just met as they are when they arise. It's hard to do them in advance, you know? For sure. Really, there's no way to prepare for it. I mean, we can try to control grief, but I think that's a rather imprudent position to take because when you control grief or when you try to suppress grief, it just gets clever and disguises itself as something else and shows up sideways because it will be seen.

It absolutely will be seen. It absolutely will be seen. It's just, are you going to see it honestly or dishonestly? So maybe we could, before we go too much further, ask a little bit about what brought you to this work and a little bit about your story about how you got into this world. Sure. Well, I was mom with three little kids and I had a fourth child in July of 1994 and she died. And I didn't have great support through that and dropped a dangerous amount of weight. I weighed less than 90 pounds within a few months. I couldn't eat. It felt like there was a grapefruit in my throat all the time. I just couldn't swallow. I would put food in my mouth and spit it out because I couldn't get my throat to open to swallow food.

I think the grief itself was bad enough, but the loneliness made it truly unbearable. I was surrounded by people who just kept saying things like, just be grateful you have other kids and you're young, you can have another one. And God has a plan for you. And, you know, at least you weren't as attached as you were to your older kids. It's just bizarre platitudes that people say that had no place in my own personal truth. And that sort of existential loneliness really sent me to a place where I thought I couldn't

make it. I didn't know if I could live in a place where I thought I couldn't make it. I didn't know if I could live in a world where not only can your child die, but your child can die and people can be pretty psychologically violent about it. So I made it through. I attribute a couple of things. I had some really amazing children who helped me get through because my children at the time were smarter than most adults around me. And my animals were amazing. I had two dogs who would just come up and sit with me and I would cry and they would just put their head on my lap and not tell me things will get

better, not tell me be grateful for whatever, you know, not say, let's go get a drink. You know, you should put this behind you. Aren't you over it yet? And then I started the nonprofit and well, before I started the nonprofit, I started doing what I call kindness project acts for her, which is where I took the money that would have been hers. And I was really poor at the time, but I knew that I would have spent $50 on her for Christmas. And so I would take that $50 and I would spend it on a child anonymously who needed it. And so I started doing kindness project things. So I think that's what really sort of helped me get through the early years after her death. And then I started the foundation just with the idea of helping a few people. And then it just grew and grew and grew. And then I went back to school. I was nursing my youngest, my fifth child. I was breastfeeding him when I went back to school.

He was two months old and got my bachelor's degree, master's degree, and eventually my PhD and became a researcher, got a tenure track position. So, you know, her death, you know, all of the amazing things that have happened since she died, I'd give back in a minute, you know, but I don't get that choice. You talked earlier about choice. The only choice that I get is what I'm going to do with it now when I'm ready. And that's the key is I have to be ready to make those choices. And so when I was ready, I made the choices that felt right to me, not just for me, but for others. And others is broadly speaking, other human beings who are both like and unlike me and

animals who are unlike me and the planet. So, I mean, I think compassion, when it stops at just our species, for me, feels problematic. So, I mean, I think our planet's in a world of hurt. And so my compassion has to extend to the planet., I think our planet's in a world of hurt. And so my compassion has to extend to the planet. And I think there are animals who are hurting every day. So my compassion has to extend into the animal kingdom, our animal brethren. So that's sort of how I got here and how I think about where I am now. In your book, you write about beautifully sort of how sorrow can just tenderize our heart in a way that beautifully can eventually

lead us to compassionate love in action, you know, to help others that are suffering, right? I want to just touch on, I guess, a key point that has really resonated within me as I've read your book and as it's connected to my experience. So just a little background. So my mom, yeah, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's six years ago. And in hindsight, as so many families do, I think we realized we probably lost my mother as we knew her maybe a few years before that. And so it's been like this long arc of like this almost 10 year period of losing her slowly along the way and grieving each little loss of her, you know? I mean, in the early days, I feel like I had some moments of traumatic grief and just the

realization of like, she's no longer really here as we've known her. And I didn't get to say goodbye, you know, like she's gone. In the early months, kind of just felt like I was walking around like in some strange, like out of body experience, like the world didn't make sense without my mom in it, you know, and she wasn't there anymore. And what was all this going to look like? So those early days were acutely hard. As years went on, the hard became just different, you know, and also less acutely hard for longer periods of time. But grief, grief has been a scary, scary thing for somebody like me who is trying to every day remember and learn and practice how to be with difficult emotions and not run from them and know that I don't have to be afraid of them. I know how to and I can be with them and I can let them come and crest and go.

And I find myself even now avoiding things like, I know I'm going to want to watch those home movies of her when we were young one day, but I know there's going to be such acute grief going into that that I almost just avoid the whole thing. But I know that in so doing, I miss these moments of beauty and connection and remembering her and connecting to the love of her. So that's a long setup for what I was hoping you could talk to us about, which is this idea of knowing we can be with our grief. How can we surrender to grief, as you say? What does that mean? What does that look like? How would you describe that to someone? Yeah, it's a great question. And I will say that we have to consider the milieu, the social milieu, right? So we're asking people to turn toward painful feelings in a culture that pushes happiness, in a culture that pushes feeling good at all times, at all costs, whether it's the dopaminergic squirt that comes from a Facebook

like, or the dopaminergic squirt that comes from, you know, shopping or from drugs and alcohol. that comes from shopping or from drugs and alcohol. We are a culture that practices avoidance of pain constantly. So what we're asking people to do is to turn toward their grief and make space for it. And yeah, it sucks. Not because grief sucks, because the person who died, that's the part that sucks for us, right? So we tend to think of grief, and this is something I have to redirect clients on gently all the time. They say things like grief isn't, am I allowed to say a naughty word? Yes, please. Naughty is welcome.

Okay. Grief is an asshole or grief is a motherfucker. And they'll actually say things like that. And I'll go, but is it really? Because if you woke up tomorrow morning and you had absolutely no grief for your six-year-old who died of cancer, how would you feel? And they think about it for a minute and they go, well, that would be weird. Yeah, it would. The asshole is not grief. The asshole is that your six-year-old died. Grief is the understandable outcome of that. And until we can start thinking of our emotions in ways that are

less marginalizing of them, until we can start seeing painful emotions as worthy of our attention and time, then considering the idea of being with them becomes too painful and it's hard to trust yourself with it. Because again, those messages are feel good, feel good, feel good, feel good. Aren't you over it yet? Don't she wouldn't want you to be sad. La la la la la. Right? Well, the best way to get there to surrendering to grief really is to have a good guide to help. Whether it's a professional, doesn't have to be a therapist or a counselor. Sometimes therapists or counselors are frankly worse. I've heard horrific stories about therapists and counselors, horrific stories. I mean, I'm a professor in the

School of Social Work. I train students, but it's an elective class. And so I only train the students who want to be trained. There are a whole bunch of students who are never trained about grief and loss. And so they're out there sort of propagating the same nonsense of our culture, that grief is an abnormal thing, that you have a certain time period and then you have to put it away, which is unhealthy. I will tell you, it's patently unhealthy. All we need to do is look at the rates of substance use in our culture and go to an NA meeting or an AA meeting and hear the stories of, my mom died when I was four, my dad committed suicide when I was 12, I saw my brother get run over by a car when I was 16.

And you start to go, oh, there's something bigger happening here, right? So obviously, what we're doing right now is not working. We have to change what we're doing right now. But it's going to require changes in research, changes in pedagogical models, and changes in the philosophical view of the world around painful emotions like grief. And grief is not, of course, this monolithic emotional structure. I call it a grief umbrella. Underneath this canopy of grief, we have anger and rage and jealousy, despair, anguish, guilt, shame, regret, loneliness. I mean, there's so many different emotions that grief encompasses, sometimes connection and compassion and

kind of fierce compassion even. So there are lots of emotions held under grief. But unless we teach people how to trust themselves with it, and how do they trust themselves with it if what they're feeling is at odds with what the world is telling them they're allowed to feel? Does that make sense? It does 100%. I think one of the things that a lot of people feel is if I were to surrender to this, if I were to let myself feel this, it would crush me. I would never recover. I would never come out of it. And so talk about that because I think that's a really legitimate fear. And that fear drives a lot of these avoidant behaviors. It absolutely does. I think some of the fear is endogenous to us, and I think some of it is exogenous to us. And this is the problem. We have to change the way society looks at it first. Because if we don't, then people internalize those, we call them negative cognitions.

They internalize those negative cognitions around grief. And this is what the research shows. Negative cognitions about grief from others is the most salient predictor of poor psychological and physical health outcomes in bereavement. Wow. Yeah. It's a real problem. So we have to change societal views

about grief. For example, if you're walking down the street and all of a sudden you see 15 people running away from the place you're walking toward, screaming and yelling, oh no, oh no, what are you going to do? Are you going to keep walking that way? You're not. You're going to turn around and go the other way because you're smart, because you're afraid, because clearly people are afraid of something down the road. And unless we quell some of that societal fear and help people feel more comfortable being uncomfortable, talking about grief, talking about loss, being able to go to someone's house and pour over photographs and videos of their dead children or their dead parents or their dead partners or husbands or wives.

Unless we can train people to start helping do this, then we end up in a situation where people internalize those avoidance messages and you get some pretty negative outcomes. It's very hard to stay with something that everyone else is afraid of too. That's really powerful. I think you're right. I mean, because there have been times culturally where there were these long, formal grieving periods where you were in mourning for a certain period of time and everyone sort of acknowledged that. And you juxtapose that with today where it's like, there's a get over it. There's a toxic positivity towards bypassing the crap and getting right to this happy year over. It's strong and

resilient phase. They push meaning. Actually, one of the studies I did that was one of the least helpful things that therapists did for grievers, because I looked at, I was examining sort of helpful therapist techniques. And one of the least helpful was therapists pushing meaning on grieving people. Like they want, like in their first, second, third visit, or even sixth or 10th visit, they're pushing, well, let's find meaning in your loss because we're uncomfortable being uncomfortable. We don't like it when we don't have a nice little bow that we can tie around a grief experience. A Grief Experience. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

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It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Let me ask a question about that last point, because we do know that, at least I think we do, in some of the research I've looked at and talking to people, and this is a different thing when we talk about, say, trauma or different things, is that learning to reframe the narrative and find meaning can be a really powerful tool. For me, you know, I was a heroin addict at 24 and learning to see at some point all the gifts that actually gave me was an important turning point from taking it to being a tragedy into a good thing. And so is the issue really in timing and allowing somebody to get there on their own? I think the last thing you just said, I think does meaning happen? If you ask me,

have I found meaning in my loss? Well, of course I have, but A, it's not worth it. Yeah. Yeah. It's just not worth losing my child over. If that's an irreparable loss, I never get to have her back in this way, in this form ever again. There's no recompense for that. And B, it has to happen in my time and it has to be my experience, not someone else pushing it, right? So people all the time who have loss and find meaning in their loss when they're ready and when it makes sense for them in accord with their culture or their spiritual practice, for sure. Yeah. But it's a very different thing to find meaning or discover meaning along the way and have it

pushed on you. So it would be like if I came home and said to one of my kids, gee, I better join a gym. I'm starting to gain some weight around my rear. They need to shut up. They need to not participate in that conversation. It's a very different thing when I say it about myself than when someone else says it, right? And this is part of the problem. And unfortunately, I meet people who have trouble in early grief because they want to get to meaning faster because that's what they're getting praised for. That's what they're getting pushed toward. And that's a lot of pressure to put on a newly grieving person. So I've seen many sort of very beautiful, well-intentioned nonprofits start up in early

grief and not sustain itself because it was too soon. I think that goes also to like, and I couldn't agree more that grief is just this huge sort of untidy thing that our culture wants to tidy up and package up and tighten up. A great example of that is Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of grief. I mean, that was never meant to be for grief, as you well know, right? I mean, this be for dying. And yet we have made this like, well, wait, so if I'm at stage five, you know, I'm almost over it. So can I just push my way through, you know, whatever the remaining stages are, and then I've grieved. But the ability to turn towards grief, like you say, to surrender, to find the support that will help you do that in a way that is not agenda and is not toxic positivity, but is supportive in your process is the thing that's going to help us actually get through the grief to a place where we can find compassion, remembrance, connection to love, you know, the ability to put another foot in front of the other.

You put a wonderful quote in one of the chapters of your book. I'm not going to be able to say his last name right. Richard von Sacker. Von Sacker. Yeah. He's seeking to forget makes exile all the longer. The secret to redemption lies in remembrance. Yeah. But the remembrance, you have to go through the grief. I mean, you can't get to remembrance without going to the grief. Right. If the person you love most in the world grief. I mean, you can't get to remembrance without going to the grief. Right. If the person you love most in the world has died, every time you remember them, it's going to come with a longing, with a pining for them, with some degree of, oh my God, I miss him or her or them.

And that's what we miss when we cut ourselves off from feeling grief and feeling grief over and over and over again throughout the rest of our lives is we cut ourselves off from the capacity to remember, to re-again-member, bring them back into our hearts. Yeah, yeah. A question that I have, I was really, and this is from kind of a Buddhist perspective, I worried that remembering her intentionally and tangibly and repeatedly, making that actually an intention and a priority, that that was a form of like clinging to the past or clinging to a person, like an unwillingness to let go. And so I've since had a bit of a reframe around that, but I'm actually curious how you think about that.

I think when it comes to the critique about attachment, I think it's to material things, not to others, capital O. I think the most dangerous thing we could do as humans would be not to attach. I mean, can you imagine a parent not attached to his or her child? I mean, or vice versa, a child not attached to his or her parents. I mean, we're wired to connect. So I guess first we'd have to operationalize attach or cling. And I think those kinds of critiques are meant for things like don't cling to your material possessions, don't cling to your identity, not to your child. And frankly, if someone said otherwise, I would just have to agree to disagree with them. I don't care what level teacher they are. I am a parent and I am definitely attached to my children. And I claim that, including my dead

child. I'm attached to her. And I don't want or need that to change, to live a heartful, mindful life. And in fact, I would argue that to not feel attached to her would impede my heartful, mindful life. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think the thing that I've come to really orient around, so it took my mom a week to actually pass away from when she stopped eating to when she died. And I was fortunate enough to be able to be by her, her bedside for that week. And Eric was there too. And it was a really sacred week. And what kept coming up to me and what I would say to her is, you know, we're always connected in love. We are always connected in love. Like it's okay that you have to go because our love

is not going to go. We're still connected there. And so when I read another quote, you put in your book by Merritt Molloy, I think. Yeah. Beautiful. It says, love doesn't die. People do. So it's a beautiful way to connect with the love that is still there that was seeded by and with my mother. Yeah. And that love and that grief, because now the love will always come with grief. So that love and that grief can be a bridge for fierce compassion. That's the thing. That's the point.

When you cut yourself off from it because you've let go of attachments, then you lose that possibility of that love and that grief becoming a force for good in the world when and if you're ready. You see, what helps me do my work unapologetically, energetically, you know, I work sometimes 100-hour weeks. And what keeps me going is love and grief. That's what keeps me going is love and grief. That's what keeps me going. In a way, grief has so much energy that it can be tireless at times. Not that I never get tired, but I am

never near burnout. I am never near a place where I'm like, oh, I don't want to do that. I've been doing this for almost 28 years, and I'm never at a place where I'm like, I don't think I want to do this. I don't think I can do this. I don't, you know, this isn't my calling. It's something that becomes your life in a way that it's more than meaning. It's deeper than meaning. It's a state of existential beingness that I can't explicate. It's inexplicable. Yeah, I think that idea of love and grief being very tied to each other is really important. I remember several years ago, I had to put down one of my dogs. It was the second one I had to do in a year. And the grief was extraordinary. And yet right in the middle of it, even in the

middle of the absolute pain, there was this, I don't know what the word is. I don't want to say gratitude. Recognition. Recognition. I don't know how, like I loved something this much. The level of grief is a pointer at the level of love and a gratitude. I guess that's the word I would use that I was able to be that much in love and connected with another being. And I think this gets a little bit to a point you make often, which is that we're not only one emotion. We can be multiple emotions. Simultaneously. I could be, yeah, I could be deeply heartbroken and feel this great love in the same moment. They feel contradictory to talk about, but the experience wasn't contradictory. It was

very whole. Right, right. Absolutely. But because we live in a, well, a lot of cultures are like this. We're like, human beings tend to be dichotomous. If you're this, then you can't be this. So grief and joy can't exist in the same space. And then, you know, people meet me and they see that I can cry and be joyful at the same time. And they're like, oh, that's possible. And that's what I mean by the pedagogical system has to really change because we have to model this for people. We have to show them that grief, you don't have to disavow grief in order to experience joy again. Even if it's a different kind of joy than you were able to have before the person you love most in the world died, you can still have joy and be

grieving at the same time. And in fact, I would say when the bottom falls out, the top pops open. It gets wider, right? When you let the bottom drop, the top has no top. And that's the thing, you know, this full range of emotional capacity to which we should have access, but we constrain ourselves because if we bring the bottom up, we simultaneously bring the top down. And so we've got this very small manageable world of emotions. And that's what we're all about in the West is managing emotions. And of course, certainly managing the quote, bad emotions, right? My experience in doing this work for more than a quarter of a century is with support, we let the bottom drop out and the top does open. Maybe not right away.

Maybe it takes practice. Maybe it takes time and love and care and nurturance and warmth and tenderness from others for sure. But it does happen for most people. Yeah. We expand our capacity to feel in both directions. Right. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I love the way you just framed that up, that when the bottom drops out the top, what do you say? Flies open, pops open. Yeah. A lot of people with grief are told that they have depression. Yeah. My question is, is there a point where that becomes true, narrowing the umbrella of grief down to extraordinarily sadness or apathy or anhedonia or exhaustion? If that goes on unabated, at what point do you start thinking that other things might be at work?

Do you? I'm kind of curious how you think about that. Well, I try and stay in my lane, which is traumatic grief. I will tell you that there has never been in more than 25 years an occasion where I've worked with a grieving person and I was like, oh, this is not grief. This is depression. Everything can be traced back. Even people I know professionally and I

meet them and they say that they have clinical capital D depression. And then I talk to them and they're like, yeah, my mom died when I was six. And I go, I'm sorry. Given who I am, I'm always going to look at it through that lens. What was your kind of support? And oh, your dad remarried and you had a stepmother. What was your relationship with her? Oh, she was cold to you and detached. And then it all makes sense. And I go, gosh, just about everything I see can be traced back to grief, particularly when traumatic. So there's not been an occasion where I have questioned whether or not it was grief when someone has lost a child or a partner to suicide or homicide or a parent in a traumatic way. I stay in my lane, but there's never an occasion where it is that

in the work that we do. I think... fuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor? We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals

the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really?

That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a great example. You know, I've been a member of 12 step programs in the past. And what you say about, we know that trauma

of any sort increases the likelihood of addiction. I mean, that's an extraordinarily well-verified piece of data, right? And traumatic grief is one of those forms. But there's a world of difference between being able to recognize, oh, I had this traumatic event when I was six. You know, I lost my mother, I lost my brother, right? And that was 35 years ago. And I am now mired in what looks very much like a depression or chronic low mood. Or how would you if someone came to you and said, I know this is feel anything, right? Like that feeling has kind of just been papered over really well. How do you think about getting back into that and healing that in a way if it's so much later? It's something I do every week. Okay. I work with a woman, for example, whose little girl who was six died of cancer. And that was in 71, I think, 1971. And she has dealt with substances and inpatient facilities and psychiatric drugs and a host of other things, multiple relationships,

living in 15 different states, you know, chaos, right? Anything to keep going so I don't actually have to be still and deal with what's going on, right? And we peel back the layers and we get to it. We do the work. Obviously, they're seeking me out. Right? And if you're seeking me out, you know, I'm going to get in there. I'm going to climb right into the wound and we're going to do the work. Like I don't mess around. I say, let's talk about it, you know? And so we revisit all of that trauma. And despite what people think, it's never in a detached way. I'm not sure if it's the environment, the animals, something about their relationship with me. I'm not sure, but people open up quite easily to me and go back to that place. Sometimes it feels like yesterday for me, objectively. I'm like,

wow, this is very emotionally intense. And it happens very, very quickly. It's not like I have to dig. It's like it's right there. So the answer to your question is probably not as interesting as it might be. People just seem to open to me and open to the space. It's not just me either. We have six other counselors who work here now, and it's the same for all of them in their experiences with our patients here. I think so much of it is just people being able to make that connection between, gosh, I lost my child back in, you know, 68 or 71 or 85, and I never talked to anybody about it because I was told not to talk to anybody about it,

implicitly or explicitly. And so I buried it underneath all of these other things, drugs or alcohol, pornography, gambling, shopping, food, you name it. There's no shortage of distractions. It's buried underneath all of this. And I know I need to do the work. I mean, I worked with a woman who was in her 80s who had a terminal illness. And her daughter died many, many years earlier. When she came to me, she's like, she believed in reincarnation. And she's like, I don't want to die not having done this work. Okay, well, let's do the work then.

Yeah, yeah. The writer, Catherine Porter, said, I may have it in Bearing the Unbearable. I can't remember. But she said, the past is never where we think we left it. And I have found that to be one of the most profound truths in doing this work ever. Wow, that's well said. That sure is. I want to pivot to a framework that you present in your book that I found incredibly useful. So there's an actual kind of, I don't know, image or chart or section where you visually illustrate this in your book, but it's this idea of increasing our ability to cope versus trying

to lower the intensity of grief. I just found it so useful because I think so many, or at least myself, let me just speak in terms of what I know. For me, it's easy to focus on, like, how do I make that feeling less intense? Because that is scary. To your earlier points, it's like, well, that's going to inevitably make it stronger, right? Like we can't pursue repressing it and have it actually go away. And so it's very hard to change and maybe impossible to change the intensity of a feeling. but we can increase our ability, capability, skillfulness, you know, ability to cope, which increases our agency and also impacts our experience with the intensity inevitably of that emotion. In other words, if we're more capable and skilled and confident, right? And that's a lever we can pull. So would you mind sharing a bit about

that framework? Sure. It's just a framework that I started applying to myself. My daughter's been dead for 28 and a half years. So what I noticed in the beginning was that I was trying to make the feelings go away. And the more I did that, the more intense they got, the more clever they got, they disguised as other things. I was exhausted from all the machinations I was going through, trying not to feel what I felt. So then I started to notice that if I made space for what I was feeling, in particular, I had a great deal of guilt. Guilt was the one thing that I dealt with a lot. I felt very responsible for my daughter's death, even though by all technical terms, I wasn't. It's quite normal for parents to have a sense of responsibility for their children's well-being. And guilt would just bring me to my knees.

It would drop me at any given point during the day. It would knock on my door in my mind heart, in my cheetah. And it would say, hey, guilt is here, you know, loud and proud. And I would have to figure out how to push it away or how to make space for it. So when I started making space for it, what I noticed was my tolerance started to increase, right? And so it's a little like I took a 10 pound weight and I lifted it over and over every day. I lifted that weight of guilt over and over and over again. And at the end of a month, I started to notice it wasn't as hard to lift anymore and I could carry it better with more ease and more grace. And I started to

learn techniques to carry it better. Oh, if I put the weight this way, it's a little bit easier for me to carry it. And I started to notice that it wasn't the weight of the guilt that changed. It was me that changed. So the guilt was still there, but I wasn't dropping weight of the guilt that changed. It was me that changed. So the guilt was still there, but I wasn't dropping to my knees anymore. I was like, oh, okay, guilt. Come on in. Have a seat. Let's have a cup of tea together. You know, let's talk. What do you want to tell me about what I did wrong today? Yes, I hear you. Absolutely. Yes, I would do things differently. Absolutely. I would have had a different doctor. Absolutely. I would have pushed harder for more tests. Absolutely.

I would have done things differently. I'm so sorry. I didn't. Please forgive me. I would give my life for you. And I would talk to my daughter in my head. And then I noticed that it wasn't that guilt didn't come. It was that guilt came and I was like, okay, come on in. I was less paralyzed and overwhelmed by the emotion. It didn't wield power over me the way it did before. And so 28 and a half years later, I still feel guilty. It's not like guilt is gone. I still feel guilty. I'm like, yeah, I know guilt. We know each other. We're very familiar with each other. I know all of guilt's little messages. I know some of guilt's stories and I know some are true and some aren't

true. And we see each other and we have a mutually respectful relationship. Does that make sense? It makes sense beautifully. I love the analogy of a weight because that's a perfect analogy. It's exactly what it's like. Yeah. Yeah. So you build the emotional and psychological muscle to carry the emotions of grief. Yeah. The more we avoid, we're not practicing, we're not lifting, we're not building, you know, when we avoid, when we let go. So one of the things I say for people who are like mindfulness people and they like the terminology, let go, I go, what if instead of let go, we say, let move, because let move implies that it might come back. Let it move. Just let it move. And it'll move.

It doesn't mean it has to go away, but it moves through you. And that's what an emotion is. An emotion is in motion. It's moving through us. It's neither good nor bad. It's just a movement. That was one of the most liberating experiences that I ever had and one of the most liberating pieces of wisdom to put into practice. It is transformational. Thank you. So you talk about that idea of there being ways to carry it better. And we've talked a little bit about being just willing to face it, right? Being willing to give it space to come in and be there. So that's one. What are some other things that people can do that you found helpful to increase their ability to cope or to carry it? familiar with her work, maybe not, but she wrote a book called It's Okay That You're Not Okay.

There's a line in there, some things can't be fixed, they can only be carried, you know, which I love that idea. So what are some ways that we can learn to carry better besides not turning away? Yeah, I mean, I've been talking about, you know, this muscle analogy for 25 years. And to me, it's that, but we can't build the muscle. We can't learn how to carry it. We can't build the emotional muscle. We need to carry it. If other people are standing on our weights, if other people are barriers to our capacity to learn, which is why one of the first questions I ask people when I meet with them is what's your social support like? Who do you have who you trust with your grief, who you trust with your heart? Do you have a safe place to land? Do you have others who treat you and your grief tenderly? And it's often quite disappointing, the answers I hear. So I did a study with a team and we looked at good social support in grief.

And we asked the experts, so who are the experts in what good social support is? And that's grievers, right? We talk about social support all the time in research, but very rarely do we give grievers the capacity to define the meeting. So what is good grief support? So one of the things that we found, we looked at actions and actors. Actions, emotional support, 100% was the most important kind of support, emotional support. And then we asked, who are the best providers? We asked about therapists, counselors, social workers, medical staff. We asked about family, friends, colleagues. We asked about religious communities, spiritual communities. We asked about family, friends, colleagues. We asked about religious communities, spiritual communities. We asked about so many different human groups. And then we asked about

pets and animals. And pets and animals outperformed every human group by a significant number, overwhelmingly significant number. I think family and friends came in at under 40% satisfaction and animals and pets came in at 89% satisfaction. This is a problem. It's incredibly hard to build the emotional muscle and develop the skills we need to carry this grief, to carry the burden of this loss for the rest of our lives. if people are standing in our way with their platitudes, with their psychological violence, with their well-intended but often landing quite sharply words of comfort, like God needed an angel to tend his garden. I was just going to say that one. That's funny you picked it. Yes. God must have needed another angel. He just, you know, yeah.

Right. And this is the problem. It's not just the responsibility of the grieving person. It is the responsibility of us as a society to basically be like a dog, sit and stay. And very few of us know how to actually do that, especially when confronted with the kind of grief that I see here, which at times be very violent, very traumatic. The stories are hard to bear if you haven't done your own work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, your book, it's a difficult book to read from that perspective, the stories. When Jenny's mom passed, we went to the funeral home and very early in her diagnosis, she and I went and we made all her arrangements, which was a gift that she gave us. But I remember being at the funeral home and

Jenny and I remarked on this, like, this is difficult enough when everything is set up and we've known it's coming and we've been thinking about it for years. I cannot imagine walking in here three days after somebody died that I just did not expect was, I mean, it just hit me in that place. There was some resonance that maybe I'm not capable of feeling just in my day-to-day life as much. It brought me face to face with like how crippling that sort of traumatic grief must be. And you point to something important here, which is that a lot of this way that we deal with grieving people is well-intentioned, but doesn't work and is not effective. So I'm wondering if you could share, besides sit and stay, what we as people can do and how do people increase their

capacity to be with this? Because very often it's not on my radar to increase my capacity to be with this because very often it's not on my radar to increase my capacity to be with traumatic grief until somebody very close to me has traumatic grief and then all of a sudden i'm out of my depth very quickly like i've got kindergarten level skills and i just got enrolled in a phd program right right right and so so what can people do to deepen their ability to help someone and to stay and deal with it themselves emotionally when they're sort of brought face to face with this so suddenly and unexpectedly? Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing is we all need to be doing our own work around, even if it's not necessarily traumatic grief, but around painful emotions that we have. Sure. We have to be able to stay with them.

So we have to stop the distractions. We have to stop the drugs and alcohol. We have to stop the pathological gambling, the shopping, the consumerism. We have to learn how to stay with uncomfortable feelings. And this is very, very hard in a culture that teaches us not to. We promote it.

I mean, you can't have a good time going to Las Vegas unless you're drinking, right? I mean, there's't have a good time going to Las Vegas unless you're drinking, right? I mean, there's commercials everywhere. There's the promotion of substances and distractions everywhere we go. It's vast. I think we need an overhaul. I don't know how to make that happen, but it would probably be prudent given the numbers of people who die from these kinds of things every single day. And so I personally think the first thing we need to do as a society is teach emotional intelligence in K through 12. I think we need to teach emotional tolerance and emotional

equanimity and teach children to feel and express painful emotions and not get over them, not reframe them, not change them. But yeah, I'm really, really feeling sad. Yeah, you're sad. Yeah. Can we draw sad and leave it? Not, oh, well, you're sad. Can we replace it with a happy thought? CBT doesn't work for emotional intelligence. It's just trying to replace. It might work when you're in kindergarten and you're sad because you didn't get to sit next to your best friend, but it's not teaching them to prepare for life's big losses. So if we start teaching emotional intelligence at a young age and start integrating this, I think we'll have a new sort of generation of upcoming emotional geniuses, which is what we need,

really. Right. And then I think we need to do our own work as adults, which means, again, not distracting, talking, reading, learning, exploring. I think there's an onus of responsibility on each of us that, for example, if I have a friend and that friend happens to belong to a native tribe and I love my friend, I have a duty to understand the effects of mass genocide intergenerationally. And so I'm going to read about it, which I do. And I'm going to read about the effects of mass genocide and how those effects reverberate through generations, through multiple generations. And I'm going to understand and I'm going to ask questions and I'm going to try to support in whatever way that I can for my friend. And so we have a duty to one another. I think it's Ram Dass who said, we're all just walking each other home. We have a duty to walk

each other home in a compassionate and tender way. Who was it? I think Lawrence Durrell, who said within each of us is a person screaming at the lack of tenderness in the world. And I think we have a duty to bring more tenderness in the world. And I think we have a duty to bring more tenderness to the world, not just to other humans, but also to animals, our animal friends and kin and to the planet. We need to walk more tenderly on this planet too. I mean, there's a lot. I don't know. That's a big question, Eric. I got a whole long list. I could write a dissertation about the shit that needs to change for us to be better. On my website, I got a whole long list. I could write a dissertation about the shit that needs to change for us to be better. On my website, I have a lot of free information, a lot of free resources.

There are free books that people can download and read and learn and grow. There are lots of psychoeducational tools. We can start there. How about that? Yeah. So we'll link to that in the show notes. Tell me if I'm off here, but to me, one of the things we can learn about why animals do such a great job of being a support is that they offer nonjudgmental presence, that feeling of someone sitting with you, not doing anything other than being in it with you, right? That's the most supportive, but we feel like it's not enough or we feel like we have to do more, but it's just not being alone in your difficult mess that is the most helpful. Well, it's almost like you read my research because the next question we asked was,

why are animals doing such a good job? And there were four themes that came out of the qualitative data. And one of them was their presence being nonjudgmental. They just show up when you're crying. They don't hand you a tissue and tell you to clean it up. They don't take you out for a drink to change how you feel. They'll sit with you and put their head on your lap. Or for some people, they talked about their horses just standing with them. The reason we as humans feel like it's not enough is because we're encumbered by a neocortex and these animals are not encumbered by that, right? These animals are just going on instinct. They're just leading with their hearts and it is the perfect thing. That's incredible. Not to put you on the spot, I'm just curious about the other three. Oh, the other three. So caretaking role was one of them, that people, their animals gave them reason to get up in the

morning and take care. Interesting. That the animals were a memorial to their deceased person. So the animals felt like a connection to their person who died. And then there was one more, sorry, it's been a while since I published it. There were four. No, again, I didn't want to put you on the spot. No, that's okay. But you can look at it. It's an open access study. So if you just Google my name and good grief support, it should pull up the open access study. I will be doing that. That's wonderful.

I have one more question, but I also want to be sensitive to time. Do you have a few more minutes, Joanne? Yeah, sure. Okay, great. Well, I just was struck by the number of uncanny coincidences in your book about stories about you coming across people named Cheyenne or the dog mags in the driveway with the person named Cheyenne and like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and how she said that when you remembered her, she would be there in the shooting star. So I mean, I just named a couple but, you know, feel free to speak to one and describe

it to us if you feel like it. Or maybe just the thing I'm curious about is like, what do you make all that mean? I know. Where are these people we love? And are they really coming back to us? As someone that just lost her mom, I crave the answer to be yes. But, you know, what do you make of it? You know, it's so hard for me.

But, you know, what do you make of it? You know, it's so hard for me. You know, I'm a scientist and I do statistical analyses and it's very hard to, with certainty, quantify what these experiences mean. I can only tell you what they feel like they mean in the moment. And what they feel like they mean in the moment is, holy shit, right? Then some time passes, right? And then I start going, well, maybe it was just a coincidence. But then I go back to what that feeling was. And I'm like, that couldn't be a

coincidence. The statistical probability of something like that happening, like the story of Mags in the book. I literally, when he said his name, those of you who haven't read it, it's worth it just to read that story. When he said that, I literally looked around. I thought I was being punked. I thought I was being punked. I thought I was like, am I just being set up here? What is... I dropped the book. I put the book down and Eric was in the other room and I was like, oh my God. And I made the guy show me his driver's license because I was like, there's no way. I took a picture of his driver's license. Wow. I don't know. Honestly, I don't know what

it means, but I know what it feels like it means. And in that moment, I just put my hands on my heart and I say, thank you. I don't know what the hell this means, but thank you. It just feels really powerful, like otherworldly powerful. And I don't know what else to say about it. like otherworldly powerful. And I don't know what else to say about it. And I don't know how to even describe it. I mean, I've had interactions with animals, wild animals that are like, I don't know what this means. Like people have witnessed it and they're like, what's going on? And I'm like, I have no idea like what's going on. I don't know how this is happening or why this is happening, but it's happening. So I just try to take it in in the moment and try not to hyperanalyze it too much, which is hard as a scientist, but it's happening. So I just try to take it in in the moment and try not to hyper

analyze it too much, which is hard as a scientist, but I try hard not to. I would like to think that it is an indication of some kind of connection. Most always, most days, I think it has to be. I have not had the amount of time since my mom passed to have a lot of these, but I've had a couple and you're right in the moment, it has struck me as just thank you and wow. And it's like a deep knowing, I can't describe it more than that, but it's like this deep knowing of that was a wow, like wow and thank you. And as my mind tries to like then in the days past, like make it neat and tidy and whatever, I just really want to hold some space for the inevitable mystery that still exists and not knowing.

Just leave it at not knowing. I will say this is probably going to be underwhelming as I describe it. But in the moment, it was a wow for me. So I told you my mom's name was Ogie, short for Olga, which is a name I don't come across every day, Olga. And so she passed away in the early morning of a Friday morning. And later that morning, I don't know, 10 or 11 o'clock, my best friend from growing up came over, you know, just to kind of be with me. And she was like another daughter to my mom. We grew

up in each other's households. My mom loved her. She loved my mom. So we were talking about the hours leading up to and when my mom passed, we were just talking about my mom. And my friend, Marianne, looks at her phone and she was like, oh my gosh, I said, what? She was like, I just got a text from someone named Olga. I just got a text from Olga. And it was a woman who was like in her phone, but no one she'd ever texted with before, but she was in her phone because she was like the mother of a soccer player on her daughter's team from some group chat. It was just like obscure. And as we were talking about my mom, I mean, it was one of those moments. And then I had a couple of those in the days after she died. And it just felt like a wink or something from my mom being

like, I'm still here. I'm part of this conversation. I can hear you. And I'm starting to get into a land where I can't substantiate any of that, but it felt special and I appreciate it. But it felt like it. So that's what it is. Yeah. I mean, and what a beautiful thing. What a beautiful moment of timing, you know, whatever had to happen for that to occur in that moment. Yes.

What a gift. What a beautiful gift and also how much you miss her, right? Yes. So much. Yeah. Makes me think of a Zen phrase, not knowing is most intimate. Indeed. And what you guys are describing are intimate moments, right? And not being able to explain it, not having to explain it is a way of staying with the intimacy of it versus, you know,

pondering what does it actually mean? Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Well, that's a beautiful place maybe to wrap up. But just to say in deep gratitude for this conversation, for your work, and for all that you do out in the world, I'm grateful that you've stayed in your grief and in your love and in the work that you do. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to this conversation. It's been lovely to meet you both. Thank you.

Thank you for introducing me to Ogi. Oh, God, thank you for saying that. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, take care. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank

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