The Wellness Scoop - Embracing Life’s Challenges

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

Today’s guest, therapist Sasha Bates, talks embracing vulnerability, expanding our emotional bandwidth, why we shouldn’t cut ourselves off from difficult emotions and the importance of stopping the ‘I’m fine’ mentality. From loosening the protective emotional armour we can create in childhood to understanding avoidance and denial, creating space for feelings, finding gems in the rubble and treating vulnerability and pain with kindness, we discuss all manner of ways to embrace and understand life’s challenges.   Sasha Bates, Languages of Loss See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me, Matthew Mills, and my wife and business partner, Ella Mills. I'm very happy to have my co-host back again today. So on the first episode, actually, of this series, we were talking a bit about the brain and the importance of acknowledging our emotions, especially given the inevitable challenges and ups and downs that happen in all of our lives. So today we're going to be delving a little deeper into this space, trying to understand some of the theories and the concepts that exist around the way that we process emotions. We've all heard of renowned thinkers like Freud

and the concepts that go with it but how much do we really understand about it? We want to look at these ideas in relation to coping with the challenges and traumas of life, most especially loss. Looking at those moments when the ground feels like it disappears from under you. After you've lost a job, a friendship, your health, your hopes, or most sadly, someone that was very close to you and means a lot. Our guest today is Sasha Bates, a psychotherapist who I met through our editor, Liz. Liz was actually the first person that put Delicious the Ella on the map when she took a chance on our first book. And she's been telling me for a while now quite how brilliant Sasha is, what a special book it is, and what an amazing podcast guest she'd be. So we're really honoured to have you here, Sasha. No pressure.

Thank you. Hello. So thank you so much for coming on today. And I guess one of the things that really struck me, so Sasha's book's called Languages of Loss, and it's incredibly beautifully written, but you're so vulnerable in it. The premise of the book is around losing your husband very suddenly, but you're also incredibly vulnerable about other losses in your life. Failed rounds of IVF, the loss of your father, the disconnect to your sister and, you know, the challenges that come with those sorts of things. And it's a kind of vulnerability and an openness that I think so many of us often struggle with and we kind of bottle up those emotions a little bit and you know I'd love to start there and understand a bit more about why in your opinion both personally and professionally it feels important to bring that kind of vulnerability and shared experience into the world especially when we're talking about topics that can be really difficult for people to talk about. Well I think that as a therapist I see that most of the issues clients come to me with can do basically all boil down to

loss and vulnerability and that need to hide from our more vulnerable selves. And it's made me realise over the years of doing it that if we can just all be honest about how we're feeling, so many of the things that we struggle with wouldn't even be an issue, but we're all so concerned with kind of hiding those parts of ourselves that we're just creating a problem that doesn't need to be there. And if everybody knew that everyone else

was feeling as rubbish as each other, then it would just make for more honest conversations and a more honest engagement with our real emotions. And has this been something that you've always had an ability to do or has it been something you've been able to learn? No, I've had to learn it. Yes. No, it's been quite a hard one learning. Maybe it's because initially I very much was at the other end of the extreme. It was like, don't show any weakness, just power on through, say everything's fine, say that you can cope and manage with everything, which was the very thing that sort of got me into therapy in the first

place in my 20s. And it's been a very hard journey since then to realise that actually, the more you give of yourself to other people, the more they are then able to give of themselves to you. And then that's the way you create deeper connections with people and deeper relationships and why do you think in the first place because I completely agree with you that we do have this kind of need to hide our vulnerability and our weaknesses in some capacity from other people why you know we always say to you how are you I'm fine yeah I'm fine even if you're the furthest thing from fine why why is that, do you think? I think it's protective. It's like that suit of armour that protects us when we feel like we've got wounds that we don't want people sticking their finger into. So we kind of put the armour on top so that people can't hurt us.

Interesting. And that way we feel like we're protecting ourselves, but arguably in the long term, we're actually not. Yeah. i mean there's a phrase that um we use a lot in therapy which is that what protects the child imprisons the adult because you put on this armor as a child to stop yourself getting hurt because children can be so cruel and they also you know are the victims of a lot of cruelty and that's really helpful because they create this armor around themselves to protect themselves but then as they get older it becomes a prison because they grow too big for it and it themselves. But then as they get older, it becomes a prison because they grow too big for it and it starts to dig in and it entraps them and their worlds get smaller and smaller

because they can't get through these defences that were there initially to protect them but are now actually hurting them. One thing you said as well that therapists often say, which I thought was really interesting, is that sometimes therapists jokingly put people into two categories those who feel but can't deal and those who deal but can't feel and I would love it if you could tell us a bit more about that. Yeah I mean I should say as well it is a joking

reductive way and nobody really thinks that you know we're one thing or the other but we do all have tendencies so I'm naturally a dealer. So I like to deal with things. I don't want like messy emotions to get in the way when I'm just trying to sort something out and solve something. Whereas other people might be more in touch with their feelings and might just want to give in to them and just really run the whole gamut. And whichever way you tend to more, there are going to be advantages and disadvantages in that. So as a dealer, if I squash down my feelings, it means that I look like I'm coping, I'm getting things done, I'm solving, I'm managing, I'm fine. Again, it goes back to the

I'm fine and nothing to see here. But if you cut yourself off from the difficult emotions, you're also cutting yourself off from the pleasurable ones as well so you're not really having a sort of 360 degree view of the world or yourself as a person you're only allowing certain traits out and they kind of narrow your bandwidth yeah exactly it's a really good way of putting it you're narrowing your bandwidth to something that's sort of quite head-led and cognitive and sensible and rational and logical, but leaves no space for messy emotions. Whereas the feelers amongst us, and Bill, my husband, who I wrote the book about, or wrote the book about losing him, he was more of a feeler. So he would get very emotional and he'd shout and scream and stomp about the place. And he sometimes

couldn't, he would get so overwhelmed, a bit like a child. He couldn't engage his brain. He couldn't rationally think, actually, is this really worth getting that hit up about? So you have to sort of learn, all of us have to learn

to balance those tendencies. And if you're a, if we start with a dealer, what are the ways you can help to balance that? Well, just trying to loosen off that armor all those protective ways that you've cut yourself off from your feelings so trying to acknowledge what they

are trying to let them out in a safe way so that they don't feel overwhelming because if you've shut them down you've shut them down for a reason because they feel overwhelming and like you won't have the resources to cope with them and do you think it's possible to do that without professional support? Or do you think it's something that people should only really do with the help of a... I think it is possible. I think, you know, as a therapist, I'm bound to say it's easier and maybe less frightening to do it with professional support. But that doesn't mean that you can't. I mean, if you have understanding friends who you can speak to or you've got a partner who you're able to sort of show you show your vulnerabilities to, then, yeah, you can learn to or just by reading and experiencing life in different ways you have if you're in a dealer to be able to get more of the the feeler side do you feel like it's more difficult to actually even just

acknowledge that that's the problem in the first place and actually dealing with the problem or or is dealing with the problem actually the much much bigger task than just actually acknowledging i think the two go hand in hand really yeah yeah and sasha if you don't mind me asking you're again really honest about your experience and when bill was suddenly taken ill you said that's where your head went into yeah how long did that last for you did you have to have a kind of conversation with yourself about letting those feelings in how was that i think because bill dying was so monumental, and it came out of nowhere, and my life just sort of imploded over overnight. I don't think I was making

very logical decisions. I think when a crisis happens, you do just revert to your natural tendency. So I wasn't even aware that I was going into dealer mode. I just did it. I think as time went on, often the feelings were so big that they just kind of swept all that out of the way. Much as I tried to keep the sort of the defenses in place, they would get sort of swept away by the deluge. So sometimes it wasn't really in my conscious control. And then I think as time went on, I was able to have more control over it and think,

oh no, come on, hang on, you're spending a lot of time being busy, you haven't been in, you know, one night this week, or you haven't stopped writing all day, there might be something going on here that you're trying to avoid. So my husband, Bill, collapsed one day. And we didn't know what it was. We rushed to hospital and it was discovered he had something called an aortic dissection, which is when the aorta, which is the main artery that takes the blood from the heart, had ruptured. The cure for which is heart surgery. So he went into heart surgery and we thought it was all going to be fine. But then it turns out the next day that before they'd

managed to repair the tear the blood that had escaped had kind of gone AWOL and run amok and that a clot had lodged itself up near his brain and over the course of the next day it slowly starved his brain of oxygen so he went in on the Sunday and by the Monday night we I was told that he wasn't going to survive because his brain had been starved of oxygen to such an extent that he wasn't ever going to come around. So it was quite, I mean, I describe it in my book as an implosion. My whole life just imploded. We went from being perfectly normal, happy, healthy couple with plans and a life to me just being on my own and he had just sort of literally dropped off the cliff it just wasn't there anymore and neither was my life as I knew it so I think when something so huge happens as with any crisis you revert to your

normal ways of being your earlier ways of being. So everything that you've learned as an adult as to how to maturely, sensibly cope with things, that sort of goes out the window. You're just in survival mode. And that can mean regressing or reverting to earlier ways of coping, which for me was to cut off from the neck down, to not think about the feelings, to move up into my head to think okay right what do I need to do how do I get through this drop some lists keep busy sort it all out deal with it you know which works up to a point it lasts for a certain amount of time how long did it last for you oh well I think I went in and out of it it was it was um you know some days it

would last all day some days it would last a couple of hours. And the feelings would break through no matter how hard I tried to suppress them. I'll try to sort of say, it'll be fine. It'll be fine. I'll get through it. I just need to, you know, if I can just source this stuff. And, you know, eventually the deluge washes it all away. And then as time went on, I was more able to consciously have control of that tap so to speak I could realize

that I was just keeping it all hidden by being busy and actually in the long run the longer I didn't address the feeling side of it the more it was going to come back to bite me because they always do feelings are always going to come back to bite you you can run but you can't hide you know defenses will always only ever work up to a point. Well that's exactly what happened with you isn't it with your mum is that you'd kind of been so busy for a few months after you learned that she had a terminal illness and then you collapsed. Yeah I mean we found out mum had a seizure we found out shortly after that people give you hope through various treatments that could happen but the

standard uh prognosis was that they probably should probably live for a year and i was walking down the street one day and i just literally collapsed and it was an utterly physical response to all the mental trauma that i was in but it was like nothing i'd ever experienced before i was walking through soho and suddenly I literally couldn't stand up and I was taken to the doctor straight away and I was fine after some kind of week of real rest afterwards but it is crazy the way that grief can manifest itself

and at very unexpected times too but it was good for me in a way because it acted as a trigger to really get under the skin and deal with absolutely everything that was happening. Whereas I think before, up until that point, I'd lived on hope. I lived on all the love that we had in our family as well. And I'd lived on being able to keep myself very busy at work.

But to actually have that realization, it's a bit of a restart for you and a regroup to um to really have to acknowledge properly properly what's happening and start to deal with it actually made the time of my mum's passing actually slightly easier because i had started that process before she actually passed away whereas for my sister it was it was different because she took very much the lead of being you know she oversaw all of my mum's treatment and we did some very innovative and exciting treatments for her but she stayed exceptionally busy the whole way through my mum's illness up to the very end and had a harder time after she passed away because the realization you know hit her like a ton of brakes whereas I had had a slightly longer period it felt like

to adapt so to your point the one thing that I absolutely learned from that experience is the importance of actually dealing with it and there is no substitute and you never know when it's coming but if you don't deal with it it will hit you at some point and that point becomes a moment of of opportunity almost because it's a moment to either get things right for yourselves and to be able to move forward or to take yourself in a much much much less productive path and i think being conscious in that moment of the very diverse choice you have to make at that moment is is really important yeah it really is and sometimes like i say you can run but you can't hide if you can't acknowledge it your body will make you acknowledge it at some

point as you discovered and i think another really interesting and terrifying but also beautiful thing about grief is how much the body will tell you it won't let you just kind of say right i'm going to deal with it it'll be like no i'm actually we need to stop we need to actually acknowledge what's happening here and it's actually is that something you see with kind of all trauma you know whether that's like traumatic event in your childhood you know say an accident or like a very difficult job loss or redundancy or some you know very difficult moments in your life is that just though do those emotions kind of obviously it's a different scale but you know do the depths of those emotions kind of come and get you as well yeah absolutely whatever the loss whether it's well I don't even want to say small or big because you know we're all surrounded by losses all the time and in the

moment of the loss whatever it is it feels huge and it is huge so whether it's a job loss or a relationship loss or a pet or a sense of identity I mean it can be quite abstract there's going to be a reaction you can't just if if you if you've lost something you're going to there's going to be a hole that needs to somehow be soothed I guess and addressed and the only way of soothing it is to embrace that vulnerability that every human being feels and to actually communicate it and yeah and as you say whether it's friends family a professional to actually get help on that yeah i thought it was interesting the part where you talked about how i thought it was really amazing the way you described it and actually made a huge amount of sense that you had obviously lost the anchor of your life and as a

result you kind of felt you needed to create that sense of kind of nesting of creating a secure environment for yourself and in doing so there was almost like a sense of kind of avoidance because you were like obsessively tidying and then obsessively just buying things and like eating a lot and kind of quite mindlessly because you're trying to fill an emotional hole in a kind of quite a physical way and you talk quite a lot about kind of over intellectualizing things denying things and avoiding things and I guess those are things on like a bigger and smaller scale that we probably actually all do all the time yeah yeah we've all got our coping mechanisms whether it's food alcohol shopping gambling too much telly whatever it is um even you know work addiction or exercise addiction there's a lot of the things that sort of can seem quite healthy they might be

more healthy physically if you spend more time down at the gym rather than spending more time with a bottle of wine but i'm not sure they're necessarily that much more healthy emotionally because they are all just ways of of not dealing with it really not addressing what's going on but presumably they're very common and I imagine lots of things that people under therapy for they've been avoiding for a long time yeah really common and also really understandable and actually also necessary we do need some cushioning. Otherwise, you know, the abyss that you're staring into, it's sort of not really survivable, which is why we don't want to go near it and, you know, put up all the barricades.

So they are necessary. You know, a bit of denial is a great thing. A bit of just enjoying yourself or losing yourself in your list making or your treadmill running or your chocolate cake whatever it is a bit of that is great because we need to take a break from it we can't just face the full horror full frankly all the time it's just too much so it's when it's when either thing gets out of control really it's everything in moderation it's um fine to have a bit of denial and say i just can't deal with this right now i'm just going to go off and do what i do best which is you know

i don't know keep busy or eat but it's when that just you kind of relentlessly do it and you don't allow any space for the feelings okay so it's about finding a balance finding the right time place moment person that you're with yeah to open up and have that sense of vulnerability yeah and making sure you have that and in amongst that the avoidance is just a natural part of life that we shouldn't kind of criticize ourselves for absolutely not no it's really necessary it's protective and you know in certain situations you need that if you are sitting with a lawyer and dealing with business matters or i don't know trying to get on a train somewhere you don't want to be a sniveling wreck telling the train conductor oh my god my husband's just

died and i can't really cope with life you know you've you've traumatized the poor man you know you do have to um know your audience a little bit and know when it's feel safe to do that i think the other thing is that you learn that vulnerability actually becomes a real sign of strength. And someone who, I think it's very rare that you speak to someone who can speak very openly about a bad thing that happened to them. And that person says, oh, you know, what a weakling. You know, it's typically seen as something, oh, my God, they're so brave. They're really able to open up. And so I do think it's absolutely a show of strength.

It's not a weakness that as human beings we have. That is absolutely right. Unfortunately, what we're all very good at is acknowledging that in everyone else and not in ourselves. So it's like, oh, no, it's, you know, it's fabulous. You know, please just show me, show me your pain. But it's like, oh, but I'm not showing you mine. So we all kind of feel like it's OK for everyone else. But when it comes to ourselves, it's like, oh's like oh god no i wouldn't possibly show that um but yeah i mean if you think about in nature i mean trees

the strongest trees are the ones that can sort of bend with the wind and have a bit of flexibility the the ones that kind of get knocked over in the wind are the ones that are rigid and solid and slightly dying inside because they don't have that flexibility to be able to move with what's thrown at them one of the other theories you talked about which i thought was really interesting is and we had touched on it on another episode about kind of relationships and things there's attachment theory and about how that as far as i understand it correct me if i'm wrong it starts to form when you're very very young and it's very much based often on your childhood experiences but then that creates such a structure

for your adult life and the relationships you then form. And then those anchors become such a fundamental part of your life. And your different attachment styles can really kind of impact on how you form those attachments, but then also how you react to losing those attachments. Yeah, attachment theory started with John Bowlby back in the 50s, I think it was. And he realised that children from very early age seek love in just the same way they seek food and water and shelter. Love doesn't come as a sort of subsidiary to that. It's an implicit human emotion. And if one receives that love and feels that it is conditional upon a certain type of behaviour, then you are going to exhibit that kind of behaviour because that's the way you get your

parents to love you. And most of this is unconscious. Most people don't realize that they're kind of instilling these habits in their children that, you know, I will only love you if you are pretty or clever or well behaved or whatever it might be the mantra in your family or mantras. But it just becomes so ingrained in us that we think everybody reacts to us in that way. So it can be quite confusing if you then meet somebody that doesn't respond in the same way or doesn't have the same expectations. But we can have different attachment styles to different people. So you might be attached in a certain manner to your mom and a different manner to your dad or to your

grandparent or to a teacher or, I don't a babysitter or something it doesn't have to a lot of the criticism that's been thrown at attachment theory is because it puts so much onus on the mother to be this amazing always there loving mother which of course it would be great if everyone could be there but people have lives and it's not just the mom children even if they don't have two parents you know there were there were other people in their lives hopefully that can that they can form attachments to that they understand don't always have to be conditional and then you kind of move those anchors is that correct as you go on through your life and so you can move them to other family members partners potential husbands wives children and then that then becomes incredibly disorientating am i right

in saying and that was your experience is when you then lose that anchor then your kind of entire world yeah yeah absolutely you can come really strongly attached people later in life it doesn't have to be again it's not a life sentence when you know just because you may have been insecurely attached as a child you can it's called earned security it's quite a life sentence when, you know, just because you may have been insecurely attached as a child, you can, it's called earned security. It's quite reassuring though, isn't it, that you can switch. And so you can have an anchor you could be with, you could be completely heartbroken or you can have a loss, but you can find a new anchor. It's actually a really reassuring thing to know, isn't it? Yeah.

There's always potential to grow. In fact, there's something called post-traumatic growth. I mean, we've all heard about post-traumatic stress. But there is actually something called post-traumatic growth, where you can use the losses that you've had to help you form deeper connections with other people, which is actually what's happened to me. I mean, I've got so close to some of my friends as a result of the trauma that we all went through, because obviously, I wasn't the only person to lose Bill. Obviously, I was the closest person to him. But know his friends his family some of my friends everybody's been changed by the experience and yeah you can grow together and you're kind of in the trenches together and so there's a bond that forms that sometimes can be unbreakable that you would never

have known there was there or that you were capable of if you hadn't gone through this thing together and you I don't know if surprised is the right word but it must feel surreal in that sense to look back now in what's obviously been like I'm presuming the most challenging part of your life by a significant way and then look back and see that like there are obviously some positives in the sense that you have got these kind of incredible deepened relationships. And has it kind of surprised you in some ways to be able to find like some positives in amongst such a difficult situation? Yeah, it really has. And the phrase I use for that is gems in the rubble because it's not trying to do this sort of Pollyanna-ish. Oh, it's all fine and

look what wonderful things have happened. It's like you have to acknowledge that the rubble is there and that there's still a lot of pain and loss and, you know, missing him. And there's a lot of trauma and stress, but there are gems amongst that rubble that you wouldn't have necessarily found if the house hadn't collapsed. You wouldn't necessarily have found the little gems that kind of emerge from it so it's acknowledging both those things the gems and the rubble and they both have importance there's a prime example in our life where we had semi put off because everything would could get in the way of working as busy as we were and then when mum passed away you really learned how finite life is in that you never know when anything's going to happen.

And we've had Sky as a result. And I talk about a gem. I mean, you know, the net amount of love in my life had certainly decreased an enormous amount when my mum passed away. But it is replenished and some now is Sky. And so it is amazing. The best, best, best things in your life can come out of the absolute worst things as well. Yeah, absolutely. And it's really hard to understand that that can be the case when you're right in the midst of it.

And you almost don't want that to be the case because you don't want to feel better. I think if you've lost somebody really important, you don't want the pain to stop because that almost feels like the love will stop or that you're not acknowledging them or their importance. So I don't know that it's always possible to recognise that that is the case. But yes, it absolutely is the case. And on that, I think quite a lot of people seem to have, and I really get this, a lot of anxiety if something difficult's happened to them. So they've lost someone very close to them or say they've just had you know a big health crisis of some capacity or you know something terrible's happened you can I think have this kind of anxiety of like what happens if it happens again and a kind of almost like fear of living for fear of what you can lose like I don't know if that's something

you've experienced or whether you have any kind of thoughts or advice for people around that well I think again maybe that's where honest conversations about how terrified you are can come in and a real honest reckoning of what it is that you're doing to try to prevent that because you can't stem the tide there are always going to be more losses and so I think trying to find ways to become more resilient, to get your support structures in place, to understand that you have survived one thing and you will survive the next thing. And yes, it will be painful addressing those vulnerabilities. If the vulnerability is the terror that you're going to lose somebody else, then that's a really big vulnerability that you need to somehow acknowledge with so much awareness of the preciousness of the thing that you are offering up really because you can't just take your deepest wound and say oh here look let's just tell it slap it about a bit and say come on get over it it'll be fine you have to be really really gentle with yourself and acknowledge how painful that is as I said we don't put the arm around it you know if it wasn't really necessary and what about

the other people in your life because obviously when you're going through something difficult and as you said you know you've got some incredible friendships that have deepened as a result but presumably it's not you know there are some like friendship gains and some friendship losses again in these sorts of difficult situations where not everyone's always able to relate or you feel like they're not able to support you and work in some capacity yeah and that that can be really tragic and sad that you see people for who they are really people show their best and their worst sides but you know again you just have to think well I might never have known that about this person um and you know better to find out now what they're made of so yeah I think you just have to say I'm really sad I've lost that person as a friend it's really sad but actually

they're not what I need around me right now so if a listener is sitting here and they think gosh I can relate to so many of these things that are being said. And I'm definitely someone where this happened in my life. And I've just been incredibly busy since or I've sat here and I've been so overtaken with the emotion of it for such an amount of time that my life has kind of stopped in many ways. What's that first step that they can take on both sides of that to start this this path back i think acknowledging what they've lost really acknowledging the effect it's had on them and the impact it's had on them and that maybe they might need some help in addressing it by sharing it with a trusted person i think acknowledging first to yourself and to a trusted other and that may be a friend

or it may be that you don't feel able to do it to a friend which is when you know a professional can can be really helpful but acknowledging with compassion and kindness not in oh I should have you know I shouldn't be like this I should have done it that way that's the first step if you don't recognize that the habits that you have built up or the defences that you've built up, that they have started to become a prison rather than a protective thing, then you really are stuck. You have to do quite a searching inventory, I think, of yourself. You have to really acknowledge what's going on for yourself. And sometimes, you know, you might not even realise until you start talking to somebody. You might know you're unhappy or you know that

things aren't right and you don't really even know know why the loss may have happened so far back in history. I mean, I have, I've had clients that when we've sort of unravelled why they're feeling unhappy, but that happened years ago, that can't be the cause. It doesn't matter how long ago it happened. You know, if you felt wounded wounded and you've kind of tightened up around that wound it's always going to be there and one thing that you spoke openly about which I'd love to touch on is body psychotherapy so that kind of indivisible link between the mind and the body and how much that helped you but not just also how much that helps you sometimes I think when you went on that yoga retreat in Sri Lanka I think you were saying it helped you also realize that actually there were a lot of emotions that you weren't

necessarily still processing and had kind of locked up a little bit yeah I think that especially for someone like me who is a dealer and tends to live in their heads a lot more we often don't realize that our bodies are just storing these things up in our muscles, in our organs, in our cells. We're kind of depositing all those things that we don't want to think about into our physical selves. And once you start unravelling that, whether it's by moving more, whether it's by going to an acupuncturist or a craniosacral therapist or having massage or doing yoga or running or whatever it is, once those things start to unlock slightly, again, that can feel quite overwhelming because we store so much emotion. And I'm also trained as a yoga teacher and I've seen it in myself and in people in yoga classes where they won't even know they've stored an emotion somewhere,

but they might be doing some big backbend and sort of opening their heart and their chest and suddenly something that they didn't even know was stored in there is released and they'll just burst into tears and they won't even know why they're feeling so emotional. So yeah, we absolutely store our emotions in our bodies. And sometimes a bit like I was saying before, sometimes letting them out is within our conscious control and we can say, okay, I want to address this, I'm going to, you know, find a yoga teacher that can help me gently move through some of this stuff. And sometimes it just happens, because we just happen to put ourself in a posture or do something where it's unleashed, and then can take you by surprise. As I think you were saying, Matt, when you were walking through Soho,

and your body just kind of went, you know what, can't really do this anymore this burden is too much to carry but yeah I absolutely believe that we store emotions physically and that if we can't deal with them intellectually they're going to go somewhere yeah I've cried in so many yoga classes yeah it's amazing it sometimes it just comes from absolutely nowhere it's incredibly powerful as you said you can just be moving and suddenly you somehow have some sense of kind of release and it just like comes pouring out i've done it in spin class as well yeah suddenly you're just bawling your eyes out it's quite an amazing release actually it's quite unlike anything else yeah exactly it is because it's not something that you have kind of made happen it's sort of

come out of nowhere it's like whoa where did that come from so one final topic i'd love to talk about because it feels like the perfect kind of place to start to wrap this conversation up is the rippling effect oh yeah which is where you end your book and it's just the most amazing concept yeah if you think about the image of like throwing a pebble in a pond, and then you have the kind of the implosion of the pebble going in, but then you get the sort of concentric circles rippling out. And that can be a really lovely metaphor for how the effect people have on those who are left in that they live on everything that they were and did lives on in the people who've been affected by them. So whether it's, I don't know, you know, somebody they taught or somebody that they loved or somebody that they helped find themselves, everyone's going to be affected by that person having lived. I mean, I just think it's a really lovely metaphor of just because we're not here in person, the effects of what we did during our lives I think

are still are still there still creating waves still creating ripples still benefiting people in ways that you couldn't possibly have known yourself when you were doing the thing that you were doing it's a really nice way of thinking about as well as you just like live your life on a day-to-day basis that like every tiny little thing that you do can have a long lasting impact sometimes even without you realizing it absolutely even just like smiling at someone who you pass in the tube you might brighten their day just because they're like oh i somebody's seen me you know somebody's acknowledged me the thing that i found almost most confusing when mum passed away was how it is the most human emotion and most human experience we can have you know everyone loses someone that they love at some point and everyone is dumped at some point or

everyone doesn't a career doesn't work out the way they want to do at some point and it binds us as human beings is one thing we can definitely all have in common some people aren't successful don't have great things but everyone has the crap stuff that happens in their life and so an ability to be able to talk about that share that normalize that is something that i found a bit weird after mum died because people would be kind of slightly nervous to talk to me about it but i was like yes mum passed away but how many other people's mum have passed away it's something that i share in common with so many's mum have passed away it's something that I share in common with so many people but it felt like it was something it was much more siloed to me

and I know that when it happened I felt I love talking about it and one it felt mum closer it felt like I was continuing her legacy as well but it was great for me and I think that people will typically be as open in return as you are to them and when I was really open to them about mum they may then say because something back to me that I probably wasn't expecting in it and then that's that's the ripple that that then goes from there and it's an additional ripple kind of through people so Sasha we always um wrap up with asking our guest to share three kind of take homes for our listeners. So I wondered if you'd be kind enough to share three things with our listeners today.

So I think it's really important to keep talking about the person that you've lost in order to show other people not to be afraid of talking about them, because people are terrified that they might upset you or they don't know what to say. And so if you just kind of show them how to help you by leading with, oh, Bill did this, or, you know, when I think about Bill that, it shows them that they're able to talk about him and that keeps him alive as well. That's another form of rippling in that we share the memories and we share the happy times. The second thing is that grief and loss is a shapeshifter and comes in many different guises. And some of those shapes are going to be easier to cope with than others. And trying to be kind to yourself in the times when it floors you and you feel just you can't cope. And also trying

to take advantage of the moments when it actually can energize you and think, no, I'm going to do this for him. He didn't get to live this life. I can. So I'm going to bloody well live it. And the other thing that I was going to say is go at your own pace and don't feel pressurized by what society or your inner critic or what your friends tell you you should be doing. Just go with what you feel you need on any one day and that's going to change from day to day. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Sasha.

And Sasha's book, Languages of Loss, is absolutely amazing. So if anyone is going through a difficult time, I would massively recommend it. Thank you so much. Thank you very much for having me. We will see you back here next Tuesday. Thank you. Bye. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top

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