Speaker 1: Pushkin. Sometimes the realization that you need to reset your
Speaker 1: relationship with your feelings comes from some minor or everyday event,
Speaker 1: like losing your temper in the parking lot while grocery shopping.
Speaker 1: But many of us have experienced a bigger, life changing
Speaker 1: event that causes us to rethink how to deal with
Speaker 1: our emotions. In the last episode, we heard from the
Speaker 1: Harvard psychologist Susan David, who realized she needed to listen
Speaker 1: to her negative feelings after the death of her father.
Speaker 1: Now I felt so untethered from myself and so untethered
Speaker 1: in this experience of grief, and I started to respond
Speaker 1: to that as so many people do when they experiencing
Speaker 1: emotional pain, especially unprocessed emotional pain, which is for me
Speaker 1: that took the form of binging and purging, refusing to
Speaker 1: accept the full way to my grief. In this season
Speaker 1: of the Happiness Lab, we're going to tackle a whole
Speaker 1: range of uncomfortable, painful emotions, and we'll give you strategies
Speaker 1: to learn from these feelings and respond to them in
Speaker 1: ways that will make you happier. But I wanted to
Speaker 1: start with the emotion that caused to Susan so much
Speaker 1: pain the one that prompted her to suppress her feelings
Speaker 1: because they hurt so badly. Grief. We live in a
Speaker 1: kind of age of what I don't think about, what
Speaker 1: I didn't talk about, isn't going to hurt me. I'll
Speaker 1: just turn away. And then when you are grieving and
Speaker 1: you feel like this, grief often feels like fear, and
Speaker 1: you have all of these competing feelings if angry and
Speaker 1: sad and confused and lost and all of that at
Speaker 1: the same time, you think you're somehow doing it wrong.
Speaker 1: This is psychotherapist Julia Samuel. Julia is the author of
Speaker 1: two best selling books about grief, Grief Works and This
Speaker 1: Too Shall Pass. With all the difficult feelings that Julia
Speaker 1: has found can come twisted up with grief, It's no
Speaker 1: wonder that grieving is so tremendously painful. But as we'll
Speaker 1: see with so many of the emotions we'll talk about
Speaker 1: in this season, our instinct to run away from the
Speaker 1: pain of grief is surprisingly ineffective. The science shows were
Speaker 1: best off when we address grief head on. We need
Speaker 1: to allow the grief to come through us, storm its
Speaker 1: way and change us and sort of come through in
Speaker 1: this kind of often very chaotic and messy ways. It's
Speaker 1: often the things that you do to block the natural
Speaker 1: grieving process that, in the end, do you harm. We're
Speaker 1: going to devote two whole episodes to the strategies Julia
Speaker 1: developed over the last thirty years to help her patients
Speaker 1: and herself develop a better relationship with grief and spoiler alert,
Speaker 1: there are no five stages involved and no euphemisms either,
Speaker 1: you know, to get over it. We really do need
Speaker 1: a relationship with the person who's passed away. By the way,
Speaker 1: I never use the word pass to way okay, sorry,
Speaker 1: because where did they pass to? Ok fair enough? It's
Speaker 1: another kind of thing where you're denying the reality of death,
Speaker 1: like they died. It's the way we kind of protect
Speaker 1: ourselves against the reality of it. We can't bear the
Speaker 1: reality of it, so if we try and soften it
Speaker 1: with words like passed away. Get ready to learn that
Speaker 1: so many of our instincts about grief are wrong. You're
Speaker 1: listening to the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 1: One of the things I love most about Diana was
Speaker 1: her laugh. She had this incredibly raucous laugh that was
Speaker 1: really quite loud, and she often put her hand to
Speaker 1: her mouth, and it was incredibly infectious, and I really
Speaker 1: miss her. Love. Coping with grief isn't just a professional
Speaker 1: pursuit for Julia. It's deeply personal. Twenty five years ago,
Speaker 1: Julia's best friend died suddenly in a car crash. That
Speaker 1: day is still vivid in Julia's memory and actually in mine.
Speaker 1: If you're old enough, you may remember it too, because
Speaker 1: Julia's best friend, Diana was Princess Diana. Despite Julia's training
Speaker 1: as a psychologist, some of the ways she grieved after
Speaker 1: this tragedy still caught her by surprise. I guess what
Speaker 1: I was shocked by was my initial response was that
Speaker 1: I was kind of angry at the huge public response,
Speaker 1: which of course I recognize is that people had a
Speaker 1: relationship with her and they loved her in their own way.
Speaker 1: But I kind of was sort of outraged at everybody
Speaker 1: else's loss when mine felt so personal and so deep.
Speaker 1: She told me about a moment in which she desperately
Speaker 1: wanted to look back at her photos of Diana, but
Speaker 1: then immediately found them really hard to deal with. This
Speaker 1: is translatable to anyone experiencing loss, is that we need
Speaker 1: to oscillate between the loss orientation and the restoration orientation
Speaker 1: of being okay, so that when I kind of wanted
Speaker 1: to connect to her and be close to her, I'd
Speaker 1: look at her photo and remember the times that we
Speaker 1: had and feel sad or all the other different feelings
Speaker 1: I felt. And then at other times I don't want
Speaker 1: to get on with my day, so I put the
Speaker 1: photo in the drawer. I kind of turned to my
Speaker 1: day and it should be at the back of my mind.
Speaker 1: All other people that have died you know that I've loved.
Speaker 1: Then you kind of can choose after the initial months
Speaker 1: maybe longer, you can choose to move in and out
Speaker 1: of it, and so you know, the love for the
Speaker 1: person never dies. And what I kind of recognize is
Speaker 1: that the relationship continues through the love although the person
Speaker 1: is no longer present, and it's having touchstones to that
Speaker 1: memory that it may be looking at their photo, it
Speaker 1: may be writing them a post guard that allow you
Speaker 1: to move in and feel connected to them and feel
Speaker 1: the love and then moving away and doing something else
Speaker 1: where you get on with your life and live and
Speaker 1: love again. It's also one of the reasons I think
Speaker 1: that grief can stick around for so long. I mean,
Speaker 1: in this case, twenty five years have gone by, but
Speaker 1: there's constant reminders. Is that the kind of typical path
Speaker 1: of grief that it keeps coming back in these ways? Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, I I think my parents' generation, who were
Speaker 1: children of the First World War and fought in the
Speaker 1: Second World War, their attitude to grief was very kind
Speaker 1: of mechanistic that you forget and move on. What you
Speaker 1: don't think about, what you don't talk about, isn't going
Speaker 1: to hurt you. And I think what we recognize now
Speaker 1: from great research, like psychologists like you and others, is
Speaker 1: that we are not robots. You can't switch somebody off,
Speaker 1: and so there can be kind of real connections to
Speaker 1: that person, often through the senses that you don't expect site, sound,
Speaker 1: touch and smile. So seeing a relation or someone, or
Speaker 1: the back of someone's head, or hearing a piece of
Speaker 1: music or eating a particular dish that reminds you of them,
Speaker 1: that image of them unexpectedly can come up with videolight recall.
Speaker 1: And I guess most of those memories later on a
Speaker 1: quite bitter sweet. They're sweet and they're oh, that's so
Speaker 1: lovely to remember that, you know, if it's a piece
Speaker 1: of music and you went to a concert together, and
Speaker 1: then it's accompanied by the sadness like, oh, I wish
Speaker 1: you were here and that we could do that again,
Speaker 1: or I could talk to you about this, or that
Speaker 1: is lifelong in everybody's kind of experience of grief. I
Speaker 1: wanted to start off with kind of the broad question,
Speaker 1: which is just what is grief? You've been studying this
Speaker 1: for many decades now, you know what is this concept?
Speaker 1: How should we describe it? You know, bereavement is when
Speaker 1: a loss has happened to you, and it could be
Speaker 1: the death of someone that is significant to you, or
Speaker 1: it could be a living loss, so it could be
Speaker 1: the loss of your job or a relationship, moving country,
Speaker 1: living in a global pandemic. And grief is the emotional
Speaker 1: experience that you feel as a result of the loss.
Speaker 1: And it's very kind of subjective. It's very uniquely your own,
Speaker 1: and it's a messy, chaotic, tricky business. And the difficulty
Speaker 1: of it is is that it's also unpredictable. You know,
Speaker 1: the word grief is such a tidy little word, and
Speaker 1: we'd like our experiences and our emotions to match what
Speaker 1: we want, and that isn't the case with grief, it
Speaker 1: brings up in us a lot of competing and conflicting
Speaker 1: feelings of anger, sadness, rage, fear, despair, and we find
Speaker 1: it very hard to hold and endure and let ourselves
Speaker 1: experience those feelings. And often because we haven't talked about
Speaker 1: grief or death, we're ignorant about what is normal and
Speaker 1: what isn't normal, and so we may turn on ourselves
Speaker 1: and attack ourselves with how we're feeling, and that of
Speaker 1: course makes the whole process much more complex, much more
Speaker 1: likely to lead to complicated grieving or prolonged grief because
Speaker 1: the purpose of grief is that pain is the agent
Speaker 1: to change. So the pain of grief, when we allow
Speaker 1: it to come through our system, forces us to face
Speaker 1: this reality that we don't want to look at that
Speaker 1: this person that I love or this thing in my
Speaker 1: life that I was really attached to is no longer here.
Speaker 1: So it's information and we are wired to adapt, we
Speaker 1: are wired to heal and have hope. That's where people
Speaker 1: can really stay stuck in their grief is when they
Speaker 1: block the natural grieving process. I mean, I think right now,
Speaker 1: modern culture just assumed we can fix everything, like there's
Speaker 1: some solution into all these things, but death seems to
Speaker 1: be this thing that there's just like not a solution for.
Speaker 1: Is this kind of part of why grief is so hard? Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think I may be wrong, and maybe
Speaker 1: your listeners will be angry with me, but I think
Speaker 1: in the US there's even greater death of denial than
Speaker 1: in the UK and Europe. And you know, when I've
Speaker 1: taught at universities and colleges in the US, the kind
Speaker 1: of message I've got is that somehow dying is a
Speaker 1: failure and that winning is when we can use medicine,
Speaker 1: technology and man's brilliance to overcome death. And you know,
Speaker 1: that is living in death denial, and it can often
Speaker 1: make the dying much more protected and painful. And the
Speaker 1: sort of weighing up of choices of quality of life
Speaker 1: or length of life is in the actual time is
Speaker 1: very is often ignored. After the break, we'll hear more
Speaker 1: reasons why grief is so difficult to look at, but
Speaker 1: we'll also see that knowing more about how this emotion
Speaker 1: operates culturally, mentally, and biologically can help us more effectively
Speaker 1: face the reality of it and maybe even to learn
Speaker 1: from it. The happiness lab will be right back. Death
Speaker 1: is an inevitable part of existence, but most of us
Speaker 1: aren't even comfortable thinking about it, let alone talking about it.
Speaker 1: We worry about the deaths of specific people in our
Speaker 1: lives and like to completely avoid the idea that all
Speaker 1: life will come to an end. Psychotherapist and best selling
Speaker 1: author Julia Samuel thinks this cultural taboo makes our experiences
Speaker 1: of grief so much more difficult to handle. Since medicine
Speaker 1: and basically the First World War, we've kind of denied death,
Speaker 1: Whereas in the Victorian times, you talked about death, you
Speaker 1: wore black armbands, you saw death, you'd see a body
Speaker 1: in your home. Death was very much part of life.
Speaker 1: There are all these Victorian black and white photographs of
Speaker 1: the person at dives surrounded by their family. And when
Speaker 1: I suggest to someone now, maybe you'd like to take
Speaker 1: a photograph of your father or grandfather or sibling that's dick,
Speaker 1: they're kind of like horrified, as if it's kind of
Speaker 1: disgusting and I'm asking them to dig into their entrails.
Speaker 1: But actually the task of mourning is to face the
Speaker 1: reality of the death. Facing that reality in ourselves and
Speaker 1: for those that we love is really vital for our
Speaker 1: mental health. I would say this idea of not being
Speaker 1: able to face death, I feel like is particularly bad
Speaker 1: for people who themselves are alive now but maybe facing
Speaker 1: a terminal disease. Right. It's really hard for them to
Speaker 1: embrace it. But it's also really hard for the people
Speaker 1: around them to talk about it. You know. I know
Speaker 1: you've talked a lot about how people who are working
Speaker 1: with somebody who's about to face grief really need to
Speaker 1: help with this. But you know, this issue of not
Speaker 1: wanting to face it, wanting to control it and pretend
Speaker 1: it's not happening there seems to come up a lot
Speaker 1: for people who are about to face you know, something
Speaker 1: that's really grief inducing too. I completely agree, and that
Speaker 1: grief starts at the point of diagnosis. The moment you
Speaker 1: have a diagnosis that limits your life, whether it's a
Speaker 1: few years or months or weeks, your perception of yourself
Speaker 1: and everyone around you changes. And again it's this magical thinking,
Speaker 1: is that sort of if I love you and you
Speaker 1: love me, we have to act like everything's going to
Speaker 1: be okay, because that's going to make everything be okay,
Speaker 1: And so you can actually build these walls of the
Speaker 1: kind of miscommunication and protect which are intended with protection
Speaker 1: that mean that you're kind of lonely behind these walls
Speaker 1: of fear around your own death or fear of the
Speaker 1: partner that you love or your parent that's dying, and
Speaker 1: you don't have those important conversations. Because the thing that
Speaker 1: will predict both good outcomes for the survivors of the
Speaker 1: death and the person facing death having it more peaceful
Speaker 1: and calm is by communicating, having those vital conversations about
Speaker 1: am I frightened? What do I believe in? Do I
Speaker 1: want to be cremated or buried? What are the unanswered questions?
Speaker 1: And those important conversations and tender conversations, I love you
Speaker 1: for those that survive them are the kind of bedrock
Speaker 1: of what you go back to and you revisit for
Speaker 1: the rest of your life. And if you miss that opportunity,
Speaker 1: if you don't kind of resolve the things or ask
Speaker 1: the things that you need to, you're then stuck with
Speaker 1: them and they kind of can ruminate and kind of
Speaker 1: go round and round in your head endlessly. And so
Speaker 1: this is I think part of the problem when it
Speaker 1: comes to grief. I mean, grief is painful and it's
Speaker 1: hard to get through, but we also have these really
Speaker 1: bad theories about it. Right. I think grief also feels
Speaker 1: like these many emotions that we want to control, and
Speaker 1: I think that's in part because a lot of people
Speaker 1: have these theories about how grief is going to work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Kubla Ras had this idea of these like five
Speaker 1: stages of grief. I think she listed them as denial, anger, bargaining, depression,
Speaker 1: and acceptance. But this can kind of lead us to
Speaker 1: think that you're supposed to go through stages in like
Speaker 1: this perfect order, right, and so talk about why this
Speaker 1: this view is a little bit wrong according to the science.
Speaker 1: I have huge respect for Kubler Ross and of course
Speaker 1: all of those aspects there are important aspects of grief
Speaker 1: that you can fight it and kind of try and
Speaker 1: force your will over it, and in the end you
Speaker 1: have to come to terms with it or you can
Speaker 1: kind of feel very depressed. But what I think what
Speaker 1: it's taken is that people kind of think that they
Speaker 1: can root march themselves in that order, like it's a
Speaker 1: step and a path that they can follow, and then
Speaker 1: if they're not doing bargaining after denial, that somehow they've
Speaker 1: got it the wrong way round. And of course we
Speaker 1: can feel all of those things a day. You can
Speaker 1: have moments of acceptance, you can have moments of fury,
Speaker 1: you can have moments of denial within half an hour.
Speaker 1: But I think what's useful about them is recognizing that
Speaker 1: those feelings we do not naturally befriend, you know, we
Speaker 1: have a problem with those feelings. And so I think
Speaker 1: when we think about why grief might be there in
Speaker 1: the first place, it's helpful to think about what grief
Speaker 1: is from sort of a biological perspective, you know, So
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about the physiology of grief. What
Speaker 1: is it doing to our nervous system? So, I mean
Speaker 1: you probably know more about this idea, but I mean
Speaker 1: it's our autonomic nervous system under threat goes into fight
Speaker 1: flight or freeze, so kind of go into fourth gear,
Speaker 1: and you can get locked into fourth gear. And of
Speaker 1: course if you're in fight flight or freeze, your capacity
Speaker 1: to cognate, to make sense of things, to make good
Speaker 1: decisions goes offline because you're just they're kind of looking
Speaker 1: for survival. Physiologically, your whole body shifts to accommodate that,
Speaker 1: so that you may be very short of breath, You
Speaker 1: may lose your appetite, you may not be able to sleep.
Speaker 1: Some people sleep a lot. Grief often feels like fear,
Speaker 1: so you feel like you know there's this gun or
Speaker 1: as people talk about this tiger that's just about to
Speaker 1: come and get you. We know that your heart in
Speaker 1: the first six weeks after a very significant death is
Speaker 1: more likely to have a heart attack, So that feeling
Speaker 1: of being broken hearted isn't just a feeling, it's physiological,
Speaker 1: and pain hits the same neurotransmitters as physical pain. Emotional
Speaker 1: pain hits the neuropathogenic pain. So grief is embodied. The
Speaker 1: mind and the body are completely interconnected. And what clients
Speaker 1: talk to me about is that they often talk about
Speaker 1: their heart hurting, it feels broken, or they put their
Speaker 1: hands on their chest this tightness and this kind of
Speaker 1: frozenness in their chest, so they feel like their capacity
Speaker 1: is very brittle and kind of locked. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think this is so powerful because when you recognize it's embodied,
Speaker 1: when you recognize that grief is your body's reaction to
Speaker 1: a typical threat like a tiger, it kind of makes
Speaker 1: so much more sense, especially when you realize that threat
Speaker 1: hasn't gone away. You know, every day you wake up
Speaker 1: and the loss and the threat is still there. And
Speaker 1: so you know, if you've seen that, kind of thinking
Speaker 1: more about the physiology of this can give people a
Speaker 1: little bit more patience with their grief. Knowledge is power.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the things that is the kind
Speaker 1: of least sexy tip I give people is like, take exercise,
Speaker 1: move your body around. You will always feel different. If
Speaker 1: you're kind of in that awful, kind of locked, terrorized
Speaker 1: state and you just can't face the day, get outside
Speaker 1: wherever you live, get outside, move your body, come back
Speaker 1: and do something that intentionally calms you, that intentionally soothes you.
Speaker 1: For me, that would be a cup of tea because
Speaker 1: I'm English. Ideally, get a hug, journal right down what
Speaker 1: you're feeling, because then you you've kind of released some
Speaker 1: of that tightness and you've let you your head and
Speaker 1: your heart kind of connect with each other with your body,
Speaker 1: and then you're more an integrated, like calm a whole
Speaker 1: because you've kind of aligned with each other. Otherwise they're
Speaker 1: all out of thoughts and you. I mean, grief feels
Speaker 1: like madness. People often say I feel like I'm going mad.
Speaker 1: Or I am mad, so the bodily things you do
Speaker 1: to calm yourself down. And you've done much more research
Speaker 1: on this than I have, but it is more and more,
Speaker 1: it's more and more powerful. How important our mind and
Speaker 1: body and exercises. If grief can feel like madness, facing
Speaker 1: a loaded gun or being chased by a tiger, it's
Speaker 1: no wonder people would rather shove this feeling away. In
Speaker 1: Julia's experience, even the people who come to her to
Speaker 1: get help are in a hurry to put grief behind them.
Speaker 1: You know very much that you talk about we want
Speaker 1: to be happy, we want to be getting on. And
Speaker 1: one of the first questions people often say to me
Speaker 1: is they walk through my door, is how long am
Speaker 1: I going to feel like this? You know? Am I
Speaker 1: ever going to get better? When am I going to
Speaker 1: get over it? Will learn her surprising answer when the
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Julia Samuel has been
Speaker 1: counseling people about grief for over thirty years. Her clients
Speaker 1: often come to her wanting to know when the pain
Speaker 1: will subside, how soon will they be able to get
Speaker 1: back to being their old selves. The answer is what
Speaker 1: Julia calls the paradox of grief. To get through the feelings,
Speaker 1: we have to let them in. It's the paradox. The
Speaker 1: more you give yourself the courage to face and think
Speaker 1: about these things and find it kind of embrace what
Speaker 1: you most fear, then it's actually liberating and you engage
Speaker 1: with the life that you do have, knowing that it
Speaker 1: is time limited, knowing that the people that you love
Speaker 1: and care about most are all gonna die, and that
Speaker 1: it's unpredictable. We don't have control, and I think one
Speaker 1: of the things from the pandemic was we recognized our
Speaker 1: lack of control over many, many kind of things in life.
Speaker 1: And I think what has always been true is the
Speaker 1: things that we care about most, whether people love us
Speaker 1: or don't love us, and when we're going to live
Speaker 1: or die, we can influence, we can shape it by
Speaker 1: our lifestyle, but we have no control. And it is
Speaker 1: fascinating how we kid ourselves. Fundamentally, my messages you don't
Speaker 1: have control, and this is the paradox, right is to
Speaker 1: get through grief, we need to recognize our lack of control.
Speaker 1: We need to embrace the fact that we're going to
Speaker 1: have to feel negative emotions towards you through this negative
Speaker 1: you know, why are they negative? Yeah? Please? Who says
Speaker 1: that negative? No? Total? Yeah? What makes them bad? Yeah?
Speaker 1: So talk a little bit about I think this is
Speaker 1: so important because this is part of what we're doing
Speaker 1: in this series for the next month, is to sort
Speaker 1: of think about emotions being good and so, you know,
Speaker 1: explain a little bit that we don't necessarily have to
Speaker 1: think of grief as a negative emotion, like why is it?
Speaker 1: Why can it be a positive signal for us? Why
Speaker 1: can it be helpful for us? I wouldn't even frame
Speaker 1: it as negative or positive. I would frame it as
Speaker 1: it's important process that we have to paradoxically allowed to embrace.
Speaker 1: If I look at feeling sad as a negative, that
Speaker 1: that's a bad thing and that it's going to make
Speaker 1: me miserable, I am compounding my relationship with sadness and tears.
Speaker 1: If I think of my sadness as a natural, expressive
Speaker 1: emotion that is actually wired in me to help me feel,
Speaker 1: and I will feel released and better after I felt sad,
Speaker 1: certainly after I've cried. I am supporting myself in that
Speaker 1: feeling of my sadness. But if I come at it like, oh, sadness,
Speaker 1: Oh that's bad. I only want to feel happy. I'm
Speaker 1: kind of stopping myself at the starting block before I
Speaker 1: even had a moment to let it do it's thing.
Speaker 1: The response we often have to grief is so counterproductive.
Speaker 1: We try to suppress our grief, you know, we kind
Speaker 1: of like put the lid on this pressure cooker. So
Speaker 1: talk about from the perspective or a physiology, why that's
Speaker 1: so bad trying to suppress all these emotions fear, anger,
Speaker 1: sadness that we're experiencing. I love the image of a
Speaker 1: pressure cooker because your emotion is evolutionally. They're wired to
Speaker 1: tell you something is up, Oh, something has happened. And
Speaker 1: when you're grieving, those emotions are like tornadoes in your
Speaker 1: body saying wake up, this is bad, this is real.
Speaker 1: You can't avoid this. So the energy you do to
Speaker 1: kind of squash them down, they stay powerful and live
Speaker 1: and full of ambition to come and talk to you.
Speaker 1: And so the more you block them, the more they're
Speaker 1: going to try and fight your suppression and speak to
Speaker 1: you so that you hear them when you allow them
Speaker 1: to speak to you. And if you like, if you
Speaker 1: think of them as tornado as an ammunition, if you
Speaker 1: allow the ammunition to come through your system and you
Speaker 1: kind of surrender to it. You face it, you feel it,
Speaker 1: You incrementally in that moment adapt a little bit more.
Speaker 1: You may incrementally in that moment express your sadness or
Speaker 1: fear or anger. And as you express it, something shifts
Speaker 1: that you know a little bit more in a way
Speaker 1: that you never wanted to know that this was true,
Speaker 1: that this person has died. And as you shift, it
Speaker 1: changes you. You know, a typical moment could be you're
Speaker 1: going to the supermarket and you always bought yogurts with
Speaker 1: four pots in and someone significant in your family has died,
Speaker 1: so you're not four your three. So in the supermarket
Speaker 1: you kind of you have this burst of feeling and
Speaker 1: you're in a public place and you don't want to
Speaker 1: feel it, and you have choices. So in a public
Speaker 1: place you may just knowledge, I feel really sad, to
Speaker 1: say it to yourself and take a breath. But then
Speaker 1: hold on to that, because if you then combined that
Speaker 1: by going on suppressing it all day, that sad, difficult
Speaker 1: images it were, grows in force inside you so that
Speaker 1: if you can do your shopping, get home, get to
Speaker 1: a safe place, and then allow as you unpack the
Speaker 1: yogurt say, I've never said this before, this is this
Speaker 1: has just come back of nowhere. I've never used yogurt
Speaker 1: and shopping. But anyway, you ally yourself to feel the sadness.
Speaker 1: The next time you buy yogurt, it's not going to
Speaker 1: hit you with the same fourth because you've processed it
Speaker 1: a little bit until in the end, over time, you've
Speaker 1: adjusted and adapted and you kind of know that you're
Speaker 1: three and you're still buying a yogurt for four. I
Speaker 1: mean the irony of this, though, is I feel like
Speaker 1: this is not necessarily a lot of people's instincts. I
Speaker 1: know it's not my instinct when I go through grief.
Speaker 1: Like if I had that moment in the shop where
Speaker 1: I had the realization of like, wait, I'm not four
Speaker 1: people buying yogurt, I'm only three, my instant reaction be
Speaker 1: like I'm going to check my email, just going to
Speaker 1: get busy, like you know, like stuff that that down, right,
Speaker 1: And so you know, how do we kind of navigate
Speaker 1: this urge to kind of just not be with our
Speaker 1: emotions like they don't feel fun And it's hard to
Speaker 1: realize this paradox that what we need to get through
Speaker 1: the emotions is to actually be I mean, I think
Speaker 1: I think awareness is the first step. And business is
Speaker 1: an anesthetic and it is a natural blocker, and it's
Speaker 1: probably along with drug and alcohol, it's probably the most common.
Speaker 1: Sometimes switching and being busy is useful. No one wants
Speaker 1: to burst in tears in front of lots of strangers
Speaker 1: in the supermarket. So it's kind of recognizing you feel sad,
Speaker 1: but also logging that at some point you need to
Speaker 1: find a way of acknowledging and its expressing it, so
Speaker 1: you know, I often talk to clients about allowing a
Speaker 1: space in a day that you have a little kind
Speaker 1: of cut out time. It maybe half an hour where
Speaker 1: you go to your memory box where you look at
Speaker 1: the person that's died, where you have a memory of
Speaker 1: doing the shopping and avoiding the pain and how painful
Speaker 1: that is. That can do it for you so that
Speaker 1: then you're not so likely to be hijacked by it
Speaker 1: in other places where you don't want it to happen.
Speaker 1: You know, I have a client who wears her dad's
Speaker 1: watch and she's got a little tiny wrist, but and
Speaker 1: it's a big male watch with a big masculine strap.
Speaker 1: And when she's talking to me and when she's talking
Speaker 1: about him, she strokes the face of the watch and
Speaker 1: you feel like she's sort of stroking his face that
Speaker 1: she can kind of really picture him and kind of
Speaker 1: embody him. And that's a direct kind of connection with
Speaker 1: him that she will use forever. And I think in
Speaker 1: society we want our friends, or our family or ourselves
Speaker 1: to get over it, get past these difficult feelings, and
Speaker 1: it's you know that it's the paradox is by allowing
Speaker 1: them is how you do overtime heal and recover and
Speaker 1: have hope again and love again and live again. But
Speaker 1: it's allowing them to find their way through you that
Speaker 1: changes you into your changed, kind of new version of
Speaker 1: yourself once this person has died. And I love this
Speaker 1: idea of the new version of yourself because I think
Speaker 1: there's this concept that you know, once we go through
Speaker 1: this process, we want to be us before we get
Speaker 1: this bad news. But that's also not how grief works.
Speaker 1: It kind of comes with this growth too completely, and
Speaker 1: you know, we're never the same. I mean, you're probably
Speaker 1: a bit different today than you were yesterday or a
Speaker 1: week ago. That we are. We're wired to evolve and grow,
Speaker 1: and when we befriend it and don't fight it, it
Speaker 1: can change us. And there's this idea of post traumatic
Speaker 1: growth that it never denies the level of the loss
Speaker 1: or the depth of the pain and the suffering. But
Speaker 1: what people have find is that when they have found
Speaker 1: that they can survive what they thought they could never survive,
Speaker 1: that they would never overcome, they've allowed themselves to feel
Speaker 1: pain at levels that were beyond their expectation, their perception
Speaker 1: of themselves, their resilience, their robustness, what matters to them
Speaker 1: in life. Feels that they've been expanded and they feel
Speaker 1: changed by it, and they wouldn't want the thing to
Speaker 1: have happened, but they would term that as internal growth.
Speaker 1: Paradox of grief is that we could only move through
Speaker 1: it once we stop fighting it. But I know firsthand
Speaker 1: that letting grief in is easier said than done. Thankfully,
Speaker 1: Julia has come up with a set of strategies or
Speaker 1: how you can support yourself while experiencing the feelings that
Speaker 1: come up during the grieving process. You'll hear about all
Speaker 1: of these strategies in part two of my conversation with
Speaker 1: Julia Samuel. If you like this show and others from
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. As a special
Speaker 1: gift to Pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be sharing a series
Speaker 1: of six guided meditations to help you practice the lessons
Speaker 1: we've learned from our experts. To check them out, look
Speaker 1: for Pushkin plus us on Apple podcast subscriptions. The Happiness
Speaker 1: Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily
Speaker 1: Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Our original music was composed
Speaker 1: by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by
Speaker 1: Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle, Heather Faine, John Schnars,
Speaker 1: Carlie Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries
Speaker 1: and me Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
Speaker 1: listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to your podcasts.