0:15

Pushkin. Sometimes

0:23

the realization that you need to reset your relationship

0:25

with your feelings comes from some minor or

0:27

everyday event, like losing your temper

0:30

in the parking lot while grocery shopping. But

0:32

many of us have experienced a bigger, life

0:34

changing event that causes us to rethink

0:36

how to deal with our emotions. In

0:39

the last episode, we heard from the Harvard psychologist

0:41

Susan David, who realized she needed

0:43

to listen to her negative feelings after the death

0:46

of her father. Now I felt so untethered

0:49

from myself and so

0:51

untethered in this experience of grief,

0:53

and I started to respond

0:55

to that as so many people

0:58

do when they experiencing emotional

1:00

pain, especially unprocessed

1:02

emotional pain, which is for

1:05

me that took the form of binging and purging,

1:07

refusing to accept the full way to my grief.

1:10

In this season of the Happiness Lab, we're going to tackle

1:12

a whole range of uncomfortable, painful

1:15

emotions, and we'll give you strategies

1:17

to learn from these feelings and respond to them

1:19

in ways that will make you happier. But

1:21

I wanted to start with the emotion that caused to Susan

1:24

so much pain the one that prompted

1:26

her to suppress her feelings because they hurt

1:28

so badly. Grief.

1:31

We live in a kind of age of what I don't think

1:33

about, what I didn't talk about, isn't going to hurt

1:35

me. I'll just turn

1:37

away. And then when you are grieving and

1:40

you feel like this, grief

1:42

often feels like fear, and you have all of these

1:44

competing feelings if angry and sad

1:47

and confused and lost and all

1:49

of that at the same time, you think you're somehow

1:51

doing it wrong. This is psychotherapist

1:53

Julia Samuel. Julia is the author of

1:56

two best selling books about grief, Grief Works

1:58

and This Too Shall Pass. With all the

2:00

difficult feelings that Julia has found can

2:02

come twisted up with grief, It's no wonder

2:04

that grieving is so tremendously painful.

2:07

But as we'll see with so many of the emotions we'll

2:09

talk about in this season, our instinct to

2:11

run away from the pain of grief is surprisingly

2:13

ineffective. The science shows were

2:16

best off when we address grief head

2:18

on. We need to allow

2:20

the grief to come through us,

2:22

storm its way and change

2:24

us and sort of come through in

2:27

this kind of often very

2:30

chaotic and messy ways.

2:32

It's often the things that you do to block

2:35

the natural grieving process

2:37

that, in the end, do you harm. We're

2:39

going to devote two whole episodes to the strategies

2:42

Julia developed over the last thirty years to

2:44

help her patients and herself develop

2:47

a better relationship with grief and

2:49

spoiler alert, there are no five stages

2:51

involved and no euphemisms

2:53

either, you know, to get over it. We really do need

2:56

a relationship with the person who's passed away.

2:58

By the way, I never use the word pass to way okay,

3:00

sorry, because where did they pass to? Ok

3:02

fair enough? It's another kind

3:05

of thing where you're denying the reality of death,

3:07

like they died. It's the way we kind of

3:09

protect ourselves against the

3:12

reality of it. We can't bear the reality

3:14

of it, so if we try and soften it with words like passed

3:16

away. Get ready to learn that so many

3:18

of our instincts about grief are wrong. You're

3:21

listening to the Happiness Lab with me, Doctor

3:24

Laurie Santos. One

3:29

of the things I

3:31

love most about Diana

3:33

was her laugh. She

3:35

had this incredibly

3:38

raucous laugh

3:40

that was really quite loud, and she often put

3:42

her hand to her mouth, and it

3:44

was incredibly infectious, and

3:48

I really miss her. Love. Coping

3:50

with grief isn't just a professional pursuit for

3:52

Julia. It's deeply personal. Twenty

3:55

five years ago, Julia's best friend

3:57

died suddenly in a car crash. That

3:59

day is still vivid in Julia's memory and

4:02

actually in mine. If

4:04

you're old enough, you may remember it too,

4:07

because Julia's best friend, Diana

4:10

was Princess Diana.

4:12

Despite Julia's training as a psychologist,

4:14

some of the ways she grieved after this tragedy

4:17

still caught her by surprise. I guess

4:19

what I was shocked by was my

4:21

initial response was that I was kind

4:23

of angry at the huge public

4:26

response, which of course I recognize is that

4:28

people had a relationship with her and they loved

4:30

her in their own way. But I kind of was

4:32

sort of outraged at everybody else's

4:35

loss when mine felt so personal

4:37

and so deep. She told me about

4:39

a moment in which she desperately wanted to look back at

4:41

her photos of Diana, but then

4:43

immediately found them really hard to deal

4:45

with. This is translatable to anyone

4:47

experiencing loss, is that we need

4:51

to oscillate between the loss orientation

4:54

and the restoration orientation of being okay,

4:56

so that when I kind of wanted

4:59

to connect to her and be close to her,

5:01

I'd look at her photo and remember

5:03

the times that we had and feel sad

5:06

or all the other different feelings I felt. And

5:08

then at other times I don't want to get on with

5:10

my day, so I put the photo in the drawer. I

5:13

kind of turned to my day and it

5:15

should be at the back of my mind. All other people

5:17

that have died you know that I've loved. Then

5:20

you kind of can choose after the initial

5:23

months maybe longer, you can choose

5:25

to move in and out of it, and so

5:28

you know, the love for the person never dies.

5:30

And what I kind of recognize

5:33

is that the relationship continues

5:35

through the love although the person is no longer

5:37

present, and it's having

5:40

touchstones to that memory that

5:42

it may be looking at their photo, it may be

5:44

writing them a post guard that

5:46

allow you to move in and feel connected

5:49

to them and feel the love and

5:51

then moving away and doing

5:53

something else where you get on with your life

5:55

and live and love again. It's also one of the

5:57

reasons I think that grief can stick around for so

6:00

long. I mean, in this case, twenty five years

6:02

have gone by, but there's constant reminders. Is

6:04

that the kind of typical path of grief that it keeps

6:06

coming back in these ways? Yes, I mean,

6:08

I I think my parents' generation, who

6:11

were children of the First World War

6:14

and fought in the Second World War, their

6:17

attitude to grief was very kind of mechanistic

6:19

that you forget and move on. What you don't

6:22

think about, what you don't talk about, isn't going to

6:24

hurt you. And I think what we recognize

6:26

now from great research, like psychologists

6:29

like you and others, is that

6:32

we are not robots. You can't switch somebody

6:34

off, and so there can be kind

6:37

of real connections to that person,

6:40

often through the senses that you don't expect

6:42

site, sound, touch and smile. So seeing

6:45

a relation or someone, or the back of someone's

6:47

head, or hearing a piece of

6:49

music or eating a particular dish

6:52

that reminds you of them, that image of

6:54

them unexpectedly can

6:56

come up with videolight recall. And

6:59

I guess most of those memories

7:01

later on a quite bitter sweet. They're sweet

7:03

and they're oh, that's so lovely

7:05

to remember that, you know, if it's a piece

7:07

of music and you went to a concert together, and

7:10

then it's accompanied by the sadness

7:12

like, oh, I wish you were

7:14

here and that we could do that again, or I could talk

7:16

to you about this, or that is

7:18

lifelong in everybody's kind of experience

7:21

of grief. I wanted to start off with kind

7:23

of the broad question, which is just what

7:25

is grief? You've been studying this for many

7:28

decades now, you know what is this concept?

7:30

How should we describe it? You know, bereavement

7:32

is when a loss has happened to you, and

7:34

it could be the death of someone that is

7:36

significant to you, or it could be a living

7:38

loss, so it could be the loss of your job or a

7:40

relationship, moving country, living

7:42

in a global pandemic. And grief

7:45

is the emotional experience that you

7:47

feel as a result of the loss. And

7:50

it's very kind of subjective.

7:52

It's very uniquely your own, and

7:54

it's a messy, chaotic, tricky

7:57

business. And the difficulty

8:00

of it is is that it's also unpredictable.

8:03

You know, the word grief is such a tidy

8:05

little word, and we'd like our

8:08

experiences and our emotions

8:10

to match what we want, and that isn't

8:12

the case with grief, it brings up

8:14

in us a lot of competing

8:16

and conflicting feelings of anger,

8:19

sadness, rage, fear,

8:22

despair, and we

8:24

find it very hard to hold and endure

8:26

and let ourselves experience those

8:29

feelings. And often because we

8:31

haven't talked about grief or death,

8:33

we're ignorant about what is normal and what

8:35

isn't normal, and so we may turn

8:37

on ourselves and attack ourselves with how

8:40

we're feeling, and that of course makes

8:42

the whole process much more complex,

8:45

much more likely to lead to complicated

8:47

grieving or prolonged grief because

8:50

the purpose of grief is that pain

8:53

is the agent to change. So the pain of

8:55

grief, when we allow it to come through

8:57

our system, forces us to

8:59

face this reality that we don't want to look

9:01

at that this person that I love or this

9:04

thing in my life that I was really attached

9:06

to is no longer here. So it's information

9:09

and we are wired to adapt, we

9:11

are wired to heal and have hope.

9:14

That's where people can really

9:16

stay stuck in their grief is when they

9:18

block the natural grieving process.

9:20

I mean, I think right now, modern culture just assumed

9:23

we can fix everything, like there's some solution

9:25

into all these things, but death seems

9:27

to be this thing that there's just like not a solution

9:29

for. Is this kind of part of why grief is

9:31

so hard? Yes, I mean, I think

9:34

I may be wrong, and maybe your listeners

9:36

will be angry with me, but I think in the US

9:39

there's even greater death of denial than

9:42

in the UK and Europe. And

9:44

you know, when I've taught at universities and

9:47

colleges in the US, the kind of message

9:49

I've got is that somehow dying is

9:51

a failure and that winning

9:54

is when we can use medicine, technology

9:56

and man's brilliance to overcome

9:58

death. And you know, that is

10:00

living in death denial, and it can often make

10:03

the dying much more protected

10:05

and painful. And the sort of weighing up

10:07

of choices of quality

10:09

of life or length of life is

10:11

in the actual time is very is often

10:14

ignored. After the break, we'll hear

10:16

more reasons why grief is so difficult

10:18

to look at, but we'll also see that

10:20

knowing more about how this emotion operates

10:23

culturally, mentally, and biologically

10:25

can help us more effectively face the reality

10:28

of it and maybe even to learn

10:30

from it. The happiness lab will be

10:32

right back. Death

10:42

is an inevitable part of existence, but

10:45

most of us aren't even comfortable thinking about

10:47

it, let alone talking about it. We

10:50

worry about the deaths of specific people in our

10:52

lives and like to completely avoid

10:54

the idea that all life will come to an

10:57

end. Psychotherapist and best

10:59

selling author Julia Samuel thinks

11:01

this cultural taboo makes our experiences

11:03

of grief so much more difficult to handle.

11:06

Since medicine and basically the First World

11:08

War, we've kind of denied death,

11:11

Whereas in the Victorian times, you talked about

11:13

death, you wore black armbands, you

11:16

saw death, you'd see a body in your

11:18

home. Death was very much

11:20

part of life. There are all these Victorian black

11:22

and white photographs of the person at dives surrounded

11:25

by their family. And when I suggest

11:27

to someone now, maybe you'd like to take a

11:29

photograph of your father or grandfather

11:32

or sibling that's dick, they're kind of like horrified,

11:34

as if it's kind of disgusting and I'm

11:36

asking them to dig into their entrails. But actually

11:40

the task of mourning is to face

11:42

the reality of the death. Facing

11:45

that reality in ourselves and for those

11:47

that we love is really vital

11:49

for our mental health. I would say

11:52

this idea of not being able to face death, I feel

11:54

like is particularly bad for people

11:56

who themselves are alive now

11:58

but maybe facing a terminal disease. Right.

12:01

It's really hard for them to embrace it.

12:03

But it's also really hard for the people around them to

12:05

talk about it. You know. I know you've talked

12:07

a lot about how people who are working

12:09

with somebody who's about to face grief really

12:11

need to help with this. But you know, this issue

12:14

of not wanting to face it, wanting to control

12:16

it and pretend it's not happening there seems to come up

12:18

a lot for people who are about to face you

12:20

know, something that's really grief inducing too. I

12:23

completely agree, and that grief starts at

12:25

the point of diagnosis. The moment you

12:27

have a diagnosis that limits

12:29

your life, whether it's a few years

12:32

or months or weeks, your perception

12:34

of yourself and everyone around you changes.

12:36

And again it's this magical thinking, is

12:39

that sort of if I love

12:41

you and you love me, we

12:43

have to act like everything's going to be

12:45

okay, because that's going to make everything

12:48

be okay, And so you can actually build

12:50

these walls of the kind of

12:52

miscommunication and protect

12:54

which are intended with protection

12:57

that mean that you're kind of lonely behind these

12:59

walls of fear around your own death or fear

13:01

of the partner that you love or your parent that's dying,

13:04

and you don't have those important

13:06

conversations. Because the

13:08

thing that will predict both good

13:10

outcomes for the survivors of the death and

13:13

the person facing death having

13:15

it more peaceful and calm

13:18

is by communicating, having

13:20

those vital conversations about

13:22

am I frightened? What do I believe in?

13:25

Do I want to be cremated or buried? What

13:27

are the unanswered questions? And those

13:31

important conversations and tender

13:34

conversations, I love

13:36

you for those that

13:38

survive them are the kind of bedrock

13:41

of what you go back to and you revisit

13:43

for the rest of your life. And

13:45

if you miss that opportunity, if

13:47

you don't kind of resolve the things

13:50

or ask the things that you need to, you're

13:52

then stuck with them and they kind of can ruminate

13:55

and kind of go round and round in your head

13:57

endlessly. And so this is I think part

13:59

of the problem when it comes to grief. I mean, grief

14:02

is painful and it's hard to get

14:04

through, but we also have these really bad

14:06

theories about it. Right. I think grief also

14:08

feels like these many emotions that we want to

14:10

control, and I think that's in part

14:12

because a lot of people have these theories about how

14:14

grief is going to work. Yeah,

14:17

So Kubla Ras had this idea of these like five

14:19

stages of grief. I think she listed them as denial,

14:21

anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

14:24

But this can kind of lead us to think that you're supposed

14:27

to go through stages in like this perfect

14:29

order, right, and so talk about why this this

14:31

view is a little bit wrong according to the science.

14:34

I have huge respect for Kubler Ross

14:36

and of course all of those aspects there

14:38

are important aspects of grief that you can

14:41

fight it and kind of try and force

14:43

your will over it, and in the end

14:45

you have to come to terms with it or you

14:47

can kind of feel very depressed. But

14:50

what I think what it's taken

14:53

is that people kind of think that they can

14:55

root march themselves in that order,

14:57

like it's a step and a

14:59

path that they can follow, and then if they're

15:02

not doing bargaining after

15:04

denial, that somehow they've got it the wrong way round.

15:06

And of course we can feel all of

15:08

those things a day. You can have

15:10

moments of acceptance, you can have moments

15:12

of fury, you can have moments of denial

15:15

within half an hour. But I

15:17

think what's useful about them is

15:20

recognizing that those feelings

15:22

we do not naturally befriend, you

15:25

know, we have a problem

15:28

with those feelings. And so I think when

15:30

we think about why grief might be there in the first

15:32

place, it's helpful to think about what grief

15:34

is from sort of a biological perspective,

15:36

you know, So talk a little bit about the physiology

15:38

of grief. What is it doing to our nervous system?

15:41

So, I mean you probably know more about this

15:44

idea, but I mean it's our autonomic

15:46

nervous system under threat goes

15:49

into fight flight or freeze, so

15:52

kind of go into fourth gear, and you

15:54

can get locked into fourth gear. And of

15:56

course if you're in fight flight or freeze,

15:58

your capacity to cognate, to make

16:00

sense of things, to make good decisions

16:03

goes offline because you're just

16:05

they're kind of looking for survival. Physiologically,

16:08

your whole body shifts

16:10

to accommodate that, so that you may

16:13

be very short of breath, You may lose your appetite,

16:15

you may not be able to sleep. Some people sleep

16:17

a lot. Grief often feels

16:19

like fear, so you feel like you know there's

16:21

this gun or as people talk about

16:23

this tiger that's just about to come

16:25

and get you. We know that

16:28

your heart in the first six weeks after

16:30

a very significant death is

16:33

more likely to have a heart attack, So that feeling

16:35

of being broken hearted isn't

16:38

just a feeling, it's physiological, and

16:40

pain hits the same neurotransmitters

16:43

as physical pain. Emotional pain hits the neuropathogenic

16:46

pain. So grief is embodied. The mind and

16:48

the body are completely interconnected. And

16:51

what clients talk to me about is

16:53

that they often talk about their heart

16:55

hurting, it feels broken, or they

16:57

put their hands on their chest this tightness

17:00

and this kind of frozenness

17:02

in their chest, so they feel like their

17:04

capacity is very brittle and kind

17:06

of locked. I mean, I think this is so powerful

17:09

because when you recognize it's embodied, when

17:11

you recognize that grief is your body's

17:13

reaction to a typical threat like a tiger,

17:16

it kind of makes so much more sense, especially

17:18

when you realize that threat hasn't gone away. You know, every

17:20

day you wake up and the loss and the threat is still

17:22

there. And so you know, if you've

17:24

seen that, kind of thinking more about the physiology

17:26

of this can give people a little bit more patience

17:28

with their grief. Knowledge is power.

17:31

You know. One of the things that is the kind

17:33

of least sexy tip

17:35

I give people is like, take exercise,

17:38

move your body around. You will

17:40

always feel different. If you're kind

17:42

of in that awful, kind

17:44

of locked, terrorized state and you

17:46

just can't face the day, get

17:48

outside wherever you live, get outside,

17:51

move your body, come back and do something

17:54

that intentionally calms you, that intentionally

17:56

soothes you. For me, that would be a cup of tea because

17:58

I'm English. Ideally,

18:01

get a hug, journal right

18:03

down what you're feeling, because then you

18:06

you've kind of released some of that tightness

18:08

and you've let you your head and

18:10

your heart kind of connect with each

18:12

other with your body, and then you're

18:14

more an integrated, like calm

18:17

a whole because you've kind of aligned with

18:19

each other. Otherwise they're all out of thoughts

18:21

and you. I mean, grief feels like madness.

18:23

People often say I feel like I'm going mad.

18:25

Or I am mad, so the bodily

18:28

things you do to calm yourself down. And

18:31

you've done much more research on this than I have, but

18:33

it is more and more, it's more and more

18:35

powerful. How important our

18:37

mind and body and exercises. If

18:40

grief can feel like madness, facing a

18:42

loaded gun or being chased by a tiger,

18:45

it's no wonder people would rather shove this feeling

18:47

away. In Julia's experience,

18:50

even the people who come to her to get help are

18:52

in a hurry to put grief behind them. You know

18:54

very much that you talk about we want to be happy,

18:57

we want to be getting on. And one of the first questions

18:59

people often say to me is they

19:01

walk through my door, is how long am

19:03

I going to feel like this? You know? Am I

19:05

ever going to get better? When am

19:07

I going to get over it? Will learn her

19:09

surprising answer when the Happiness Lab

19:11

returns in a moment. Julia

19:23

Samuel has been counseling people about grief for

19:25

over thirty years. Her clients

19:27

often come to her wanting to know when the

19:29

pain will subside, how soon

19:31

will they be able to get back to being their old selves.

19:34

The answer is what Julia calls the

19:36

paradox of grief. To get through

19:38

the feelings, we have to let them in. It's

19:41

the paradox. The more you give

19:43

yourself the courage to

19:46

face and think about these things

19:48

and find it kind of embrace what you

19:50

most fear, then it's actually liberating

19:53

and you engage with the

19:55

life that you do have, knowing that it

19:57

is time limited, knowing that the people

20:00

that you love and care about most are

20:02

all gonna die, and that it's unpredictable.

20:05

We don't have control, and I think

20:07

one of the things from the pandemic was

20:10

we recognized our lack of control

20:13

over many, many kind of

20:15

things in life. And I think what has

20:17

always been true is the things

20:19

that we care about most, whether people love

20:21

us or don't love us, and when we're going

20:23

to live or die, we can influence, we can

20:25

shape it by our lifestyle, but we have no control.

20:28

And it is fascinating how

20:30

we kid ourselves. Fundamentally,

20:33

my messages you don't have control, and

20:35

this is the paradox, right is to get through

20:37

grief, we need to recognize our lack of control.

20:40

We need to embrace the fact that

20:42

we're going to have to feel negative emotions towards

20:45

you through this negative you know, why are they negative?

20:47

Yeah? Please? Who says that negative? No?

20:50

Total? Yeah? What makes

20:52

them bad? Yeah? So talk a little bit

20:54

about I think this is so important because this

20:56

is part of what we're doing in this series

20:59

for the next month, is to sort of think about emotions

21:01

being good and so, you know, explain a

21:03

little bit that we don't necessarily

21:05

have to think of grief as a negative emotion,

21:07

like why is it? Why can it be a positive signal

21:10

for us? Why can it be helpful for us? I

21:12

wouldn't even frame it as negative or positive.

21:16

I would frame it as it's

21:18

important process

21:21

that we have to paradoxically

21:24

allowed to embrace. If I look

21:26

at feeling sad as a negative,

21:29

that that's a bad thing and that it's

21:32

going to make me miserable, I am compounding

21:35

my relationship with sadness and tears.

21:38

If I think of my sadness as a

21:40

natural, expressive emotion

21:43

that is actually wired in me

21:45

to help me feel, and I will feel

21:48

released and better after I

21:50

felt sad, certainly after I've cried.

21:53

I am supporting myself in

21:55

that feeling of my sadness. But if

21:57

I come at it like, oh, sadness,

22:00

Oh that's bad. I only

22:02

want to feel happy. I'm kind of

22:04

stopping myself at the starting block before

22:07

I even had a moment to let it

22:08

do it's thing. The response we often

22:11

have to grief is so counterproductive.

22:13

We try to suppress our grief,

22:16

you know, we kind of like put the lid on this pressure

22:18

cooker. So talk about from the perspective or a

22:20

physiology, why that's so bad trying to suppress

22:22

all these emotions fear, anger, sadness

22:25

that we're experiencing. I love the image

22:28

of a pressure cooker because your

22:30

emotion is evolutionally.

22:33

They're wired to tell you something is

22:35

up, Oh, something

22:37

has happened. And when you're

22:39

grieving, those emotions are like tornadoes

22:43

in your body saying wake

22:45

up, this is bad, this is

22:47

real. You can't avoid this.

22:50

So the energy you do to kind of squash

22:52

them down, they stay

22:54

powerful and live and full

22:57

of ambition to come and talk

22:59

to you. And so the more

23:01

you block them, the more they're going to try

23:04

and fight your suppression and

23:06

speak to you so that you hear them when

23:08

you allow them to speak to you.

23:11

And if you like, if you think of them as tornado

23:13

as an ammunition, if you allow the ammunition

23:15

to come through your system and you

23:17

kind of surrender to it. You

23:19

face it, you feel it, You incrementally

23:22

in that moment adapt a little

23:24

bit more. You may incrementally

23:26

in that moment express your sadness

23:29

or fear or anger. And as you

23:32

express it, something

23:34

shifts that you know a

23:36

little bit more in a way that you never wanted

23:38

to know that this was true, that this person

23:41

has died. And as you shift,

23:43

it changes you. You know, a

23:46

typical moment could be you're going to the

23:48

supermarket and you always bought yogurts

23:50

with four pots in and someone

23:52

significant in your family has died, so you're

23:54

not four your three. So in the supermarket

23:57

you kind of you have this burst

24:00

of feeling and you're in a public place

24:02

and you don't want to feel it, and

24:05

you have choices. So in

24:07

a public place you may just knowledge, I feel

24:09

really sad, to say it to yourself and take

24:12

a breath. But then hold

24:14

on to that, because if you then combined

24:16

that by going on suppressing it all day,

24:19

that sad, difficult images it

24:21

were, grows in force inside

24:23

you so that if you can do

24:26

your shopping, get home, get to

24:28

a safe place, and then allow

24:30

as you unpack the yogurt say, I've never said

24:32

this before, this is this has just

24:35

come back of nowhere. I've never

24:37

used yogurt and shopping. But anyway, you

24:40

ally yourself to feel the sadness. The

24:42

next time you buy yogurt, it's

24:44

not going to hit you with the same fourth because

24:47

you've processed it a little bit until

24:49

in the end, over time, you've

24:52

adjusted and adapted and you

24:54

kind of know that you're three and you're still

24:56

buying a yogurt for four. I mean the irony

24:58

of this, though, is I feel like this is not necessarily

25:01

a lot of people's instincts. I know it's not my instinct

25:03

when I go through grief. Like if I had that moment

25:06

in the shop where I had the realization of

25:08

like, wait, I'm not four people buying yogurt, I'm only

25:10

three, my instant reaction be like I'm going to check

25:12

my email, just going to get busy, like you know,

25:14

like stuff that that down, right, And

25:16

so you know, how do we kind of navigate

25:18

this urge to kind of just not be with our emotions

25:21

like they don't feel fun And it's

25:23

hard to realize this paradox that what

25:25

we need to get through the emotions is to actually

25:27

be I mean, I think I think awareness is

25:29

the first step. And business is

25:31

an anesthetic and it is a natural blocker,

25:34

and it's probably along with drug and alcohol,

25:37

it's probably the most common. Sometimes

25:39

switching and being busy is useful.

25:43

No one wants to burst in tears in front of lots

25:45

of strangers in the supermarket. So

25:47

it's kind of recognizing you feel

25:49

sad, but also logging

25:52

that at some point you need

25:54

to find a way of acknowledging and

25:56

its expressing it, so you

25:58

know, I often talk to clients about

26:00

allowing a space in a day that you

26:03

have a little kind of cut out time. It

26:05

maybe half an hour where you go to your

26:07

memory box where you look

26:09

at the person that's died, where you have a memory

26:11

of doing the shopping and avoiding the pain

26:13

and how painful that is. That can do

26:15

it for you so that then you're not so likely

26:19

to be hijacked by it in other

26:21

places where you don't want it to happen. You

26:23

know, I have a client who wears

26:26

her dad's watch and she's got a little

26:28

tiny wrist, but and it's a big male

26:30

watch with a big masculine strap.

26:33

And when she's talking to me and when she's talking about

26:35

him, she strokes the

26:38

face of the watch and you feel like she's

26:40

sort of stroking his face that she can

26:42

kind of really picture him and

26:45

kind of embody him. And that's a

26:47

direct kind of connection with him

26:49

that she will use forever. And

26:51

I think in society we want

26:53

our friends, or our family or ourselves to get

26:55

over it, get past these difficult

26:58

feelings, and it's you know that it's the paradox

27:00

is by allowing them is how you do overtime

27:04

heal and recover and have hope

27:07

again and love again and live again. But

27:09

it's allowing them to find their way through

27:12

you that changes you into

27:14

your changed, kind of new version

27:16

of yourself once this person has died.

27:19

And I love this idea of the new version

27:21

of yourself because I think there's this concept

27:23

that you know, once we go through this process, we want to be

27:25

us before we get this bad news. But

27:28

that's also not how grief works. It kind of comes

27:30

with this growth too completely,

27:32

and you know, we're

27:35

never the same. I mean, you're probably a bit different today

27:37

than you were yesterday or a week ago. That

27:39

we are. We're wired to evolve and

27:41

grow, and when we befriend

27:44

it and don't fight it, it can

27:46

change us. And there's this idea of

27:48

post traumatic growth that it never denies

27:51

the level of the loss or the depth of the

27:53

pain and the suffering. But what

27:55

people have find is that when they have found

27:58

that they can survive what they thought

28:00

they could never survive, that they would never

28:02

overcome, they've allowed themselves

28:04

to feel pain at levels that were beyond

28:07

their expectation, their

28:09

perception of themselves, their resilience,

28:12

their robustness, what matters

28:14

to them in life. Feels

28:16

that they've been expanded and

28:19

they feel changed by it, and

28:21

they wouldn't want the thing to have happened,

28:24

but they would term that as

28:26

internal growth. Paradox

28:30

of grief is that we could only move through it once

28:32

we stop fighting it. But I know firsthand

28:35

that letting grief in is easier said

28:37

than done. Thankfully, Julia

28:39

has come up with a set of strategies or how you

28:41

can support yourself while experiencing

28:43

the feelings that come up during the grieving process.

28:46

You'll hear about all of these strategies in

28:48

part two of my conversation with Julia

28:50

Samuel. If

28:53

you like this show and others from Pushkin Industries,

28:55

consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus.

28:58

As a special gift to Pushkin Plus subscribers,

29:00

I'll be sharing a series of six guided

29:03

meditations to help you practice the lessons

29:05

we've learned from our experts. To

29:07

check them out, look for Pushkin plus us on Apple

29:09

podcast subscriptions. The

29:14

Happiness Lab is co written and produced by

29:17

Ryan Dilley, Emily Anne Vaughan, and

29:19

Courtney Guerino. Our original

29:21

music was composed by Zachary Silver, with

29:23

additional scoring, mixing, and mastering

29:25

by Evan Viola. Special thanks

29:27

to Milabelle, Heather Faine, John

29:30

Schnars, Carlie Migliori, Christina

29:32

Sullivan, Brandt Haynes, Maggie Taylor,

29:34

Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston

29:37

Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my

29:39

agent, Ben Davis. The

29:41

Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries

29:43

and me Doctor Laurie Santos. To

29:46

find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on

29:48

the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

29:50

or wherever you listen to your podcasts.