Lessons From a Grief Therapist

and the loss. Julia Samuel has worked for thirty years as a grief counselor in the UK and as an expert on trauma and loss. She's also the author of two best selling books, Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass. Julia has counseled thousands of people through their grief and has identified strategies that can help all of us navigate the loss of a loved one. You know, people say time is a great healer and the pain of grief does change over time, but if we aren't active in

the process of grieving, it doesn't change so much. It just gets shut down, so that the things you do to block your pain are in the end the things that harm you over time. On today's episode, Lessons from a Grief Therapist. I'm Maya Shunker, and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. You know, Julia, you refer to death as the great last taboo that we resist. We resist using the word death.

We prefer euphemisms like loss and passed away. And we can be so scared of death that sometimes we engage in magical thinking right where we believe that maybe if we don't talk about it, it won't happen to us. And so, given this very natural desire to resist talking or thinking about death, I'm curious to know what led you initially to run directly into the fire, directly into that emotional fire, and become a grief therapist. I mean,

I don't think I recognize what I was doing. I think like most of us probably don't realize until after the fact and you look back and you get, oh, that's what it was. You know. My parents had brought up by parents who had survived the worst kind of war in history, where everybody was grieving someone they loved, a father, a son, a brother, a husband, and they had no choices, but to get on and multiply, and no one was able to kind of take on anyone else's grief. And then they had to do the same

after the Second World War. But both my parents had very significant and traumatic bereavement. So my mum, by the time she was twenty five, her father, her mother, her sister, and her brother had all died, so she was an orphan. And my father, his father, and his brother had also died by the time he was a young man, so they had experienced really devastating death and they literally never

talked about it. It was like everything that was painful and difficult wasn't talked about and was voiced, and everything that really didn't matter and was inconsequential was what we talked about. And I as a child, I was one of five children, five of us born in four years because I'm a twin and I have twin sisters, and so I was quite quiet and an observe and I was always trying to work out what was going on, and I could never really quite make sense of what

was going on. And so I think unconsciously that led me, you know, and I'm still quite young in my late twenties to go into the area of bereavement. But it wasn't because I knew it was because of my childhood. It was just because what I was drawn to and somehow fascinated by. But as I've had like thirty years of therapy, Sinse, I kind of that doesn't take much to put the pieces of the chigsaw together. You mentioned that growing up, no one spoke about it, No one

spoke about any any of the deaths. And why do you think we don't like talking about our feelings. I mean, it just it feels so tragic and unfortunate that we resist doing the very thing that can help us in the face of a death. I think that's a really good question. The sort of paradox of by allowing us to feel the aspects of ourselves that we most kind

of fear, we do in the end heal. And I think a lot of it is probably to do with control and shame that somehow, maybe you'd know the reasons to do with evolutionary drives that in order to kind of be out in the world and you know, thrive, we have to show that we're strong and that we can fend for ourselves and that we're not vulnerable. But also, I mean, I think from the control perspective, it's that what we feel is invisible. You know, most of grief

and emotions. You know, you can read some things on someone's face, but they're all underground. So it's messy, it's chaotic, and I think a lot of people when they talk to me about grieving, they want to sort of Mari condo their feelings into kind of tidy sock draws, color coordinated because you feel so powerless when you're grieving, that this thing has happened to you and blown you off your center. I think if you can kind of control your feelings, then you feel like I can okay, I

can survive this. But when feelings hit you completely out of the blue, then you feel in some way threatened, so you automatically put on shields of defense of business. I think is the most common, actually getting super busy, scrolling, running, because then you feel like I'm in control, I've got this. Is it correct for me to say then, that as we're going about our normal lives, we experience the illusion

anyway that we are managing and controlling our feelings. And then when something like a profound loss happens, a death of someone who is so important to us. That illusion evaporates because suddenly we are confronted with the enormity of the feelings, and as you mentioned, they're messy and complicated and confusing and overwhelming, and I guess we're taken by storm, and that might be why we don't want to engage.

We don't want to take the lid off, because if we see what's underneath there, it's just it all feels too intimidating and overwhelming. Is that right? I think that's absolutely right. And there's this sort of blissful ignorance that when something terrible hasn't happened to us, that we have

control the good things happen to good people. That life has a kind of order that your parents die first and you know you'll go next, and then your children, and then having a devastating experience throws that order completely off kilter. And also you have the feelings that you

do not want to have. You become a version of yourself that you don't want to meet, where you feel furious for seeing someone talk to their father because your father's died, or they can't bear to see other people or people laughing, which then you feel like you're this joyless kind of ogre and you want to be there, the old you, that light was in there laughing with them. And that's what you're confronted with is lots of aspects

of yourself which, when you're not suffering, kind of go quiet. Yeah, are most natural instinct as humans is to avoid suffering, But you do say that contrary to all of our instincts, we have to allow ourselves to feel the pain in order to make progress. Right, your mantra is pain is the agent of change, and to start, I'd love to

know what's led you to that conclusion. Emotions are transmitters of information, so that they are informing us that something is up, and that our emotions and our cognitions are reciprocal feeds, so that when we have an experience of a feeling, it connects with our thinking and we're saying to ourselves, I feel frightened, I feel scared, I feel distressed. And then in the process of that thinking, you then think,

what's happened? Why am I distressed? And you begin to develop a narrative that is telling you the reason your distress. And as you do that, and as you express the feeling and say the words. Incrementally you adjust a little bit more to this new reality that you didn't want and you didn't choose, because your first response, or most people's first response to grief is shock and numbness, and that it's surreal and we can only feel the pain

of it in very tiny increments. If we felt it all at once in that moment, I think it would kind of blow our kind of brain circuits. And so the pain is slowly forcing you to face this new reality, and as you face it, you adapt, and as you adapt, it gives space to kind of think about, well, who am I now, and how am I going to live now? What does this mean now? And what do I need?

And so then you can get your needs met. If you shot all that like my parents did, you function, but your capacity to feel gets foreshortened so that you wouldn't know what you were feeling, so you couldn't get your needs met. So you may feel distressed, but then you would use behaviors or other kind of mechanisms to

self medicate. Yeah. No, I think it's so helpful to think about it in terms of processing, because when we think about it, it's just at least for me on a personal level, Like Julia's prescription to me is to marinate in the pain. I'm like, Okay, basically, you are

prescribing hell on earth to me. I don't want to do that, right but for whatever reason, and I don't know if I'm the only one who finds comfort in this When I see it as a dynamic process where my mind is engaged and I am in communication with

my feelings, that feels more manageable for me. So I'm feeling terror, I'm feeling panic, I'm feeling distress, But there's a conversation happening where I'm picking apart some of these emotions and trying to unpack them, and then in the process, maybe they lose some of their power over me, you know. I mean, that is right. But the piece that you haven't added, which I hope I say with equal force, is that it's the love and connection to others that

enables us to survive when we feel the pain. I really profoundly believe we can't do this alone, and that when love dies, it's the love of others we need most. So that you need find ways of both supporting yourself personally and how you know, one of the kind of cruel paradoxes of grief is that often people turn against themselves and have you know what I call a shitty committee where they're attacking themselves. I'm ant, I'm a fool,

all that guilt of if only, what if? Why didn't I and often don't seek support because there's this sense of shame that I can't ask for help. But you need both to be compassionate to yourself and get the support of other people so that that processing isn't chilly and isolating and alone, but is connected and that you can feel the warmth and the heart or another person with you. But the person who's listening who says, Okay, Julie, I totally understand that I need love to heal, but

I currently don't have those resources in my life. Where can they begin? I mean, is there are there ways to find that compassion in love? I mean, we do live in a digital world where maybe it's possible to forage connections that you might not have been able to. But I just I want to give hope to the person who says, okay, you know, the privileged among us might have lots of love in our support networks, but I don't, so I think the first place to turn

is to yourself, is to be self compassionate. And then you know, there really are groups, a lot of support groups for people that are grieving, and it's often the groups around the relationship with the person that died, so you know, partners that have died, or parents that have died, or children that have died, so that you can find, you know, this club that nobody wants to be a

member of, but you can join. And I think if you don't want to do it through grief, you can do it through volunteering or pastimes, you know, joining organizations, gardening clubs. Are you interested in art? Are you interested in music? Are you interested in nature? Do you like cycling?

And so I think for someone who's grieving, what's difficult is taking themselves that one step out of their comfort zone to kind of say I need more help than i'm getting myself, because you can get into this incredibly negative cycle that nobody cares, nobody loves me, and nothing's going to make any difference. And the more you say that to yourself, the harder it is to take that first step and find a network that would meet you. But anyone listening, I would say please just small for

what you know, do small things. Don't set yourself too big a task. Send the first email, do the first Google search, and then every day do a little step. You don't have to be in the group, like find out think about what you're interested in that can be your task to day, do a Google about what there is locally that can be a task another day. You know, so that you do incremental steps towards finally support for yourself.

I love what you say about about loneliness because the vague Morthy, who is a certain general, he was going on a medical expedition initially to different parts of the country, trying to understand these different health conditions like addiction and obesity exactly and ultimately found that loneliness was at its root. So I love the recommendations that you make around how any of us can try try and seek that out.

I know the way that we grieve can be very idiosyncratic based on so many factors, like our psychological wiring, our circumstances, what have you. But I know you have identified at least some common patterns across the people that you've worked with, especially in the aftermath of loss. Like I was just I was talking with a friend of mine, Quinn, who lost her nineteen year old sister, and I remember at the memorial service she was saying, a part of

me feels she's still coming home. You know, my brain, my rational brain, fully registers that she's gone. But how could it be? How could it be that that Dixie, who had the most promising future one can imagine, is gone, Like her brain wasn't able to make that connection. And so yeah, I would just love for you to unpack

these two distinct frames of mind. And I like that you talk about in terms of movement between the two, the adjustment to like your friend's sister dying suddenly and at nineteen, which is you know, a death out of time, that kind of out of the clear blue sky shock. The process of accommodation learning to live with it is a movement between facing the reality and feeling the pain where her head knew it but her heart didn't feel it.

The pain kind of allows some connection between the two where the head and the heart of feeling it at the same time, like, ah, you know, I'm buying a set of yogurts for four and we're used to be four people an hour, only three and in that moment you know it, and then in that moment, as you know, you kind of adjust an accommodate, and then it frees you to have a little breather and be restorative, like go home, make some supper, do something that soothes you

that is intentionally calming. And it's the movement between the two, allowing yourself to have times to remember to be sad, to talk to a friend, to grieve, and time to give yourself a break from grief, to give yourself permission to have moments of joy or moments of calm or kind of feel within yourself a sort of sense of

peace that it isn't so raw. I think we can choose times that we focus on our lost through having a memory box or different ways that we can decide to kind of focus on them, because I think one of the aspects that is also not kind of recognized is there's a dual process of facing the reality that this person is no longer physically present, but what we

feel for them, our love for them, never dies. The love continues, and so it isn't about forgetting and moving on, It's about remembering and connecting when we're back from the break Julia will give us advice on how to process our grief. Julia Samuel has been a grief therapist for more than thirty years, much of that time working with the UK's National Health Service or NHS. Through her experiences, Julia has identified some things we can do to help

through the grieving process. She calls them pillars of strength, and we did a deep dive on a few of them in our conversation. So I came up with the pillars not as a kind of ten rules, but from a perspective of when we're in the throes of this tumultuous experience, when we feel like we have this hole in the center of our being, we need attitudes, ways of being and behaviors that can hold us up when we feel kind of tipped and off kilter. And survival kit.

It's your survival kit. Yeah, And I think the thing that helps people a lot is the relationship to the person that's died. So I've often people will once I talked to them about, you know, grieving and feeling the pain of their death, but also in continuing their relationship.

People are amazingly creative in what they do. So one person her husband died and she got his pajamas and made them into a patchwork quilt that she put on their children's beds, so that they had all these little squares of their dad on their beds, so when they went to sleep when they really missed him, they had some of their dad. And someone else had a son that died in a terrible car crash, and they didn't

want other people to see their mementos. But in their mains kind of sitting room where they lived all the time, they had a trunk and inside the trunk was his trainers, were some of his school books, the wristband that he had when he died, a lot of his things, and some of them sort of still felt to them like they smelt of him, and so that he was there

what other people couldn't see. And when they wanted, they could open the trunk and she could put his t shirt, you know, into her nose and feel connected to him, and that would meet an expression of needing to love him, because it's that people miss the hugs, the telling them I love you, and they feel like they've failed, and so having something concrete that you can go to really helps.

I think one of the other pillars that really helps is moving your body, you know, taking exercise, getting your heart rate up, because it reduces the cortisol. It brings your whole mind body connection down to kind of first gear where then you can get support, You can think more clearly, You can choose to do things that are kind of kind to you rather than of desperation and fear. So I mean, I say to people, one of the first things I say to any clients I said it

this week is get outside. You know, even if it's going for a walk around the block, you know, on a pavement with tons of noise and cars ten minutes outside. You will always feel better if you can go into nature, if you can go into a park, that is even better.

Because what you want is to choose things that help calibrate your over alert system, to help you bring your system down, because then you then you can connect with other people and connect with yourself in a way that you can't and you're kind of really stressed out, really

kind of full of fear. One thing I read in your book about our relationship with ourselves that I just had never really thought about was the way in which the death of someone that we love can affect our self structure our self identity, the way it can affect our self esteem and our confidence because of our inability to in those moments feel like we can fully be ourselves. And I resonated with that so much. I mean, as you know, and many of my listeners know because I

shared this story on the show. You know, my husband Jimmy, and I lost identical twin girls to a miscarriage via surrogacy, and I don't think at the time I appreciated the loss of identity, and I think learning about that from me was really helpful to me, which is again, it was this short lived period where I felt like I was a mom, or as you guys would say, a mom, and you know, from that first blue line on the

pregnancy test, suddenly I feel like I'm a mother. And so when the loss happens, you're grieving certainly the loss of that pregnancy, but you're also grieving the loss of an identity that you were aspiring to have. And when you saw that blue line, you pictured yourself as a mom holding a baby who would be a parent for the rest of her life. So you kind of grieving the dream as a mom, and that's incredibly painful. Yes, Are there any other pillars of strength you'd like to share.

I think the other ones that are really helpful are to do with limits, so that our capacity to manage ourselves to engage in the world of what we can do.

Our boundaries change when we're grieving, and people often push us to come and do something or want us to be okay because they want us to kind of be okay, and so kind of recognizing how important your boundaries are when you're so out of control, and that having a good no means that when you say yes, it's a really good yes, and that can be very positive and confident building. So it's not saying no to the world, but really assessing of how much energy do I have?

Will this be? Can I cope with this? Do I dare go out of my comfort zone? Maybe it's good a little bit, you know, all of those things and deciding rather than kind of pushing through, which I think people often want to do. I think one that I one of the pillars that I have relied on during what's been just incredibly hard period of time for the entire world has been I think you would catch this

under your structure pillar. But having extremely small rituals in my day to day life that without fail I try and do and for me, I know you're a tea lover, Julius, so you're going to find residence in this one. But it is making myself a cup of Indian style tea. So I get out the fresh ginger cardamum boiled milk. All all you Indian people out there know what I'm talking about. It's the most delightful, wonderful part of my day. And every morning I start off with at least two cups.

And you know, I sometimes do it begrudgingly because when there is trauma and grief, it doesn't feel like it fits. It feels jarring to have that kind of indulgence against the backdrop of pain. But just the mere fact I'm engaging in what I would call a normal behavior is therapeutic in its own way. It signals to the subconscious part of my brain that there are some parts of life that are still okay. I think that's so beautiful.

And in some ways it's simple but complex what you're saying, in the sense that kind of that's a structure that is really a ritual, isn't it. That is a self soothing calming, safe place ritual that takes you back to your roots in your family, you know, to all that

you understand and where you feel safe. And as you say, when you're kind of in trauma, everything is like your body is on far and you're drowning at the same time, so that everything is heywa But by having small, bite sized, very manageable structures and rituals again, they just bring you down a little bit to that sense of safety, and feeling safe in your body and your mind and in your home gives you a kind of robustness to deal with the onslaught of the feelings of your trauma and

the loss. So we've talked a bit about how we can help ourselves in the throes of grief, and I'm wondering what we should keep in mind when a person we love has lost someone and we're so eager to help, and naturally the answers don't feel clear to us. I mean, what did you need from others? It's a great question. I think what I needed from people was helping me understand what I needed. I didn't know what I needed, and I was so perplexed and I was so confused.

I remember texting my brother, because he was like, I don't know what you need right now, and I want to be there for you and I want to support you. And I said, I don't know what I need right now, and I'm sorry that I don't have that clarity. And I'm not trying to be flipped or anything. I just I don't know. And I think actually calling upon the people you love to help you figure that out, to actually bring them in on the journey with you, to test things out, and almost view it as an experimental

process that you're in together. I think that's that's maybe what's helpful to me in these moments. I mean, that sounds so rare and so unique that you had open and trusting communication like him saying I don't know what you need. I just want you to know that I love you and that I'm here, and that you were able to say back, I really don't know what I need either, that you were completely transparent with each other. Often in families, people say I'm fine, how are you?

You know? It becomes and the walls of protection, which are meant to protect the other person from suffering, or often walls that creates gaps of connection where people then suffer in isolation and more. I'm just remembering to that one breakthrough I had with my brother was telling him in part why I was pushing him away, and that was because I was jealous of him. He has three beautiful daughters, my nieces, who I love more than anything, and in that moment, I resented that that wasn't my life.

I resented that he hadn't gone through this path like all things you hate admitting but are just true. And I felt like, easy for you to say, easy for you to say, with your perfect family, that's the instinct. And of course that's such such a disservice to his life too, which is of course not you know, no one's life is the picture perfect thing. But in that moment,

I think I was. I was filled with that kind of frustration and resentment, and just telling him, admitting to that was it helped to bridge an important gap that I was feeling. So I don't know if that helps anyone listening that, like, sometimes just admit to aiming it, Yeah,

just say it did the person. It's okay, you know, but it actually takes insight to know that it was the jealousy of him with his three daughters that was blocking you because sometimes it's hard to kind of recognize you with your propriate liphan exactly, And like, why was it that my child free friends were able to bring you more comfort in those days? Well? Du right, Why was I not pushing them away? Why was I more

willing to want to talk to them? You know, yes, but you have a lot of self knowledge, and naming what's difficult often bridges the gap, doesn't Yeah, my dad of justifying it, not explaining it, just saying and he'll get that, yeah, yeah, he did. You know, Juliet, you spent thirty years in this space, and you've had the rare experience of counseling so many people through the worst moments of their lives. I'm sure your patients have taught you countless lessons. You say as much in your book.

But I'm wondering if there was any particular patient or story that changed you in a significant way, you know, working in the NHS where children died, you know, completely out of the blue or with a terrible diagnosis, or all the different ways it's done. Two things. One is I have more fear for my own children or grandchildren because I really know in a way that I can't not know that they can die. So when they have

a headache, I think they have a brain tumor. When they're late, I think they've been run over, and it drives them nuts. My son now when he says call me, he always puts brackets, not bad news. That's so sweet.

At the other end of that is just enormous awe at the preciousness of life and what people like you can survive and still live and love again and dare to and the extraordinariness of our human beings and the people I've worked with, and you know, just knowing you and seeing you, that we can do that, and that feels so extraordinary. And so I feel very grateful every

day that I'm alive. So you know, every night I don't really believe in God per se, but I thank God and I say all my children's names, I say my husband's name and my grandchildren's names, that they're alive. And that gratitude really works for me. What's your advice to us when it comes to what we should do more of in life to manage our grief better when it does happen, when it inevitably happens. I think important conversations with the people that you love about death and dying.

Your own and deaths can really help you when it happens, because you have some recognition that we're all mortal, and I think that is very supportive. And I think the big thing is to really learn to kind of support ourselves with you know, we don't always have to face grief from death to have difficult things, But by finding our own tool kit within ourselves of how we manage difficulty and that we can then access that when the difficulty gets worse, will really help us. Don't go close

your eyes. Bad things aren't going to happen to me. Bad things aren't going to happen to me, because then when it happens, you are really left with so little inside yourself that can support you. So develop good support systems, both as much as possible with your friendships and your family, but also internally. Yeah, yeah, all right. I'll end on a beautiful quote of yours, which you've already alluded to, that you say, when there is death, love is the

only way forward. Do you mind justus sharing what that means to you on a personal level. I think in the end, the only thing that really matters is love. When we look back at our lives, it's the love we've felt for others and that they've felt for us that gives us meaning. And that's that's the thing that matters most. Hey, thanks for listening. Join me next week

when we hear from doctor Richard Harris. He's an anesthesiologist and an expert cave diver, two skills he put to the test when he went on a mission to rescue a boy's soccer team from deep within a cave in Thailand. This is the moment of truth, when this whole fanciful idea will actually become reality. And I'm about to meet these children who I've heard so much about and thought so much about for such a long time, and now I'm going to see them face to face, and I'm

going to have to make a decision. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written an executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes Tyler Green, our senior producer, Emily Rosteck, our producer and fact checker, Jen Guera, our senior editor, Ben Taliday, our sound engineer, and Neil Lavelle, our executive producer. Louis Skara wrote our theme song and

Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, including Nicole Morano, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Heather Fame and Carly Mgliori, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week.