Pushkin hey Slight change listeners. It's Maya. We'll be back with a new season on June fifth, but before then, I wanted to share some of my favorite conversations with scientists about mental health. Since May is Mental Health Awareness Month, I hope you enjoy this conversation with grief therapist Julia Samuel. It's full of wisdom. I still think about, like how it's important to grieve the loss of identity that often accompanies major life changes. I'd love to hear your thoughts
on this episode. You can find me on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker.
When you kind of in trauma, everything it's like your body is on far and you're drowning at the same time, so that everything is heywhaw. But by having small, bite sized, very manageable structures and rituals, 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.
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 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 have 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 recognized what I was doing. I think like most of us probably don't realize until after the fact and you look back and you go, oh, that's what it was. You know. My parents are 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 of my parents had very signific, vocant 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 wasn't 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 un observer, 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 was 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 since I kind of that doesn't take much to put the pieces of the jigsaw together.
You mentioned that growing up, no one spoke about it, no one spoke about 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 maricondo 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 busyness. 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're 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, that 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 the old you that what 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, our most natural instinct is 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 you're 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? And what does this mean now? And what do I need? And so then you can get your needs met. If you shut all that down 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 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 an idiot, 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 to get the support of other people so that that processing isn't chilly and isolating and but is connected and that you can feel the warmth and the heart of another person with you.
For 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 forge 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 to bigger 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 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 finding support for yourself.
I love what you say about loneliness because the vag Morphy, who is the Surgeon 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 ABSI 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 rational brain fully registers that she's gone. But how could it be. How could it be 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 it 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 are 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 are now we're only three. And in that
moment you know it. And then in that moment, as you know, you kind of adjust and 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 loss, 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 us 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 talk to them about, you know, grieving and feeling the pain of their death, but also in continuing the 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 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 mementoes. But in their main kind of sitting room where they lived all the time, they had a trunk and inside the trunk was his trainers were his some of his school books, the wristband that he had when he died, a lot of his things that and some of them sort of still felt to them like they smelt of him, and so that he was there 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 out 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 know, 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, 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 bias, and I don't think at the time I appreciated the loss of identity, and I think learning about that from you is really helpful to me, which is again it was a 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 am I 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, well, 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, look, I know you're a tea lover, Julius, so you're going to find resonance in this one. But it is making myself a cup of Indian style tea. So I get
out the fresh ginger CARDIVM boil milk. 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 and 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 heywhire. 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.
Yeah, 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
flip 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 maybe what's helpful to me in these moments.
I mean, that sounds so rare and so unique that you had open and trust in communication like Kim 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, are often walls that creates gaps of connection where people then suffer in isolation and more.
I'm just remembering too, 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 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 it.
Yeah, to say it to 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 perfect exactly.
And like, why was it that my child free friends were able to bring me more comfort in those days?
Well?
Duh, 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 it. Yeah, No, I doubt justifying it, not explaining it, just saying and he'll.
Get that, yeah, yeah he did. You know, Julia, 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 and 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 humor, when they're late, I think they've been run over. 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 or 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 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 live. 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 theirs 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 toolkit 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 just sharing what that means to you on a personal level.
I think in the end, the anything that really matters is love. When we look back at our lives, it's the love we've felt for others and that they felt for us that gives us meaning. And that's that's the thing that matters most.
A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes Tyler Green, our senior producer, Emily Rosstek, our producer and fact checker, Jen Guera, our senior editor, Ben Holliday, our sound engineer, and Neil LaBelle, our executive producer. Louis Scara 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 mcgliori, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow a slight change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maiah Schunker. See you next week.