How to Navigate the Path of Grief with Dr. Joanne Cacciatore

self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. If you've lost track of what's important to you, you're not alone.

We often go through phases in life where we feel dissatisfied or disconnected, and when we get off track, it's easy to get stuck in unhelpful patterns like avoidance or perfectionism. It shows up as negative self talk, breaking your own rules, procrastinating, or struggling to let go of addictive or otherwise harmful

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and sign up. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is doctor Joe Ann Catchatori, a professor at Arizona State University, where she runs the graduate Certificate in Trauma and Bereavement. She's also the founder of the MISS Foundation. Since nineteen ninety six, doctor Joe has worked with and counseled those affected by traumatic death. She started the first therapeutic care farm in the world for traumatic grief, based on a framework for incorporating fifty plus domestic and farm

animals rescued from abuse, torture, neglect, and homelessness. Her work has been featured on Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry's Apple TV docuseriies The Me You Can't See, and Doctor Joe also served on their Mental Health Advisory Board along with thirteen esteemed colleagues as part of the series. Her research has been published in peer reviewed journals such as The Lancet Omega Journal of Death and Dying, The Journal of Mental Health, Counseling Seminars, and Fetal and Non Natal Medicine

in the International Journal of Nursing. Her best selling book, Bearing the Unbearable Love Loss and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief won the Indies Book of the Year Award. Her subsequent books include Grieving as Loving and an audible Great Courses series called Understanding and Coping with Grief. Hi, Joy, and welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. It's lovely to be here with both of you. I'm so excited to have you on. Jenny is here

with us. Hello this interview. Hello Jo, and we're going to be discussing your work around grief, specifically the book Bearing the Unbearable Love Loss and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief. But before we get to that, we'll start, like we always do, with the Parable and the Parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always

at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well,

it's testing. You had me on greed, and you had me on hate, not so much on fear, And the reason not so much on fear in terms of my work, because I work with people who have experienced traumatic grief, fear is quite a normal, expectable, natural emotion to experience, and I tend not to think about emotions in dichotomous ways. So for me, I certainly wouldn't feed, nor withhold feed

for whatever emotion there is. For me, I would see emotions as this sort of well spring of experiences that we each have, some of which can be more challenging than others, some of which we tend to want to gravitate toward or experience more of than others. And yet we know from meditative practices, for example, that that which we pursue is more elusive, and which we avoid can be more aggressive toward us, can be more difficult to disavow or to essue. So I tend to have a

much more neutral stance about emotion. Though I'm not a big fan of greed or hatred, obviously, an emotion like fear I see as normal. I also think that I like the way the parable uses feeding because I do think we can overly invest in certain emotions and divest investment in certain other emotions. And I think if we could have a more neutral position about emotions, I think we get to the place where we're a little bit more emotionally intelligent and equanimous, which for me is the

goal in my work. So remember that because of the work that I do, I work with people, for example, whose children have been murdered. Why would they not have fear? Why would they not have hatred? Greed? It's not as applicable to the work that I do, But these are so normative in my line of work that I think the parable in general is probably a useful parable, but perhaps not such a great application in the work that

I do. Yeah, makes total sense. And every time we go through the parable, I'm always worried about sending the message that emotions are bad, you know, And yet it points to us having choice in some degree of where we want to put our attention. I thought maybe we could start by talking a little bit about most of

your work is around traumatic grief. Jinny lost her mom in November after a six year battle with alzheimer So it's a very different type of grief, right, There's a lot of grief along the way, sometimes called it the long goodbye type of grief. Yeah, but I'd love to just talk about grief taking different forms and it's showing up differently for different people based on their circumstances. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And I write actually

a lot about this in my research. I'm a professor at Arizona State University, so I conduct research in this area. And one of the things that we know is that context does matter. So, Jinny, you look relatively young, and it's hard to lose a parent at a young age when you're young. So that's one of the contexts that, for example, a really good counselor or therapist would consider

age circumstances of death, homicide, suicide, violent deaths. Death where there is a prolonged illness six years of Alzheimer's would be a very different thing than for example, someone who was ninety eight years old and died as an elder and had a quote good death. And what by good death, I mean Paine was well controlled. Things went relatively quickly. The family is highly cohesive. Everyone is at bedside, they're singing Grandma's favorite song, Grandma and great Grandma's favorite songs.

Candles are lit, lavenders in the room, and it's a peaceful death without the prolonged suffering. So context in my work matters more than just about any other factor, and that's why it's so important to consider the circumstances, the nature of the relationship, how someone died, the quality of the relationship. And yet it's something that we so rarely take the time to examine deeply in our sort of fast food mental health culture. Right, we want everything quickly.

We want a quick diagnosis, we want quick treatment, we want simple reductionistic approaches to how to treat everyone in a protocolized way, and it just doesn't work. Yeah, I think it's an important thing. Though to name Eric, I'm glad you brought it up because one of the things that I've been struck by in my own sort of long arc of grief and my mom being unfortunate, to say, the first really close person to me that I've lost, and I'm going to be forty four next month. It's

a very new journey for me, this grief journey. And I think if we don't name that, like your own experience is perfectly fine and normal just as it is. You know, as we talk about grief, we could run the risk of alienating people whose grief doesn't match what we describe. Right. But I've just noticed that, like so many things that I thought were perhaps unique to me, then I'll read about them, like in your work, and I realize how normal they are, you know, which is comforting.

It takes any shame or any I don't no doubt about what your grief or lack of acute sadness means about your relationship to your love one, or your love for the love one, or how good of a job you're doing grieving. You know, none of that's helpful. Really, It's very helpful to just hold your grief loosely and lovingly, you know, with room to be what it is. Well, that's the key, right, and that's what mindfulness is, right, being with what is without needing to change it. Yeah, yeah,

can I ask Mom's name? Oh? Thank you? Yeah. So she's a unique name, her nickname, and that's what she went by was Ogie, so it was short a nickname for Olga, so Oggie like Yogi without the way, gotcha? Gotcha? Okay? Yeah. So when Ogie died, I mean, your life, because this is your mom is irreparably changed, Like you don't get to go back, at least not in this way, on this planet, in this moment, and get Ogie back. You know, the loss of your mom is a forever, irreparable loss.

And that's the thing that I think people think. I think people mistakenly think, Okay, you have this loss and

then you're done. You grieve, and then you're done. But the reality is ten years from now, when you're fifty four, you're going to be grieving for Ogie not being with you at fifty four, and when you're sixty four, and then of course at some point she would have predated you, we hope in death had she been here still, But I think that there's this ongoing grief that you wake up into every single day, like I'm still missing her today for who she would have been in my life today,

and we tend to really miss that piece that it's not just a moment in time you're grieving, it's you grieve for the past, and you grieve for the present, and you're grieving for the future. Yes, and I grieve the life that she didn't get to have, you know, I grieve her missing. I mean, you're so right. I've

noticed that. It's funny. I took the month of December off from work to sort of make some space for what was coming up in me after her death, kind of thinking like, I feel like I've been able to through the support I've had, especially Eric around me, and then my mindfulness practice and meditation practice throughout my mom's illness, I've been able to sort of meet what is as it arises and try and be with it in a healing way. So I thought, well, is there anything left

over that I need to sort of tidy up? You know, let's just tidy up with them. We'll move on. But I think now what I'm realizing more than ever is there's no like, Okay, now I've grieved, so now we will move on with the rest of our life. I mean, it's not that I'm in a constant state of inconsolable sadness. It's just that, like you said, there's like new old grief that pops up right and those moments are to

be just met as they are when they arise. It's hard to do them in advance, you know, for sure, And really there's no way to prepare for it. I mean, we can try to control grief, but I think that's a rather imprudent position to take, because when you control grief, or when you try to suppress grief, it just gets clever and disguises itself as something else and shows up sideways. Because it will be seen. It absolutely will be seen. It's just are you going to see it honestly or dishonestly?

So maybe we could, before we go too much further, ask a little bit about what brought you to this work, and a little bit about your story about how you got into this world. Sure, well, I was mom with three little kids, and I had a fourth child in July of nineteen ninety four, and she died and I didn't have great support through that and dropped a dangerous amount of weight. I weighed less than ninety pounds within

a few months. I couldn't eat. It felt like there was a great fruit in my throat all the time. I just couldn't swallow. I would put food in my mouth and spit it out because I couldn't get my throat to open to swallow food. I think the grief itself was bad enough, but the loneliness made it truly unbearable. I was surrounded by people who just kept saying things like, just be grateful. You have other kids, and you're young. You could have another one, and God has a plan

for you. And you know at least you weren't as attached as you were to your older kids. It just bizarre platitudes that people say that had no place in my own personal truth, and that sort of existential loneliness really sent me to a place where I thought I couldn't make it. I didn't know if I could live in a world where not only can your child die, but your child can die and people can be pretty psychologically violent about it. So I made it through. I

attribute a couple of things. I had some really amazing children who helped me get through because that my children at the time were smarter than most adults around me. And my animals were amazing. I had two dogs who would just come up and sit with me and I would cry, and they would just put their head on my lap and not tell me things. Will get better. Not tell me be grateful for whatever you know, not say let's go get a drink. You know you should

put this behind you. Aren't you over it yet? And then I started the nonprofit, and that well, before I started the nonprofit, I started doing what I call kindness project acts for her, which is where I took the money that would have been hers. And I was really poor at the time, but I knew that I would have spent fifty dollars on her for Christmas, and so I would take that fifty dollars and I would spend it on a child anonymously who needed it. And I

started doing kindness project things. So I think that's what really sort of helped me get through the early years after her death. And then I started the foundation just with the idea of helping a few people, and then it just grew and grew and grew. And then I went back to school. I was nursing my youngest, my fifth child. I was breastfeeding him. When I went back to school he was two months old. And got my bachelor's degree, master's degree, and eventually my PhD, and became

a researcher. I got a ten year track position so you know her death, you know all of the amazing things that have happened since she died. I'd give back in a minute, you know. But I don't get that choice you talked earlier about choice. The only choice that I get is what I'm going to do with it now when I'm ready. And that's the key is I

have to be ready to make those choices. And so when I was ready, I made the choices that felt right to me, not just for me, but for others and others is broadly speaking, other human beings who are both like and unlike me, and animals who are unlike me, and the planet. So I mean, I think compassion when it stops at just our species for me feels problematic. So I mean, I think our planets in a world have hurt, and so my compassion has to extend to

the planet. And I think there are animals who are hurting every day, so my compassion has to extend into the animal kingdom, our animal brethren. So that's sort of how I got here and how I think about where I am now. In your book, you write about beautifully sort of how sorrow can just tenderize our heart in a way that beautifully can eventually lead us to compassionate

love in action, you know, to help others that are suffering. Right, I want to just touch on I guess a key point that has really resonated within me as I've read your book and as it's connected to my experience. So just a little background. So my mom, Yeah, she was diagnosed with alzheimer six years ago, and in hindsight, as so many families do, I think we realized we probably lost my mother as we knew her, maybe a few

years before that. And so it's been like this long arc of like this almost ten year period of losing her slowly along the way and grieving each little loss of her, you know. I mean in the early days, I feel like I had some moments of traumatic grief and just the realization of like she's no longer really here as we've known her, and I didn't get to

say goodbye, you know, like she's gone. In the early months kind of just felt like I was walking around like in some strange, like out of body experience, like the world didn't make sense without my mom in it, you know, and she wasn't there anymore, and what was all this going to look like? So those early days were acutely hard. As years went on, the heart became just different, you know, and also less acutely hard for

longer periods of time. But grief, grief has been a scary, scary thing for somebody like me who is trying to every day remember and learn and practice how to be with difficult emotions and not run from them and know that I don't have to be afraid of them. I know how to and I can be with them, and

I can let them come and crest and go. And I find myself even now avoiding things like I know I'm going to want to watch those home movies of her when we were young one day, but I know there's going to be such a cute grief going into that that I almost just avoid the whole thing. But I know that in so doing, I miss these moments of beauty and connection in remembering her and connecting to

the love of her. So that's a long setup for what I was hoping you could talk to us about, which is this idea of knowing we can be with our grief. How can we surrender to grief? As you say, like, what does that mean? What does that look like? How

would you describe that to someone? Yeah, it's a great question, and it's very I will say that we have to consider the milieu, the social milieu, right, So we're asking people to turn toward painful feelings in a culture that pushes happiness, in a culture that pushes feeling good at all times, at all costs, whether it's the dopaminergic squirt that comes from a Facebook like or the dopaminergic squirt that comes from you know, shopping, or from drugs and alcohol.

We are a culture that practices avoidance of pain constantly. So what we're asking people to do is to turn toward their grief and make space for it. And yeah, it sucks, not because grief sucks because the person who died. That's the part that sucks for us. Right, So we tend to think of grief and this is something I have to redirect clients on gently all the time. They say things like, grief isn't am I allowed to say

a naughty word? Yes? Please, naughty as well? Okay, grief is an asshole or grief as a motherfucker, And they'll actually say things like that, and I'll go, but is it really because if you woke up tomorrow morning and you had absolutely no grief for your six year old who died of cancer? How would you feel? They think about it for a minute and they go, well, that would be weird. Yeah, it would. The asshole is not grief. The asshole is that your six year old died. Grief

is the understandable outcome of that. And until we can start thinking of our emotions in ways that are less marginalizing of them, until we can start seeing painful emotions as worthy of our attention and time, then considering the idea of being with them becomes too painful and it's hard to trust yourself with it because again, those messages are feel good, feel good, feel good, feel good. Aren't you over it yet? Don't say she wouldn't want you

to be? Sad? La la la la la. Right, Well, the best way to get there, to surrendering to grief really is to have a good guide to help. Whether it's a professional, doesn't have to be a therapist or a counselor. Sometimes therapists or counselors are frankly worse. I've heard horrific stories about therapists and counselors. Horrific stories. I mean I'm a professor in the school of social Work. I train students, but it's an elective class, and so I only train the students who want to be trained.

There are a whole bunch of students who are never trained about grief and loss, and so they're out there sort of propagating the same nonsense of our culture that grief is an abnormal thing, that you have a certain time period and then you have to put it away, which is unhealthy. I will tell you it's patently unhealthy.

All we need to do is look at the rates of substance use in our culture and go to ANNA meeting or an AA meeting and hear the stories of my mom died when I was four, my dad committed suicide when I was twelve. I saw my brother get run over by a car when I was sixteen, and you start to go, oh, there's something bigger happening here. Right So obviously what we're doing right now is not working.

We have to change what we're doing right now, but it's going to require changes in research, changes in pedagogical models, and changes in the philosophical view of the world around painful emotions like grief and grief is not, of course, this monolithic emotional structure I call it a grief umbrella. Underneath this canopy of grief, we have anger and rage and jealousy, despair, anguish, guilt, shame, regret, loneliness. I mean,

there's so many different emotions that grief encompasses. Sometimes connection and compassion and kind of fierce compassion. Even so, there are lots of emotions held under grief. But unless we teach people how to trust themselves with it, and how do they trust themselves with it if what they're feeling is at odds with what the world is telling them they're allowed to feel. Does that make sense? It does

one hundred percent. I think one of the things that a lot of people feel is if I were to surrender to this, if I were to let myself feel this, it would crush me. I would I would never come out. Yes, And so talk about that because I think that's a really legitimate fear, and that fear drives a lot of these avoidant behaviors. It absolutely does. I think some of the fear is endogenous to us, and I think some of it is exogenous to us, And this is the problem.

We have to change the way society looks at it first, because if we don't, then people internalize those we call them negative cognitions. They internalize those negative cognitions around grief, and this is what the research shows, negative cognitions about grief from others is the most salient predictor of poor psychological and physical health outcomes and bereavement. Wow. Yeah, it's a real problem. So we have to change societal views

about grief. For example, if you're walking down the street and all of a sudden, you see fifteen people running away from the place you're walking toward, screaming and yelling, oh no, oh no, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna keep walking that way? You're not, You're going to turn around and go the other way because you're smart, because you're afraid. Because clearly people are afraid of something

down the road. Unless we u well some of that societal fear and help people feel more comfortable being uncomfortable talking about grief, talking about loss, being able to go to someone's house and pour over photographs and videos of their dead children, or their dead parents, or their dead partners or husbands or wives. And unless we can train people to start helping do this then we end up in a situation where people internalize those avoidance messages and

you get some pretty negative outcomes. It's very hard to stay with something that everyone else is afraid of too.

That's really powerful. I think you're right. I mean, because there have been times culturally where there were these long formal grieving periods where you were in mourning for a certain period of time and everyone sort of acknowledge that, and you juxtapose that with today where it's like, right, there's a get over, there's a toxic positivity towards you know, bypassing the crap and getting right to this happy year

over at strong and resilient phase, they push meaning. Actually, one of the studies I did that was one of the least helpful things that therapist did for grievers, because I looked at I was examining sort of helpful therapist techniques, and one of the least helpful was therapist pushing meaning on grieving people like they want. Like in their first, second, third visit, or even sixth or tenth visit, they're pushing, well,

let's find meaning in your loss. Because we're uncomfortable being uncomfortable. We don't like it when we don't have a nice little bow that we can tie around a grief experience. Let me ask a question about that last point, because we do know that, at least I think we do in some of the research I've looked at and talking to people, and this is a different thing when we talk about say trauma or different things. Is that learning to reframe the narrative and find meaning can be a

really powerful tool for me. You know, I was a heroin addict at twenty four and learning to see at some point all the gifts that actually gave me was an important turning point from taking it to being a tragedy into a good thing. And so is the issue really in timing and allowing somebody to get there on their own that I think the last thing you just said, I think does meaning happen? If you ask me, have I found meaning in my loss? Well of course I have.

But at A it's not worth it. Yeah, it's just not worth losing my child over that's an irreparable loss. I never get to have her back in this way, in this form. Ever, Again, there's no recompense for that. And b it has to happen in my time and it has to be my I experience, not someone else pushing it. Right. So people all the time who have loss and find meaning in their loss when they're ready and when it makes sense for them in accord with

their culture or their spiritual practice, for sure. Yeah, but it's a very different thing to find meaning or discover meaning along the way and have it pushed on you. So it would be like if I came home and said to one of my kids, gee, I better join a gym. I'm starting to gain some weight around my rear. They need to shut up, they need to not participate in that conversation. It's a very different thing when I say it about myself than when someone else says it right,

And this is part of the problem, you know. And unfortunately I meet people who have trouble in early grief because they want to get to meaning faster, because that's what they're getting praised for, that's what they're getting pushed toward. And that's a lot of pressure to put on a newly grieving person. So I've seen many sort of very beautiful, well intentioned nonprofits start up in early grief and not

sustain itself because it was too soon. I think that goes also to like, and I couldn't agree more that grief is just this huge, sort of untidy thing that our culture wants to tidy up and package up and tighten up. A great example of that is Elizabeth Coobler

Ross's Stages of Grief. I mean that was never meant to be for grief, as you well know, right, I mean, it's for dying, and yet we have made this like, well, wait, so if I'm at stage five, you know I'm almost over it, So can I just push my way through, you know, whatever the remaining stages are, and then I've greed.

But the ability to turn towards grief, like you say, to surrender, to find the support that will help you do that in a way that is not agenda and it's not toxic positivity, but is supportive in your process is the thing that's going to help us actually get through the grief to a place where we can find compassion, remembrance, connection to love, you know, the ability to put another

foot in front of the other. You put a wonderful quote in one of the chapters of your book, I'm not gonna be able to say his last name, right, Richard Vons von Sacher. Yeah, he's seeking to forget, makes exile all the longer. The secret to redemption lies and remembrance. Yeah, but the remembrance you have to go through the grief. I mean, you can't get to remembrance without going to

the grief. Right If the person you love most in the world has died, every time you remember them, it's going to come with a longing, with a pining for them, with some degree of oh my God, I miss him or her or them. And that's what we miss when we cut ourselves off from feeling grief and feeling grief over and over and over again throughout the rest of our lives, is we cut ourselves off from the capacity to remember, to re again member bring them back into

our hearts. Yeah, yeah, that I have. I was really curious on how you might think about this. So at first with my mom, and in the days and weeks after she passed away, and actually in the first couple of months, I worried that and this is from kind of a Buddhist perspective, I worried that remembering her intentionally and tangibly and repeatedly making that actually an intention and a priority, that that was a form of like clinging to the past or clinging to a person, like an

unwillingness to let go. And so I've since had a bit of a reframe around that. But I'm actually curious how you think about that. I think when it comes to the critique about attachment, I think it's to material things, not to others. Capital Oh, I think the most dangerous thing we could do as humans would be not to attach. I mean, can you imagine a parent not attached to his or her child I mean, or vice versa, a child not attached to his or her parent. I mean,

I were wired to connect. So I guess first we'd have to operationalize attach or cling. And I think those kinds of critiques are meant for things like, don't cling to your material possessions, don't cling to your identity, not to your child. And frankly, if someone said otherwise, I would just have to agree to disagree with them. I

don't care what level teacher they are. I am a parent and I am definitely attached to my children, and I claim that, including my dead child, I am attached to her and I don't want or need that to change. To live a heartful, mindful life, and in fact, I would argue that to not feel attached to her would impede my heartful, mindful life. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, I think the thing that I've come to

really orient around. So it took my mom a week to actually pass away from when she stopped eating to when she died, and I was fortunate enough to be able to be by her bedside for that week, and Eric was there too, and it was a really sacred weak And what kept coming up to me and what I would say to her is, you know, we're always connected in love. We are always connected in love, Like it's okay that you have to go, because our love

is not going to go. We're still connected there. And so when I read another quote you put your book by Merritt Malloy, I think, yeah, beautiful says love doesn't die. People do. So it's a beautiful way to connect with the love that is still there, that was seated by and with my mother, and that love and that grief because now the love will always come with grief. So that love and that grief can be a bridge for

fierce compassion. That's the thing that's the point when you cut yourself off from it, because you've let go of attachments, then you lose that possibility of that love and that grief becoming a force for good in the world when and if you're ready. You see what helps me do my work unapologetically energetic. You know, I work sometimes one hundred hour weeks, and what keeps me going is love and grief. That's what keeps me going. In a way. Grief has so much energy that it can be tireless

at times. Not that I never get tired, but I am never near burnout. I am never near a place where I'm like, oh, I don't wonder this. And I've been doing this for twenty almost twenty eight years, and I'm never at a place where I'm like, I don't think I want to do this. I don't think I can do this. I don't You know, this isn't my calling. It's something that becomes your life in a way that it's more than meaning, it's deeper than meaning. It's a

state of existential being. This that I can't explicate, it's inexplicable. Yeah, I think that idea of love and grief being very tied to each other is really important. I remember several years ago I had to put down one of my dogs. It was a second one I had to do in a year, and the grief was extraordinary, and yet right in the middle of it, even in the middle of the absolute pain, there was this I don't know what

the word is. I don't want to say gratitude, recognition, recognition, I don't know how, like I loved something this much. The level of grief is a pointer at the level of love and a gratitude I guess that's the word I would use, that I was able to be that much in love and connected with another being. And I think this gets a little bit to a point you make often, which is that we're not only one emotion.

We can be multiple emotions. Yeah, I could be deeply heartbroken and feel this great love in the same moment. They feel contradictory to talk about, but the experience wasn't contradictory. It was very whole right right, absolutely. But because we live in a well, a lot of cultures are like this where human beings tend to be dichotomous. If you're this, then you can't be this, So grief and joy can't

exist in the same space. And then you know, people meet me and they see that I can cry and be joyful at the same time, and they're like, oh, that's possible. And that's what I mean by the pedagogical system has to really change because we have to model this for people. We have to show them that grief. You don't have to disavow grief in order to experience joy again, even if it's a different kind of joy than you were able to have before the person you

love most in the world died. You can still have joy and be grieving at the same time. And in fact, I would say, when the bottom falls out, the top pops open. It gets wider. Right, when you let the bottom drop, the top has no top. And that's the thing, you know, this full range of emotional capacity to which we should have access, but we constrain ourselves because if we bring the bottom up, we simultaneously bring the top down. And so we've got this very small, manageable world of emotions.

And that's what we're all about in the West is managing emotions, and of course certainly managing the quote bad emotions. Right. My experience in doing this work for more than a quarter of a century is with support, we let the bottom drop out and the top does open, maybe not right away, and maybe it takes practice. Maybe it takes time and love and care and nurturance and warmth and tenderness from others for sure, but it does happen for most people. Yeah. We expand our capacity to feel in

both directions, right, correct? Yeah? Yeah, I love the way you just frame that up that when the bottom drops out, the top flies open, close, open, pops open. Yeah. A lot of people with grief are told that they have depression. Yeah. My question is is there a point where that becomes true? Narrowing the umbrella of grief down to extraordinarily sadness or apathy or antedonia or exhaustion. If that goes on unabated, at what point do you start thinking that other things

might be at work? Do you? I'm kind of curious how you think about that. Well, I try and stay in my lane, which is traumatic grief. I will tell you that there has never been, in more than twenty five years an occasion where I've worked with a grieving person and I was like, oh, this is not grief, this is depression. Everything can be traced back. Even people I know professionally and I meet them and they say

that they have clinical capital D depression. And then I talk to them and they're like, yeah, my mom died when I was six, and I go, I'm sorry. Given who I am, I'm always going to look at it through that lens. What was your kind of support? And Oh, your dad remarried and you had a stepmother. What was your relationship with her? Oh? She was cold to you and detached. And then it all makes sense and I go, gosh, just about everything I see can be traced back to grief,

particularly when traumatic. So there's not been an occasion where I have questioned whether or not it was grief. When someone has lost, you know, a child or a partner to suicide or homicide, or a parent in a traumatic way, I stay in my lane. But there's never an occasion where it is that in the work that we do. I think this is a great example. You know, I've been a member of twelve step programs in the past, and what you say about we know that trauma of

any sort increases the likelihood of addiction. I mean, that's an extraordinarily well verified piece of data, right, and traumatic grief is one of those forms. But there's a world of difference between being able to recognize, Oh, I had

this traumatic event when I was sick. You know, I lost my mother, I lost my brother, right, and that was thirty five years ago, and I am now mired in what looks very much like a depression or chronic low mood or how would you if someone came to you and said, I know this is what it is. It's unprocessed grief. Sure, but when I think about it, I don't really feel anything right, Like that feeling has

kind of just been papered over. Really well, how do you think about getting back into that and healing that in a way if it's so much later, it's something I do every week. Okay. I worked with a woman, for example, whose little girl who was six, died of cancer, and that was in seventy one, I think, nineteen seventy one.

And she has dealt with substances and inpatient facilities and psychiatric drugs and a host of other things, multiple relationships, living in fifteen different states, you know, chaos, right, anything to keep going, so I don't actually have to be still and deal with what's going on, right, and we peel back the layers and we get to it. We do the work. Obviously, they're seeking me out. Yeah right, And if you're seeking me out, you know, I'm going to get in there. I'm going to climb right into

the wound and we're going to do the work. Like I don't mess around. I say, let's talk about it, you know, And so we revisit all of that trauma. And despite what people think, it's never in a detached way. I'm not sure. If it's the environment, the animals, something about their relationship with me, I'm not sure. But people open up quite easily to me and go back to that place. Sometimes it feels like yesterday. For me. Objectively, I'm like, wow, this is very emotionally intense, and it

happens very very quickly. It's not like I have to dig. It's like it's right there. So the answer to your question is probably not as interesting as it might be. People just seem to open to me and open to the space. It's not just me either. We have six other counselors who work here now, and it's the same for all of them in their experiences with our patients here.

I think so much of it is just people being able to make that connection between Gosh, I lost my child back in sixty eight or seventy one or eighty five, and I never talked to anybody about it because I was told not to talk to anybody about it, implicitly or explicitly, And so I buried it underneath all of these other things, drugs or alcohol, pornography, gambling, you know, shopping, food, you name it. There's no shortage of distractions. It's buried underneath all of this, and I know I need to

do the work. I mean, I worked with a woman who was in her eighties who had a terminal illness and her daughter died many many years earlier. When she came to me, she's like, she believed in reincarnation, and she's like, I don't want to die not having done this work. Okay, well let's do the work then. Yeah. Yeah. The writer at and Porter said I may have it in bearing the Inbearable. I can't remember, but she said, the past is never where we think we left it.

And I have found that to be one of the most profound truths in doing this work ever. Wow, that's well said. That sure is. I want to pivot to a framework that you present in your book that I found incredibly useful. So there's an actual kind of I don't know image or chart or section where you visually illustrate this in your book, but it's this idea of increasing our ability to cope versus trying to lower the intensity of grief. I just found it so useful because

I think so many at least myself. Let me just speak in terms of what I know. For me, it's easy to focus on, like how do I make that feeling less intense? Because that is scary to your earlier points. It's like, well, that's going to inevitably make it stronger, right, Like, we can't pursue it, repressing it and have it actually go away. And so it's very hard to change and

impossible to change the intensity of a feeling. But we can increase our ability, capability, skillfulness, ability to cope, which increases our agency and also impacts our experience with the intensity inevitably of that emotion, in other words, of form more capable and skilled and confident, right right, And that's a lever we can pull. So would you mind sharing a bit about that framework? Sure, it's just a framework

that I started applying to myself. My daughter's been dead for twenty eight and a half years, So what I had noticed in the beginning was that I was trying to make the feelings go away, and the more I did that, the more intense they got, the more clever they got, they disguised as other things. I was exhausted from all the machinations I was going through trying not to feel what I felt. So then I started to notice that if I made space for what I was feeling.

In particular, I had a great deal of guilt. Guilt was the one thing that I dealt with a lot. I felt very responsible for my daughter's death. Even by all technical terms, I wasn't. It's quite normal for parents to have a sense of responsibility for their children's well being. And guilt would just bring me to my knees. It would drop me at any given point during the day.

It would knock on my door in my mind, heart, in my cheetah, and it would say, hey, guilt is here, you know, loud and proud, and I would have to figure out how to push it away or how to make space for it. So when I started making space for it, what I noticed was my tolerance started to increase, right, And so it's a little like I took a ten pound weight, and I lifted it over and over every day. I lifted that weight of guilt over and over and

over again. And at the end of a month, I started to notice it wasn't as hard to lift anymore, and I could carry it better with more ease and more grace. And I started to learn techniques to carry it better. Oh, if I put the weight this way, it's a little bit easier for me to carry it. And I started to notice that it wasn't the weight of the guilt that changed, it was me that changed. So the guilt was still there, but I wasn't dropping to my knees anymore. I was like, Oh, okay, guilt,

come on in, have a seat. Let's have a cup of tea together, you know, let's talk. What do you want to tell me about what I did wrong today? Yes, I hear you. Absolutely, yes, I would do things differently. Absolutely, I would have had a different doctor. Absolutely I would have pushed harder for more tests. Absolutely I would have done things differently. I'm so sorry I didn't. Please forgive me. I would give my life for you, and I would talk to my daughter in my head. And then I

noticed that it wasn't that guilt didn't come. It was that guilt came, and I was like, okay, come on in. I was less paralyzed and overwhelmed by the emotion. It didn't wield power over me the way it did before. And so twenty eight and a half years later, I still feel guilty. It's not like guilt is gone. I still feel guilty. I'm like, yeah, I know guilt. We know each other. We're very familiar with each other. I

know all of guilt's little messages. I know some of guilt's stories, and I know some are true and some aren't true. And we see each other and we have a mutually respectful relationship. Does that make sense? It makes sense beautifully. I love the analogy of a weight because that's perfect analogy. It's exactly what it's like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So you build the emotional and psychological muscle to carry the emotions of grief. Yeah. The more we avoid, we're

not practicing, we're not lifting, we're not building. You know, when we avoid, when we let go. So one of the things I say for people who are like mindfulness people, and they like the terminology let go, I go. What if instead of let go, we say let move because let move implies that it might come back. Let it move, Just let it move, and it'll move. It doesn't mean it has to go away, but it moves through you. And that's what an emotion is. An emotion is in ocean.

It's moving through us. It's neither good nor bad. It's just a movement. That was one of the most liberating experiences that I ever had and one of the most liberating pieces of wisdom to put into practice. It's transformational. Thank you. So you talk about that idea of their being ways to carry it better, and we've talked a little bit about being just willing to face it right, being willing to give it space to come in and

be there. So that's one. What are some other things that people can do that you found helpful to increase their ability to cope or to carry it? Makes me think of a line by another grief person, Megan Divine. I'm sure you're familiar with her work, maybe not, but she wrote a book called It's Okay that You're Not Okay. There's a line in there. Some things can't be fixed, they can only be carried, you know, which I love that idea. So what are some ways that we can

learn to carry better besides not turning away. Yeah, I mean I've been talking about you know, this must analogy for twenty five years and to me it's that. But we can't build the muscle, we can't learn how to carry it. We can't build the emotional muscle we need to carry it if other people are standing on our weights, if other people are barriers to our capacity to learn, Which is why one of the first questions I ask

people when I meet with them is what's your social support? Like, who do you have who you trust with your grief, who you trust with your heart? Do you have a safe place to land? Do you have others who treat you and your grief tenderly? And it's often quite disappointing the answers I hear. So I did a study with a team and we looked at good social support in grief and we ask the experts, So, who are the experts in what good social support is? And that's grievers, right.

We talk about social support all the time and research, but very rarely do we give grievers the capacity to find the meeting. So what is good grief support? So one of the things that we found we looked at actions and actors actions. Emotional support one hundred percent was the most important kind of support, emotional support. And then we asked who are the best providers. We asked about therapist counselors, social workers, medical staff. We asked about family, friends, colleagues.

We asked about religious community, spiritual communities. We asked about so many different human groups, and then we asked about pets and animals, and pets and animals outperformed every human group by a significant number, overwhelmingly significant number. I think family and friends came in at under forty percent satisfaction and animals and pets came in at eighty nine percent satisfaction.

This is a problem. It's incredibly hard to build the emotional muscle and develop the skills we need to carry this grief, to carry the burden of this loss for the rest of our lives. If people are standing in our way with their platitudes, with their psychological violence, with their well intended but often landing quite sharply words of comfort, like God needed an angel to tend his garden. It's just going to say that one. That's funny, you picked it. Yes,

God must have needed another angel. He just you know, yeah, right, And this is the problem. It's not just the responsibility of the grieving person. It is the responsibility of us as a society to basically be like a dog, sit and stay. And very few of us know how to actually do that, especially when confronted with the kind of grief that I see here, which at times be very violent, very traumatic. The stories are hard to bear if you haven't done your own work. Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean

your book. It's a difficult book to read from that perspective, the stories. When Jenny's mom passed, we went to the funeral home, and very early in her diagnosis, she and I went and we made all her arrangements, which was a gift that she gave us. But I remember being at the funeral home in Jenny and I remarked on this like, this is difficult enough when everything is set up and we've known it's come in and we've been

thinking about it for years. I cannot imagine walking in here three days after somebody died that I just did not expect it was I mean, it just hit me in that place. There was some resonance that maybe I'm not capable of feeling just in my day to day life as much it brought me face to face with like how crippling that sort of traumatic grief must be.

And you point to something important here, which is that a lot of this way that we deal with grieving people is well intentioned but doesn't work and is not effective. So I'm wondering if you could share besides sit and stay, what we as people can do and how do people increase their tacity to be with this because very often it's not on my radar to increase my capacity to be with traumatic grief until somebody very close to me has traumatic grief and then all of a sudden, I'm

out of my depth very quickly. I've got kindergarten level skills and i just got enrolled in a PhD program, right right? And so what can people do to deepen their ability to help someone and to stay and deal with it themselves emotionally when they're sort of brought face to face with this so suddenly and unexpectedly. Yeah, well, I mean the first thing is we all need to be doing our own work around even if it's not necessarily traumatic grief, but around painful emotions that we have. Sure,

we have to be able to stay with them. So we have to stop the distractions. We have to stop the drugs and alcohol. We have to stop the pathological gambling, the shopping, the consumerism. We have to learn how to stay with uncomfortable feelings. And this is very, very hard in a culture that teaches us not to. We promote it. I mean, you can't have a good time going to Las Vegas unless you're drinking, right, I mean there's commercials everywhere.

There's the promotion of substances and distractions everywhere we go. It's vast. I think we need an overhaul. I don't know how to make that happen, but it would probably be prudent given the numbers of people who die from these kinds of things every single day. And so I personally think the first thing we need to do as a society is teach emotional intelligence in K through twelve.

I think we need to teach emotional tolerance and emotional equanimity and teach children to feel and express painful emotions and not get over them, not reframe them, not change them. But yeah, I'm really really feeling sad. Yeah you're sad. Yeah, can we draw sad and leave it? Not Oh, well, you're sad. Can we replace it without happy thought? CBT doesn't work for emotional intelligence. It's just trying to replace It.

Might work when you're in kindergarten and you're sad because you didn't get to sit next to your best friend, but it's not teaching them to prepare for life's vague losses. So if we start teaching emotional intelligence at a young age and start integrating this, I think we'll have a new sort of generation of upcoming emotional geniuses, which is what we need really right. And then I think we need to do our own work as adults, which means

again not distracting, talking, reading, learning, exploring. I think there's an onus of responsibility on each of us that, for example, if I have a friend and that friend happens to belong to a native tribe, and I love my friend, I have a duty to understand the effects of mass genocide intergenerationally, and so I'm going to read about it, which I do, And I'm going to read about the effects of mass genocide and how those effects reverberate through generation,

through multiple generations, and I'm going to understand, and I'm going to ask questions and I'm going to try to support in whatever way that I can for my friend. And so we have a duty to one another. I think it's Ramdas who said we're all just walking each other home. We have a duty to walk each other home in a compassionate and tender way. Who was it, I think Lawrence Durrell who said within each of us is a person screaming at the lack of tenderness in

the world. And I think we have a duty to bring more tenderness to the world, not just to other humans, but also to animals, our animal friends and kin, and to the planet. We need to walk more tenderly on this planet too. I mean there's a lot. I don't know. That's a big question, Eric, I got a whole long list. I can write a dissertation about the ship that needs to change for us to be better. On my website, I have a lot of free information, a lot of

free resources. There are free books that people can download and read and learn and grow. There are lots of psycho educational tools. We can start there. How about that? Yeah, so we'll link to that in the show notes. Tell me if I'm off here, but to me, one of the things we can learn about. Why animals do such a great job of being a support is that they offer non judgmental presence, that feeling of someone sitting with you, not doing anything other than being right in it with you. Right, right,

that's the most supportive. But we feel like it's not enough, or we feel like we have to do more, but it's just not being alone in your difficult mess. That right is the most helpful. Well, it's almost like you read my research, because the next question we asked was why are animals doing such a good job? And there were four themes that came out of the qualitative data, and one of them was their presence being non judgmental.

They just show up when you're crying. They don't hand you a tissue and tell you to clean it up. They don't take you out for a drink to change how you feel. They'll sit with you and put their head on your lap, or for some people that they talked about, their horses just stand ending with them. The reason we as humans feel like it's not enough is because we're encumbered by a neo cortex, and these animals are not encumbered by that. Right, these animals are just

going on instinct. They're just leading with their hearts and it is the perfect thing. That's incredible. Not to put you on the spot. I'm just curious about the other three. Oh, the other three. So caretaking role was one of them. That people their animals gave them reason to get up in the morning, ah and take care. Interesting that the animals were a memorial to their deceased person, so the animals felt like a connection to their person who died. And there was one more. Sorry it's been a while

since I published it. There were four. No, again, I didn't want to put you on the spot. That's okay, but you can look at it. It's an open access study. So if you just google my name and good Grief Support, it should pull up the open access study. I will be doing that. That's wonderful. I have one more question, but I also don't want to be sensitive to time,

like five minutes. Yeah, sure, okay, okay. Well, I just was struck by the number of uncanny coincidences in your book about stories about you coming across people name Cheyenne or the dog Mags in the driveway with the person named Shyanne, and like Elizabeth Coogler Ross and how she said that when you remembered her, she would be there

and the shooting star. So I mean, if it's just named a couple, but you know, feel free to speak to one and describe it to us if you feel like it, or maybe just the thing I'm curious about is like, what do you make all that mean? I know, where are these people we love and are they really coming back to us? And it's someone that just lost her mom. I crave the answer to be yes. But you know, what do you make of it? You know,

it's so hard for me. You know, I'm a scientist and I do statistical analyzes, and it's very hard to with certainty quantify what these experiences mean. I can only tell you what they feel like they mean in the moment, and what they feel like they mean in the moment is holy shit. Right. Then some time passes, right, and then I start going, oh, maybe it was just a coincidence. But then I go back to what that feeling was,

and I'm like, that couldn't be a coincidence. The statistical probability of something like that happening, Like the story of Mag's in the book. I literally when he said his name, those of you who haven't read it. It's worth it just to read that story. When he said that, I literally like looked around. I thought I was being punked. I thought I was like, I was like, there might just being set up here. What is I dropped the book.

I put the book down, and the Eric was in the other room, and I was like, oh my god. And I made the guy show me his driver's license because I was like, there's no way. I took a picture of his driver's license. Wow. I don't know. Honestly, I don't know what it means, but I know what he feels like it means. And in that moment, I just put my hands on my heart and I say thank you. I don't know what the hell this means, but thank you. It just feels really power full, like

otherworldly powerful. And I don't know what else to say about it. And I don't know how to even describe it. I mean, I've had interactions with animals, wild animals that are like I don't know what this means, Like people have witnessed it and they're like, what's going on? And I'm like I have no idea, Like what's going on? I don't know how this is happening or why this

is happening, But it's happening. So I just try to take it in in the moment and try not to hyper analyze it too much, which as hard as a scientist, but I try hard not to. I would like to think that it is an indication of some kind of connection. Yeah, most always, most days, I think it has to be. I have not had the amount of time since my mom passed to have a lot of these, but I've had a couple, and you're right, in the moment, it has struck me as just thank you and wow, and

it's like a deep knowing. I can't describe it more than that, but it's like this deep knowing of that was a wow, like wow and thank you, and as my mind tries to like then in the day's past, like make it neat and tidy and whatever, I just really want to hold some space for the inevitable mystery that still exists, and not knowing, just leave it it. Not knowing. I will say, this is probably going to be underwhelming as I describe it, but in the moment,

it was a while for me. So I told you my mom's name was Ogi, short for Olga, which is a name I don't come across every day, Olga. And so she passed away in the early morning of a Friday morning, and later that morning, don't know, ten or eleven o'clock, my best friend from growing up came over, you know, just to kind of be with me. And she was like another daughter to my mom. We grew up in each other's households. My mom loved her. She loved my mom. So we were talking about the hours

leading up to and when my mom passed. We were just talking about my mom and my friend Mary Anne looks at her phone and she was like, oh, my gosh, I said what she was like, I just got a text from someone named Olga. I just got a text from Olga. And it was a woman who was like in her phone but no one she'd ever texted with before. But she was in her phone because she was like the mother of a soccer player on her daughter's team

from some group chat. It was just like obscure. And as we were talking about my mom, I mean, it was one of those moments. And then I had a couple of those in the days after she died, and it just felt like a wink or something from my mom being like, I'm still here in part of this conversation, I can hear you, and I'm starting to get into a land where i can't substantiate any of that. But it felt special and I appreciate it, but it felt

like it. So that's what it is. Yeah, I mean, And what a beautiful thing, What a beautiful moment of timing, you know, whatever had to happen for that to occur in that moment. Yes, what a confluence, What a beautiful gift. And also how much you miss her? Right, yes, so much?

Yea makes me think of a Zen phrase. Not knowing is most intimate indeed, and what you guys are describing her intimate moments, not being able to explain it, not having to explain it is a way of staying with the intimacy of it, yeah, versus you know, pondering what

does it actually mean? Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Well that's a beautiful place maybe to wrap up, But just to say, in deep gratitude for this conversation, for your work and for all that you do out in the world, I'm gratefully you've stayed in your grief and in your love and in the work that you do. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to this conversation. It's been lovely to meet you both. Thank you, Thank you for introducing me to Ogie. Oh God, thank you for saying that, Yeah,

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