Episode 356: Navigating the Labyrinth of Grief Emotions

Hello everyone. This is Rebecca Green for the Wine Inclusa podcast, and I am super excited today because I get to speak with the lovely Edie Nathan. Edie, thank you so much for doing this with me today.

Oh, I, I'm so happy to be here, Rebecca.

So let me tell you a little bit about her. She has her MA, her LCSWR, her CST. She's an author, a public speaker, a licensed therapist, foremost authority on grief and trauma. She is an AASECT-certified sex therapist, hypnotherapist, and certified EMDR practitioner with more than 20 years of experience. Edie earned degrees from New York University and Fordham University with postgraduate training at the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy. She practices in New York City and holy moly, Edie, that is a lot that you do. That's a lot. That's a lot of goodness there.

Well, it's, it's been a lot of years in the making, so yeah. Yeah.

I'm like, oh my goodness. I'm like, I've never heard of an AASECT certified sex therapist.

Yeah. And there aren't, considering how many therapists there are, aren't a whole lot of us out there. 1,200, 1,500. That's about it.

Yes.

And but to become certified, it's an arduous 2-year process just for the certification alone. And before Prior to that, you have to do a, a bunch of learning and training and well worth it.

I'm already impressed with you. Very impressed with you. And I would love— you're hearing the word sex, everybody listening. So I'm sure you want me to jump into that. We're gonna do that. I think next time we're gonna talk about grief today. And it's because I have heard so many mothers. We mostly have mom listeners and I've heard so many of them struggling with grief. And I really think Edie is gonna help you today. And I wanna start with asking you, can you share a little bit with us about your journey, about becoming a therapist specializing in grief, trauma, and sexual health? How did you get there?

No one path is straight.

It's true. Yes.

So the path, like grief, is nonlinear. It comes at you. It came at me from many different directions. It was certainly the loss of my partner when I was 27 and realizing that loss. There was no one to go to. There was no one to speak to because the messaging I got, the groups I went to filled with more women than men, the messaging was, you're young, you'll find someone else. And that was not the message I needed to hear.

That's what they were telling you. Yes.

That didn't help my process or my grief, or even the idea that it could be honored, that it was worthy of being honored, addressed, and that my pain, even though we'd only been together for 2 years, was not significant for me. And yes, if you've been married to someone for 50 years, that's a different kind of loss. And that is their loss. I had an opportunity. It was a very— I was very blessed to go to an intensive weekend with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. Actually, it was a week. And she really, she was the figure around grief and around loss. The thing is that though her workshop for that week was incredible and I felt alive in a way that I hadn't felt alive in a long time, Her 5 stages were really about people who were dying and the stages that they were going through dying, not people who were living with loss. And so though I felt like I was dying and I wanted to go into my own denial, I wasn't dying. My partner had died. And I realized, okay, let me go back to school. Let me think about how I'm going to create a new lens around loss. And it started with creativity and the use of theater and the use of finding other ways to notice, understand how the complexities of grief can not only touch the brain, but touches the whole organism of the body. And that it's not just what I'm thinking, it's also what I am externally and internally feeling within my body. And it was finding a way to have those two elements, the mindfulness, the psyche, talk to the body, to talk to the parts that love to play hide and seek. So I realized that I wasn't gonna get through it, and I realized that I needed to actually find a whole different vernacular around it. And when I, I also had terrible anxiety, and the anxiety occurred before the, the loss, long before the loss. What I learned about anxiety and what anxiety taught me, and I'm telling this to your audience because part of grief can often be when you're clobbered with feelings of anxiety that are so overwhelming and you feel like you've lost your, yourself and you don't wanna go outside, you don't wanna socialize. And I realized, ah, the more I try to push it down, the more I try to ignore it, the more I try to make it not real, the bigger it got.

Yeah.

And it would just want to clobber me and it got bigger and bigger until I didn't have a 500-pound gorilla in the room. I had a 5,000-pound gorilla in the room. and it was called anxiety. And that anxiety and the 5,000-pound gorilla I did not love, I realized I had to stop avoiding it. I had to partner with it. Hmm. And it was the understanding of I need to partner with this anxiety that helped me then move that partnership into grief. Let me partner with my grief, something that's going to be with me. Paul's been gone quite some time now, and what I can tell you is I have his Timex watch, and it's one of those windable watches, and I can still wind it and it still ticks. And that is my dance with him, and it just doesn't impact me the way it did in its fragile ways in the first 2 or 3 or 4 years. After that, I was able to really incorporate it as a dance. And sometimes the dance is rugged and sometimes it's, I'm swinging and sometimes it's just, we can walk side by side.

I didn't expect to cry during this podcast.

So I am accused of this all the time.

I'm like internally telling myself to pull it together. So partnering, I'm listening to you describe partnering with the anxiety and partnering with the grief. Are you meaning accepting? Can you tell us what partnering looks like?

Okay. There's a lot of languaging that we use that was used with me that I began to play around with. Okay. So for you and for your listening audience, there's no right or wrong here. It is simply, I, for my own legitimacy in looking at grief and how I have my lens, has been when someone said, you'll accept it. I felt crushed. I don't want to accept. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. And I understand that acceptance can be, I accept that this happened. I'm not in denial anymore. And that the counter to denial is perhaps this idea of acceptance. But it was like, I don't accept this. It doesn't feel good. I hate it. Let me think of how else I can communicate what this experience is, that as I'm dancing with this partner— and the word integration came into being, and it's not my word, it's been a word, it's a word that's around for forever. Yet the idea of the spirit of integration, the idea that this loss is going to be integrated into my being, into my personal identity, into my sexual identity, And yet I, I use the loss to push forward the idea of survival and of learning from Paul and learning from those losses, because there were many. It wasn't just Paul. Learning from those losses and taking what is learned to open up new stories and new paths.

Mm, that's beautiful.

And that no matter where I am, there he is. And I can have other relationships. I have had other relationships. I'm married. I've been together with my now husband for 23 years. I talk freely about Paul with my husband, not ad nauseam, not all of the time, but perhaps on the day of Paul's death, or perhaps if I'm feeling a certain I've had a dream and I might wanna share it. To me, it's like a visitation. Hmm. Instead of being shocked by it, it's, oh, thank you. And maybe there's something I need to be looking at from that time long ago. And so to think that it's not about forgetting our loved ones or putting them into a place, or it's about finding your placeholders for them.

And my husband's gonna love you because he talks to me about words. He's very into word choices. And what you're teaching me, again, see, I'm supposed to learn this lesson because it keeps coming up, is how important our word choices are to how we're feeling.

Yeah.

And you're choosing the words so carefully of what fits better for you.

That's right.

Yeah. I, I love that. And I'm so curious. I have to ask you. So I have learned, I'm a social worker. We've all learned of the 5 stages of grief. I wanna know what your 11 phases of grief are because I am clueless about this.

So the 11 phases really take you through the labyrinth of grief. And a labyrinth, uh, it actually has two parts, right? It has the meander where you're meandering and you're just going until you get to your center core. And it has the maze, which is like you start, oh, there's a dead end. You turn around, you try to find another path that will not be a dead end until until you get to a dead end. And I see grief as having— as being in that labyrinth energy, if you will. And the 11 phases are part of that labyrinth that I start with what I call the emotional armor phase. And I use phase instead of stages because phases move in and out. I see a stage as having a very specific beginning, middle, and end. And I, I just don't see grief as having a, a very succinct beginning, middle, and end. There might be a very specific beginning, and this was the point that forever changed you, and that's the hero's journey. Something happens that forever changes you, yet, yet it changes you, and then there's always this revisitation of what's next to change me. So the emotional armor phase is that first phase that probably most people who are meeting their grief for the first time or for the first time, once again, because it's new and there's a newness to it based on how much one grows and learns about themselves and ages and the age that one was at the time of that loss, that death. So the emotional armor phase includes the denial and the numbness and the out of control sometimes behavior. It also includes just a, a protest and a despair that I see the emotional armor phase. It is an armoring and it allows people a respite. From the journey of grief. It's almost a mandatory place, not for all, but for many. It is also the place that when people are going through the many different phases of their grief, including anxiety, including anger and rage, including forgiveness and grace, that when they go through or they meet those different phases, they may need to take a timeout and that timeout go— takes them back to the emotional armor phase.

Oh my goodness. This is a hard topic. I give you so much credit, your expertise, you're willing to talk about it. I can't even believe all the feelings that I'm even having listening to you talk about grief. It's not an easy thing.

Now, so what are the feelings you're having?

Oh my gosh. I never get anxious about podcasts. I never have any anxiety, and I would definitely say anxiety, unease. It's definitely something that I resist.

Okay, so I'm not being a therapist here, just, just curious. Okay.

Yeah.

And where is it in your body?

Oh, that is an excellent question. I'm gonna say my stomach.

Okay. So not surprising, the gut holds a lot of emotion. And so for any of, of you all out there that have gut issues, anxiety and grief can rest right there.

Yeah.

Uh, and so smart. What would happen when there's anxiety, there's usually anger. And when the anger can get expressed, the anxiety often gets— dissipates. It dissipates. So there's fear. Yes. This is scary stuff.

Yes.

And we, some of us, don't want to No grief. We'll avoid it at all costs.

Yeah, stay away.

And yet, you know what's funny, Rebecca, is the moment we were born, we experience it. The moment we're born and we're taken, we come into the world and maybe into bright lights. We're leaving the darkness and the warmth of the womb, and that leave-taking of that safe environment is our first experience with loss.

Yeah, we've all experienced loss, some of us more than others.

That's right.

I had an interesting question that I asked my friend that I want to talk to you about, because you say, is grief something you get over? And is it linear? And I want to talk about that because I said to her, I'm like, okay, you lost your mother a year ago. The one-year anniversary is just like humongous to, to me, to her. And I'm like, are you doing better, the same, or worse? And she said worse. And I was like, it was that moment that I realized grief is not linear. Like I had maybe thought it was.

Oh yeah.

So can we talk about that?

Sure. So the year, the first year. Is the year of firsts, which means you're like an infant experience every day for the very first time without your loved one. And you don't know what that day is going to feel like, how you're going to interpret your own experience of the day, or if you see a mother and child walking down the street or you have a fight with your partner or your kids, And if you've lost a parent or you've lost a partner, and it's different for everyone, or lost a child, and that's really different. And depending on— there are so many variables. If the loss is a shock and came out of nowhere and was unexpected versus a loss that you had some time you knew you had a little bit of time to say goodbye or not, to plan or not. And you'd be surprised, or maybe not, how many people, even knowing that there's a terminal illness, how often plans are not made and people get stuck. And so the first year is a year of firsts, and I'm not surprised your friend said, I'm worse, because the real work doesn't begin until the second year, most likely, because that first year, you're, you're— there's shock, there's numbness, there's anxiety, there's anger, there's despair, there's depression. And not everyone is going to experience all of the different phases. There may be phases that one lands more than in other phases, but they can also layer. And there's a layering effect of these phases so that depression all mixed into one and it, it feels like your brain is going haywire. There's also a, almost a dissociative factor, and it doesn't mean that you've had trauma in your life. And it, it can feel like a traumatic imprint when the loss comes out of nowhere and the shock. Gets replayed over and over again. There's no timeline also. And we wanna say, it's a year, aren't you better? And it's no, I'm worse. No, because it's not that year. It's actually, okay, so now it, it's almost as if what the one-year marker does is it's, it elucidates for the person who is grieving the loss that this is real.

20 years later, my mother lost her mother 20 years ago, my grandmother. 20 years later, the feelings, I'm not, I'm gonna tell you they're easier, but I still see how hard it is for her in particular to have lost your mother 20 years ago. I don't know that it's something you ever get over.

That's why, or through, and maybe the goal is not to get over, maybe the goal is not to get through. Perhaps the goal is let me connect with the part of that mother or that father or that partner or that child who continues to live within me. Let me tell stories. Let me share stories. It doesn't mean that I'm— the grief is overwhelming. It means that, that I don't wanna get over it because I have stories and I wanna continue to tell those stories and I wanna laugh. Honor my, my mom. I lost her 20, 23 years ago, 24 years ago. And we still tell stories of her. My, she was an Oh, she dressed to the nines and her makeup and that woman just looked great no matter what. And yet she could harness enough humor about herself that one day at a family pool outing, she walked into the pool with the grandchildren fully dressed. And we can still tell that story and we can laugh that this woman who dressed to the nines, jewelry, makeup done, walked into a pool completely dressed.

That's amazing. I love her already.

That's right.

I never met her. I think she's awesome.

I dance with her.

Oh, I love your language. You have more language that we're gonna talk about. So you have a book, and I want you to tell everyone about your book. And you mentioned this term disenfranchised grief. So tell us about your book and this term.

Okay, so the book, the title of the book is It's Grief: A Dance of Self-Discovery Through Trauma and Loss.

Oh, beautiful.

And the reason it's trauma and loss is, is because the book is not just about the loss of a loved one. It is also about the losses we incur in our lives. And it also touches upon— and, and this is a very sensitive topic— touches upon the notion that sometimes when a partner is lost, that the surviving partner is not always sad but relieved. And we never think about it in those terms. Maybe there was abuse, Maybe there was unhappiness, and because of faith, a faith-based marriage, there was not going to be a separation or divorce. And instead of assuming someone is unhappy, or, or, and, and no one is going— they're going to act as there's sadness because that's the expectation. And hopefully, if there's anybody out there who's had this experience I just want you to know I see you. Mm-hmm.

And we don't talk about that part. No. And I see two different parts to it in one scenario, because if you're taking care of someone every day and you're seeing them suffer, you are glad they're not suffering anymore. And you also almost don't know what to do with yourself because you were taking— there's just, it's so complicated.

That's right. It is, it is. And there is a relief factor, and there also is this sense of being in the role of the caretaker, which is both a role that we enter into oftentimes when we're caring for a loved one. It is also an archetypal role which has a shadow side, which might be that the shadow of the caretaker is So a caretaker may be a caretaker because it makes them feel needed. And without that role, they don't feel like they belong anywhere.

Yes.

And that is the shadow part of any of the archetypes. An archetype is a symbol that we all relate to and is common to all of us. So that when I say mother, you know what mother is to you. And it doesn't matter what language I'm speaking. If I say mom, mama, maman, You will know, have an image of that person, that mother. And that is an archetype, a symbol that goes beyond language, a symbol that goes beyond one's ethnicity or wealth and is understandable by all. Ah, definitely. Now, disenfranchised grief is not my term. This brilliant man by the name of Ken Doka, D-O-K-A, KA, created this framework and it was brilliant, truly brilliant. Disenfranchised grief is a grief that is felt by people as a deep grief, yet is not seen societally by others as a grief that is worthy of the response of grief or the responses to loss. For example, job loss or a house loss or the loss of a pet. People grieve these, and depending on their backgrounds, the depths— the depth of that grief will be different for all. It's still a grief reaction or response, and too often those grief responses are either diminished or poo-pooed. Mm.

That's not good. And I see that the most with pets. And as a pet owner, I mean, they're my babies.

Yes.

Like if you're a pet owner, you, you might understand it. And if you're not a pet owner, you might get less. Right.

And you can get another pet. The disposable pet. Really?

Oh boy. Yeah. I have seen that many times. I did not know that term. So thank you for educating us.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I hope to meet him one day. He's rather brilliant.

And you have more cool stuff that I want to learn. What is big G and little g grief?

Ah, yeah. So the big G's and the little g's. Interestingly, I just covered the what might be considered little g's, and it's going to depend on what one's experiences have been with grief in their lives and how they've dealt with those losses. So a little g could be job loss, but it could also be a big G, and it could be a big G if you've had a lot of job losses and the job losses also combine with loss of a house and loss of one's personal identity, loss of a partnership. And it might all work together that the partnership breaks up because of the job loss, creates the loss of the house, and it ends up being a lot of little losses that create the big G kind of loss, however, Those big Gs are loss of a partner, loss of a child, loss of one's home. Survivors of war, hostages experience tremendous grief. And it is, they experience a loss of self, a loss of sometimes personal and sexual identities. So those are big G kinds of losses that intermingle at times with also that traumatic imprint, which is like a slap that leaves a red mark, and the red mark always remains, and you are reminded of that trauma, and that trauma has created an imprint that isn't forgotten. The idea is how to incorporate it, how to integrate, how to find grace.

And you're very fascinating because I know you talk about The Wizard of Oz in your book.

Oh, I do. Yeah.

Can you tell us about this?

Sure. So The Wizard of Oz is a theme of mine. It will also be the closing for the second book and probably the beginning of a third book. Excuse me. The Wizard of Oz is, it is the true hero's journey. So Joseph Campbell wrote a book called The Hero's Journey, and we see the hero's journey in many of the films and the heroic stories that we read about or that we see on film. And The Wizard of Oz is a true hero's journey, and the hero's journey is that something happens that forever changes someone. So in this case, in Dorothy's case, we know that she loses consciousness and she ends up in a whirlwind and ends up in a new land. Metaphorically, that land is really that landscape, and that land and all of the people represented are the tasks that she is invited to endure and conquer within herself so that she can perhaps reach a certain maturity to move into her next phase. There is a sense though of a loss of the child within to become the woman, and grief is very much like that ever-changing experience of what we've lost, how we tender that loss, how we partner and dance with that loss, and how we take metaphorically the yellow brick road with all of its different turns and experiences and tasks. And that really, when she was given the red shoes, and in the book it's actually white, which is interesting, but I think with color coming in, they became red. Those red shoes were really, uh, something she didn't know she had. And it was meeting the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion, meeting the idea of herself as having brains, as having her own courage, and as having a heart that enabled her to summon her power and her strength to fight the Wicked Witch and to see the, the melting of all that was evil so that she could then imbibe and incorporate the power of the shoes so she could go on to the next phase of her life. And that's what grief is.

Oh my goodness. I have never heard The Wizard of Oz described like that, and everybody listening is probably going to agree with me that now I want to go watch The Wizard of Oz. Oh, wow. So I love that you're using that movie in your books, and I love that you love that movie.

There was a series of books, and actually it was, not to get political, but truly the book, what the books were, political commentary on what was going on in terms of industrialism. However, of course, once converted into this movie, we saw a bit of that commercialism, that which is hay, that which is mettle and the courage it takes to not, not be hidden behind that which shrouds us. And the idea that grief plays hide and seek is like the wizard hiding and saying, okay, so you're not so powerful. Come out and let's partner.

Hmm. Can we end with how parents can help kids deal with their grief?

Kids are really smart.

Yes.

And they can map in their parents when they're not telling the truth. And when the truth is not told in a language that can be understood by the child, depending on their age, the child remembers that. And the potential for somewhat of a fracture in the relationship because of a tendered mistruth with the thought that the child will be protected can sometimes backfire. So when a parent says, your grandparent is sleeping, your grandparent is around if you summon them, those two messages can be pretty scary. Or the Lord has taken mom, dad, sister, aunt, uncle, parent away. And then the Lord, or whatever one believes, if that's the message, becomes so powerful that the child may be afraid. And the goal in grief is to calm the child's nervous system. With as much truth as you possibly can give them. And to understand that in grief, children will often regress. So a child that seems to have learned how to toilet themselves may regress and start to be a bedwetter. Or children may go to their video games, if video games are allowed within the family unit, and play games that seem a little violent, but they're working out their anger. And if instead of saying, no, don't watch that, or don't play that, as the parent or surviving parent or grandparent, you could sit with that child and be curious and say, tell me about this game, tell me who you're shooting up, I want to know, you actually engender a conversation that they might not have. Children's drawings are important. So can you be creative with your child as a means to understand their grief and for you as a parent and as a sibling to be able to say, okay, let's play this game, or let's draw, or let's draw the family and let's talk to all of the family members that you've drawn. When maybe Grandma who just passed away is there, what do you wanna say to Grandma? And maybe it's not appropriate to take this child to the funeral, and yet maybe it is appropriate when the child is old enough to say, there's a place that we honored Grandma or Grandpa or Mom or Dad, and this, if you would like to come, and they don't have to, they can say no, and it's not an insult. Children will grieve again like adults in their own way, and it will look different, and it can look like anger, rage, regression. It can also look like numbness where they're silent, they're quiet, and it doesn't mean that something wrong with them. It means that they're dealing with it in their way. And if you talk about it without taking their role away as children, that will also be really helpful. It's not that now you are the man of the house to the 7-year-old. It's more like we're all a team and yes, Dad has passed, Dad died, and we're now a team and we're navigating this, or we're building this and we need to build a new kind of house. So let's build that house. Let's think about how we're all gonna do this versus, okay, now you're the man. Of the house, or you're the woman of the house, or now you're gonna have to learn how to cook. And it's, oh, the way that this can be interpreted is I'm no longer being seen. It can feel like neglect, which is really not what you want your child to feel. Oftentimes they offer programming if you don't have a lot of money that are just offered gratis. A lot of times your houses of worship can have groups for kids. What you are looking for though, if there is a group for kids, is a group that is closed, meaning that once the group begins, and this is for you as an adult or for children, that no new children or no new adults come in so that there can be a developed trust. And you really wanna make sure of that because if kids are coming in all of the time, And kids who are going through a family separating is also grief. And to understand that, that it wasn't a death, but it is a death of the family as this child understands it, and that it needs to be understood in that way.

And I think that what you're touching on is that sometimes parents don't know how to talk to their children about grief. And I hope that they will find someone to help them, a group to help them, a therapist to help them.

And don't do it alone. You don't have to do it alone. Yeah. When there are There are groups for children going through divorce and there, and there are groups for adults going through divorce or loss of a loved one or loss of a parent. And these losses are similar and different. And also if it was a tragic loss or an expected loss, and it, please understand, in no way do I think that an expected loss is not tragic. It is tragic. There's just a difference in how much one can prepare, as much as anyone can ever prepare. But if it's they left and now they're, they're never coming home is very different than we've had multiple surgeries and hospital stays. And it's a, it's just a different experience within the mind and the body and the soul.

Definitely. So for the mothers, fathers, anyone listening who might need your help, are you taking clients? How does that work?

Right now, when I do see people, it's all online. And then once or twice a year, I will offer an intensive weekend for parents or for women who've lost their mothers or for men who have lost their mothers. And sometimes it's good to separate out the, the men are looking for one kind of work and the women are looking for another. And those groups, when you, if you contact me through my website, which is easyedieNathan.com, it's just my name. And if you do, if you sign in and you get me your, your name, your email address, and you actually say that you heard me on Rebecca's podcast, number one, I'll send you a copy, a chapter from the book, but also you'll then learn about all of the things that I'm doing and the groups that I'm leading. And I, because I've been in process of writing this second book, I haven't had as many groups, but that will be coming into the future. So yeah.

And tell everyone the title of the next book. Do you have to?

It's a working title. Okay.

Okay.

And so I just want everybody to know when a publisher gets ahold of a book, you can dream all you want about the title you want. It is not necessarily the title that's gonna land.

Sure.

I, as you mentioned before, I'm a sex therapist, and so I work in the field a lot with trauma and traumatic imprints and sexuality and the loss of one's personal identity. And with that comes a sense of just intense— sometimes when there's trauma, whether it's because of a predatory event or a developmental experience, that can often lead to a sense of disgust, self-disgust, or loathing. So the title is The Sexual Grief Effect: Transform the Self from Loathing to Liberation to Love.

That's beautiful.

Thank you.

I told her before we started, that's going to be a good book. Oh my goodness, I can't thank you enough. For all of your time and expertise. I just love talking to you.

It was a pleasure talking with you, Rebecca. Thank you so much.

And hopefully you will see her again because she has so much to talk about. This is just one of many subjects.

Yes. And I just want to say to everybody, regardless of your gender, you have the red shoes. And you have the power within you to go through your life and dance with it.

Oh, that's so beautiful. I want you to know I will always remember that line. This is Rebecca Green, and I want to remind everyone to spend every day laughing, learning, and loving. Thank you for tuning in to the Winey Palooza podcast. If you like what you heard, Please be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. While you are there, leave a review. I love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.

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