UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Meghan Riordan Jarvis. Meghan is a clinical psychotherapist and author, a podcast host and a sought-after consultant with over 20 years of experience in the fields of trauma, grief, and loss. For all of us, grief is extraordinarily personal. Meghan has written a debut memoir called End of the Hour, in which she shares her personal story of experiencing severe PTSD after the deaths of both of her parents within two years of each other. And now with Sounds True, Meghan Riordan Jarvis has written a new book. It’s called Can Anyone Tell Me? Essential Questions about Grief and Loss. Meghan, welcome.
Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Thank you so much for having me. I’m just thrilled to be here.
TS: When both of your parents passed away, and I know particularly the death of your mom was a tremendously intense experience for you, you were already an expert in the field of grief and loss. Is that correct?
MRJ: Yes. Yeah. I have been working as a trauma therapist really specializing in loss, the experience of loss for probably solidly 10 years, but in practice for about 15, 20 when my mom died.
TS: And then were you surprised by the intensity of what went through the journey you went through when your mom passed away?
MRJ: Yeah. I mean, I often sort of say it’s humbling the way in which you come to understand something by experience, right? So I felt as though I had a deep understanding of my client’s experience with loss because even when my dad died in 2017, that wasn’t the first significant loss I had ever been through. But I only have one mother, I’m a daughter to only one person. And when my mom died, I really, not only was I surprised, I was sort of pissed because I felt like what is the point of knowing all of these things if it doesn’t mean you get to sort of skip the line of having to experience all the hard things. But truly, I came to understand what my clients had been telling me about for decades really, really differently when I lost my mom.
TS: And one thing right here at the beginning of our conversation, just to create the linkage for people, you suffered severe PTSD. What in your view was the relationship between the loss and the experience of trauma, trauma so severe that, and you write about this, that you actually ended up admitting yourself into a hospital thing?
MRJ: Yeah, I mean, so one of the things I’m always careful to help people with in what you’ll know, but I’ll just say it for our listeners, is that trauma is a bad event, but becoming traumatized is the meaning that your system makes of the event. And so what I sort of came to peel back when I was writing end of the hour and doing a lot of research for this book, but I think I would say I’m still learning it, is that my relationship with my mom had a really strong codependent streak, meaning that I looked to make sure that she was okay a lot before I even checked to see if I was okay. And so when my dad died, my experience with his death was what many people experienced. It was very sad, very hard, but it didn’t knock me off my life path with my mom.
I had, again, what I have treated for so many clients and have a really intellectual understanding. I had an immediate rumination form when I learned that she had died. And that thought, which then repeated, I was running laps around a track that thought was, it’s your fault. She died. And I knew enough, I kind of had this metacognition, the clinician was in there in the early sort of hours of learning about my mom’s death. I knew that that thought was kind of dragged me. I knew that it was going to come in and pummel me because I had seen that happen with so many of my clients. I also understood that it was a distraction. So the idea of this terrible thought, it’s your fault that she died part of its job. I always see it as doing a little soft shoe tap dance. It’s like, look over here, look over here.
It’s distracting me from the part of life that’s going to be much harder, which is how am I ever going to figure out how to live without my mom? I’ve never done that before, but I could probably stay here and kind of relentlessly attack myself on this looped thinking forever. And if I did that really well, even though it’s painful, I will never have to address the fact that my life now no longer includes this person who was a north star. Not always in the best possible way. I think when people hear I hospitalized myself after my mom died, they assume that means I must have been super close with her. We were close, but really what it meant was she was a person that I checked in on how was she doing to kind of even know how I was doing. So when it was just me left, I had no idea how I was doing. It felt like the center pole in the tent had fallen down and I couldn’t get my bearings really at all.
TS: Now you mentioned this rumination. What did you learn about how to break that circling around the track in your case it was, it’s my fault that she died. People may have other ruminating thoughts that just keep going. What have you learned about how to break that?
MRJ: Well, the first thing that I learned is that they’re much more serious than we sometimes talk about them as being, we think about, oh, they’re thoughts, but I mean, I don’t need to tell you this, but our bodies and minds are connected with the vagus nerve, which is this super highway of information. Our body has 12 physical systems that it’s made up of, all of which can be impacted by difficult thoughts sending electrical signals down into the body. If we don’t manage these thoughts, if we don’t contain them, if we don’t find a strategy to interrupt them, they can make you sick really fast. And I don’t think I understood. I think I was part of sort of the school of clinical thought that minimized them a little bit. And then when I experienced them it was like, oh, I’m on this rollercoaster. I really understood just how villainous letting that thought have any oxygen could be.
One of the things, when I went to an inpatient facility, I really was a patient when I got in there. I was so appreciative that they didn’t defer to my expertise at all. And they said, we are going to do everything. So in my book end of the Hour, I talk about the very first exercise they had me do was one I was so skeptical of, which is equine therapy. I grew up with horses. I had never really experienced them as therapeutic. I had a very bad attitude about going to do this exercise. And almost immediately, the bilateral movement, which is a lot of how we sort of regulate the body of brushing this horse, stabilized my thinking. And instead of only having that thought, it’s your fault, she died just in this very first exercise, I had this little glimmer of it’s going to be okay.
And it was a thought just like as powerful as it’s your fault, she died. So I did. I learned all kinds of thought stopping techniques. I learned to immediately say out loud, I’m having that thought. I learned to create little triangles with people who I could turn to and say that my rumination is, I think it’s my fault. I’m having that rumination right now. And even though I don’t have that particular rumination very often it does still happen. And sometimes I have to wake my husband up in the middle of the night because what I have learned is it’s very bad for me to have that thought and be by myself. I need the co-regulation and support of someone else to at least know what’s happening even if they can’t do anything about it.
TS: And what did you mean, Meghan, by creating triangles with people. What’s the triangle part?
MRJ: So this is actually my technique and I talk about it in Can Anyone Tell Me?, creating a little triangle of support. So I think many of us have a best friend or a husband or a partner or wife that is the person we tell and knows kind of us concretely, but one person is never enough because they’re in a meeting or they’re in a fight with you or they’re on an airplane. And so when you are having that moment, you actually need another two points. So I’ve given this example before, but my husband travels a lot and he is my person who I would normally talk to, but my sister and my best friend probably are. It’s equitable in terms of who can I trust. And our dog who was new to our family, our chocolate lab, he’s fine by the way. I can skip to the end and say he’s totally fine, but he ate an entire Tupperware container grapes, which can be fatal to a dog.
So I was driving him furiously to an animal hospital and I texted my husband even though I knew he was away, my best friend and my sister. And what was so powerful about it is the answers, the responses that I got were also different. One of them was like, do you need help? Are you safe to drive? Are you going to be okay? And that really wasn’t, I was safe to drive. I was just annoyed and furious and scared and my husband’s response came much later. And the second response, which came from my best friend, just sort of said, stupid dogs. They’re such idiots. And that really helped me. I was able to sort of pick from the kind of support, the support that I actually needed in that moment. And then it doesn’t put as much pressure on your person, your one person or your two people to get it exactly right every time.
TS: And just to link here for our listeners, so here you write a memoir of your experience, which shares your own healing journey and insights. What then brought you to write this new book, Can Anyone Tell Me? where you’re answering people’s essential questions about grief and loss?
MRJ: I came out of inpatient treatment sort of furious at myself and the world at large that there is not, does not already exist, a core education on what to expect with grief and loss. And what I sometimes hear when I say that is people say, well, it’s so personal and it’s so individual, which is true, but it’s also primarily in those early days, incredibly physical and we grieve with our bodies. And so what I really wanted was all that I had learned in the field of trauma as a somatic therapist. I really wanted that to be translated better into the world that we use with grief and loss. And some of what was happening was I was sort of consuming what was on the internet, which is good and bad. Some of what’s on the internet when it comes to grief and loss or on Instagram and social media will say things like in grief, you just feel your feelings, which is a lovely sentiment. Accept that when you have dysregulation in your system, that happens quickly. Feeling your feelings is not great unless you have a way to process them through your system. So I really wanted well-informed processes and explanations. And what I did, I read 188 books on grief and loss memoir and all the books.
TS: Whoa, that’s a lot of books.
MRJ: That’s a lot of books. I feel very proud of that I probably didn’t read them all and some I just sort of tossed across the room like this isn’t what I’m looking for. But in the beginning, what I was really hoping to do was to find the book that I thought was going to really land it for me. And there is a book out now, my colleague, Mary Francis O’Connor, wrote a book called The Grieving Brain, which is really close to what I was looking for in that moment. But what I also wanted to offer folks was not just grievers, but the people who were supporting grievers. Just some things to try because my bias is that you have to become a griever. Grief is a change process. You lose something that you can’t ever get back, and part of that is who you are. And so there has to be some novelty in the next experience moving forward, which might include all the things that Grievers have told me in the past.
They started playing an instrument that they hadn’t played since they were nine. Their painting myself, I started writing. I was never a writer beforehand, but we need to get that energy through us somehow. And I needed people to understand there’s a difference between anxious energy and energy that’s depressed, that you show up for that energy and you move it differently. I needed people to have some understanding of how the limbic system works so that when they were feeling strong sensations in their body, which most people call feelings, but they’re actually emotions before their feelings. I really wanted people to have core education kind of the way we’re doing with menopause now, right? It’s like people have been suffering not knowing that there are all of these symptoms that are connected to menopause. I read something yesterday that women in menopause, they often lose teeth. Both my sister and I have lost teeth.
I didn’t know that. I sent it to her and I was like, oh my God, I can’t believe that we were feeling bad that our teeth were bad at 50. But actually it’s a part of the menopause process. There is so much in grief and loss that my clients come in and say, I don’t know what’s going on, but my hair is really brittle well and my nails and my skin. Well, your hair and your nails and your skin are all part of one system and they absolutely can be impacted by a traumatic event. Most people don’t know that. So really, particularly in the early chapters of the book, I wrote it kind of in fury in real anger and frustration. Why haven’t we given people a deep understanding of what the body can go through? It doesn’t mean everyone will, but the same way when we teach puberty to kids, not everybody’s going to have these things happen to your body.
We just don’t want you to be terrified if they do. And one example that I use often is if you’ve been married for 50 years and your partner dies, absolutely you’re going to have all of the physical symptoms that we would expect when your brain is trying to learn how to navigate the world now that you have profound loss as a part of it. But if you’re 70 years old when that happens and you have the very common symptom of memory loss and brain fog, which is what most grievers have in those early weeks, I have had clients who are terrified that they now have early onset dementia. Their family is having them evaluated, and even the primary doctor doesn’t know this is a grief related symptom. And all of that just makes me, half of this book was just written out of frustration and anger, honestly, Tami,
TS: Well, it has a lot of clarity and to the point and bullseye quality to it. I think from that energy. And one of the sections at the very beginning is can you tell me why my brain feels broken? And you’ve been just hinting at that why my memory feels off or I feel foggy. Why does our brain feel broken when we’re grieving?
MRJ: So what happens in trauma and the death of a loved one is a trauma, but grief can also be the end of a marriage. It could be the end of a dream, it could be a health crisis. Any significant loss shows up in the system as a threat, a really profound threat. And so what that threat means is your brain does what it does to protect you. The amygdala enlarges as it enlarges, it cuts off the electrical currency as it normally travels, which is from the base of the brain where the limbic system is all the way up to your forehead, which is where your prefrontal cortex is. So the way I always sort of imagine is like, okay, there’s a storm and the bridge goes out. So the mailman that would normally send the messages right to the mailboxes is kind of standing on the other side of the bridge where the water is throwing the mail hoping that the letters get to the right boxes.
But you can see some of them are getting swept into the river. And that means that elements of your brain that would normally light up in these appropriate ways like your hippocampus to retain and create new memory or your hypothalamus, which does things like sort of regulate your body temperature. Those things are not getting the mail. And when they don’t get the mail, then they don’t notice sort of send the energy back down that vagus nerve, which is the superhighway into the body and send the right electrical currents into the body to create things like tiredness or hunger in the appropriate ways. So brain fog is really the early part of that happening, which is those messages are not going where they’re supposed to go. And you can actually feel it inside your brain. There are words and you know what they are, but you can’t find them.
Or somebody says something to you like, well, that happened on Tuesday or Wednesday, and all of a sudden you’re not really sure even what season it is. Those are stories that I’ve heard from clients. There’s another element to brain fog, which is maybe adaptive, maybe protective, which is when things are really intense, the brain can sort of say like, nah, we’re not going to engage that much and just sort of give you a dissociative quality and it’s not forever. And there are some things which I talk about in the book that you can do moving both sides of your body that can help the brain come into regulation. But it is incredibly typical. It was a conversation with a friend who’s a very high achieving person. She said to me, her mother-in-law died. And she said to me, I can’t even remember what year I graduated from college and it’s scaring me. And I was like, oh, let me just walk you through the neuroscience of why that’s happening. And I mean, we were on a zoom call, it was during Covid, and I could just see her whole body relax like, oh, okay, I’m not going crazy on top of this death. And now I have a couple of things that I can do when I feel like my brain is not working appropriately.
TS: Now, Meghan, you’re very clear and supportive in the book that it’s not about we need to get rid of grief Now at the same time, I mean you have an emphasis on helping grief move through our physical bodies, and I wonder how you can address that in a way, it’s a little paradoxical. This is not a problem we need to solve, although we want to I think, solve it like a problem because we want it to move through. So how do you see that paradox if you’ll,
MRJ: That’s such a good question. So yeah, I mean, grief is not even a mental health problem. We just sort of put it in that category so that we can understand and get support somewhere. But grief is just a developmental stage of life. And so for some people it might, profound grief might come early. You lose your mother when you’re nine, but it’s going to be a part of every one of our lives. It’s not a problem to be grieving, but it is distressing and it does make our lives. We don’t want to suffer in our grief because we are experiencing really significant symptoms and we don’t know how to get out of them. Part of the reason I build the book, the way that I build it is also what we know about traumatic events, events, bad events that then sort of land in the system and leave a negative tattoo is that the sooner we get quality support that kind of nails what we need, we are more likely to be able to shake off the idea that it’s going to leave a significant negative impact for the rest of our lives.
So if you think about why childhood trauma is so challenging, it’s because children are still formulating their whole beliefs and understandings of the world. And so when a bad event happens to a child and they don’t have enough support, they can’t talk out their confusion with an adult or there isn’t someone there to sort of explain, it’s not your fault. When a child is in that really narcissistic stage, then they carry that meaning with them for the rest of their lives and it sort of becomes a lens in which they see the world. I actually think that happens with grievers really quickly. So the Surgeon General wrote a report last year about isolation. What is not named in that report anywhere is the idea of grief and loss, but feeling isolated is an experience that grievers have. Almost immediately, almost immediately, a griever will say, I could see the whole rest of the world happening.
The UPS guy was delivering the packages, that lady was going and buying milk, and I just was no longer part of that world. So it’s not a problem, it’s not a pathology, it’s not something that you’re doing wrong, but it is something that’s happening. And the surgeon General tells us that if people remain isolated, the physical impacts to their longevity of life is the equivalent of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. So the impacts of some of these symptoms mean the reason I ended up checking myself into a trauma facility is that I did not eat any solid food for 23 days. I couldn’t do it. And oddly, my body was packing on weight as part of the stress of that, and I did not sleep more than two hours and 20 minutes through. So the idea of had I had a family constellation where I had to be the person who was taking care of my three kids by feeding them, and we would’ve been in a lot of trouble that those symptoms were not being interrupted, I was lucky enough to be able to sort of spread support across family and friends so that we could take care of my family in general.
But many times people say I couldn’t fall apart because of my kids. Well, I had kids and I felt all the way apart. So what I’m always looking towards is those ends chapters that are in the book, which really are about, well, what happens when it is a mental health problem? What happens when it is trauma? What do we do then? I really believe that if we get the right kind of support in for Grievers early, we may be able to prevent some of that from happening.
TS: Obviously support is a big factor here, but what I’m curious about, since grief is such a physical experience in the way you’re describing it, disrupting our eating and our sleeping and how it’s affecting our brains, what is like, okay, here are the ABCs. You must do this for your body and mind when you’re in acute grief, you must do this. And then for the support people, what must we do for the loved ones in our lives in this kind of condition?
MRJ: That’s so good. So I love that question and I feel like it’s a loving question to ask because it’s like that’s what we all want to know is what are the things that we really need to make sure that we’re doing right? Because grief is work, it feels terrible, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to kind of push yourself still. So the three things that I say is, one, you need to take a walk. You need to take a walk every day. You need to move your body. You don’t need to do CrossFit, you just need to take a walk for people who are able to tolerate connection. You need to take a walk with a person. They can walk behind you, they, they don’t have to talk to you, but grounding that energy in connection with someone else. And if you can’t do it with a person today, then try to do it with a person tomorrow.
And if you can’t do it with a person today or tomorrow, try to do it with a person on the phone even if you’re not talking to them. So already we’re moving, so we’re getting the energy moving through our body a little bit and we’re already busting through this uncomfortableness of isolation that we have already got right here. And then the third piece is beginning to work on the story that you are telling yourself about what happened. So we create our entire realities around narrative. So I’m moving my body, I’m staying in connection, and I am expressing the story. So you could talk it out with someone. My brother died suddenly while I was, this is what I say all the time. My mother died suddenly while I was on vacation with her and my kids. I can talk about that. I could write it, I could dance it, I could paint it, I could. But something that is allowing me to sort of come to know the story so that I can carry it so that I can begin to say, this is the reality of what happened to me.
TS: Lemme ask you one question about that. I was with you on the first two steps with the story. One of the things I wonder is if we keep telling a story that perhaps has some of these rumination qualities in it where we’re at fault for something or there’s some kind of blame, is that really helpful to keep repeating that same story again and again and again?
MRJ: Well, no, you wouldn’t have ruminations in them. So again, part of what the book asks you to look out for are ruminations and ruminations are almost like we talk about them as being kind of serious and we stop them. So you wouldn’t be, the idea of the narrative is what is the story that you’re telling yourself that you can carry? So what you’re looking for is the story that you can say out loud without getting totally dysregulated. So you’re practicing a reality. Now in the first year, it might be that the story centers you as a victim. This thing happened to me that in the following six months, it might have a different tone to it, but it might not just be something that happened to you. It might be something that really taught you something I’ve really changed in the past couple of years instead of something that just happened.
And in four years time, it might have a tone of gratitude inside it, which is something that’s really hard for grievers to ever believe. We’re never going to be grateful they died, but we might be grateful of some of the things that have grown. So the narrative is about you being able to express to other people, express to yourself first, and then be able to share with other people in a way that doesn’t drive people away, that allows them to connect so that you can go and get other supports. So those are the three things that I sort of say universally are helpful. When people are saying to me, what am I supposed to say? How am I supposed to show up? How am I supposed to, and I have a whole section in the book about this, which is like, Hey, check in if you’re going to become the primary support for someone, you need to check in on these things first.
Do you really have the time? Can you really commit to this person? Are you okay centering them in the story? Sometimes we’re drawn to other people’s calamity because we’re trying to process through some of our old garbage, and so I coach people to just in are your motives pure? And then the next thing, what I say is you’re going to get it wrong. You’re going to show up. You’re growing into becoming a grieving supporter. So the first piece that I want supporters to think about is do what is organic and true to you. No one wants me to bring them a lasagna. Tami, I am a terrible, terrible cook, but I will take your kids to a waterpark. I’ll throw them in the back with my three kids. I won’t even notice that they’re, I’ll keep them for two weeks if you need me to.
I can take them to soccer because I’m already in the car, I’m already driving. I am a good practical hands-on support. I’m also amazing at a Shiva where you do not want to see your father’s ex-wife. I will block that person from getting anywhere near you. But really getting a sense of what is it that you organically have to offer and then you kind of have to get consent with your griever be is this welcome? How about I come and take your kids? The second piece that I say is, put the date of the loss in your phone and ping that person every year, every week, whatever it is. But particularly in early loss, you want to ping them regularly every couple of days. And when I say ping, it could just be a heart, it could be a broken heart, it could be a kiss face emoji.
It could be thinking of you no need to return. It could just be a call. Some people say you have to show up physically. I have learned from my grievers that that can be really intrusive. So I will send a text that says, I really want to rush over to you. Is that what you’re looking for? So if you think about it as a consent possibility, and then the third piece is to be able to say to yourself that this grief is going to shift and grow over time. So to remember that what you’re doing right now for the first three weeks, you actually have to have some plan to be doing that right now for the first three weeks and probably for the next 30 years. So what is it going to look like for you to support this griever over time? Maybe it means you’re going to think about them and buy them a book and send them a book or give them the name of a movie or connect them to another friend.
But I have come to understand that we actually need to put those reminders in our phone because we’re all the leading lady on our own story. And even though I am bereft, I have a friend who lost her mother two days ago. I probably went six hours this morning without remembering to check in with her. My phone pinged at noon just with her name, and I was like, oh, thank God. I put that reminder in there and then I sent her because it can be so painful for Grievers who don’t get one minute of reprieve. They need you to be remembering them, and it is for much longer and much more consistently than we will be able to do it because we are not experiencing that same loss with that same intensity.
TS: Now you said being there for this person potentially for 30 years, and I think one of the big questions that people have, and it’s not just a question, it’s a judgment, which is about the timeline in relationship to grief, and I wonder what your view is on that.
MRJ: Well, do you mean how long it lasts or whether it should, I mean,
TS: Is this person experiencing some kind of complex grief or is there something going on here that seems, this is not a term you use, but this is unhealthy, that they’re still grieving X number of decades later? How do you view all of that?
MRJ: Yeah, I mean, you’ll always be able to find somebody that passes a kind of judgment, which I don’t always think is meant to be meant to be judgy. I think it is really distressing when you love someone to know that they’re going to carry a lifelong pain. But I do think that grief exists for the rest of your life. I don’t think it has the same level of acuity for the rest of your life, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I don’t think it’s a bad thing at your son’s wedding to miss your husband who is not there for it. I don’t think it is a bad thing on the holidays to miss your wife who isn’t there or your child who I don’t think it SULs anything. I also don’t think it’s a pathology. So without getting too deep into the diagnostics, there is again, I think well intended by clinicians, this prolonged grief disorder diagnosis, and people get really up in arms because it says if you have these symptoms of longing for restoration for a year, you wish the person would come back for a year, then maybe you have prolonged grief.
I don’t think that’s how it’s intended. Also, I think it misses the mark, meaning I don’t want anybody suffering with really significant symptoms for a whole year without going and seeing a treatment provider. I mean, I knew, I think the greatest privilege of my life is that I knew that rumination was going to make me sick, and I knew it because I had had so much experience watching ruminations make people sick, and I understood what they were. And so when it did not get better and it got worse and my body got worse, I was like, well, I can’t do this on my own. I need as much support as I can possibly get. I don’t know where I would be in my life if I had waited a year. So I think that people have carried grief in different ways for their whole life because the loss is part of their lives, their whole life.
Some folks will say to me, I didn’t grieve my mother at all for the first 10 years. I also don’t really think that is true. I think they probably just didn’t experience sobbing in those 10 years. And then something about where they landed in their life 10 years after their mother died, there was some wisdom in their body that was ready to sort of process through those sad feelings. But there are different ways of grieving and there are different constructs to the grieving, but I don’t think it’s a problem for people to 30 years later say, I miss my son. I don’t think that’s a problem. I think that’s totally normal. And I think if we maybe pulled away the judgment and the bias that grief is a bad thing and instead said grief is just a way that we remember and honor our attachments, we could see that as actually something really beautiful that during the holidays, I remember the people that used to be at the holidays with me.
TS: In Can Anyone Tell Me? you answer all kinds of questions, the questions people have about grief and loss and you say, this is the book you wish you had the grief education book that was there for you. Why do you think grief education has been such a long time in coming here in our western culture? Why are we so grief illiterate, if you will, historically, at least in the culture?
MRJ: I think there are several things at play. I think one is Americans really like to feel like they’re winning, and I think we see death as losing and not achieving. I think we see death not as a development, the final developmental stage of what everyone’s life will be. I think we sometimes see it as like, oh, that person lost at life. So I don’t think we love making room for things that don’t look like achievement and success. I think, and this maybe sounds a little more sinister, I think that, I mean to me, the idea of this book has a social justice component behind it. I’m a therapist who charges a lot of money and I’m only one person, and when you come in and see me, it’s just one hour a day. That is not what anyone’s grief experience is. And I think there are some people that are more impacted by the fact that they can’t get any room in their lives to experience their grief, right?
People who are working shift work don’t get, I took six months off after my mom died. That’s unheard of. I do think that our culture also is served by sometimes the oppression of some people not being able to sort of rise up and get the resources that they need in order to do well and recover from bad things that have happened. I hate saying that, but I really believe it. The more I’m in this work, the more the mystery around why wouldn’t we just educate people about this? I also think there really just genuinely still is from everywhere from the medical component to even in the therapy field. I went to social work school. I wasn’t required to take a single class on grief and loss. I don’t have to take a single class on grief and loss to get my continuing education. And if I wanted to, there aren’t that many to take. So I don’t just think it’s people who don’t like feeling feelings. I think there are a lot of ways in which people say grief and loss is not that big a deal. And then they’re like me. They go through it and they think, gosh, I have some apologies that I need to make to people who were managing to still continue to function when this is how difficult the experience was on their mind and their body and their psyche and their entire experience.
TS: Or Meghan, I’m going to throw some other questions at you that you ask in the book and answer, why do I feel so irritable all the time when I’m grieving?
MRJ: Yeah, so similar to what we talked about with that limbic system response. So Dan Siegel talks about the window of tolerance, which is this idea that there’s a certain amount of energy inside your system where you just feel good. So think about when you’re driving in traffic and you’re listening to music and you feel fine and you get home and kiss your wife and everything’s okay versus same traffic, same amount of time in traffic, and you’re swearing and you’re screaming and you’re wondering if you can pull your car up on the side of the road and just leave it there and walk home. What you’re really talking about is the amount of energy that’s inside your system that has taken you into that reactive space. So our central nervous system, it’s built around these two ideas, well, these two components of energy, your sympathetic nervous system, which is the activation side and the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the calming side for many of us.
We get irritable as a way of being on the edge of that vigilance, anxiety. There’s too much energy inside my system. So I always describe it as sort of grief can feel like you are wet and you’re more than damp walking through the world, which means sitting in a chair is uncomfortable, getting up from a chair is uncomfortable. Trying to get into a taxi cab is uncomfortable because everything on your body and in your system has a kind of energetic texture to it that people see, but you can feel. So the irritability is there as a way to sort of, it’s like a fight response, it’s an activation response. It’s how do I get away from this response? For me that showed up as I was irritable with everyone in everything that everyone did. I found people really oppressive and irritating for months and months and months. And honestly, even though I knew all of this, I really was like, God, people are the worst. Knowing it didn’t help me say, oh, this is just energy inside my system.
TS: If knowing it didn’t help did anything help?
MRJ: Other people knowing it helped. So that’s part of what the book has is like this is for you, but it’s also for the griever to know. So my kids knowing that I was popping, we talk about zero being asleep, 10 being you’re having a panic attack, five being you’re just sitting doing your work, the kids would be like, oh, mom’s already popped to a seven. Mom popped quick to a seven. That was the language that they were using. So them being able to sort of normalize, it wasn’t my fault, it was just what was happening because probably I was hanging out at a six when I used to hang out at a four because of the energy in my system. So that actually really did help. And all the central nervous system, deescalation techniques like box breathing that allow you to sort of take yourself from a seven back down to a four, I used all of those and I still do.
TS: Maybe you can just briefly share what box breathing is in case someone’s listening and they’re not familiar with that.
MRJ: I love box breathing the most. So if you’re listening to this, you can go and Google it and there will be so many wonderful instructors, but just imagine that you’re drawing a box in the air with your finger. You breathe in for a count of four, you hold for a count of four, you breathe out for a count of four, and then you rest for a count of four. And you do that sort of, I don’t know, 5, 7, 12 times and the bioscience behind it, your body cannot help but oxygenate differently. It causes your lungs to expand because your breath is expanding and it will, if you can monkey with your breath, you will be monkeying with your heart rate at the same time. So it’s a very quick way the Navy seals use it to really calm yourself when you’re in an agitated state and it’s a great tool to use in a meeting, you can do it really tightly so people don’t see if you’re on an airplane. It’s just a great regulation tool.
TS: Here’s another question, and I’m going to read a little paragraph, short paragraph from the book. Why am I afraid all the time? And then you write that, you ask this question to new clients when they start therapy with you, what’s the secret terror you have since your loss and not one client in 20 years has said, what in the world do you mean?
MRJ: So what I learned, and I actually learned this really early, I had a young adult who was beloved to my family, drown when I was nine years old. And almost instantly what sort of took up house in my system was a whole series of fears, the most profound of which was I was afraid my same aged brother was going to die. And so when I had the courage to sort of voice that out loud once somebody said, well, that’s irrational, but it’s not irrational. It’s just not true. So it’s not irrational. I had already seen a teenager die worrying that my brother might die in a similar way when it had never occurred to me before. Wasn’t irrational, it just wasn’t true. What I know about the way in which we respond to these attachments slipping out from underneath us is that then we immediately look around and survey because our brain’s primary job is to keep us safe.
And so it looks at the data. One of a bad thing happened, somebody you love died, you check out all the other people. How are they looking? Is it safe to continue these attachments because that loss was really bad for us? And so what I typically hear from Grievers is one of two things. They are suddenly afraid that they are going to die and they’re going to impact the people around them the way they have been impacted by loss, or they are really afraid that somebody or a couple of somebodies might die because those are the people that they really would not be able to continue to live without. And then we dress for rehearse both of those calamities. If any of those people are 10 minutes late to dinner, I am imagining what song I’m going to sing at their funeral. Or if I have a tiny little lump on my shoulder, I’m imagining how I’m going to tell all my family that it’s terminal cancer and I have three more days to live. So I sort of learned that from my clients that those fears need to be validated. You don’t say that’s irrational. What you actually say is it makes perfect sense that your brain is saying, how can we make sure we never live through something as terrible as this again, but also we can’t make sure. So it’s validating and also just being able to sit in that ambiguous element of nobody really controls anything about life or death.
TS: I want to call our conversation, Meghan, essential grief education. And of course in your book, Can Anyone Tell Me? you have many, many questions and answers and exercises and wise counsel for those of us who are supporting grievers when it comes to essential grief education. But I want to see here as we’re coming to a conclusion, if there’s anything you think is really important to share as part of this conversation that you haven’t shared yet when it comes to essential grief education.
MRJ: I mean, I think what I really want for people, I try to put in the book everything that I’ve ever really heard about grief and loss. There’s a chapter on spirituality, there’s a chapter on how you end up hating all your friends and family for a little while. I want people to feel like all of that is normal because I want them to know that there is hope that life actually does go on. I think it’s really essential when you are at your most devastated, when life is the most confusing to have someone say to you, I get it. So many of us felt that way. So many of us felt that way, that it’s all outlined here in this book, and it will not always feel this way. It will not always feel just this way. And that if you can get through today by taking a walk or reaching out to somebody or playing the violin or painting, or if you can get through today, then you never have to do today again.
And the hope is that by the time we get to tomorrow, it’ll be like 1% that your brain has learned, which is I’m beginning to live into a life with loss. But that people all over the globe are doing it with you and they’re not more special than you. They’re just as human as you, and they had just as hard a time, but they’re doing it. And so if we’re all surviving a hundred percent of the days so far, you will get to a point where the grief will be something that you carry rather than drags you.
TS: I do want to ask you one more question, Meghan, and I think it’s because I’m reflecting on you and your story and the death of your mom and how much suffering you went through that then led to the writing of your memoir and now this new book, Can Anyone Tell Me? and how you mentioned that there must have been some codependence between you and your mom that you discovered. And my question has to do with how we can become interested in what grief might reveal about the underground material that’s been in our life that we might not have previously been aware of.
MRJ: You are tapping into something. I’m so grateful for this question, which is also sort of a critical element that is hard to grab hold of in grief and loss. It’s also hard to grab hold of when you’re a teenager or when you’ve just been fired. But you’re asking us to be curious, to be curious about what is possible and what can grow and what might be there. And curiosity is one of those parts of the brain that when you’re in trauma gets dialed down really quietly because if the bear ran into this tiny little podcast room that I’m in right now, we wouldn’t want me to be curious what it’s fur felt like we would want me to run all the way away, but curiosity, that neuro pathway gets damaged. And so just saying, I wonder what it would be like to be curious invites that neuro pathway to start to kind of twitch again, it invites it to heal.
Our brain is literally damaged kind of like a concussion by some of the early elements of grief. And in order for us to sort of reflect, why was this so hard for me, we need to have some tools to teach us how to do the ING, the verb of grief. So for me, that was writing. I was writing stories about my mom and wondering why am I the only one of my five brothers and sisters who had to go to an inpatient facility? I wasn’t even the closest. She was much closer to my sister, but to both of my sisters than she was to me. So part of the writing was really trying to do two things. One pen and maker talks about all of the synapses reforming when you’re using pens and paper and words and language. But also it was like I was trying to open the door to myself and just say, let’s see what we can do today.
Let’s see what we can figure out today. Not everybody’s going to end up writing a memoir or writing a clinical book, but you may come to an insight that is important for you. Just this weekend, I was in Nantucket with my best friend. Part of the story that’s, it’s really kind of a compelling part of the story when my mom dies, is that right before I learn that she dies, I have this incredible physical sensation in my body like water breaking, and then I have this thought, which is she died. So that’s actually how I learned my mother died, is that my body told me, which takes us down a whole spirituality road that I need you to know I was not interested in when this happened. I did not want to think about spirituality, any of those things. In that moment. All that I really focused on was, and then the next thought was, it’s your fault.
She died. I was sitting with my best friend and I was like, oh my God. Now that I’ve kind of moved through that PTSD, the moment before I had that unbelievably painful thought that it was my fault she died. That moment may have been the most sacred moment of my entire life. The one where I physically felt my mother was no longer on the earth, but it’s been five years since she died, and that was the first time I thought of it. So being able to get curious and a, you’re not really able to in the beginning, but we have to wonder about it. What can we do to become a griever? How can we invite ourselves in the door? But being able to allow that curiosity lets the story and the death or the loss, it gives it life. Honestly.
TS: When you said at that moment she died, you felt water breaking as in giving birth, that kind of water breaking?
MRJ: Yeah. I was in the car driving to my best friend to pick up my godson and I this, my mother had been ill with a stomach flu, and I had this strong sensation, like a whoosh through my body that the only other time I felt that sensation is when my water broke when I was pregnant, and it was so strong, I looked down while I was driving, expecting to see my lap be soaking wet, my legs be soaking wet, and as I was looking down, I had a clear thought that sort of came like I could see it, and it said she died. And that was how I knew she died. And then I called my husband and he was back at the house and said, I think my mom died. And he went into her room and she had died. She had not died in that moment. She had been dead several hours. But that was the moment that I sort of maybe quantum physics wise or spirituality wise, that was the moment I knew.
TS: Well, it’s interesting just that image that if you will, of water breaking the image of earth birthing or a new life occurring death as a new life as well. I would say, as I hear you saying that.
MRJ: Absolutely, and I can tolerate all of that now, but if we had had this conversation two years ago, I would’ve nodded my head politely and been like, whatever, Tami, you’re, you might’ve even cursed me, said, get the hell out of my story. You’re stretching here. But I do believe that, and as I was sitting, I was on the fert in Nantucket and we were talking about something having to do with my book, and I was like, God, I’ve spent all this time focused on those ruminations and how sick they made me, and I really do think of them as a magician, sleight of hand. Look over here. And I was like, but if we literally pack them away for a moment, the thing that happened seconds beforehand was this sacred kind of energy of something being born, a new version of myself being born, but I really had not paused to think about it that way or been able to show up with that kind of curiosity. And that’s what I’ve been journaling on all week is what has been born and what was being born and what was a new and what was, because so much of what I felt in those moments was the trauma and not the newness.
But of course, both things always are existing, and that’s the part in Can Anyone Tell Me? that I think is important is that if we can validate and educate around the pain so that people don’t feel like they have to explain themselves at a time when it’s impossible to explain yourself, because other people kind of get it because they have core grief education, then maybe they can move towards those moments that feel like, okay, there’s some hope. There’s some hope that there’s going to be something. What Grievers say, David Kessler talks a lot about this, is that there is some meaning that is made early. Grievers don’t want to hear that. Don’t tell me that there’s meaning made in my daughter dying, except that six years down the line, you’re probably going to tell me that something feels different in your life that is not just terrible because your daughter died. That’s the goal. The goal is not to only be tattooed with the pain of the loss, but to also be able to transform into the hope that life keeps going and that the love and the attachment, the legacy that you carry, and not the pain only of what is no longer here.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Meghan Riordan Jarvis, she’s the author of the new book: Can Anyone Tell Me? Essential Questions about Grief and Loss. What a delight, Meghan, to spend this time with you. Thank you.
MRJ: It was such an honor. Thank you so much, Tami.
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