Pushkin

When tragedy strikes, it can feel like everything in your life is falling apart.

Like you're trapped in some old building, and the walls are crashing down around you.

Big life plans may have become uncertain, or even impossible.

You may have lost some of the people you relied on most for care and support.

Experiencing a big loss can make it feel like all that's left around you is chaos and confusion.

People feel like this is internal rubble, the roof and the foundations of their building

has been completely obliterated, and so what they need is scaffolding.

This is psychotherapist and grief expert Julia Samuel.

If you haven't heard part one of our conversation, go back and listen to it now.

When we're grieving, cleaning up all that emotional rubble can feel impossible.

But it gets worse, because our minds come up with all kinds of stories about why we shouldn't even try.

We might deny what we're feeling, and try to power through, pretending that nothing's wrong.

We try to block ourselves from experiencing grief, which as we heard in the last episode is nearly certain to make the pain worse.

The first difficulty people often have is that they turn against themselves without grieving,

and they attack themselves for doing it wrong or making a fuss or taking too long.

What I really believe, and I've witnessed thousands of times, is that we have a lot more agency when we engage with our grieving process.

When we kind of recognize that we can't fight it, but we can support ourselves in it,

that we can allow space for all of those different feelings, that we can find ways of expressing them.

Today we're going to talk about how to build those supports,

the ones that can help us hold up the weight of our grief, and help us reconstruct everything after loss.

You're listening to the Happiness Lab, with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

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