Mind If We Talk?: Coping with Grief and Loss

Welcome to Episode 2 of Mind If We Talk?

Mind If We Talk? is an original podcast created by BetterHelp and Acast Creative Studios. Hosted by licensed therapist Haesue Jo, this 8-episode series takes a grounded, therapeutic approach to some of life’s most relatable mental health challenges. Each episode features candid, two-part conversations exploring topics like imposter syndrome, grief, procrastination, and setting boundaries. With warmth, clarity, and professional insight, Mind If We Talk? creates space for honest reflection and emotional growth. Whether you're deep into your self-growth journey or just starting out, this show offers comfort, connection, and practical tools for healing.

Episode 2: Coping with Grief and Loss

Grief is universal—but it rarely feels that way when you’re in it.

On this episode, Haesue sits down with writer and podcaster Misty Stinnett to unpack what grief really looks like: messy, unpredictable, and often very lonely. Misty shares the story of losing her father suddenly in her twenties, and the very different experience of losing her aunt years later, a loss that came with time to say goodbye. Along the way, she opens up about somatic therapy, the pressure to “perform” progress, and why grief sometimes teaches us how to love harder.

Haesue is then joined by therapist Dr. Sreela Roy-Greene for a grounded, practical conversation about navigating grief in everyday life. From how to handle grief at work, to simple somatic exercises you can try at home, this episode offers compassionate guidance for anyone who’s struggling—or supporting someone who is.

I think something that I needed at the time was permission. Permission to take up a lot of space in my grief. Permission to have it take way longer in the acute phase than maybe made other people around me feel comfortable.

After, you know, three months the world starts to go on, right? And people sort of, you know, start approaching you like it's totally normal, et cetera. But I remember feeling like I had to pretend that I was somehow making progress with my grief as though I hadn't gone in the bathroom at work between a meeting and silently sobbed, and then touched up my makeup and went back out and said, "Hey, what do you guys want for lunch?"

HAESUE:

Welcome back to Mind If We Talk? Where you get to be a fly on the wall for many therapy sessions and learn some mental health tips in the process. I'm your host, Haesue Jo. I'm a licensed therapist with over 10 years of experience providing individual and family therapy. This week's question, How Do I Cope With Grief and Loss? This is a big one. It's something all of us deal with at some point in our lives. And despite being so universal, it's an experience that most of us don't know how to address. Three to five days is the standard bereavement leave in the United States, yet up to 10% of adults may feel deep depression symptoms for over a year after loss. That's called Prolonged Grief Disorder. If you're experiencing any kind of grief right now, I see you, I'm sorry, and you are not alone. I'm hoping this episode will help you feel understood and give you some tools for managing how you feel.

Talking about death and severe grief is almost taboo in our country. The expectation is that we all avoid talking about uncomfortable topics and get back to normal as quickly as possible. 

Today, we're going to break that taboo. 

Misty Stinnett is the co-host of Go Help Yourself, a comedy, self-help podcast too. And I'm quoting here, "Make Life Suck Less." Misty and her co-host Lisa, have dissected hundreds of self-help books in search of the best and worst advice. And today she's willing to open up about her experience with grief and all the things she's learned along the way. For Misty, Go Help Yourself is part of a personal development journey that kicked off after a sudden loss she experienced, which we're going to get into. My conversation with Misty made it clear that different kinds of loss can bring on very different kinds of grief. Let's get talking.

Hi, Misty. Really excited to be talking to you today.

MISTY STINNET:

Haesue, thank you so much for having me. I'm really glad that we're talking about this so that anyone who's going through it, you know, feels less alone.

HAESUE:

That's right. I really hope this helps our listeners, because grief is a universal experience, right? No one really is alone in grief, but for some reason when it's happening, we feel like we are, it's something everybody eventually experiences. So maybe we talk a little bit more about your experience with grief.

MISTY STINNET:

Yeah, I have several experiences with grief, unfortunately, and I lost my dad very suddenly in 2012. I was 25 at the time. And really that sudden loss is what kicked off my personal development journey,

because all of a sudden I found myself with not that many people who could understand, because in my mid twenties, I didn't know that many people who had lost a parent or someone significant. And I was feeling alone and feeling a lot of complex things that I wasn't sure how to manage.

 And that's when I sought therapy for the first time. And therapy really opened up my mental and emotional capacity to sit with difficult things, to reframe situations, to start to make meaning of my pain. I remember I opened up my podcast app one day and I said, surely there's a podcast that reads or summarizes self-help books so I can know in like an hour if it's worth my time. Surely. And it didn't exist. And I just thought, huh, I think I'm going to have to make that. And so that's, that's how Go Help Yourself was born. It's one of the more beautiful things that has come out of my grief and the loss of my dad, and it's something that has really helped me make sense of that pain.

HAESUE:

Thank you for sharing that. And it's a great technique to channel your grief into some kind of action. And in this case, you're finding humor and helping others through your podcast, which is a really wonderful thing. You kind of alluded earlier to having experienced grief in another way, so I'm curious to hear more about the different kinds of experiences that you've had. You mentioned your father, of course, and, I think there might be something else there that you were kind of hinting at.

MISTY STINNET:

You know, when the world really opened up after that initial lockdown period, I decided I was going to do my own Eat, Pray, Love and travel across Latin America. And I got a call that my aunt, my tia, who was my uncle's wife, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Laura was several years younger than my uncle, and so she was only three years older than me. When I got that news, it was gutting because she is, she's a peer, and she was healthy otherwise, it just felt so unexpected and so shocking. And she had a five-year-old daughter, and my uncle needed to keep working to keep the health insurance, of course. And I decided that I would move in with them in order to help take care of her five-year-old daughter and to start taking her to her medical appointments while my uncle was working, et cetera.

And again, this is such a wildly different experience than my dad. Because I actually lost my dad suddenly on Christmas day in 2012. So there's a particular grief when it's a holiday where everyone celebrates every year, and it's the most wonderful time of the year for a lot of people. And I didn't see it coming, and I didn't know, and it completely shattered my reality. And then with Laura, we knew that she was going to pass at some point, and here I was looking into the eyes of a peer, a beloved family member and a peer. And the difference, the real difference there for me is that we knew we had probably a year or so with Laura, and we got to have so many conversations about what do you think is on the other side? How do you feel about this? I don't want you to go, what do you want me to say to your daughter about these subjects? How do you want me to have the puberty conversation with her? You know, it's like you get to, it's devastating and heartbreaking, but the fact that there was space and time and iterations to be able to sit with what was coming and say what we needed to say and cry and laugh. It was a completely different experience. Those are some of the gifts on the other side, because my dad passed suddenly, I did not have to witness his prolonged suffering, but with Laura I did. Those, I would say, are the main differences.

HAESUE:

Yeah. And you're describing something that people might even learn about in therapy. It's called anticipatory grief. You know, grief is very reactive to something that's happened, a loss. Anticipatory grief is the experience we go through that you're describing with Laura. You know, you, you have this time and space almost to kind of plan the reality beyond that moment that they're gone with them, which yeah, kind of changes all of our experience with it. We know that whatever is on the other side of things they are involved in. Like you said, you've been so considerate to consider her decision making, what life would look like for her child. One is so sudden you use some language here that I think is very powerful, the shattering of reality. There was no time to think about it. In fact, there was a whole lifetime of thinking about the Christmases in the future. We're gonna have together the milestones in my life that I have not yet shared with him. Um, and all of that was just taken away very, very quickly. And it sounds like in between the two is almost 10 years you've changed, you've had lifetimes of experiences. I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on how you feel like your experience with grief evolved in that time as well.

MISTY STINNET:

The largest part for me is that grief has a way of stretching one's capacity for discomfort, whether you want to or not. You know, we find ourselves in these situations, whether by choice or if they're thrust upon us.

 The very first experience with my father's very sudden passing, it made the world feel dangerous and unstable. And it felt like, oh my gosh, I, anything terrible could happen at any time. I really struggled. I was living with my older sister at the time, and every single morning that she left for work for the first few months after my dad died, I thought, oh my God, that's the last time I might ever see her. So it kind of ripped this, this tear in the fabric of reality for me. And so I had to work on trusting the goodness of life again, and trusting that safety and stability could be present and could feel good, that life could feel good again. And so when my aunt was diagnosed, I was working with my somatic therapist, and she really helped me to understand that death is a part of life and that we can approach it as this phase of life, this part of life. And what the anticipatory grief allowed me to do is to accept the process, talk with my loved one. And then when she passed, it didn't feel like the big before and after that it had felt like with my dad, it felt like the next step in this journey that was already evolving.

HAESUE:

Thank you for sharing that. And the imagery of the monster that we didn't want there. You know, monsters, if they were to appear in front of me, I can imagine myself, like you said, losing any sense of stability or safety in my environment. I could see myself not being able to sleep very well, um, becoming more vigilant, like you said, when your sister was leaving the home. Just having really heightened anxiety to the level of not being able to really focus on anything or concentrate. So all of these things are very common symptoms of grief and, you know, people don't really talk about grief or the death of a loved one as though it is a traumatic event. But truly, when we think about what trauma is, it's generally our physiological emotional reactions to having the sense of safety ripped away from us. You mentioned that your therapist is a somatic therapist, and I, I'm gonna guess that there's some people out there that don't know what that is, haven't really heard about it. So I'd love to hear from you after you've been in this kind of therapy, what your understanding of what it is, how it's helped you, what somebody can expect if they were to go find a somatic therapist.

MISTY STINNET:

Definitely, I would be so happy to share about this. So, somatic therapy, it's dealing in bodily sensations, bodily intelligence. Most of us are not taught a large emotional vocabulary. If we are, and we're able to describe nuanced emotions that we're feeling or even identify them, it's even rarer that we can go into our body and say, oh, like, this is where I feel the sadness. I feel the sadness in the left side of my chest. It was so interesting when I first started getting into somatic therapy because we'd start a session that was a lot like, talk therapy, how are you feeling? You know, what's coming up for you? And then it was learning and practicing in real time, this skill of tuning into my body and going, well, where, where is that? What does that feel like? It has given me the gift of allowing me to sit with difficult emotions like grief and all of the emotions that encompasses, and allow them to be paid attention to move through if they need to, by crying, by screaming, by breathing, by singing, whatever that is. And it does feel like a little bit of that leaves my body or gets unstuck each time. And so having both the cognitive behavioral therapy, the talk therapy and the somatic therapy really helped me gain space in my body and find relief from some of those more acute symptoms of grief.

HAESUE:

Beautiful depiction of what you gained from somatic therapy. You mentioned the very strong tie between the brain and body. You also alluded to, in our western society, us not really thinking about or learning about that connection sometimes until much later in our lives when it's reactive to needing to figure that connection out. And some people never figure it out at all. And so it makes sense when your body's uncomfortable, but you don't know why the initial thing, your brain just kind of perceives it as like, I'm unwell, I'm not well. And some people panic from that. Some people get worse from that deterioration. So being able to tune into these subtle things within us is such a good practice. People up there may have heard of things like mindfulness, grounding exercises, being centered, and a lot of that has to do with tuning into those internal processes that are happening to us physiologically

It is very Western that we don't really think about how mental health challenges can manifest in our bodies. But what actually, for a lot of, um, Eastern cultures, people aren't really talking explicitly verbally about their emotions and their experiences with feelings or that internal process. But in fact, a lot of the manifestations of mental health struggle are somatic. So somebody that is depressed in maybe an Eastern country may come to a doctor saying, my neck really hurts. I don't know where all this tension is coming from, but it's making it so I can't work. And oftentimes people don't have the language for, I think it's because I'm so anxious and I'm hiking up my shoulders to my ears all day. What's something that you think is misunderstood about grief? Something that you wish more people would pause to consider when thinking about it?

MISTY STINNET:

Something I learned in the wake of my dad's passing is that I could feel wildly happy and desperately sad at the same time. Three weeks after my dad passed, I got what was at the time my dream job. And I didn't want anybody at work to know I was grieving. I didn't want them to think I couldn't handle the new job. And I remember feeling so excited about that job, so grateful, so wildly sad, so desperately scared, so freaked out, and imposter syndrome also very capable. It just showed me that so many things can be present at the same time and that there's a lot of complexity in there. And I think this was not 100% your question, but I feel it's really important for anyone who knows someone who has, and I'm speaking specifically about the loss of a loved one here.

Not, not necessarily the grief of a job or a relationship ending, but if you know someone who has lost someone recently, I think one of the most common ways that people approach someone is to say, "how did it happen?" They say, "how did it happen? Tell me."And I think there is a care in that question. They're trying to say, share the, you know, details with me, let me in. And I also think there's sometimes a morbid curiosity in that question, and people wanna know, how did it happen so I can protect myself? What I wanna offer to people is if the grieving person wants to share those details with you and open up, they will. By asking "how did it happen?" you never know what horrific details you might be asking them to relive, especially if it's sudden, right? And in that same vein, I found folks who sent food, not flowers to be the most helpful, because in acute grief, it is hard. I lost my appetite, my ability to do laundry, to take care of myself and the folks that sent over a sandwich tray or came over and said, "let me just clean your house, let me just do an act of service for you so that you don't have to think about it," that was really helpful. And flowers are beautiful, but they do die a week later. And then you're seeing, oh, look, life is dying around me.

HAESUE:

A lot of traditions and a lot of cultures that's actually ingrained, embedded into, you know, the ritualistic ceremonious tradition of what we do for somebody that's grieving. Um, for example, I know in the Jewish community, that's a huge thing to bring food over. It certainly is in my parents' culture, we feed because like you said, when you're grieving, you kind of lose a lot of executive function, I think in these great tips that you've provided, you've also kinda given me a little bit of a glimpse into how grief has impacted you at that time, what you were going through and the immediate days following. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you feel like it's been impacting you now.

MISTY STINNET:

You know, this Christmas day will be 13 years since I lost my dad. And where I am with death and grief now is that it has allowed me to embrace the finitude of life in a very healthy way, and in a way that helps me appreciate every single sunset, every miracle that is a flower blooming on the bush next door. And it's really helped me to shape what I really wanna be working on while I am here. I think the idea of like, what's my purpose? How can I live my best life? It is too heavy. It's too big of a question for a lot of us. But it helps me ask the question, okay, at this point in my life, how do I wanna orient my life? How do I wanna show up? Something unexpected that happened for me when I was grieving, especially in my mid twenties, is I did not expect that not only would I be in my own grief, but I couldn't bring it up with just whomever, even close friends. Because when I brought it up, I kind of noticed a lot of them just went stiff. You could tell they were so uncomfortable with the subject. I found myself having to not only manage my own grief, but manage the comfort of a lot of the people sitting across from me. And that was really, really hard. And I found deep solace in the few people who said, tell me all about it. Welcome to the Dead Dad Club. Let's talk about it. So something that I do every year now is I volunteer at a children's grief camp. It's called Camp Erin.

HAESUE:

It speaks to something that some people may discover depending on the type of therapy they go into. But there is a therapeutic concept that really emphasizes the act of altruism is how we get closer to the truth of who we are and closer to the connectivity between people. And a lot of people that struggle with mental health are isolated. They don't feel like they're valuable to anybody. They don't feel like they've ever done anything valuable for anybody. So I really love this tradition that you've brought into your life to really extend kindness and love and compassion to other people. You're providing something so valuable to these kids. It's perspective, it's firsthand experience of something that they're going through. Is there something that you now know you needed at that time and you didn't necessarily receive it, and maybe it's something that you're now able to provide to yourself?

MISTY STINNET:

Hmm. I think something that I needed at the time that I had a little bit of, but really could have used a lot more in an ongoing way, was permission. And what I mean is permission to take up a lot of space in my grief. Permission to have it take way longer in the acute phase than maybe made other people around me feel comfortable. After, you know, three months the world starts to go on, right? And people sort of, you know, start approaching you like, it's totally normal, et cetera. But I remember feeling like I had to pretend that I was somehow making progress with my grief, again, managing the comfort of the person across from me as though I hadn't gone in the bathroom at work between a meeting and silently sobbed and then touched up my makeup and gone back out and said, "Hey, what do you guys want for lunch?" You know? There was a lot of pretending going on, and I think when it is a massive loss, it's constant. It is always there. And I needed permission to take up space, permission to be messy, permission to speak freely around friends, permission to be angry. You know, I can only speak for my own experience, but as a woman, I'm not that comfortable being angry. I'm like, oh, no, let me bring in compassion and let me extend, you know, all kinds of explanations for why I shouldn't feel this way. So I really just needed the space and time to take a long time. I mean, my dad was my best friend. It happened suddenly. I haven't gotten to see him for the last 12 years, and that's still upsetting to me. Yeah. I really needed more people eight months in, 10 months in, 12 months in, to say, "Hey, do you, do you wanna go on a walk and talk about your dad?"

HAESUE:

Yeah. It's interesting that, with grief, especially in the workplace, like I, coworkers just are, there's a level of separation between us. Like sometimes we can become really good personal friends with the people we work with, but by and large, most of the time there is some little bit of censorship going on. It is us at work, but it's a, it's a version. And I have observed and found when a colleague or yourself is grieving, people just don't wanna cross this barrier and get into the emotion-based dynamic that exists between loved ones. People also don't want to make things uncomfortable for them or the other person. I really like what you're saying here, and, and I think what you're asking for is actually very reasonable, but in our current modern day society, the infrastructure of supporting our colleagues through grief is questionable. I know I could ask you so many more questions. It's clear that you are very self-help. I imagine your box of self-help tools and the things that you've learned along the way are bigger than anyone I've ever met. So I do wanna ask one more question to kind of start wrapping things up. What would you say are some of the top things that you've got out of this that have actually been really helpful for you, that you've actually incorporated into the everyday, if not some kind of routine?

MISTY STINNET:

We all need professional guidance, helpful guidance from our community to know that we belong. And that all is not lost. Reassurance from our peers, our friends, encouragement from those who have gone before to say, "Hey, I've been standing in your shoes and I know it feels helpless, but hang in there and you'll come out the other side of this." 

There's so much. But one other thing is that there are no bad emotions. Emotions are just information. Right. Like, when we feel angry, it lets us know like, hey, maybe a boundary has been crossed when. We are sad, it lets us know, oh my gosh, I was hoping for something and I, maybe I didn't get that something.

HAESUE:

So much research out there shows that those that try to do it alone face more mental health challenges, more physical illness and earlier death. So we are meant to be together, whatever that looks like for whoever.

MISTY STINNET:

And I also cannot overstate the power of humor to help us carry heavy things and the heavy weight of grief. It is okay to laugh. Take yourself to a comedy movie, scroll TikTok on your For You Page, you know, whatever it is. And, and also, you know, there's a time and place to dissociate. There's a time and place to say, you know what? I've been processing a lot. It's too much. I'm gonna tap out.

HAESUE:

Thank you so much for this, this conversation, for being so open, for being vulnerable, um, and sharing such valuable insight through the experiences that you've had. I'm very, very grateful for your time and your energy and just for being here today.

MISTY STINNET:

Thank you so much for having Haesue.

HAESUE:

So much came up in that discussion with Misty. She's further along in her grief journey and has experience with a couple different kinds of therapy. There's still plenty of challenges to expand upon here because when you're grieving, there really isn't a standard playbook. You might only realize a lot about what you need after the fact. So let's try to break down that conversation and see if we can pull out some more specific guidance and who better to do that than another therapist. Joining us again here on the show is Dr. Sreela Roy Green, clinical operations manager at Better Help. Sreela is a personal friend of mine, and she's been a therapist for years. Both of us have helped many clients work through their grief, and we found that, of course, this emotion looks a bit different for everybody. With that in mind, we zeroed in on some interesting parts of Misty's story and pulled out some advice and exercises for you all to think about. Let's get into it. Sreela, thanks so much for being here.

SREELA ROY GREEN:

Thanks for having me, Haesue

HAESUE:

Misty talked about hiding her grief, constantly feeling like she was pretending so she could avoid the stigma, and social awkwardness that sometimes comes with experiencing grief. So I wanted to dive a little bit deeper and see how you as a licensed professional therapist recommend someone who's grieving move through social and professional spaces. I mean, something that comes to mind now is, it's been multiple times throughout my career that not just as a therapist, but through my colleagues, somebody has lost someone very significant to them. And that conversation comes up if I don't know how to navigate the workplace with this. People are saying weird things to me. They're kind of acting strange around me.

SREELA ROY GREEN:

That reaction in and of itself speaks to the larger issue. Right? It's not something that people feel comfortable processing, talking about, being open about, and yet it's something every single person experiences, whether that's in a relationship ending, which is a separate type of grief, but it's a grief nonetheless. The loss of any loved one that can be a pet or a friend, and then you've got family members, right? There is no right way. There is no perfect way to go through grief because it is so individual, it is so subjective to the person experiencing it because it's theirs. And the other piece to it is it's so fluid. There is no one way to feel. And on top of that, no one day looks like the next or another, you know? And I think addressing that head on is the biggest thing, is to be able to say, I'm going through something. I'm going through some grief right now, or, I've had this really significant loss and I really don't know how I feel about it. It's okay to say that too. I've often said that to my clients when they're going through grief is like, "it's okay to not know how you're feeling right now. You might be having so many feelings right now, and there is no one right way to feel."

HAESUE:

You mentioned that grief affects everybody differently. You know, how somebody moves through the grieving stage, I think is gonna be affected by so many things like the relationship you had with that person. So many things leading up to it, like your own resiliency factors, protective factors you've already had or risk factors that you've been carrying around for you with you. So what I'm hearing is like sometimes we may be, without realizing it, explicitly seeking some kind of comfort from somebody else. And sometimes it falls short because everybody experiences grief differently. So we're leaning on a friend or a colleague, and they may be providing to us what they would have needed in a time of grief, but that's not always the same as what I need. So what, what do you think it looks like to give yourself permission to grieve?

SREELA ROY GREEN:

I think that it would depend on each person. Um, for sure. I think sometimes having even something as simple as a, um, quick one-liner of being able to say, you know what, today's just not the day, or today is the day I just need to do this. Or I need to have a really good cry. Or, today's the day I just need to ask for the day off, or I need to tell whoever I might be accountable to whoever that is in your life to say, I'm having a bad day, today's that day and I'm going to do X, Y, and Z, or just X, whatever it is. And I think even being able to give yourself permission to just be, right? To just be in the moment, be still, so to speak, and say, I'm going to just feel this right now. Because if I don't, and I don't give myself that permission, it's going to create a really difficult dynamic for myself to not move through how I am feeling right now in the here and now. My other favorite tip is, what would you say to somebody you care about at this moment? If they were there and they were struggling, what would you ask them to do? How would you give them permission and then apply that to yourself instead?

HAESUE:

I love that last tip. It's so similar to what I've been thinking of, of how I would respond to this. Like with my clients, I do a lot of work in getting in touch with the inner child. I may not say it explicitly that we're gonna be doing this. But what I find is that a lot of us are carrying around trauma that happened to us when we're very young. And that person, that kid is still there. And we turn into these adults that for a variety of different reasons, stop allowing that child to do what the child needs to do or allowing the child to feel or allowing the child to be sad in some kind of moment. So I really like what you said about thinking about what kind of permission you may give or what you would say to somebody that you care about. Somehow along the way, a lot of us neglect to care for ourselves in that warm, nurturing, kind, patient way.

SREELA ROY GREEN:

I agree a hundred percent. One thing you just said that really resonated with me is that that child is still in there. We've internalized so many, perhaps not kind messages over time, or messages we wish we had gotten and are not taught from a young age how to navigate these negative experiences or for that matter, grief. You fast forward, you become an adult and it's like, well, how do I do that? It was never done for me.

HAESUE:

Something that has also come up with my clients, but also in this conversation that I had with Misty, is this idea that when somebody passes away, especially abruptly, suddenly, no warning, we didn't know it was gonna happen. There's this loss of trust in our environment, in the safety of our world, the stability that we've come to understand. Like she talked about feeling afraid of the world after her father had passed away. She felt like something terrible could happen at any minute. And I think there are a lot of traumatic experiences that could give somebody a very similar feeling to that. Sure. So what are some good first steps, as Misty put it, to trust that life could feel good again.

SREELA ROY GREEN:

A lot of it has to do with grounding oneself and some basic kind of strategies and grounding techniques to remind yourself you are in the here and the now, creating a safe space too. You know, I think that the other piece is having worked with individuals who have significant trauma, recreating, redefining spaces and relationships, even to some degree to make them safe for you. You know, grounding can be something as simple as keeping something in your hand, you know, that is tactile and grounding for you that makes you feel safe. Uh, pictures, um, you know, using five senses to really feel kind of in the present moment and being able to acknowledge and be here. Now I'm okay having mantras of sorts or, or key talking points with yourself, and it's okay to also lean on the people who you can lean on to help you through that to remind you that you're safe.

Something as simple as your partner or a loved one or sibling, whoever is able to say, “I got you. You're okay. You're okay with me.” And it's okay to teach people that too. To say that to you, like, "I need you to say this to me if I start to spiral or I start to feel emotional or overwhelmed or feel unsafe, and I say this to you, I need you to say this to me." And also kind of calling on times, uh, where you have felt safe and being able to kind of access that when we're feeling unsafe, like thinking of times, you know, you know, guided imagery or visualizations come to mind when I say this. You know, imagining those quiet, safe spaces where you had safety and abundance. It takes practice though, too. That's the other thing I try to remind people, um, especially my clients, is that if you're going to try these techniques and these strategies it's a really good idea to also practice them as much as possible so they become a habit.

HAESUE:

Right. I mean, the thing I tell my clients all the time is, you can decide today to run a marathon tomorrow, but if you haven't been training, you're not gonna be able to finish or you're going to get really injured.The, the similar idea comes with these skills that we practice, these grounding skills, these exercises. If you just think that you're gonna do it tomorrow when you have a panic attack, it's probably not gonna work out very well because you haven't been practicing or training that muscle. Um, so similar to this idea that there's certain exercises that can connect our minds and our bodies to find some kind of soothing for ourselves. I know that grief and other types of emotional stress can actually be held in our body. That's something that therapists talk about. And, um, certain times of therapists also practice something called somatic therapy. And this is something that Misty brought up. This is part of her journey that was part of her healing. She described very briefly in our conversation a little bit about what somebody can expect by going into this, but do you ever do this kind of work with clients and, and, you know, even if you don't, I imagine you're familiar with some of it. So what might you say is a good entry level somatic exercise for grief to help listeners get into their body a little bit more?

SREELA ROY GREEN:

I've done, I guess, some various degrees of some somatic work before it actually probably got that name. And, uh, and you know, in the years since I've been practicing, it's become its own, you know, carved out therapeutic intervention. And I think it's fantastic. By the way, the things that do come to mind, um, is when I've been sitting in a session with a client and, and they're in distress and they're feeling overwhelmed. One of the first things that I will say is, "where are you feeling this right now in your body? How is it feeling for you? What's coming up for you beyond just what you talked about or, or what you're, you know, specifically discussing in here and now something else must have come up for you. What do you think that was and where are you feeling it?" Um, and really acknowledging that, that physical sensation, you know, it might be, I'll use nausea as my example. You know, I'll have a client that will be like, you know, I, as I was just talking about that "I just felt so sick to my stomach, I feel like I'm going to throw up." And then it's talking it out and then deep breathing and getting through it and seeing like, "what do you think that is and where did that come from and what did that elicit for you?" Obviously, I'm paraphrasing and it's much deeper than that, but really helping them to walk through the physical sensation of that and hopefully getting them to a safer place where they're maybe not feeling so sick to their stomach ultimately, but being able to then process like once that physical sensation is passed, then really sitting down and being like, "where do you, what do you think the origin of that might have been?" Or what was causing that to really sit there? I think that it has a lot of value. 'cause again, we don't always recognize that we're holding stuff in.

HAESUE:

Yeah. I think it's great modeling for people to start paying attention because even, where do you feel now? What does it feel like on a scale of so-and-so? Like, is it a hot feeling? Is it like all these things that people don't really ask themselves? Um, I think, uh, is a really, really good practice. You know, some people, and Misty kind of alluded to this too, some people even describe having had more insight come through their grief. Maybe having some kind of positive association with something that has happened because they've learned something about themselves. Something changed in a different relationship in their life as a result of what happened here. Maybe a deeper sense of gratitude for something. So I know this is a complicated idea, but I was hoping that we could get into this notion, can grief teach us something? You know, maybe some listeners out there who've experienced a more recent loss, they're not quite there yet, or maybe they won't be there, um, or disagree even with the idea and the concept that grief and loss can have something to teach us. But I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on this concept.

SREELA ROY GREEN:

This may not be something that everybody's ready to hear,

but grief can be an amazing teacher, when you're ready for it. I think that's the piece, you have to be ready for it.

 There's an old proverb, and I forget where the origins of it were, but you know, when the student is ready, the teacher will arrive. That's what comes to mind as you were, as you were talking, is yes, grief can be a really powerful teacher if and when it's appropriate. I think that's the piece. You know, I love what Misty did say is that it stretched her capacity for discomfort because it's, there's an incredible truth to that. There's nothing that's gonna make you more uncomfortable in life than the grief that you're gonna experience for a loved one and learning how you grieve and what that looks like for you.

I have found, um, for, for people I've worked with and on a personal level, people who have gone through personal grief, they have shifted to almost like 180 in terms of their capacity for generosity and compassion for others. You know, they didn't see those amazing qualities, maybe that that person that they lost had or, um, had trouble reconciling with what that person did, um, you know, during their time on, on earth. And then they, they, they're lost and suddenly it's like, I want that. I wanna live that on or take on that legacy, or whatever the case is. So it's really a question of what you want it to be for you and how you want your grief to potentially shape you. And again, when that person is ready, if they are ready, that's something that they can certainly do. But I don't know that that's necessarily gonna happen for everybody, for some people, it's simply like, I had a loss. I'm gonna grieve for them and I'm just gonna keep going.

HAESUE:

There is no one correct way to grieve. And so even with this concept, if you learn something, great, if you don't, you're moving through it. You're getting through it in the ways that you need to. So I don't think we should place expectations on ourselves to like, learn some great lesson. I think being open to the universe for lessons that could come is always a nice step. Um, but just continuing to grant permission to ourselves to do what we need to do and feel what we need to feel and having compassion, like whatever it is that comes up, it is and it is okay.

SREELA ROY GREEN:

As adults especially, we are so bad at treating ourselves the way we deserve to be treated, which is with kindness and compassion and love. And especially when we are grieving, when we are at our potential worst, that's when we should love ourselves even more.

HAESUE:

I think that's a great note to end on. When we are at our worst, it's when we need to love ourselves the most. So thank you so much Sreela for your time, your wisdom, your energy here today. So, um, I hope this was helpful for other people as much as it was for me too.

SREELA ROY GREEN:

Same here. Thank you for having me.

HAESUE:

I wanna give a big thank you to better help for their passion behind this project and for giving us a platform to champion the wellbeing in all of us. Mind If We Talk is produced by Acast Creative Studios in collaboration with Better Help and hosted by me, Haesue Jo. If you like what you just heard, drop us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and share with your friends. Maybe one of our topics will help someone in your life. And remember, your Happiness matters Mind if we talk is intended for entertainment and education, not for mental health diagnosis or medical advice.