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Episode 750: Grief and The Dance of Self-Discovery with Edy Nathan · The Trauma Therapist

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Or welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gaming Person.
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My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible cells, to be human,
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to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big believer in
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who we are is more important than what we know, and this requires cultivating
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authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn more
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about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot com.
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That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started, all right,
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So here we go five or three, two and one, our folks,
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welcome back to the podcast. Very excited to have us. My guest today,
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Edie Nathan Evie, Welcome to the podcast. Guy, it's great to
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be here. Thank you so much. Appreciate that. So. Eedie is
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a certified sex therapist and thought leader specializing in grief, trauma, and sexuality.
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She works with businesses, universities, and long term care homes to help
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people understand how these areas filters through their lives and affect everything from creativity to
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productivity. Working together. She offers creative ways to do with grief, trauma,
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and sexuality in her new book called Its Grief the Dance of self discovery
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through trauma and loss. Eadie examines the emotional and devastating impact of loss and
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trauma. The book identifies the intricacies of the dark and unfamiliar effects on this
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self, also illuminates how the brain holds a complex circuitry of grief. Eadie,
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welcome. Oh, it's great to be here. Appreciate that. Just
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off the top of my head. Grief, trauma, and sexuality. Each
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one of those topics, in any of themselves, is like so intense and
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so intricately layered, right, but all together I'm like, oh my god.
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But before we get there, do you hear with our listeners where you're
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from originally and where you are currently? So I'm originally a Midwest girl and
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I'm from Chicago, and I am currently in Massachusetts and New York. Cool,
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So that's where I'm currently living. So let's start out here. How
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how did you get into this field? It started with grief, although it
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probably started with my own experiences of trauma, but it got it that got
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buried, and then I had a major loss in my life of my loved
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one when I was twenty seven years old, and it changed the entire trajectory
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of my life, and I went from thinking I was going to speak in
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the corporate world on drug abuse to going back to school and learning about grief
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and how best to talk to people and help people move through their grief.
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What happens when you start to talk about grief, if if it starts with
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a personal journey, is that if there are prior traumas, oftentimes when one
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door opens, other doors then consecutively follow. And I found myself in the
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mire of looking at traumatic incidents that had occurred over the time of my life
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and really began to see how how they talk to one another grief and trauma,
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and then the sexuality piece. When you're dealing with trauma, most often
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you're going to have people walk into your private practice and start to talk about
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abuse and violence and domestic issues and sexual abuse. And then an entire world
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began to open up to see how everything was starting to fit together like a
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mosaic. Okay, so that's the thirty thousand foot view, But sud they
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agree that you willing to share, what were you what were you covering?
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What had been suppressed? You know, I think there's different types of suppression
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and repression, and you can know something but not let it come up.
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So there was a knowing, and I chose not to let it come up
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until I couldn't let it until I couldn't avoid it anymore, which is really
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what anxiety is looks like you can push it away and push it away until
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it gets so big that finally it just overwhelms. And I had experienced at
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a very young age, having been abused by classmates physically and and that kind
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of sexual abuse was was the beginning of weight gain and protection within my body
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to say, no one's like classmates, yeah by class Wow, Okay,
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what age are we talking about here? Nine? Ye? And the thing
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is is that when you're working in this field, you must separate out what
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is mine and what is yours. And what I realized was that yes,
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it happened, and yet for those girls to have done that to me,
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they themselves had to have knowledge, which meant that they must have been abused
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too, and they were acting out something that had been done to them.
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And so my forgiveness, which I talk about in my book on Grief,
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it was part of my own journey and what I teach to my peeps,
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my clients and whenever I speak on this is to understand to have a lens
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that that doesn't have to capture me or hold me hostage. Instead, I
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can actually start to negotiate and navigate with the hostage taker of memory to kind
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of rethink it and relive and live with it in a different way. And
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in all truth and honesty, that can be a long journey from when something
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occurred to getting to the point where you're able to have that sentiment. But
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how so, this went uncovered for a long time, a long time,
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and even when it was uncovered, I didn't want to believe it, and
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I thought that I had created it. I thought that I and this is
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what the mind does because the idea of it. And for anyone who experiences
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any kind of sexual, traumatizing grief experience, you just you how could this
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be? And yet one of the girls in her thirties came to me and
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said and said, I'm so sorry. Oh wow. And it was at
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that point I was thirty two years old guy, when I realized I didn't
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make this up. Oh my god. So it was just like out of
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the blue, she calls you were tech, out of the blue, out
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of the blue, out of the blue. It was she saw me on
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Facebook and she reached out and she said, can we talk? And I
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said, well, I happened to be in Chicago, and she said,
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well I'm still living there. Let's meet. Wow. Yeah, and okay.
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It's heavy. And it showed me as a clinician the possibilities. Right.
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So you were a clinician at the time, Yeah, I was.
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I was actually back in school becoming a clinician, going for a second master's
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degree in social work. So I was. I was a drama therapist,
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creative arts therapist and realized, oh, you know what, I need more
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schooling and just had written a thesis for my first masters on grief and creative
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techniques and in working with grief because I've lost my first love. But it
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was the loss of my first love. It was the loss of Paul that
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began really this journey. And that is where I see that that grief,
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that losses can be gifts, and what I do carries him and his life
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that I the man I knew it carries it forward because of this work,
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because what he taught me hired to that woman reaching out to you. Was
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there ever an understanding or within you that something had happened, and were you
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Were you coping in what way? I was? I was coping. I
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don't know how authentic or real I was. You know, I was very
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guarded I had. I was nine. By the time I was thirteen,
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I was a thin nine year old. By the time I was thirteen fourteen,
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I was easily one hundred and eighty pounds. Because the weight became my
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my my defense, like, no one's going to touch me if I'm this
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weight. And we all have our defenses and they come out for everyone in
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a different way. And that realization has helped me in my practice now.
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It helped me when I was learning to become a practitioner, for sure.
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So so the loss of your loved one and then this call from this friend.
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How far apart were they? So it was five years? Five years,
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yeah, five years, And they're very interesting looking at this. I
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mean, I'm curious about how they informed the work you do. Well.
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She informed me about forgiveness, and he informed me about how grief is a
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lone process and it doesn't look the same for anyone, and that though it
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is painful and it doesn't go away. He really we want to pretend that
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you get through it or over it. Okay, there's the great pretend and
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the pretense of right, guy, I'm going to get through this, I'm
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going to get over it. And the realization that that was a lie,
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that you don't get over it and you don't get through it. That,
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as my title says, like it is a dance, It is a partnership,
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and by partnering with it instead of refuting its presence, has enabled me
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to be sane and more grounded and actually be a thinner person as well.
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However, meeting up with that that woman, that then woman at thirty two,
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it was after meeting her that the rest of my weight fell. And
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so it was very interesting because I because up until that I wasn't sure that
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I that it actually had happened. And then of course there's a there's therapy,
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and there's conversations, and there's intensives that as a clinician and as the
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woman in this body I needed to enter into and realizing that not just talk
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therapy was going to work, that there needed to be more creative expressive means
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like mask making, like like psychodrama, like role play, because our psyches
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love to protect us, guy, and so what what what what? What
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My clients would find is, you know, I'd be sitting on the floor
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with them with clay and we'd be making masks of grief and we'd break them
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down. I would have intensives with men and women and grief cruises where people
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would really work their grief and work through their trauma. When I say through,
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it like to get to a place where they could partner with it.
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And there was an awakening, and the awakening comes through I believe the creative
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techniques, not just us sitting in a room talking. You were interest in
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creativity and creative expression and the dancing with grief. Did that come as a
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result of your loss? I love body? Yeah, because there were no
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words? How did you? How did that? How did you approach that
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initially and then get to a point where you were like, okay, I
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want to explore this. I want to help others move through dance As you
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say, yeah, well it wasn't. It didn't start out as a dance,
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that's for sure. A guy, you know, it started out with
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me saying being very proactive, I'm going to go to some grief groups.
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I'm gonna I'm gonna help myself. I'm going to talk about this. Most
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of the grief groups, the men and women who were in them were older
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sixties, seventies, eighties, and they saw me at twenty seven and they
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said, oh, you know, you're young, and you'll find another person
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and you'll be fine. And that didn't help. And I refuted that,
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and it was crushing because I had hoped that I would get some help and
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I would find some relevance in I what I was experiencing I and I couldn't.
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And it was then that I said, Okay, you're going to have
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to be a teacher. You're gonna have to teach yourself. And as I
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learned about grief, and I went to intensives with Elizabeth Coopler Ross and and
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did a whole slew of personal work, I realized, we need a languaging
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that's a little bit different than the languaging for the dying, and a little
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bit different languaging for anyone at any age who is facing grief. And then
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my idea of grief expanded and it's like, oh, this is not just
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about the loss of a loved one guy, this is about the losses we
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have in our lives, and they accumulate so it was. It was a
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reckning with this huge life lesson of grief from the loss of a loved one,
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grief that happens when there's a loss of the self, and grief that
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happens when there's trauma involved. Well, I think each and every one of
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those could be a podcast episode unto itself and a book unto itself certainly.
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But you said you went in and you were doing a lot of work and
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you were trying to find a different language. What is it that you discovered
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briefly? I mean, you know, I think just your use of the
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word dance and as opposed to we're going to get through This is in and
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of itself a shift. But culturally speaking, how are we looking how do
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we look at loss and grief? And what are you bringing to the table
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in a sense, your perspective how we look at grief and loss is we'll
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do anything to avoid talking about it. I mean, that's it. And
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like any good anxiety, when anxiety comes up, what do we want to
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do but push it away? And you know when you push it away,
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it gets bigger. And so if we think about it, it's an invitation
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in rather than a kick out. The door. And so it is inviting
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grief in. It is making time to grapple with it, to understand that
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it can hold you hostage, to understand that it has a grip, and
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that it will lighten its grip if you start to pay attention. And that
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is a different lens. And also I moved away from the idea of the
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stages of grief because I found them self limiting and instead because grief is nonlinear.
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Not my term, it just is. And and the nonlinearity of grief
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it to me, it's the stages don't speak to Oh, you know,
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they're going to combine, they're going to coalesce, they're gonna, they're they're
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gonna, they're they're they're going to create a mosaic, they're going to stack,
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and they're going to be crazy semaking and the languaging. In that way,
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I I decided to bring that in and that's that's what I'm part of
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my offering, if you will. All right, let's just pause here for
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a second to thank our sponsors. All Right, we are back, and
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just to be clear, we're not just talking about the grief of loss losing
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someone, but as you mentioned, grief of losing oneself and just too briefly,
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Uh, interjected, what's going on? I recently went through a divorce
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which was like out of the blue, and I'm identifying a lot with what
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you're saying in terms of the grief of losing an identity, you know,
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and this idea of not wanting to talk about it. I mean, this
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is it just seems like such an easy question. But here's about your response.
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Why don't we want to talk about it? I don't want to talk
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about but it might seem obvious, and yet it's it's what we've done historically
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sociologically, if you will, to clean up the messiness of death, of
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any kind of death thing like a divorce, where it is you're both alive,
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but there's a nothing that's going on within the soul, and to just
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puritanically make things look better than they are, have that smile on your face,
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create that union mask, forget the shadows that are in the hero's cave,
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and and and just act like everything is okay, and then it will
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be. And it's a it's kind of a polyani an ish you, if
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you will, on one hand, and yet it's self preservation on the other.
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It's also There's something important here, which is if we if we thought
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about our own demise or our own dying all of the time, I think
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we would be insane. Okay, so we must have a healthy denial of
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death. There's got to be that to have a healthy denial of death.
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They're also in line with that, is that healthy denial of grief, because
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to deny grief is part of denying death. And so to say, okay,
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you know, I can, I can have that healthy denial of death.
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I don't need to necessarily have the healthy denial of grief because one does
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not necessarily have to align with the other. Yeah, And I think the
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word your word dance comes perfectly in here. It's it's hard to look at
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ourselves on the best of day. At the best of days, it's really
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hard to look inward when we don't know what the hell is going on,
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when we've experienced trauma and grief. How did you get to the point eat
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where you were like, this is what I want to do. I want
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to write books. I want to work with people. How did that come
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about for you? Never in a million years? And I think I ever
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wanted to write a book, you know, And it took me ten years
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to write this, this the first book. It's grief. But when you
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think about your audience and you think about the reader, and you think about
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the people who I've been able to help one on one or with groups,
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or when I do some public speaking, it's like, Okay, I'm going
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to write a book that if when I was grieving, would have helped me.
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And that's why I wrote the book. And there are parts of it
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the eleven phases of grief, the me, myself and I. There are
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a lot of wonderful grief books out there. They tell you what to do,
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they give you exercises, all things that I will incorporate in I do
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incorporate in my book. The differences is that grief is also one of our
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best teachers and it can teach us about ourselves in ways that we never imagined.
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We don't want it, but if we allow it. So within within
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the book, I do self assessments. Are you introvert, extrovert, ambivert
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because based on that, the kind of help you might get is going to
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be different. What will work for the ambivert might not work for the introvert
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or the extrovert. And so to understand you know that that that's it's not
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formulaic in terms of how one gets help, but knowing the self and grief
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can provide that if one dares, and it is a dare to dance kind
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of peace, it's a it's it's saying, am I, am I going
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to be able to create community to support myself? Am I going to be
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able to get talk about this? Am I an introvert? And can I
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really just I need to be like with one therapist and one person and that's
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it. Or am I more of you know, an extrovert and more mutable
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in my personality and therefore, you know, I might go to a group
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and a therapist and then I have my community. So this the idea that
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there are so many different vessels that one can can explore as they encounter what
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they never wanted to encounter, grief. One of the things I found that
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when I when this happened for me, you know, and I was kind
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of open about it, and people were coming out of the would work saying,
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You're going to be fine, You're going to get through it. It
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was the best thing that happened to me. Meanwhile, I'm thinking to myself
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Okay, but I'm not even there yet. I can't even think about that
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thing. You know. I'm kind of really resonating with what you're saying about
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the grief being nonlinear. There aren't set stages. It's going to be different
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for everybody. And that's I think that takes. That takes a certain amount
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of awareness to realize for for people when they go through not only go through
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that, but are talking to someone who is going through that. Absolutely,
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Like you know, I have the I call them phases because I see them
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as just it's a phase and then it can come back and it's you know,
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and they meet again and again and they overlap and and the the first
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phase is called the emotional armor phase, and that's exactly what it is.
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And your divorce, you were in an emotional armor. You might have been
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numb, you might have gone through a high emotionality at times, you might
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have felt like this is not happening to me. I'm you know, you
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know, and expletive expletive expletive and and and and yet you know, it's
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it's it's that first phase is I believe the place that people go back to
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time and time again to collect themselves and that emotional armor. Just like my
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weight was. My emotional armor is the safe haven. So I might go
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to food and that comforts me, and you will go to whatever you go
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to. For people to come up to us and say it's going to be
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better, and you know, it's the best thing that ever happened. They're
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not meeting you where you are. And what I love to share with people
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is you have a voice. And if grief doesn't teach you anything, it
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is your voice to say that doesn't help me. I know you're trying to
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help me. What would help me is just to say, what do you
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need? I'm giving that as an example. Yeah, and it's a great
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one. What did you need when you were going through that? I needed
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people to stop saying you're young and you're going to find somebody else. And
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it took me a good year and a half to finally be able to say
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stop saying that to me, right that I mean that in it it's kind
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of insensitive, right, it's automatically I'm just going to discount this person who
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I just lost and I'm going to find someone. No, yeah, no.
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And it's also that the other piece, you know, I don't use
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the word closure in my book, and closure and acceptance are not part of
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my verbian if you will, because when people said, you know, you'll
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get to the acceptance stage, that's what they said. And I'm like,
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I don't want to accept this. I know that doesn't feel good to me
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at all. It feels really crappy because if I accepted, it means it's
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over. I need to find a way to integrate it. And that's when
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I started to think about what do we integrate and what is integration? And
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it's a dance because you know what, that first love, he's in me.
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He taught me about what love was. He taught me that I could
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love myself, and then he died. But he's in my heart, he's
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in my soul and I carry I still carry his time X watch that keeps
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on clicking and it's how many years? And it's not because I haven't found
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other people to love. It's just that that we can, we can have
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our memories and it doesn't mean that we can't also have our joy to what
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degree. Let me just remind everyone that I'm speaking with Eedi Nathan. The
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book is called It's Grief, The Dance of Self Discovery through trauma and loss.
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And you also have a new book coming out, which we'll get to.
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But to what degree is what you're talking about here universal? Is there
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a cultural You know, there's got to be some kind of cultural component too.
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There certainly are cultural components. And though the book itself is not does
27:33
not cover, you know, all of the culture resonances with grief, because
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that would be volumes, right. What I do bring in is a union
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perspective, and that Unian perspective is that of the collective unconscious that we have
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these archetypes, and the archetypes are images and symbols that we all, no
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matter where we're from, no matter what our socioeconomic backgrounds are, no matter
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what our beliefs, we all know when we say mother, that we know
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what that means, or father, or magician or trickster. And so I
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use that terminology to gather the collective unconscious. We all, we all face
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grief. How how dying is dealt with culturally, even in the United States,
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is vastly different, depends on depending on one's background. Now you take
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it out to the world at large, and yet collectively we know what it
28:37
is to mourn, We know what it is to lose a sense of self.
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We know what it is to be a victim of war or you know,
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to be hurt, whether it's teased, or to lose a friend.
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We we understand. And that is global And does the dress is the Is
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the book more of a global conversation about grief? Yes? You know you
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You seem to have this innate knowing and an innate passion about this work that
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you're doing. You can feel it. I could feel it. I'm wondering
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if you would agree with that. Yes, yeah, what do you think?
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What do you feel eat your mission as your purposes in the work you're
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doing. It's I didn't choose it. It chose me. And it's a
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it's like a leaving of a legacy. Two allow people to realize that taking
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on the self in the name of perhaps how they face grief or how grief
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comes comes in uninvited, doesn't have to land with a loss of the self
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that is so extreme that life is not worth living. And I guess I
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want to to give people a sense of what I call the yet, which
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is I guess hope. And whenever anybody says yet, then it means I'm
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not there yet. But there's a hope in a vision for a better or
30:45
a different outcome or tomorrow. The new book is called so it's a working
30:53
title because I'm waiting for a publisher to pick it up, but right now
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it's called Healing Sexual Grief, Reclaiming the Self from loathing to liberation to love.
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Okay, we didn't even get into the whole sexuality part, which is
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a huge component here, yea, if we could just well, okay,
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the book, give us, give us a thumbnail on the book. So,
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sexual grief is a new term coined by me after working with trauma and
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sexuality and grief and realizing my people who were working with trauma that there was
31:41
a missing link. And we were talking a lot about trauma but not really
31:45
bringing grief into the conversation. And I was, oh, wow, you
31:49
know grief, grief and the intensity of grief. Here is the missing link.
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And then I started to look at it and realize that right now,
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my working definition of sexual grief is that it is a natural response to an
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unnatural sexually traumatic event or experience that holds you hostage and keeps you from living
32:15
the life you deserve. And it's not just about sexual abuse. Or sexual
32:22
violence. It can occur for anyone along their developmental timeline, from the unwanted
32:30
child with cognitive issues, and just the very fact that they're unwanted can cause
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them to have cognitive issues and low self esteem and that self loathing and disgust
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that then intimacy or partnering or friendships or work become impossible. That's sexual grief.
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Or the girl who's never told about the fact that she's going to have
32:58
her menses and when she gets them, she thinks she's bleeding to death,
33:01
and because the trauma of that is so extreme, every month her body starts
33:07
to react and she shuts down. That's sexual grief. Or the woman the
33:13
women and men who are aging and they're having sexual issues and they're not who
33:17
they used to be, and their bodies are shifting, not because of anything
33:22
that was done to them, but because again of something that naturally happens.
33:28
That's sexual grief. Wow, yeah, I mean it. When you're saying
33:34
it like that, I'm thinking to myself, of course, I mean,
33:37
grief and trauma seem to go hand in hand, and yet there aren't always
33:44
spoken of thank you, thank you. It's it's the missing link. I
33:51
believe it's the missing link and if I may share with you, guy,
33:55
the most exciting part of the book are what I offer to the reader is
34:02
learning how to become a hostage negotiator because I have hostage negotiation techniques in the
34:08
book, so they can negotiate with sexual grief the hostage taker and they can
34:14
be the negotiator for themselves. Wow. Yeah, well, look, I've
34:22
got to have you back. You. I would love to be back.
34:25
You are amazing, My god. What's the best way for people to get
34:30
in contact with you? So my website which is Etie Nathan dot com and
34:37
I'm then, I'm I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on all the social media,
34:40
I'm on Psychology Today, Medium, sub Stack soon. So and if they
34:47
go to my website Edie Nathan dot com and they write to me, you
34:52
know, they give me a little note and say hey, I heard you,
34:57
you know on Guys Show, and you know would love to you know,
35:00
hear more information, they will get a free download of either a meditation
35:07
or one chapter from Its Grief. Awesome. Wow, Okay. Once again,
35:14
the book is called It's Grief, The Dance of Self Discovery through Trauma
35:16
and Loss, Obviously we could have talked on and on about many things,
35:22
but look, I really appreciate you coming on here and sharing yourself and sharing
35:28
your story. I mean, that's what this podcast it's all about. And
35:34
I'd love to have you. Baccinti. Thank you so much. Thank you
35:37
all right, take care too, No