How To Deal With Grief and Trauma

Send us Fan Mail In this mini series episode, I revisit number four in the top ten most listened-to episodes: my third conversation with Meghan Riordan Jarvis — psychotherapist, podcast host, TEDx speaker, and author — on the essential questions about grief, loss and trauma. Meghan joins me for the third time, and this conversation goes deepest. We explore the intersection of grief and trauma, what neuroscience and bioscience tell us about what grief actually does to the body and brain, and t...

Send us Fan Mail In this mini-series episode, I revisit number six in the top ten most listened-to episodes: my conversation with Laney Rosenzweig, the developer of Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) — an evidence-based, eye movement therapy that can resolve the symptoms of PTSD, grief, depression, anxiety, and more, often in just one to three sessions. Laney is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with over three decades of experience and the founder of the Rosenzweig Center for Rapid ...

Send us Fan Mail Content note: This episode discusses suicide, intimate partner abuse, and traumatic loss. In this mini-series episode, I revisit number eight in the top ten most listened-to episodes: my conversation with Shavaun Scott, a psychotherapist and author who shares the story of her husband’s revenge suicide — an act carried out on the very day she asked for a divorce, after 17 years in an abusive relationship. Shavaun brings nearly 35 years of clinical experience and 20 years of pe...

Send us Fan Mail In this mini-series episode, I revisit one of the top ten most listened-to episodes of the podcast: my conversation with Stephanie Sarazin on Ambiguous Grief — the grief that arises from losing someone who is still alive. Stephanie is a writer, researcher, and ambiguous grief guide, and the author of Soulbroken: A Guidebook For Your Journey Through Ambiguous Grief, winner of the 2023 Nautilus Books Gold Award. She shares how her own mid-life trauma led her to define ambiguous...

Send us Fan Mail This is the second of a two-part episode. Check out part 1: 188 What a Death Doula Knows About Grief That Most of Us Don't (1/2) | Sierra Campbell What does someone who has spent more than three decades sitting with the dying actually know about grief, and what can that teach the rest of us about living? Today's guest is an elder caregiver, end-of-life doula, and founder of a leading end-of-life education platform. She began working in care at sixteen, opened her own home car...

Send us Fan Mail This episode is different. Instead of sitting across from a guest, I am the one in the chair. In this solo episode, I share my own personal timeline of grief, loss, and trauma — and trace how each experience shaped the ones that came after it. From what I learned about grief growing up, through infertility, miscarriage, the death of my daughter A’Mya three days after she was born, the suicide of my mother four and a half months later, a significant trauma in my adult life, se...

Send us Fan Mail When someone is visibly grieving, the people around them quickly conclude, usually without adequate evidence. She isn't crying, so she must be coping. He went back to work, so he must be over it. They seem angry, not sad — that can't be grief. These are presumptions. In Part 3 of this three-part series, Nathalie examines how presumptions about grief operate in real time, in specific moments, and why they cause a different kind of harm from grief myths and preconceptions. What...

Send us Fan Mail Before a loss happens, most people already hold a set of beliefs about what grief will look like. These are not myths absorbed from the culture in general — they are something more personal: internalised convictions, absorbed through upbringing, family, religion, and lived experience, that then shape how a person enters and moves through grief. These are preconceptions. In Part 2 of this three-part series, Nathalie examines the ten most common preconceptions about grief and m...

Send us Fan Mail Grief myths are everywhere. They show up in condolence cards, in workplace bereavement policies, in the advice given by well-meaning friends and family and, often, inside the grieving person themselves. They feel like common sense. They are not. In this episode, the first in a three-part series on the beliefs that distort the experience of grief, Nathalie unpacks eight of the most common grief myths: where they come from, why they persist, how they cause harm, and what a more...

Send us Fan Mail Trauma isn’t only a story in the mind—it’s also physiology, sensation, and nervous system patterning. In this final episode of the Many Faces of Trauma series, we explore how trauma can show up in the body through hyperarousal (fight/flight), hypoarousal (shutdown), stress-related symptoms over time, dissociation, and chronic tension patterns. Using a simple polyvagal-informed lens, we explain how nervous system state can shape sensations and symptoms—and why “I know I’m safe...

Send us Fan Mail Complex trauma forms through repeated or prolonged exposure to threat or chronic stress—often in contexts where escape isn’t possible and where relationships or systems meant to provide safety are also part of the problem. In this intro-level episode, we clarify the difference between single-incident PTSD patterns and complex trauma, and we outline how C-PTSD discussions often include PTSD symptoms plus broader impacts on emotion regulation, self-concept, relationships, and a...

Send us Fan Mail Community shock happens when a public tragedy or disaster disrupts a community’s sense of safety and predictability, creating a ripple of nervous-system activation far beyond those directly involved. This episode is the Trauma Types companion to S16E161, where we explored collective grief and trauma after sudden tragedy. Here, we zoom in on community shock as a trauma pathway: why people cycle through hypervigilance, numbness, anger, and exhaustion; how media exposure can kee...

Send us Fan Mail Chronic scarcity and instability can shape the nervous system in ways that look like anxiety, irritability, shutdown, or “burnout,” even when a person is working incredibly hard to survive. In this episode, we explore poverty, insecurity, and social exclusion as a society-shaped trauma pathway—where the threat is often not a single event, but ongoing conditions with limited control and limited recovery. Using simple polyvagal-informed language, we name common “invisible injur...