 My friends welcome to the depression to Expression podcast Where no topic is off limits because mental health affects anything and everything we do and Of course, you can't speak about emotional well-being. You can't speak about the human condition without talking about death and as you all know from previous podcast episodes and my YouTube videos that I've been sharing for the last seven years I Speak about death a lot Which is why I am so humbled so grateful and You know a lot of people think about okay I can't wait to meet a celebrity and I'll be very intimidated. Maybe your favorite musician favorite actor. I Was it was like I was meeting a rock star Dr. Joanne catch a Tory. I was so well. I'm gonna say yeah I was nervous meeting you Because this conversation meant so much and I'm such a huge fan of her work And if you go on her website her work, it's a 21-page resume. I don't even know how I'm gonna introduce her But it was such a refreshing discussion throughout this podcast episode that you're about to listen to We talk about grief. How can you talk about mental health emotional well-being? Without speaking about tragedy grief loss We're all going to lose someone that we love in this life You know in her book bearing the unbearable, this is what she discusses How can we come to terms? With this fact that there is going to be death in our lives and that we will eventually die and Dr. Joanne speaks about how she lost her daughter in 1994 and she expresses this love by Carrying the pain with her and that's why this is such a special episode and she made me cry Which I am so happy to be sad today and so happy to cry that She really gets to the bottom of of why we're here and how we can bear with the unbearable and The stories that she's heard over the years and this humanistic approach that she has and how she loves all species Being a vegan we cover so much in this episode and I am just so Grateful to have had her on Again, I could go through the credentials. She's a professor. She's an author. She's a public speaker. She's a mother of five Just what an incredible human being I had the chance to sit down with and what happened as we we began chatting And you know, I love these organic conversations on this podcast because that's what I like to listen to right? And we got to chatting which you'll hear and we discovered that there's a lot of commonalities in our work and in our message You know, I I invite people to to acknowledge that it's okay to feel The way you feel right now Now let's think about that for a second and let's feel that actually for a second. It's okay to feel the way you feel right now We always chase that end of the spectrum of emotion right the happiness to feel good We we love living in the short term and get that instant gratification but True life doesn't just Live on that end of the spectrum. It's the full spectrum and that full spectrum involves seemingly that unbearable reality of dying of loss of tragedy and Although this may seem like a heavy podcast which it is this episode Dr. Joanne has such a refreshing Perspective on this and has been through so much and continues to help so many people through her work and I just I can't wait to see her in person. I cannot wait to visit her care farm, which again will talk about and Let me tell you something with her work and I'm not just saying this with her work and her posts and her thoughts and her Her her incredible work with people and animals, you know, she's she's really pushing me to try this whole vegan thing out I gotta tell you. I'm not just saying that so I'm done chatting. Here's dr. Joanne catch a Tory in three two One dr. Joanne, thank you so much for coming on the depression to expression podcast Thank you for having me. Well, I wanted to connect for so long and last year we made plans We're going back and forth via email and you said the coolest thing to me when you couldn't make a certain time You said, sorry, I can't make that time. I got to feed my animals. I've never had that. I've never had that response before It was so cool So so where are you living do you live on a on a farm or you take care of a lot of animals, right? yeah, well, well, I started the first care farm in the world for traumatic grief and We rescue animals here. So most care farms aren't rescues, but we rescue farm animals so we have almost 40 animals and You know pigs and donkeys and horses alpacas dogs and cats of course sheep and goats and So, you know my morning my morning routine is pretty intense and they require a lot of work But we don't reproduce we only rescue and that's that's part of our whole thing is that we bring Humans who have known trauma and loss and suffering and fear and grief and loneliness and having been separated from their families We bring them together with the humans who also have known grief and trauma and fear and loneliness and they connect and You know animals in a lot of ways are Wiser and more in the moment than a lot of humans in terms of holding space for pain My horse chimaco never asks me to stop crying and hands me hand me a Kleenex He just doesn't do that. He says, you know I accept whatever you feel in this particular moment and I'll just hang out here with you And he's the great space holder. I tell people he's the best therapist I ever met so So the animals really have a potent effect. I'm actually in researching it now We have our first empirical study that's published We have several papers out but our first empirical study yielded three papers One has already been published one is under review and another one is in is in writing And then we're recruiting right now on a study with dramatically bereaved veterans here on the care farm so that So that they can have the experience of having worked with our animals in nature, you know in an ecotherapeutic setting trauma-informed care and And it's really the the results that we're getting are really encouraging and it's preliminary data, but it's helpful data Well, a lot of the research has has research been done just on, you know There's all types of when he's to volunteer at a hospital and call it the psych ward and that we'd have therapy dogs Come on, but is the research involving all kinds of different animals and the impacts of different kinds of species So the research is about their entire holistic experience here in the care farm and so people so one of the things about Interventions that I really feel and and a shortcoming of our current system is we don't have a protocol here We don't have an agenda and so people come here and they get to create their own Very individual personalized experience. So some people are really really scared of horses and Because of that, they really want to confront fear and and be able to Connect with a horse and there are some people who are afraid of horses who can't who can't approach that yet And that's just fine. So people get to to really have their own experience here So part of it is meaningful work here on the farm part of it is connecting with all beings So we're a therapeutic community So they'll come here and they'll meet other people who have also had traumatic grief who have lost a child or a Partner or a parent or a spouse and they'll connect with them They'll connect with an animal who has I had a bereaved mom here who lost twins twin babies during birth and We have one of our sheep She had two babies twins who were killed in a coyote attack and that mother connected deeply with that one sheep Whose twins died and that was profound for her I mean she she just she would sit with that sheep and you know for whatever reason. I'm not I'm not proclaiming any extraordinary prescient or You know psychic capacity of animals, but animals do rely on intuition and They have the capacity to see things that humans don't because of all of our chatter, right? And so this she just kind of sat with her Where the sheet this particular sheep are to me she doesn't really sit with people very much She's still quite fearful, but she really loved this mom So I mean the meaningful connections that happen and so people talked about that in the research about how they would have You know a two-hour session of trauma-informed therapy followed by going out to the to the you know To the outside and hanging out with the animals and the animals sort of help them process Some of their emotional experiences they had so so there are lots of things It's not about a specific species per se and more what we saw wasn't about dog versus horse versus sheep versus goat It was more about the animals being rescued which was important for people. Oh Of course because the animals had known all the same emotions that these humans knew Right like seriously, they knew pain. They knew suffering One of the horses that we rescued had been tortured literally tortured absolutely horrifically tortured And and and so a lot of the people a lot of the people I work with They hear his story and they see his pictures and they and they and they came to me and said They've come to me in their own sort of iteration of this phrase if he can survive so can I Wow, yeah, beautiful. Yeah, it's beautiful and it's profound and it and it helps us to feel more connected It yields more connection rather than let that rather than fewer connections, which is which is important Well, so is it strange for me and millions of others that I see the pictures on your Instagram of you with animals and With long these planes of fields and I'm just longing for that and I miss it so much Is that pretty normal when people come there? Are they finally feeling that connection with nature? We've lost that an eighth sense and we crave that. Yes Yes, we crave it and it's missing and it's really missing from the psychotherapeutic experience of today's world in quote mental health I don't even really like that. We call it mental health I would prefer to call it emotional health or at least Emotional and mental health because underneath mental is always emotional anxiety is a thing But it's only a thing because there's an emotion underlying it, which is fear Absent fear or worry or terror. There's no anxiety Right, it loses its potency, right the whole word anxiety means nothing in the absence of fear But we want to sound more scientific so we call it mental health, you know and and and of course I I'm always about being honest and using language carefully because I'm a writer and so in using language carefully I say go to the real world get be specific and precise with our language in the way that we describe things Because I think actually not talking about our emotions is probably one of our biggest problems in quote mental health in our culture So that's fantastic. Let's let's go with that one because I think you and I might be fighting a similar fight and I become I could use I'll say angry I become angry at what maybe mental health awareness has become and it and I saw this beautiful picture that you put on your Facebook This there's umbrella terms that we use in let's say just mental health and people say and they identify with a feeling they're saying I have Anxiety right I said hold on a second hold on What does anxiety mean that isn't that just an umbrella term and right? What about grieving is it okay? Someone's grieving. Well, what are the emotions under that right? Is there always this? it's it's like in in Medical literature or at least in mental health. There's always that one umbrella term depression and we leave it at that and we Don't dig deeper Yes, that's exactly it and so when people come into this is my office my office where I meet with clients So when people come in my office and they sit down and they say something like You know, I'm depressed. I say well without using the word depression. Tell me about how you feel because Depression to one person might mean something very different versus depression to another person It tells me really nothing about that person's very specific and precise experience And I don't want to hear the words that other people have told them that they're experiencing I want to hear it with their words, but we're very lazy in our culture. We're very we don't have time We have a 50-minute session and so we have to hurry hurry hurry hurry And and there are a few things that That concerned me as much as this sort of rushed Laconic intervention model that that we employ we're lazy and we have to stop being lazy If we expect the the mental health system or any system for that matter to really help people We have to stop being lazy. We have to start being willing to do the hard work well hard work is When it comes to emotional health, it's something that people aren't willing to do sometimes But it because for me personally it involved me getting deeper and and really discovering some Uncomfortable and nasty demons in there. Do you think as a culture? We're afraid to discover that so we'll stay on the surface for a little bit longer Well, superficiality is definitely an issue This is this is this is this is part of the happiness cult that I talk about in my book Like we all want to be happy. We feel like we should be happy all the time So if we're not happy all the time, there's something wrong with us or our lives or we're not doing something, right? And I'm like, I don't know who told y'all that you're supposed to be happy all the time But that's not life and it's not realistic and it's gonna actually add to your unhappiness Because then you're gonna be unhappy about not being happy, which is very very strange It becomes a negative feedback loop. And so what I encourage people to do You know people say I want you know if they say to me I want you to help me feel better what I always it's my pat answer and it's and I don't say it in a Superficial way. I don't help people feel better. I help them feel and Whatever better there is comes from feeling Because the reality is if we don't feel all our feelings then our lives start to get very small Because we bring the bottom up, but we also bring the top down and As we bring the bottom up in the top down our lives become a contracted version of what they could have otherwise been And I'm like now I'm willing to feel all my feelings because I I want to be I want to blow the top I'll let the bottom drop out because I know the top will also come off and I'm willing to feel it all You know my daughter died in 1994 and you know for about for a long time I felt a lot of pain and grief and that was all I felt it took up all the oxygen in the room And I was willing to do that because her life and her death were worthy of my devotion to those feelings, right? I didn't want a shortcut or bypass And at some point it's not that the grief diminished it didn't this is it's been almost 26 years since she died And and I would say that my grief isn't less what happened is the capaciousness expanded So I got so my heart and my life got bigger and bigger and bigger So now I hold all that grief, but there's room for other things now, too And that's what I wanted because to me in order to honor her I couldn't become a smaller version of me I had to become a bigger version of me I have trouble and I think people have trouble understanding that to to lose someone that you love To that degree with your story losing you losing your daughter your book is called bearing the unbearable And even just projecting myself into the future and and creating a reality in my mind that my parents Will not be here one day and the likelihood of me being here while my parents are gone is very high. Yes I don't even know if I can go there. I don't even know if I can go there, Joanne How am I supposed to how is a human being supposed to bear that incredible pain of losing so much purpose that we find in other human beings? Um, yeah, so uh, this is this is why people avoid thinking about it and because because it evokes fear and terror and the reality is that it Human beings have have borne this pain Since the beginning of human beings and animals have borne this pain animals grieve J95 the killer whale to Lake Wa who carried her baby's body for two months Two months more than two months. I think along the Pacific Ocean is where I believe she was The reason that she carried her baby's body is because she was in grief and her pod when she was tired from carrying her baby's body Her pod helped her carry her baby's body. How we bear the unbearable is through the compassionate support of the community And that's why that's so important because we live in such a superficial world that you know that that I've had so many parents greet greeting parents say You know they were pushing their their grocery cart in the grocery store down the aisle and their neighbor came around the corner saw them and literally turned the car around and went the other way Yeah, oh this happens all the time because it because it scares people to think about to contemplate and the reality is if we don't contemplate it then Then there are there are many things that we lose by not thinking about it. First of all, we lose the practice of reality like like your parent You're right. Your parents likely are going to die before you at least they hope so because yeah because they don't want to come and see me Right, right. So your parents at some point we hope that they live a very full long long life. They're probably close to my age So hopefully they have many many years to come The next thing that we lose is the capacity to practice compassion for other people who have had loss because we don't think about it We don't imagine what it would be like for us and how painful it would be for us. And so we take the edge off that that propensity for compassion And the third thing that we lose is appreciation for the people because I'll tell you what nothing will make you appreciate those you love Like contemplating the possibility that this could be the last time you see them That's amazing. It's so incredibly true. We kind of well at least in my experience I moved away from that thinking for a while or when I did think about it It didn't make me feel anything and as we spoke about before I before we recorded here I was on antidepressants a fairly high dose for 12 years and due to the current circumstances I put my best foot forward and I got off them Do you feel like and I could go with my story It was basically they handed me a box of pills and said the whole classic story of the chemical imbalance And my psychiatrist didn't even ask me why I was depressed and it was it was 12 years ago And at the time I'm feeling so terrible that I'm going to take the pills because I know the story of the pills It's like an antibiotic and it'll make me feel better, right? So do you find that with grieving and depression and the mental health culture and the awareness and getting people to talk about their feelings Are we going in the right direction with diagnosing people? Is that the conversation that's happening today? It is it's a conversation that's happening and I'm and I'm I'm pretty vociferously opposed to diagnosing people who are grieving grief is not depression but also though I mean one of the first questions This is odd to me that your doctor didn't say has anything happened to you like life changes like tell me about how you're feeling about life And part of it is honestly managed care right because an early on a psychiatrist who's written extensively is one of my favorite writers in psychiatry And he talks about this he talks about the superficiality of you know of managed care and how it has fueled this sort of brief intervention protocol that just includes writing a prescription Right so you know because how long would it take for your psychiatrist just to sit down and say let's talk right and your psychiatrist doesn't have that kind of time because of managed care And then so y'all am is pretty critical about that and I'm actually on the same page with him about that I think that that what he said was brave and actually heroic in the field So one of the things that I would actually ask the first thing I'd say is tell me about any changes that you've had tell me about what you're feeling Let's talk about your sadness right and without using the word depression how are you feeling talk about that and then if if like if you say if you were to answer me it's very rare But if you were to have answered me like nothing everything in life is great like I have a terrific family and I love my partner and my kids are great and I love my job And if you were to have answered me that way which have been which would have been very unlikely then my next question would have been is what what about your past like the distant past Have there been losses in your distant past have there been experiences in your distant past that were particularly painful for you because I have worked with for example not long ago I had a woman come out to the care farm who was in her mid 80s and she had a baby die in 1960 I think it was 63 64 Yeah, the writer Catherine Porter said the past is never where we think we left it Oh, I love that Right And so and that's something we so there's no time limit people come to the farm with losses that happened 20 30 40 50 years ago Because because the past is never where we think we left it we're affected by the past and if we didn't deal with it then we're going to have to deal with it at some point or it will deal with us We either deal with it or we deal with the consequences of not dealing with it And that and that's what happened with her I mean that's so many people like that end up on using substances they end up trying to outsmart their feelings their emotions and the trauma you know because the reality is your body knows what happened to you you can't trick it into forgetting and so so what I do is help people approach that again in a safe way even if it's been that many years now gets a little more interesting because there are so many layers like like if you've waited 40 years to confront a deep trauma and grief There are a lot of layers to sort of gently peel back to get down there right but it's doable and I've worked with many people like that and it's so important because because we want to be the we want to experience our biggest potential right I mean that's who doesn't want that for their lives So what what have you learned because I know you've met so many people over the years and heard countless stories Does it not weigh on you a lot to have these people come and share and this could be with really any any psychologist to does it not wear on you to hear these stories of of tragedy and death and mourning and grieving on almost a regular basis how do you separate that or do you separate it Well okay so in my area of research one of the things that we found is there's a difference between cognitive empathy and affective empathy and and I'm a big fan of empathy but I mean an even bigger fan of compassion and the word compassion actually means calm which means with and passion means to suffer actually And so what I find is I've been doing this work for almost a quarter a quarter of a century and I get to ask this question a lot and yes I feel deeply with other people I suffer deeply with them and I cry a lot I'm a prolific cryer lots of cry Yeah I'm great at crying and I find that actually my life is bigger not smaller and that I actually have more internal resources now I have a good self care regimen right so I have a Zazen meditation practice I I hike barefoot I have my animals I have my horse my therapy horse to Mako who is always there hold space for me I eat clean clay dirty move my body a lot get lots of sunshine so I have a good self care routine I do take really good care of myself I love bibliotherapy This is my office and it's 360 degree books all around me so so I have something a strategy that I use to help take care of myself so there are times I say okay all right I want to take some time and I pull the energy in turn my heart inward and now tend to my own heart but I I don't I'm not I'm nowhere near burnout I'm not vicariously traumatized I'm not my life is not diminished doing this work I can't imagine doing anything else more worthwhile How isn't that just a good feeling I'm not going to say all the time but to have that compass and purpose that you found through tragedy years ago is that is that somewhat of a strange strange feeling to know that this came out of something so horrific and terrible Yeah oh I mean you know there are many times I say to myself in my mind I would give everything back to have my dead child but I don't get that choice so I do this you know not to make meaning of my pain more I do this to make meaning of my life I do this more because because I have this grief and I can't change it and grief is an energy just like all emotion they actually the word emotion comes from a Latin word move here which means to move through and so So I fully inhabit my pain my grief my despair my guilt my shame my anguish my longing my loneliness my fear my anger I fully inhabit all those emotions that are associated with my grief and when I fully inhabit them I can stay with them and then they they transform And in being transformed and this is an ongoing process by being transformed then I can turn them into an energy to do something and for me the energy is fierce compassion in the world and so I have this sort of tireless compassion and I have a lot of energy for an old lady And I think the energy that I have actually comes from fully inhabiting my emotions I think the energy that I've been able to employ in the world and saving animals and helping lots of humans doing research teaching running programs at the university all the energy that I have to do a lot of hats that I wear comes from all the emotions that I experience and can fully live with and create space for So, you know, yes, in a very tangible way, it's a very strange thing to look back 26 years and see that these were that all of this stuff has been stepping stones setting me up for where I am in my life today, I would give it back and a heartbeat in a heartbeat without any thought at all to have my child but I don't get that choice so the Then the only thing that I can do is make the decision to to to to live for both of us I suppose in a way. What do you think you've learned through people coming coming to your, what would you call it? Not a ranch care farm it's a care farm care farm care farm sorry. What have you learned from people coming to the care farm? Are there certain outcomes and things that people realize that are in common or is every single individual something so different? Are there common themes that that come up during therapy or when people come and they connect with nature and get this this idea of meaningful work and get involved and connected? What's the outcome here? Are people feeling the same things? Some what I mean, you know, so it's sort of a macro micro thing at the macro level. There are really common themes, but then when you get into the specifics, then you see the nuances that are different that are also important. Right. So, for example, one of the themes that I found in my research with people who came here was this connection to the animals, especially because they're rescue. But when you get into the specifics, why they were important so what for one person they're important because it helped them process emotions for another person. It's important because it helped them realize that the sort of the oneness capital oneness and suffering right that everything suffers all being suffer right and so she didn't feel so alone. So, so yes, there are things and yes, there are even nuances within those things. So at the macro level, there's a lot of commonality. The same way that you would say that I might say I feel today I feel deep deep a wellspring of sadness because my child isn't isn't here. My son's getting married next next year. So let's say next year at my son's wedding. I'm feeling this immense wellspring of sadness, which I probably will be feeling because the whole family isn't there because we have a missing person and she doesn't get to see her brother get married. Right. And so, so there's this sort of wellspring of sadness that comes up for me that might be different from someone else's sadness on that particular day. So my sadness might be at a broad level the same. But if you get into the nuance, it's that it's that shy is not here experiencing her brother's wedding and it's that the whole family. We will never have a whole family picture again. All of us together will never have these different things. And so, so I think that that's one of the reasons that individualized care is so important. When we use a check sheet, which many therapies do, they use a check sheet. Not existential therapy, of course, which is why I love existential therapy and not humanistic approaches, but so many of the other therapies use a checklist approach. And I find those to be they lack intimacy, they lack personalization, they lack efficacy in my view, especially with catastrophe. They're not culturally sensitive and they're not familiarly and individually centered. So they tend to try to take the person and fit the person into the therapy rather than approaching the person as a unique individual and a unique family system and a unique cultural and experiential system. And then we provide the kind of care that works specifically for him or her. Does that make sense? I absolutely love that. I couldn't agree more. It's just, you know, you said we have this this medical care system that is really stressed on time. So in my experience, like probably millions of other people, I went to my GP first and she had the checklist for depression and she said, fill it out. Okay, have you felt in the last two weeks? Have you felt low? Have you lost your appetite? Have you had suicidal thoughts? And it was like, everything except suicidal suicidal thoughts. I'm like, check, check, check. And it's like ding, ding, ding. There you go. Here's the slip of paper. So with the words are so important. That's what I've realized. They have so much power and value. So I guess my first question would be, do you think the mental health will call it a crisis with with depression on the rise and anxiety disorders among children, especially there's so many different factors. What do you think is increasing this kind of the statistics of anxiety on the rise? Is it because we're diagnosing people more with disorders? Is it because more people are talking about and googling this word anxiety? So we see the keyword research is just off the top of, right? Like what's going on here? What's with the increase? You know, I can't really respond to that in an empirical way. I can respond to it in a sort of what my opinion is. And, you know, here's what I think about. I think about the Holocaust. And I think about the fact that there wasn't social media during the Holocaust. And I often think what would have happened if there was social media during the Holocaust, which was an unfathomable trauma for millions and millions and millions of people in that generation and also intergenerationally, because that's that kind of trauma is the trauma that keeps on given. I certainly think that when we pay attention to things, we see them more often. Pregnant women know this because women, you wouldn't know this, Scott, but women who are pregnant, women who are pregnant, they are in a particular state. And then they go out in the world and because they're in that state, they're noticing other people who are pregnant, other women who are pregnant. And then all of a sudden it seems like everybody's pregnant when it's probably not any more than usual. It's just you don't notice it because you're not paying attention. Right. So there is this sort of we are paying attention. There is also this thing that we're probably a little less connected, even though we're kind of technically more connected because of social media, we're more superficially connected. You know, we have had to move like our organization, I run the nonprofit, the Miss Foundation, which is for parents whose children have died or are dying. And so we've had to move to a Zoom model because we can't meet in person, but we don't want to completely not be available for families who need us. So we've moved to a phone mentorship system and Zoom and and it's not good. I mean, it's better than nothing, but it's not good. Yeah. You know, I mean, we, many people don't even know who their neighbors are or spend time with their neighbors. We don't have a very strong sense of community in a lot of places, not all, of course, but in a lot of places that is true. So I don't know what the rise is, except that yes, there probably is more diagnosing. I think there's a lot of fear of mental health problems in part because we're talking about mental health more. I wish we were talking more about emotional health, but I understand that it's a paternalistic system and men do tend to not like feminine emotions, what they perceive to be feminine emotions. I mean, that's what hysteria was all about, right? I mean, there was a diagnosis and psychiatry of hysteria, which comes from a Latin word for the uterus. Right, hysterectomy. No kidding. Yeah, no kidding. When was that not diagnosed anymore? Well, I mean, I think to some degree, they still diagnose that they just use different words because hysteria is offensive and feminist, you know, sort of said. You know, the reality is that feminine emotions are often categorized as irrational and unwarranted and sort of marginalized, and we wouldn't want, don't be emotional about it. And, you know, and of course, you know, ma'am, you're going to have to calm down. That's all someone has to say to me. And then you're calm down. Ma'am, you're going to have to calm down is not something that I'm going to appreciate, right? And you see this problem with, because it's minimizing, it's degrading, it's marginalizing, right? Right. And so you, there's a longstanding history of pathologizing feminine emotions and psychiatry. Because we have to be rational rather than emotional. It's not, you can't be rational and emotional. I am a really rational person. I'm a scientist. I engage dialectical thinking all the time. I'm a pretty intelligent person, but don't intimate to me that my emotions are irrational. Right. Because emotions are not irrational. Now, what we do with them, if I'm angry and I punch someone, that's not an irrational emotion. That's an irrational behavior. You don't get to get angry and punch someone, but anger is not irrational. It's the behavior. And so what we do in our culture is we focus on behavioral health and mental health and we leave emotion completely out of it, which is utterly ridiculous and misguided, in my opinion. How do you even get to one from the other? It's like you can't skip over the emotional part. Right. Exactly. I mean, exactly. And all you need to do is look at a three-year-old or preschool, right? So you've got two three-year-olds and one three-year-old takes the toy away from another three-year-old and that three-year-old feels frustration and anger and bites the other three-year-old. What they focus on is the bite rather than the emotions underneath it, right? Ah, of course. We're not teaching children how to express their emotions in other ways. So I mean, you know, your whole idea of expression I just love because we have to be able to express. But we can't express what we can't, what we don't have self-awareness about and we have virtually no self-awareness about emotion. I can't tell you how many times I ask people, tell me how you feel about something and they'll tell me about their body, their physical or they'll tell me about something they did. Their behavior. But very rarely do people are people at least immediately until they've been working with me for a while. Very rarely do they automatically go to, I'm noticing this sense of despair come over me and I'm feeling really lonely about it and hopeless, right? So we don't even know how to talk about our emotions in therapy. Right. Right. And it's the one place where you can say anything. Therapy is the best. Theoretically. Now I will tell you that there are many therapists who know less about emotions than I would like. Yeah. That is again. The pedagogical models fail. The pedagogical models are failing. So we're taught about mental health and behavioral health, but we're not taught about emotional health. That's a massive problem when someone actually wants to go express themselves freely in that room with a trained psychologist or therapist and they don't have the tools or recognition of how we're feeling. It comes also down to that language piece that we don't even have the language sometimes to express what we're feeling because we've seen the word depression all the time. We've seen anxiety there all the time. So we automatically just identify with, yeah, that's probably it. I saw the symptoms. Okay. It's anxiety. This is what I'm feeling anxiety. I think it's so great that you go deeper into that. Right. Well, because you have to in order to really understand the suffering person sitting across from you. If you don't, you're doing them a great disservice and you're being very psychologically lazy and quite frankly, I think endangering them. Quite frankly, I think it teeters on malpractice because we have to be willing to be fully present with what's happening and what's unfolding right now. And we have to be confident in our skill set and that includes emotions. And if you're not confident emotionally, then you probably shouldn't be a therapist. I mean, do your own work for God's sake. I cannot tell you the number of therapists who have not done their own grief work. It is vast and terrifying actually because that shows up in therapy because then when the client comes in to sit with you and her mother just died and your mother died 28 years ago when you were 14 too, but you never did the work. And now this client comes in, you're going to have a harder time relating in a way that has meaning for this client because you didn't do your own work. If you do your own work, you can take people to the depths. If you haven't done your own work, that comes from that comes from Pema Children's work. So Pema Children said you can only take people to the depths you're willing to go yourself. And it's true. What do you think, you know, does I guess grieving like different emotions, these umbrella terms grieving can be obviously felt differently by other people. Do you feel like with social isolation now, are people feeling, can we use the word grieving for once was and the state of normality? Because sometimes grieving, it is a heavy word. It's like when people come home from work and they're like, I'm exhausted. I'm like, yo, you'll reframe that exhaustion. You're on your own two feet. You're cooking dinner. Are you emotionally exhausted? Is grieving too heavy a word to use to describe how we're feeling right now with social isolation with COVID-19? It's a great question. And so what I invite people to do is rather than, you know, use that word automatically, really sit with what that means. And so what are you really feeling? Be specific. And what most people are feeling when I probe, like my neighbors, because I only work with traumatic grief. So the people I work with are grieving and re-grieving, right? Wow. But when I'm talking to my neighbors and my friends, what they say is actually it's probably not grief. It's more loneliness and a lot of fear of uncertainty, some frustration, some anger. Grief is a big word and I'm very circumspect about using that big word at times like this. And what I mean by at times like this is that there are people whose loved ones are actually dying. I work with a bereaved person, a man, whose wife and two children were run over intentionally. And so, you know, so people are complaining to him about having to be in isolation with their families. Yeah. Right. I mean, we really should be very sensitive to people whose loved ones are dying. Horrific deaths right now inside and outside the pandemic and who are experiencing exceedingly traumatic grief. I don't want to take ownership of this word grief and I don't tell people what they can and can't feel. I just, I'm, in my research, one of the things that I talk about is the idea of primary victims. So one of my studies, I researched families after the Sandy Hook shootings, families whose children were actually killed. And it was important to them that people understood that their grief is different from the community grief. That life for them never goes back to what it was before even remotely because their child is dead and was shot at school. The magnitude of that, the magnitude of that, most people get to go home and tuck their children into bed. These people don't. And so I'm sensitive to primary victims because that's the work that I do. And so I'm not inclined to tell people what they should or shouldn't feel. But what I am inclined to do is say, really dig deep and explore. Is that what you're really feeling or is there some more nuance to it? Right. What I find in my own corner of the world is that most people aren't actually feeling grief. If they're, if they haven't lost someone or someone's not critically ill, most of them are feeling fear, frustration, loneliness, anger, a lot of different emotions. Right. And so I think, I think what we again try to do is get lazy with words and try to just find the quickest word that describes it. Yeah. So yes, in a way it's a loss and maybe there's sadness to that loss. So what's the difference between sadness and grief? Sadness might be more of a specific emotion. Whereas grief, I wrote, you know, in that, in that umbrella grief is sort of so many different emotional experiences. And then on top of it, physical experiences, right? Because, because we experienced physical, global pain, gastrointestinal problems, headaches, sleeplessness. I mean, all kinds of things that come along with the death of a loved one that are physical, existential, cognitive, emotional, all of that. Right. So I invite people to a deeper conversation about it, generally speaking. It's very hard for me to talk about it in a sort of a hurt or abbreviated way. Yeah, of course. Talking about the pandemic. Of course. And when we're kind of, we're talking about going deeper into emotion and really, really feeling things, which I've had the pleasure of doing since getting off of antidepressants. You mentioned that you do some kind of, I didn't get the exact name of the meditation. What was the name of the, was it yoga or meditation that you practice? Oh, it's meditation. Yeah. And meditation is that, does that help us be more in tune with the emotions and what we're feeling in the moment? If we have a good teacher, yes. Wow. I think that it's important. I mean, I think like the app apps are great and they can help us calm our nervous system. Those are wonderful. In fact, there's a great app called calm and it's wonderful. But I think for people who really want to get serious about practice, it's good to have a teacher. And so look for a good teacher. You know, I'm a member of Zen Garland Order and I have two Roshis, two Zen teachers who helped me. And I think that it's important to have Asanga a community if meditation is something that interests you. Certainly you can use meditative techniques to calm your nervous system because like during the pandemic, for example, a lot of people, their nervous system is on overdrive. Like, you know, we have a lot of time now to think and feel things that we haven't thought and felt before because we've been busy and distracted. So discursive mind is an interesting thing. And so what I tell people is, you know, if you're interested in it, find a really good teacher and then follow that, you know, interview some teachers and start your own practice. I think that meditation and this is empirical too has helped a lot of people in many ways, but it is definitely for me, it's not calming. It's it just is it's just meditation. It's a practice and the idea isn't to relax. In fact, it sometimes feels like a marathon for my mind because the propensity toward discursive mind, which is, you know, monkey mind, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Yeah, you're you're every time you've been here, you're bringing it back to neutral and you've been here and you bring it back to neutral. And it's a constant, you know, it's a marathon. It's a practice you're exercising your mind muscles to follow you instead of you following your mind muscles. Yes, there's all kinds of different narratives out there for mental health, which which is well, let's say for meditation. The narrative is, oh, you want to calm down, you want to relax, well, you know, you just deep breathe and your mind will become quiet. So that's the narrative there. And then with mental health, sometimes the narrative, it couldn't be, OK, you deal with this emotion. And if you deal with too much of it at a certain time, then you have a diagnosis or a mental illness. The narratives almost need to to switch. And this is why I absolutely love your work with really feeling the emotion fully and going deeper into pain. That's something that you really teach. It's like to not scratch the surface of pain to go deeper. Right. Go deeper. Go deeper because and let me add the caveat to this, though. It's hard to go deeper until we feel safe. And so it's hard to feel safe unless we have someone who who has the capacity to hold all of that pain. And that's why, you know, whether it's a therapist or a spiritual leader or your neighbor who you have tea with or your horse or your dog or your cat. Feel safe somewhere before because I think it's important. You know, when we start to approach the hard work, the reason that we back out is because it's too scary. But if we have a stable, solid presence of someone who helps us feel safe, then we can approach the fear. In the absence of that, it becomes too overwhelming for our nervous system. Physically, it becomes too overwhelming, but also emotionally because we feel threatened. Right. So this is this is incredibly important that we feel safe. The tradition on the podcast, Dr. Joanne is to give you the mic for the last few minutes and you can, you know, a lot of people on the podcast sure are dealing with all sorts of mental health issues, emotional issues. We could we could say some are maybe in a process of grieving right now because it's such a broad audience. Any message that you like to say to someone struggling right now, the mic is yours. Well, I mean, I didn't know this was coming, but that's okay. I can add that. I mean, the reality is if you're in grief, if you're in suffering, if you're feeling pain. I think one of the most important things that we can do for ourselves and for our family and for the world is to feel our pain is to find someone who has the capacity to hold that witnessing to bear witness with them. And to help us feel safe to feel that pain. And when we can be with it, when we can be with it, then we can create space for it in our lives and really feel. And when we really feel this is the great gift that keeps on going because you start to learn how to trust yourself in ways that probably you've never trust yourself before. And as you build trust in yourself, you build in a sense emotional muscle. And with emotional muscle, we start to learn that we can carry a lot more. We can bear that which we think we thought at one point we could never bear. Coming full circle back to your comment about your parents, Scott. So you build emotional muscle and then you start to trust yourself. And the trust in oneself is in my opinion one of the greatest gifts that we can give that will endure our lifetime. I endured the death of my child. I would have never thought I could endure something like that without dying. And maybe in a way sort of metaphorically I did die and was reborn, right? But I trust myself with everything now. There is never a moment in my life where I think I can't handle that. I haven't had that thought since 1994 since my child's death that I couldn't handle something else. And the reason is because I 100% trust myself with everything. And that is a gift that my dead child gave me for which I'm thankful that I would return in a heartbeat but for which I'm thankful. Now having said that, one of the most important imperatives facing us today is what I call fierce compassion or radical compassion or unrestricted compassion. And we as a world have got to get better at doing that. We have got to get better at feeling compassion for others who are like us, for others who are different from us, for others who are a different species from us. And for the earth that holds us all. Because if we don't do that, we will continue to repeat the cycle of trauma and re-trauma over and over and over again. Once we have reached that capacity to extend our circle of compassion beyond ourselves, beyond other people like us, other people different from us, other species and the earth. Once we can do that, what we will find is that compassion turns inside out and upside down and toward us. And then we feel ultimate compassion toward what's here. I know self-compassion feels like a very hard thing to cultivate. And so practice self-compassion for sure. But one of the ways that I practice self-compassion is through connecting with others in compassion. And by others I don't mean just our species. I mean outside of our species and the planet. So one of the things that's important to us here is the care farm is sustainable. We don't use any pesticides. We take care of the mother earth. We take care of the land. Because the land is what sustains us. And until we understand that we have to take care of the structures that sustain us, then we keep abusing this, even consciously or unconsciously, abusing the structures that sustain us. And so like a lot of the people who come here to do the work that they do, they start to realize that. They start to realize self-compassion and other compassion. So they look for their own story exactly in the stories of others who are grieving. So someone has lost a brother or sister and they want to find someone else on the farm who lost a brother or sister. And then they start to see others who have lost parents and others who have lost children. And others who are homeless, who haven't had lost or via death. Or others who are struggling with substance problem. They start seeing suffering broadly speaking. And then they start seeing the connection between themselves and a horse who knew loneliness or who was separated from a brother or sister. And then they start to understand how that compassion and tenderness can extend to the world. Once we get into that cycle, then I really feel like it's that awareness and that practice that's going to change the world for the better ultimately. I don't think that we'll ever have peace really on this planet until we do that. And I think that it's people who have known deep loss and catastrophe and suffering who can bring it because of their capacity to hold pain and their capacity to transform that pain into fierce compassion in the world. I'll say it for the first time. Dr. Joe, thank you so much. That was absolutely beautiful. I told you folks, I would cry on this podcast. I told you thank you so much for your time. This meant so much to not only myself, but to all those listening. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you everyone. Thanks so much for listening. Stay strong. Keep being you and don't forget to express yourself.