Transcriber: Muhammad Shoaib Akram Reviewer: esra kurul
So this story is from a few years ago.
My then ten year old daughter comes racing into the house,
slams herself up against the door like she's being chased eyes wide and wild.
She's clutching a piece of paper to her chest. It takes me a minute. Let me see.
I unfold it. Now. I understand.
She's holding the permission slip for the dreaded birds and
the bees class that is taught to all the fifth graders by
the very awkward health teacher at her school every year.
You have to get me out of this, she says to me.
So I'm known to be a pretty understanding parent.
But having been wildly misled by an eighth grader
at the back of my school bus around her age,
I know that she needs to learn about her body from a trusted source.
So puberty is a universal human experience
and we want to support our kids
so that they can feel confident in their changing bodies.
And education goes a long way to help with that.
You know what else is a universal human experience?
One that we will all go through,
whether you are a ballerina or a bartender or a stockbroker or
a grocery stocker. We're all going to one day grieve.
And many of you likely already have.
So raise your hand if you took a grief class in middle school.
Oh, there's not a hand up. Let the record show. How about two over there?
Two over. I have two. How about high school?
I like this college. I got a couple graduate school.
Okay, guys, that's not a lot of hands.
Basically, very few of us have been educated in grief.
So I know there's somebody standing out there right now saying you can't educate
us in grief. It's too personal. It's two individuals to specific.
How would you do it?
So here’s the thing.
Grief is the natural reaction that we energetically have to lose.
And we grieve with our bodies.
And bodies actually are pretty generalizable,
even across cultures.
Which means we could teach it in a health class.
So I'm a trauma informed therapist. I specialize in grief and loss.
I’ve spent the last 20 years with clients talking about what is going on
with their bodies and their minds as they are grieving.
Things like Disturbed Sleep. You've heard of this hunger. It's all out of whack.
Your mood? It's low. These are not surprises.
But did you know that also memory loss,
Poor word recall and the inability to follow multi-step instructions are also
classic grief symptoms.
Anger that feels irrational.
All sorts of increased anxiety and fear.
Exhaustion, low muscle tone.
That’s Grief 101.
Nearly every patient
that I have ever worked with has walked into my office
and told me they were losing it
because they were experiencing these symptoms and they didn't know why.
Many of them for upwards of a year and they weren't telling anyone.
And we know why.
Because you get about, what, three months in this culture?
And then if you're not demonstrating that you are experiencing some resolution
to your grief symptoms, eople start to judge.
You’re doing your grief wrong.
So I was nine years old when
a teenager who was beloved to my family drown while we were on the beach
and nobody noticed.
So in many ways,
my life and my work is part of my own
journey and searching to find resolution
and understanding about grief in my own life.
So I learned in social work,
school and through lots of hours with clients that grief is actually not
a problem that we're supposed to solve. It's not a pathology.
It's not a mental health issue.
It's just a natural thing that we will all go through that needs to be validated
and frankly, better understood. In 2019.
My mother died suddenly when I was on vacation with her in my and my family.
She died in her sleep. And I have to tell you that
I was pretty stunned to discover that even after all the books I read,
all my hours with clients and my own experience previously with loss.
That I was not inoculated from becoming someone who couldn't eat, couldn't sleep,
couldn't concentrate, couldn't do anything else except sort of blame myself
for my mother's death. But when my symptoms worsened instead of abating
because I was so, well, grief informed,
I knew that I needed treatment and support.
And I also knew where to get that support.
And for most of the people that I work with.
They don’t know any of those things.
They're not even aware that
the symptoms that are happening are related to their grief at all.
I only spent about three months suffering with my symptoms.
And as I said before, we have some data that tells us people suffer
for more than a year before they feel entitled to seek out support.
So let me give you a sense of what grief education could be.
This is a show and tell part.
Everybody put your hand on your back of your head
where your skull meets your neck
And now just draw a line right up to your forehead. Terrific.
You have now just traced the primary way
that information travels through your brain.
It goes from the oldest part, which is the limbic system back here.
And it travels up to your prefrontal cortex,
which is right behind your forehead,
where we do all of our critical thinking and our analysis.
How many people have been to a club where there's
a bouncer outside deciding who will let people in?
Just raise your hand. Okay.
Records showing way more hands on that question.
Okay, so the brain has something like
a bouncer that decides what information goes inside.
It’s called the amygdala.
And it enlarges when it feels a sense of threat or danger.
And the impact of that enlargement is it chokes off the other messages
that would come up
through the brain to the prefrontal cortex.
So essentially where we do our critical thinking
and analysis gets cut off. And instead we’re using our instincts.
So that bouncer is a little bit like, you know, someone who's not too intellectual,
just using his strength and his instincts to say what can
and can't come into your system.
The smarter part of the brain is sort of left behind and not part of
the conversation. The brain has 12 cranial nerves.
Those nerves send information down into the body.
One of these nerves.
The 10th nerve is called the vagus nerve,
and the vagus nerve is more like a transfer station.
This is a bit like a mailman just dropping off the mail.
The vagus nerve is like a transfer station that sends the information from
the body back up into the brain.
So the amygdala enlarges because it senses some sort of danger or threat.
It cuts off the information to places like your hippocampus,
which is what helps to formulate memory or your hypothalamus,
which regulates your sleep and your hunger.
And then it keeps sending the information down into your body
and you can see how it doesn't take much
for your body to suddenly be all out of whack and your brain to not be thinking
or coding memories properly. And suddenly you can't remember your own birth date.
Whether you shut the oven off. Or even what day your dad died.
And you're not sleeping and you're not eating and you don't feel like yourself.
Most grievers don't know this information.
The reason it’s critical is that it impacts
when and if you go and get support.
The education is what drives us to know how to get our bodies
back into regulation and to do that much sooner than a year out.
Most of the people that I have worked with didn't realize that the grief,
that it was a grief symptom in their body
and they certainly didn't know how to get support.
So since the pandemic began,
we have had more than 1 million Americans die from COVID 19 virus.
Which there's an estimate out there that that means more than 9 million people
just because they lost someone to COVID.
9 million people are grieving those losses.
This really is an important time.
To think about bringing grief education to the masses,
just like we want to support our fifth graders
with their changing bodies in puberty.
We need to be helping our entire population
understand changing bodies in grief.
There’s no reason why grievers should feel isolated
and judged while they are also mourning a tremendous loss.
You know, workplaces have been navigating unprecedented attrition.
You may have heard of this.
They need help talking about grief and loss in the workplace.
I want you to imagine what would happen if everywhere you went this week
supermarket, grocery store, library, school, sporting event, TED Talk.
If every one of those places brought grief education to the forefront,
taught you a little bit of something you didn't already know.
Those of us in the crowd who are grieving would feel more welcome
and possibly also have better access to support.
So those of us, which frankly is all of us who want to be able to provide better
support to our friends and family
when they are in grief, we need grief, education.
So as you leave here today,
I hope you feel the urgency for grief, education.
But I don’t want to make it sound like everybody has to go find a grief expert.
Grief education can be simple. Go pick up a memoir.
Almost every one of those stories is a is a story of loss.
If a memoir is too much, go listen to a podcast.
Or better yet, every one of you know someone who has grieved.
Have a conversation with them. Ask them about their experience.
You know, we're all responsible for both perpetuating.
And transforming how we do grief as a culture.
Let’s be agents of positive and proactive change.
Grief is natural.
And it’s everywhere.
And it’s going to impact all of us.
We’re going to need the education.
But I honestly think we could do this.
Thank you for your time.