Episode 7: Hearing the Truth, Telling the Truth, with Megan Devine
Megan Devine and I discuss how our culture around grief is broken and it is only truth (the telling of it, the ability to hear it) that will fix it. www.nurturinghabit.com
On an otherwise normal summer day, Megan Devine's partner Matt drowned in front of her. Immediately, she was thrust into a world that she thought she knew, from her work with grieving people as a psychotherapist, but quickly discovered she didn't understand at all. And it was so much worse than she'd ever imagined. That experience became the root of Megan's current work, because in her deep grief, she came face to face with the realities of how our culture just cannot face pain and suffering in any supportive or healing way. Around grief, she came to see, our culture is badly broken. But she believes we can begin to fix it.Megan is a psychotherapist, grief advocate, and author of the book It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss In A Culture That Doesn't Understand (affiliate link). She's on a mission to help people love each other (and I'd add, themselves) more.In this wide-ranging conversation, we discuss how we handle grief so badly in our culture and how to take steps towards improving, how to build a practice of nurturing yourself, creating small moments of personal agency even in out of control experiences, and some deeply thoughtful ways to approach the holiday season. Although Megan mostly works with people facing out of order grief - that is, having lost someone to an accident, violence, or other unexpected circumstance - her ideas apply to all of us, even those of us not grieving a loss.Listen to Episode 7 with Megan Devine now by clicking the little arrow in the play bar below (if you don’t see it, reload the page), or head over to iTunes or your favorite podcast player.What was your biggest take away from this episode? Leave a comment or send me a note and let me know!Here are links to some of the things we discussed in this episode:
Widow's Voice, now Soaring Spirits.org
Episode 3, with April Johnson Stearns, and her magazine for young women breast cancer survivors, Wildfire.
Megan's book, It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss In A Culture That Doesn't Understand (affiliate link)
You can find the holiday support articles I mentioned from Megan's newsletter on the Refuge In Grief blog.
To find out more about Megan and Refuge In Grief:
Refuge In Grief (use the "more" menu to find the best place to start with this resource).
About Megan's book, It's Ok That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand.
Writing Your Grief workshop and other resources RIG offers.
You can also find Megan and Refuge In Grief on Twitter and on Facebook.