Healing the Healer: When a Grief & Trauma Therapist Becomes the Patient, with Meghan Riordan Jarvis

When a trauma therapist with over 20 years of experience is blindsided by her own debilitating grief after losing both parents, where does she turn? In this deeply moving conversation, Meghan Riordan Jarvis takes us on her journey from professional expert to admitted patient at the same treatment facility where she once sent her toughest cases.

With raw honesty, Meghan shares how grief affected her physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  From finding spirituality in a documentary about mushrooms to spontaneously road-tripping across America during COVID with her kids, Meghan's personal transformation insights will reframe how you think about loss, healing, and what's really needed to support grievers.

Meghan's hard-won wisdom disrupts our cultural awkwardness around grief as she calls on employers  to stop avoiding this universal human experience. 

Get ready to question everything you think you know about the "rules" of mourning as you hear:

• Why talking about the five stages of grief is like saying the world is flat
• Why you should ignore some of the most common advice grievers hear
• Who needs to step up to change things in Western culture
• The surprising places you might find new sources of spirituality
• What we can learn from children about processing difficult emotions
• And so much more...

Learn more about Meghan:

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Music credit: Limitless by Bells

Transcript

Transcript

Jessica Fein: Welcome. I'm Jessica Fein, and this is the “I Don’t Know How You Do It” podcast, where we talk to people whose lives seem unimaginable from the outside and dive into how they're able to do things that look undoable.

I'm so glad you're joining me on this journey, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. 

Welcome back to the show. I am so glad you're here for today's episode. If you are grieving, if you know somebody who's grieving, if you think you might ever be grieving, this is a must listen episode. My guest Meghan Riordan Jarvis is the author of the bestselling memoir, The End of the Hour, which was published in November, 2023.

Can anyone tell me why? Essential [00:01:00] Questions About Grief and Loss, which will be published later this year, Host of the “Grief is My Side Hustle” podcast, two time TEDx speaker, psychotherapist, educator, and consultant, specializing in trauma and grief and loss. She's also an exceptional human being. 

With more than 20 years of clinical experience and training in a variety of intensive somatic treatment modalities, Meghan was stunned by her own experience with PTSD after her mother's sudden death just two years after her father died from cancer.

Ultimately, Meghan checked herself into the same inpatient facility where she sends her most difficult cases and re emerged inspired to teach and speak in public platforms about the importance of creating a more grief informed culture. It is my honor to bring you Meghan Riordan Jarvis.

Jessica Fein: Meghan, welcome to the show. I am [00:02:00] so thrilled to be here. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: This really was all I've been looking forward to today. So 

Jessica Fein: Me too. And I have to tell you in reading your book, I had to read it with two lenses, because on the one hand I was reading it in preparation for this conversation. But on the other hand, I was literally putting stickies.

I was underlining things that I personally, as a reader and as a griever, was resonating with that. Not necessarily relevant for today's conversation, but I think we need to have a follow up so I can ask you.

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Every Friday at 10. We're going to just, you know, get together and talk death. 

Jessica Fein: Perfect. Perfect. There's nothing I'd rather do. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: I know. 

Jessica Fein: Okay, so let's just dive in. You were a trauma therapist for almost 20 years. Yes. When you found yourself in the midst of your own personal trauma, after your parents died within just two years of each other, that's kind of the crux of the book and what happens from there.

So can you tell us a little bit about that? 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Yeah, [00:03:00] sure. I mean, part of the reason I chose to write the book is because we do such a poor job of supporting grievers and making room for grief as a normal developmental process. There is so much like bogus general opinion. I've been in rooms where people are like, well, you know, she's still not doing well.

I'm like, well, you know, her husband died only a year ago. What do you expect? And the reality is we don't really know what to expect because nobody talks about it. I mean, you and I talk about it, but we're a small subset of the population. We would rather sort of like avoid and sublimate. And, you know, TV and movies are kind of the way that we're invited to imagine how the world works.

Like, so if you only had TV and movies to imagine what a trauma therapist does, you might imagine a trauma therapist was going to try to sleep with you. Because that is what happens in a lot of movies. 

Jessica Fein: Wait, you mean that doesn't really happen? 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Shockingly, I have only slept with, no. Um, so part of the reason that I wanted to write about it was I think people would assume, right, [00:04:00] the woman has two master's degrees, has been in the field for 20 years.

I have so many certifications of complicated trainings, not just like a weekend workshop that I went to, but shit that took me like five years to get certified in. Um, I think you would think that lady is going to pass through with like when someone is in really good shape and they have to, you know, go for a run, you're like, they're going to be able to do that.

No problem. We don't need to keep the camera on them. That was not my experience. My experience was wholly different, which is that grief hits your body and your mind and your spirit. However, it hits your body, mind, and spirit. And for me, with my dad, that was. Kind of, I think, how we expect, which was, it was heavy and hard, but not debilitating.

And with my mom, I had to check out of all the things because I could not bear up my life underneath the weight of the loss of her. And I had PTSD pretty much from the instant I discovered that she died. I had ruminations pretty much from the very first second I knew she was no longer on the earth. [00:05:00] 

Jessica Fein: Did that surprise you?

I mean, you say that other people would think somebody with all of your experience would sail through, as you put it. Did you think, like, maybe I have a kind of protective bubble wrap around me? Like, I got this? 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: That's a good question, Jess. There you go. Right in on the good question, because it pissed me off.

Like I was so mad. I was so mad that people come to me for the very symptoms I was experiencing. And you know, it's a little bit like trying to tickle yourself. Like you can't treat yourself. So I was really pissed. Was I surprised? I was surprised that my mother's death undid me. And I think there's a projection that people often have, which is like, that is because you were so close to her.

But I have five brothers and sisters, and I have other siblings who are much closer to my mother than I was. So it was not about just the closeness. It was the meaning that it made in my life that she was no longer here. And I see this on [00:06:00] Instagram sometimes, like, that the voice in your head that's a critic sounds like your mom.

My mom and dad were not that for me. My mom and dad were the people that I called with good or bad news, and they cared about it as much if not more than I did. They were the backstops of those experiences for me. And even still, even now, like I had a hard day yesterday, I just was like grumpy and cranky, and there were some real things going on.

And it took me, I don't know, till four o'clock when I was walking the dog and was like, Oh, this like sharp. edge is I just want to call her and I want her to say her things about this. So was I surprised that I was traumatized? I knew I had trauma in my system from childhood. I was deeply shocked to discover that I had not processed it all out and that it was rearing its head in treatment.

They called it a renaissance. I was really surprised to discover that there was more work to do. And [00:07:00] I think sometimes that sounds like, Oh, well, Megan, you didn't do your work. That's not it. It's, you know, I can grieve so much today and four months from now, I'm going to grieve again because there is new grief.

Jessica Fein: I want to underline so much of what you just said and want people to really take it in because there's so much wisdom here and it's so important for us to understand there's no right or wrong, there's no timetable, all that stuff that we can say and feels obvious, it is not viewed that way.

And I love the description of your relationship with your parents because it speaks so much to me about my relationship with my parents, both of them I spoke to at least once a day, and I love the notion that there were people out there who cared just as much if not more about what happened to me. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: My mom was so good at that.

If you were to say, like, what was the thing that she was amazing at? Like, she would never forgive a friend who crossed the line. me, even if I begged her to, you know, if I told her one story about somebody doing something wrong, she held that grudge [00:08:00] for the rest of her life. I could call her and use acronyms.

Like I got into X, Y, and Z for LPQ on A's and she'd be like, no way. I can't believe it. I'm so excited for you. She just knew how to jump in. And you know, the other thing that she did was she really held worries for me. My mom was really deeply religious. And for lots of complicated reasons, the Catholic church didn't fit me anymore.

I walked away from that experience, but not without the yearning for believing that there was some benevolent force that I could seek solace and support from. And so my mom used to be the conduit. You know she was like the third in my spiritual relationship where I'd be worried about something with one of my kids or I'd be struggling with something and I would say like mom can you just like pray about this or can you even better get the little old ladies because she had a whole string of little old ladies that she worked at the shop with.

I forget what it's called now. One of your listeners is going to remember, but there's a way of [00:09:00] praying. It's concentric prayer, maybe, where there is a prayer happening at all times that somebody, during the time of the day, it's your hour to pray. It's like a rosary that they're just circling in prayer and you can put your intention into that.

You know, can you pray for my brother? 

Jessica Fein: I love that. So you end up checking yourself into the very treatment center where you've sent a lot of patients. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Yeah. 

Jessica Fein: And I wondered, was it easier because you were so familiar with that facility, or was it harder, like, that's not for me, that's for my patients? How did that feel to you?

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: I can't say easier or harder because I have no comparison. What I can say is the fact that I knew where to go and that I knew what treatments I needed was such an incredible privilege. It's not in the book as heavily as it was originally written, but when people say to me, what did your background allow you to access?

It's both things like understanding. Oh, my God, I'm sick. And [00:10:00] it's not going to get better on its own. It's unlikely to get better on its own. And two, You know, there are very few treatment centers, inpatient treatment centers. I mean, I call it trauma camp, but make no mistake. It's an inpatient treatment center that are designed for people not entering recovery.

There's a lot that do either detox, which is like sort of the medical coming down off of drugs and alcohol or Just a recovery center in general, where you're working primarily on your addiction. This center is one of the very few in the country that they assume you have those things somewhat under control.

There's meetings, and you can talk to counselors, but you're here to do the root work that's underneath that experience. Many, many, many people have called me or texted me or DM'd me and said, what is the actual name of the program? And I'm happy to tell people, you just have to understand, I don't make money from them.

I love them. I went there four years ago. Much of the clinical staff has changed, but it's [00:11:00] called Milestones, and it's in a program called Onsite. So it's the long term program there. And you know, I'm clear in the book, I stay for three weeks, which is an extraordinarily short stay. Most people that were there when I was there were there at least 60 days, and it is blindingly expensive.

So I did not walk into this program being like, this is gonna be a breeze. I had visited the campus, and I think if I came to your house for a second time and had seen your house before, or even seen it in a picture, or had you describe it to me, I would have just sort of like less tension in my system, because it's like, no, I know this is Jess's house.

So that part of when I got to the campus, I wasn't like, where is it? What's going on? I knew what to expect because I had been there probably, I don't know, four times before. There are dogs on the campus and I knew the names of the dogs because I had met them before. And I knew a number of staff, including the owner of the [00:12:00] program who came over to see me, which kind of blew my cover as being like not a normal person.

People are like, why are you talking to the guy from the brochure? And I was like, Oh, yeah, no, I actually work in this field, which made the people around me, I think, feel like, Oh, well, then we're really in the right place. Like if a trauma therapist would come here. But I have to say, and I do write about it in the book, I was fucking terrified.

I mean, I don't know that I have shaken from fear very many times in my life, but I was shaking in the car on the way. I was so unwell. I just didn't know if yielding to my illness was going to destroy my life.

Jessica Fein: And, by the way, you also had to say, I am going to take this quote, unquote, time out. My kids are going to be without, my husband's going to be without, my patients, you are already on a leave.

But you were like, I need to look in and deal with myself and what's happening. And that is a major, major thing to come to terms [00:13:00] with and to admit. And then when you finally decide, yes, I need help, I need more. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Yeah, it's interesting because what it's making me think about is some of the criticism, which I think is good criticism, right?

I think it's useful, is to talk about the privilege of being able to take time out. At the moment, it did not feel like a privilege. It felt like I was gonna die if I didn't. But lots of people are put in corners where they feel like they're going to die if they don't. The fact that I could walk away from my job and that wasn't going to put me in peril because I worked for myself.

The fact that I had people I could borrow money from in order to check myself into the program because I couldn't afford it. Right. Um. You have a husband to take care of your kids. Yeah, that I had someone that was going to be able to care for the kids and that I trusted, right? Because lots of people have husbands, but they don't trust them to take care of their kids, right?

So all of those things, again, I think made possible something that in the moment felt like there wasn't any other choice, but it was a choice. It's [00:14:00] difficult to look back at it now because what happens to me now is people will say, I can't do that. And I'm like, no, I know. And then they say, so what can I do instead?

And that was four years ago. It was before COVID. I went six months before COVID started. I don't know. I had this thought during COVID, like, this is it. We're going to get ready for all the grief and loss that's going to hit us. And we're going to train up therapists and we're going to make care more affordable and accessible.

And I mean, if anything, I would say it's like even trickier than ever before.

Jessica Fein: I don't get it. I really don't get it. Because when I think about what are the things in life that pretty much every single one of us is going to experience, there aren't that many. But it's a pretty sure thing that we're all going to experience grief.

And yet, when it happens, there aren't the systems in place. There isn't the understanding. And so, first of all, we're caught off guard. We're like, what's happening to me? You know, if we are not in the field and so we don't understand it, it [00:15:00] puzzles me because it's so universal.

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Well, I mean, it's the most universal human experience.

Right? And, and what I think is important and part of the reason that, that I wrote the book also, and the way that I wrote the book, because there was some conversation at some point of like, do you really need to write about your dad's death? And I mean, the answer, obviously, because it's in there, I did need to, but I understood what was being asked.

Because it seems as though the thing that was really devastating was my mom's death. But really what it is, and anyone who's had more than one terrible experience at a time, is like, you can't really tell which wave knocked all the water into the cup. Like, it's just at some point, it's super full. 

Jessica Fein: And so don't look at any one of them in isolation.

Like every one, it's like, okay, my mom died. And my father's not here to hold my hand through it. I mean, each one builds on the next, as you're saying. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Yeah, I mean, my dad would not have held my hand through my mother's death, but yes, I mean, the fact that my system sort of had taken on the waves of those experiences.

One thing that I think about all [00:16:00] the time is that we don't understand, although, you know, there are some good people out there talking about it, that all loss needs to be supported. That it's a developmental process similar to, I mean, please take this with a grain of salt, developmental process like similar to going through puberty, which is like, that's a really awkward, terrible stage for a lot of kids, but we're not trying to stop it, and we're not trying to minimize it.

What we have to say is like, I'm so sorry, you woke up with 12 pimples. It won't be like that tomorrow. At some point, you're going to integrate all these hormones that are going on, and your body and mind are going to be totally different. The experience of loss and grief is actually a lot like that, and Mary Frances O'Connor, who's this extraordinary neuroscientist, writes these books.

One is called The Grieving Brain, she's got another one coming out called The Grieving Body, which really affords us, like, here it is, it's written down, all the core education about what happens to the 12 physical systems in your body on account of a trauma, and a grief is a trauma, so is a car accident, [00:17:00] but grieving is a core trauma.

What I will say, so again, sort of going back to what I think is really fair criticism of the book about the sort of accessibility of how I am able to help myself, is there are also, sometimes in the same note, a comment that says, I don't have, from the writer, like, I don't have a husband that can help me, I don't have good health insurance, And in that sentence, what there is is like anger at me that I was able to access care.

I just want to say to folks, when someone is saying it is a privilege for you to get mental health care, what they are telling me is, you do not think mental health is health, because you would never say that. If that whole story, if the story in my book about throwing out my back, if I then solved that problem by going to a back surgeon and took three weeks out of my life and didn't see my children and didn't do my job because I had [00:18:00] back surgery, that comment isn't there anymore.

Does that make sense? 

Jessica Fein: Yes, and I can see where somebody might feel like, okay, but I do have health insurance and I would be able to get some kind of care. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: A hundred percent. Right. Right. 

And so that's the point. That's exactly the point. Is that as a. Medical community, what we have said is if you have an ailment that we can fix, we will come in and do the surgery and we will cover it with health insurance, right?

And I understand, like, I really genuinely believe that people are struggling in the best way that they know how, but sometimes what we do is we point at somebody and say, like, if there's a famine and we're pointing at the person and we're like, how come you ate? Instead of why are we all not eating right?

Why are we all not eating and that I think is at the root of your question, which is we do not live in a [00:19:00] culture that respects the impact of grief and loss. I have seen in corporations, these horrifying documents that have been put together by HR that say things like, if it's your mother, you get this many days.

Jessica Fein: Oh, yes. And we're going to get to that because I know that that's a big piece of your work is trying to make change in the workplace. But let's stick with your story for a little bit more because I have a bunch more questions. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: I'm ready. I'm ready. 

Jessica Fein: Okay. I'm curious. Now you come out of the treatment center.

You have this number of months off. You go back to work. Did the way that you treated your patients change at all based on going through it yourself?

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: You know, this is a tricky answer where it's like, I want there to be violins and a swell of music where it's like, and then it all went so much better traumatic growth.

But the real story is I was only back in my office for about three months before COVID hit. So I don't know the answer. I don't know. I mean, I have several patients that I still work with who have [00:20:00] weathered the change in me, and I think they're fine. I think there are other people where the change was not okay for them.

But we never really had to sit and have those hard conversations because the whole world went crazy. So I didn't get the feedback as to whether or not it made me a better clinician or a worse clinician. I certainly think for some people it was not a welcome change. And I think for some people it brought up a lot of fear because I was unwell.

I didn't hide that from people. I told them, you know, my mental health was completely shredded. And I still live with PTSD and I'm still grieving, like, still now. So I didn't hide that. I just think I'm all around a better person. In the early days, I had a lot of anger and a lot of, like, intolerance, but I think that's because my system was completely full up with my own emotional experience.

So I just, like, couldn't take in other people. It felt like I was walking around wet and the whole rest of the world couldn't see that. And I was like, but the air conditioning's too cold because I'm wet. And people would ask me to do [00:21:00] things and I'm like, but I'm wet. I can't do that. So when that pain, when the like central nervous system dysregulation started to sort of settle, I do find myself as both like unbelievably compassionate towards people that are having a hard time, so much less reactive.

Like even if it's just someone in Starbucks, it's like acting shitty. I used to be somebody that's like, God, that guy's a dick, but now I would probably be like, I wonder what's going on in his life. Just more of that, like more of that. And I'm pretty careful about where I put my energy these days. So I don't know if I had gone back to work.

If I would have kept working with 25 clients, all of whom had core trauma. It's so emotionally expensive and it's like my finances changed. Like I used to have more money and so I could go out to lunch with people who didn't have enough money to cover the bill and I would not notice it. But now I need my cash for myself.

And so I [00:22:00] don't think I could have kept working that many clients with that level of need intensity. 

Jessica Fein: You mentioned a few minutes ago that when you were younger, before the deaths of your parents, when you were quite young, you experienced a traumatic event, and that it wasn't something that was ever discussed in your family.

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Yeah. 

Jessica Fein: And you wrote, this is a quote, “General culture insisted it was best to protect children with silence. Yeah. So I was left to invent. my own ways to cope.” Yeah. That was so powerful to me because as my daughter got sicker, we were not silent, but we surely were not transparent with our other children.

And the words you chose here, “I was left to invent my own ways to cope.” I think as adults, so often, it's not that we are ill equipped to talk to the children in our lives about what's going on, but we have this idea [00:23:00] that we're going to protect them. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Yeah, absolutely. And we end up doing the opposite. I mean, maybe we do the opposite.

Like, I wouldn't go back, maybe, and write all those sentences the same way now. 

Jessica Fein: Oh, but I loved that sentence. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: No, no, I know. But I mean, I think some people may take some, like, pissed at the adults for not doing a better job, when really what I feel like is, I'm older now than those adults were at that time, and I have all the education.

I look at that and I'm like, oh my god, they were in the most impossible situation. Like, it's very hard to care for children when you are having your own children. Reactions, right? But also that is what children do. If Children are not given a alternate way to manage something that is unmanageable, like a big feeling, they will find a way and their way will be a childlike way.

I mean, many, many people that I work with tell me that in their childhood they, you know, were painters or they were singers or they rode their BMX bike up and down the hill. Like, [00:24:00] kids often have access to things that adults have kind of extinguished that are unbelievably powerful and meaningful. I mean, oh my God, my entire adolescence, all I did was listen to music and sing and, you know, I still listen to music.

I mean, music is still a big portion of my life. But I don't have the kind of time that I used to have to listen to music. 

Jessica Fein: And by the way, I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, I would listen to music with my sisters or my friend or whatever, and we'd be like, you know, belting it out together, and believe me, we had dance moves, the whole thing.

So even now, listening to music becomes, you know, it's much more of a solitary. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: That's exactly. So if you think about, like, grief is this energy that is created. In the space where the loss is inside your body. It's not just an emptiness. It's the energy. It's what is filled in that that place and that energy needs to move through you and it doesn't need to move through you once it's going to need to move.

It's a wave. So that water is filling up. That energy is filling up [00:25:00] and sometimes children are really good at figuring that out. You know, they go to Barbie and they play like, Oh, my sister's dying. And parents are like, holy shit, what are they doing? But it's like, no, they're working it out. For me, that wasn't the case because what the energy felt like for me was fear and deep confusion about what was our responsibility as a family, because we were on the beach that day, like what we were supposed to be upset about, you know, how do you stay connected to another person who has lost a sibling?

I felt so guilty that my brother hadn't died, that in fact he had been the person who had found, you know, this teenager who died. And then also, like, what does it mean to live in a world where other people are telling you, like, if you pray to God, God will take care of you, and this teenager just died, like, in the midst of all of our praying.

You know, what does it mean? And kids can only really rise to the occasion in the way that they're developmentally able. So, I was not able to really do anything, because at that stage, I was nine, [00:26:00] you're just so self centered. So I just thought most of it was my fault, and that's why people weren't talking to me about it.

And we better not talk, you know, about it because it was going to upset people. 

Jessica Fein: And to be clear, you know, without going too much into it, it had nothing to do with you. So this notion that it was your fault, this has nothing to do with you. You were essentially a bystander. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Yeah, you know, here's the thing, though.

There is part of me that believes it was my fault, still. I'm just saying that because irrational thoughts are not just things that kids experience. You then carry them in your system into adulthood, and they are very hard to get out. That's another reason. So, yes, do I understand that a teenager who was not my responsibility at age 9, diving in the water on a beach that my family was also on, that his death was not my responsibility?

Of course. And also a little bit, I think it was. 

Jessica Fein: You know, you said, we think that if we just, you know, pray to God and do what we're supposed to do from that perspective, everything will be okay. And it's interesting [00:27:00] because one of my kids absolutely had that response coming to me and saying, I'm praying and praying and praying, and she's not getting better.

And you write that your faith feels slippery to you. You call yourself, at best, an open hearted seeker, and at worst, a skeptic. So on those days when you feel, like you said the other day, you had an emotional crick in your neck, or when you feel like you're wet and nobody can see that, nobody can appreciate that.

And faith is not accessible to you, and yes, you can go to the LOLs and have them pray for you, but what else do you do in the moment? 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: This is really interesting, and I appreciate you asking this question, because I started my podcast probably about a year after my mom died, and for very specific purposes, I was just going to do eight episodes, and now we're on like, I don't know, 130 or something.

This is the question I ask to every one of my guests. It's like, where do you land spiritually and how did you get [00:28:00] there, basically, because I have a long history of let's call it religious trauma. I was raised Irish Catholic, which did not work for me because it never seemed right to me that we were talking about Jesus instead of Mary.

She seemed to be the person that was more interesting to me and had more to say about what she had been through, but that was never the center of the narrative. And I never understood what it meant that, like, he died for our sins. I still don't. I ask people that question a lot. But most importantly, the Catholic church that I was raised in became the epicenter of some of the most horrific abuses to children in Boston.

While I was in that church, I didn't learn of that until long after it happened, until long after The Spotlight team spotlighted it in Boston. It was, it was another five years before it was the movie that brought that to my attention and I had long left the Catholic church. So there's already like religious trauma, which I think of as different from spirituality, but I had already done some church hopping.

I had already kind of [00:29:00] looked around. My mother was the sidecar to my spirituality and I never had to have any spirituality that was not connected to her. Ever. And then she died and actually she died in this incredibly beautiful way. She fell asleep in her favorite pajamas, holding her rosary in her home and was discovered by my husband, who is one of her favorite people.

So for her, that was a good like cereal wrap. Like that was a great way to die. Right? And it was horrific for me. But I couldn't look to my left and be like, what do you think about this? Right. She would say like, well, in the Bible, and I'm like, the Bible, you know, I didn't have anybody to like bump it off of.

So in the early days, and it's in the book, there's a lot of shit happening, like big rainbow skies, butterflies, things that other people who were in a different energy would have found comforting in that moment. And I was like, that's kind [00:30:00] of nuts that this is happening. Like, what a weird coincidence. Now, it's four and a half years later.

I have a deep spiritual connection that I think I was seeking, so I think it's like something that I brought back into my life. Now, if my husband were standing here, he would be like, don't say it, don't say it. But now you gotta say it. The way that I most deeply came in connection to it was when a friend of mine took me to see a documentary.

And I was like, I hate documentaries. I don't want to go see this. The documentary is called “Fantastic Fungi.” And it is about the mycelium that breaks down all organic material back into the earth. So it's the spores of mushrooms that are. All over the surface of the earth and underneath the earth and the documentaries about that and also how trees communicate and take care of each other.

And I was like that my friends is God. It's so good. They show you in a time lapse a [00:31:00] tree and how it is disintegrated and brought back into the earth by these spores that you can't see. So there isn't a moment. There isn't a moment where I am not aware that I can't go outside and make a tree. So I don't know what that is.

We traveled across the country during COVID. We went to National Parks and Monuments, and I had this like, voracious craving to see the Grand Canyon, to see a dark sky in Idaho, to see the Canyon Lands, which looks like an emptied out fish bowl. And every time we would get to the place, I'd be like, the littleness of my humanity.

The most magic was in the Badlands. We were in the Badlands in South Dakota during COVID. So like animals were roaming. The Badlands, if you haven't been there, look like, they really look like dinosaurs are going to come walking across the territory [00:32:00] in one second. And I just, I was still pretty ill. So like I wasn't the one playing.

It was like I got out of the car and was like, where the hell are we? Looked like a movie set. And then, there was this unbelievable electrical storm that came from the distance towards us. And my kids, during this time, they're doing online school. So like, they're still going to school. I'm trying to ground myself in reality, but here is this electrical storm.

And as a parent, part of me is like, we should probably get in the car. This doesn't look totally safe. But it's these huge cracks of lightning and this dark sky and that looks like stranger things. And I just can't tear myself away. I can't believe the energy and the electricity. And my littlest guy says.

Do you know, lightning actually strikes from the ground up to the sky? And my middle guy is like, shut up, it does not. And so now they're ruining my like, church vibe, right? That I can't believe how strong the world is. And so the littlest one says, Dad, give me your phone. So he [00:33:00] takes the phone, he looks at whatever he's doing.

Cause he's been in school, he's been learning about, Weather in school, and he pulls up this National Geographic page, and it says that when storms gather, the clouds change the polarity of the space in the sky, the energy in the space in the sky, the magnetism underneath them. So they send energy down, but they also pull energy up from the earth, which means lightning is co created by the earth in the sky.

And that is the deepest description, it could make me cry, of what spirituality is. You have to have yours, and then you gotta pull it from whatever. Whatever it is. Is it music? Like, for me, sometimes it's Kate Bowler, but I will always find it in the vastness of nature. I just can't not find it there, because explain it to me otherwise.

Explain the awe and the breathtaking beauty of the randomness and the insanity of what [00:34:00] is happening in nature at all times, otherwise. 

Jessica Fein: Well, you convinced me 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: That was more of an answer you expected. You stepped in it there. 

Jessica Fein: I'm like, I got to go on a road trip now. I've got to go to Badlands. I've got to watch the documentary.

I think we might need to wrap up because I got things to do. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: You do have an assignment. 

Jessica Fein: One of the things that was so gorgeous in the book is when you write about the you of the present and the you of the future, leaning forehead to forehead, nose to nose. Breath to breath. I just love that. You were the person who had yet to live with the trauma, with the person who already had.

And that gave you this understanding. And there was spirituality in that too. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Yeah. A different kind of spirituality. 

Jessica Fein: Where did that idea come from? 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: So there's a kind of therapy that I use. Which I feel it's important to say, like, and I have melded to my own ideas, so it's not in its purest form, which is called internal family [00:35:00] systems, which has this idea that we have these core parts of ourselves that we're protecting all the time with other parts of ourselves.

So, the part of me that couldn't live without my mother was being protected by the part of me that could perseverate over it being my fault. That's kind of the nuggets. It's, you're built into these parts. And the parts are the exile, so the deep, deep pain that comes from a childhood place, the managers who are constantly trying to keep you from avoiding, All the danger in the bad stuff managers can be all the things that you imagine managers can be annoying you know exacting all that and then firefighters which are the heroes who swing in don't care what kind of destruction they do but they will get you out of the situation so like.

Drugs and alcohol is kind of like a firefighter when people have been in the system, and they understand their parts. One of the things that you really deeply understand is the core of the exile experience. And so for [00:36:00] me, the core of my exile experience was this. I need to do these things alone. There is no help to be had.

And in the work, which is incredibly beautiful, and there are other versions of therapy that also borrow on this, you get to use your imagination. So you bring up in your system the extreme feeling of fear and loneliness that I had in that moment, standing in the driveway, knowing I'm about to walk in and see my mother, dead.

So I pull that up, what was that like? I smell the pine trees and the fact that it was raining a little bit, I can look down and see my dress. I can actually do this on my own. I don't need a therapist to do this, but you can do this in an, with an IFS therapist. And then the therapist says, what do you need?

And you can bring in anything you want. Now, what you need might be to yell, like you might just need to behave differently in that moment. I did a beautiful session with a client many years ago. She had witnessed her little [00:37:00] brother die of a seizure and all she wanted in that moment Was to say goodbye to him.

She knew she couldn't stop it from happening, but she hadn't had a moment to say goodbye. So we did the whole thing like a director of a movie. We brought the fear back in. I mean, she was in her forties and she just ran over and hugged him goodbye. And the way that it then felt inside her system, which is how it often feels for me, is like that's what happened because you're changing the organicity of how it has been coded by your five senses, by me.

Resourcing by adding something that wasn't there. So there are two different examples in the book. One is I come back for myself having lived through this moment. And then there's another scene where I imagine when I learned that my mom died instead of doing what I have to do, which is like drive this minivan full of kids.

I imagine that my older brother and his wife come and it's not what happened. A little bit, it feels [00:38:00] like, but I know it didn't happen. I'm not confused. I didn't create memories. It's not a false memory. But when I feel myself back into that moment, it's with less terror and that sense of alone. And it's actually not that hard to do.

Like, I had a terrible miscarriage before we had Lucy, and it was just this horrifying medical experience where the doctor realized there wasn't a heartbeat, sent me to go get a second opinion ultrasound, and I sat for 40 minutes in an ultrasound room. I mean, in like the waiting room, in a paper napkin.

My husband wasn't allowed to come back because it was a woman's clinic and was just terrified. But I did some work around that memory and instead, oh, it's going to choke me up. Every woman who's ever loved me sits in there like a locker room. And that's what feels like happened. 

Jessica Fein: That makes me think about when you wrote in the book that so many of us live with moments that [00:39:00] were the break in a before and after.

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Absolutely. 

Jessica Fein: And you wrote that we tend to relive that liminal space over and over and over again. And so this is so fascinating to me. When I was 27 and my sister died, she was 30 and it was sudden. I had been on the phone with her an hour earlier chatting. And my father got a call, we weren't 100 percent sure what happened, and he and I drove from Boston to a suburb west of Boston where she had been taken to the hospital.

And we so didn't appreciate what had happened that we stopped for gas on the way. Every single year on the anniversary of her death, until my father died, he and I would, without deciding we were going to do it, we would replay every bit of that day. I never really knew why, it was just this thing we would do, and it was interesting because you write about that, that we relive that experience.

But are you saying then that if [00:40:00] I were to relive that experience of that drive and maybe change some of the details that the memory wouldn't feel as, what, as raw, as painful?

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: So there is a thing in trauma which is like, we repeat. Because we're trying to get to another resolution, but really it's like running around a track, so we're just walking in a circle, checking the details, checking the details, and that can re traumatize us, right?

I'm safe in the present, but I'm gonna go into my past, and I'm gonna bring up, I'm gonna check all the details. People do this when they discover there's infidelity. This is a huge thing that happens as they go into their past and they check every single moment of their life to see, should I have known then?

Should I have known then? Should I have known then? Right? And so then they're kind of tainting happy memories with the fear that exists in the present. It's more common actually for me to be fine. I'm fine right now. My sister's not dying right now. But I'm going to go back into the [00:41:00] memories that were so painful and I'm going to bring them into this present moment.

Yes. So this present moment now has fear. And the thing about the present moment is we are always predicting the future from our present. And so now I'm predicting a future of fear. And so there are all of these techniques, but just knowing that is really helpful to me. Like thought stopping is really important.

And not when we talk about like, well, we don't want to have a. person described the whole event to us too many times over because it's re traumatizing. That is what we mean. What we mean is you are calling up in the five senses the experience that you already lived through with no resolution. It's just a track.

You're just going back over this terrible experience over and over again. So sometimes maybe you just go through it and this time you imagine not stopping for gas. And you imagine speeding up and you just imagine, is the outcome going to be any different? No, but maybe it will feel different in your system because that is what you [00:42:00] wanted to do.

That is what you wished you could have done. There's a really powerful scene in a movie called “Fearless” with Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez from a million years ago in the early 90s. Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez live through a plane crash, but her child doesn't. They're in this horrible plane crash, and the impact for Jeff Bridges is he's like, borderline suicidal.

Rosie Perez is in this deep grief because her child, who she held on her lap, died in the impact of the plane crash. And she says, it's my fault, it's my fault, it's my fault. If only I had held him tighter, if only I had done something different. He puts her in a car. For more UN videos visit www. un. org Gives her like a watermelon or a bag of something.

I can't remember what it is. And then he drives into a wall and the watermelon goes flying from her arms. And like they both almost die, but she is like crying and laughing and she's like, Oh, it's just an idea that I had, like, there was no possible way that any outcome was going to be any [00:43:00] different. So if we enter instead and say the outcome is the same, all that we can change is how you feel supported emotionally in this moment.

What would work? I mean, I've had clients say to me, like, if, Mrs. Weasley was there, because that is the epitome of the best mother in their mind. Or, if the doctor just came and said to me plainly, She's gonna die in ten minutes. Who knows if that's actually true? If the doctor had come and said that to you, maybe you would have had a panic attack and passed out and missed everything.

The wisdom of your system says, I would have liked that, and so how can we try to give that to you? How can we see and you may be wrong. I have certainly been like, well, I'd like to try to blah, blah, blah in my mind and gotten in there and been like, no, this is making it. I feel worse. This is making it worse.

I have not had that happen with other clients. Every time I say to the client, what do you want to do next? Where would you like to go? Do you want to stay here? Do you want to bring in any people? What resources will help you? [00:44:00] How can we get this feeling out of your system? They don't stay stuck. Usually I can't think of a time that they have.

Jessica Fein: You're good at what you do for sure. Alright, we talked at the very beginning about just how it is the most universal experience. There's so much misconception. Is there like one or two myths that you would like to dispel? You have been working in this field for a long time. You have experienced it personally.

You have written about it. You are a really important voice in this space. What myth do people carry with them that we just want people to know, hey, that's not true? 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Well, I mean, the five stages, that just is enough to make me burn my hair off. And I feel like talking about the five stages is like saying that the world is flat.

And I feel like they shouldn't get to say it on TV. There should just be a generalized understanding that this is old data that is inaccurate. Which, by the way, wasn't even meant originally. I mean, it was just misinterpreted and inaccurate. But [00:45:00] I just sort of feel like there should be a memo that goes out.

Like, you know, All of a sudden it was whether people feel any kind of way about this is not relevant, but it's like, guess what? There's more than two genders. Like, here's the memo. More than two genders now. That's the world that we live in. Everyone has to accept that now. Like, you have to. You can have feeling about it.

God bless and keep you if you do. But that's, that's the way we're living now. Right? And we're gonna put that out there everywhere. I just wish we could send a memo. Like, no, no five stages. No five stages. Don't put it on your TV show. Don't say it on your talk show. Don't. Like, no five stages. So that I feel like is the first, but you know, the second one that I, that I think is subtler that I've been talking a lot about is in recovery work, but also in trauma work, there is this adage, this sort of belief that like when someone is going through something really terrible, we should have no sudden movements.

We should try to take it easy and slow. And don't make drastic change. And I am telling you, this is an embodied, lived experience. I [00:46:00] could, I could not go back into rooms in my own house. Because I was like, nope, I'm not the person who used to go into that room. If my husband would have let us move, I would have moved.

Not that he was resisting me. I just was like, so a lot of what we then did, which was like drive across the country during COVID, which a lot of people are like, that's amazing. And I'm like, it was maybe also dangerous though. You know, my three kids with me, people are like, that was such a great educational experience.

You were such a good parent. And every single time I would say that was just me grieving. I just could not sit still. So I really believe that I did not attend well. I did not bear witness well to what people were telling me because I was holding an old belief of like, No, when bad things are happening, we have to go slow and do less and stay within the window of tolerance.

Like I had a jet pack of fuel inside of me. If someone said you have to sit on your porch here in Maryland, I think I would have gotten sicker. So when people [00:47:00] are like, don't cut your hair, don't move to Arizona, don't leave your husband, what I say is do all of those things if you need to. Who the fuck am I to say those are not the right things to do?

Jessica Fein: I would love to end this conversation on who the fuck am I to say, but I promised, I promised we would come back because you mentioned at the beginning, this idea of what happens in the workplace and what really needs to change. And I know this is a big part of your work. How we can improve on the way we address grief in the workplace.

And so if you can just tell us what needs to change on that front. And I know that's like, you know, a whole other episode, but… 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: yeah, no, I can, I mean, what needs to change is our Western culture. The entry point that I think makes the most sense is the workplace. It's not like I'm like, Oh my God, the workplace is suffering the most.

It's where are most adults for a third of their life. They're in their workplace, what happens in workplaces. You have to go to meetings and trainings about sexual harassment and bias and racism. So let's just add one about grief and [00:48:00] loss. That's all. It just seems practical and savvy to me. And there is so much grief and loss.

at the root of the difficulties that people are having in the workplace right now, it would really benefit you. I mean, it has always existed, the idea that an employer can look you in the eye and say like, no, we have a great, you know, bereavement plan. People get three days off, like, based on what is that?

You know, I used to work at Children's Hospital and people would say things to me and I would like, can you just ground that in theory for me? I'm not here to challenge it. I just want to know, like, where the fuck did you get three days? Like, grounded in what? Who has ever said I was ready to go back to work after three days?

Like, no people. So ground that in something for me. What I can tell you, Empathy. com, which is, you know, an extraordinary resource, just, just published a study. It's the first study since 1993 that has comprehensively looked at the impact of grief and loss in the workplace. And here's how they looked at it.

They looked at it through [00:49:00] people who were executors of estates. Ah. And the right, so those are your upper level managers. These are the high functioning people that companies generally care about your VPs of whatever. 93%, 94%, 92%. These are the reporting statistics said that it impacted their mental health, that it impacted how they did their job.

Jessica Fein: I wonder if you said that five years later, as in my case, I still have things I haven't attended to with them. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Oh my God. I mean, there are so many things in my life where I'm like, yeah, I think that's just going to be. That's not going to happen. We've gotten as far as we're going to get with that one.

But you know, we had all this. It's like the great resignation and quiet quitting and people were like, we can't figure it out. It's like, you can't figure it out because you are not saying a million Americans died of COVID. Nine million people are grieving and then they're going to work. What do you think?

I mean, I won't go off into my tirades, but I am a social scientist at heart. I got a lot of studies. [00:50:00] podcasts about people and you know, I have a Google alert on those topics where people are like this. This is why it's happening. And the most brutal was when Brene Brown did a whole episode and it was like the tagline was like, we're going to tell you what's at the root of the great resignation.

And she had these two scientists, well, they were economists come and they had done all this research by pulling data from Glassdoor, which, so that's a biased community. And then they analyzed it because 31 million people, 31 million Americans left their jobs in this like four month period. Yeah. Yeah. And what they came up with was like, well, the workplace has become toxic.

Like somebody left a bag of potatoes and somehow they had rotted. And now we have all this noxious gas in the workplace. Instead of talking to people who study people who would say, listen, we have these instinctive responses to trauma and stress, fight, flight, freeze. First we fight, and you know what, all those people who were like, we're going to do a plank challenge, and we're going to bake [00:51:00] sourdough bread, and we're going to make this the, we're going to learn Spanish, that's a fight response, but if it doesn't get you into a space of resolve, you progress, fight, flight, and freeze are progressive, so now you move to flee, guess what fleeing is, leaving your damn job.

I don't know that I have heard other people say this because I wrote a couple of op eds and they went very viral, but people either liked what I said or really hate what I said. But the flea response seemed to me to be the obvious thing that was happening during the Great Resignation. And then quiet quitting, which is like people are just not working very hard at their desk, is a freeze response, right?

Like I tried the plank challenge. I tried to leave my job. So many people left their jobs and came back to the same job. That statistic is nuts. So then I came back and now I'm just sitting at my desk kind of like hoping it's going to be over one day. Now, COVID is not the same as it once was, but I am telling you that when layoffs happen and 1200 people suddenly don't work at your company anymore, most companies, not all, but most [00:52:00] companies are like, and now back to work.

So what happens? Well, now I'm terrified that mom and dad are going to kick me out of the house. Like they did my 1200 siblings and I'm not supposed to talk about it. I'm just supposed to be grateful that I still have a desk. Like you and I know that's not going to work. It's not going to work and what typically happens, they're not looking before and after what typically happens is you get 8 to 10 months down the road and that person is looking for another job, which is not really what anybody wants.

So the, the work that we do in the workplace, I have a business partner, Julianne, the work that we do in the workplace really is because it seems like the smartest place to talk to people about this. Where else do we get? adults in a learning situation, and they are being directly impacted in ways, particularly by non death loss, that they can't identify and see.

Jessica Fein: Okay, so everybody must read End of the Hour. Now you, now you know why, now you've heard exactly why, and I know that it's just gonna compel everybody [00:53:00] listening the way it did me, and you're working on a new book. 

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: I am, so I've got a bunch of things happening. So I, so I just handed in a book called Can Anyone Tell Me Why?

Which is essential questions about grief and loss answered. So can anyone tell me why I have brain fog? Can anyone tell me why I think that butterfly is my mom? Can anyone tell me why smart people say such stupid shit? Those are some of the names of the chapters. When is that book coming out? October, October, so we're in copy edits right now.

I'm really excited about that book. I have a novel that I just sent out to my publisher, so we'll see where that goes. And my business partner and I are working on this thing called the grief mentor method, which is, M stands for mindfulness, E stands for energy, and so on. But basically, it's a framework for daily grief practice.

It's the belief that every one of us has grief that needs some way to move through the system and land outside of us. And that just like we exercise regularly and we have a regular sex life and that we eat nutritiously and [00:54:00] we explore the arts regularly. We need to have some educationally neuroscience, bioscience, and the field of mental health informed.

Rituals and practices that help us understand. Oh, this is what grieving is. This is the I-N-G of grief. 

Jessica Fein: Meghan, thank you so much. Thank you for this time and for sharing so much and for writing this and for the books that haven't even come out yet that I'm like, can I preorder them now? You are such a delight.

Meghan Riordan Jarvis: Thank you. Thank you so much for doing this. I just admire everything about you and you're going to be on my podcast in a hot second. So We have our third coffee date coming up soon.

Jessica Fein: I’m very excited. Here are my takeaways from the conversation with Meghan. Number one, you may think you know how you'll handle grief.

But even with training or lots of lived experience, it can shake you to your core in unexpected ways. 

Number two, talking about the five stages of grief is like saying that the world is flat. It is an [00:55:00] outdated concept. 

Number three, if you find yourself questioning your faith or feeling unmoored from whatever spiritual beliefs once anchored you, that is perfectly normal. Allowing yourself to be an open hearted seeker and discovering new sources of awe can be healing. Maybe mushroom documentaries speak to your soul now. Let your curiosity guide you. 

Number four. Don't listen to people who say to move with caution in your grief. If staying in the same rooms of your home is too painful right now, get out.

Take the road trip. Get the haircut. Change your job. Listen to what feels right for your grieving soul. 

And number five. Talk about it. Western culture is awkward and backwards when it comes to talking about grief, but opening up can bring solace even in surprising ways. You are not alone in this universal experience, even when it feels loneliest.

Thank you so much for listening. If this episode was meaningful to you, take a second now and share it with a friend. If you want to learn more about our podcast guests and about my upcoming book, Breath Taking, a Memoir of Family, [00:56:00] Dreams, and Broken Genes, Sign up for my newsletter, The Fein Print, at www.jessicafeinstories.com.

That's Jessica Fein. F like Frank, EIN stories.com. Have a great day. Talk to you next time.