MARTIN: Hi everyone, this is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast Health Shot podcast. You will find me at life-enthusiast.com.

EDY: And I have the pleasure of introducing to you today, Edy Nathan.

MARTIN: Welcome, Edy.

EDY: Martin, it's wonderful to be here with you.

MARTIN: And just as we're talking, preparing for this show, I’m realizing, this is not going to be an easy, sunshine, everything's beautiful, we're going to go easy-story, because you actually choose to talk to people about grief.

EDY: Yes, that's right. And it's certainly not something anybody chooses, right?

MARTIN: As these things go, we usually get there because of our own personal journey, right?

EDY: Absolutely, couldn't have said it better.

MARTIN: Right. Well, so people, grief, you need to not ignore it. And we'll be talking about that today. Why ignoring it is not the wise strategy.

EDY: It's so true.

MARTIN: Why don't you just lay it out? How did you fall into the pits of grief?

EDY: There are many stories that I could tell and share with you and with your audience. But let me start with the opening to my book: “It's Grief”, which is a parable, but also a true experience as I was out walking in Florida. And I came upon this bird and I had no idea what kind of bird it was, and it was this huge bird and I was just like, stopped. And it was gorgeous. And all of a sudden, as I stopped, it hopped toward me. And then I took a few steps closer to it, and then it hopped toward me again. And then I took a few more steps. And its last hop, I realized one thing, it was missing its leg. And it became the opening parable for my book because here was this Sandhill Crane, huge, taller than me, I’m all of five foot three and it was thriving against all odds. It looked healthy and it was missing something. And that’s what grief is like. We are missing something or someone. And yet there is a call to also live with it, not to get through it, but how are you going to partner with it so it doesn’t take your whole life away from you?

MARTIN: Yeah. I guess as you're describing the one-legged crane, I’m thinking, okay, that’s sort of like a soldier coming home from someplace minus a leg, minus an arm. But that’s the physical manifestation.

EDY: Minus a soul, okay?

MARTIN: Right. Because you're not the person you once were.

EDY: That's right. And you lose that self. And you go through what I talk about in the book, role confusion—who am I now that I have lost this person, this thing, this pet, this caretaker role, this sense of myself? Who am I once I've lost self-confidence? Who am I when I'm feeling a kind of self-loathing? And so, grief can show up in many, many different ways. And though, yes, it’s after the loss of a loved one, it is also after the loss of a self, of the self.

MARTIN: Right. Oh, yeah, the diamond, so many facets, right? We live many faceted lives, and I have my life as a husband and as a father and as a provider, and as an employer, and as many facets of my life, right?

EDY: That's exactly right.

MARTIN: I may need my left arm for that.

EDY: Yes.

MARTIN: But not necessarily for the other.

EDY: That's right. Anyway, I love the metaphor of the diamond. I’ve never really heard that metaphor and the different facets. And the thing is, we are all diamonds, right? We all have many different facets. But what happens when there's grief or this new term that I’ve coined called the sexual grief effect, which happens after one experiences a predatory event or experience in their lives.

MARTIN: Yeah.

EDY: That forever changes you. And then you may be walking around looking the same and talking the same, but nothing about you is the same. And maybe you haven't lost this limb, but you've lost a symbolic limb, which is the attachment to the self.

MARTIN: Yeah, I have a vivid memory of having walked back to our house, our home, and it had been ransacked. Somebody went through it. They took a few things and just the feeling for days, long time after, it felt, I wanted to wash it, I wanted to clean it, I wanted to scrub it, I wanted to get rid of the presence of these uninvited guests. I wanted to just sterilize the thing and it was not possible. And I’m just visualizing if somebody does a sex act on another person that involves unwanted contact.

EDY: Contact without one's permission.

MARTIN: Yeah.

EDY: That's right.

MARTIN: How do you scrub it off of yourself, right?

EDY: That's right, how do you scrub it off? And you know, Martin, one of the interesting pieces here is that sometimes you don't even have to be touched in an unacceptable way. You can also view it or even if you've escaped it, if you were so close, the traumatic imprint of it is still very much there.

MARTIN: Sure. All right, so there we have it. I guess the whole box would be called trauma, right?

EDY: I call it the traumatic imprint only because we are using trauma in many different ways and forms. And so I like to say traumatic imprint, not as a correction, but as a yes-and because sometimes we're using certain words like survivor, like trauma, in ways that they almost at times have less meaning. And so I'm trying to change the language a little bit for myself and for us as clinicians and for us in the world. Because then we don't become immune to a language that we use again and again and again.

MARTIN: Well, I think it's beautifully insightful the way you're putting it because you are leaving this in a box. You have this thing identified and it's movable and changeable because if you make me a victim, I'm imbued with it and it's changed me forever. When you talk about the imprint, I'm actually able to tie a bow around it and do stuff with it.

EDY: That's so well said. That's it exactly. I don't, even around survivor, I talk about survivalist. Now what are survivalists? If we look it up in the dictionary, a survivalist is somebody in the middle of a forest. Let's say, trying to figure out, well, how am I going to get out of here? What do I need?

MARTIN: Actually, I have a modification for you. A survivalist is somebody who voluntarily enters a world of difficulty, just because they want to be prepared for when it's required.

EDY: Yes, that's right. That's right.

MARTIN: Yeah, it’s like training in martial arts. Not because you want to fight somebody, but just that you might need to.

EDY: That's right. And I love that. So, a survivalist is, okay, it is one aspect of you. It doesn't define you. What the work is around is helping people who have truly been imprisoned by the impact of their survivorship.

MARTIN: Yeah, it owns you.

EDY: It owns you. And how to disengage from the sense that you're held hostage by it, because that's what a hostage does. A hostage taker owns you.

MARTIN: Yeah.

EDY: And what I have introduced is something I'm now calling the liberation protocol. And the liberation protocols are actually an increased perspective on the hostage negotiation strategies used by FBI agents and professionals when there is a true hostage situation.

MARTIN: All right.

EDY: And what we have learned from a study done at Columbia University is that true hostages upon their release experience the same thing as someone who's gone through a traumatic imprint.

MARTIN: Absolutely, how could it not be?

EDY: That's right.

MARTIN: You have been invaded, you have been constrained, and who knows what else? And you have seen things and been told things that you should never have to have.

EDY: That's exactly right. And so this is a yes-and two, anyone who is in therapy, who's been in groups to try to work through their stuff. Because sometimes we don't have the language and the sexual grief effect is a natural response to a sexually traumatic predatory event or even a developmental experience that happens and holds you. The thing is, is that when people are having difficulty with the grief that is a result of the loss of a loved one, if they are going through a year, two years, three years, and at the three-year mark, they are still very intensely grappling with that loss, most often that loss is combined with something that's more complex. And when it's more complex, there could be a traumatic imprint that's part of it.

MARTIN: Alright. Yeah.

EDY: And that is where some of this work began.

MARTIN: Alright. Yeah, in the simple language that I can put it is, it's not what happens, it's how you deal with it, how you react to it, what you do about it, is here at the core of this issue. We all will encounter things that may seem in a sense to one person, but traumatic to another.

EDY: That's right.

MARTIN: And so it's our stuff. We have the memory. We have the imprinting event.

EDY: That's right.

MARTIN: And we need to learn to, I think you're doing an awesome job of explaining how you need to put it in something that you can define.

EDY: A container. We need a container because it feels containerless.

MARTIN: I called it a box, but a container is better.

EDY: If that's better, it’s not meant as a correction.

MARTIN: No, no, no. I'm not worried about that. And anyway, the technique that you're bringing here is really important because I think every one of us will come with a bunch of stuff.

EDY: That's right. 

MARTIN: And the stuff that will define us.

EDY: That's right.

MARTIN: We should be able to choose off whatever it is that we don't want to be defined by.

EDY: That's exactly right. And if we think of it like a pie, what has happened to you can be part of the pie. Does it affect the rest of the pie and how that pie exists? Yes. And yet it doesn't mean that it is the only way you define yourself. And if I go back for a moment, just about grief and not the traumatic imprint grief, but the grief that could become a traumatic imprint, but the grief after the loss of a loved one that many people think that: “oh, there are five stages and all I have to do is go through those five stages.” But really and truly, when Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and her brilliance was studying people who were dying, she was studying what were the different finite stages that they went through until their death? And it was not written at all for people who were living with the loss. It was meant for people who were dying. And so yes, it was acceptance and yes, it was initially denial. I wrote what I call the 11 phases of grief in this first book, “It's Grief”. And because, number one, grief and the way that one experiences it is nonlinear. What that means is it doesn't follow a path. We want it to. We want it to have a structure. We want to know we just have to go from A to B to Z and we're done. But that's not what happens.

MARTIN: Yeah, acceptance does not necessarily mean that you're done with it.

EDY: No. I lost my partner when I was 27, and it is because of that loss that I went into this work. And what people were saying to me is: “You're young, don't worry about it. You'll find another partner.” And I was like: “This is not helping at all. This isn't helping me on any level. I got to figure this out.”And figuring it out, I then went back to school and I got a couple of master's degrees and I started to think about these as not stages because they're not finite.

I don't know about you, Martin, but when I think of a stage, I think of there's a beginning, middle, and an end, and there's an end. There is no end, and that's why I wanted it to be more liquid, as in the phases, as in a movement. And part of my phases, I start with the emotional armor phase.

And emotional armor is what I think everyone kind of experiences initially. And I think it's a place that we go back to over and over again, every time there's growth or there's a shift because it's a resting place. Our numbness, our dysregulation, our shock, our denial, our protest, that's all a place where our brains are just needing to figure out how we can relax our nervous systems. How do we shut down? How do we get back to ourselves even in shock and denial? But then the real work begins. Role confusion, we were talking about that at the very beginning. Who am I? I don't even know who I am anymore after this loss, just to deal with grief. I don't know who I am.

MARTIN: It can be very disorienting. Yeah, all of this, I mean, it feels like an explosion, right? The whole life that's rearranged in unpredictable ways.

EDY: That's right. The unpredictability of it. And then, so this isn't in any order, but one of the phases is anxiety and rage. Well, guess what? You can have anxiety and rage because you don't know who you are. And that rage can come out in a way that you've never experienced your rage before.

MARTIN: Yeah.

EDY: And if that rage or that anger is sublimated, is not attended to, you know what tends to come up? Anxiety.

MARTIN: Yet they live on the same territory. I do this with people a lot. This is the autonomic nervous system playing, and anxiety and rage are two sides of the same coin. Rage is expressed outward, anxiety is expressed inward.

EDY: That's right. That's right. And I was riding on a subway. I have actually survived agoraphobia. So, when I was 23 years old, I could not walk outside my front door.

MARTIN: Okay.

EDY: And most people don't survive this. So, I was on the subway and it was like one of my first forays out. And I was so excited and I was starting to get anxious and I could feel my heart pounding. Now, my heart rate could go up to 180 with no problem whatsoever. And I was terrified. So my subway ride, and I'm thinking I just got to breathe through this and I got to use all my tools and I got to just calm myself down. And meanwhile, am I grieving the loss in that moment of my independence because it feels like I’m going backwards? I don't know what's going on. And in that moment, a guy went for the chain on my throat and I said: “Don't you expletive dare.” And I got off at the next stop. Now, that was very unlike me because I didn't like walking because of the anxiety. I got off the train and I started walking to my apartment on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. And I realized I have no anxiety. It's gone. And it was because I tapped into the anger.

MARTIN: Yeah, the impulse. Yeah.

EDY: And there it was. Yeah. And it was like, so now somebody comes in and they're feeling the anxiety. It's like, let's get into that anger because you're not honoring the anger that's underneath it.

MARTIN: Yeah. Very good. You see, it's a physiological thing. I don't know if people realize that, but it's an acidic event. Or in the pH, the internal pH actually shifts. And when you release it, the anger is actually just causing it to flush and flood out. 

EDY: I really like that analogy. That it really makes the anxiety flood out.

MARTIN: Yeah.

EDY: Wow. Beautiful. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for that. I will use that and I will certainly attribute that turn of phrase to you. Okay. I appreciate it.

MARTIN: Let me tell you one more visual on the topic. This is, you're in a toilet and you're drowning in it. And all you have to do is flush it and be done with it.

EDY: Mm-hmm.

MARTIN: That's it.

EDY: That's it. So, when in the middle of an anxiety episode, it is very hard to even think that you can think.

MARTIN: Oh, it owns you. Absolutely.

EDY: Great.

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

EDY: So the idea, so, I don't know if in that moment that guy hadn't gone, he kind of saved me from my anxiety episode.

MARTIN: Yeah.

EDY: And he didn't get my chain, by the way, I just want you all to know, okay? He did not get my chain because I was so loud on that subway, he immediately removed his hand. And I got off. But the thing is, is that that actually began to frame so much of my work and what I talk about. And the grief I felt in that moment.

MARTIN: Yeah. All right. There's an experience that can redefine you, right?

EDY: That's right. It redefines you.

MARTIN: Yeah.

EDY: That's right. And in my brain, so in clients brains, the hope is, let's use that neural plasticity. Let's start to change the way those neurons are actually reattaching or sending signals to, your information to the amygdala, to the prefrontal cortex, right? That information can begin to shift and then you can have a different relationship the next time you might have an episode with anxiety.

MARTIN: Right. All right. So let's circle back to that grief business. Yeah.

MARTIN: So you have, you have a traumatic event. It consumes you for a while, right? It's like when you throw a rock into the middle of the pond, it creates at first a big splash, and then you're watching the waves kind of fade out into the distance. And I think, it's a lot like that in our emotional world that when it first happens, it's a major splash. It's like we're in the middle of it. But with time and living, it just gets a little less intense.

EDY: It can, not necessarily. And the reason it can and not necessarily is if you happen to be living under the same roof as a predator. If you happen to be living in the area where you were hurt.

MARTIN: Okay. Well, if you're getting re-traumatized every day that’s a big rock every day. 

EDY: That's exactly right. And if you don't have the wherewithal or the knowledge, especially, for example, with domestic violence survivors, it's very, very hard to get out and to extricate oneself from that situation. And one in six women, some stats even say one in three, and one in ten men, are sadly experiencing traumatic imprints. And also developmental hits as well, and the developmental hit can come from neglect. That is the work of Ruth Cohn on neglect. And it is also the unwanted child in pregnancy. It is also any kind of negative initial first sexual experience. These are all examples where actually sexual grief can come up because it's affecting the brain stem, and it's affecting the nervous system and the way one is able to be in the world. So what is taken away is one's personal and social identity, one's inability to trust intimacy or be intimate or to learn or to hold on to learning. Many people don't finish school, and that's in some of the developmental hits. 

And as we age, in terms of aging, women going through menopause is a hot topic now. There are many women who are being told: “Oh, you know, don't worry about it, you'll just get through this.” And it's like, no, it's actually a sexual grief thing because they're losing their minds, they're losing their desire, they're losing their core senses of self, and no one talks about this more than ever before. But rarely are people actually talking about this. And for men, because this is not for women only, I'm a big advocate for men, medication or prostate issues and all of a sudden, their performance sexually is flattened or nonexistent, and that was part of their identity. And many men, more than we care to even identify, become suicidal, become self-loathing, disengage from family or partners because of what they're grappling with. And they are imprisoned by this and held hostage by the imprint it leaves.

MARTIN: Right. Well, yes, to acknowledge, it is so. And fortunately, we have tools to help with physiology. We do have bioidentical hormones that could help. We do have tools for men to deal with their stuff, but that's on the physiology. They may not know it because in the mainstream, this is not discussed.

EDY: That is it. In the mainstream, no one is talking about it, not really. So yes, it is available.

MARTIN: It's fixable.

EDY: And if you come from a poor community, if you come from a, whether it's a community filled with strife and inequities, no, not at all.

MARTIN: No need to stuff it, bury it, and suffer.

EDY: So this is for all people, which is why I'm writing this second book who’s write now titled “Dare to Live: Liberate the Self from Sexually Traumatic Experiences and Learn to Thrive.” Because it is available to all people, no matter what your background, no matter what access you have to medical care, to understand, yes, there is help. But there is one other piece. There are times when bioidentical hormones can certainly help. But if you already have this sense of yourself, and that is filled with self-loathing, even though you may begin to feel better, some part of the brain hasn't adjusted. And so you can physically manifest something,

MARTIN: Yeah, you do need to redefine yourself. You have to.

EDY: That's it.

MARTIN: And it's a hard adjustment because you are experiencing a loss. Loss of youth is not fun. Loss of your reproductive ability is not fun.

EDY: That's right.

MARTIN: Loss of your sexual enjoyment, it's not fun.

EDY: No. 

MARTIN: We need to redefine. 

EDY: That's exactly right. And find the tools to actually be curious. So one of the liberation protocols is curiosity. And it's a curiosity that is embodied. It is not just, so how are you feeling? It is actually, you go into the self and it is an embodied curiosity. The questions you're asking have to do with, you know, not just how you're feeling, but what the experience is and how would you rather be feeling, and what have you lost, and what are you grieving, and what are you yearning for? And we don't put it in those terms.

MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah, so my favorite way of dealing with problems is to not feel them.

EDY: Yes.

MARTIN: As you're saying these words, I'm thinking, oh yeah, that's right. I should actually go inside and ask the question, what am I now grieving for?

EDY: Yeah

MARTIN: Specifically.

EDY: That's right. And oftentimes when I use the word grief, people don't understand because they think they associate grief only with the loss of a loved one. So it's like, well, I haven't lost anybody. So what are you talking about? Oh, so you haven't lost some part of yourself. Let me reframe. So the reframe is, what are you yearning for?

MARTIN: Yeah. That's right. The gap between what is and what could be.

EDY: That's right. And what are you hungry for? Okay, because you're yearning for something that was lost. It's not necessarily a person. It might be you.

MARTIN: Oh, now you're going very deep. And I'm not talking about you, per se, but the you.

MARTIN: No, no. The sense of who I am, was, could have been.

EDY: That's exactly right.

MARTIN: Oftentimes, it's just realizing that I will not be the, I don't know, pilot or race car driver or whatever the heck you think you could have been.

EDY: That's right. That’s right.

MARTIN: Yeah.

EDY: That’s exactly right.

MARTIN: All right, so how do you go about helping people? So you write the book? Where do you find them?

EDY: Where do I find the people? Well, I'm a clinician. I'm in private practice, but I also go around the world and I talk about this. My last outing was to… Actually, I did not speak there, but I certainly got a massive education. And that education was around, the conference was called “End of Violence Against Women International”, but it's also for men. And this organization really helps police and FBI learn how to talk to people and interview people who have been assaulted.

And how important it is to really have a conversation where you come from believing rather than disbelieving. And I was not aware of how many people are disbelieved around our nation when they go in and report it. And so many times, what happens to people is underreported. So my hope is that next year I'll be speaking there, but I also speak at Oxford University, I speak at the Adlerian conference, the University of Michigan, and other universities around so that people get a sense of what I’m doing. And now I’m developing a course called “On Grief”, and it's the 11 phases. The next course will be on sexual grief.

MARTIN: That's awesome. So, the website that you have put together. 

EDY: Yes, so it's just https://edynathan.com/.

MARTIN: Right. And Edy is spelled E-d-y. 

EDY: It is.

MARTIN: So it’s https://edynathan.com. All the links are there. So let's go visit and see what good stuff can be put forward.

EDY: Absolutely. Absolutely. And thank you. Thank you.

MARTIN: Yeah, I see it as a very worthwhile service to mankind that you put out. And you're coming through with such a level of wisdom that I don't know, I just have a sense of it, is that you cannot really have wisdom without bumping into problems and overcoming them. It's not just book learning. This is life learning. And I can just feel it coming through you very loudly.

EDY: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that. Thank you for being present with me.

And thank you for allowing me the gift of being present with you.

MARTIN: Much appreciated. 

EDY: Yes.

MARTIN: Edy, you do such an important thing in life. Helping people get up from where they are falling apart.

EDY: Thank you. Yeah, it’s not something I chose, it chose me.

MARTIN: Yeah.

EDY: Right? And so, the legacy of the works continues by these conversations. And talking about the things that people don’t want to talk about. Grief, the traumatic imprint and frankly sex, and the driver of sex.

MARTIN: Oh yeah.

EDY: Okay, I'm not talking about sex.

MARTIN: Yeah, we haven’t talked about that enough. But maybe we should take another two minutes to just spend a while explaining just how messed up people can get, and how hard it is to put it back together, right?

EDY: Yeah, it’s,

MARTIN: We talked about the container. Oh, you talked about the container.  I don’t want to be the container, that’s the whole thing. I just want to be able to compress it, set it aside, make it even smaller yet, maybe make it really tiny.

EDY: Disappear. You want to make it disappear. And the thing is, is that we can’t make what happened disappear. And I was just writing about this. We can’t make it disappear. So, since we can’t make it disappear, let’s step into it. Because as we were talking about anxiety, the more you try to push it away, the bigger it gets. The more you invite it in and say: “I’m not afraid of you, you, you!” I’m going to actually see you. I’m going to engage with you. And instead of just trying to push you away which makes it bigger and bigger and bigger, I'm actually going to actually say: “Ah, I see you.” And I'm going to learn about you. And it’s the same with the sexual grief, the imprint, but also one’s sexuality, and when I talk about sexuality I'm not talking about a sexual partnership, okay? I’m talking about, really what Freud talked about, which is we have a primal sexual self, and that is, and I’m not a Freudian, everybody, just so you all know, ok? But it is that part of us that drives us, that manifests within us as an awesome part of us that gets excited by things, that wants to flourish. And when that sexual driver is flattened, then we can’t, we don’t thrive. And if we are dysregulated, it’s flattened. So it’s about getting, allowing the primal sexual self to have energy again. And to locate it. And that comes from the personal and social identities. 

MARTIN: Yeah. Alright, so you can get help. Edy Nathan is going to be there for you. Go read the book. If the book is not enough, watch the videos, if the videos are not enough, get a consultation. 

EDY: Thank you. Thank you for this.

MARTIN: Yeah. Edy Nathan. Edynathan.com. You got this from Martin Pytela at Life Enthusiast Health Shot. You can find me at www.life-enthusiast.com. Thank you for being here.

EDY: Thank you.