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.
Find detailed show notes at www.nurturinghabit.com/episode7
