Conversations on Healing

Welcome to the Conversations on Healing podcast, where host Shay Beider speaks with renowned healthcare leaders, practitioners, and thought leaders to explore the world of wellness, the incredible powers of self-care, and what it truly means to heal today. Join us on this journey to become more whole, healed, and connected.

Shay Beider Welcome to today’s episode of The Conversations on Healing podcast. I’m Shay Beider, and I’m absolutely thrilled to introduce the remarkable Laurel Braitman, a bestselling author, educator, and a pioneering voice in the world of medical storytelling. She’s the author of two impactful books, “What Looks Like Bravery,” and “Animal Madness,” both of which resonate deeply with readers worldwide through their raw honesty and insightful exploration of the human and animal experience. With a PhD in Science, Technology and Society, from MIT, Laurel masterfully combines intellectual rigor with profound emotional insight. Currently, she serves as the Director of Writing and Storytelling at the Stanford School of Medicine, where she championed the integration of narrative into healthcare. Her efforts enable clinicians, students, and patients to uncover meaning and build connections through the power of storytelling. Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of “Wild”, has said about Laurel’s work that it is “a gorgeous, tender, and beautiful book… that it is magnificent.”

In today’s episode, we delve into Laurel’s memoir “What Looks Like Bravery” and explore how she has harnessed storytelling as a means to navigate her own grief, particularly following the loss of her father during her late adolescence. We discuss the therapeutic potential of writing in processing complex emotions, and she shares some of the techniques from her writing workshops. As many people today grapple with feelings of depression and anxiety and overwhelm, Laurel helps us to see how resilience can be cultivated through the stories we tell ourselves — and one another. She illustrates the power of vulnerability and connection in both human and non-human animal relationships, highlighting the importance of surrounding ourselves with those who see and believe in our true potential. For anyone listening who wants to understand how to transform the stories that they tell themselves, this is a fascinating and wonderful episode. So, let’s dive into this conversation with Laurel Braman.

Well, Laurel, I am delighted to invite you on to the Conversations on Healing podcast. Thanks so much for being a guest on the show.

Laurel Braitman Thank you so much for having me and having these conversations.

Shay Yes, I had the pleasure of reading your most recent book, “What Looks Like Bravery,” recently — which we will touch on in this episode — and it’s such an eloquent memoir and just telling of your own story, and there’s many elements that relate in it to healing. And, you know, one of the pieces that I was very touched by — because through the work that I do with Integrative Touch, we work with a lot of children and families that are experiencing significant grief and in your story, it’s almost like this lifelong processing and unfolding of grief that’s revealed in such a gorgeous way. And I actually thought before we dive in that I would read just one little passage from your book, “What Looks Like Bravery,” because I was particularly touched about how it addresses pediatric grief, and how pediatric grief is a little bit different from the grief that happens when we’re adults.

And so this was a piece that came forward when, in your work, you had connected with a nonprofit organization that was working with a lot of children who were experiencing grief and had facilitators that were helping them. And one of the women who was in a leadership position within this organization, as she was describing children and how they grieve, she said that children are delayed mourners, that they won’t do it until they know they’re safe. And I thought about just that simple concept — of how children grieve a little bit differently, and how they’re delayed mourners, and they won’t do it until they feel safe. And somehow, in this context of having a conversation on healing, that felt like a really interesting place to start — sort of as a centerpiece to your work, which is so much around the stories that we tell, the way that we can use writing as a tool to engage with those stories, and even redefine those stories, or find nuances in those stories, that we can reveal — that we didn’t even know were there. And so, I’m curious about your understanding of how this idea — of how children grieve a little bit differently — impacts you in your writing, work, and life. And I know it’s a huge question, but here we go.

Laurel Sure. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, you know — just so your listeners understand — I had a loss, a very long, ongoing loss, from when I was three until I was 17. My dad was terminal, and we never knew how long we were going to have with him. So it was a kind of endless cycle of saying goodbye. And then he would get a few months, or weeks, or at most two or three years, and then we would say goodbye again. And so it was a long goodbye of like, you know, roughly 14 and a half years, but I never knew how long it would be. And, you know, so that’s the background. And as a kid, I had a safe childhood in many ways — but in other ways, it wasn’t safe, in that I never knew when that goodbye was really going to happen. And mourning really just didn’t factor in.

Sadness was not a big coping mechanism in my household. And so I really buried a lot of my grief for a really long time, and it wasn’t until I was an adult. So that’s the background, and that’s what drove me to start volunteering with kids who were grieving and getting close to people who helped grieving kids, in the hope that I may understand myself a little better. And frankly, that wasn’t necessarily conscious for a long time. So that’s the background of why I was with those kids and why I am interested in grief in children and young adults — because that was my lived experience. So yeah, I think I’ve also written a lot about non-human animals, and it’s something we have in common, which, you know, oftentimes a non-human won’t show pain either until they feel safe, or they’re alone, or they’re not under threat in any way.

And so I think that that’s something deeply ingrained in us as creatures. It crosses species lines too, and it’s just a big part of who we are. And knowing it can set you free a little bit, and give yourself a bit of a pass if you feel like you wouldn’t let yourself have certain emotional experiences — sometimes for years. There’s probably a reason for that. Either you haven’t developed the coping skills you need yet to let yourself feel those things, or you weren’t safe in your life — for any variety of reasons — to be able to do that. And so, learning that that was something that wasn’t just my own experience, but that happened to many people who had suffered a big loss or lived through something traumatic of any kind, really just sort of gave me a pass to figure out how I could let myself feel those things.

Shay And I think there’s that element too of — when you experience a lot of significant challenges in childhood — it’s a very common response to just find ways to sort of keep functioning, right, like you “function over” is kind of classically discussed in psychology. It’s like you just learn to function over the pain because you still need to go to school, and you still need to be with your friends, and you still need to function and do all the things that kids do. And so what can be a really effective coping strategy — and like you said, non-human animals do the same thing, right, they also continue to function because it’s not always the right moment to express your pain in the immediate now, because sometimes something else is taking priority. And so, absolutely, we do have that in common with many other creatures that we get to share this planet with.

But I still feel like what is very poignant in your story –and I mean, it’s obviously not an accident that your work is around kind of medical storytelling and the ways that we frame like these challenging experiences that we go through, not only ourselves but as caregivers, right? Because this impacts everyone in kind of the whole realm of that illness or disease that someone is experiencing. And one of the pieces that I thought was just so salient in your work and your writing is that sometimes that kind of pause on feeling the pain can take 20 years, can take 30 years, can take 40, 50 years. There’s really no cap or limit on that. And so, I’m curious now, with the work that you do around medical storytelling — helping caregivers, people also in healthcare, people themselves that are experiencing illness — to write about and share about their emotional experiences, what you’ve learned about how we do process our pain.

Laurel Great question. Thanks for asking that. You know, every day, I’ve realized there’s just so much more that I don’t know — that I know is the truth. And I think it just has to be different for every single person. I think we tell ourselves a lot of kind of lies and wind up pressuring ourselves to sort of express or emote in a certain way, or process the way the internet tells us to, or the most recent self-help phenomen tells us to. And I think all of that is a shame. The worst thing that we could do to ourselves when we’re suffering is to make ourselves suffer further for not doing it. Right? And I just think that’s some people’s path — that you were just not going to let yourself kind of open the Pandora’s box of difficult things that happened maybe 30 years ago, until maybe your mid-sixties, until your seventies, until your eighties, until your forties.

Who knows? You know, I think there’s no one right way to do it. And for me to tell someone that them putting off dealing with it, I think, is irresponsible. You know, it comes back to that kind of safety and self-equipped piece, which is that it takes many of us– because of our lifestyle, circumstances, lived experience– different timescales to be able to touch the most difficult things that happen to us. And honestly, for many people, dare I say most people, they never do. Right? And that is just their path to walk in this life. So the last thing I want to do is to be another voice out there telling people to experience grief a certain way. I just don’t think that’s realistic. And so I just try to meet people where they are that, well, you know, want to work with me or want to write with me. And it’s self-selecting– like, you don’t choose to work with a writer and write about difficult things unless part of you really wants to.

So most of the people who find their way to me are not as resistant as they could be, and that’s great. And I just meet people where they are. And, you know, for example, if I’m working with a group of, like, let’s say very burnout, traumatized nurses, okay? I will give them an opportunity to answer a question along a continuum. So when I give people a writing prompt in one of our reflective writing workshops for healthcare professionals, for example, I usually give them three options. Right? There’s an option to really push on the bruise, which is a phrase that the writer Pam Houston uses that I like. But also, they can, you know, write a recipe or a WikiHow article for getting through something hard that they’ve done at work that week. So you can choose to relive and put yourself back in a moment and kind of work out a narrative about that moment on the page with me, or you could do something else entirely.
And I think that that’s fair. And also, our ability to do this kind of stuff changes on a daily basis, an hourly basis, a minute-by-minute basis, depending on, you know, what’s happening in the news, or if our taxes are due, or whatever the hell else is going on, right? So even though we’re someone who might be “capable” to work through some of our emotions– sometimes in public– other days, we just aren’t. And that’s okay. So that’s a long answer to like– the timescale is dependent, and there isn’t one right way. I know that there were grief experiences that I could not touch in my twenties and thirties, that I really was not emotionally, physically, et cetera, capable until my mid- forties. And that’s fine. You know? That’s my journey. There is a woman that I, you know, really admire, who I write about in the book, who started a grief support organization for kids in the Bay Area called Josie’s Place.
And — I don’t think — I want to say she was in her fifties, you know, before she started really thinking about the loss of parental figures in her life and sort of questioning those experiences anew. And also, we reinterpret, you know, the hard things that have happened to us every time we reach a different developmental stage. And I think too often we think those developmental stages are done when our prefrontal cortex is done developing in our late teens or twenties. And I think that’s just not true. Right? And I hope that I am reaching new developmental stages, like, well into my seventies and eighties. You know, I hope to live that long, and I hope that I will continue developing that way. And every time I reach a new level of awareness about myself or life itself, then I must reinterpret my life. And I just think that’s a more honest way to live.

Shay Yeah. And I’m curious about, you know, you’ve chosen writing as this vehicle for helping others and also yourself in terms of processing some of the things that you went through. So we’ve already touched on this incredible period in your life– like you said, from the ages of three to 17– where your father had this cancer diagnosis that was in just constant stages of the unknown, you know, whether he would survive and how much longer and what that looked like. And it was always changing, with repeated hospitalizations and treatments, and then he was okay for a while and had a leg amputated. I mean, it was a perpetual story throughout that entire period of your life. And at the same time, as you grew into adulthood and you started to, you know, define and develop your own passion for writing and then brought that into your career and profession, you began to recognize that as a tool that could also be used to help others. And so I am very interested in what you inherently see as the capacity of, like, the written word– and maybe even the spoken word, right? Like storytelling itself– as a vehicle for helping us to heal from some of the deepest traumas and challenges that we face in our lives. And why is storytelling and writing so powerful and effective to help us to heal?

Laurel Well, I think, you know, we’re narrative animals. I think that’s honestly, like, what the world’s religions are. I think that’s what the sciences are. I think, you know, if there’s something that separates us from other creatures– and some other creatures, like, I do think great apes do this too– like, I think that we are meaning-making animals, and that’s the human experience. You know? “Why me?” is, like, the very feeling of being human. “Why this?” I think that’s the human heart and the human mind. And so we naturally search for explanations. And I think that just happens ever more when something difficult happens to us, right? We want to know why. And I think putting a narrative to the hardest things– even if there is no why, right? Even if the story, which it usually is, is like, “Well, I don’t know why, but here’s what happened”– gives us some comfort in putting a narrative to things.

That’s what undergirds the entire psychiatric and psychological profession, right? That’s basically therapy– is you narrativizing things, coming up with new stories, maybe stories that serve you better than the stories you’ve been telling yourself previously about yourself. So I think, I think that’s the ticket, right, is like when we try to write something down– or, and by the way, this can happen through music, this can happen through art of any kind– I don’t think this has to be writing at all. It can happen through conversation. It can happen through oral storytelling. So writing is just what I happen to know how to do, you know, on a good day. But really, I think it could be any sort of creative medium. But I think it’s the process of trying to tell the story that gives us a bit of comfort. And I think, particularly if you’re telling a story about something that has happened to you, it gives you power back over that thing, even if you can’t change the outcome.

I think it’s a way of taking back a little bit of agency, even though we know better, even though we know that it doesn’t protect us from, say, future loss or future difficulty. But there is something in telling our story that is very often heartening, gives us a bit of confidence, and helps us sort of reinterpret or reexamine. And then, in my case, in writing memoir, it forces me to have empathy for a version of myself– because I’m a character, I’m no longer me– and also empathy for the people around us. The best way to get a reader to set your work down is to have an insight that you haven’t had about yourself or someone around you, or feel like you’re being too nice to yourself and not giving other people the benefit of the doubt. So if you want to be a good memoir writer, I think what you really have to do is make sure that you have done as much empathy generation for yourself and the other characters in your story as you can, because otherwise you’re going to lose the reader.

They’re going to realize that you’re being selfish or self-centered, or you’re not insightful enough, and they’re going to put your work down. And I think that’s something that separates really good memoir from less good memoir– is that the author hasn’t done that kind of work. And the reader– it’s sort of the frustration of when you solve a mystery before you’re supposed to in the book. I think the equivalent with memoir is that you have an insight about the author in their life that they haven’t had, and you kind of lose respect for them. So I think that process is good for us.

Shay Right. Wow, that’s a very interesting way to talk about it. You also discuss in your book, “What Looks Like Bravery”, this kind of transformative process. And even in the title– it’s “What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey From Loss to Love”– and so there’s this sense of transformation in your work. There’s also this sense of how we can find joy because of the meaning that we forge from it. And so I’m interested to hear, because I do think it’s also part of how we heal, that relationship between joy and loss, and how there are two pieces of a puzzle that actually fit together in some way. And I’m curious in what way you see those as companions to one another.

Laurel Yeah, thanks. If I could rewrite that subtitle, I would, because I think it’s misleading. It’s not like we leave loss behind and then find love. The whole book is about how we need one to experience the other– or at least to feel the magnitude of the other. So yeah, I think I spent a lot of time in my early life avoiding negative feelings– well into adulthood, frankly. And what I realized in trying to avoid feeling my deepest pain was that I was also muting the best experiences of life. I was muting my joy and happiness, because if you keep one at arm’s length, you’re actually keeping both at arm’s length. You can’t have one without the other. And that was one thing I really learned from the kids, because they often don’t really try. They’ll volley between abject despair and wild happiness– sometimes in the space of 30 seconds.

And that was just such an awesome thing to see. And this is just also kids who haven’t had a hard thing happen– I mean, they go from screaming, crying because there was a crust on their sandwich, you know, to being just absolutely thrilled that they saw a turtle. You know what I mean? That is just a lovely kind of thing. I am sure it’s hard if you’re a parent, but I think, as an adult who may be trying to avoid certain feelings, it’s really educational. And so that, to me, is the secret and the trick. And I wish I had had a life without loss. You’ve mentioned the loss of my dad, but I’ve lost both my parents. I lost my home. I lost a marriage. I’ve racked up a number in my 47 years. And I will say, I wish I hadn’t had any of ’em.

I wish I was just a real basic, shallow person that really maybe hadn’t experienced it. That would be interesting to choose, but that’s not the life that I got. And so then what do we do? That’s not the life that most of us get. So I think thinking about the ways that the deepest pain teaches me– not just how to appreciate anything, because I think I was actually already pretty appreciative– but helps me understand that it’s a piece of the joy and a piece of the happiness is helpful. It’s just the colors are turned up a little bit more brightly, and it increases the saturation on the world, for better and for worse. So, I don’t know. I think the avoidance of pain, the avoidance of suffering– I just spent a lot of time doing that. And a lot of– certainly society in America is set up to do that. We have so many shiny distractions. There’s so many things to buy. There’s so many things to listen to and do, that it is sort of easy to get on the hamster wheel of the seeking of pleasure and forget that there are real gems in acknowledging our suffering at the same time.

Shay And also, I want to talk about the way that you live and also the way that you grew up, because one of your prior books– “Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves”– is important in that your whole life, you’ve lived on a ranch. Not– I shouldn’t say whole life– you had other experiences too, but your formative years were on a ranch. You currently, as I understand it, live on a ranch. You have a deep connection to animals and nature. That was an important decision that your parents made very early on and something that they were committed to. And it has shaped you– your connection to animals, your understanding of the parallels, similarities, the things that we have in common with non-human animals– and how that can also teach us more deeply about ourselves is, I think, central to who you are.

And so, I’m also particularly curious because some of your work has looked at, in a way, this mental health side of how we process grief, of how we tell our stories, of how we reframe the losses and tragedies that happened to us. And, in fact, the ranch where you grew up was burned by a fire– completely gone– and many of your memories went with it. And so even there, you’ve had to reclaim, right? There was this whole deep– I would imagine, I can always think– it’s possible to be an incredibly intense process of figuring out how to reclaim and reposition yourself within the context of something that’s such a revolutionary change in your life and in what you knew to be true or to be so or to be familiar. And so, I wonder about how you see that relationship between nature, animals, and mental health, and what that collaboration actually is all about.

Laurel Sure, yeah, I mean, you were right on. It’s always been an important part of my life. It always will be. And I actually, as I find myself getting older, it becomes more important rather than less. There’s something about the immortality, or at least the life extension- ness of planting trees, of seeing trees around me also go through wildfire and come back. Metaphor in the landscape has always been, I’d say, my religion, and frankly, that it’s inherent in so many religions. There’s a reason why people have Christmas trees and Easter and spring and everything else, and all of the world main religions have elements of nature wrapped up in them. I think, again, as humans, we’ve always turned to the rest of the world, the natural world, to look for meaning and help us understand ourselves as a piece of something larger. And so I feel that way when I’m reading– it’s maybe not conscious, but I’m not on my phone, I’m not reading email, maybe I’m listening to a podcast– but I find there is a kind of busyness in taking care of the landscape and the land and/or being out in a non-cultivated natural space that I just find really comforting.

And I don’t even know why. Some people have looked at, like, well, is there molecules in the air, forest, that are calming us physiologically? Probably. But I also think there’s something just to be said of reminding us that we’re part of something larger, that the cycle of birth and death goes on in everything, not just us, and that there’s something more important than the top of our email pile. I think it’s an old thing. And as we’ve become industrialized creatures, we’ve gotten further away from non-human nature. Most of us are not involved with growing our own food and raising animals to eat them. We have a pet in our house, and that’s most people’s main way. Maybe they go to the zoo, go to the grocery store, look at the beautiful piles of produce. And I’m not digging any of those things. I think they’re all important, but there is a kind of peace.

And for me, a medicine in gardening and being out on the ranch and hanging out with animals that have their own problems rather than seeing nature is a blank canvas. What a lot of my work has been about is, like, well, that dog might have its own anxiety disorder too. They might be on the same meds as you. Rather than find that depressing, I find it really heartening that even at our most neurotic, we’re the least alone on this planet, I find funny and heartening, not depressing. And so that too is great. But I am a writer. I’m really verbal. It’s also nice for me to have relationships that are nonverbal. I find it kind of relaxing. So that’s another way that animals help me just forget about the things that don’t matter.

Shay And that’s an important part of healing itself and understanding in a capacity even to drop into the nonverbal, even that which is beyond language, that which is not easily captured in words because it’s a more visceral, lived, primary experience. And we can have a lot of those kinds of experiences in nature and with animals that are just profound in the essence of what they are that aren’t about a comment on it, but they’re just about an experience itself. It’s like a fundamental kind of origin point of just connectivity with ourselves and other being ourselves and the planet ourselves, and everything that’s around us, where you just drop in to that connection rather than comment on the connection. And that can be so healing and transformative.

Laurel Beautifully put. Yeah, and I think, again, to come back to young people, I think that is something that they’re very good at naturally, especially younger kids. They haven’t actually developed the language to narrate these emotional experiences that we’re talking about. And so they are forced to just embody them. And I think that that is something we can learn from, because there’s no reason that even though we can talk about it as adults, that we need to. So, I think there’s a lot of wisdom there for different ways of being that we could practice as adults.

Shay And it is interesting. You are such a mix of so many things. Like we were saying, you have this experience, you grew up on a ranch, but also you, you’re in academia. You ended up getting your PhD from MIT, you’re the director of Writing and Storytelling at Stanford School of Medicine. You developed a global Grand Rounds tour called “Writing Medicine” for healthcare providers and patients and caregivers. And so you’re this interesting mix around the academic and this sort of way of communicating with audiences from that lens. But then also you’re very much about getting these ideas to the general public. And I even think during COVID, some of that work really took off more so for you. And so I’m curious about your passion about how you help people in the world.

Laurel Well, thanks for saying I help people. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s selfish, and I’m not just saying that. I think when I feel out of touch with any sort of purpose that is greater than myself, I feel kind of empty and weird. I’m a dog that needs a job, is the truth, right? I’m like an anxious Australian shepherd. It’s like if I don’t have a direction to point myself in, I’m going to chew my tail off. And that’s just me. And so part of it is just giving myself something to do. And I was lucky and privileged enough that didn’t have to be a factory job from being a young person. I didn’t come out of college with debilitating loans. I got graduate school paid for. I have had, you know– through grants and stuff– but I haven’t have had the great gift of being able to think for my job and then also to live in a variety of different sort of beautiful places.

And I think that has given me the kind of freedom to then look around and be like, well, how might I do this with other people? I had the gift of learning how to tell stories and tell my own stories and that of others, and then what do you do with that? And I don’t have kids. I think legacy is important to me, and it doesn’t have to be legacy by name or my books or anything, but I think I want to be a kind of person that reminds other people of what’s possible. That was the great thing that my parents did for me is they sort of inculcated in me the belief that I was capable of more than I thought I was. And I don’t think we’re all lucky enough to get the family or mentors who do that for us. And if that’s something that I can do through my teaching, whether that’s with my students or a social worker that crosses my path in a workshop, or someone who sits next to me on a plane, or a friend of one of my nephews, then that’s something that I’m going to do because it made all the difference in my life.

And so I think I try to do that in my books. I try to do that in my teaching. I try to do that in every interview. I think that is my purpose, and it may not always look the same. Sometimes that’s writing about elephants, and sometimes that’s teaching at the Stanford Medical School. But in the end, I think that’s the core in all of it. I’ve never really articulated this before, but I know possibility is something in there. It’s a kind of, look, the world is bigger than you think, you are less alone than you think, these painful experiences you are feeling, you are not alone in them. And I think that’s at the root of all my work, whether I’m writing about science or I’m teaching creative writing, or I’m walking someone around the ranch.

Shay You tell a story in the book about how your dad had driven you to MIT, so you could take a look at it, and you did not even want to get out of the car. You were just like, no, I don’t even want to go and look at it. And it’s so ironic then, that later on that is one of the schools you ended up going to.

Laurel I so regret that I was such a brat. I just was furious. Furious. And inside all that was like, I know I’m not going to get in here. I’m not good enough to be in this place. And so instead of think about it as a dream, it was easier to just close the door so that I wouldn’t disappoint myself and others. And here he was literally dying, and he just wanted me to get out of the car and take a look at the damn hallway, and I couldn’t do it. But I don’t think it’s an accident that I went there. I mean, I think I probably was trying to prove something. right? Through the ether, I was trying to make up for being that resentful, scared kid, and I don’t regret it. It was a hard eight years, man. But I don’t regret it. I just think now I try to be a little bit more self aware of like, oh, why am I doing this thing? Why am I doing this thing? Is it to prove something, or is it because I really want to do it?

Shay And the capacity of– it sounds like both of your parents, you feel, to almost see the– I’m not going to get the words quite right here– but your own possibility, or the best version of yourself, and what you were capable of, even ahead of what you could see for yourself. Why do you think that was so impressed upon them? Or why was that so strong inside of them– that was something that they were passing on to you– that ability to see the fullness of your potential?

Laurel I don’t know. I mean, I had– a dear friend of mine is on tour with Yo-Yo Ma right now, the incredible cellist– and they were on stage the other night and I was there, and Yo-Yo Ma was talking about how he had two tiger parents instead of one. And I was just nodding in recognition. I definitely had two tiger parents who– and it wasn’t just like, “We expect you to have a meaningful life.” It was like, “We expect you to be excellent, and there is no other option than excellence.” And I am grateful to them. And also, I think I would do it a little bit differently. But what they were trying to do was basically just keep me safe. I mean, they wanted me to have a good life, and particularly my father knew that he was going to die while I was still a very young person.

And so that was kind of their insurance, I think, that I would be okay– was pushing me that hard. And then also, it was lovely. May we be so lucky to have people believe that we are capable of more than we think. I think they got that from a variety of places. I think in my mom’s case, I think she wished she had been pushed more by her parents, that they had seen more potential in her. And I think that was something she wanted to correct for with me. And in my dad’s case– well, both of my parents’ case– they were grandchildren of immigrants to this country. Also, I think– there were Jews– they were a minority. When my father went to college, there was still a quota for Jews. I think that he felt like he had something to prove. And also that there was still a kind of recent immigrant mindset, even though they were one generation in.

And now it’s something I see very often with my students at the medical school, particularly those who are first or second generation, where that pressure is real– real, real, real. And sometimes it will last for a couple generations. And so I think they also had that, honestly, which is: there isn’t room for us to have a career or a life that isn’t excellent in some way. They still worried about paying off loans and paying the bills and everything else. So I think there was that too. It was a kind of deep practicality and anxiety in equal measure. So it was all of it.

Shay Yeah. So you have a newsletter that you share called “Dark Horse” about the unexpected good stuff in life, plus prompts to deal with this stuff that isn’t, because as we’ve discussed, writing can be such a powerful tool for processing emotions. And when you think about, in your own story, just even in the writing of your most recent memoir, how do you feel that your own writing journey has contributed to your healing process– like directly?

Laurel In every way. I mean, I was a kid who kept journals as a kid, and I actually don’t think I would’ve been able to write my memoir if I hadn’t, because I don’t have a great memory. And I wish I still journaled. I stopped journaling sometime after college, in my late twenties, early thirties. And I regret that, and I wish I was still doing it. But now that writing is my job, writing as a journal– I don’t know– it’s taken a backseat. One thing I will say: I fought Julia Cameron’s “The Artist Way” for a really long time. And then– I am honestly, full disclosure– I haven’t finished the three-month chunk or the four months, however you’re supposed to do it, but I’ve started it twice. And that has been helpful. Kind of doing morning pages in the morning to just sort of get the monkey-mind stuff out of the way– that’s been really helpful.

So I don’t know. I think writing for me has just been a way, as I said before, to reflect on and find meaning in things, and also to celebrate things that I wouldn’t otherwise notice. And I think that’s a biggie, and I stress this to my students all the time– that what you’re doing when you choose to write about something is to shine a spotlight on it, for better or worse. It could be a painful thing, it could be a difficult thing, it could be an injustice, or it could be something beautiful that you’re seeing. But in taking the time to write about something, you really, really have to notice it. And I think that is my sort of meditative practice. If I am describing a tree or an otter or a scientific breakthrough or a conversation, I have to sit with it, and it’s slower to write about it than it is to see it or have the conversation.

And I think there’s something about that that just makes me pause, because otherwise I’m very ADHD and I go a million miles an hour, and there’s a lot I don’t notice or I don’t hear or I don’t see. But writing is a way around that. It forces me to stop and think about the taste of something or a metaphor– how would I describe this to somebody who didn’t taste it? It really, really makes me slow down, and I don’t think I’d do that in life without it. I’m a terrible meditator, but writing is a way of forcing my own and others’ attention on something that we might otherwise miss.

Shay In your memoir, you also talk about your relationship with men and some of the patterns. You got divorced after your first marriage and then went through a series of different relationships. And there was a period, it felt like in the way that you were telling it, where there was almost like something you couldn’t see about yourself in the way that you were managing those relationships. And it felt so deeply connected to your childhood and some of the unprocessed grief and kind of those– what I always call them are our blind spots– the things that we can’t quite see about ourselves, that sometimes other people can point out quite nicely on the outside, and they can see it. It’s a little more obvious when you’re on the outside. And so you had some of these– I call them blind spots– where your relationships were taking a certain kind of familiar pattern, but it wasn’t necessarily exactly what you needed, wanted, for the rest of your life.

And so how you came to transform that pattern and understand a little more deeply what was happening in that part of your story. And I think it’s important, again, to help us to understand; Wait, how do we heal? How do we actually change? How do we actually restructure? How do we actually notice those blind spots in our lives? So for our listeners who are thinking about those areas in their lives where they’ve continued to struggle or mistakes, or make choices that sometimes others around them would be like, “You might want to think about that one…” So I’m interested how you think you learned those lessons and what allowed you to heal through some of those experiences?

Laurel Well, I’ll say I don’t think we can do it in a vacuum. And I think that’s where people who are close observers of you and care about you really matter. And we may not want to hear what they have to say– we really don’t, frankly. And I think often we can’t hear it until we’re ready, for whatever reason. And I think that’s sort of a mysterious moment. In my case, I was just sort of– oh God– dating is a form of drug use, almost, and making real questionable choices and romantic partners and how I went about it. Also having a ton of fun from time to time, but slowly just getting very exhausted and demoralized. And it was my ex-girlfriend, actually, that made all the difference for me– who is now one of my very best friends. But at the time, it was the first person I’d been with in a long string of people that, when she asked me how I was and I said “fine”, called me on it. Didn’t believe me. And forced me to answer hard questions about how I was actually feeling.

And I realized I couldn’t answer. And it was the first time I’d been with someone who really held my feet to the fire to answer– that didn’t treat it like a sort of cashier interaction, where I answer, “I’m doing okay,” and because maybe professionally I was, that everyone was like, “Well, there’s nothing to see here. Everything’s fine.” And I couldn’t answer her. And also, I was just sort of exploding relationships with people who cared about me. And I thought I wanted one, but all my choices made it seem otherwise. That– I don’t know– I think it was her asking me the questions that I couldn’t answer. And me also, for a variety of reasons I don’t quite understand, being finally ready to admit that maybe there was something wrong. And honestly, for the better part of 10 years, I couldn’t have done that. And so I think Connie came into my life at a time where I was ready.

And also, she was the exact right person. She had a degree in mediation, she is just a rock star of communication, and that kind of held me responsible in a way that, frankly, most of the men I dated just weren’t capable of. And I hate to make huge gender stereotypes, but that was my lived experience. And so it was Connie– and not being able to answer her– and also our relationship ending, or I just realized there was some stuff I needed to know about myself and the world. And there was something that wasn’t serving me, and that opened a door to a new way of being. And it wasn’t like, overnight, I was capable of love and relationships. It took years and years. It’s still a problem. I hate being in love– it scares the hell out of me. I don’t want to lose anybody else. And that’s something that I wrestle with on a daily basis. But I got married again. I am in a healthy relationship. It’s not easy, but I’m doing it. And I think that wouldn’t have happened– that wouldn’t have happened without Connie in any way, shape, or form.

Shay And you have had– the loss of your father was a longer loss. The loss of your family home was very quick and sudden. The loss of your mother was unexpected and quick. And so I wonder too, how that has shaped your understanding of what you’re willing to commit to in love, knowing that.

Laurel It’s a struggle. So, we rebuilt on the ranch. I am joining you from an office that didn’t exist– it was actually my brother’s metal shop– but I’ve turned it into an office, and I’ve hung things on the wall. And it’s hard. I live with a lot of anxiety, is the truth. And I worry every time I hang something up, or I find something beautiful and I drag it home and put it in the house, that I’m going to lose it again. And it’s not a wild thought– we have wildfires all the time. Another one could come for us. We grow food, so we’re not going to move to the middle of a city. We live in a wildland interface area. Fire is a threat I live with, just like cancer is– just like it always is for everything. So, I don’t know. I haven’t figured it out.

I live with a lot of anxiety. I have a lot of nightmares. I grind my teeth down to nubs. That’s the honest truth. It’s not like I’ve gotten to some other side where I’m not worried about any of this stuff. I think about it. I think once something hard has happened to you, no– going back, you never, ever, ever can live in a world of which bad things happen for no reason. There’s just… once. I try to be nice to myself when I feel myself spiraling– that I’m going to lose everything that I love– and realize that that is just… there’s no other option. I could decide that I’m not open to love. I could decide that I’m not going to make my house or my office beautiful, that I’m not going to get attached to anything or anyone. But that’s just a different kind of suffering.

So I’ve chosen the lane of having to live with knowing it can be taken from me in any moment, for any reason. And it’s terrible in here, but I think it’s going to be more terrible if I don’t let myself love anything or anyone. So I don’t know. It’s uncomfortable. It’s awful. Maybe I should be a Buddhist, but I don’t think I have it in me. So I don’t know. I think we’re just in here. One of my best friends– she’s also my doctor– and she lost her mom when she was young, and also to a really aggressive form of bone cancer. And for both of us, anytime we have a weird pain in the night, for both of us, it’s cancer. And we sort of joke that every five years we’re going to pay out of pocket to get a full body MRI, right?

It’s crazy expensive, but sometimes you just got to do that, and you buy yourself another four years of knowing you don’t have any tumors. Part of that is crazy. I know I probably don’t have a tumor, but sometimes you just got to do the test because that is– you have a bit of medical PTSD, right? Or life PTSD. And so we joke about it, but I drove her, her MRI. She’s fine, she’s fine. It was like a knee sprain. But sometimes you got to do it. So that’s the way it is for me, right? It’s like I acknowledge it, I laugh about it. I know I’m part of a kind of sort of medical PTSD experience, and that’s it. I just try not to shame myself for it.

Shay And I wonder how that fits into how you would define or describe what healing is, because since this is a Conversations on Healing podcast, we’re always looking at the different ways that– based on our individual life experiences– we’re each approaching that question of, even fundamentally, what is healing? How would I, even based on my life experience, define or describe what healing is? And given that medical trauma and PTSD and the residuals of that, how do you look at healing in the context of your life experience?

Laurel That’s a great question. I very rarely use the word because I feel like I’m not, and that’s okay. I feel like, to me, it’s a little bit like saying, “When I get over the loss of X…” and I just think I’m not. I’m marked. I’m going to be wounded forever. Does that mean I’m not capable of great things and of joy and love and all the good things? Not at all. And I don’t think it’s depressing, but I would never want to say that I’m healed or that I know a path to healing because I feel like I’m on it. And my life’s work is to be in search of healing, whether or not achieving it is possible, if that makes sense. So I think I’m on the road. I don’t know if I ever will be, but I also think that’s okay. That’s not really my goal.

I’d say my goal is to make sense of, be present with the things that happen in my life, try to be better every day. But to me, emotional wounds are not necessarily healable. They may start to hurt less, they may scab over, they may scar. but I guess I’m not in search of healing– I’m in search of meaning. And maybe those are the same things. Maybe those are the same things, but I’m not sure I would say that I’ve healed or that it’s possible. I don’t know that I’d say that, but I clearly need to listen to all of your episodes because maybe I will change my mind.

Shay No, no, no. Don’t worry about that. It reminds me your way of describing it. I had seen, a long time ago– and I don’t know about this firsthand, I just read about it– that on a horse where they’ve been kind of scarred, sometimes the flesh will rise up, and that some people call that “proud flesh”. So it’s this idea of our scars, in a way. You could see that in so many ways: the integration of our scars and is, that in a way, our proud flesh– this part of us that doesn’t ever go away. It’s not like that scar is going to disappear. It is an essential and fundamental part of our story and who we are, and even who we’ve become, and even who we’re becoming is all nestled or embedded in those prior experiences that, like you said, you never get rid of them.

It’s not like they go anywhere. It’s more about then how we continue to be with them, in relationship to them. And that has a lot of transformative potential and capacity that can move in good directions or not-so-good directions. But there is a capacity inherent, in my view, in our relationship with those wounds and that woundedness. And then even that language around “proud flesh”– I thought was so interesting. I thought, wow, if we took all those things that happened to us and held them in that context, I wonder how much that would change the way we see our own kind of healing and transformation and stories also, like you’re describing– not as an end result or a destination point, but rather just a piece of the journey that then is integrated into the essence of who we are.

Laurel I love that so much. I’ve never heard that phrase– proud flesh– and I am going to go read about it as soon as we get off. What a beautiful, beautiful thing, and what an excellent metaphor. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Shay Yeah, I know. I saw it once a long time ago, and it just stayed with me. I was like, oh, there’s something I can learn deeply from that. So much of your work– I mean, especially in the ongoing post COVID world– so many people, and also it’s this intersection of technology. It’s an intersection of things that are happening globally on a political scale, but people are struggling more than ever before with things like anxiety and depression. And we’re seeing those numbers just increase significantly. And a big part of your path has been around improving mental health and helping to build resilience rooted in the stories that we tell ourselves and one another. And so I’m interested in how you see the relationship between storytelling and the writing work that you do– the classes and workshops and things that you teach online– and how that can support people that are struggling with anxiety, depression, and significant mental health challenges.

Laurel Yeah, I think, again, it’s something that should ideally happen in a cornucopia of other interventions– which is talking to someone, offer medication, whatever your practices are, getting outside, supportive friends and family. So I would never suggest that writing in a vacuum is enough to make you feel better. Sometimes writing makes me feel worse. But I do think there’s a piece, particularly of writing and community, that I’ve seen be really helpful. Again, going back to this point of we’re less alone than we think. I think a lot of contemporary life is very isolating– more or less so depending on where you live in the world, and what you do for work, and your family life. But I think in general, we are becoming more isolated as people, as a function of technology and the way we work. And that I think a little bit of writing could be good medicine– whether it’s virtual or in person with others, there’s something about hearing other people’s stories.

It’s not even doing the writing– it’s the listening to other people as they narrate their own experiences, good and bad, and everything in between, that I think is deeply, deeply comforting. So the magic of a lot of our writing groups is not people writing their own stuff– everyone writes their own stuff– and then people volunteer to share. And it’s the listening to others, realizing that you have much more in common with others than you thought you did. Or when someone describes an emotional experience that you haven’t given words to, but brings the bell inside of you, that’s such a relief. I think that’s why we’ve always looked to art. Music will help us feel sad in a way that we won’t need and want to, but without that sound, we wouldn’t have felt. I think the same thing is happening in a writing group when it comes to finding some relief from our anxiety, or terror, or sadness. There’s a little bit of other people’s art helping us experience our own emotions, and also getting a bit of a release from that. And also realizing someone else feels this way too. I think it just sort of counteracts the inherent loneliness and those emotional experiences. At least that’s what it does for me. And I think a lot of participants in our work.

Shay And you have a great example to me– a moment in your life where you kind of were that person being vulnerable and sharing in a group of other people, where then they could experience that and maybe understand parts of their own story differently. And that was where you wrote about, in what looks like bravery, where you went on– I’ll call it kind of a vision quest. And you can describe it much better, what that experience was. But the point that I’m referring to is after you went through this vision quest, and you kind of congregated with the other people who had also done this journey individually, but now you were coming back together to share your stories. In your sharing, there was a vulnerability and a revealing of a lot of really key and important pieces in your own life that I feel like had to have been transformative to others who were in that circle with you. So I’d love for you to share whatever piece of that you feel like would be helpful for our listeners to understand exactly this point that you’re making– that in the telling of our stories from a place of vulnerability, we actually offer a gift to those around us.

Laurel Sure. Yeah. I mean, I will say, I can’t speak for the other people that were with me, but I can tell you that I felt that way. So this was an experience with a organization called The School of Lost Borders, which is just a marvelous group that does rites of passage experience for young people, young adults, and adults. And the basic idea is that you go out into the wilderness for four or five days without food and without a tent, but with water, and you’re safe. People know where you are or you’re safe, sort of. And you’re alone with your thoughts and no distraction, no phone, no book, et cetera. And you have all this empty space. And for me, that was the longest I’ve ever been alone with my thoughts, which was much scarier to me than not having food for a couple days, even though I’d also never gone a few hours without eating anything.

But it was being alone with my thoughts. And then, at the end of the time, you come back together as a group. I went out with a group of women. You don’t talk to anybody else while you’re gone. And then you come back, and you take turns hearing people talk about what happened to them out there. And we had two wonderful facilitators who also would then mirror and tell back our stories to us once we told them. And there was something just profoundly life-changing and affirming for me in explaining what had happened to me out there. And then also hearing people respond to it, and hearing our facilitators sort of tell the story of my experience back to me. That is just an incredible experience. I think everyone deserves to have that in their life. It also really is a nice form of rite of passage because certainly, in much of Western industrialized culture at this point, our rites of passage are like, you got your driver’s license, you got to vote, you went to your prom, whatever.

I mean, none of these are rights of passage where you actually have to face your own mortality. And when you come back having earned something to sit at the adult table, now they’re sort of administrative in many cases. And here is a chance to do something that I think all peoples have done for a very long time, which is go out, challenge yourself, do something you’re not sure capable of as a way of entering a new stage of life, whether that’s adulthood or elderhood, or what have you. And so hearing people’s stories of reckoning with being hungry for five days, with being cold, with surviving a storm, and my own experiences too, really were just incredibly exciting and also really comforting. And then I walked away with this feeling of like, oh, I can do this thing that scares me and I’m going to be okay.

And not only that, but the other people in this circle heard me. They had their own emotional experiences while I spoke, and as I heard their stories, I relived my own. And I think that’s what we’re doing in a much less maybe exciting or hungry way in a write a workshop. And people can do it all kinds of ways. You do it when you get together with your friends after a long time and everyone sort of checks in, and says how they’re doing, right? We do it. But I think there is something really amazing about making it sort of ritualized, setting aside if you can, a day or a week of your life to kind of do this in an intentional way. For me, it was deeply, deeply healing and hearing other people’s stories. Really. It was almost a religious experience, I would say, even though it was deeply secular.

Shay Yeah. Well, we’ll definitely put in the show notes information about how people can find you and if they’re interested in any of your writing workshops. As we wrap up our conversation, is there anything else that would feel important for you to share with our listeners?

Laurel Oh my gosh, no. Mostly I’m just thankful. I’m thankful for all this good work you’re putting out in the world, helping people. You’re really a lighthouse for healing. Even if I don’t use that word, I would use it to describe you,

Shay But in no other context whatsoever. It’s okay. I really get it because I always laugh. It’s kind of like, in a way, healing to me is a little bit like the word, enlightenment, that I’ve also always bristled at. I’m like, well, the authentic lived experience of any of those kinds of things, it’s a lived, it’s a visceral, it’s a process. It’s an ongoing, it’s not like an attainment. It’s not like–

The idea of attainment to me around something like that feels a little silly. And also egotistical, right? It’s coming from almost like the part of ourselves that is the most egoic and wanting to separate ourselves from others. And so, I do think that a healthier approach is to just look at it as an engaged process. Something that we’re all in and all kind of working on in our own ways, however we want to define it and with whatever word we want to use. So I’m not stuck on healing. Feel free to use any word that you prefer.

Laurel No, I like healing. I’m going to try to work it in. Now I want to figure out how can I use it in a way that feels right. But you’re right, enlightenment should be really a verb, right? Healing’s a verb.
So I think, as long as we talk about it that way, then it makes sense.

Shay Yeah. Then it feels more real and humanizing. And I do want to say, just in reading your memoir, I think one of the most beautiful things about it is: it is so humanizing, very much what you said. When you hear people share their stories with one another, it’s like you just realize how much we actually all have in common, and in the sense that we are all fundamentally facing– the struggles might look different, the stories might look different– but the essence has so many parallels and things that we can all relate to. So there is something beautiful about that shared journey and how you express it in the telling of your own story. So thank you.

Laurel Thank you. That is ridiculously kind.

Shay Alright, well, it’s a pleasure to have you on the show, and thank you so much.

Laurel Thank you so much. I so, so appreciate it.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of The Conversations on Healing Podcast. If you haven’t yet, please go to Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast, it helps so you won’t miss an episode. See you next time.