Dr Mary Lamia of Grief Isn’t Something to Get Over: 5 Things Anyone Can Do To Optimize Their Mental Wellness
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Understand emotions and how they inform us. Classifying emotions as positive or negative has little to do with their value, but instead involves how they motivate us through the ways they make us feel. The emotions that motivate us to learn, to thrive, to achieve success, and to engage with others, for example, are not just positive one. Humans are also motivated, and even driven to achieve, by negative emotions which are a powerful and often misunderstood source of motivation. Negative emotions motivate us to do something to avoid experiencing them, or they urge us to behave in ways that will relieve their effects.
As a part of my series about the “5 Things Anyone Can Do To Optimize Their Mental Wellness”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Mary Lamia.
Dr. Mary Lamia PhD, who is the author of the new book Grief Isn’t Something to Get Over: Finding a Home for Memories and Emotions After Losing a Loved On — currently on sale wherever books are sold, strives to convey an understanding of emotion through her practice as a clinical psychologist in Marin County, CA, and her work as a professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley. She is also dedicated to educating the public about the psychology of human behavior by blogging for Psychology Today, Thrive Global, and Psychwire, and providing numerous media interviews and commentary. Along with Grief Isn’t Something to Get Over, she is the author of five previous books, including Emotions! Making Sense of Your Feelings; The Upside of Shame; The White Knight Syndrome; and Understanding Myself: A Kid’s Guide to Intense Emotions and Strong Feelings.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
Career choice is often inextricably tied to one’s personal history, and this is certainly true in what led me to become a psychologist. My parents and grandparents were Sicilian immigrants, and, like many people from the old country, they held interesting beliefs. My maternal grandmother was sought out by others for guidance and was viewed as someone who could predict the future, such as the gender of an unborn child. My mother was highly creative and always seemed able to fix anything. In fact, my mother’s favorite saying was that she could “fix anything but a broken heart.” The notion of fixing a broken heart, and even understanding what that meant, always intrigued me. Like my grandmother, my mother had an interest in interpreting various signs, but usually in a more “academic” way. For example, she consulted books about dream interpretation, written in Italian, to inform my brother and me about the meaning of the dreams that we told her. Following my grandmother’s death and my mother’s cancer diagnosis when I was 4 years old, my mother began to have a recurring dream that her own mother was calling her to heaven. She died when I was 11 years old.
In my early adolescence a recurring dream took hold in my own mind that involved a ship docked at a foggy harbor at night. Two women on the ship, whose shadowy images resembled my deceased mother and grandmother, summoned me to go with them. I told them that I couldn’t go and walked away down a ramp alongside the ship, which always awakened me with anxiety.
I developed an interest in dreams and psychology, spending many hours in middle school and high school reading encyclopedia articles on dreams, the mind, Freud, behavior, and any other references I could find. My continuing interest in dreams, and anything related to them, may have been my way to keep my lost mother close to me.
Not having a mother was confusing and heartbreaking, and, at age 13, having an abusive stepmother was even worse. My father did not intend to re-marry to a person who was disturbed. He was introduced to her as was done by Italians in those days, and, according to him, he couldn’t reject her. Divorce was unacceptable in the context of our Catholicism, and my father claimed that he just wanted to go to heaven to be with my mother. When I was 22 years old, he died of heart failure as a result of rheumatic heart disease that was purposely left untreated. I just couldn’t fix his “broken heart.”
I have always loved to work. From age 12 to sixteen, I worked on weekends selling automobile parts at a wrecking yard in order to buy clothes that I thought would help me to fit in at school. This experience provided me with valuable knowledge about cars that, even now, I appreciate having acquired. At age 16, I began working for an insurance office after school and on Saturdays and continued this work at various locations throughout college and a master’s program. A District Manager urged me to become an insurance agent, and he took some pride in the possibility of mentoring the first female insurance agent in the company, if not in the country. I came within weeks of taking the exam, but decided at the last moment that the idea was ludicrous: in 1971 who would buy insurance from a woman?
Upon completing my college education at U.C. Berkeley with a major in psychology, I wanted to become either a teacher or a psychologist. So, the compromise was to obtain a master’s degree in Educational Psychology. In 1973 I became a counselor, teacher, and subsequently the Guidance Director at a Catholic high school for boys in San Francisco. I continued this work until I graduated with my doctorate in 1977.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
All of the stories I have heard during my career are interesting, but one that stands out is described in my book, Grief Isn’t Something to Get Over: Finding a Home for Memories and Emotions After Losing a Loved One:
Decades ago, while in training to become a psychologist, I was assigned a client whose profound fear and anguish lacked explanation. He and I eventually linked the recent onset of his symptoms to his age, which was approaching the age his father had been when he died. Dimly aware of the age-matching anniversary, the client had dismissed its importance. His memory, however, did not: It alerted him to the emotions and sensations that had overwhelmed him as a 7-year-old, helplessly watching his father’s deterioration and death. Memories of that time had remained quietly within him until he approached age 34, the age of his father when he passed. As we looked back and recognized his grief, his anxiety slowly diminished, and the unbearable depression lifted.
During my work with this man, I silently recalled my own childhood experiences of loss. Inhabiting a dark corner of my mind from the time I was an 11-year-old was a sense that my life, like my mother’s, would be over at age 40-something. Logically, and self-assuredly, I assumed that my awareness of the potential unconscious impact of age-matching anniversaries allowed me to escape my client’s emotional struggle. However, conscious knowledge does not eliminate memories that script our present emotional responses and influence how we govern our lives. Every so often, I found myself calculating the years until I would reach the age of my mother’s death.
My father, brokenhearted from my mother’s passing, did not show me how to deal with death, let alone how to have a happy or long life after such a loss. Professing his wish to be in heaven with my mother, my father died from heart disease 10 years later, surrendering to a religiously acceptable form of suicide by declining vital surgery. I was then a young adult without living parents and had only memories to keep them present within me.
Can you share a story with us about the most humorous mistake you made when you were first starting? What lesson or take-away did you learn from that?
For psychologists “mistakes” are rarely humorous, but they are something from which we can learn.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I am grateful to all of the patients I have seen during my 45 years of practice, all of whom have taught me something.
What advice would you suggest to your colleagues in your industry to thrive and avoid burnout?
“Compassion fatigue” or “vicarious trauma” requiring self-care are commonly referred to in my profession. These refer to states of physical tension and cognitive preoccupation with the suffering of those being helped to the degree that it can create changes in the therapist’s physical health, interpersonal relationships, sense of self, spirituality, worldview, and behavior. Therefore, these are also the elements we should attend to regarding self-care. However, what does this really mean?
Emotions make us care. Not only are negative emotional responses stressful for therapists, but positive emotional responses can be stressful as well. There is no special remedy or activity for self-care. We are all different in terms of what we do to feel better, but overall, we must either activate positive emotions and avoid or relieve the effects of negative ones. Yet self-care also involves accepting what we are feeling, particularly when we experience shame, so we can take a look at it and translate the language of our emotions.
What advice would you give to other leaders about how to create a fantastic work culture?
Relationships mean everything.
Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. Mental health is often looked at in binary terms; those who are healthy and those who have mental illness. The truth, however, is that mental wellness is a huge spectrum. Even those who are “mentally healthy” can still improve their mental wellness. From your experience or research, what are five steps that each of us can take to improve or optimize our mental wellness. Can you please share a story or example for each.
1. Understand emotions and how they inform us. Classifying emotions as positive or negative has little to do with their value, but instead involves how they motivate us through the ways they make us feel. The emotions that motivate us to learn, to thrive, to achieve success, and to engage with others, for example, are not just positive one. Humans are also motivated, and even driven to achieve, by negative emotions which are a powerful and often misunderstood source of motivation. Negative emotions motivate us to do something to avoid experiencing them, or they urge us to behave in ways that will relieve their effects.
A simple example from my book, What Motivates Getting Things Done: Procrastination, Emotions, and Success will illustrate how emotions work alongside the thoughts that accompany them. Imagine getting into your car while holding a café mocha you had just purchased. You inadvertently squeeze the cup, the top pops off, and the coffee spills all over the car seat. You may experience a variety of emotions at that moment, and certainly you will feel some combination of startle and distress. Distress alone can motivate you to clean up the mess. But in such situations, startle and distress will blend with anger, which can lead you to curse in response to the spill and be agitated as you wipe it up. However, motivation to clean up the mess will also result if your brain triggers both distress and fear — a combination we often refer to as “anxiety,” which may be accompanied by the thought that you will stain your clothes if you sit down on any smudge that is left from the mocha. Even greater motivation to clean up the mess, and do it well, will result if your brain adds shame to fear and distress, which may arise with the thought or image of sitting on a remaining chocolate smudge, staining your pants, and someone thinking you had an “accident.”
2. Understand how memories inform our present circumstances and our future intentions.
As an example, Susan explained that late afternoons weighed on her in the weeks after her husband’s death. Sudden intolerable anguish, a flood of tears, or a stomachache would lead her to wonder if she wanted to go on living. When an implicit memory emerges, we are unaware that something from the past is being recalled, even though we may have intrusive feelings, behavioral reactions, perceptions, and bodily sensations. Susan eventually realized these episodes always happened around the time of day she had typically anticipated her husband’s arrival home from work. He was always there, exactly on time. When he did not arrive, despite the fact that her memory told her it was time for him to be there, she felt stricken.
The work of our implicit memory primes us, in a sense, to know what to expect. The model in Susan’s implicit memory involved her excitement upon hearing her husband’s car enter the garage and greeting him with a hug when he walked in. Her inner world was primed to feel and expect something at a specific time. Implicit memories do not necessarily remain an unconscious enigma. The puzzle pieces of implicit memory may later be put together as explicit memories, thus becoming conscious autobiographical information. This isn’t necessarily a relief. For example, Susan later associated the daily ritual of enjoying her husband’s return home with her unbearable sadness about his absence. Her way of adjusting to her new reality was to take a walk with a friend that time of day or do enjoyable errands. As weeks passed and the intensity of her grief subsided, she could tolerate the wave of sadness when she was home at the critical hour. On occasion, she imagined her husband coming through the door, and she would excitedly call out, “Hi, Evan!” Then, amused at herself, she would laugh.
3. Recognize that there are two basic criteria for success whether one is a procrastinator or someone who completes tasks ahead of schedule; namely, that you never miss a deadline and that your work reflects your best efforts.
People can become consumed by a cycle of failure and shame, wherein every failure amplifies the shame they already feel, and chronic shame interferes with their efforts. Procrastination is an insufficient excuse for missing a deadline and failing. Nevertheless, the many studies that link procrastination in general with all sorts of personality traits are a missed opportunity to determine what actually interferes with the motivation of those who fail and blame it on procrastinating.
Consider Lauren, for example, who described her pattern of missing deadlines, explaining that when she becomes aware of things, she has to get done she just ignores them. When a deadline approaches, she avoids what she feels, as well as the task, by drinking heavily and watching movies. Her attack-other response to shame results in thoughts such as Screw it, I hate those people anyway and just won’t do it. In her last two jobs, Lauren was warned that she’d be fired for neglecting her responsibilities, but she left before it happened: “They were lousy jobs anyway,” she noted. Lauren has spent years refusing help based on the fact that when she was in school her parents “forced” her to have tutors and therapists whose time she “wasted.” The actual repetitive and intensely shaming experiences that led to a cycle of failure beginning early in her life were never addressed.
Some procrastination researchers might identify Lauren as a procrastinator, accusing her of possessing any of the qualities that have been studied in efforts to determine why some people delay, such as a lazy, task aversive, fraudulent, self-handicapping slacker with low conscientiousness. Such personality assassination hardly provides insight into Lauren’s defensive adaptation to deeply internalized childhood shame. However, it does illustrate that focusing on personality traits of people, like Lauren, who fail obscures the emotional states that repeatedly lead them to miss deadlines.
4. Understand that the tendency to procrastinate does not interfere with success. Those who wait are just as likely to be successful as people who complete tasks ahead of time. Procrastination should not be linked with failure; just as early action should not be tied to success. The different timing of procrastinators and non-procrastinators to complete tasks has to do with when their emotions are activated and what activates them. Procrastinators who consistently complete tasks on time — even if it’s at the last moment — are motivated by emotions that are activated when a deadline is imminent. They are deadline driven. In contrast to procrastinators, task-driven people faced with uncompleted tasks are compelled to act right away. Motivated by their emotions to complete a task ahead of schedule and put it behind them, those who are successful attend to the quality of their work prior to scratching the task off their list. Thus, procrastinators are motivated by emotions that are activated by deadlines and task-driven people are motivated by emotions that are triggered by the task itself.
As a couple Melissa and Sam were invited to participate in a ceremony and had 3 months to prepare. Melissa was asked to recite a poem; Sam was asked to give the opening speech. Consistent with her task-driven style, Melissa began memorizing the poem right away. Typical of task-driven people, she likes to prepare in advance — just in case something happens. The possible interference could be anything because, as she put it, you never know what could stand in the way of getting something done. Sam accommodated Melissa’s requests to be her practice audience; however, eventually he limited how much time he’d spend doing it.
Intermittently, and with a hint of agitation in her voice, Melissa asked Sam if he had prepared his part. As a procrastinator, Sam put off tangibly working on the talk, leaving it to “marinate” in his head. “During that time,” he clarified, “I worked on it at a subconscious level — in my yoga class, walking, sleeping, etc. At some point, much like a solution or steps to a solution, the content of the talk started to come together.”
Expressing her annoyance with Sam in similar circumstances, Melissa remarked, “He makes me nuts when he waits. I try to let it go and let him do his thing, but I don’t get why he does this last-minute stuff.” Sam contends that Melissa just worries too much about when he will get stuff done.
The evening prior to the ceremony Sam created an outline of his talk. According to Melissa it was after 11:00 p.m., they were in the hotel room, and she was in bed peering past the sheets at Sam’s notes scattered across the covers. In the morning, Melissa went for a walk knowing she would have a hard time being in the room while Sam was finishing his talk. When he is in that mode, she explained, he doesn’t answer her questions and sometimes doesn’t even seem to hear her speak. She knew he’d be a different person when she returned; that is, if he was finished. Sam wrote out his talk while Melissa was on her walk. “I knew exactly what I wanted to say,” he explained. “On one level, it may be called procrastination, but I think it is a way to more fully use the brain power I have.”
5. Optimize your motivational style and recognize that emotional states such as a “fear of failure” can be highly motivating.
Consider Anthony, for example, who noted, “When I try to do something in advance, my thoughts just aren’t there. I can’t do it.” Describing his typical process of procrastinating, he said, “When a deadline is in sight, everything seems to come together in my head. I put it down on paper, and that’s it. I can always be trusted to deliver an excellent product on time.” Since his livelihood involves writing a lot of reports, Anthony makes sure that everyone who requests them either already knows or is told that he wants an absolute deadline.
However, one day as Anthony was thinking about the next report he had to complete, he began experiencing his usual fear of failure. His thought led him to wonder whether he was being arrogant in not reviewing his documents before sending them out. The thought that his reports may have been less than excellent and that he should have been reviewing them along the way made him anxious and very motivated to seek confirmation. Arbitrarily, he opened files and read reports that he had written in the past five years. He found nothing he would have altered. Even so, Anthony’s own assessment of his previous work was not enough to relieve his shame anxiety. Therefore, he offered to pay two colleagues who were familiar with these types of reports to critique a few of his own that he had randomly chosen. When both reviewers highly praised the reports and had no suggestions for improvement, Anthony then began to wonder why he had doubted himself in the first place but saved his musings for later since now the deadline was imminent to write his current report. Actually, it is not unusual for procrastinators to doubt themselves when they are in the midst of shame anxiety about a specific task they must finish. Thus, on the day Anthony started doubting the accuracy of his reports, an approaching deadline had triggered shame anxiety, which he placed in the context of a fear of failure about his work in general rather than on the specific task at hand.
How about teens and pre teens. Are there any specific new ideas you would suggest for teens and pre teens to optimize their mental wellness?
It is essential to understand your emotions and how they work. In my book, Emotions! Making Sense of Your Feelings, I inform teens and young adults how:
- Focusing on feelings instead of details may lead to better quality decision making for certain complex decisions.
- Anxiety can improve creativity, productivity, and the quality of your work.
- In competitive situations, fear can interfere with success if it causes you to change your strategy.
- Your friend’s embarrassing behavior won’t reflect on you
- People who bully do not have low self-esteem; however, they are very shame prone.
- Guilt helps you to maintain your relationships.
- Lonely people look for sources of acceptance in facial expressions.
- Hope can affect expectation and how you feel.
- Many people cry at a happy ending after holding back their expression of sadness.
- Venting anger doesn’t help you.
- Overvaluing happiness can lead you to be less happy, even when happiness is within your reach.
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story?
Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self by Donald Nathanson made a significant impact on my understanding of the role of shame in our lives.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I would continue to provide the public with the knowledge psychology has to offer, dispelling the myths we hold.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
“In countless ways, and to varying degrees, images based on our memories keep us close to loved ones who have died. Yet memories also contain painful reminders of irretrievable joy. Without positive emotional memories and imagery to arouse it, grief is absent. Remembering is what makes us grieve.” (From my book, Grief Isn’t Something to Get Over: Finding a Home for Memories and Emotions After Losing a Loved One.)
Losing my mother at age 11 and my father at age 21, I found that they continued to live inside of me and provided the motivation to pursue my goals.
What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intense-emotions-and-strong-feelings
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
Dr Mary Lamia of Grief Isn’t Something to Get Over: 5 Things Anyone Can Do To Optimize Their Mental… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.