Julia Samuel: How Do We Process Grief?

Julia Samuel’s first book, Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death, and Surviving, is organized by the type of loss; losing a parent, losing a child, and confronting your own death. Is the way which someone grieves different by the loss or is it more defined by who they are? Samuel, a psychotherapist specializing in grief who spent the last 25 years working with bereaved families describes grief as a process that’s unique to every person, but universal in the need to be experienced and discussed.

This week on Just the Right Book, Julia Samuel joins Roxanne Coady to discuss the book, out now from Scribner.

From the episode:

Julia Samuel: One of the messages in my book is that we need to be active in the grieving process and we need to participate in it to support ourselves, to manage it, but also to do things that help us express our grief. So talk about exercise. The physical body holds grief like fear in our bodies, and when we are in fight or flight, your body gets heightened and you’re vigilant. Often people who are grieving, they feel like that and they feel frightened all the time. So if they take regular exercise that tells the body that you’ve flown, it helps wind the system down where they feel much calmer.

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Julia Samuel is a psychotherapist specializing in grief, who has spent the last twenty-five years working with bereaved families. Grief Works is her first book.

Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.