🧍‍♀️❤️‍🩹Healing Body Grief: Make Peace with Your Body & Rebuild Self-Love | Jayne Mattingly | Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LoGrasso (A Creativity Podcast)

Description

Have you ever felt disconnected from your body—or grieved the version of it you used to know? I have. And in this episode of Unleash Your Inner Creative, I’m talking with disability advocate and author Jayne Mattingly about something we don’t hear enough about: body grief, and how it can quietly block our creativity and self-love.

Here’s what I’ve come to realize: when we lose trust in our bodies, we often lose connection to ourselves and therefore our creative voice. But when we start rebuilding that trust—even slowly—we open the door to healing, peace, and creative freedom.

Jayne created a powerful framework to help us understand and move through body grief, and in this episode, she shares her story, how it applies to you, and how getting into a relationship with your body can shift everything—from how you heal to how you create.

From this episode, you’ll learn:

-What body grief is and how to recognize it in your own life
-The 7 stages of body grief and how to move through them

-How to begin rebuilding trust with your body—at any stage
-Why healing your relationship with your body can unlock your creativity

TW: Eating Disorders and Mental Health

More on Jayne

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✨ Want personalized support to reconnect with your creativity yourself and share your work with the world? I’m a creative coach who helps artists, entrepreneurs, and multi-passionate creatives move through self-doubt and unleash their authentic voice.

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Transcription

Speaker #0
Have you ever struggled with having a body, with the grief over the way your body changes throughout the years or times when you've been in pain and just wish there was a way to make peace with it? What if you could get into a genuine relationship with your body and learn how to trust it? Today's guest will share how navigating body grief can open up paths for healing, self-love, and creative expression. She'll walk you through how acknowledging your body's changes. and sticking with yourself and your body can connect you to a deeper sense of peace and authenticity. Welcome to Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LaGrasso. I'm Lauren LaGrasso. I'm a Webby Award-winning podcast host and producer, singer-songwriter, public speaker, and creative coach. This show sits at the intersection of creativity, mental health, self-development, and spirituality, and it is meant to give you tools to love, trust, and know yourself enough to claim your right to creativity and pursue whatever it is that's on your heart. Today's guest is Jane Mattingly. She's a disability advocate and recovery expert who has developed a groundbreaking approach to navigating body grief. In her work, Jane teaches that body grief isn't something to overcome, but something to feel deeply and work through with self-compassion and grace. She walks us through the seven stages of body grief from her book, This Is Body Grief, which is out now and I highly recommend you read. The stages range from shock and self- blame to hope and eventual body trust, which can help us make space for the full range of emotions that come with mourning and accepting our ever-changing bodies, and that we're going to be living in these for the rest of our lives. I wanted to have Jane on the podcast because she offers a fresh, compassionate perspective on having a body. And trigger warning, I'm about to talk about eating disorders. As you may know from listening to the podcast, I've struggled with eating disorders. and had all kinds of feelings about my body. And in reading Jane's work, I really realized I still have so much to work through there. And that's a beautiful thing because her book gave me tools and a framework for that. And I know this conversation will do the same thing for you and help you start to get in relationship with your body, move through your body grief, and come to body trust. From today's chat, you'll learn what body grief is and how to start moving through it. how to start to get into relationship with your body, the seven stages of body grief, and how moving through your body grief and making peace with your body is connected to your creative process and loving yourself as a whole. Okay, now here she is, Jane Mattingly. Jane, I am so thrilled to have you on the show to talk about this big, difficult... and beautiful topic of body grief. So thank you for being here and thank you for writing your book.
Speaker #1
Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker #0
Oh, it is my honor. And I have a sneaking suspicion that allowing ourselves to feel body grief and learning body trust is a key to unleashing creatively and loving yourself more. We've talked about it briefly before we got into it. We'll hit it again at the end, but just super exciting and a juicy topic. But to start out at the top, what is body grief.
Speaker #1
Body grief is a term that I came up with years ago when I was struggling with my own body grief and working with people with eating disorders and body image. But really, body grief is making peace with the loss that comes with living in a body. It is mourning the loss that we have when we live in a body that's betrays us or we perceive that's betraying us. And there's so many lives that we live in our bodies, right? And sometimes it's really unfair when we can't live those specific lives that we were told we once could live or when we can no longer live the life that we used to live in our bodies. And so this is body grief is really about my story, but it's about so many other people's stories. And there's case studies of stories about people living through... all of their bodies that they've lived through and how to do that and the phases in which you go through and ways to cope and how it's nonlinear and multicyclical. And it's just a beautiful, messy journey.
Speaker #0
Yeah, for sure. And I know you came to understand about body grief very intimately through many different phases of your life. But would you mind taking me through the story of how you ended up wanting to speak about this?
Speaker #1
Yeah, no, not at all. Not at all. So to make a long story short, I had an eating disorder starting at the age of nine and it went undiagnosed, unnoticed, which is really common until I was about 22. I went through recovery. I had really very little barriers to care. I was very privileged in that. And then I wanted to turn my problem into my purpose. And so I went and got my master's in clinical mental health counseling. And then I was like, okay, I want to work with people with eating disorders and body image. It was a needed thing. A lot of people were not getting the help that they needed. And eating disorders were very underrepresented. And so I started working with people. with body image concerns and eating disorders. And I looked at it from this lens of grief. I then started doing events and like self-love events and body image events. Little did I know at the time how ableist that was because I was not disabled. I was quote unquote healthy. And then I took a bar class and which is like a Pilates class for those people that don't know, just with like ballet bars. And I lost my sight. my body was like not working. Like the lower half of my body pretty much like went paralyzed, what it felt like went paralyzed. And I was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder called intracranial hypertension. It's when your cerebral spinal fluid increases abnormal amounts and it bruises your spinal cord and your brain and your optic nerve. And that's why I lost my sight. And I was eligible for a brain surgery that saved my sight at that time. And that was number one of 19 brain and spine surgeries and a total hysterectomy that is over the past six and a half years. I was then within that year diagnosed with my genetic disorder that I was born with called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a connective tissue disorder that affects all of your tissues in your body, all of your connective tissues in your body. It's a spectrum disorder. It is known as a rare condition. disorder, but now geneticists are saying that it's the most common illness that you've never heard about. It really, really, really affects me within my neurological system. And it just like really took me down. My life has greatly changed. You know, me and my husband have been together for 12 years. So we've been through this journey of being able-bodied, non-disabled to disabled. Being a new bride, you know, was a big deal with my rollator going. out on the beach with my walker was a huge deal. That was a body grief journey, you know, just really grieving this past life that I used to live. But at that point, I was like, you know, sitting on hospital tables and laying down in hospital beds realizing like, well, shoot, now my body can't do. Here I was screaming from, you know, rooftops, like, love your body for what it can do. And I was like, well, what now? How am I supposed to love my body? This is I'm grieving. That was my story. And I looked back then on my journey. And when I was nine years old, that was body grief. I started talking to my clients and my aunts and my mom and my friends of all ages. And they were like, oh my God, body grief. I've never heard that term, but I definitely resonate. That's when I started to realize this is a universal concept that we all need to name it. And we've all... been through it, but maybe we've just never had the literacy or the coping skills to really move through it in a way that is healthy or is like just less bumpy.
Speaker #0
How did naming it help you on your journey?
Speaker #1
I mean, hugely, because it's kind of like when you're going through something and it's like, you can't find your way. For instance, if anyone has ever gone through the dismissal of trying to, like if you're really sick and you're, God forbid this happens, but it's quite common when you're dealing with symptoms and you're trying to get diagnosed with a chronic illness. Or you're just dealing with terrible symptoms and doctors are just dismissing you over and over and over again. And it turns out that you're just like almost relieved once you get a diagnosis. It's like that name of the diagnosis. It's not that you're relieved something's wrong with you. You're almost just relieved that now that there's like a way forward. Now that there's a name to the diagnosis, you're like, finally, there's something I can do with this. Finally, I'm not running around in the dark, having no clue what to do with this, having no clue how to cope. I don't feel quote unquote, and I don't like using this word, but I don't feel. crazy. I don't feel like I'm gaslighting myself anymore. And that is exactly what it felt like when I finally was able to name my body grief. It was like, this is grieving, you know, all of these emotions, all of these, you know, fluctuations of what I was, what was happening, like no wonder. No wonder because I'm grieving.
Speaker #0
Take me through that because you've got these seven stages of grief. Do the stages happen before you know what's your in-body grief? Like, I guess it would make sense because I'm looking at them right now. Could you share like in your own journey how each one hit?
Speaker #1
Yeah. So the phases are, you know, nonlinear, multicyclical. And for everyone, they're going to happen differently. But. you know, for a lot of people, they're going to happen, you know, how I have them laid out in the book. Dismissal being the first, shock, apology, fault, fight, hope slash hopelessness, and then trust. That's kind of usually how they occur. And that's, you know, how I've studied them and the many cases in the book, that's kind of how they've occurred for people. For me, that's how they occur. But I think one thing that's really interesting is you can kind of find that depending on your personality type depending on you know your trauma or temperament style you might lean towards certain phases more than the other i feel that yeah yeah i'm curious to know like what ones you might have leaned towards because like i lean towards apology and fight yeah
Speaker #0
I think I lean toward apology, fault, and fight.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
Definitely. But the apology one was really, I mean, your whole book was very confronting.
Speaker #1
Really?
Speaker #0
In an important way. Yeah, because I too struggled with eating disorder as a kid. I was bulimic, and I now would say I was anorexic, 7th grade through 8th grade. Nobody ever knew.
Speaker #1
I fixed it,
Speaker #0
quote unquote, on my own. It was... Kind of amazing. Creativity really saved my life because a Carpenter song randomly came on the radio. And it was like in the midst of when I was in this struggle that no one knew about. And my dad told me about Karen Carpenter. What he said was she ruined her voice. He said she was never able to sing again. And at that point, music was already very, very important to me. And I never made myself throw up again after that because I... didn't want to lose something that I loved more than, yeah, than whatever body hatred I was having at that time. So music, creativity really saved my life. But that said, like when I hear about people in recovery or who have recovered, I'm like, oh, I don't think I ever did that.
Speaker #1
Interesting. And that's so interesting too, not to go off topic, but when we compare our stories, that's dismissal.
Speaker #0
Ooh. So tell me more. So am I dismissing myself?
Speaker #1
Yeah. You're dismissing yourself right there because like an eating disorder is an eating disorder. It's going to look whatever way it's going to look. And it's so common with eating disorders to be like, well, mine wasn't that bad.
Speaker #0
I didn't think I did it well enough. I never completely stopped eating, you know, like,
Speaker #1
by the way, no one does.
Speaker #0
Right. But I didn't know that at the time. I just like, this is fuck. And I still have a lot of issues, so I'm sure I'm going to say a lot of things wrong.
Speaker #1
It's okay.
Speaker #0
I literally didn't think like, well, I'm not throwing up every meal, so I don't think I qualify.
Speaker #1
Isn't that interesting? Because this is very common. The amount of, and I did the same thing, Lauren. I did the exact same thing when I was in my eating disorder recovery. And the eating disorder brain, it does this. It clicks on and it will be like, wait, but it's fine. Like you're good. But every single client I've sat down with has said something of this nature.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
And that's dismissal because of external dismissal that we have heard from other people. The amount of doctors that had once said like, you're good. Like you're fine. She's good. She's good. And I was like, I remember thinking, and I talk about this in the book with the hall pass, you know, the doc, the amount of doctors and the amount of the therapist, even that like. I remember I knew something was wrong. Like I knew I wasn't eating enough. I knew that I was weak. I knew that something wasn't right, but I looked quote unquote normal. Now looking back, I'm like, damn, I was not looking good, but I was got a hall pass. And I remember being like, that's, that's my hall pass. Like, I remember being like, okay, that doctor and that therapist, they said I was good. And so we take that and we internally dismiss ourselves. And so like, yeah, that's dismissal too. And so like we can bounce in between these phases. And then like that adds to our apology then. Because then we're like, oh, I'm really sorry for taking up too much space. And I think women really do that. Then when we're like, oh, you know what? I'm so sorry. I don't have an eating disorder. You know, like I should I shouldn't have raised that alarm. You know, like too much. I'm too much.
Speaker #0
I totally felt like a burden. You know, like that's why I didn't want my parents to know. I didn't want to stress them out. You know, I don't want anyone to be worried about me. Yeah, it's just interesting because like as you were talking and I was also thinking back to the book, like it also doesn't matter because no matter what you do, no one's ever happy with you. Like I remember friends like criticizing that I wasn't eating enough. And then I was all proud because I ate a piece of carrot cake. And then I told that same friend that was criticizing and she's like, carrot cake is so bad for you. And we treat ourselves and our bodies the same way. It's like no matter what you do, no matter what our body does for us or its capabilities are, if we're not in relationship with our bodies. It's never enough.
Speaker #1
So true. We're always doubting it. We're hard on it. I mean, I know myself, like I'm so, so, so hard on my body. Like, like, why are you doing this? Why is this happening? And then, you know, we have to remember that it's always on our side, even when the symptoms suck, like really suck. It's kind of like, you know, when a toddler throws a tantrum, it's throwing a tantrum, your body is throwing a tantrum and you have to like still soothe it and be like, it's okay.
Speaker #0
So how do you do that and stay with it? Because you've gone through so much stuff medically, even when you're in the midst of one of the hardest moments. How do you do that?
Speaker #1
Oh my goodness. There's a lot of skills and tools that I use. Sometimes I fail at it. And that's the thing is with body of grief, you have to have compassion first and grace with yourself. So that means that like sometimes you might not do great at this process. And it's having gratitude and grace and compassion and knowing that this is harm reduction. That means like, you know, we're using skills to hopefully like get to a place where we burn out on our maladaptive coping skills, right? You know, an eating disorder or substance use or whatever are ways that aren't helpful in the body grief process, right? And now we know that. Like I don't blame the little girl that used an eating disorder because she didn't know that. But now I know better. Now I know that that's not helpful. And so when I'm dealing with really awful just thing after thing after thing, sometimes I even have it in the book. I'll give a little nugget. Like I throw a temper tantrum and like I plan it out. Sometimes, you know, I like really lean into my feelings and really feel the feelings. Sometimes I really tap out of the feelings. and lean into, you know, community, I really believe community is the antidote to body grief, truly, truly, truly, which is not a popular thing these days. In our society, individualism is like being pushed on us, I think, in so many ways, I think makes us more of a soldier within our capitalistic society, which then disconnects us from our body even more. And the more we're disconnected from our body, the less likely we are to grieve.
Speaker #0
What does community healing look like through a body grief lens?
Speaker #1
Telling people how you feel, opening up to someone, allowing people to help you. I think that is one of the biggest things, allowing people to help you. Like you just said, I feel like a burden. That's so common. When people feel like burdens, I know I feel like that a lot. I then don't want people to help because I feel like that's just adding on. And it's like people want to help. People want something to do. So allowing people to help. Community can be online. Community can be, you know, at the library, in a group, in a mom's group, in a women without kids group, in, you know, an LGBTQ group. It could be, you know, anywhere. A gardening group. You know, I really think this is where I saw something online actually yesterday where it was like. Community also means showing up to that event, even if you don't want to. And I was like, this is really important because, and it says showing community also means like picking up that friend from the airport, even if it means you don't want to. And I was like, I think this is so important because I think in the last like five years, society has really moved into this world where like, we're like, you can get an Uber. Like, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not going to that event anymore. Like I'm like prioritizing myself. That's important to prioritize ourselves. But I think we've like gone a little too far.
Speaker #0
I agree. Like I don't think that that's healthy or sustainable. Like it is not normal to not need anyone.
Speaker #1
Yeah. Like, you know how what is the saying where it's like no new friends?
Speaker #0
I hate that saying.
Speaker #1
I hate that saying. I'm like, no, we need more friends like we need community.
Speaker #0
Yeah, I think that saying is so weird. I've actually I've like done posts about that before. I'm like, fine. Send them to me.
Speaker #1
Yeah,
Speaker #0
send them to me. Send them my way. Yeah, they're welcome in my home. I loved even in the in the book how you talked about actually it really inspired me how you and your husband have a friend over for dinner at least once a week.
Speaker #1
Yes. Yes. It's so important.
Speaker #0
Yeah. My grandpa used to have his friend Beverly over for lunch every day. Like she would come over and hang out with him. They were like platonic friends. Like she was just like this sweet woman. She was actually married to one of his best friends. She worked in the area pretty much every day. Bev would come over, he would make coffee and make her a sandwich and they'd hang out. And why don't we do that anymore?
Speaker #1
I know it's because we're tired and depleted. But then again, that's giving into the system that's telling us to be another like cog in the system, right? And that is not good. Like we don't want to be disconnected from our bodies because then we can't grieve and then we can't heal. If we don't grieve, we can't heal. And if we can't heal, we can't be a part of society or community. And this is why it's a universal issue, right? It's not just eating disorders. It's not just chronic illness. It's not just disability. You know, I talk about in the book, it's injury. It's pregnancy loss. It's motherhood. It's infertility. It's gender dysphoria. It's, you know, racial inequity. It's, you know, everyone experiences body grief because we have some loss of a life due to our bodies.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And it's also the smallest things too, like things you might not even ever think of. In reading your book. My hands sweat a lot. I have something called hyperhidrosis. And it's something I felt ashamed of and like gross about my entire life. Because when you go to shake someone's hand, and it's not all the time, but when you go to shake someone's hand and then they like wipe it off, it makes you feel like you need to apologize. That's where the apology one really hit me. Because I've been apologizing for it and also denying it, really. denying, dismissing myself, trying to pretend like it wasn't happening, trying to find all these ways to not make myself sweat. It's the smallest thing. It's not a life-threatening disorder. There's nothing. But it can even show up in little ways like that.
Speaker #1
Oh, yes. Sometimes, like you said, the littlest of ways are the biggest. Say you have the common cold and you have been just working your ass off. And you have your favorite artist coming to town to perform and you get the common cold and like you get really sick. Like that's body grief. Like maybe when you were younger, you would be able to just like fight off that cold a little bit better. But now you can't. That's grief. Like that is grieving that your body can't do that anymore because you were just like, you know, your body is slammed you to the ground and you cannot make it to your concert. You can't make it to that, you know. doji concert or you know that for me it would be like you know taylor swift i would be so upset it could be you know breaking your ankle to the common cold to you know a pregnancy loss to 19 brain spine surgeries you know like there's no hierarchy to suffering here it's body grief it all is there's body grief and then there's also just like remembering you have a body
Speaker #0
And you spoke a little bit to this in the book, but for some reason, when I really have to get in touch with that, it freaks me out. Like I start to feel like tingly and scared and sometimes it can feel good, but often it feels like, well, who am I then? Like if I have a body, I have me, okay, I live in my body, but then my body's its own thing and it's got its own consciousness, like what's going on? And then I kind of get freaked out and then I just, I think I dissociate. So what does having a relationship with your body actually look like? And also, what is that like weirdness that I'm experiencing? Is that common?
Speaker #1
Oh, it's so common. I'm glad you brought this up because it's a really common experience, which is why in the book I talk about the ocean of body awareness. It's like, hey, let's take this real slow. We're going to literally dip our toe in like we can take it right out. put our shins in, let's wait in the water. Because most people have a really hard time being in their body. I would say most people in capitalist society do because we're not used to being in it. I mean, we're scrolling and we're dissociated from our body most of the time. And I don't blame us for being that, right? Because look at what the world is. Like, it's a terrifying place right now. It's stressful and scary. And depending on how old we all are, like it has been for a long time. And depending on, you know, like if you've had an eating disorder and body image, like that just adds to the trauma of being in your body. And so what it is, is your amygdala, which for the people that haven't read the book or don't know this, that is the bite. flight freezer fawn that's where that lives it's a central nervous system that tells me that your amygdala is being hijacked right there is that it's saying like this isn't safe and it tells me that your frontal lobe is shutting off when you're in your body a little bit and it just needs more time and that is going to be a muscle that needs to be like literally your amygdala might be bigger so actually like your pet the pet scans have shown you People with eating disorders, people with ADHD have larger amygdalas than people without. Because, you know, there's such a thing as neuroplasticity. Our brains can change. And so people with eating disorders, depending on how long they've had them, but have larger amygdalas because we spend more time in our amygdalas than other people.
Speaker #0
That's fascinating.
Speaker #1
I know. It could be part of that.
Speaker #0
That's so interesting. And it's interesting too, and you talk about this, but how it goes in and out. I was in a really good place with my body, or probably the best place I've ever been, end of 2023, beginning of 2024. And then I feel like recently, maybe as I've been going through more stuff, which I'm sure is common, is you unearth and you actually start working through things, you have a regression. How do you manage, because you're also going through so many things physically, how do you manage the going? in and out of like feeling like you're in a good place. And then today the grief is more intense. How do you work through that?
Speaker #1
I really, really, really try not to label it as good and bad.
Speaker #0
Oh, that's good.
Speaker #1
Gosh, my therapist at like a community counseling center when I lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming with my husband, he was my boyfriend back then. It was over 10 years ago. I was going through my eating disorder and he was like, I want you guys to use the word helpful and unhelpful. instead of good and bad. And I was like, we use it now all the time. Like, that's all we do. And it's so helpful. It is. It's like, is this helpful or unhelpful? You don't ever grade anything then. You don't ever shame anything then. And so when it comes to my body grief, I'm like, is this, you know, a helpful day or an unhelpful day? Is this a helpful thing or an unhelpful thing? I actually say for Sean, like, this is a rule for us, but like, I ask for him not to ask how I'm doing because that gives me too much pressure because I usually just don't feel good. I know that might feel shocking for some people to hear, maybe not, depending on who's listening. Like, I don't feel good. That is my norm, which sucks. Like, that is body grief.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
Depending on, like, what my pain management is or how bad that feeling is, like, that might be a better day for me. And I might be able to get out of the house. Now, there are some things that can be really awful and triggering. Some people have asked, like, how have you kept yourself in recovery with eating disorders? How has your body image been? How have you been able to, like, continue to, like, love yourself and all these things? And I think the constant there has been, I know that it is my responsibility to... continue to take care of myself and be compassionate to myself, whatever that looks like in that moment. A big reason I wrote this book, I talk about this in the hope slash hopelessness chapter, which is a hard chapter, but a beautiful chapter is a lot of people that live with chronic illness and chronic pain struggle with hopelessness and despair. And they have a hard time going to therapy because when they go to therapy, they don't want to express that to a therapist in fear that the therapist will
Speaker #0
you know, be worried about suicidal ideation or, you know, fear that the therapist will then, you know, commit them. And having worked in the fields, I wanted to write a book that a client could take to a therapist's office and say, Hey, I'm going through this. I'm going through body grief. I don't have a plan. I am safe, but I am experiencing this. There are moments and days where I don't want to wake up because I am so hopeless and I'm dealing with so much body grief and I want to talk about it. That's normal with people with chronic pain. That's normal when it comes to body grief. And the more we can talk about it, the less likely we're going to have devastating, devastating news. And that's a big reason why I wrote this book.
Speaker #1
When you were writing it, Because I hear so many authors come on the show and they're like, oh, I wrote a book. It was so hard and terrible. So I know just like writing a book of any sort can be a process.
Speaker #0
I actually don't feel that way.
Speaker #1
So glad to hear it. I've had a couple of people recently say that it makes me so happy. So tell me about your process of writing and what it was like and like how it affected your body and your relationship with your body.
Speaker #0
I hope this doesn't like make people mad, but I loved writing this book. It was really wonderful and magical. I keep using the word magical because it was a magical process. I got to talk to so many people and interview like amazing people from all walks of life. And they were able to tell me their stories. And like how healing and therapeutic is that? I was so honored to be on the other end of the call and just hear about their body grief and be able to write their stories. But also... To be able to relive the stories, there's a lot of trauma in this. And so I don't remember some of the stories exactly. And so I was able to talk to my family and hear it from their perspective. And that was kind of wild. There were some of the things in the hospitals that happened. And I was like, oh my God, I don't remember that. You're right. And so hearing it from my sister's perspectives, From my mom and dad's perspective, from Sean, my husband's perspective, that was really tough. They go through a whole different piece of it. I'm in the circus of it all. I'm being poked and prodded. But Sean and my parents and my sisters, they're going through it and are traumatized in a completely different way. And so I feel like I was writing for once and was like taking it in from their perspective. And that was hard. heartbreaking, but it was also beautiful because I was so grateful. And, you know, I had like my book playlist and I don't know, it just really made me so grateful for everything I have. Going through this type of body grief and dealing with like terminal illnesses and having like near death experiences, you know, it changes how you view life. I was like a book deal. I was like, hell yeah. Like I would never complain about this.
Speaker #1
What is the biggest change in how you view life now as opposed to before you were diagnosed?
Speaker #0
We would be having the same conversation, but I'm not the same person. It's so wild. I'm so much more chill.
Speaker #1
That's interesting. Why?
Speaker #0
Oh, my God. I have OCD. So it's like very much who I am. It like tortures me to my core. Right. But thank God for medication. So that like keeps me a little bit wired. Right. But. I was working five jobs. And so I was a TA. I was getting my master's. I was working two nanny jobs. And then I was an assistant at a therapist's office. And then I was running my business. I was just doing it all. And I was like then going to workout classes. And I was like, boss, babe, I couldn't stand myself now. Like I would be like, ew, that girl. I thought I could do everything. And I really kind of ran myself into the ground. I'm not blaming that, but I really kind of did this to myself a little bit.
Speaker #1
To your point in the book and all our conversation today, the culture does this to us too. It makes us feel that we're only good if we're a good little machine and that the moment we're not useful, we are useless and have no value.
Speaker #0
Oh, I love that.
Speaker #1
I really, really, really relate. I saw so much of myself in you. I mean, it was shocking because even while you were still going through this and getting your brain surgeries and getting your back surgeries, there was one scene from your life you depicted where I think you had had a brain surgery and then days later were trying to meet with clients. I was freaking out during that part. Okay. I was panicking. I was sweating reading it.
Speaker #0
It was bad. That was in the beginning. I was in complete denial. Like I look back and I'm like, what a terrible role model was I to be sitting with clients?
Speaker #1
I mean, you had to go through it to learn it though. Who can teach it better now? But I understand because again, like when you got sick, it happened so fast. Your brain probably didn't have a chance to catch up.
Speaker #0
It was. I mean, I remember it so vividly too. I woke up. My family has just been really great. They've come down. And just helped, helped, helped. I'm very lucky to have them. And, you know, he was working on his computer. And I woke up and I was like, my head hurts. He was like, Shane, you just had brain surgery. And I was like, oh, right. I was just in denial. He was like, yeah, dude, you just had brain surgery. I remember kind of like my OCD always comes out after surgeries. Like it gets, I get like kind of neurotic in like a clinical way. I'll be like, I can't, I can't, I have to, I have to do this. I have to do this. And I remember being like, I have to see clients. I have to see them. Like, I can't lose my business. Like if I lose my business, I lose everything. And I remember that just being like the most devastating thing ever. I was like, I've lost my body. I've lost my health. And if I lose my business, like I'm nothing.
Speaker #1
How have you, and do you still work on knowing that who you are is the best thing about you, that you're worth it? doesn't lie outside of you or even on you, that it's in you?
Speaker #0
Gosh, it's an everyday practice. What you talk about with creativity is probably like the best thing that I've started to lean into in the past couple of years. I grew up as a dancer. Being in my body in that way is just for fun is what I do. I literally dance constantly in my wheelchair, just listening to music that way. Like... Reminding myself that life is fun, even if it's being at home, twerking and in my wheelchair, whatever that looks like. Painting. I love to paint now. Being with my pets and my husband. Small pockets of joy and gratitude. It's tough, though, when this book is now my everything and I'm trying to sell it.
Speaker #1
Oh, yeah. It's so difficult to know that there is purpose. joy and merit just in the creative process. And also to be in an industry that only succeeds if people buy or tune in or download. It's like it's a constant mindfuck because you're like, OK, I believe this in my soul that this is worthy no matter what. And I still have a dream that it will be read or heard by thousands or millions of people. Yeah, it's like a constant balancing act.
Speaker #0
Yeah, it makes sense. You know, it's the world we live in, but it's hard not to get like crumbled by it. And I'm an all or nothing person. So I have to keep myself in check. And so for me, that means doing emails from bed or doing it on the porch, finding balance in it all and leaning into community, community, community, because I isolate. It's so easy for me to isolate. I'm a middle child. I'm a really good one too. I know how to like bring it up constantly.
Speaker #1
That sounds like middle child healing to me, being like, hey, I exist.
Speaker #0
I know. I know. It's so funny. I think being a middle child is the funniest thing ever. But middle children know how to like navigate things and self-play and all that kind of stuff, you know? So it's just easy for me to just like be alone. And now that I am disabled and can't drive and all the things, it's just easy for me to do that. But also, I'm a really good friend and I'm social. So it's like, I got to just keep leading into community.
Speaker #1
Can you just talk a little? Because I feel like we didn't fully answer this. Like, what is body trust? And what are some practical ways to rebuild trust with our bodies? Hey, Creative Cutie, I wanted to remind you of something. I am a creative coach. And if you're interested in unleashing your creativity, sharing your creative project with the world, and or finally going after your biggest dreams, I would love... to help you, to hold up a mirror for you, to support you, and to be your co-creator and your coach. You can email me at lauren.lagrasso at gmail.com to set up a free discovery call, or go to my website, laurenlagrasso.com, and click the contact page and write me an email on there. I can't wait to help you unleash your inner creative and find your authentic voice. Creativity is your birthright. Let's unleash.
Speaker #0
Body trust is something that we really... It's interesting because body trust I put as the last phase, but it's really something that we carry along with us throughout all of these phases. It's something that we learned. We learn through hindsight. It's collected throughout our grief. So it's like when we go through one of the phases, we learn that, ah, I can trust my body because I got through this phase. She got me here. He got me here. They got me here. I got you. I got you. It's saying like, because I was able to get through here, I can go on and bridge myself to the next phase. It's that bridge. It's that liaison. It got me there. So it's not only the last phase, but it's also this like, it's this bridge onto the next grievance in that like, it's that compounding factor.
Speaker #1
Like all healing. It's not like a place you're like, I'm healed. I've arrived.
Speaker #0
It's not a destination.
Speaker #1
Right. Yeah.
Speaker #0
And that was something that was really important for me to get across when I was talking to Penguin when they took this book. Because I was like, self-help is a tough thing for me. Because usually there's this like band-aid solution at the end. And that is not this book. There's no such thing as grieved. There's no such thing as being like trusted or whatever. I want people to feel attuned. with where they are on their bodies. But you might only be there for like a minute, or you might just be there for a day and then you go back. And then you're like, okay, but I was here. I know what attunement feels like. And so because I have that, now dismissal is going to feel different.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's so important too. Because as I was prepping for this, actually, I was like feeling a lot of shame because I was in a... what I would have called before this, but I'm going to consider what was the terminology used? Not good, bad.
Speaker #0
Helpful or unhelpful.
Speaker #1
I was in a helpful place back in the end of 2023 and early 2024. And as I was like reading the book and prepping, like I was feeling shame, like what happened? Like, why have I regressed? What's like, what's wrong? What's going on? And now it, instead of feeling that shame, I'm like, well, I was there then. So I can get that again. And maybe there's just something else that's coming up. right now that I have to address instead of like saying what I'm feeling in this moment is bad. Maybe it's information.
Speaker #0
Oh, I love that. My sister just reminded me of this. Actually, my younger sister, Claire, she was like, cause I was talking to her about like regression and things like that. I was like, Oh, I really don't want this to happen. And she was like, but Jane, it won't. She was like, I just read a book. And I was like, you're so cute. Cause she read an early copy. She's like, I just read a book that said this. I was like, I love you so much. Um, she's like, you can't ever go back because you're only forward. You've learned and gained all this perspective. So the trust is there already in your compound. It's compounded. It's exactly what you just said. So we're only better, baby.
Speaker #1
Hey,
Speaker #0
going up from here. Welcome to us.
Speaker #1
For our last minutes together, I do want to talk about the connection between body trust and trust. and body grief and creativity. What do you see that as?
Speaker #0
I think it's a beautiful bridge towards safety. For me, I just think of, I'm right now looking at my paintbrushes. When I am in a lot of pain, I go straight towards painting with no purpose behind it. I don't want to think about selling anything. I don't want to think about anything. I just want to think about putting color on canvas. And I put on my favorite playlist. I don't want to think about anything else. And I might smoke a little cannabis to make myself feel better. And I just paint. Body trust is a two-way street. And I will say that time and time again. And so in order for me to trust my body, my body has to trust me back. And so I'm taking care of my body. And so in those moments, I really set the tone. You know, it's aromatherapy. It's nourishing my body. It's giving myself. electrolytes. It's giving myself, you know, hot compresses. It's really, really treating myself with so much compassion. And also the tears are going to be flowing. You know, the emotions are going to be going. That allows me to just be in my body and trust whatever comes up. That for me is like what those things mean. What about you?
Speaker #1
Well, I think everything is connected to everything. So I see it from that perspective. But I do think that like trusting your body and like being in touch with your body is inherently connected to trusting and loving yourself. And that if you're constantly living as like a floating head or trying to make yourself into a machine and dissociating from your body, you're never actually like grounded in the present moment. and here with yourself. And so since my theory is that to unleash creatively, we need to love, trust, and know ourselves enough to believe we have the right to do that. I think believing you have a body, like actually believing that and knowing you're in it and believing you have a right to take up space and be here is as important as saying I am inherently creative. Creativity is my birthright and I have a right to express it.
Speaker #0
Ooh, I love it. That's a beautiful affirmation for your body grief, you know, and that body trust phase. I love that.
Speaker #1
I love your paintings and I love that you call them paintings. P-A-I-N-T-I-N-G-S. I mean, I know that's how it's normally spelled, but the way you like emphasize that is so beautiful. Like, so did you paint before?
Speaker #0
Not really, no. Yeah. I mean, my dad is a painter, like paints houses, faux finish, all that stuff. And so I did like samples and he taught me a lot of stuff.
Speaker #1
How do you feel like prior to a painting session versus when you leave a painting session? Like what does it do for, I know you just went through a beautiful description of it, but like what do you feel in your body post painting?
Speaker #0
It's interesting because the pain doesn't go away.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
Because that's because structurally nothing changes. But emotionally I'm lighter. I feel more free and I'm able to just compartmentalize things better. I'm actually a lot nicer, a lot kinder. Pain can make me a mean person at times. It can make me mean to the people I love.
Speaker #1
It can make anyone mean. Years ago, I had a surgery on my vulva. I had a pre-melanoma there and so I had to get it removed. And it was definitely to that point the most... vulnerable medical thing I'd ever gone through. And I just remember just being so short with my parents who are like doing everything to help me and being like, oh, I'm not myself right now. Like I just like this has taken over me and it's like in the forefront. And it just gave me so much respect and compassion for people who are chronically in pain. So, you know, my heart is with you. And I'm also just so grateful that You're showing up for yourself. You're showing up for your community. You're showing up for your creativity. You're showing up for your body. It is such a beautiful example. And the fact that you're willing to do it wherever you're at on any given day, it's important for people to see that we don't have to be perfect in order to be out there and sharing.
Speaker #0
It can be messy.
Speaker #1
Yeah. And that's beautiful. And that's creativity.
Speaker #0
Thank you so much for having me. This was a beautiful conversation.
Speaker #1
Thank you for being here. I loved every second. I really loved your book. Everybody go get Jane's book. It is out now. Start your body grief process. Yay.
Speaker #0
Thank you.
Speaker #1
Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thanks to my guest, Jane Mattingly. For more info on Jane, follow her at Jane Mattingly and find her book. This is Body Grief at janemaddingly.com or wherever good books are found. Unleash Your Inner Creative is hosted and executive produced by me, Lauren LaGrasso, produced by Rachel Fulton with theme music by Liz Pohl. Again, Creative Cutie, thank you so much for listening. If you like what you heard today, remember to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Share the show with a friend and post about it on social media. Tag me at Lauren LaGrasso and at Unleash Your Inner Creative. and I will repost to share my gratitude. Also tag Jane, at Jane Mattingly, so she can share as well. My wish for you this week is that you start to get in touch with your body. Just remember you have a body and you have a relationship with that body. And I think that's a really good place to start. I love you, and I believe in you. Talk with you next week.

About Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LoGrasso (A Creativity Podcast)

Unleash Your Inner Creative is a Webby Award-winning podcast designed to help you break free from self-doubt, embrace your creativity, and live an authentic, purpose-filled life. I’m Lauren LoGrasso, a multi-passionate creative, and I believe that repressed creativity is one of the root causes of unhappiness—which is why I’m here to help you unleash yours! Through a blend of inspiring interviews, solo episodes, and coaching sessions, this show explores creativity, mental health, spirituality, and self-development.

On the pod, you'll hear from incredible guests like The Artist’s Way author Julia Cameron, How I Built This host Guy Raz, brain coach Jim Kwik, and Codependent No More's Melody Beattie, as well as artists and performers like Chrisette Michele and Hannah Berner. Together, we share the tools and insights to help you rewire your mindset, overcome fear, and follow your heart’s deepest desires. Whether you’re a lifelong creative or just feeling a spark, I invite you to tune in, tap into your true potential, and unleash your inner creative!

New episodes are out every Wednesday - follow, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts :)

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LoGrasso (A Creativity Podcast)

New episodes are out every Wednesday - follow, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts :)

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Description

From this episode, you’ll learn:

-What body grief is and how to recognize it in your own life
-The 7 stages of body grief and how to move through them

-How to begin rebuilding trust with your body—at any stage
-Why healing your relationship with your body can unlock your creativity

TW: Eating Disorders and Mental Health

More on Jayne

Unleash is Nominated for a Webby Award and we need your help to win! Vote here: https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2025/podcasts/shows/creativity-marketing

📩 Reach out for a free discovery call at Lauren.LoGrasso@gmail.com or visit https://www.laurenlograsso.com/contact/

Follow the show: @unleashyourinnercreative

Follow me: @LaurenLoGrasso

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Have you ever struggled with having a body, with the grief over the way your body changes throughout the years or times when you've been in pain and just wish there was a way to make peace with it? What if you could get into a genuine relationship with your body and learn how to trust it? Today's guest will share how navigating body grief can open up paths for healing, self-love, and creative expression. She'll walk you through how acknowledging your body's changes. and sticking with yourself and your body can connect you to a deeper sense of peace and authenticity. Welcome to Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LaGrasso. I'm Lauren LaGrasso. I'm a Webby Award-winning podcast host and producer, singer-songwriter, public speaker, and creative coach. This show sits at the intersection of creativity, mental health, self-development, and spirituality, and it is meant to give you tools to love, trust, and know yourself enough to claim your right to creativity and pursue whatever it is that's on your heart. Today's guest is Jane Mattingly. She's a disability advocate and recovery expert who has developed a groundbreaking approach to navigating body grief. In her work, Jane teaches that body grief isn't something to overcome, but something to feel deeply and work through with self-compassion and grace. She walks us through the seven stages of body grief from her book, This Is Body Grief, which is out now and I highly recommend you read. The stages range from shock and self- blame to hope and eventual body trust, which can help us make space for the full range of emotions that come with mourning and accepting our ever-changing bodies, and that we're going to be living in these for the rest of our lives. I wanted to have Jane on the podcast because she offers a fresh, compassionate perspective on having a body. And trigger warning, I'm about to talk about eating disorders. As you may know from listening to the podcast, I've struggled with eating disorders. and had all kinds of feelings about my body. And in reading Jane's work, I really realized I still have so much to work through there. And that's a beautiful thing because her book gave me tools and a framework for that. And I know this conversation will do the same thing for you and help you start to get in relationship with your body, move through your body grief, and come to body trust. From today's chat, you'll learn what body grief is and how to start moving through it. how to start to get into relationship with your body, the seven stages of body grief, and how moving through your body grief and making peace with your body is connected to your creative process and loving yourself as a whole. Okay, now here she is, Jane Mattingly. Jane, I am so thrilled to have you on the show to talk about this big, difficult... and beautiful topic of body grief. So thank you for being here and thank you for writing your book.
Speaker #1
Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker #0
Oh, it is my honor. And I have a sneaking suspicion that allowing ourselves to feel body grief and learning body trust is a key to unleashing creatively and loving yourself more. We've talked about it briefly before we got into it. We'll hit it again at the end, but just super exciting and a juicy topic. But to start out at the top, what is body grief.
Speaker #1
Body grief is a term that I came up with years ago when I was struggling with my own body grief and working with people with eating disorders and body image. But really, body grief is making peace with the loss that comes with living in a body. It is mourning the loss that we have when we live in a body that's betrays us or we perceive that's betraying us. And there's so many lives that we live in our bodies, right? And sometimes it's really unfair when we can't live those specific lives that we were told we once could live or when we can no longer live the life that we used to live in our bodies. And so this is body grief is really about my story, but it's about so many other people's stories. And there's case studies of stories about people living through... all of their bodies that they've lived through and how to do that and the phases in which you go through and ways to cope and how it's nonlinear and multicyclical. And it's just a beautiful, messy journey.
Speaker #0
Yeah, for sure. And I know you came to understand about body grief very intimately through many different phases of your life. But would you mind taking me through the story of how you ended up wanting to speak about this?
Speaker #1
Yeah, no, not at all. Not at all. So to make a long story short, I had an eating disorder starting at the age of nine and it went undiagnosed, unnoticed, which is really common until I was about 22. I went through recovery. I had really very little barriers to care. I was very privileged in that. And then I wanted to turn my problem into my purpose. And so I went and got my master's in clinical mental health counseling. And then I was like, okay, I want to work with people with eating disorders and body image. It was a needed thing. A lot of people were not getting the help that they needed. And eating disorders were very underrepresented. And so I started working with people. with body image concerns and eating disorders. And I looked at it from this lens of grief. I then started doing events and like self-love events and body image events. Little did I know at the time how ableist that was because I was not disabled. I was quote unquote healthy. And then I took a bar class and which is like a Pilates class for those people that don't know, just with like ballet bars. And I lost my sight. my body was like not working. Like the lower half of my body pretty much like went paralyzed, what it felt like went paralyzed. And I was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder called intracranial hypertension. It's when your cerebral spinal fluid increases abnormal amounts and it bruises your spinal cord and your brain and your optic nerve. And that's why I lost my sight. And I was eligible for a brain surgery that saved my sight at that time. And that was number one of 19 brain and spine surgeries and a total hysterectomy that is over the past six and a half years. I was then within that year diagnosed with my genetic disorder that I was born with called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a connective tissue disorder that affects all of your tissues in your body, all of your connective tissues in your body. It's a spectrum disorder. It is known as a rare condition. disorder, but now geneticists are saying that it's the most common illness that you've never heard about. It really, really, really affects me within my neurological system. And it just like really took me down. My life has greatly changed. You know, me and my husband have been together for 12 years. So we've been through this journey of being able-bodied, non-disabled to disabled. Being a new bride, you know, was a big deal with my rollator going. out on the beach with my walker was a huge deal. That was a body grief journey, you know, just really grieving this past life that I used to live. But at that point, I was like, you know, sitting on hospital tables and laying down in hospital beds realizing like, well, shoot, now my body can't do. Here I was screaming from, you know, rooftops, like, love your body for what it can do. And I was like, well, what now? How am I supposed to love my body? This is I'm grieving. That was my story. And I looked back then on my journey. And when I was nine years old, that was body grief. I started talking to my clients and my aunts and my mom and my friends of all ages. And they were like, oh my God, body grief. I've never heard that term, but I definitely resonate. That's when I started to realize this is a universal concept that we all need to name it. And we've all... been through it, but maybe we've just never had the literacy or the coping skills to really move through it in a way that is healthy or is like just less bumpy.
Speaker #0
How did naming it help you on your journey?
Speaker #1
I mean, hugely, because it's kind of like when you're going through something and it's like, you can't find your way. For instance, if anyone has ever gone through the dismissal of trying to, like if you're really sick and you're, God forbid this happens, but it's quite common when you're dealing with symptoms and you're trying to get diagnosed with a chronic illness. Or you're just dealing with terrible symptoms and doctors are just dismissing you over and over and over again. And it turns out that you're just like almost relieved once you get a diagnosis. It's like that name of the diagnosis. It's not that you're relieved something's wrong with you. You're almost just relieved that now that there's like a way forward. Now that there's a name to the diagnosis, you're like, finally, there's something I can do with this. Finally, I'm not running around in the dark, having no clue what to do with this, having no clue how to cope. I don't feel quote unquote, and I don't like using this word, but I don't feel. crazy. I don't feel like I'm gaslighting myself anymore. And that is exactly what it felt like when I finally was able to name my body grief. It was like, this is grieving, you know, all of these emotions, all of these, you know, fluctuations of what I was, what was happening, like no wonder. No wonder because I'm grieving.
Speaker #0
Take me through that because you've got these seven stages of grief. Do the stages happen before you know what's your in-body grief? Like, I guess it would make sense because I'm looking at them right now. Could you share like in your own journey how each one hit?
Speaker #1
Yeah. So the phases are, you know, nonlinear, multicyclical. And for everyone, they're going to happen differently. But. you know, for a lot of people, they're going to happen, you know, how I have them laid out in the book. Dismissal being the first, shock, apology, fault, fight, hope slash hopelessness, and then trust. That's kind of usually how they occur. And that's, you know, how I've studied them and the many cases in the book, that's kind of how they've occurred for people. For me, that's how they occur. But I think one thing that's really interesting is you can kind of find that depending on your personality type depending on you know your trauma or temperament style you might lean towards certain phases more than the other i feel that yeah yeah i'm curious to know like what ones you might have leaned towards because like i lean towards apology and fight yeah
Speaker #0
I think I lean toward apology, fault, and fight.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
Definitely. But the apology one was really, I mean, your whole book was very confronting.
Speaker #1
Really?
Speaker #0
In an important way. Yeah, because I too struggled with eating disorder as a kid. I was bulimic, and I now would say I was anorexic, 7th grade through 8th grade. Nobody ever knew.
Speaker #1
I fixed it,
Speaker #0
quote unquote, on my own. It was... Kind of amazing. Creativity really saved my life because a Carpenter song randomly came on the radio. And it was like in the midst of when I was in this struggle that no one knew about. And my dad told me about Karen Carpenter. What he said was she ruined her voice. He said she was never able to sing again. And at that point, music was already very, very important to me. And I never made myself throw up again after that because I... didn't want to lose something that I loved more than, yeah, than whatever body hatred I was having at that time. So music, creativity really saved my life. But that said, like when I hear about people in recovery or who have recovered, I'm like, oh, I don't think I ever did that.
Speaker #1
Interesting. And that's so interesting too, not to go off topic, but when we compare our stories, that's dismissal.
Speaker #0
Ooh. So tell me more. So am I dismissing myself?
Speaker #1
Yeah. You're dismissing yourself right there because like an eating disorder is an eating disorder. It's going to look whatever way it's going to look. And it's so common with eating disorders to be like, well, mine wasn't that bad.
Speaker #0
I didn't think I did it well enough. I never completely stopped eating, you know, like,
Speaker #1
by the way, no one does.
Speaker #0
Right. But I didn't know that at the time. I just like, this is fuck. And I still have a lot of issues, so I'm sure I'm going to say a lot of things wrong.
Speaker #1
It's okay.
Speaker #0
I literally didn't think like, well, I'm not throwing up every meal, so I don't think I qualify.
Speaker #1
Isn't that interesting? Because this is very common. The amount of, and I did the same thing, Lauren. I did the exact same thing when I was in my eating disorder recovery. And the eating disorder brain, it does this. It clicks on and it will be like, wait, but it's fine. Like you're good. But every single client I've sat down with has said something of this nature.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
And that's dismissal because of external dismissal that we have heard from other people. The amount of doctors that had once said like, you're good. Like you're fine. She's good. She's good. And I was like, I remember thinking, and I talk about this in the book with the hall pass, you know, the doc, the amount of doctors and the amount of the therapist, even that like. I remember I knew something was wrong. Like I knew I wasn't eating enough. I knew that I was weak. I knew that something wasn't right, but I looked quote unquote normal. Now looking back, I'm like, damn, I was not looking good, but I was got a hall pass. And I remember being like, that's, that's my hall pass. Like, I remember being like, okay, that doctor and that therapist, they said I was good. And so we take that and we internally dismiss ourselves. And so like, yeah, that's dismissal too. And so like we can bounce in between these phases. And then like that adds to our apology then. Because then we're like, oh, I'm really sorry for taking up too much space. And I think women really do that. Then when we're like, oh, you know what? I'm so sorry. I don't have an eating disorder. You know, like I should I shouldn't have raised that alarm. You know, like too much. I'm too much.
Speaker #0
I totally felt like a burden. You know, like that's why I didn't want my parents to know. I didn't want to stress them out. You know, I don't want anyone to be worried about me. Yeah, it's just interesting because like as you were talking and I was also thinking back to the book, like it also doesn't matter because no matter what you do, no one's ever happy with you. Like I remember friends like criticizing that I wasn't eating enough. And then I was all proud because I ate a piece of carrot cake. And then I told that same friend that was criticizing and she's like, carrot cake is so bad for you. And we treat ourselves and our bodies the same way. It's like no matter what you do, no matter what our body does for us or its capabilities are, if we're not in relationship with our bodies. It's never enough.
Speaker #1
So true. We're always doubting it. We're hard on it. I mean, I know myself, like I'm so, so, so hard on my body. Like, like, why are you doing this? Why is this happening? And then, you know, we have to remember that it's always on our side, even when the symptoms suck, like really suck. It's kind of like, you know, when a toddler throws a tantrum, it's throwing a tantrum, your body is throwing a tantrum and you have to like still soothe it and be like, it's okay.
Speaker #0
So how do you do that and stay with it? Because you've gone through so much stuff medically, even when you're in the midst of one of the hardest moments. How do you do that?
Speaker #1
Oh my goodness. There's a lot of skills and tools that I use. Sometimes I fail at it. And that's the thing is with body of grief, you have to have compassion first and grace with yourself. So that means that like sometimes you might not do great at this process. And it's having gratitude and grace and compassion and knowing that this is harm reduction. That means like, you know, we're using skills to hopefully like get to a place where we burn out on our maladaptive coping skills, right? You know, an eating disorder or substance use or whatever are ways that aren't helpful in the body grief process, right? And now we know that. Like I don't blame the little girl that used an eating disorder because she didn't know that. But now I know better. Now I know that that's not helpful. And so when I'm dealing with really awful just thing after thing after thing, sometimes I even have it in the book. I'll give a little nugget. Like I throw a temper tantrum and like I plan it out. Sometimes, you know, I like really lean into my feelings and really feel the feelings. Sometimes I really tap out of the feelings. and lean into, you know, community, I really believe community is the antidote to body grief, truly, truly, truly, which is not a popular thing these days. In our society, individualism is like being pushed on us, I think, in so many ways, I think makes us more of a soldier within our capitalistic society, which then disconnects us from our body even more. And the more we're disconnected from our body, the less likely we are to grieve.
Speaker #0
What does community healing look like through a body grief lens?
Speaker #1
Telling people how you feel, opening up to someone, allowing people to help you. I think that is one of the biggest things, allowing people to help you. Like you just said, I feel like a burden. That's so common. When people feel like burdens, I know I feel like that a lot. I then don't want people to help because I feel like that's just adding on. And it's like people want to help. People want something to do. So allowing people to help. Community can be online. Community can be, you know, at the library, in a group, in a mom's group, in a women without kids group, in, you know, an LGBTQ group. It could be, you know, anywhere. A gardening group. You know, I really think this is where I saw something online actually yesterday where it was like. Community also means showing up to that event, even if you don't want to. And I was like, this is really important because, and it says showing community also means like picking up that friend from the airport, even if it means you don't want to. And I was like, I think this is so important because I think in the last like five years, society has really moved into this world where like, we're like, you can get an Uber. Like, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not going to that event anymore. Like I'm like prioritizing myself. That's important to prioritize ourselves. But I think we've like gone a little too far.
Speaker #0
I agree. Like I don't think that that's healthy or sustainable. Like it is not normal to not need anyone.
Speaker #1
Yeah. Like, you know how what is the saying where it's like no new friends?
Speaker #0
I hate that saying.
Speaker #1
I hate that saying. I'm like, no, we need more friends like we need community.
Speaker #0
Yeah, I think that saying is so weird. I've actually I've like done posts about that before. I'm like, fine. Send them to me.
Speaker #1
Yeah,
Speaker #0
send them to me. Send them my way. Yeah, they're welcome in my home. I loved even in the in the book how you talked about actually it really inspired me how you and your husband have a friend over for dinner at least once a week.
Speaker #1
Yes. Yes. It's so important.
Speaker #0
Yeah. My grandpa used to have his friend Beverly over for lunch every day. Like she would come over and hang out with him. They were like platonic friends. Like she was just like this sweet woman. She was actually married to one of his best friends. She worked in the area pretty much every day. Bev would come over, he would make coffee and make her a sandwich and they'd hang out. And why don't we do that anymore?
Speaker #1
I know it's because we're tired and depleted. But then again, that's giving into the system that's telling us to be another like cog in the system, right? And that is not good. Like we don't want to be disconnected from our bodies because then we can't grieve and then we can't heal. If we don't grieve, we can't heal. And if we can't heal, we can't be a part of society or community. And this is why it's a universal issue, right? It's not just eating disorders. It's not just chronic illness. It's not just disability. You know, I talk about in the book, it's injury. It's pregnancy loss. It's motherhood. It's infertility. It's gender dysphoria. It's, you know, racial inequity. It's, you know, everyone experiences body grief because we have some loss of a life due to our bodies.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And it's also the smallest things too, like things you might not even ever think of. In reading your book. My hands sweat a lot. I have something called hyperhidrosis. And it's something I felt ashamed of and like gross about my entire life. Because when you go to shake someone's hand, and it's not all the time, but when you go to shake someone's hand and then they like wipe it off, it makes you feel like you need to apologize. That's where the apology one really hit me. Because I've been apologizing for it and also denying it, really. denying, dismissing myself, trying to pretend like it wasn't happening, trying to find all these ways to not make myself sweat. It's the smallest thing. It's not a life-threatening disorder. There's nothing. But it can even show up in little ways like that.
Speaker #1
Oh, yes. Sometimes, like you said, the littlest of ways are the biggest. Say you have the common cold and you have been just working your ass off. And you have your favorite artist coming to town to perform and you get the common cold and like you get really sick. Like that's body grief. Like maybe when you were younger, you would be able to just like fight off that cold a little bit better. But now you can't. That's grief. Like that is grieving that your body can't do that anymore because you were just like, you know, your body is slammed you to the ground and you cannot make it to your concert. You can't make it to that, you know. doji concert or you know that for me it would be like you know taylor swift i would be so upset it could be you know breaking your ankle to the common cold to you know a pregnancy loss to 19 brain spine surgeries you know like there's no hierarchy to suffering here it's body grief it all is there's body grief and then there's also just like remembering you have a body
Speaker #0
And you spoke a little bit to this in the book, but for some reason, when I really have to get in touch with that, it freaks me out. Like I start to feel like tingly and scared and sometimes it can feel good, but often it feels like, well, who am I then? Like if I have a body, I have me, okay, I live in my body, but then my body's its own thing and it's got its own consciousness, like what's going on? And then I kind of get freaked out and then I just, I think I dissociate. So what does having a relationship with your body actually look like? And also, what is that like weirdness that I'm experiencing? Is that common?
Speaker #1
Oh, it's so common. I'm glad you brought this up because it's a really common experience, which is why in the book I talk about the ocean of body awareness. It's like, hey, let's take this real slow. We're going to literally dip our toe in like we can take it right out. put our shins in, let's wait in the water. Because most people have a really hard time being in their body. I would say most people in capitalist society do because we're not used to being in it. I mean, we're scrolling and we're dissociated from our body most of the time. And I don't blame us for being that, right? Because look at what the world is. Like, it's a terrifying place right now. It's stressful and scary. And depending on how old we all are, like it has been for a long time. And depending on, you know, like if you've had an eating disorder and body image, like that just adds to the trauma of being in your body. And so what it is, is your amygdala, which for the people that haven't read the book or don't know this, that is the bite. flight freezer fawn that's where that lives it's a central nervous system that tells me that your amygdala is being hijacked right there is that it's saying like this isn't safe and it tells me that your frontal lobe is shutting off when you're in your body a little bit and it just needs more time and that is going to be a muscle that needs to be like literally your amygdala might be bigger so actually like your pet the pet scans have shown you People with eating disorders, people with ADHD have larger amygdalas than people without. Because, you know, there's such a thing as neuroplasticity. Our brains can change. And so people with eating disorders, depending on how long they've had them, but have larger amygdalas because we spend more time in our amygdalas than other people.
Speaker #0
That's fascinating.
Speaker #1
I know. It could be part of that.
Speaker #0
That's so interesting. And it's interesting too, and you talk about this, but how it goes in and out. I was in a really good place with my body, or probably the best place I've ever been, end of 2023, beginning of 2024. And then I feel like recently, maybe as I've been going through more stuff, which I'm sure is common, is you unearth and you actually start working through things, you have a regression. How do you manage, because you're also going through so many things physically, how do you manage the going? in and out of like feeling like you're in a good place. And then today the grief is more intense. How do you work through that?
Speaker #1
I really, really, really try not to label it as good and bad.
Speaker #0
Oh, that's good.
Speaker #1
Gosh, my therapist at like a community counseling center when I lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming with my husband, he was my boyfriend back then. It was over 10 years ago. I was going through my eating disorder and he was like, I want you guys to use the word helpful and unhelpful. instead of good and bad. And I was like, we use it now all the time. Like, that's all we do. And it's so helpful. It is. It's like, is this helpful or unhelpful? You don't ever grade anything then. You don't ever shame anything then. And so when it comes to my body grief, I'm like, is this, you know, a helpful day or an unhelpful day? Is this a helpful thing or an unhelpful thing? I actually say for Sean, like, this is a rule for us, but like, I ask for him not to ask how I'm doing because that gives me too much pressure because I usually just don't feel good. I know that might feel shocking for some people to hear, maybe not, depending on who's listening. Like, I don't feel good. That is my norm, which sucks. Like, that is body grief.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
Depending on, like, what my pain management is or how bad that feeling is, like, that might be a better day for me. And I might be able to get out of the house. Now, there are some things that can be really awful and triggering. Some people have asked, like, how have you kept yourself in recovery with eating disorders? How has your body image been? How have you been able to, like, continue to, like, love yourself and all these things? And I think the constant there has been, I know that it is my responsibility to... continue to take care of myself and be compassionate to myself, whatever that looks like in that moment. A big reason I wrote this book, I talk about this in the hope slash hopelessness chapter, which is a hard chapter, but a beautiful chapter is a lot of people that live with chronic illness and chronic pain struggle with hopelessness and despair. And they have a hard time going to therapy because when they go to therapy, they don't want to express that to a therapist in fear that the therapist will
Speaker #0
you know, be worried about suicidal ideation or, you know, fear that the therapist will then, you know, commit them. And having worked in the fields, I wanted to write a book that a client could take to a therapist's office and say, Hey, I'm going through this. I'm going through body grief. I don't have a plan. I am safe, but I am experiencing this. There are moments and days where I don't want to wake up because I am so hopeless and I'm dealing with so much body grief and I want to talk about it. That's normal with people with chronic pain. That's normal when it comes to body grief. And the more we can talk about it, the less likely we're going to have devastating, devastating news. And that's a big reason why I wrote this book.
Speaker #1
When you were writing it, Because I hear so many authors come on the show and they're like, oh, I wrote a book. It was so hard and terrible. So I know just like writing a book of any sort can be a process.
Speaker #0
I actually don't feel that way.
Speaker #1
So glad to hear it. I've had a couple of people recently say that it makes me so happy. So tell me about your process of writing and what it was like and like how it affected your body and your relationship with your body.
Speaker #0
I hope this doesn't like make people mad, but I loved writing this book. It was really wonderful and magical. I keep using the word magical because it was a magical process. I got to talk to so many people and interview like amazing people from all walks of life. And they were able to tell me their stories. And like how healing and therapeutic is that? I was so honored to be on the other end of the call and just hear about their body grief and be able to write their stories. But also... To be able to relive the stories, there's a lot of trauma in this. And so I don't remember some of the stories exactly. And so I was able to talk to my family and hear it from their perspective. And that was kind of wild. There were some of the things in the hospitals that happened. And I was like, oh my God, I don't remember that. You're right. And so hearing it from my sister's perspectives, From my mom and dad's perspective, from Sean, my husband's perspective, that was really tough. They go through a whole different piece of it. I'm in the circus of it all. I'm being poked and prodded. But Sean and my parents and my sisters, they're going through it and are traumatized in a completely different way. And so I feel like I was writing for once and was like taking it in from their perspective. And that was hard. heartbreaking, but it was also beautiful because I was so grateful. And, you know, I had like my book playlist and I don't know, it just really made me so grateful for everything I have. Going through this type of body grief and dealing with like terminal illnesses and having like near death experiences, you know, it changes how you view life. I was like a book deal. I was like, hell yeah. Like I would never complain about this.
Speaker #1
What is the biggest change in how you view life now as opposed to before you were diagnosed?
Speaker #0
We would be having the same conversation, but I'm not the same person. It's so wild. I'm so much more chill.
Speaker #1
That's interesting. Why?
Speaker #0
Oh, my God. I have OCD. So it's like very much who I am. It like tortures me to my core. Right. But thank God for medication. So that like keeps me a little bit wired. Right. But. I was working five jobs. And so I was a TA. I was getting my master's. I was working two nanny jobs. And then I was an assistant at a therapist's office. And then I was running my business. I was just doing it all. And I was like then going to workout classes. And I was like, boss, babe, I couldn't stand myself now. Like I would be like, ew, that girl. I thought I could do everything. And I really kind of ran myself into the ground. I'm not blaming that, but I really kind of did this to myself a little bit.
Speaker #1
To your point in the book and all our conversation today, the culture does this to us too. It makes us feel that we're only good if we're a good little machine and that the moment we're not useful, we are useless and have no value.
Speaker #0
Oh, I love that.
Speaker #1
I really, really, really relate. I saw so much of myself in you. I mean, it was shocking because even while you were still going through this and getting your brain surgeries and getting your back surgeries, there was one scene from your life you depicted where I think you had had a brain surgery and then days later were trying to meet with clients. I was freaking out during that part. Okay. I was panicking. I was sweating reading it.
Speaker #0
It was bad. That was in the beginning. I was in complete denial. Like I look back and I'm like, what a terrible role model was I to be sitting with clients?
Speaker #1
I mean, you had to go through it to learn it though. Who can teach it better now? But I understand because again, like when you got sick, it happened so fast. Your brain probably didn't have a chance to catch up.
Speaker #0
It was. I mean, I remember it so vividly too. I woke up. My family has just been really great. They've come down. And just helped, helped, helped. I'm very lucky to have them. And, you know, he was working on his computer. And I woke up and I was like, my head hurts. He was like, Shane, you just had brain surgery. And I was like, oh, right. I was just in denial. He was like, yeah, dude, you just had brain surgery. I remember kind of like my OCD always comes out after surgeries. Like it gets, I get like kind of neurotic in like a clinical way. I'll be like, I can't, I can't, I have to, I have to do this. I have to do this. And I remember being like, I have to see clients. I have to see them. Like, I can't lose my business. Like if I lose my business, I lose everything. And I remember that just being like the most devastating thing ever. I was like, I've lost my body. I've lost my health. And if I lose my business, like I'm nothing.
Speaker #1
How have you, and do you still work on knowing that who you are is the best thing about you, that you're worth it? doesn't lie outside of you or even on you, that it's in you?
Speaker #0
Gosh, it's an everyday practice. What you talk about with creativity is probably like the best thing that I've started to lean into in the past couple of years. I grew up as a dancer. Being in my body in that way is just for fun is what I do. I literally dance constantly in my wheelchair, just listening to music that way. Like... Reminding myself that life is fun, even if it's being at home, twerking and in my wheelchair, whatever that looks like. Painting. I love to paint now. Being with my pets and my husband. Small pockets of joy and gratitude. It's tough, though, when this book is now my everything and I'm trying to sell it.
Speaker #1
Oh, yeah. It's so difficult to know that there is purpose. joy and merit just in the creative process. And also to be in an industry that only succeeds if people buy or tune in or download. It's like it's a constant mindfuck because you're like, OK, I believe this in my soul that this is worthy no matter what. And I still have a dream that it will be read or heard by thousands or millions of people. Yeah, it's like a constant balancing act.
Speaker #0
Yeah, it makes sense. You know, it's the world we live in, but it's hard not to get like crumbled by it. And I'm an all or nothing person. So I have to keep myself in check. And so for me, that means doing emails from bed or doing it on the porch, finding balance in it all and leaning into community, community, community, because I isolate. It's so easy for me to isolate. I'm a middle child. I'm a really good one too. I know how to like bring it up constantly.
Speaker #1
That sounds like middle child healing to me, being like, hey, I exist.
Speaker #0
I know. I know. It's so funny. I think being a middle child is the funniest thing ever. But middle children know how to like navigate things and self-play and all that kind of stuff, you know? So it's just easy for me to just like be alone. And now that I am disabled and can't drive and all the things, it's just easy for me to do that. But also, I'm a really good friend and I'm social. So it's like, I got to just keep leading into community.
Speaker #1
Can you just talk a little? Because I feel like we didn't fully answer this. Like, what is body trust? And what are some practical ways to rebuild trust with our bodies? Hey, Creative Cutie, I wanted to remind you of something. I am a creative coach. And if you're interested in unleashing your creativity, sharing your creative project with the world, and or finally going after your biggest dreams, I would love... to help you, to hold up a mirror for you, to support you, and to be your co-creator and your coach. You can email me at lauren.lagrasso at gmail.com to set up a free discovery call, or go to my website, laurenlagrasso.com, and click the contact page and write me an email on there. I can't wait to help you unleash your inner creative and find your authentic voice. Creativity is your birthright. Let's unleash.
Speaker #0
Body trust is something that we really... It's interesting because body trust I put as the last phase, but it's really something that we carry along with us throughout all of these phases. It's something that we learned. We learn through hindsight. It's collected throughout our grief. So it's like when we go through one of the phases, we learn that, ah, I can trust my body because I got through this phase. She got me here. He got me here. They got me here. I got you. I got you. It's saying like, because I was able to get through here, I can go on and bridge myself to the next phase. It's that bridge. It's that liaison. It got me there. So it's not only the last phase, but it's also this like, it's this bridge onto the next grievance in that like, it's that compounding factor.
Speaker #1
Like all healing. It's not like a place you're like, I'm healed. I've arrived.
Speaker #0
It's not a destination.
Speaker #1
Right. Yeah.
Speaker #0
And that was something that was really important for me to get across when I was talking to Penguin when they took this book. Because I was like, self-help is a tough thing for me. Because usually there's this like band-aid solution at the end. And that is not this book. There's no such thing as grieved. There's no such thing as being like trusted or whatever. I want people to feel attuned. with where they are on their bodies. But you might only be there for like a minute, or you might just be there for a day and then you go back. And then you're like, okay, but I was here. I know what attunement feels like. And so because I have that, now dismissal is going to feel different.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's so important too. Because as I was prepping for this, actually, I was like feeling a lot of shame because I was in a... what I would have called before this, but I'm going to consider what was the terminology used? Not good, bad.
Speaker #0
Helpful or unhelpful.
Speaker #1
I was in a helpful place back in the end of 2023 and early 2024. And as I was like reading the book and prepping, like I was feeling shame, like what happened? Like, why have I regressed? What's like, what's wrong? What's going on? And now it, instead of feeling that shame, I'm like, well, I was there then. So I can get that again. And maybe there's just something else that's coming up. right now that I have to address instead of like saying what I'm feeling in this moment is bad. Maybe it's information.
Speaker #0
Oh, I love that. My sister just reminded me of this. Actually, my younger sister, Claire, she was like, cause I was talking to her about like regression and things like that. I was like, Oh, I really don't want this to happen. And she was like, but Jane, it won't. She was like, I just read a book. And I was like, you're so cute. Cause she read an early copy. She's like, I just read a book that said this. I was like, I love you so much. Um, she's like, you can't ever go back because you're only forward. You've learned and gained all this perspective. So the trust is there already in your compound. It's compounded. It's exactly what you just said. So we're only better, baby.
Speaker #1
Hey,
Speaker #0
going up from here. Welcome to us.
Speaker #1
For our last minutes together, I do want to talk about the connection between body trust and trust. and body grief and creativity. What do you see that as?
Speaker #0
I think it's a beautiful bridge towards safety. For me, I just think of, I'm right now looking at my paintbrushes. When I am in a lot of pain, I go straight towards painting with no purpose behind it. I don't want to think about selling anything. I don't want to think about anything. I just want to think about putting color on canvas. And I put on my favorite playlist. I don't want to think about anything else. And I might smoke a little cannabis to make myself feel better. And I just paint. Body trust is a two-way street. And I will say that time and time again. And so in order for me to trust my body, my body has to trust me back. And so I'm taking care of my body. And so in those moments, I really set the tone. You know, it's aromatherapy. It's nourishing my body. It's giving myself. electrolytes. It's giving myself, you know, hot compresses. It's really, really treating myself with so much compassion. And also the tears are going to be flowing. You know, the emotions are going to be going. That allows me to just be in my body and trust whatever comes up. That for me is like what those things mean. What about you?
Speaker #1
Well, I think everything is connected to everything. So I see it from that perspective. But I do think that like trusting your body and like being in touch with your body is inherently connected to trusting and loving yourself. And that if you're constantly living as like a floating head or trying to make yourself into a machine and dissociating from your body, you're never actually like grounded in the present moment. and here with yourself. And so since my theory is that to unleash creatively, we need to love, trust, and know ourselves enough to believe we have the right to do that. I think believing you have a body, like actually believing that and knowing you're in it and believing you have a right to take up space and be here is as important as saying I am inherently creative. Creativity is my birthright and I have a right to express it.
Speaker #0
Ooh, I love it. That's a beautiful affirmation for your body grief, you know, and that body trust phase. I love that.
Speaker #1
I love your paintings and I love that you call them paintings. P-A-I-N-T-I-N-G-S. I mean, I know that's how it's normally spelled, but the way you like emphasize that is so beautiful. Like, so did you paint before?
Speaker #0
Not really, no. Yeah. I mean, my dad is a painter, like paints houses, faux finish, all that stuff. And so I did like samples and he taught me a lot of stuff.
Speaker #1
How do you feel like prior to a painting session versus when you leave a painting session? Like what does it do for, I know you just went through a beautiful description of it, but like what do you feel in your body post painting?
Speaker #0
It's interesting because the pain doesn't go away.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
Because that's because structurally nothing changes. But emotionally I'm lighter. I feel more free and I'm able to just compartmentalize things better. I'm actually a lot nicer, a lot kinder. Pain can make me a mean person at times. It can make me mean to the people I love.
Speaker #1
It can make anyone mean. Years ago, I had a surgery on my vulva. I had a pre-melanoma there and so I had to get it removed. And it was definitely to that point the most... vulnerable medical thing I'd ever gone through. And I just remember just being so short with my parents who are like doing everything to help me and being like, oh, I'm not myself right now. Like I just like this has taken over me and it's like in the forefront. And it just gave me so much respect and compassion for people who are chronically in pain. So, you know, my heart is with you. And I'm also just so grateful that You're showing up for yourself. You're showing up for your community. You're showing up for your creativity. You're showing up for your body. It is such a beautiful example. And the fact that you're willing to do it wherever you're at on any given day, it's important for people to see that we don't have to be perfect in order to be out there and sharing.
Speaker #0
It can be messy.
Speaker #1
Yeah. And that's beautiful. And that's creativity.
Speaker #0
Thank you so much for having me. This was a beautiful conversation.
Speaker #1
Thank you for being here. I loved every second. I really loved your book. Everybody go get Jane's book. It is out now. Start your body grief process. Yay.
Speaker #0
Thank you.
Speaker #1
Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thanks to my guest, Jane Mattingly. For more info on Jane, follow her at Jane Mattingly and find her book. This is Body Grief at janemaddingly.com or wherever good books are found. Unleash Your Inner Creative is hosted and executive produced by me, Lauren LaGrasso, produced by Rachel Fulton with theme music by Liz Pohl. Again, Creative Cutie, thank you so much for listening. If you like what you heard today, remember to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Share the show with a friend and post about it on social media. Tag me at Lauren LaGrasso and at Unleash Your Inner Creative. and I will repost to share my gratitude. Also tag Jane, at Jane Mattingly, so she can share as well. My wish for you this week is that you start to get in touch with your body. Just remember you have a body and you have a relationship with that body. And I think that's a really good place to start. I love you, and I believe in you. Talk with you next week.

About Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LoGrasso (A Creativity Podcast)

New episodes are out every Wednesday - follow, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts :)

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About Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LoGrasso (A Creativity Podcast)

New episodes are out every Wednesday - follow, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts :)

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

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Description

From this episode, you’ll learn:

-What body grief is and how to recognize it in your own life
-The 7 stages of body grief and how to move through them

-How to begin rebuilding trust with your body—at any stage
-Why healing your relationship with your body can unlock your creativity

TW: Eating Disorders and Mental Health

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Transcription

Speaker #0
Have you ever struggled with having a body, with the grief over the way your body changes throughout the years or times when you've been in pain and just wish there was a way to make peace with it? What if you could get into a genuine relationship with your body and learn how to trust it? Today's guest will share how navigating body grief can open up paths for healing, self-love, and creative expression. She'll walk you through how acknowledging your body's changes. and sticking with yourself and your body can connect you to a deeper sense of peace and authenticity. Welcome to Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LaGrasso. I'm Lauren LaGrasso. I'm a Webby Award-winning podcast host and producer, singer-songwriter, public speaker, and creative coach. This show sits at the intersection of creativity, mental health, self-development, and spirituality, and it is meant to give you tools to love, trust, and know yourself enough to claim your right to creativity and pursue whatever it is that's on your heart. Today's guest is Jane Mattingly. She's a disability advocate and recovery expert who has developed a groundbreaking approach to navigating body grief. In her work, Jane teaches that body grief isn't something to overcome, but something to feel deeply and work through with self-compassion and grace. She walks us through the seven stages of body grief from her book, This Is Body Grief, which is out now and I highly recommend you read. The stages range from shock and self- blame to hope and eventual body trust, which can help us make space for the full range of emotions that come with mourning and accepting our ever-changing bodies, and that we're going to be living in these for the rest of our lives. I wanted to have Jane on the podcast because she offers a fresh, compassionate perspective on having a body. And trigger warning, I'm about to talk about eating disorders. As you may know from listening to the podcast, I've struggled with eating disorders. and had all kinds of feelings about my body. And in reading Jane's work, I really realized I still have so much to work through there. And that's a beautiful thing because her book gave me tools and a framework for that. And I know this conversation will do the same thing for you and help you start to get in relationship with your body, move through your body grief, and come to body trust. From today's chat, you'll learn what body grief is and how to start moving through it. how to start to get into relationship with your body, the seven stages of body grief, and how moving through your body grief and making peace with your body is connected to your creative process and loving yourself as a whole. Okay, now here she is, Jane Mattingly. Jane, I am so thrilled to have you on the show to talk about this big, difficult... and beautiful topic of body grief. So thank you for being here and thank you for writing your book.
Speaker #1
Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker #0
Oh, it is my honor. And I have a sneaking suspicion that allowing ourselves to feel body grief and learning body trust is a key to unleashing creatively and loving yourself more. We've talked about it briefly before we got into it. We'll hit it again at the end, but just super exciting and a juicy topic. But to start out at the top, what is body grief.
Speaker #1
Body grief is a term that I came up with years ago when I was struggling with my own body grief and working with people with eating disorders and body image. But really, body grief is making peace with the loss that comes with living in a body. It is mourning the loss that we have when we live in a body that's betrays us or we perceive that's betraying us. And there's so many lives that we live in our bodies, right? And sometimes it's really unfair when we can't live those specific lives that we were told we once could live or when we can no longer live the life that we used to live in our bodies. And so this is body grief is really about my story, but it's about so many other people's stories. And there's case studies of stories about people living through... all of their bodies that they've lived through and how to do that and the phases in which you go through and ways to cope and how it's nonlinear and multicyclical. And it's just a beautiful, messy journey.
Speaker #0
Yeah, for sure. And I know you came to understand about body grief very intimately through many different phases of your life. But would you mind taking me through the story of how you ended up wanting to speak about this?
Speaker #1
Yeah, no, not at all. Not at all. So to make a long story short, I had an eating disorder starting at the age of nine and it went undiagnosed, unnoticed, which is really common until I was about 22. I went through recovery. I had really very little barriers to care. I was very privileged in that. And then I wanted to turn my problem into my purpose. And so I went and got my master's in clinical mental health counseling. And then I was like, okay, I want to work with people with eating disorders and body image. It was a needed thing. A lot of people were not getting the help that they needed. And eating disorders were very underrepresented. And so I started working with people. with body image concerns and eating disorders. And I looked at it from this lens of grief. I then started doing events and like self-love events and body image events. Little did I know at the time how ableist that was because I was not disabled. I was quote unquote healthy. And then I took a bar class and which is like a Pilates class for those people that don't know, just with like ballet bars. And I lost my sight. my body was like not working. Like the lower half of my body pretty much like went paralyzed, what it felt like went paralyzed. And I was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder called intracranial hypertension. It's when your cerebral spinal fluid increases abnormal amounts and it bruises your spinal cord and your brain and your optic nerve. And that's why I lost my sight. And I was eligible for a brain surgery that saved my sight at that time. And that was number one of 19 brain and spine surgeries and a total hysterectomy that is over the past six and a half years. I was then within that year diagnosed with my genetic disorder that I was born with called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a connective tissue disorder that affects all of your tissues in your body, all of your connective tissues in your body. It's a spectrum disorder. It is known as a rare condition. disorder, but now geneticists are saying that it's the most common illness that you've never heard about. It really, really, really affects me within my neurological system. And it just like really took me down. My life has greatly changed. You know, me and my husband have been together for 12 years. So we've been through this journey of being able-bodied, non-disabled to disabled. Being a new bride, you know, was a big deal with my rollator going. out on the beach with my walker was a huge deal. That was a body grief journey, you know, just really grieving this past life that I used to live. But at that point, I was like, you know, sitting on hospital tables and laying down in hospital beds realizing like, well, shoot, now my body can't do. Here I was screaming from, you know, rooftops, like, love your body for what it can do. And I was like, well, what now? How am I supposed to love my body? This is I'm grieving. That was my story. And I looked back then on my journey. And when I was nine years old, that was body grief. I started talking to my clients and my aunts and my mom and my friends of all ages. And they were like, oh my God, body grief. I've never heard that term, but I definitely resonate. That's when I started to realize this is a universal concept that we all need to name it. And we've all... been through it, but maybe we've just never had the literacy or the coping skills to really move through it in a way that is healthy or is like just less bumpy.
Speaker #0
How did naming it help you on your journey?
Speaker #1
I mean, hugely, because it's kind of like when you're going through something and it's like, you can't find your way. For instance, if anyone has ever gone through the dismissal of trying to, like if you're really sick and you're, God forbid this happens, but it's quite common when you're dealing with symptoms and you're trying to get diagnosed with a chronic illness. Or you're just dealing with terrible symptoms and doctors are just dismissing you over and over and over again. And it turns out that you're just like almost relieved once you get a diagnosis. It's like that name of the diagnosis. It's not that you're relieved something's wrong with you. You're almost just relieved that now that there's like a way forward. Now that there's a name to the diagnosis, you're like, finally, there's something I can do with this. Finally, I'm not running around in the dark, having no clue what to do with this, having no clue how to cope. I don't feel quote unquote, and I don't like using this word, but I don't feel. crazy. I don't feel like I'm gaslighting myself anymore. And that is exactly what it felt like when I finally was able to name my body grief. It was like, this is grieving, you know, all of these emotions, all of these, you know, fluctuations of what I was, what was happening, like no wonder. No wonder because I'm grieving.
Speaker #0
Take me through that because you've got these seven stages of grief. Do the stages happen before you know what's your in-body grief? Like, I guess it would make sense because I'm looking at them right now. Could you share like in your own journey how each one hit?
Speaker #1
Yeah. So the phases are, you know, nonlinear, multicyclical. And for everyone, they're going to happen differently. But. you know, for a lot of people, they're going to happen, you know, how I have them laid out in the book. Dismissal being the first, shock, apology, fault, fight, hope slash hopelessness, and then trust. That's kind of usually how they occur. And that's, you know, how I've studied them and the many cases in the book, that's kind of how they've occurred for people. For me, that's how they occur. But I think one thing that's really interesting is you can kind of find that depending on your personality type depending on you know your trauma or temperament style you might lean towards certain phases more than the other i feel that yeah yeah i'm curious to know like what ones you might have leaned towards because like i lean towards apology and fight yeah
Speaker #0
I think I lean toward apology, fault, and fight.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
Definitely. But the apology one was really, I mean, your whole book was very confronting.
Speaker #1
Really?
Speaker #0
In an important way. Yeah, because I too struggled with eating disorder as a kid. I was bulimic, and I now would say I was anorexic, 7th grade through 8th grade. Nobody ever knew.
Speaker #1
I fixed it,
Speaker #0
quote unquote, on my own. It was... Kind of amazing. Creativity really saved my life because a Carpenter song randomly came on the radio. And it was like in the midst of when I was in this struggle that no one knew about. And my dad told me about Karen Carpenter. What he said was she ruined her voice. He said she was never able to sing again. And at that point, music was already very, very important to me. And I never made myself throw up again after that because I... didn't want to lose something that I loved more than, yeah, than whatever body hatred I was having at that time. So music, creativity really saved my life. But that said, like when I hear about people in recovery or who have recovered, I'm like, oh, I don't think I ever did that.
Speaker #1
Interesting. And that's so interesting too, not to go off topic, but when we compare our stories, that's dismissal.
Speaker #0
Ooh. So tell me more. So am I dismissing myself?
Speaker #1
Yeah. You're dismissing yourself right there because like an eating disorder is an eating disorder. It's going to look whatever way it's going to look. And it's so common with eating disorders to be like, well, mine wasn't that bad.
Speaker #0
I didn't think I did it well enough. I never completely stopped eating, you know, like,
Speaker #1
by the way, no one does.
Speaker #0
Right. But I didn't know that at the time. I just like, this is fuck. And I still have a lot of issues, so I'm sure I'm going to say a lot of things wrong.
Speaker #1
It's okay.
Speaker #0
I literally didn't think like, well, I'm not throwing up every meal, so I don't think I qualify.
Speaker #1
Isn't that interesting? Because this is very common. The amount of, and I did the same thing, Lauren. I did the exact same thing when I was in my eating disorder recovery. And the eating disorder brain, it does this. It clicks on and it will be like, wait, but it's fine. Like you're good. But every single client I've sat down with has said something of this nature.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
And that's dismissal because of external dismissal that we have heard from other people. The amount of doctors that had once said like, you're good. Like you're fine. She's good. She's good. And I was like, I remember thinking, and I talk about this in the book with the hall pass, you know, the doc, the amount of doctors and the amount of the therapist, even that like. I remember I knew something was wrong. Like I knew I wasn't eating enough. I knew that I was weak. I knew that something wasn't right, but I looked quote unquote normal. Now looking back, I'm like, damn, I was not looking good, but I was got a hall pass. And I remember being like, that's, that's my hall pass. Like, I remember being like, okay, that doctor and that therapist, they said I was good. And so we take that and we internally dismiss ourselves. And so like, yeah, that's dismissal too. And so like we can bounce in between these phases. And then like that adds to our apology then. Because then we're like, oh, I'm really sorry for taking up too much space. And I think women really do that. Then when we're like, oh, you know what? I'm so sorry. I don't have an eating disorder. You know, like I should I shouldn't have raised that alarm. You know, like too much. I'm too much.
Speaker #0
I totally felt like a burden. You know, like that's why I didn't want my parents to know. I didn't want to stress them out. You know, I don't want anyone to be worried about me. Yeah, it's just interesting because like as you were talking and I was also thinking back to the book, like it also doesn't matter because no matter what you do, no one's ever happy with you. Like I remember friends like criticizing that I wasn't eating enough. And then I was all proud because I ate a piece of carrot cake. And then I told that same friend that was criticizing and she's like, carrot cake is so bad for you. And we treat ourselves and our bodies the same way. It's like no matter what you do, no matter what our body does for us or its capabilities are, if we're not in relationship with our bodies. It's never enough.
Speaker #1
So true. We're always doubting it. We're hard on it. I mean, I know myself, like I'm so, so, so hard on my body. Like, like, why are you doing this? Why is this happening? And then, you know, we have to remember that it's always on our side, even when the symptoms suck, like really suck. It's kind of like, you know, when a toddler throws a tantrum, it's throwing a tantrum, your body is throwing a tantrum and you have to like still soothe it and be like, it's okay.
Speaker #0
So how do you do that and stay with it? Because you've gone through so much stuff medically, even when you're in the midst of one of the hardest moments. How do you do that?
Speaker #1
Oh my goodness. There's a lot of skills and tools that I use. Sometimes I fail at it. And that's the thing is with body of grief, you have to have compassion first and grace with yourself. So that means that like sometimes you might not do great at this process. And it's having gratitude and grace and compassion and knowing that this is harm reduction. That means like, you know, we're using skills to hopefully like get to a place where we burn out on our maladaptive coping skills, right? You know, an eating disorder or substance use or whatever are ways that aren't helpful in the body grief process, right? And now we know that. Like I don't blame the little girl that used an eating disorder because she didn't know that. But now I know better. Now I know that that's not helpful. And so when I'm dealing with really awful just thing after thing after thing, sometimes I even have it in the book. I'll give a little nugget. Like I throw a temper tantrum and like I plan it out. Sometimes, you know, I like really lean into my feelings and really feel the feelings. Sometimes I really tap out of the feelings. and lean into, you know, community, I really believe community is the antidote to body grief, truly, truly, truly, which is not a popular thing these days. In our society, individualism is like being pushed on us, I think, in so many ways, I think makes us more of a soldier within our capitalistic society, which then disconnects us from our body even more. And the more we're disconnected from our body, the less likely we are to grieve.
Speaker #0
What does community healing look like through a body grief lens?
Speaker #1
Telling people how you feel, opening up to someone, allowing people to help you. I think that is one of the biggest things, allowing people to help you. Like you just said, I feel like a burden. That's so common. When people feel like burdens, I know I feel like that a lot. I then don't want people to help because I feel like that's just adding on. And it's like people want to help. People want something to do. So allowing people to help. Community can be online. Community can be, you know, at the library, in a group, in a mom's group, in a women without kids group, in, you know, an LGBTQ group. It could be, you know, anywhere. A gardening group. You know, I really think this is where I saw something online actually yesterday where it was like. Community also means showing up to that event, even if you don't want to. And I was like, this is really important because, and it says showing community also means like picking up that friend from the airport, even if it means you don't want to. And I was like, I think this is so important because I think in the last like five years, society has really moved into this world where like, we're like, you can get an Uber. Like, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not going to that event anymore. Like I'm like prioritizing myself. That's important to prioritize ourselves. But I think we've like gone a little too far.
Speaker #0
I agree. Like I don't think that that's healthy or sustainable. Like it is not normal to not need anyone.
Speaker #1
Yeah. Like, you know how what is the saying where it's like no new friends?
Speaker #0
I hate that saying.
Speaker #1
I hate that saying. I'm like, no, we need more friends like we need community.
Speaker #0
Yeah, I think that saying is so weird. I've actually I've like done posts about that before. I'm like, fine. Send them to me.
Speaker #1
Yeah,
Speaker #0
send them to me. Send them my way. Yeah, they're welcome in my home. I loved even in the in the book how you talked about actually it really inspired me how you and your husband have a friend over for dinner at least once a week.
Speaker #1
Yes. Yes. It's so important.
Speaker #0
Yeah. My grandpa used to have his friend Beverly over for lunch every day. Like she would come over and hang out with him. They were like platonic friends. Like she was just like this sweet woman. She was actually married to one of his best friends. She worked in the area pretty much every day. Bev would come over, he would make coffee and make her a sandwich and they'd hang out. And why don't we do that anymore?
Speaker #1
I know it's because we're tired and depleted. But then again, that's giving into the system that's telling us to be another like cog in the system, right? And that is not good. Like we don't want to be disconnected from our bodies because then we can't grieve and then we can't heal. If we don't grieve, we can't heal. And if we can't heal, we can't be a part of society or community. And this is why it's a universal issue, right? It's not just eating disorders. It's not just chronic illness. It's not just disability. You know, I talk about in the book, it's injury. It's pregnancy loss. It's motherhood. It's infertility. It's gender dysphoria. It's, you know, racial inequity. It's, you know, everyone experiences body grief because we have some loss of a life due to our bodies.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And it's also the smallest things too, like things you might not even ever think of. In reading your book. My hands sweat a lot. I have something called hyperhidrosis. And it's something I felt ashamed of and like gross about my entire life. Because when you go to shake someone's hand, and it's not all the time, but when you go to shake someone's hand and then they like wipe it off, it makes you feel like you need to apologize. That's where the apology one really hit me. Because I've been apologizing for it and also denying it, really. denying, dismissing myself, trying to pretend like it wasn't happening, trying to find all these ways to not make myself sweat. It's the smallest thing. It's not a life-threatening disorder. There's nothing. But it can even show up in little ways like that.
Speaker #1
Oh, yes. Sometimes, like you said, the littlest of ways are the biggest. Say you have the common cold and you have been just working your ass off. And you have your favorite artist coming to town to perform and you get the common cold and like you get really sick. Like that's body grief. Like maybe when you were younger, you would be able to just like fight off that cold a little bit better. But now you can't. That's grief. Like that is grieving that your body can't do that anymore because you were just like, you know, your body is slammed you to the ground and you cannot make it to your concert. You can't make it to that, you know. doji concert or you know that for me it would be like you know taylor swift i would be so upset it could be you know breaking your ankle to the common cold to you know a pregnancy loss to 19 brain spine surgeries you know like there's no hierarchy to suffering here it's body grief it all is there's body grief and then there's also just like remembering you have a body
Speaker #0
And you spoke a little bit to this in the book, but for some reason, when I really have to get in touch with that, it freaks me out. Like I start to feel like tingly and scared and sometimes it can feel good, but often it feels like, well, who am I then? Like if I have a body, I have me, okay, I live in my body, but then my body's its own thing and it's got its own consciousness, like what's going on? And then I kind of get freaked out and then I just, I think I dissociate. So what does having a relationship with your body actually look like? And also, what is that like weirdness that I'm experiencing? Is that common?
Speaker #1
Oh, it's so common. I'm glad you brought this up because it's a really common experience, which is why in the book I talk about the ocean of body awareness. It's like, hey, let's take this real slow. We're going to literally dip our toe in like we can take it right out. put our shins in, let's wait in the water. Because most people have a really hard time being in their body. I would say most people in capitalist society do because we're not used to being in it. I mean, we're scrolling and we're dissociated from our body most of the time. And I don't blame us for being that, right? Because look at what the world is. Like, it's a terrifying place right now. It's stressful and scary. And depending on how old we all are, like it has been for a long time. And depending on, you know, like if you've had an eating disorder and body image, like that just adds to the trauma of being in your body. And so what it is, is your amygdala, which for the people that haven't read the book or don't know this, that is the bite. flight freezer fawn that's where that lives it's a central nervous system that tells me that your amygdala is being hijacked right there is that it's saying like this isn't safe and it tells me that your frontal lobe is shutting off when you're in your body a little bit and it just needs more time and that is going to be a muscle that needs to be like literally your amygdala might be bigger so actually like your pet the pet scans have shown you People with eating disorders, people with ADHD have larger amygdalas than people without. Because, you know, there's such a thing as neuroplasticity. Our brains can change. And so people with eating disorders, depending on how long they've had them, but have larger amygdalas because we spend more time in our amygdalas than other people.
Speaker #0
That's fascinating.
Speaker #1
I know. It could be part of that.
Speaker #0
That's so interesting. And it's interesting too, and you talk about this, but how it goes in and out. I was in a really good place with my body, or probably the best place I've ever been, end of 2023, beginning of 2024. And then I feel like recently, maybe as I've been going through more stuff, which I'm sure is common, is you unearth and you actually start working through things, you have a regression. How do you manage, because you're also going through so many things physically, how do you manage the going? in and out of like feeling like you're in a good place. And then today the grief is more intense. How do you work through that?
Speaker #1
I really, really, really try not to label it as good and bad.
Speaker #0
Oh, that's good.
Speaker #1
Gosh, my therapist at like a community counseling center when I lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming with my husband, he was my boyfriend back then. It was over 10 years ago. I was going through my eating disorder and he was like, I want you guys to use the word helpful and unhelpful. instead of good and bad. And I was like, we use it now all the time. Like, that's all we do. And it's so helpful. It is. It's like, is this helpful or unhelpful? You don't ever grade anything then. You don't ever shame anything then. And so when it comes to my body grief, I'm like, is this, you know, a helpful day or an unhelpful day? Is this a helpful thing or an unhelpful thing? I actually say for Sean, like, this is a rule for us, but like, I ask for him not to ask how I'm doing because that gives me too much pressure because I usually just don't feel good. I know that might feel shocking for some people to hear, maybe not, depending on who's listening. Like, I don't feel good. That is my norm, which sucks. Like, that is body grief.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
Depending on, like, what my pain management is or how bad that feeling is, like, that might be a better day for me. And I might be able to get out of the house. Now, there are some things that can be really awful and triggering. Some people have asked, like, how have you kept yourself in recovery with eating disorders? How has your body image been? How have you been able to, like, continue to, like, love yourself and all these things? And I think the constant there has been, I know that it is my responsibility to... continue to take care of myself and be compassionate to myself, whatever that looks like in that moment. A big reason I wrote this book, I talk about this in the hope slash hopelessness chapter, which is a hard chapter, but a beautiful chapter is a lot of people that live with chronic illness and chronic pain struggle with hopelessness and despair. And they have a hard time going to therapy because when they go to therapy, they don't want to express that to a therapist in fear that the therapist will
Speaker #0
you know, be worried about suicidal ideation or, you know, fear that the therapist will then, you know, commit them. And having worked in the fields, I wanted to write a book that a client could take to a therapist's office and say, Hey, I'm going through this. I'm going through body grief. I don't have a plan. I am safe, but I am experiencing this. There are moments and days where I don't want to wake up because I am so hopeless and I'm dealing with so much body grief and I want to talk about it. That's normal with people with chronic pain. That's normal when it comes to body grief. And the more we can talk about it, the less likely we're going to have devastating, devastating news. And that's a big reason why I wrote this book.
Speaker #1
When you were writing it, Because I hear so many authors come on the show and they're like, oh, I wrote a book. It was so hard and terrible. So I know just like writing a book of any sort can be a process.
Speaker #0
I actually don't feel that way.
Speaker #1
So glad to hear it. I've had a couple of people recently say that it makes me so happy. So tell me about your process of writing and what it was like and like how it affected your body and your relationship with your body.
Speaker #0
I hope this doesn't like make people mad, but I loved writing this book. It was really wonderful and magical. I keep using the word magical because it was a magical process. I got to talk to so many people and interview like amazing people from all walks of life. And they were able to tell me their stories. And like how healing and therapeutic is that? I was so honored to be on the other end of the call and just hear about their body grief and be able to write their stories. But also... To be able to relive the stories, there's a lot of trauma in this. And so I don't remember some of the stories exactly. And so I was able to talk to my family and hear it from their perspective. And that was kind of wild. There were some of the things in the hospitals that happened. And I was like, oh my God, I don't remember that. You're right. And so hearing it from my sister's perspectives, From my mom and dad's perspective, from Sean, my husband's perspective, that was really tough. They go through a whole different piece of it. I'm in the circus of it all. I'm being poked and prodded. But Sean and my parents and my sisters, they're going through it and are traumatized in a completely different way. And so I feel like I was writing for once and was like taking it in from their perspective. And that was hard. heartbreaking, but it was also beautiful because I was so grateful. And, you know, I had like my book playlist and I don't know, it just really made me so grateful for everything I have. Going through this type of body grief and dealing with like terminal illnesses and having like near death experiences, you know, it changes how you view life. I was like a book deal. I was like, hell yeah. Like I would never complain about this.
Speaker #1
What is the biggest change in how you view life now as opposed to before you were diagnosed?
Speaker #0
We would be having the same conversation, but I'm not the same person. It's so wild. I'm so much more chill.
Speaker #1
That's interesting. Why?
Speaker #0
Oh, my God. I have OCD. So it's like very much who I am. It like tortures me to my core. Right. But thank God for medication. So that like keeps me a little bit wired. Right. But. I was working five jobs. And so I was a TA. I was getting my master's. I was working two nanny jobs. And then I was an assistant at a therapist's office. And then I was running my business. I was just doing it all. And I was like then going to workout classes. And I was like, boss, babe, I couldn't stand myself now. Like I would be like, ew, that girl. I thought I could do everything. And I really kind of ran myself into the ground. I'm not blaming that, but I really kind of did this to myself a little bit.
Speaker #1
To your point in the book and all our conversation today, the culture does this to us too. It makes us feel that we're only good if we're a good little machine and that the moment we're not useful, we are useless and have no value.
Speaker #0
Oh, I love that.
Speaker #1
I really, really, really relate. I saw so much of myself in you. I mean, it was shocking because even while you were still going through this and getting your brain surgeries and getting your back surgeries, there was one scene from your life you depicted where I think you had had a brain surgery and then days later were trying to meet with clients. I was freaking out during that part. Okay. I was panicking. I was sweating reading it.
Speaker #0
It was bad. That was in the beginning. I was in complete denial. Like I look back and I'm like, what a terrible role model was I to be sitting with clients?
Speaker #1
I mean, you had to go through it to learn it though. Who can teach it better now? But I understand because again, like when you got sick, it happened so fast. Your brain probably didn't have a chance to catch up.
Speaker #0
It was. I mean, I remember it so vividly too. I woke up. My family has just been really great. They've come down. And just helped, helped, helped. I'm very lucky to have them. And, you know, he was working on his computer. And I woke up and I was like, my head hurts. He was like, Shane, you just had brain surgery. And I was like, oh, right. I was just in denial. He was like, yeah, dude, you just had brain surgery. I remember kind of like my OCD always comes out after surgeries. Like it gets, I get like kind of neurotic in like a clinical way. I'll be like, I can't, I can't, I have to, I have to do this. I have to do this. And I remember being like, I have to see clients. I have to see them. Like, I can't lose my business. Like if I lose my business, I lose everything. And I remember that just being like the most devastating thing ever. I was like, I've lost my body. I've lost my health. And if I lose my business, like I'm nothing.
Speaker #1
How have you, and do you still work on knowing that who you are is the best thing about you, that you're worth it? doesn't lie outside of you or even on you, that it's in you?
Speaker #0
Gosh, it's an everyday practice. What you talk about with creativity is probably like the best thing that I've started to lean into in the past couple of years. I grew up as a dancer. Being in my body in that way is just for fun is what I do. I literally dance constantly in my wheelchair, just listening to music that way. Like... Reminding myself that life is fun, even if it's being at home, twerking and in my wheelchair, whatever that looks like. Painting. I love to paint now. Being with my pets and my husband. Small pockets of joy and gratitude. It's tough, though, when this book is now my everything and I'm trying to sell it.
Speaker #1
Oh, yeah. It's so difficult to know that there is purpose. joy and merit just in the creative process. And also to be in an industry that only succeeds if people buy or tune in or download. It's like it's a constant mindfuck because you're like, OK, I believe this in my soul that this is worthy no matter what. And I still have a dream that it will be read or heard by thousands or millions of people. Yeah, it's like a constant balancing act.
Speaker #0
Yeah, it makes sense. You know, it's the world we live in, but it's hard not to get like crumbled by it. And I'm an all or nothing person. So I have to keep myself in check. And so for me, that means doing emails from bed or doing it on the porch, finding balance in it all and leaning into community, community, community, because I isolate. It's so easy for me to isolate. I'm a middle child. I'm a really good one too. I know how to like bring it up constantly.
Speaker #1
That sounds like middle child healing to me, being like, hey, I exist.
Speaker #0
I know. I know. It's so funny. I think being a middle child is the funniest thing ever. But middle children know how to like navigate things and self-play and all that kind of stuff, you know? So it's just easy for me to just like be alone. And now that I am disabled and can't drive and all the things, it's just easy for me to do that. But also, I'm a really good friend and I'm social. So it's like, I got to just keep leading into community.
Speaker #1
Can you just talk a little? Because I feel like we didn't fully answer this. Like, what is body trust? And what are some practical ways to rebuild trust with our bodies? Hey, Creative Cutie, I wanted to remind you of something. I am a creative coach. And if you're interested in unleashing your creativity, sharing your creative project with the world, and or finally going after your biggest dreams, I would love... to help you, to hold up a mirror for you, to support you, and to be your co-creator and your coach. You can email me at lauren.lagrasso at gmail.com to set up a free discovery call, or go to my website, laurenlagrasso.com, and click the contact page and write me an email on there. I can't wait to help you unleash your inner creative and find your authentic voice. Creativity is your birthright. Let's unleash.
Speaker #0
Body trust is something that we really... It's interesting because body trust I put as the last phase, but it's really something that we carry along with us throughout all of these phases. It's something that we learned. We learn through hindsight. It's collected throughout our grief. So it's like when we go through one of the phases, we learn that, ah, I can trust my body because I got through this phase. She got me here. He got me here. They got me here. I got you. I got you. It's saying like, because I was able to get through here, I can go on and bridge myself to the next phase. It's that bridge. It's that liaison. It got me there. So it's not only the last phase, but it's also this like, it's this bridge onto the next grievance in that like, it's that compounding factor.
Speaker #1
Like all healing. It's not like a place you're like, I'm healed. I've arrived.
Speaker #0
It's not a destination.
Speaker #1
Right. Yeah.
Speaker #0
And that was something that was really important for me to get across when I was talking to Penguin when they took this book. Because I was like, self-help is a tough thing for me. Because usually there's this like band-aid solution at the end. And that is not this book. There's no such thing as grieved. There's no such thing as being like trusted or whatever. I want people to feel attuned. with where they are on their bodies. But you might only be there for like a minute, or you might just be there for a day and then you go back. And then you're like, okay, but I was here. I know what attunement feels like. And so because I have that, now dismissal is going to feel different.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's so important too. Because as I was prepping for this, actually, I was like feeling a lot of shame because I was in a... what I would have called before this, but I'm going to consider what was the terminology used? Not good, bad.
Speaker #0
Helpful or unhelpful.
Speaker #1
I was in a helpful place back in the end of 2023 and early 2024. And as I was like reading the book and prepping, like I was feeling shame, like what happened? Like, why have I regressed? What's like, what's wrong? What's going on? And now it, instead of feeling that shame, I'm like, well, I was there then. So I can get that again. And maybe there's just something else that's coming up. right now that I have to address instead of like saying what I'm feeling in this moment is bad. Maybe it's information.
Speaker #0
Oh, I love that. My sister just reminded me of this. Actually, my younger sister, Claire, she was like, cause I was talking to her about like regression and things like that. I was like, Oh, I really don't want this to happen. And she was like, but Jane, it won't. She was like, I just read a book. And I was like, you're so cute. Cause she read an early copy. She's like, I just read a book that said this. I was like, I love you so much. Um, she's like, you can't ever go back because you're only forward. You've learned and gained all this perspective. So the trust is there already in your compound. It's compounded. It's exactly what you just said. So we're only better, baby.
Speaker #1
Hey,
Speaker #0
going up from here. Welcome to us.
Speaker #1
For our last minutes together, I do want to talk about the connection between body trust and trust. and body grief and creativity. What do you see that as?
Speaker #0
I think it's a beautiful bridge towards safety. For me, I just think of, I'm right now looking at my paintbrushes. When I am in a lot of pain, I go straight towards painting with no purpose behind it. I don't want to think about selling anything. I don't want to think about anything. I just want to think about putting color on canvas. And I put on my favorite playlist. I don't want to think about anything else. And I might smoke a little cannabis to make myself feel better. And I just paint. Body trust is a two-way street. And I will say that time and time again. And so in order for me to trust my body, my body has to trust me back. And so I'm taking care of my body. And so in those moments, I really set the tone. You know, it's aromatherapy. It's nourishing my body. It's giving myself. electrolytes. It's giving myself, you know, hot compresses. It's really, really treating myself with so much compassion. And also the tears are going to be flowing. You know, the emotions are going to be going. That allows me to just be in my body and trust whatever comes up. That for me is like what those things mean. What about you?
Speaker #1
Well, I think everything is connected to everything. So I see it from that perspective. But I do think that like trusting your body and like being in touch with your body is inherently connected to trusting and loving yourself. And that if you're constantly living as like a floating head or trying to make yourself into a machine and dissociating from your body, you're never actually like grounded in the present moment. and here with yourself. And so since my theory is that to unleash creatively, we need to love, trust, and know ourselves enough to believe we have the right to do that. I think believing you have a body, like actually believing that and knowing you're in it and believing you have a right to take up space and be here is as important as saying I am inherently creative. Creativity is my birthright and I have a right to express it.
Speaker #0
Ooh, I love it. That's a beautiful affirmation for your body grief, you know, and that body trust phase. I love that.
Speaker #1
I love your paintings and I love that you call them paintings. P-A-I-N-T-I-N-G-S. I mean, I know that's how it's normally spelled, but the way you like emphasize that is so beautiful. Like, so did you paint before?
Speaker #0
Not really, no. Yeah. I mean, my dad is a painter, like paints houses, faux finish, all that stuff. And so I did like samples and he taught me a lot of stuff.
Speaker #1
How do you feel like prior to a painting session versus when you leave a painting session? Like what does it do for, I know you just went through a beautiful description of it, but like what do you feel in your body post painting?
Speaker #0
It's interesting because the pain doesn't go away.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
Because that's because structurally nothing changes. But emotionally I'm lighter. I feel more free and I'm able to just compartmentalize things better. I'm actually a lot nicer, a lot kinder. Pain can make me a mean person at times. It can make me mean to the people I love.
Speaker #1
It can make anyone mean. Years ago, I had a surgery on my vulva. I had a pre-melanoma there and so I had to get it removed. And it was definitely to that point the most... vulnerable medical thing I'd ever gone through. And I just remember just being so short with my parents who are like doing everything to help me and being like, oh, I'm not myself right now. Like I just like this has taken over me and it's like in the forefront. And it just gave me so much respect and compassion for people who are chronically in pain. So, you know, my heart is with you. And I'm also just so grateful that You're showing up for yourself. You're showing up for your community. You're showing up for your creativity. You're showing up for your body. It is such a beautiful example. And the fact that you're willing to do it wherever you're at on any given day, it's important for people to see that we don't have to be perfect in order to be out there and sharing.
Speaker #0
It can be messy.
Speaker #1
Yeah. And that's beautiful. And that's creativity.
Speaker #0
Thank you so much for having me. This was a beautiful conversation.
Speaker #1
Thank you for being here. I loved every second. I really loved your book. Everybody go get Jane's book. It is out now. Start your body grief process. Yay.
Speaker #0
Thank you.
Speaker #1
Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thanks to my guest, Jane Mattingly. For more info on Jane, follow her at Jane Mattingly and find her book. This is Body Grief at janemaddingly.com or wherever good books are found. Unleash Your Inner Creative is hosted and executive produced by me, Lauren LaGrasso, produced by Rachel Fulton with theme music by Liz Pohl. Again, Creative Cutie, thank you so much for listening. If you like what you heard today, remember to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Share the show with a friend and post about it on social media. Tag me at Lauren LaGrasso and at Unleash Your Inner Creative. and I will repost to share my gratitude. Also tag Jane, at Jane Mattingly, so she can share as well. My wish for you this week is that you start to get in touch with your body. Just remember you have a body and you have a relationship with that body. And I think that's a really good place to start. I love you, and I believe in you. Talk with you next week.

About Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LoGrasso (A Creativity Podcast)

New episodes are out every Wednesday - follow, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts :)

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About Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LoGrasso (A Creativity Podcast)

New episodes are out every Wednesday - follow, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts :)

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Description

From this episode, you’ll learn:

-What body grief is and how to recognize it in your own life
-The 7 stages of body grief and how to move through them

-How to begin rebuilding trust with your body—at any stage
-Why healing your relationship with your body can unlock your creativity

TW: Eating Disorders and Mental Health

More on Jayne

Unleash is Nominated for a Webby Award and we need your help to win! Vote here: https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2025/podcasts/shows/creativity-marketing

📩 Reach out for a free discovery call at Lauren.LoGrasso@gmail.com or visit https://www.laurenlograsso.com/contact/

Follow the show: @unleashyourinnercreative

Follow me: @LaurenLoGrasso

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Have you ever struggled with having a body, with the grief over the way your body changes throughout the years or times when you've been in pain and just wish there was a way to make peace with it? What if you could get into a genuine relationship with your body and learn how to trust it? Today's guest will share how navigating body grief can open up paths for healing, self-love, and creative expression. She'll walk you through how acknowledging your body's changes. and sticking with yourself and your body can connect you to a deeper sense of peace and authenticity. Welcome to Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LaGrasso. I'm Lauren LaGrasso. I'm a Webby Award-winning podcast host and producer, singer-songwriter, public speaker, and creative coach. This show sits at the intersection of creativity, mental health, self-development, and spirituality, and it is meant to give you tools to love, trust, and know yourself enough to claim your right to creativity and pursue whatever it is that's on your heart. Today's guest is Jane Mattingly. She's a disability advocate and recovery expert who has developed a groundbreaking approach to navigating body grief. In her work, Jane teaches that body grief isn't something to overcome, but something to feel deeply and work through with self-compassion and grace. She walks us through the seven stages of body grief from her book, This Is Body Grief, which is out now and I highly recommend you read. The stages range from shock and self- blame to hope and eventual body trust, which can help us make space for the full range of emotions that come with mourning and accepting our ever-changing bodies, and that we're going to be living in these for the rest of our lives. I wanted to have Jane on the podcast because she offers a fresh, compassionate perspective on having a body. And trigger warning, I'm about to talk about eating disorders. As you may know from listening to the podcast, I've struggled with eating disorders. and had all kinds of feelings about my body. And in reading Jane's work, I really realized I still have so much to work through there. And that's a beautiful thing because her book gave me tools and a framework for that. And I know this conversation will do the same thing for you and help you start to get in relationship with your body, move through your body grief, and come to body trust. From today's chat, you'll learn what body grief is and how to start moving through it. how to start to get into relationship with your body, the seven stages of body grief, and how moving through your body grief and making peace with your body is connected to your creative process and loving yourself as a whole. Okay, now here she is, Jane Mattingly. Jane, I am so thrilled to have you on the show to talk about this big, difficult... and beautiful topic of body grief. So thank you for being here and thank you for writing your book.
Speaker #1
Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker #0
Oh, it is my honor. And I have a sneaking suspicion that allowing ourselves to feel body grief and learning body trust is a key to unleashing creatively and loving yourself more. We've talked about it briefly before we got into it. We'll hit it again at the end, but just super exciting and a juicy topic. But to start out at the top, what is body grief.
Speaker #1
Body grief is a term that I came up with years ago when I was struggling with my own body grief and working with people with eating disorders and body image. But really, body grief is making peace with the loss that comes with living in a body. It is mourning the loss that we have when we live in a body that's betrays us or we perceive that's betraying us. And there's so many lives that we live in our bodies, right? And sometimes it's really unfair when we can't live those specific lives that we were told we once could live or when we can no longer live the life that we used to live in our bodies. And so this is body grief is really about my story, but it's about so many other people's stories. And there's case studies of stories about people living through... all of their bodies that they've lived through and how to do that and the phases in which you go through and ways to cope and how it's nonlinear and multicyclical. And it's just a beautiful, messy journey.
Speaker #0
Yeah, for sure. And I know you came to understand about body grief very intimately through many different phases of your life. But would you mind taking me through the story of how you ended up wanting to speak about this?
Speaker #1
Yeah, no, not at all. Not at all. So to make a long story short, I had an eating disorder starting at the age of nine and it went undiagnosed, unnoticed, which is really common until I was about 22. I went through recovery. I had really very little barriers to care. I was very privileged in that. And then I wanted to turn my problem into my purpose. And so I went and got my master's in clinical mental health counseling. And then I was like, okay, I want to work with people with eating disorders and body image. It was a needed thing. A lot of people were not getting the help that they needed. And eating disorders were very underrepresented. And so I started working with people. with body image concerns and eating disorders. And I looked at it from this lens of grief. I then started doing events and like self-love events and body image events. Little did I know at the time how ableist that was because I was not disabled. I was quote unquote healthy. And then I took a bar class and which is like a Pilates class for those people that don't know, just with like ballet bars. And I lost my sight. my body was like not working. Like the lower half of my body pretty much like went paralyzed, what it felt like went paralyzed. And I was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder called intracranial hypertension. It's when your cerebral spinal fluid increases abnormal amounts and it bruises your spinal cord and your brain and your optic nerve. And that's why I lost my sight. And I was eligible for a brain surgery that saved my sight at that time. And that was number one of 19 brain and spine surgeries and a total hysterectomy that is over the past six and a half years. I was then within that year diagnosed with my genetic disorder that I was born with called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a connective tissue disorder that affects all of your tissues in your body, all of your connective tissues in your body. It's a spectrum disorder. It is known as a rare condition. disorder, but now geneticists are saying that it's the most common illness that you've never heard about. It really, really, really affects me within my neurological system. And it just like really took me down. My life has greatly changed. You know, me and my husband have been together for 12 years. So we've been through this journey of being able-bodied, non-disabled to disabled. Being a new bride, you know, was a big deal with my rollator going. out on the beach with my walker was a huge deal. That was a body grief journey, you know, just really grieving this past life that I used to live. But at that point, I was like, you know, sitting on hospital tables and laying down in hospital beds realizing like, well, shoot, now my body can't do. Here I was screaming from, you know, rooftops, like, love your body for what it can do. And I was like, well, what now? How am I supposed to love my body? This is I'm grieving. That was my story. And I looked back then on my journey. And when I was nine years old, that was body grief. I started talking to my clients and my aunts and my mom and my friends of all ages. And they were like, oh my God, body grief. I've never heard that term, but I definitely resonate. That's when I started to realize this is a universal concept that we all need to name it. And we've all... been through it, but maybe we've just never had the literacy or the coping skills to really move through it in a way that is healthy or is like just less bumpy.
Speaker #0
How did naming it help you on your journey?
Speaker #1
I mean, hugely, because it's kind of like when you're going through something and it's like, you can't find your way. For instance, if anyone has ever gone through the dismissal of trying to, like if you're really sick and you're, God forbid this happens, but it's quite common when you're dealing with symptoms and you're trying to get diagnosed with a chronic illness. Or you're just dealing with terrible symptoms and doctors are just dismissing you over and over and over again. And it turns out that you're just like almost relieved once you get a diagnosis. It's like that name of the diagnosis. It's not that you're relieved something's wrong with you. You're almost just relieved that now that there's like a way forward. Now that there's a name to the diagnosis, you're like, finally, there's something I can do with this. Finally, I'm not running around in the dark, having no clue what to do with this, having no clue how to cope. I don't feel quote unquote, and I don't like using this word, but I don't feel. crazy. I don't feel like I'm gaslighting myself anymore. And that is exactly what it felt like when I finally was able to name my body grief. It was like, this is grieving, you know, all of these emotions, all of these, you know, fluctuations of what I was, what was happening, like no wonder. No wonder because I'm grieving.
Speaker #0
Take me through that because you've got these seven stages of grief. Do the stages happen before you know what's your in-body grief? Like, I guess it would make sense because I'm looking at them right now. Could you share like in your own journey how each one hit?
Speaker #1
Yeah. So the phases are, you know, nonlinear, multicyclical. And for everyone, they're going to happen differently. But. you know, for a lot of people, they're going to happen, you know, how I have them laid out in the book. Dismissal being the first, shock, apology, fault, fight, hope slash hopelessness, and then trust. That's kind of usually how they occur. And that's, you know, how I've studied them and the many cases in the book, that's kind of how they've occurred for people. For me, that's how they occur. But I think one thing that's really interesting is you can kind of find that depending on your personality type depending on you know your trauma or temperament style you might lean towards certain phases more than the other i feel that yeah yeah i'm curious to know like what ones you might have leaned towards because like i lean towards apology and fight yeah
Speaker #0
I think I lean toward apology, fault, and fight.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
Definitely. But the apology one was really, I mean, your whole book was very confronting.
Speaker #1
Really?
Speaker #0
In an important way. Yeah, because I too struggled with eating disorder as a kid. I was bulimic, and I now would say I was anorexic, 7th grade through 8th grade. Nobody ever knew.
Speaker #1
I fixed it,
Speaker #0
quote unquote, on my own. It was... Kind of amazing. Creativity really saved my life because a Carpenter song randomly came on the radio. And it was like in the midst of when I was in this struggle that no one knew about. And my dad told me about Karen Carpenter. What he said was she ruined her voice. He said she was never able to sing again. And at that point, music was already very, very important to me. And I never made myself throw up again after that because I... didn't want to lose something that I loved more than, yeah, than whatever body hatred I was having at that time. So music, creativity really saved my life. But that said, like when I hear about people in recovery or who have recovered, I'm like, oh, I don't think I ever did that.
Speaker #1
Interesting. And that's so interesting too, not to go off topic, but when we compare our stories, that's dismissal.
Speaker #0
Ooh. So tell me more. So am I dismissing myself?
Speaker #1
Yeah. You're dismissing yourself right there because like an eating disorder is an eating disorder. It's going to look whatever way it's going to look. And it's so common with eating disorders to be like, well, mine wasn't that bad.
Speaker #0
I didn't think I did it well enough. I never completely stopped eating, you know, like,
Speaker #1
by the way, no one does.
Speaker #0
Right. But I didn't know that at the time. I just like, this is fuck. And I still have a lot of issues, so I'm sure I'm going to say a lot of things wrong.
Speaker #1
It's okay.
Speaker #0
I literally didn't think like, well, I'm not throwing up every meal, so I don't think I qualify.
Speaker #1
Isn't that interesting? Because this is very common. The amount of, and I did the same thing, Lauren. I did the exact same thing when I was in my eating disorder recovery. And the eating disorder brain, it does this. It clicks on and it will be like, wait, but it's fine. Like you're good. But every single client I've sat down with has said something of this nature.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
And that's dismissal because of external dismissal that we have heard from other people. The amount of doctors that had once said like, you're good. Like you're fine. She's good. She's good. And I was like, I remember thinking, and I talk about this in the book with the hall pass, you know, the doc, the amount of doctors and the amount of the therapist, even that like. I remember I knew something was wrong. Like I knew I wasn't eating enough. I knew that I was weak. I knew that something wasn't right, but I looked quote unquote normal. Now looking back, I'm like, damn, I was not looking good, but I was got a hall pass. And I remember being like, that's, that's my hall pass. Like, I remember being like, okay, that doctor and that therapist, they said I was good. And so we take that and we internally dismiss ourselves. And so like, yeah, that's dismissal too. And so like we can bounce in between these phases. And then like that adds to our apology then. Because then we're like, oh, I'm really sorry for taking up too much space. And I think women really do that. Then when we're like, oh, you know what? I'm so sorry. I don't have an eating disorder. You know, like I should I shouldn't have raised that alarm. You know, like too much. I'm too much.
Speaker #0
I totally felt like a burden. You know, like that's why I didn't want my parents to know. I didn't want to stress them out. You know, I don't want anyone to be worried about me. Yeah, it's just interesting because like as you were talking and I was also thinking back to the book, like it also doesn't matter because no matter what you do, no one's ever happy with you. Like I remember friends like criticizing that I wasn't eating enough. And then I was all proud because I ate a piece of carrot cake. And then I told that same friend that was criticizing and she's like, carrot cake is so bad for you. And we treat ourselves and our bodies the same way. It's like no matter what you do, no matter what our body does for us or its capabilities are, if we're not in relationship with our bodies. It's never enough.
Speaker #1
So true. We're always doubting it. We're hard on it. I mean, I know myself, like I'm so, so, so hard on my body. Like, like, why are you doing this? Why is this happening? And then, you know, we have to remember that it's always on our side, even when the symptoms suck, like really suck. It's kind of like, you know, when a toddler throws a tantrum, it's throwing a tantrum, your body is throwing a tantrum and you have to like still soothe it and be like, it's okay.
Speaker #0
So how do you do that and stay with it? Because you've gone through so much stuff medically, even when you're in the midst of one of the hardest moments. How do you do that?
Speaker #1
Oh my goodness. There's a lot of skills and tools that I use. Sometimes I fail at it. And that's the thing is with body of grief, you have to have compassion first and grace with yourself. So that means that like sometimes you might not do great at this process. And it's having gratitude and grace and compassion and knowing that this is harm reduction. That means like, you know, we're using skills to hopefully like get to a place where we burn out on our maladaptive coping skills, right? You know, an eating disorder or substance use or whatever are ways that aren't helpful in the body grief process, right? And now we know that. Like I don't blame the little girl that used an eating disorder because she didn't know that. But now I know better. Now I know that that's not helpful. And so when I'm dealing with really awful just thing after thing after thing, sometimes I even have it in the book. I'll give a little nugget. Like I throw a temper tantrum and like I plan it out. Sometimes, you know, I like really lean into my feelings and really feel the feelings. Sometimes I really tap out of the feelings. and lean into, you know, community, I really believe community is the antidote to body grief, truly, truly, truly, which is not a popular thing these days. In our society, individualism is like being pushed on us, I think, in so many ways, I think makes us more of a soldier within our capitalistic society, which then disconnects us from our body even more. And the more we're disconnected from our body, the less likely we are to grieve.
Speaker #0
What does community healing look like through a body grief lens?
Speaker #1
Telling people how you feel, opening up to someone, allowing people to help you. I think that is one of the biggest things, allowing people to help you. Like you just said, I feel like a burden. That's so common. When people feel like burdens, I know I feel like that a lot. I then don't want people to help because I feel like that's just adding on. And it's like people want to help. People want something to do. So allowing people to help. Community can be online. Community can be, you know, at the library, in a group, in a mom's group, in a women without kids group, in, you know, an LGBTQ group. It could be, you know, anywhere. A gardening group. You know, I really think this is where I saw something online actually yesterday where it was like. Community also means showing up to that event, even if you don't want to. And I was like, this is really important because, and it says showing community also means like picking up that friend from the airport, even if it means you don't want to. And I was like, I think this is so important because I think in the last like five years, society has really moved into this world where like, we're like, you can get an Uber. Like, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not going to that event anymore. Like I'm like prioritizing myself. That's important to prioritize ourselves. But I think we've like gone a little too far.
Speaker #0
I agree. Like I don't think that that's healthy or sustainable. Like it is not normal to not need anyone.
Speaker #1
Yeah. Like, you know how what is the saying where it's like no new friends?
Speaker #0
I hate that saying.
Speaker #1
I hate that saying. I'm like, no, we need more friends like we need community.
Speaker #0
Yeah, I think that saying is so weird. I've actually I've like done posts about that before. I'm like, fine. Send them to me.
Speaker #1
Yeah,
Speaker #0
send them to me. Send them my way. Yeah, they're welcome in my home. I loved even in the in the book how you talked about actually it really inspired me how you and your husband have a friend over for dinner at least once a week.
Speaker #1
Yes. Yes. It's so important.
Speaker #0
Yeah. My grandpa used to have his friend Beverly over for lunch every day. Like she would come over and hang out with him. They were like platonic friends. Like she was just like this sweet woman. She was actually married to one of his best friends. She worked in the area pretty much every day. Bev would come over, he would make coffee and make her a sandwich and they'd hang out. And why don't we do that anymore?
Speaker #1
I know it's because we're tired and depleted. But then again, that's giving into the system that's telling us to be another like cog in the system, right? And that is not good. Like we don't want to be disconnected from our bodies because then we can't grieve and then we can't heal. If we don't grieve, we can't heal. And if we can't heal, we can't be a part of society or community. And this is why it's a universal issue, right? It's not just eating disorders. It's not just chronic illness. It's not just disability. You know, I talk about in the book, it's injury. It's pregnancy loss. It's motherhood. It's infertility. It's gender dysphoria. It's, you know, racial inequity. It's, you know, everyone experiences body grief because we have some loss of a life due to our bodies.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And it's also the smallest things too, like things you might not even ever think of. In reading your book. My hands sweat a lot. I have something called hyperhidrosis. And it's something I felt ashamed of and like gross about my entire life. Because when you go to shake someone's hand, and it's not all the time, but when you go to shake someone's hand and then they like wipe it off, it makes you feel like you need to apologize. That's where the apology one really hit me. Because I've been apologizing for it and also denying it, really. denying, dismissing myself, trying to pretend like it wasn't happening, trying to find all these ways to not make myself sweat. It's the smallest thing. It's not a life-threatening disorder. There's nothing. But it can even show up in little ways like that.
Speaker #1
Oh, yes. Sometimes, like you said, the littlest of ways are the biggest. Say you have the common cold and you have been just working your ass off. And you have your favorite artist coming to town to perform and you get the common cold and like you get really sick. Like that's body grief. Like maybe when you were younger, you would be able to just like fight off that cold a little bit better. But now you can't. That's grief. Like that is grieving that your body can't do that anymore because you were just like, you know, your body is slammed you to the ground and you cannot make it to your concert. You can't make it to that, you know. doji concert or you know that for me it would be like you know taylor swift i would be so upset it could be you know breaking your ankle to the common cold to you know a pregnancy loss to 19 brain spine surgeries you know like there's no hierarchy to suffering here it's body grief it all is there's body grief and then there's also just like remembering you have a body
Speaker #0
And you spoke a little bit to this in the book, but for some reason, when I really have to get in touch with that, it freaks me out. Like I start to feel like tingly and scared and sometimes it can feel good, but often it feels like, well, who am I then? Like if I have a body, I have me, okay, I live in my body, but then my body's its own thing and it's got its own consciousness, like what's going on? And then I kind of get freaked out and then I just, I think I dissociate. So what does having a relationship with your body actually look like? And also, what is that like weirdness that I'm experiencing? Is that common?
Speaker #1
Oh, it's so common. I'm glad you brought this up because it's a really common experience, which is why in the book I talk about the ocean of body awareness. It's like, hey, let's take this real slow. We're going to literally dip our toe in like we can take it right out. put our shins in, let's wait in the water. Because most people have a really hard time being in their body. I would say most people in capitalist society do because we're not used to being in it. I mean, we're scrolling and we're dissociated from our body most of the time. And I don't blame us for being that, right? Because look at what the world is. Like, it's a terrifying place right now. It's stressful and scary. And depending on how old we all are, like it has been for a long time. And depending on, you know, like if you've had an eating disorder and body image, like that just adds to the trauma of being in your body. And so what it is, is your amygdala, which for the people that haven't read the book or don't know this, that is the bite. flight freezer fawn that's where that lives it's a central nervous system that tells me that your amygdala is being hijacked right there is that it's saying like this isn't safe and it tells me that your frontal lobe is shutting off when you're in your body a little bit and it just needs more time and that is going to be a muscle that needs to be like literally your amygdala might be bigger so actually like your pet the pet scans have shown you People with eating disorders, people with ADHD have larger amygdalas than people without. Because, you know, there's such a thing as neuroplasticity. Our brains can change. And so people with eating disorders, depending on how long they've had them, but have larger amygdalas because we spend more time in our amygdalas than other people.
Speaker #0
That's fascinating.
Speaker #1
I know. It could be part of that.
Speaker #0
That's so interesting. And it's interesting too, and you talk about this, but how it goes in and out. I was in a really good place with my body, or probably the best place I've ever been, end of 2023, beginning of 2024. And then I feel like recently, maybe as I've been going through more stuff, which I'm sure is common, is you unearth and you actually start working through things, you have a regression. How do you manage, because you're also going through so many things physically, how do you manage the going? in and out of like feeling like you're in a good place. And then today the grief is more intense. How do you work through that?
Speaker #1
I really, really, really try not to label it as good and bad.
Speaker #0
Oh, that's good.
Speaker #1
Gosh, my therapist at like a community counseling center when I lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming with my husband, he was my boyfriend back then. It was over 10 years ago. I was going through my eating disorder and he was like, I want you guys to use the word helpful and unhelpful. instead of good and bad. And I was like, we use it now all the time. Like, that's all we do. And it's so helpful. It is. It's like, is this helpful or unhelpful? You don't ever grade anything then. You don't ever shame anything then. And so when it comes to my body grief, I'm like, is this, you know, a helpful day or an unhelpful day? Is this a helpful thing or an unhelpful thing? I actually say for Sean, like, this is a rule for us, but like, I ask for him not to ask how I'm doing because that gives me too much pressure because I usually just don't feel good. I know that might feel shocking for some people to hear, maybe not, depending on who's listening. Like, I don't feel good. That is my norm, which sucks. Like, that is body grief.
Speaker #0
Yeah.
Speaker #1
Depending on, like, what my pain management is or how bad that feeling is, like, that might be a better day for me. And I might be able to get out of the house. Now, there are some things that can be really awful and triggering. Some people have asked, like, how have you kept yourself in recovery with eating disorders? How has your body image been? How have you been able to, like, continue to, like, love yourself and all these things? And I think the constant there has been, I know that it is my responsibility to... continue to take care of myself and be compassionate to myself, whatever that looks like in that moment. A big reason I wrote this book, I talk about this in the hope slash hopelessness chapter, which is a hard chapter, but a beautiful chapter is a lot of people that live with chronic illness and chronic pain struggle with hopelessness and despair. And they have a hard time going to therapy because when they go to therapy, they don't want to express that to a therapist in fear that the therapist will
Speaker #0
you know, be worried about suicidal ideation or, you know, fear that the therapist will then, you know, commit them. And having worked in the fields, I wanted to write a book that a client could take to a therapist's office and say, Hey, I'm going through this. I'm going through body grief. I don't have a plan. I am safe, but I am experiencing this. There are moments and days where I don't want to wake up because I am so hopeless and I'm dealing with so much body grief and I want to talk about it. That's normal with people with chronic pain. That's normal when it comes to body grief. And the more we can talk about it, the less likely we're going to have devastating, devastating news. And that's a big reason why I wrote this book.
Speaker #1
When you were writing it, Because I hear so many authors come on the show and they're like, oh, I wrote a book. It was so hard and terrible. So I know just like writing a book of any sort can be a process.
Speaker #0
I actually don't feel that way.
Speaker #1
So glad to hear it. I've had a couple of people recently say that it makes me so happy. So tell me about your process of writing and what it was like and like how it affected your body and your relationship with your body.
Speaker #0
I hope this doesn't like make people mad, but I loved writing this book. It was really wonderful and magical. I keep using the word magical because it was a magical process. I got to talk to so many people and interview like amazing people from all walks of life. And they were able to tell me their stories. And like how healing and therapeutic is that? I was so honored to be on the other end of the call and just hear about their body grief and be able to write their stories. But also... To be able to relive the stories, there's a lot of trauma in this. And so I don't remember some of the stories exactly. And so I was able to talk to my family and hear it from their perspective. And that was kind of wild. There were some of the things in the hospitals that happened. And I was like, oh my God, I don't remember that. You're right. And so hearing it from my sister's perspectives, From my mom and dad's perspective, from Sean, my husband's perspective, that was really tough. They go through a whole different piece of it. I'm in the circus of it all. I'm being poked and prodded. But Sean and my parents and my sisters, they're going through it and are traumatized in a completely different way. And so I feel like I was writing for once and was like taking it in from their perspective. And that was hard. heartbreaking, but it was also beautiful because I was so grateful. And, you know, I had like my book playlist and I don't know, it just really made me so grateful for everything I have. Going through this type of body grief and dealing with like terminal illnesses and having like near death experiences, you know, it changes how you view life. I was like a book deal. I was like, hell yeah. Like I would never complain about this.
Speaker #1
What is the biggest change in how you view life now as opposed to before you were diagnosed?
Speaker #0
We would be having the same conversation, but I'm not the same person. It's so wild. I'm so much more chill.
Speaker #1
That's interesting. Why?
Speaker #0
Oh, my God. I have OCD. So it's like very much who I am. It like tortures me to my core. Right. But thank God for medication. So that like keeps me a little bit wired. Right. But. I was working five jobs. And so I was a TA. I was getting my master's. I was working two nanny jobs. And then I was an assistant at a therapist's office. And then I was running my business. I was just doing it all. And I was like then going to workout classes. And I was like, boss, babe, I couldn't stand myself now. Like I would be like, ew, that girl. I thought I could do everything. And I really kind of ran myself into the ground. I'm not blaming that, but I really kind of did this to myself a little bit.
Speaker #1
To your point in the book and all our conversation today, the culture does this to us too. It makes us feel that we're only good if we're a good little machine and that the moment we're not useful, we are useless and have no value.
Speaker #0
Oh, I love that.
Speaker #1
I really, really, really relate. I saw so much of myself in you. I mean, it was shocking because even while you were still going through this and getting your brain surgeries and getting your back surgeries, there was one scene from your life you depicted where I think you had had a brain surgery and then days later were trying to meet with clients. I was freaking out during that part. Okay. I was panicking. I was sweating reading it.
Speaker #0
It was bad. That was in the beginning. I was in complete denial. Like I look back and I'm like, what a terrible role model was I to be sitting with clients?
Speaker #1
I mean, you had to go through it to learn it though. Who can teach it better now? But I understand because again, like when you got sick, it happened so fast. Your brain probably didn't have a chance to catch up.
Speaker #0
It was. I mean, I remember it so vividly too. I woke up. My family has just been really great. They've come down. And just helped, helped, helped. I'm very lucky to have them. And, you know, he was working on his computer. And I woke up and I was like, my head hurts. He was like, Shane, you just had brain surgery. And I was like, oh, right. I was just in denial. He was like, yeah, dude, you just had brain surgery. I remember kind of like my OCD always comes out after surgeries. Like it gets, I get like kind of neurotic in like a clinical way. I'll be like, I can't, I can't, I have to, I have to do this. I have to do this. And I remember being like, I have to see clients. I have to see them. Like, I can't lose my business. Like if I lose my business, I lose everything. And I remember that just being like the most devastating thing ever. I was like, I've lost my body. I've lost my health. And if I lose my business, like I'm nothing.
Speaker #1
How have you, and do you still work on knowing that who you are is the best thing about you, that you're worth it? doesn't lie outside of you or even on you, that it's in you?
Speaker #0
Gosh, it's an everyday practice. What you talk about with creativity is probably like the best thing that I've started to lean into in the past couple of years. I grew up as a dancer. Being in my body in that way is just for fun is what I do. I literally dance constantly in my wheelchair, just listening to music that way. Like... Reminding myself that life is fun, even if it's being at home, twerking and in my wheelchair, whatever that looks like. Painting. I love to paint now. Being with my pets and my husband. Small pockets of joy and gratitude. It's tough, though, when this book is now my everything and I'm trying to sell it.
Speaker #1
Oh, yeah. It's so difficult to know that there is purpose. joy and merit just in the creative process. And also to be in an industry that only succeeds if people buy or tune in or download. It's like it's a constant mindfuck because you're like, OK, I believe this in my soul that this is worthy no matter what. And I still have a dream that it will be read or heard by thousands or millions of people. Yeah, it's like a constant balancing act.
Speaker #0
Yeah, it makes sense. You know, it's the world we live in, but it's hard not to get like crumbled by it. And I'm an all or nothing person. So I have to keep myself in check. And so for me, that means doing emails from bed or doing it on the porch, finding balance in it all and leaning into community, community, community, because I isolate. It's so easy for me to isolate. I'm a middle child. I'm a really good one too. I know how to like bring it up constantly.
Speaker #1
That sounds like middle child healing to me, being like, hey, I exist.
Speaker #0
I know. I know. It's so funny. I think being a middle child is the funniest thing ever. But middle children know how to like navigate things and self-play and all that kind of stuff, you know? So it's just easy for me to just like be alone. And now that I am disabled and can't drive and all the things, it's just easy for me to do that. But also, I'm a really good friend and I'm social. So it's like, I got to just keep leading into community.
Speaker #1
Can you just talk a little? Because I feel like we didn't fully answer this. Like, what is body trust? And what are some practical ways to rebuild trust with our bodies? Hey, Creative Cutie, I wanted to remind you of something. I am a creative coach. And if you're interested in unleashing your creativity, sharing your creative project with the world, and or finally going after your biggest dreams, I would love... to help you, to hold up a mirror for you, to support you, and to be your co-creator and your coach. You can email me at lauren.lagrasso at gmail.com to set up a free discovery call, or go to my website, laurenlagrasso.com, and click the contact page and write me an email on there. I can't wait to help you unleash your inner creative and find your authentic voice. Creativity is your birthright. Let's unleash.
Speaker #0
Body trust is something that we really... It's interesting because body trust I put as the last phase, but it's really something that we carry along with us throughout all of these phases. It's something that we learned. We learn through hindsight. It's collected throughout our grief. So it's like when we go through one of the phases, we learn that, ah, I can trust my body because I got through this phase. She got me here. He got me here. They got me here. I got you. I got you. It's saying like, because I was able to get through here, I can go on and bridge myself to the next phase. It's that bridge. It's that liaison. It got me there. So it's not only the last phase, but it's also this like, it's this bridge onto the next grievance in that like, it's that compounding factor.
Speaker #1
Like all healing. It's not like a place you're like, I'm healed. I've arrived.
Speaker #0
It's not a destination.
Speaker #1
Right. Yeah.
Speaker #0
And that was something that was really important for me to get across when I was talking to Penguin when they took this book. Because I was like, self-help is a tough thing for me. Because usually there's this like band-aid solution at the end. And that is not this book. There's no such thing as grieved. There's no such thing as being like trusted or whatever. I want people to feel attuned. with where they are on their bodies. But you might only be there for like a minute, or you might just be there for a day and then you go back. And then you're like, okay, but I was here. I know what attunement feels like. And so because I have that, now dismissal is going to feel different.
Speaker #1
Yeah, that's so important too. Because as I was prepping for this, actually, I was like feeling a lot of shame because I was in a... what I would have called before this, but I'm going to consider what was the terminology used? Not good, bad.
Speaker #0
Helpful or unhelpful.
Speaker #1
I was in a helpful place back in the end of 2023 and early 2024. And as I was like reading the book and prepping, like I was feeling shame, like what happened? Like, why have I regressed? What's like, what's wrong? What's going on? And now it, instead of feeling that shame, I'm like, well, I was there then. So I can get that again. And maybe there's just something else that's coming up. right now that I have to address instead of like saying what I'm feeling in this moment is bad. Maybe it's information.
Speaker #0
Oh, I love that. My sister just reminded me of this. Actually, my younger sister, Claire, she was like, cause I was talking to her about like regression and things like that. I was like, Oh, I really don't want this to happen. And she was like, but Jane, it won't. She was like, I just read a book. And I was like, you're so cute. Cause she read an early copy. She's like, I just read a book that said this. I was like, I love you so much. Um, she's like, you can't ever go back because you're only forward. You've learned and gained all this perspective. So the trust is there already in your compound. It's compounded. It's exactly what you just said. So we're only better, baby.
Speaker #1
Hey,
Speaker #0
going up from here. Welcome to us.
Speaker #1
For our last minutes together, I do want to talk about the connection between body trust and trust. and body grief and creativity. What do you see that as?
Speaker #0
I think it's a beautiful bridge towards safety. For me, I just think of, I'm right now looking at my paintbrushes. When I am in a lot of pain, I go straight towards painting with no purpose behind it. I don't want to think about selling anything. I don't want to think about anything. I just want to think about putting color on canvas. And I put on my favorite playlist. I don't want to think about anything else. And I might smoke a little cannabis to make myself feel better. And I just paint. Body trust is a two-way street. And I will say that time and time again. And so in order for me to trust my body, my body has to trust me back. And so I'm taking care of my body. And so in those moments, I really set the tone. You know, it's aromatherapy. It's nourishing my body. It's giving myself. electrolytes. It's giving myself, you know, hot compresses. It's really, really treating myself with so much compassion. And also the tears are going to be flowing. You know, the emotions are going to be going. That allows me to just be in my body and trust whatever comes up. That for me is like what those things mean. What about you?
Speaker #1
Well, I think everything is connected to everything. So I see it from that perspective. But I do think that like trusting your body and like being in touch with your body is inherently connected to trusting and loving yourself. And that if you're constantly living as like a floating head or trying to make yourself into a machine and dissociating from your body, you're never actually like grounded in the present moment. and here with yourself. And so since my theory is that to unleash creatively, we need to love, trust, and know ourselves enough to believe we have the right to do that. I think believing you have a body, like actually believing that and knowing you're in it and believing you have a right to take up space and be here is as important as saying I am inherently creative. Creativity is my birthright and I have a right to express it.
Speaker #0
Ooh, I love it. That's a beautiful affirmation for your body grief, you know, and that body trust phase. I love that.
Speaker #1
I love your paintings and I love that you call them paintings. P-A-I-N-T-I-N-G-S. I mean, I know that's how it's normally spelled, but the way you like emphasize that is so beautiful. Like, so did you paint before?
Speaker #0
Not really, no. Yeah. I mean, my dad is a painter, like paints houses, faux finish, all that stuff. And so I did like samples and he taught me a lot of stuff.
Speaker #1
How do you feel like prior to a painting session versus when you leave a painting session? Like what does it do for, I know you just went through a beautiful description of it, but like what do you feel in your body post painting?
Speaker #0
It's interesting because the pain doesn't go away.
Speaker #1
Right.
Speaker #0
Because that's because structurally nothing changes. But emotionally I'm lighter. I feel more free and I'm able to just compartmentalize things better. I'm actually a lot nicer, a lot kinder. Pain can make me a mean person at times. It can make me mean to the people I love.
Speaker #1
It can make anyone mean. Years ago, I had a surgery on my vulva. I had a pre-melanoma there and so I had to get it removed. And it was definitely to that point the most... vulnerable medical thing I'd ever gone through. And I just remember just being so short with my parents who are like doing everything to help me and being like, oh, I'm not myself right now. Like I just like this has taken over me and it's like in the forefront. And it just gave me so much respect and compassion for people who are chronically in pain. So, you know, my heart is with you. And I'm also just so grateful that You're showing up for yourself. You're showing up for your community. You're showing up for your creativity. You're showing up for your body. It is such a beautiful example. And the fact that you're willing to do it wherever you're at on any given day, it's important for people to see that we don't have to be perfect in order to be out there and sharing.
Speaker #0
It can be messy.
Speaker #1
Yeah. And that's beautiful. And that's creativity.
Speaker #0
Thank you so much for having me. This was a beautiful conversation.
Speaker #1
Thank you for being here. I loved every second. I really loved your book. Everybody go get Jane's book. It is out now. Start your body grief process. Yay.
Speaker #0
Thank you.
Speaker #1
Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thanks to my guest, Jane Mattingly. For more info on Jane, follow her at Jane Mattingly and find her book. This is Body Grief at janemaddingly.com or wherever good books are found. Unleash Your Inner Creative is hosted and executive produced by me, Lauren LaGrasso, produced by Rachel Fulton with theme music by Liz Pohl. Again, Creative Cutie, thank you so much for listening. If you like what you heard today, remember to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Share the show with a friend and post about it on social media. Tag me at Lauren LaGrasso and at Unleash Your Inner Creative. and I will repost to share my gratitude. Also tag Jane, at Jane Mattingly, so she can share as well. My wish for you this week is that you start to get in touch with your body. Just remember you have a body and you have a relationship with that body. And I think that's a really good place to start. I love you, and I believe in you. Talk with you next week.

About Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LoGrasso (A Creativity Podcast)

New episodes are out every Wednesday - follow, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts :)

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About Unleash Your Inner Creative with Lauren LoGrasso (A Creativity Podcast)

New episodes are out every Wednesday - follow, rate and review wherever you get your podcasts :)

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

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