Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show and founder of Yes to Life, the UK charity that for 20 years has been supporting a much broader, more hopeful, open-minded and empathic approach to cancer care, one that goes under the banner of integrative cancer care. My guest today has been on the show once before when we had a fascinating chat about pain and so I’m excited to welcome Catherine Rolt back again, this time to speak about the uncomfortable topic of grief. Catherine, welcome back to the YestoLife show.

Catherine Rolt
Good morning Robin, it’s lovely to be back with you.

Robin Daly
it’s great to have you as my guest again. So last time you were on the show we spoke about a paradox that exists around pain as you’d written a book on the subject. Well now apart from being a Chinese medicine practitioner you describe yourself as a grief recovery specialist. That’s not a title I come across too often and you want to talk about another paradox today, one that’s around grief. It is beginning to look like you’re attracted to paradoxes here but anyway it seems to me that there are a lot of parallels with pain and the grief is an intensively painful process in itself. So do you want to first of all describe the paradox that you want to highlight around grief?

Catherine Rolt
Yes. my work is fundamentally about showing people that nature is not just outside of us, but is within us. So we have seasonal shifts going on inside of us. And in traditional Chinese medicine, there are five seasons, not four. And so traditionally, we are still in the autumn and not in the winter. And the autumn is associated with the emotion, grief and letting go. if you look at the trees right now, if we’re in England and we’re in this season, you just have to, and it’s a very beautiful sight, but it also can be very dangerous. You’ve got so many leaves just tumbling down and the trees are getting more and more naked. in a way, I think that shows us the paradox of in order to carry on living and in order to carry on flourishing, we do need to get the hang of letting go. And grieving is a natural process of actually living our lives to the full. I think that the culture that I was brought up in any way, it was like this ridiculous pressure that you had to be really good at something before you even were taught how to do it. And most of us, if we’re really honest, don’t really know how to live our lives. And we don’t know how to be more emotionally honest in a sense. We’re living in this sort of the illusion that we have to stick to one season, we have to be happy and peaceful and fine. Our language is, I’ll ask you, Robin, how you are, I’m fine. And the thing of fine is frightened, insecure, neurotic and emotional. Right. I’ve heard that before, very good. My stepchildren, we used to kind of every day, they come back from school and I would say, how are you doing? How are you feeling? And they would play this kind of joke about frightened. They were not frightened today. Neurotic, no, insecure, no, frightened, and eventually they’d come out with how they were. it sort of trained them to be able to be allowed to say they were angry or they were hurt or they were lonely or somebody bullied them at school, but they just spoke the truth as we had tea or whatever it was. I think that real health, which I think you can learn when you’ve been given a horrible diagnosis, is actually learning to be emotionally more energetically alive and following nature. You can’t really go wrong. So in the autumn, it’s a fantastic time to allow yourself to declutter the gutters as it were internally. So that’s what I’m talking about.

Robin Daly
So it’s kind of embracing last as part of life and therefore being able to live a lot more fully. Interesting. Okay. Very good. So before we go any further, exploring grief, maybe you could remind us of the route that brought you to where you are today and tell us what’s in your toolbox when it comes to helping people recover from grief.

Catherine Rolt
Well, one of the wonderful things at the Grief Recovery Institute that’s in America, and if anybody listens to this and really knows that they want to actually recover from acute episodes of grief, I absolutely recommend them getting hold of a book which is called the Grief Recovery Handbook, and it’s by John James and Russell Friedman. there’s a woman in England who works alongside the Institute. And by the way, I don’t get anything at all from definitely promoting them. But one of the amazing things that they teach is, first of all, that the grieving process is completely natural and normal. There isn’t something wrong with you because you are heartbroken or because you can’t follow society’s kind of cues. then secondly, which is I think really important because it is part of the way that society deals with grief is very counterintuitive in a sense. So one of the lovely things they teach is that when you’re sharing and when you’re working with people, you talk about your own losses. So in a sense, you’re not talking at people, you’re sharing with people. one of the skills that I have now is I will always use my own personal examples. And I was in a very, very extreme situation which, you know, when you’re in war zones, it happens all the time. I lost 13 key people in my life over a three-year period. And I remember vividly saying to someone, I wish I wasn’t living in a prestigious place in London and even in England. I wish that I was in Beirut or somewhere. I don’t want to insult anyone by using the reference of Beirut. It could be anywhere. The point that I was trying to make was that I wish I had been around other people that were in devastating loss because I would be walking down the street and I sort of got to know quite a few people and they were sort of saying things to me which were normal for them, like, you know, what are you doing for Easter? You know, what’s going on in your life? You know, are you dating anyone? How’s your family? Ievery time they talked about my family, I was wincing. Every time they reminded me there was the normal holiday coming. I just couldn’t cope.

Robin Daly
Massive disconnect

Catherine Rolt
Yes, completely. So the grief recovery taught me that my response was normal. And firstly, and then without making other people wrong, actually society didn’t have the skill set to get in line with where I was. So society was isolating me further. And I think that’s a really key thing when you’re diagnosed with something. Because whether you like it or not, your hopes, your dreams, and your expectations of what you thought your life was going to be, even in the short term, let alone middle term and long term, it’s just suddenly blown up. And you don’t know where to go to. You know to go to the oncologist or the practitioner to have your physical body helped. But where do you go emotionally with that heartbreak? You’re suddenly, even in the middle of summer, you’ll get a diagnosis and you’re like a tree that is shoved into autumn. Your leaves, your hair falls out.

Catherine Rolt
the most important tip that I can give people is actually allow yourself to know that this dreadful sense of loss and the hopes and the dreams and the expectations that are kind of flooding your system almost in shock. It’s normal and you need to reach out to people who actually understand about loss. getting hold of the book or the audio is going to help enormously because it’s a completely different way of looking at loss. You don’t have to replace it. And then the other thing that I, and I’m just quoting it in very short, I hope, concise ways, the book and the teaching is all about something called sturbs. And once you’ve got the hang of sturbs, it’s fantastic. Short-term energy relieving habits or behaviors. And most of us are disturbing. We’re in loss, we’re in pain. And what we do is we watch TV, we get involved in all sorts of business. We do all sorts of stuff which works. Sturbs work energetically. They work because they change the subject. However, and this is where the grief recovery works so well with Chinese medicine, it’s short-term. It isn’t dealing with the roots of what’s really going on. And until you deal with the roots, what is going to happen, and I’ve worked with it in clinical practice 40 years, is people come to me and they are literally carrying absolutely tons of unresolved grief which does impact of physical well-being. So one of the first things that people can do when they get a diagnosis is begin, not in an overwhelming way, but to begin to know that it’s time to let go of those tons of unresolved grief. And there are people out there who are fully trained to absolutely support you. if you can’t afford to do the whatever, for goodness sake, find a way of asking somebody else to buy the audio for you or the book, and you will begin to look at grief very differently and actually align yourself with how normal you are rather than even the man that a lovely, lovely person who had food supper last night, because he’s in heartbreak, he thinks there’s something wrong with him. What’s right with him is that he’s in heartbreak.

Robin Daly
Very interestingly different perspective. So in a way you’re telling me that your own personal experience has brought you to wanting to find out about this and find tools to deal with it and it gives a new perspective on it, if you like. you’re also saying that the opportunity that’s present in a serious situation like cancer is to actually come to terms and to see all this stuff for ourselves rather than doing constant years of disturbing, as you put it there, just in order to manage our way through. So we have this ongoing process which is a kind of, yeah, it’s a fundamentally poor relationship to life, you like. Things are wrong all the time basically but we’re managing it rather than finding out, well, what’s actually going on here and possibly finding some resolution.

Catherine Rolt
Well, and also Robin, which is sort of, I think it’s just so full of hope and inspiration. The more that we can begin to get the hang of the seasons within us and the losses that do go on, we breathe in, we let go, and it can be that fundamental for us. The more our behaviors change. So Christmas is a fantastic time for us to be doing this interview because already the people that are traumatized by Christmas, they have to be traumatized once, only sometimes tragically they’re traumatized over and over again as children. But it’s like that one trauma or several traumas years ago will hijack them. this Christmas time comes and they’re already in their behaviors beginning to get really panic-stricken by it. Well, you do a grief recovery process and the word recovery is the key thing. You can recover and stop being hijacked. I mean, the closest friend that I had ever had died and I could have carried that loss because our friendship was so extraordinary right through to this day, rather than actually celebrating what I did have with her, because I can absolutely guarantee that she is the dreadful burden of loss. She’d want me to celebrate the extraordinary lives that she did have and I was privileged enough to share some of it with her. And then it was time for her to go. Do you see what I mean? Definitely. So my behavior is not caught up in what I call an emotional hijack. And Christmas, you know, my Christmas is I’m here now and many, many people, you will see this and people listening to this. You will come across people who just, I hate Christmas. And you can see by their whole behavior, they’re already shutting down, but they’re not shutting down just for themselves. They’re going to take their family with them and their friends. That’s trudging. rather than the hope of hold on a minute i can recover from these burdens there’s nothing wrong with me i just need help

Robin Daly
It seems to me it’s a perfectly reasonable mistake to make to actually carry on disturbing, as you put it, actually because that’s what we see all around us all the time, and actually the idea that there could be a resolution is so distant that, as you described it, disturbing is actually normal, and we think it’s normal, and we see other people around us, we think they’re normal, and they’re all doing these things. So we think that’s actually how we have to live, and it’s kind of burden passed on to us by the previous generation. And, you know, we just do it if we’re not careful mindlessly, and it’s actually a sort of constant suffering, really.

Catherine Rolt
Yeah, it is. I think also one of the misconceptions, and again, I’ll use the example of my own life. If I hadn’t done the grief recovery training, I would have thought that I was being disloyal to this dear friend of mine. Rather than actually, I realized now that if I had carried the burden of the heartbreak and loss, and I hadn’t allowed myself to recover, that would have been disloyal to our friendship, which is completely the other way around.

Robin Daly
It is fantastic to do this kind of total rebrand on grief because in my mind it’s a little bit like inflammation. Inflammation is actually a proper process that has a useful function. The only time when it turns otherwise is when it’s just there all the time, just rumbling along at a low level. So it feels it’s very like that. The grief doesn’t go through its proper process but it just malingers and never fully expresses itself, never really goes away, just rumbles along all the time. It’s actually doing damage and it’s leading us towards a kind of cliff edge of a crisis eventually, which could be cancer with a low level inflammation, could lead you to cancer. So yeah, it seems to me it’s very like that and actually the rebrand you’re talking about where we look at it as actually a wholesome, useful process that we need. We may not like it but we need to accept in order for us to be fully human and to be engaged in life. It is fantastic because anyway society is not saying that generally but I think it is beginning to become more common currency. There’s more of an understanding and we have to thank people like legendary Sophie Savage for throwing a spanner into the accepted ideas around Greek. She just refused in typical fashion to be boxed in by anybody else’s ideas and she did a deep dive into her own experience to come up with a really fresh interpretation of Greek. In the past I think it was largely seen as a sort of disease in itself with symptoms that needed to be suppressed or managed. Or medicated. Medicated even, yes exactly. But I think we have moved on a bit from that. There’s quite a broad acceptance of it in some ways but it hasn’t really had this rebrand where it goes from being just something horrible that comes along to being something that actually has a purpose.

Catherine Rolt
I had the privilege of working with both John and Russell and they were absolutely phenomenal human beings because John started and then Russell joined him.

Robin Daly
These are the authors of the book and the force behind the association you spoke about.

Catherine Rolt
Probably Robin will put the link so that people can get it. I remember John told this story, which was of his own private life. He was a soldier in Vietnam, and had been through so much already, so much death, devastation, and he had been able to cope and then he shared it with us publicly, so I am hoping to God it’s okay to share this. But he found himself in the hospital with his wife, and they had a stillborn child. And a friend of his in the hospital who he’d served with put his arms right to him and said, it’s all right, mate, because you’re both still young and you can have another child. And in that moment, something happened to John, where he just broke inside. he found himself on a beach a little bit of time later with his own revolver. And he was so devastated, he actually took the revolver out and he put it to his head. In that second, split second, before he was going to kill himself, he just went, wait a minute. What on earth? What’s happening to me? I’ve been through Vietnam. Why is this different? what he realized was different was the way in which he was expected to get over this and replace the loss. And that was what started him, actually bothering to do a deep dive. then he uncovered that our educational system, when we’re babies, I mean, this is fascinating, when we’re babies, if we have healthy parenting or aunts or grandmothers, when we cry, or we scratch ourselves or whatever it is, we’ve run to a safe place. And we go, daddy, daddy, mommy, mommy, I’ve cut myself. And we kiss it better, don’t we? In some form or another. Now, as adults, there comes a point in our schooling when we sort of run to safety and we’re suddenly told to pull ourselves together. We’re given in America, we’re given a cookie or we’re given a glass of milk, or the TV is put on, distraction, distraction. we live, and I’m tying this up with inflammation, because every time I think and I work with inflammation, I always think of misinformation, always. And the misinformation in our educational system is pitching us against ourselves. The second we have an emotional, appropriate response, we are told basically to distract ourselves. But if you and I are in an accident, no paramedic comes and stands over us and goes, right, well, we’re going to distract you now, we’re going to put a TV screen on. We don’t do that, but emotionally we do. So we are stuck carrying all this stuff. And that is why it is so clever what John and darling Russell ended up doing. And now I think it’s John’s son that is continuing the Institute. So they are rung up from all over the world when these horrible, terrible things happen. And they are immediately put onto TV or whatever it is to attempt to soothe people and literally take it away from, there’s something wrong with me. There’s something right with you absolutely because you are responding appropriately. You’re in pain. It’s okay. You’re in devastation. You’re in heartbreak. Watch the seasons, the trees, every single year, the leaves come off.

Catherine Rolt
We need to let go. But how do we let go? And this particular, the only other training I’ve ever had, Robin, is the grief recovery training. because it is so in line with Chinese medicine and the traditions of traditional Chinese medicine is all about energy and flowing with the realities of our lives. Not controlling it, not manipulating it, not headbutting it as I call it, not boxing it up. You can’t. Sturbs work short term, not long term.

Robin Daly
Interesting, interesting. Well, maybe I’d like to draw a little bit of my own experience at this point and just talk about, you know, I lost my daughter. And I went through, obviously, a period of intense grief. But I do remember that one aspect of it, which I think was a good move on my part, is that something of me said right at the beginning is that I don’t care what happens, I’m going to let it happen. And during the course of the period of intense grief, all sorts of things came along, which were the kind of ideas of how I should be responding. And I dispensed with them all one by one. But it was interesting to watch them come along. Oh, I haven’t even thought about it for a few hours. The fact I lost my daughter, that’s terrible. That would be a kind of response. Not like, oh, that was a relief, but that was bad. That was just as bad. You know, these kinds of ideas that we should be a particular way in response to a situation. And they were really strong things. I mean, as I said, I just batted them off. But I realized how much of that stuff is actually running our lives all the time, how I think I should be, or how I think I should respond. You know, just ideas that I’ve been told about how I should relate to life rather than what’s actually happening, how I am actually responding to life, which I realized before that time, I had a little idea about actually, I didn’t know what my real responses were until that time. And hence it was a fantastic opportunity to learn who I was.

Catherine Rolt
It’s so powerful when you begin to understand that fundamentally the human body, mind, body, and spirit is created, and when I say spirit, I don’t mean a religious spirit, but our essence actually knows what it’s doing. And when we have a devastating loss, we have to go through the process. I tell this story often, when I worked with someone and we were going for a walk, because sometimes when people are really going through the most devastating grief, to have them in a room just sitting opposite you is very claustrophobic. Grief can be very, very claustrophobic, and to go in nature will help the processor just for me to witness. So we were going for a walk, and this darling, darling person turned right, and she said, in her absolute rage, she said, Catherine, I must be able to get through with this, it’s ridiculous. I’m just, everyone’s so bored of me talking about it, and I’m losing friends, and I wah. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So these are friends who don’t understand grief and loss firstly. then secondly, can you please now go up to that tree, that tree there, I said, and just shout at it and tell it to jump three seasons? And she said, what? And I said, go and shout at that tree, demand that it just jumps three seasons. And she said, oh my God, I get it. I can’t control this, can I? I said, no, but we live in a society, in the worst anyway, that absolutely controls our emotional responses, and it doesn’t work. And she went, oh, and you could see the relief that she was going to be allowed with me anyway. To keep going through the process, to recover. It wasn’t that she was going to carry on loving this person to the rest of her days, but it had to change. now she’s absolutely recovered. That’s huge. The word recovery when it comes to loss is something that we don’t ever think about, but the people that we lose need us to recover. We are not stagnant puddles, we’re not supposed to be. It doesn’t work for our bodies. We can carry on loving. Your daughter will be with you and in your heart forever.

Catherine Rolt
look at the work that you’re doing. But if you’re a sort of behavioral disturb, you know, I would be terrified of doing an interview with you. You’re a friend.

Robin Daly
But it’s interesting to note, though, that recovery doesn’t mean getting back to where I was before it all happened. It means that we’ve actually encompassed what happened, and then we’re able to move on. It’s that process of encompassing it, which the grief brings along. But it’s also, I think it’s good to notice that you’ve talked about the tactics we employ in order to manage all these emotional responses that we don’t like. But it’s good to notice just how much of our life energy goes into that. I mean, to me, it seems like almost all. It’s like, you know, it’s just massive, the amount of energy that the lack of trust we have in things as they are, including our own responses, it just sucks up all our life thoughts into trying to hold it down, manage it, deal with it, get by. it’s all based on a deep, fundamental mistrust of life and ourselves, you know, as you just pointed out, there’s a process happening here that is actually trustworthy. But we have to let it happen.

Catherine Rolt
what made Sophie exceptional was that she was a rebel. There was this wonderful moment that she describes in her book, in one of her books, where she was the only person sobbing, I mean, she was talking to me on the phone during it. She was sobbing when she was in the oncology reception and the nurse came up to her really worried. So she was so funny about it afterwards, she said the nurse was so inappropriate because she said, what’s wrong with you?

Catherine Rolt
Sophie said, being Sophie, she said, there’s nothing wrong with me, but there is a lot wrong with everyone else sitting here because they’re all terrified and they’re all feeling things inside, but the face they have on the outside is, I’m okay, like a zombie. And that’s, you know, again, this lovely person last night said, I don’t want to burden you, Catherine, you go through your own things. I went, telling me the truth is not a burden. I can feel it when you walk in. So one of the wonderful things about recovery is that you’re more available to other people. So Robin, if you walked into the room or someone that I know walks into the room, I am available to tune in and go, oh, think something, Robin might not want to talk about it, but I think something’s up, you know, so I can be gentle and kind and thoughtful. Now, most human beings I know want, want to be available and want to have a better connection with another person. If you’re full of your own stuff, there’s no room to be available to Robin. Robin, don’t share anything. Don’t be quiet. Be quiet. Let’s watch television. Let’s go to the theatre. You should have moved.

Robin Daly
a bit like I’m describing as to all our energy going into it. We haven’t got any spare basically.

Catherine Rolt
Exactly. So, you know, one of the, I mean, I’m wildly enthusiastic about this, as you can tell, when people come to me and they have a diagnosis, one of the most incredible voyages that they are going to go into, if they want to, is they are going to learn to get rid of a whole lot of misinformation that hasn’t worked and is not their fault, and they are going to become more available. That’s an incredible plus. It is. In the horrors of the devastation of a diagnosis.

Robin Daly
So this being brought to a halt by something like cancer just provides this opportunity to, well, just take a look at these failed strategies. You know, disturbing is a failed strategy, basically, as you say, because every time you stop doing it, the problem’s still there. And it hasn’t gone away at all. It’s in trouble. But even the tablet doesn’t work after a while. So, yeah, I mean, it’s a funny thing. I mean, it’s something I like to talk about a lot. Are the opportunities inherent in a situation like being diagnosed with cancer? Not because anybody wants to be diagnosed with cancer, you wouldn’t wish that on anybody. But if that’s the reality, if you’re there, well, what potential is there in this situation? in my experience, there’s a huge amount of potential there. And it’s not being spoken about nearly enough. It’s just cancer is absolutely gruesome, which it is. But bring this potential along and suddenly, well, okay, it’s gruesome, but, and then you end up with these people, the people who really do take advantage of the opportunity inherent in it are the people who say, oh, yeah, cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me, you know, which doesn’t make any sense to everybody else. But it makes complete sense to them because it gave them the opportunity to see that they’d been struggling away all these years with rubbish strategies that took up all their energy and didn’t allow them to engage fully in their own life.

Catherine Rolt
Well, again, going back to Sophie and referencing her amazing book, The Cancer Whisperer, one of her absolute passionate pet hates was to talk about cancer, getting rid of it and hating it and, you know, eradicating it and cutting it out. And she was passionate about what was life itself attempting to open up for her and for others. I often say, you know, I was born with, we kind of probably know about five generations of, in my family, and every time another generation is born, there are some genetic lips. And so I’ve been born with some very rare, very dangerous diseases. what’s extraordinary is that I can now say absolutely categorically what a privilege that’s been, because it’s life itself has been so on the line in multiple ways for me. And cancers has been one of the things that is part of this genetic sort of blip. Actually, it’s meant that I’ve learned how to live because death is with me every day. The extraordinary privilege is, I’ve gone 40 or more, 45 years beyond my sell by date. And there are key people who are sweet, they say, gosh, Catherine, you’re extraordinary. I’m not really extraordinary. I mean, I value myself highly. What makes me extraordinary though on one level, but not extraordinary, is different strategies. That’s it. the point is that if somebody is thinking I’m extraordinary, then that takes it into, well, she’s extraordinary, but I’m not.

Robin Daly
It can’t happen to me. Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah. Well, that’s a very important message though, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter in some ways if any example is there that life can be different. If you can separate yourself from that and say, well, because they’re special, it can’t happen to me. Well, it doesn’t have any power. But I think the thing with I’m dealing with, a lot of what you’re dealing with is with people in a situation like with cancer, we need it to be shared around that actually it is quite common that people have had a total change of consciousness through having cancer. It’s not rare. It’s actually quite common, but nobody’s talking about it. They’re not talking to each other. then there’s no general acceptance of the fact that this has happened to a lot of people. These people have actually started living in a way that everybody on the planet could do with. They’ve taken the opportunity of cancer to step into another life. And this is an extraordinary thing. And it’s not esoteric really. It’s very down to earth ordinary thing about simply our pretense comes to an end with the diagnosis of cancer. Suddenly we can’t keep it up anymore. And we’re brought face to face with reality right now. And we have to respond that we don’t have to, but we have a choice to respond to it to that point. And Robin. Thank you.

Catherine Rolt
The thing that I’m so clear about is that we can respond on a very grounded practical level. There are so many, I mean, I’m fascinated. Nobody ever, ever asks me about none of the consultants I’m under. So I’m supposed to be under 13 different consultants. Okay. None of them ever ask me how I am thriving. None of them. I used to think, again, before I did the grief recovery, I used to think, my God, that’s another, that’s more evidence of what’s wrong with me because it seems I am not on the same planet. It’s logical. Yes. Whereas actually, people like me and you, we need to get it out there. I mean, when somebody says, they give me a compliment, I go, hold on a minute, thank you very much on the one hand. But on the other hand, please do not let yourself walk away thinking that I can do this and you can’t. Everything I’m talking about, you can also do if you want to. You can recover. The quality of your life can be a thousand percent different with the absolute horror of a diagnosis. And that’s the paradox that is not talked about enough in my understanding of what’s going on out there.

Robin Daly
completely agree and that’s a powerful statement to end the interview on because we’re out of time. That worked quickly, didn’t it? Really interesting and important check, haven’t it? So, I love talking about this stuff, I want it talked about more and you talk about it so well. So, thank you very much indeed for coming on the show today.

Catherine Rolt
Thank you very much, Robin. Take huge care. Bye-bye.

Robin Daly
Catherine has such a wealth of supportive and helpful advice to offer and the fact that she’s sharing her own experience makes her advice authentic and trustworthy, not just book learning. I’ll make sure the resources she mentioned are shared along with the show, so do follow them up if you’re interested to know more. Yes To Life is running its Christmas appeal right now, so if you like what we do and you’d like to help us do even more to directly support people with cancer and shout about the need for integrative cancer care, then please visit the dedicated appeal website which is stockingsofhope.org Thanks a lot for listening, please join me again next week for another Yes To Life show here on UK Health Radio. Goodbye.