Crying Out Loud with Dr. Laura Berman

When we lose someone we love, we often lose so much more than that person. We lose the future we imagined, our sense of safety, sometimes our relationships, and often parts of ourselves we barely realize are missing until we look around and wonder, Who am I now? And some of our deepest losses aren't necessarily connected to a death at all. They can come from the dreams that never happened, the rel...

What do you do when you’re grieving something that hasn’t actually ended? When you’re sick and don’t know if you’ll get better. When someone you love is struggling with addiction and you don’t know who they’ll be on the other side of it. When you’ve lost a pregnancy, a future you were counting on, or even the person you used to be. There’s grief in all of that. But it’s a strange kind of grief bec...

When someone we love dies, the relationship doesn't simply disappear. We still talk to them. Think about them. Look for signs from them. Miss them. Love them. But where do we put all of that? For me, one of the answers has been creating sacred space. In this episode of Crying Out Loud, I'm talking with Robin and Michael Mastro about the power of altars and why creating a physical place for connect...

When someone you love dies by suicide, grief can become tangled up with questions that may never have answers. Why? What did I miss? Could I have stopped it? Did they know how much I loved them? Carla Fine knows those questions intimately. Her husband, Harry, died by suicide at 43. They had met in college, married at 21, and spent 21 years building a life together. Harry was a physician, a teacher...

When someone you love dies, you start looking for them everywhere. In dreams. In songs. In signs that show up at exactly the right moment. Anything that might tell you they’re still here somehow. But what happens when psilocybin opens a door you didn’t even know was there? My guest, Heather A. Lee, is one of the first certified and licensed psychedelic-assisted psychotherapists in the U.S. Before...

Have you ever had something happen after someone you love died that made you stop and think, Wait...was that you? A song at exactly the right moment. A dream that feels different from an ordinary dream. A coincidence that feels almost impossible to explain. For a moment, you feel them. And then your rational brain kicks in. Am I imagining this? Am I seeing what I want to see? Was that really them?...

When Sammy died, I expected heartbreak. I didn’t expect what grief would do to my brain. I couldn’t remember things. I couldn’t concentrate. Words disappeared in the middle of sentences. I would walk into a room and have no idea why I was there. At times, I genuinely wondered what was happening to me. If you’ve experienced grief brain, you know how frightening it can be. And there are real reasons...

How do you keep choosing life when the life you loved disappeared in a single instant? In 2018, Colin Campbell and his wife Gail were driving home from a family trip to Joshua Tree when a drunk driver slammed into their car at 90 miles an hour. Colin and Gail were knocked unconscious. When Colin opened his eyes, their two teenage children, Ruby and Hart, were already gone in the back seat. There w...

Most of us are so afraid of grief that we push it away without even realizing we're doing it. We ignore it, stifle it, cover it up, and tell ourselves we're moving on. But loss doesn't ask for permission. It happens to us, whether we're ready for it or not, and when someone we love dies, it can leave us feeling like we've lost all control. But here's something we don't talk about enough: We still...

When you lose someone you love, every loss asks something different of you. One goodbye can leave you heartbroken but standing. The next can bring your whole world to a stop. Sometimes grief gives you months to prepare, convincing you that you'll know how to survive what's coming. Other times, it arrives without warning, turning an ordinary day into the day your life is divided into before and aft...

Grief has a way of making everyone else uncomfortable. After the funeral, the messages slow down. A few days later, people expect life to carry on as if nothing happened. You're back at work. You stop bringing up the person who died because it feels like everyone else has already moved on. But you haven't. The truth is, life never goes back to what it was after losing someone you love. Carla Ferna...

Some losses come with a funeral. People bring food. They hug you. They say, "I'm so sorry for your loss." Some rituals help you begin to make sense of what has happened. But some losses don't look like loss at all. They're the kind that keep you awake at night, staring at your phone, wondering if it will ring. They're the kind where your child is still alive, but addiction has taken so much of who...

Losing your mother changes you in ways you don't always recognize at first. It isn't only the moment she dies that hurts. It's all the moments that follow. The day you instinctively reach for your phone to call her. The holiday when her chair sits empty. The milestone you wish she could have witnessed. The ordinary Tuesday when you realize no one else remembers your childhood quite the way she did...

Grief has a way of splitting time. There is the life you lived before the loss, and then there is everything that follows. Somewhere in between, you find yourself asking questions that seem impossible to answer. How do I keep going? Will this pain ever soften? What am I supposed to do with all the love I still have for someone who is no longer here? My guest on this episode of Crying Out Loud is R...

What happens when grief doesn’t just take someone you love but the version of you that existed before the loss? Who are you then, and what do you do with questions you never needed before? Where is God in this? Is there meaning in suffering? Will you ever feel whole again? For more than four decades, Marianne Williamson has sat with people in that exact space, helping them navigate what those ques...

Millions of people read Amy Krouse Rosenthal's final Modern Love essay, You May Want to Marry My Husband. It was a breathtaking love letter, a farewell, and an extraordinary act of generosity. Written from hospice just days before her death, Amy introduced the world to the man she loved and gave him something few people ever receive: permission to love again someday. The essay touched millions. Th...

There are seasons in life when everything seems to shift at once. You lose someone you love. Your body begins changing in ways you don't fully understand. Your emotions feel bigger, your energy disappears, your patience thins, and the strategies that used to carry you through life suddenly stop working. Many women blame themselves. They wonder why they can't keep up. Why they feel anxious, overwhe...

There are ways we learn to disappear long before we realize we're doing it. Some of us become caretakers. Some become achievers. Some become peacemakers. We learn how to earn love, avoid conflict, meet expectations, and survive the environments that shaped us. Over time, those adaptations can become so familiar that we mistake them for our personalities. But what happens when the cost of staying d...

What if the people we love don't disappear when they die? What if the bond continues, even after death? And what if some of the people who have shaped our lives most deeply, including our children, were connected to us long before this lifetime began? In this episode of Crying Out Loud, I sit down with psychic, spiritual teacher, and bestselling author Ainslie MacLeod for a conversation that chall...

Kris Carr has spent more than two decades helping millions of people navigate illness, fear, healing, and uncertainty. As a bestselling author and one of the most recognizable voices in wellness, she has inspired people around the world while living with Stage 4 cancer herself. But when her father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Kris found herself facing something entirely different: the lon...

Why does it feel like the more healing work you do, the harder life hits back? You've done the therapy. You've meditated. You've read the books. You've "done the work." And then life hits you with a pandemic, a friend's suicide, a divorce, and a toddler, all in the same week. So now what? In this episode of Crying Out Loud, I sit down with Devi Brown, a meditation teacher, podcaster, author of Liv...

In 2022, the sudden death of Bob Saget made headlines around the world. As the public mourned a legend, his widow, Kelly Rizzo, was grieving her husband with the whole world watching. How do you mourn so publicly, release someone you love, and eventually find love again when you had lost all hope?  In this episode of Crying Out Loud, I sit down with Kelly Rizzo, food and travel creator, host of th...

Why are we so uncomfortable talking about death when it’s the one thing every single one of us will face? We plan weddings. We plan careers. We plan retirement. But when it comes to the end of our lives, most of us are completely unprepared… emotionally, practically, and spiritually. And what if that avoidance is actually costing us something much bigger than we realize? In this episode of Crying...

What if the day that broke you… could also be the day that brings you back to life? Most of us think grief is something we move through, step by step, until we’re “on the other side.” But what if that’s not true? In this deeply moving episode of Crying Out Loud, I sit down with pastor, storyteller, and grief advocate John Onwuchekwa to explore a different truth. One that might completely reframe t...

What if the most painful part of grief isn’t the loss itself, but the belief that you’re doing it wrong? That quiet voice that says you should be further along… that you should be handling it better… that somehow, if you had done one thing differently, they might still be here… I hear that voice every single day in my work. And I’ve felt it in my own grief too. But here’s the truth: you’re not doi...