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The Susan Hollins Podcast
The Susan Hollins Podcast episodes
- They didn't deserve this
“They didn’t deserve this.”
We hear these words following a death which has shocked us, rocked our world... We may have spoken them ourselves. But what are we really saying?
What is the this? And what do we mean by deserve? Are we talking about fairness, goodness, innocence, suffering, or about the deeply held assumptions about life and death that we may not even know we have until grief sweeps them from beneath our feet?
In this episode, Susan Hollins opens out one deceptively simple sentence and follows where it leads: into the untidiness of being human, the ancient questions raised by Job and the Psalms, into our strange relationship with Death, and to the difference between causation and deserving.
And perhaps They didn’t deserve this is not an explanation at all. Perhaps it's a protest. Perhaps it's a lament.
A 25-minute exploration of grief, fairness, mortality, and what happens when the world refuses to conform to the moral order we thought we understood.
www.susanhollinscounselling.co.uk
WhatsApp @susanhollinscounselling
26 min - Where it began
Before The Susan Hollins Podcast, there was Thresholds.
In this episode I pause to tell you where and how this podcast began, and how my writing about loss and grief on Substack became the first seven episodes you can find here.
I talk about what Thresholds continues to be: a meeting place for psychotherapy and lived experience, spirituality and theology, religious belief and practice, psychic awareness and experience, alongside other ways in which we try to understand and engage with the complexity and profundity of loss and grief.
While the name of my Podcast has changed, the concept of the threshold remains at its heart, with the personal experience of grieving people at its core.
You can contact me at:
https://www.susanhollinscounselling.co.uk
8 min - The Un-Words of Grief
In this episode I'm delighted to welcome Tina Naldret to The Susan Hollins Podcast. Tina is a Celebrant, Expert Healthcare Coach and Nurse Hypnotherapist in private practice in Devon.
Together we explore what we came to call the “un-words” of grief: feeling unheard, misunderstood, undone and unseen, among others. These words give expression to some of the deeper anguish of grief, particularly those experiences which can be difficult to explain to other people or even to put into words ourselves.
Our conversation ranges across our experiences of working with grieving people and the ways in which grief can affect our sense of ourselves, our relationships and our place in the world.
Find out more at:
Tina Naldret, Independent Celebrant
https://camomileceremonies.com
https://www.susanhollinscounselling.co.uk
45 min - When Grief became private
As you grew up, what happened in your neighbourhood when someone died? What happens when someone dies where you live now?
In this episode I reflect on the waning of communal grief and what may have been lost as grief has increasingly become a private experience. The customs and rituals which once made death and grief visible within a community have changed or disappeared, leaving many grieving people increasingly isolated and lonely. I consider what it means to grieve when the wider community no longer readily recognises, witnesses or shares our loss.
Find out more:
https://www.susanhollinscounselling.co.uk
26 min - Being uprooted by grief
Clients often tell me how uprooted they feel in their grief; how the absence of an anchor person, an anchor pet or an anchor place can unsettle their sense of where and to whom they belong.
In this episode I reflect on this experience of being uprooted by grief. What happens when someone or something which helped to locate us in the world is no longer there? I consider the relationship between grief, place, identity and belonging, and the disorientation we may experience when the familiar anchors of our lives are lost.
Find out more:
https://www.susanhollinscounselling.co.uk
16 min - The Wildness of Grief
Grief is neither tidy nor rational. At times it may be quiet and seemingly manageable; at others it can overwhelm us, so that we behave in ways which surprise or even shock us.
In this episode I reflect on the wildness of grief: those times when grief refuses to be contained by our usual expectations of ourselves or by what others consider acceptable. Rather than seeing this wildness as something which must be controlled or suppressed, I consider the place it may have within our grieving, and what may happen when we give ourselves permission to experience it.
Find out more:
https://www.susanhollinscounselling.co.uk
15 min - The Underworld
In this episode I reflect on what I term The Underworld: that wild and unfamiliar place we may enter when profound loss upends the life we knew and the old bearings and moorings no longer hold.
The Underworld can be a place of darkness and disorientation, but it may also become a place of deep learning and transformation. I reflect on what we may encounter there, what grief may ask of us, and the invitations we may begin to recognise as we find our way through this unfamiliar territory.
Find out more:
https://www.susanhollinscounselling.co.uk
19 min - The silence in grief
In this episode I expand on the idea of the landscape of grief: the wild and frightening inner landscape into which we may fall when loss and grief enter our lives.
I reflect particularly on the silence of grief: the places within our grieving for which words can be difficult, or even impossible, to find. I also consider the impossibility of simply returning to the life we had before loss came along. Grief changes the landscape, and somehow we have to find a way of living within a world which is no longer the one we knew.
Find out more:
https://www.susanhollinscounselling.co.uk
13 min - When grief breaks in
Loss, and its bedfellow, grief, can arrive without warning and change life in an instant.
In this first episode of The Susan Hollins Podcast, I explore what happens when loss breaks into our lives and turns the familiar world upside down. I reflect on the disorientation of grief, on what happens when the life we knew can no longer be recovered, and on why understanding something of the nature of grief can help us begin to find our way within a profoundly changed world.
Grief is not something we simply overcome or leave behind. Learning to live well with grief means discovering how we may carry what has happened while continuing to live a life which still has meaning.
Find out more:
https://www.susanhollinscounselling.co.uk
11 min
About The Susan Hollins Podcast
From the publisher's feed
Grief is a raw, existential, threatening experience which will encounter all of us during our lives.
I'm Susan Hollins, an Accredited Psychotherapist, author, writer and podcaster with a special interest in the many ways grief enters and changes our lives, through death certainly, but also through relationships, identity, ageing, belonging, change, and the losses we may struggle to name.
In my podcast, I reflect on loss and grief through the lenses of psychotherapy, spirituality, religion, psychic awareness and experience, and alternative spiritualities. I'm curious about what happens when we allow these different ways of understanding and interpreting human experience to sit alongside one another and to relate to one another, rather than keeping them entirely separate.
Central to my work is the recognition that grief can be a raw, gut-wrenching and existential experience. Profound loss can tear through the fabric of our life, upending what was familiar, leaving us without the bearings and moorings by which we knew and could navigate our world. We enter a wild and unfamiliar place which I term the Underworld: a place where much of what we've known and relied upon no longer holds, and where we're confronted by questions such as, “Who am I now … without … ?” and “This is meaningless. How can I make meaning from this terribleness?”
Some episodes are conversations with invited guests who bring their own particular understanding and approach to the table. In other episodes I reflect upon an aspect of grief which has caught my attention. For grief is unmistakably existential, challenging our understanding of love and loss, meaning and mystery, the life of the psyche and how we may learn to live with what cannot be undone.
This is a podcast for anyone who is grieving new or older losses; for people who want to think more deeply and widely about loss and grief, not as something to be overcome but as one of the great human experiences through which we may learn so much about ourselves. It's also a podcast for anyone curious about the broader and sometimes stranger territories within grief, including the parts of it which don't fit neatly into conventional conversations about it.