About the Episode
Grief doesn’t always follow a clear path. For many people, it can feel layered, disorienting, and difficult to move through, especially when the emotions don’t resolve in the ways we expect.
If you’ve been feeling stuck in your grief or unsure how to carry both the love and the pain, this conversation offers a way of understanding what’s happening beneath the surface.
In this episode, Dr. Julie Lopez and grief expert Aurena Green explore the reality of complicated grief, why it can feel so complex, why it doesn’t follow a predictable timeline, and what it can look like to begin moving through it in a way that honors your full emotional experience.
You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of how to stay present with intense emotions without shutting down, how to hold both the beauty and difficulty of your relationships, and how to begin reconnecting with yourself in a way that feels more grounded, more open, and more alive.
This is a thoughtful, honest look at grief that makes space for the full experience, without rushing it or trying to simplify what it means to move forward.
Episode Guest
Aurena Green is a licensed trauma therapist, registered yoga instructor, and Reiki Master teacher. She works with adults and specializes in grief & loss, PTSD, anxiety, identity, depression, and the LGBTQ+ community.
More about Aurena Green:
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Episode Transcript:
Dr. Julie Lopez: Hi everyone, my name is Dr. Julie Lopez, and I’m your host for Whole by Design. On this month’s episode, we will be diving into complicated and complex grief and how you can specifically heal from even the most devastating of losses.
You are going to want to stay until the end, when our guest is going to share about the three essential elements around really regaining your life and coming online and living to your fullest.
Today, I’d like to welcome Aurena Green. She is a talented clinician who is also the author and co-founder of the Planet Grief Card Deck, a powerful tool for moving through grief. She does incredible work both individually and with groups, and she is an absolute expert on the topic of grief in all of its complicated forms.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Aurena. It’s so awesome to have you.
Aurena Green: Thank you for having me, Julie. I’m really grateful to be here.
Aurena’s Personal Journey with Grief
Dr. Julie Lopez: So tell us, first of all, I’d love to hear how you got into this particular specialty area. I think all of us as humans can relate to some type of grief or loss because that’s the journey of humanity.
But when it comes to complicated or complex grief, it’s a very special niche area and I’d love to hear about how you found yourself here.
Aurena Green: Yeah, so I found myself here through personal experience. I think my first real, I guess, personal relationship initiation into the realm of very visceral grief happened when I was actually seeing a client who was in the process of dying.
And that was the first time I’ve ever been up close and face-to-face with the dying process. And of course, there was a complexity so woven into that process. We were very similar ages at the time.
And also being in the role of therapist, not friend, it was navigating a whole lot of complexity there, of how much I felt I was allowed to grieve and how much I actually was grieving and how much of that I couldn’t show to the client along the way. That was a huge initiation for me. And shortly after that, I actually had the experience of my mother being diagnosed with stage four cancer, and went through that, a very similar process with her, but of course, also completely different because she was my mother.
And that was an even deeper understanding of what it means to grieve someone so essential to your life. I mean, literally your life giver, and also someone with whom the relationship can be the most complex.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Okay. So, of course, I want to pause for all of that. It sounds like you really got an initiation by fire one after the other. And I was envisioning this process and thinking about how much your nervous system probably took in during this short amount of time.
It is so hard to be in a space where your job is to create safety and permission for someone else while you’re personally grieving their loss and being conscious of making space. And then, fairly shortly thereafter, go through it on such a profound level. It just like kind of hit me, even while you were talking, like the weight of that onto you.
Aurena Green: Yeah, it was, it was very weighty. I mean, the span from going to my client’s funeral to learning my mom had cancer was seven days. So it was one after another trial by fire, initiation by fire.
What Grief Teaches About Life
Dr. Julie Lopez: And I’ll just say on a personal level, personally for me, and then watching kind of the most masterful experts in the field and learning about their experiences that drew them to the place. It certainly sounds like you got that real-life, authentic experience, which propels so many to dive deeper into how this incredible human system works and how things unfold. So I’d love to hear more about what you can share with listeners about what you’ve learned and what you’ve borne witness to, in yourself and in your work.
Aurena Green: Oh, my goodness, I’ve learned so much. You know, nothing has connected me to the sanctity of life like grief has. And I never expected that to be the case.
I actually expected to come through those experiences, feeling quite jaded and cut off. And I do think that when we go through something like that, there is a conscious decision we have to make. Like, do I want to stay in this place of bitterness and of anger and also of fear of what life can do to me and to the people that I love? Or do I want to let this connect me more deeply to my fellow human? Do I want it to deepen my appreciation of life? And how can I hold both? How can I hold that raw pain and the fear, and also find presence for what’s here?
Choosing How Grief Shapes You
Dr. Julie Lopez: Wow, that sounds pretty complicated when I think about things like loyalty or survivor’s guilt or even like allegiance to someone who’s gone before, and what can get in the way of, you know, what you presented here, of course, and I appreciate so much such a simple moment of choosing one thing or another.
Like already I was thinking, wow, I can see how that choice might become really complicated.
Aurena Green: Yeah, absolutely. And for me personally, I mean, I don’t, I do think that grief is so unique and everyone will take something different from it.
But for me, my feeling was, okay, I can either let this be a horrifying, traumatizing part of my life that I let just sort of close me up. Or I can allow it to be some fertilizer for how I want to grow and how I want to share myself with the world. There’s a really amazing quote by Parker Palmer, where he says, when the heart breaks, it can either break like shrapnel, hurting everyone in its path, or it can break open into largeness.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Wow.
Aurena Green: And when I heard that, yeah, my mom hadn’t even died yet when I heard that. And I thought, wow, I have the power right now to either break like shrapnel, which is so tempting to do something.
I can’t say that I never broke like shrapnel. But there’s a choice there. I can also choose to find ways to break open into largeness and expand my capacity for love and for life.
Making Space for the Messy Middle of Grief
Dr. Julie Lopez: Yes. And you said it was, I mean, you’d had this grieving process with your client. And then you were going through a loss and grief process, even before your mom passed away, when you started to see this choice.
What do you see in your work around this moment? Like, how long does it take someone to get to a place of deciding not to be shrapnel? Because it certainly can be really satisfying to see other people hurting to mirror your own or to see how you can cause and have some agency over something that can feel really out of control. Like, what do you see, kind of in general, around that choice point for people?
Aurena Green: That’s a great question. You know, I’ve sat in the messy middle with many clients in their grief. And I think honestly, one of the most powerful things that we can do that I can do as a practitioner and that I can help them do with their systems is to not rush one bit of it. That is what will get them to that choice point if that’s where they want to be, to just honor every single piece of their journey with grief, which is a journey that, of course, never ends. And there are more raw chapters in it than others at times.
And sometimes that’s not necessarily even at the beginning, because of course, grief changes shape as we grow.
But really, what I’ve found is the power is in those smaller, seemingly smaller moments where we are allowing to come through what wants to come through. If it’s rage, it’s rage.
I’ve taken clients to rage rooms, we throw stuff, we break it, we honor that. That helps it also to not to come out sideways when they go home to their families and their partners. It’s honoring what comes up, it’s not supposed to be this thing where we walk in and say, how can we make this beautiful?
It’s like, this is really messy, and this is really painful. And let’s be with the feral ferocity and acute pain of that. And let’s see where we come out.
Let’s see how this starts to shift when you are given access to everything, when it’s okay to feel how you feel.
Dr. Julie Lopez: I think it was really powerful, just your naming of it, calling it the messy middle. And that’s part of what you see. I asked you a question like a timeline, like an average, and you said, ” Hey, it’s different for everybody.”
And the most important posture is to be present with the truth of whatever comes up and embracing the messiness.
Why Complicated Grief Feels So Hard to Move Through
Dr. Julie Lopez: Can you tell me a little bit more about that? I know you’ve talked about complicated grief. I’m wondering what makes it complicated, what makes it complex? And what would you want listeners to hear about that? Because many people may want to stay till the end to hear about how to become alive again, which may seem and feel like a nice, neat bow, like, oh, my gosh, yes, please.
Like, I’m angry and messy and all this stuff. How do I get there? What is the path? So, sorry, I threw in a bunch of stuff there. But I would say, I just want to know, what makes things complicated about this process?
Aurena Green: Oh, so many things.
Well, on just a logistical level, let’s name that our culture does not support creating the space and time necessary to be with our grief and honor it to its fullest extent. So, I mean, that complicates grief, certainly.
Life moving on when it simultaneously feels like it’s frozen in place.
And then, of course, just the fact that most often, losing someone is not a clean break. We are multifaceted, complex human beings, and our relationships reflect that. And so often, I see that when a person is lost, they start to get painted in this kind of angelic light. Oh, this person was the best person I’ve ever known, or the kindest person. And a lot of that might be true. Yes.
And the people with whom we have our closest relationships, there’s going to be complexity there.
Holding Both Love and Hurt After Loss
Dr. Julie Lopez: No one’s angelic and perfect. And I love that you actually used an improv technique, which is “yes and.”
The whole “yes and” allows for a little more complexity.
Any examples of that that you could share to kind of illustrate what does that mean in terms of not idealizing someone who’s lost, especially who has been lost or has passed away?
Like what might be an example where someone might feel pressure to memorialize them in all their best qualities and get stuck because of it?
Aurena Green: Oh, yes, I can absolutely give an example of that. And I’ll speak from my own personal experience.
My mother, whom I love very much and who I do think was a beautiful human being, she also had her difficult parts and her hurtful parts. And in my relationship with her throughout my life, she had a very complicated relationship with my queerness. And in order to maintain a relationship with her.
I had a sort of pattern of in both big and small ways, self-abandoning, neutralizing her hurtful words in order to maintain that connection to her, portraying her as, you know, the most amazing mom in public while in private, knowing that there were other, you know, complexities and, and, you know, experiences with her that were deeply, deeply hurtful.
And these were things that I didn’t fully reckon with when she was alive. And that is because I did want to maintain that relationship.
I was afraid that confronting all of the pain would create more distance between her and I.
And we got to do a bit of the healing towards the end of her life, but it wasn’t the fullest extent that I would have wanted and needed it to be in order to feel that closure.
So after she passed, there was this initial impulse to do what I felt most other people were doing and paint her in that angelic light and let that be the image that everyone took away of her.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Her legacy.
Aurena Green: Her legacy. Right. And, there are, of course, gorgeous parts of her legacy that I’m so grateful and honored to carry forward.
And there are also those other pieces that I haven’t reckoned with, and I didn’t think I, I initially didn’t think it was going to be helpful to reckon with it. Cause I’m like, she’s gone. There’s no one to resolve this with, you know?
But it would come to me in moments that I didn’t expect. I’d be at a pride parade, and I’d see a mother with their queer child, like hugging them, holding them, celebrating them. I would see the moms who would go to the pride parades, like, get a hug from a mom.
And I’m like, Oh, I want that. I want that. But I don’t, I don’t want to open myself to that.
That feels too painful.
And it all started to come to a head as I was beginning to plan a future with my partner, who is a trans person. And the immediate feelings I was trying to tap into the celebration and the love of my mother was like, Ooh, she would never have supported this.
Like this wouldn’t have been a celebratory time for her. And that’s when a lot started to come up for me and be unearthed about, Oh boy, there is some unattended sorrow in me that has just never had the freedom to move through for fear that it could disrupt my most sacred, special survival-based relationship. So I’ll pause there because I’ve been talking for a long time, although there’s more I’ll say about it.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Well, and my assumption as you’re sharing is that this very real and less than ideal felt experience with your mom was getting in the way of your present day process of grief, right?
And yes, you’re shaking your head. Yes. So I’m on track, but I’m thinking about the idea of complexity and how people can get stuck in really poignant and painful ways that don’t allow them to move forward.
Aurena Green: Yes. And not only was it disrupting my grief process, but it was actually, I’ll say it was integral to my grief process, but I had ignored it for a long time. It was disrupting my self-expression because there was still that little part of me that was you can be queer, but don’t be queer too loudly.
Don’t be too proud. Don’t be too open.
So it was that internalized voice of my mother, of this is how you be safe in the world.
And that’s no longer the shape of my life, and I don’t want it to be the shape of my life.
And so, reckoning with that entailed making my mother wrong in her beliefs about that and her beliefs about my life while knowing not to make her the villain of my story, because she’s not. Even her venom was meant to be the antidote.
She was afraid for me and what the world would see and the world would do if they saw me in my fullest expression. But the real medicine of acknowledging that she was wrong about me and wrong about what it meant for me to be safe was me getting to go back and be with those parts of myself that were hurt by her and to say, your pain is valid and it’s okay. You’re you are safe now.
And actually, I celebrate who you are. You can talk about it, you can be about it.
You can wear your rainbow to the parade, you know.
Releasing Emotional Weight You’ve Been Carrying
Dr. Julie Lopez: And, I’m going to interrupt just for a moment because I want to make sure that I and the audience are tracking. You’re saying you as you are speaking to yourself.
You are okay. You’re right. Which meant in the grief process, making space for your mom to have been hurtful for her not to have been all angelic, that she was a flawed person, and that wasn’t you being disloyal to her by recognizing the truth of the complexity of her.
Aurena Green: Yes. And that also allowed me to accept the fact that she’s human. She’s not a God.
She’s not infallible. Yeah.
Dr. Julie Lopez: And tell me what that did for you in terms of your process of grief.
Aurena Green: That just felt like it allowed me to… I think the best way I can say it is that it allowed me to clear my own channels and to really release any of that residual feeling of shame that comes with being myself, being who I am. And it also helped me to just release the energy that was inside and stagnant, like it was me taking my own medicine that I so often share with my clients. Emotion is energy in motion.
The emotion of anger wants to be moved. It wants to be expressed. If it’s not, it’s going to get stuck. It’s going to get heavy or it’s going to come out sideways.
So it was like I think I had previously held the belief for myself that feeling this anger means all of a sudden I’m creating distance between me and my mom and I’m no longer going to be able to maintain this relationship with her after death. But it wasn’t that at all.
It was there’s this energy here, and you deserve not to be carrying it anymore.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Oh my gosh. Your word choice was so powerful, Aurena.
And I picture the fear and the struggle around sometimes touching into places that might feel disloyal or might cause guilt or might even feel as if they’re going to disrupt a closeness to someone who’s been lost, and that you’re really living testimony. And by proxy, I assume you’ve witnessed this with many of your clients, that by actually going there, paradoxically, it frees you and then doesn’t create this distance that you were thinking of.
That is so powerful.
You’ve said so many powerful things. I’m just like, also, that I think you said emotion is energy in motion.
I love that.
3 Ways to Move Through Complicated Grief
Dr. Julie Lopez: So great. And you’re going to be so shocked. But it’s that moment right now.
You’ve already, I know it’s crazy, right? You’ve already given us so many incredible nuggets. But if you’ve been waiting, Aurena is now going to share about these three essential elements to being fully alive again after complex grief.
So I’ll let you take it.
Aurena Green: Well, thank you, Julie.
I will say that three essential elements to alivening again after a loss are:
Number 1, allow yourself the freedom to feel authentically. Let it be wild. Let it be loud. This is the way that we move this energy. And, you know, honor the rage, honor the sadness, honor, even truly the sense of freedom that can come.
And I’m talking about this because after I lost my mom, there was this sense that there was a part of it amidst the heaviness and amidst the heartache that was, oh, there’s a little bit more freedom in my life to be me. I’m not thinking about what my choices will look like through the filter of someone else’s lens. I’m just living.
So being able to honor that too and say that out loud and realize that when I said that to groups of people, there were so many, oh, I feel that too. And I never wanted to say it out loud.
So, yeah, it’s allowing yourself to feel authentically. It’s allowing yourself to acknowledge the beauty of these relationships. Like I had someone in a grief group once that had shared about how her father had mostly been a toxic force in her life. And so after she lost him, a lot of her friends and family were like, oh, well, whatever, don’t waste your breath.
And she said, wait a second. I want to be able to acknowledge and honor the parts of that relationship that were really meaningful to me. So, so permission, permission to acknowledge the beauty, permission to acknowledge the pain, your grief is yours.
It’s not anybody else’s. You don’t have to grieve according to their template or their relationship with that person or what they think is right or wrong.
You get to honor the full spectrum of your experience, knowing that these things don’t cancel each other out. They co-exist.
The love can co-exist with the hurt. You know, the beauty can co-exist with the toxicity, even.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Amazing. I love that. So I know you’ve called this the power of permission.
And so just to review, it was number one, being allowed to feel it all authentically. Number two, really honoring the beauty of the relationship and the loss that that creates. And number three, really being able to give yourself permission to acknowledge the parts that weren’t so positive, that weren’t so perfect.
Aurena, thank you so much for being on Whole by Design today.
Aurena Green: Thank you so much for having me, Julie. It’s an honor.
Dr. Julie Lopez: And thank you for joining me on this episode of Whole by Design. I hope it left you feeling inspired to toss out the labels, embrace new perspectives, and take one step closer to the joy and clarity that is waiting for you.
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