Being human means experiencing loss. If we let it, these moments can propel us towards a deeper, richer inner journey. In this episode of the Depth Work podcast, Sarah Avant Stover shares her profound experiences through many circumstances of grief and heartbreak, detailing the events that led her to write her latest book. She discusses the unique nature of betrayal trauma, the transformative power of grief, and the significance of ritual and communal support in healing. Her exploration into Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and its impact on her is also highlighted.
In fact, Sara was generous enough to demonstrate an IFS session in real time with yours truly….
We discuss:
00:06 Sara’s story 02:13 Betrayal Trauma and Its Unique Challenges
04:14 The Transformative Power of Grief
12:16 Navigating the Early + Later Stages of Grief
14:51 Collective Grief and Community Healing
19:48 The Role of Rituals in Healing 25:20 Exploring Internal Family Systems (IFS)
32:29 Demonstrating a session - Jazmine’s parts
48:35 Understanding Inner Child Dynamics
Transcript Excerpts:
Jazmine: You wrote about heartbreak and grief as kind of demarcating who you were before that experience and then who you will be. And that really stuck with me. Several of your experiences that you describe in your book, I also quite relate to.
I went through a breakup that had some similar qualities of the manipulation and emotional abuse and And going through that breakup really did feel that way. Like there was a before and there was an after. I think that is just such a beautiful way of describing that transformative experience because I find that with a lot of different forms of trauma, that kind of breaking point is always a bit of a quality in that. Can you talk a bit more about that piece, like what it was like to really realize that you can't go back to how things were before?
Sara Avant Stover: There were many times over those years. Those are six years. So definitely over the first four years or so where I kept trying to put my life back together in the way that was familiar because it was pretty put together before that event, more dialed in than it had ever been. My second book had just come out, my business was doing, doing really well, all these pieces were in place. And so I kept kind of like reaching for that old model of stability until some years in when I just realized that's , it's not coming back.
And I realized that trying to do that was putting unnecessary pressure on myself. And it was a way of willfully trying to expedite the healing process. And something I talk about a lot in the book is it takes as long as it takes. So there was just, there was deeper levels of acceptance that I needed to come to.
I can't force a new structure on the chaos until it's time, a new order will emerge from within the chaos. And so I just needed to really let go into that and trust that that was going to happen. And I had to look at reference points of people who I knew had been through unthinkable things, to see how they were further along on their paths and how a new life had formed around them. But in order for that to happen, there does need to be this complete letting go of the old frame of references, not just in how my day was structured, but also in how I was or who I was.
Sara Avant Stover: And I had to just realize, Who I am doesn't exist anymore. My old life doesn't exist anymore. I don't know who I'm going to be. I don't know what my life's going to be like, but I know that I just need to let go and trust the process and trust that I'll land on my feet.
Jazmine: Yeah, it struck me when I was in the middle of my own transition with that, that there is a kind of a strange gift within knowing that you can't go back to something. You can't cling to something old that you're almost forced to trust in this way. You have no other option. Right? And so it's just a, a free fall in a way. And it's absolutely terrifying. But I would say for me, at least, so my pivot was that I wound up moving, I used to live in New York and I wound up moving to Berlin, Germany, where my life just became completely different.
And I got to rebuild a whole new, even better foundation. And I think for some people when they hear that grief can be transformative or these kinds of breaking points can be transformative, people think often that that maybe is quite a Pollyanna way of talking about it. But I think that you really balance that deep honoring of grief in such a beautiful way to find the transformation within that.
One of the quotes that I really like that you wrote is, "We're encouraged at every turn to hurry up and get on with it". Meaning heartbreak and grief, "but by trying to power through these messier seasons of life, we're denying ourselves the very answers to our healing and growth". So I just, I absolutely love that. What does grounding in grief in a way, what does that enable us to do?
Sara Avant Stover: Well, one of the stories that I share in the book, one of the heartbreak stories is about a series of fertility treatments that I went through. I was trying to have a child on my own after the betrayal and was finding myself in my early forties, single childless and very much wanting a family.
So I went through those fertility treatments and they all, they failed. And through that, then I was struck with an even deeper level of heartbreak of needing to face the fact that I was. Most likely going to, going to be childless for the rest of my life. And I came across the work, Jody Day, who runs a community based in Europe. You're nodding your head so , you know, of gateway women. And she wrote a really beautiful book called "living the life unexpected" that I spent some time with. And in that book, she talks about how grief is the engine of change and how by really surrendering to grief and letting it have us. It is the very fuel that transforms us.
And so that gave me more courage just to say, okay, grief is really hard. It sucks. It's a huge energy that overtakes me and it's no fun to feel at all. And I know that it's, it's this phenomenon itself, that is going to give me what I want. That's going to get me where I want. Even if I'm not totally clear what that is anymore, because my dreams keep being shattered, but I know that I needed to let this force move me and somehow it will guide me to the shores of my new life.
And it, did, and it, has,
The Power of Collective Ritual
Jazmine: Yeah, It also strikes me that this conversation is particularly important right now, especially when it comes to collective grief with the war in Gaza ongoing, whereas in many places around the world and coming through COVID and there's so much that we're hit with all the time now. And I find that I talk to a lot of people who essentially you might call it have grief fatigue, you know? They're so kind of worn down by this collective grief, by climate grief, so many different areas, it seems to be hitting us in all kinds of different ways.
What would you say is some of the medicine that we might be able to find in experiencing and honoring this collective grief or to folks who might find themselves being fatigued or shut down or dissociated from it?
Sara Avant Stover: Well, I think that one of the main reasons why we get fatigued or shut down with it is that we don't have places to process it collectively. And so if we did have these community grief rituals that you could go to and really kind of offload whatever you're holding. I share the story of a grief ritual that I went to in this. Tradition that I mentioned of Mali Doma and Sabanfu Some, I went to it here where I live in Boulder, Colorado.
And I remember the morning that I went, I wasn't really feeling any grief. I was feeling okay, actually. So some parts of me just thought, well, maybe we don't actually need to go, but I forced myself to go. And I was so glad that I did. And pretty much right when the ritual started. These waves of grief just took me over that didn't necessarily have any content related to them.
It was just grief moving through me. And that's what everyone there was experiencing. And when I left a few hours later, I felt like I had been washed clean. I felt this clarity that I feel sometimes when if I do like a week long meditation retreat or if I do something like a juice cleanse, it's like everything just had more definition and more of a sparkle to it. So I wish that, and maybe this will be something that we create together as a global community or within smaller communities. That we could have more of these regular grief rituals, even something just like once a month where we could come and be cleansed of all that we're holding that were many of us aren't even aware of because it has become too much for our systems and there is no place to process it.
We're not meant to do it alone.
Jazmine: Yeah, I agree. I think that there is one thing that I've personally found in really, really big grief moments is that the one thing it really connects me to is others collectively and ancestors, particularly because when you're faced with such heavy grief, for me, at least I feel in my body that I am not the first or the only one who has experienced that level of grief or about that particular human experience.
And so I do think grief can be deeply connecting and communal. But you're right. We don't have so many spaces if any, depending on where we live or the culture community we're around to be able to experience that collectively.
Sara Avant Stover: And I'm glad that you mentioned the ancestors, Jazmine, cause that's another practice that I share in the book that I learned from Dr. Daniel Foor, who wrote a really wonderful book called "ancestral medicine". And he talks about this predicament that we're in that we're meant to grieve together. But we live in such a hyper individualistic culture that we don't have the opportunity to do that. So one of the practices that he recommends is for, for each of us, if we are grieving to create an invisible circle around us of our ancestors. Of our wise and well ancestors and have any other guides or people in our lives that maybe are not with us physically, but we can call them in energetically. So we do create a circle. We do create a container to be held in. So we don't need to be holding ourselves.
Inner Child & Parts Work: Internal Family Systems
Jazmine: Yeah. I want to go back to this idea of Grief as transformative, ritual as transformative. There's a lot that happens within processing grief, and as you've mentioned, betrayal trauma specifically, that can really change our perception of self, can really change not just what we think our life will be, but what we think about who we are, how we experience ourselves to be.
And I'm curious, going back to this idea of demarcating before and after, Coming through the many years of grief and different types of heartbreak that you've experienced. How did your identity shift or your relationship to yourself? How did that shift?
Sara Avant Stover: I'm just pausing because it's a big question.
The biggest thing is I feel a much deeper level of wholeness now, and a much deeper level of at homeness in myself. And prior to all of this, I, even though I had done, as I mentioned, a lot of spiritual practice, a lot of therapy, Parts of me were, out of reach and kind of a mystery to me. And it was through the heartbreaks instigated me to do a deeper healing work, which was layer after layer after layer for all those years.
And the primary modality that I used for that was internal family systems, which is a cutting edge psychotherapeutic model that Sees each of us as having a multiplicity of parts or multiplicity of inner selves, as well as an essential self or a core essence of who we are. So I feel now a deep connection to myself with a capital S.
And a self connection to my parts. Like, I don't feel like there are any parts who are kind of have gone AWOL and just, I don't know where they are, I don't know what's happening. I feel a deep sense of togetherness and harmony within me.
Jazmine: Beautiful. I'd love to hear more about your experience with IFS, internal family systems.
It is such a wonderful modality and I've studied it a bit myself and have worked with many practitioners over the years, colleagues of mine who are practitioners and have wonderful things to say about it. I would love to hear more about how you got introduced to it and what felt Revolutionary about it to you.
Sara Avant Stover: Well, I had started doing parts work in my twenties with a meditation mentor that I worked with and did a lot of work together on my inner critic and but of voice dialogue work. And then it was in my mid thirties, right before all of this blew up. One of my longtime mentors was trained in IFS. And in one of our sessions, she led me through a process that is really, now I understand it is like the IFS model that she led me through. And we went on this inner journey of exploring a trigger that I had to a situation and exploring that trigger all the way to its root and finding a five year old part of me that was really hooked into getting external validation.
And we went through a process of healing her so that she could really understand her innate worthiness. And there's an integration process in IFS where oftentimes for 30 days, after you do that kind of healing, you go inside and you connect with that part to help it really root into that transformation.
And so that whole process was really, really powerful for me. And I had never experienced anything quite like it. And so then I, when I had it into the first heartbreak, that same mentor, she then challenged me, she said, Sarah, you really need to put this work like at the top of your list and make this your number one priority for an extended period of time and to do weekly IFS sessions.
So you can really get to the root of these parts of you that have been unconsciously running the show, especially in your intimate relationship. And I took her up on that challenge and I started doing weekly IFS and I, I did that for years for those years. And you know, there wasn't any like one eureka moment where I felt like, "Oh, everything has really shifted in me".
It's a, it's a more of a gradual accumulation, where we reach a tipping point in ourselves, and there's kind of this critical mass of self energy inside that really helps to heal and settle the system. And I felt so transformed by that work that at the end of those years that I write about at the end of 2020, I decided to go on into train and IFS and have become certified in it.
And now I integrate it into all of my work because I work with so many women who were struggling with the same things that I was struggling with and all the resources that they were using weren't quite reaching it. And so I'm really grateful to have this technology that's really gentle and also incredibly effective.
Jazmine: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's so intuitive too, right? In the sense that I think many of us sense, especially trauma survivors that There can be parts of the self that feel very fractured off that feel very isolated that we've lost touch with parts that sometimes get the steering wheel for a moment and we're like, "Whoa, how did, how did that happen?" sometimes multiple parts that are kind of combative with each other, you know, fighting for the stage.
And I loved what you said about it just kind of accumulating when you do this work into a critical mass because I have found that to be very true as well, that often it's not so important exactly what it is that you say or do with that part, but that you are there spending time with them, that they know that you are willing to have their back and hold their hand and be with them through whatever they're experiencing and give them the stage to be able to say whatever it is that they're thinking or feeling. I feel that that is the fundamental transformative aspect of it.
Sara Avant Stover: Absolutely.
(Full Transcript is available via Spotify)
Sara Avant Stover is an author, Certified Internal Family Systems practitioner, and teacher and mentor of women’s spirituality and entrepreneurship. Her work—integrating Buddhism, embodiment, and psychology—has uplifted the lives of countless women worldwide. She has taught at Kripalu, 1440 Multiversity, and Shambhala Mountain Center and has been featured in Yoga Journal, HuffPost, Newsweek, Natural Health, and more. She lives in Boulder, Colorado. For more, visit saraavantstover.com.
Links
Handbook for the Heartbroken: A Woman's Path from Devastation to Rebirth By Sara Avant Stover https://www.soundstrue.com/products/handbook-for-the-heartbroken?variant=43436021809351
Programs: https://saraavantstover.com/offerings
Podcast: https://saraavantstover.com/podcast/
Resources Mentioned
Jody Day https://gateway-women.com/
Sobonfu Some https://www.sobonfu.com/
Daniel Foor https://ancestralmedicine.org/bio/
Sessions & Information about the host: JazmineRussell.com
Disclaimer: The DEPTH Work Podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Any information on this podcast in no way to be construed or substituted as psychological counseling, psychotherapy, mental health counseling, or any other type of therapy or medical advice.