Grief 02: The Science Behind Processing Grief—An Interview with Matthew LaPine Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Laura Wifler: Hey friends, Laura here. Welcome back to another episode of Risen Motherhood. My sister-in-law, Emily, will be joining me in just a moment.
We are in our second episode of the Grief series, and this week, we'll be talking with Matt LaPine. Matt is a personal friend of mine and Emily's, and today, he'll be sharing about the process of grief and offering more information on how to grieve well from more of a counselor's perspective. Matt is the Director of Christian Education at Citylight Church in Omaha, Nebraska. He holds a PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and writes on theology, emotion, and mental health. You might have heard of his book, The Logic of the Body, which was a finalist for Christianity Today's book of the year.
I know after today's episode, you're going to want to know more about him, so check out his work at matthewalapine.com. A couple last things before we dive into the series. Emily and I knew that we couldn't possibly cover every aspect of these topics in the span of one show, which is why you're going to find a series of additional resources on walking through grief on our series landing page. We have additional recommendations for books, articles, and a Spotify playlist just for you that you're going to want to check out. As a reminder, while this series is meant to be an encouragement to you in times of grief, we know that a podcast episode can't speak to the specific details and struggles of your day-to-day life. This episode is not meant to give personal advice or to be a substitute for professional help.
Lastly, I'm so sorry, but be prepared that the audio is a bit off. As you might have heard, we recorded this series almost entirely from home as we had sick kiddos. We're super sorry about that, but the content is still incredible. With that caveat, let's get to the show.
Hey, Matt, welcome to Risen Motherhood.
Matt LaPine: Thanks so much for having me.
Laura: Absolutely. We are thrilled to have you here. For those of you who haven't heard yet, Matt is a dear friend of both Emily and I. He is a past board member from Risen Motherhood. You probably heard all of that in the preamble. Matt, it is just a joy to have you on the show because we have so much personal history with you. Especially for me, you have been incredibly pivotal in my life to help me process through a lot of things—a lot of the griefs. That is the topic of our show today. While I could go on and on about you, could you just maybe tell any listeners that haven't heard about you who you are and what you do?
Matt: In terms of vocation right now, I'm the Director of Christian Education at Citylight Church in Omaha, Nebraska. We have two locations in Omaha. The basics of that is I oversee ministry with men, and then I teach core classes. We have classes in spiritual formation, spiritual beliefs, and Christian story. What we're really trying to do is to raise biblical literacy and get people to really understand the script that we're living. Personally, I'm married to Molly. I have three girls—twelve, ten, and seven now. We just had a birthday this last week for my middle daughter, Eden.
Professionally, my interests have been on the borders of theology and psychology, or theology and mental health, so I wrote The Logic of the Body, which was published with Lexham in 2020. That really tried to put my finger on a problem that I had had going back to the earliest days in seminary, which is where I had really encountered the idea that anxiety was sinful unbelief. I wanted to think a bit more holistically about how emotion worked in an embodied way. That book is really an attempt to try and combat what I call "emotional voluntarism," which is the idea that our emotions are a bit like raising our arm; we can just change them and alter them quickly just by changing our thoughts.
I wanted to really highlight how the body features in, and especially, how our unconscious ways of reading our environment and childhood experiences and those sorts of things enter into the equation. And then really apply—we're already bringing psychological concepts to the Bible, but some of those psychological concepts are bad—apply a more informed way of reading Scripture to Scripture itself and really try and talk about how we're cultivators of our body. So that's my interest. I've been in discussion with therapists and people who study these things for a while now. It's probably where my research is going probably for the rest of my life—to continue to work on the borders here.
Emily Jensen: It's such a fascinating topic and one that I think you're probably on the forefront of. We're hearing more and more about theology and psychology and the body and how all those things are interconnected. I know Laura, like she said, has been helped by your thoughts, especially on grief, and so we're excited to share some of that with our community today. Matt, how would you define grief?
Matt: Grief is complicated because I hesitate to say that it's just one emotion. Sadness is obviously a strong component, but it's probably truer to say that grief is a range of emotions. It's also helpful–there's a psychologist named Mary-Frances O'Connor who distinguishes between grief and grieving. Grief would be a response to loss. It's a psychological and bodily response to loss, but grieving, then, is the process of working through those strong responses over time. It's an intense feeling that's triggered by memory—by the realization that things are different, that they can't be restored to the way that they were.
This last year in a lot of ways has been a grieving process for me, and you just have these moments where you have this wave of feeling that comes, and you just find yourself crying, or you find yourself just stunned and sitting there, and you feel your life is fragmentary. Your thoughts are fragmentary. That's the primary component— that you have that wave of feeling of loss that comes. Then there's also the process—and I know that a lot of people have heard of—I think it's Elisabeth Kubler Ross's five-step process. I think more recent research has shown that it's maybe not quite as simple as her five steps. They are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
It's probably not a linear process in that way, but it does take, I would say, at least a year to get through an intense time of grief. It's a process of moving from that sort of yearning, that sense of loss, to greater acceptance of the reality that you're in. That's what I would say is that wave of feeling but also the process whereby that wave of feeling maybe becomes less dominating in your life.
Laura: That's really helpful. I know it was in my early thirties when I feel I experienced the deep, deep, life-changing, life-altering grief. Prior to that, there had been griefs in my life—and some big ones—but it stormed. It didn't just rain; it was storming in my life. I started to feel what you're talking about. This process—it wasn't just a few weeks of grief. It was very long-term for me. In fact, I know I still am even working through some of those things today.
I am curious—because something that was really helpful for me to understand is—if you can talk through how that grief impacts a person. Some of the work that I've really appreciated that you do is talking about how we are embodied beings and how grief really does affect us in all facets of our lives—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Maybe we can just start with physically and talk a little bit about—I know you said it's not linear and it is—we recognize we're asking you to hold something very ambiguous. If you can, help us just talk through: what might a mom, or a person, be able to expect or might see physically whenever she's going through a season of grief?
Matt: One way of looking at this would be to say that that wave of feeling that hits you is really the way that your body is reacting in a hyper-aroused state. The healing that happens over time happens when those bodily reactions calm down a little bit, but then there's also the mental components and circumstantial components. One thing I'll just throw in real quick before I get to the actual question you asked was—I think both of you guys have experienced what would be called "complicated grief." Complicated grief is more complicated partly because you might have an absence, but you don't have closure. Or you might have presence, but you don't have, in a sense, full presence.
Maybe this is a debilitating injury or something like that, but in both of those cases, there's an ongoing openness to the situation. When I mentioned the year process, that is by no stretch of the imagination a standard number. It's just trying to set minimum expectations. Complicated grief is obviously much harder, much more difficult. What's happening in grief is—the neutral psychological word for it is "stressor." Stressors are things that your body needs to bring to your attention— things that are happening, that you're tracking in the world that your body needs to bring to your attention.
A stressor will cause all sorts of things to happen to your body. One is that your endocrine system will release hormones—cortisol, especially. Cortisol is a catabolic hormone, which means that it breaks down proteins to create sugars. Cortisol can keep you going when things are difficult for a long time, but it also has a whiplash effect on the back end. Oftentimes, if you're in a high-stress situation for a long time, you'll feel rundown over time. You'll feel scattered or just have a hard time processing mentally, and so that's just a very real physical thing that's happening to you.
When grief hits you, you also have a much more active subcortical region, especially with the limbic system of your brain. Your amygdala is responsible for anxiety; your hippocampus for memory and for managing stress. Those areas of the brain are much more active. There are neurotransmitters going to different organs in your body which actually reroute blood. You've got blood there; it's going away from your stomach, and it's going to your major muscle groups or your lungs. That's why a lot of people will have stomach problems both during mental health difficulties and during grief—digestive problems—because you're literally getting less blood.
You have alpha and beta receptors in your blood vessels that constrict or expand them, and that's how all that works. There are very real physical things. Your heart rate could be elevated. Because of the hormones that are going on in your body, you could have either trouble sleeping, or you could sleep way too much, but then there's also—your brain is wired with all sorts of memories.
Especially with the loss of a loved one, you've got so many things that are associated with "we" in your head, and so all of those things can be individual triggers for a fresh wave of hormones and neurotransmitters. Those things are active, and they're active because they're triggering areas in your brain which are keyed to strong emotional cores of who you are—your deep sense of identity—and so those can stay with you for quite some time.
Emily: Thanks for describing all that. Even if someone listening doesn't know all of those terminologies or feels like, "Hey, it's hard to follow all of these details," I still think someone experiencing grief knows, "There's something different about my body." Maybe it doesn't work the way that it typically does, or they feel more on edge. Sometimes even just knowing this is a normal reaction to grief—or this is a normal reaction to something that's bringing on a wave of emotion—is helpful and comforting.
Matt: If I can jump in and say—every time I talk about the bodily aspect of emotion, I recommend CrashCourse History Sympathetic Nervous System. If you just Google that on YouTube, that's really helpful, because it's exactly what you're saying. The analogy is: I think our emotions are a bit like, let's say, house plants. You're cultivating, but when something happens to a plant, there's damage, and there's something that has to be revitalized and regenerated. So, paying attention to that physical foundation of who we are as embodied beings, I think, is really important for having patience with ourselves.
Laura: I think that stuff is really helpful, especially just knowing how to physically even act after grief—like, "Oh, I might need more sleep, or "Oh, I might be sleeping too much." Or just even trying to watch what you're eating and if you're getting daylight, sunlight, and all those things. I think sometimes it can even be helpful to just—I think when I was in a lot of grief, I wanted to lay on my bed in a dark room, to be honest—and recognizing that our bodies need care, too, in grief. I think that for a long time, that hasn't been as popular or known to do. Let's talk mentally—how about that? I know a lot of—we were talking a little bit about some mental stuff, but talk to us about that.
Matt: Mary-Frances O'Connor—I mentioned her already once, but she talks about how grief is learning. Mentally, what we're trying to do is—we're trying to make sense of this. I mean, there may not be a five-step process, but there does seem to be maybe three aspects that are prioritized in each part of the grieving process. One would be sadness—that’s the resigned, nothing-I-can-do-about-this type of thing—to anger or guilt or anxiety stage in the middle, and then finally, a more accepting stage. But I think part of what makes that the way that it is is that we understand ourselves in terms of narrative.
What makes grief so hard is that it's not just the absence of something that you want that's there but also—"Where am I going? What possible future is ahead for me?" It takes a long time to come to terms with the narrative turn that has happened in your story. And I think this is where the mental—I'm not separating mental and spiritual here—but I think that what we're doing as Christians is we're trying actually to live the script that the Bible tells us we're living. In that script, we do expect grief.
It's interesting. Romans 8 is one of my favorite texts in Scripture, because it talks about what the union of Christ means for us—that it means that we have the Spirit living inside of us. By the way, that is the Spirit who brought Jesus's dead body to life, it says early in the chapter. But then later in the chapter, it comes back, and it says creation groans awaiting its restoration, and we ourselves groan—who have the first fruits of the Spirit—awaiting the redemption of our bodies. I love that contrast between those two verses within the same chapter because the Spirit literally brought Jesus back from the dead, and it can repair my neural pathways or my sympathetic nervous system. Sorry, I just said it. He! Here I am theologian Matthew on your podcast. [Laughter]
So the Spirit can restore our bodies. We still actually live in the already-not-yet. We are here on this side of our glorified state, and we're going to have suffering. We're going to have pain, and that should be an expected thread in our narrative, but it's hard for us to imagine the future. Paul just simply says, "Our sufferings can't be compared to what will be revealed." You're like, "Well, but I want to know. I want that to be revealed. I want to experience that." At the end of the day, Paul's answer is: you have to know the Spirit is with you, and he prays with you, and through him, you can say "Abba Father" and he ministers to you. But also, that God loves you, and nothing can ultimately separate you.
None of the suffering that we could list can separate you from the love of God. The truth is that our story is not a tragedy. It doesn't end in total collapse and failure; it actually ends in blessing. God with us. It's of my favorite texts in all Scripture; Revelation 21:1-4 talks about how God will come and live with us. He will be our God. We'll be his people. There'll be no more tears, no more crying—former things have passed away. All things are new. It's hard for me even to read or recite that without being on the edge of tears, because I've experienced griefs, and I've asked "Why?". I've asked, "How long?"—all those things. But that is part of my story. It's an expected part of my story, and it takes time to work through those things, spiritually and mentally, but learning to trust God in the midst of it, I think, is the key. To say that God listens and that he's near and that I can bring my griefs and I can cry out to him, and he hears the cry of people who suffer. He uses these things to produce endurance and character as James 1 and Romans 5 says.
Emily: Such beautiful gospel truths there. I feel like that was ministering to me. It's so interesting how, in the midst of grief or grieving, it can even be hard to remember some of those most basic promises, like you said—the narrative that we're truly living in and to be replaying that narrative in our minds, alongside our woes and our questions and all of those things. Is there anything else you would add, Matt? I know we're trying to cover big swaths of information here about how grief does go on to impact us emotionally and spiritually.
Matt: As you mentioned, narrative—it's interesting that God reveals himself in the biblical narrative. We get to know God the same way that we get to know any other person, which is through his deeds and his actions. He reveals himself through how he's interacted with humanity. Books like Hosea are beautiful to me—that God is faithful when we're unfaithful. Honestly, during intense times of grief in my life, Lamentations has been a really powerful book, and I don't just mean Lamentations 3. Everybody preaches on Lamentations 3, but we forget that the book actually ends, "Unless you have forsaken us. Utterly forsaken us or forsaken us forever." It ends on that open question.
I'm not sure if Jeremiah wrote Lamentations, but if he did, he also wrote things about the new covenant that God would make with his people. It's just an interesting—you have in chapter 3 of Lamentations about how God's mercies are new every morning, but then, on the other hand, you have that lingering, "Maybe we are forsaken." I think that existential wrestling is something that we all face at various times. We're going to have those moments, and it's appropriate to pray the Psalms in those moments and to say, "How long?" I know that there have been a number of Psalms that have been really important to me.
Psalm 13 has been one that I've read a lot. Psalms 42 and 43 also are fantastic Psalms for just taking up the words of lament and crying out to God. As I was saying, he reveals himself in narrative, because we actually get to see what comes next after Lamentations. We get to see that God brought his people back into the land, and there was still unfaithfulness in Ezra, Nehemiah, but then, after these few hundred years of silence, there's the dawning of this light, and the glory of God is revealed in the Son. John says, "We beheld his glory, full of grace and truth," and that glory was revealed, not in all of his power, but, actually, Jesus says the hour of his glorification was the cross.
Whatever else is true about us, it's true that God is with us in suffering. He came and suffered for us, and, through that, he shows his love for us. That is the moment of Christ's glorification on the earth, but it also secures for us the ultimate faithfulness of that covenant. I just spent a lot of time in the biblical narrative, looking at how we were with God in blessing in Eden, we went to exile, we faced the curse, but he subjected the world to the curse in hope. And the hope was that, through all this pain and all this desire to be home, that we would, again, find our home in the Son, and that God, again, would be our God and would dwell with us in blessing. That story is so sustaining for me.
Laura: Just to hear the gospel preached, I mean, right there—it is such a beautiful story. I'm so thankful that we do live with hope, and that is such a different way than the world grieves. It's such a gift to hear it just washed over us here. I know you were talking a little bit about when we have doubts, and we feel like God is forsaking us. That is such a common feeling in grief, probably a universal one, for everyone at some point starts to ask those questions.
I'm curious—when might those questions be going too far or other areas of someone's life she be struggling with grief in a way that she might need professional counseling? I feel like that's the question—when does someone need to get a professional counselor, and when, perhaps, might it just be something that can be dealt with within the church or great friendships or wise mentors?
Matt: All this exists on a spectrum—whether in any mental illness, this is the case. We all know what that might feel like at some level. You get to a point where you're in a qualitatively different situation when you need professional counseling or medication if you've got very intense grief that is disruptive, and it's taking a lot longer than it maybe does for other people. It's a bit like breaking a bone; there's expectation that it's broken, it's going to need to be set, it's going to need time to heal, and then you're going to have to test it to see if it's sturdy, but there can be complications with that.
There's not a specific timeline, because it's different for everyone, but in general, that yearning and that deep sense of loss will tend to diminish. You'll grow further towards acceptance. But if you're in a situation where the depression is deepening— there's intense mental preoccupation with this, you're blaming yourself for wishing to die, you're gaining weight, you're not sleeping, there's lethargy—I would certainly encourage you to go talk with someone. Talk to a psychiatrist or a psychologist and see what's going on. I mean—there's other questions to be asking yourself too, which is just sort of patterns of life—whether those patterns of life are healthy.
Sometimes it's very, very hard in intense grief to do things that are healthy, but finding a friend to start a workout regimen or eating healthy, getting up out of bed— even if that's just the most difficult thing that you do in the day—going to work—these things are really healthy. Talking with someone who's been there, I think, is the most—I mean, that to me has been really, really helpful in life—to talk with guys who are fifty-five years old, who've been through things that I just can't even imagine—just so much harder than the things I'm currently facing—and have come through with grace. I didn't see him in the heat of it—but to see, "Oh, that's possible. It's possible to get to that point."
I feel that way every time I read the book of Philippians and read what Paul says about his life and about the suffering that he encounters: "For me to live is Christ and to die is gain." I just think to myself, "That is a mighty oak." And I feel like I'm like a one-year-old sapling. I think just encountering those in real life—in your church community—can also be really helpful. I think I'm trying to say—the specialist is not there to fix everything. You actually have to live a holistic life that's connected with other people and connected with work and connected with food and exercise and nature. There's not just one pathway, but those are some signs that maybe you should see some help.
Emily: So kind of switching gears here. Can someone be going through a season of grief and not really know that that's what they're going through?
Matt: Yes, this is—I think it's really interesting, actually, that there's even something called "unconscious pain." I mean—this is familiar to us when we think about it, but you could be in the middle of a conversation and then suddenly realize, "Oh, I have a headache." You didn't know when it came—you just know that it hurts. The whole point of pain, whether it's physical or psychological—and they work in similar ways in terms of the brain areas—is to get our attention. Sometimes things can happen under the surface, and especially if you've got a habit of ignoring what's going on in your body, big things can be going on under the surface that you're not aware of.
I think a lot of times that happens when your default mode is to take action and to go into hyperdrive, rather than slowing down and really paying attention. That would be my—if something big has happened, and you've not taken the time to slow down, you may want to just do that. You may want to take a day of solitude, and really pray and really journal through what's happening.
I mean, turn your attention to your body: "What am I feeling?" I know—really uncomfortable for some people, but it is possible to. Honestly, your sympathetic nervous system and your immune system are closely related. Gabor Maté has done some interesting work on this stuff, but you can have autoimmune stuff—you can have all sorts of issues when you're not paying attention to what your sympathetic nervous system is doing.
Laura: I have been that person. [Laughter] I definitely resonate with that. I think I went through a couple of different things where I was like, "I'm fine." I am totally the bulldozer. I will tell you I'm fine all day long and just go into hyperdrive and stay busy and not rest and not think, and it wasn't a good idea. I mean, looking back, I see that I will carry some lifelong scars because I was unwilling to slow down, and I just pretended things were fine or they weren't affecting me as deeply as they were.
Matt: It's dangerous for yourself but also for others too because you can get to a snapping point and do some damage to yourself or to other people.
Laura: I mean, at perhaps even a low level—but just feeling consistently impatient or feeling consistently angry or little things setting me off that never would have normally, and it took a while for me to connect that back to grief. Because I thought everyone was just not doing what they're supposed to be doing, but really, it was that I did not have the tolerance and the patience and the kindness that I used to, because I was in a lot of pain.
Matt: In the past couple years, for me the single biggest thing that has sustained me through grief is slowing down to experience the presence of God. If you're not doing that, you also can get to a point where you just are angry at God, like, "Why are you doing this to me?" What you haven't realized is that you actually haven't slowed down to really just rest in him. You've implicitly and unconsciously assumed something is wrong and broken, and "I need to fix it."
Then the more and more you do, the more you get frustrated about your inability to control things. When, if you have a habit along the way of just sitting before God with your hands open and saying, "I don't understand, but I'm going to rest in you"—that sort of courageous, faith-filled dependence that just opens your hands to God. I'm not saying that's easy. I'm saying that habit will actually enable you, in those moments, to respond in ways that are healthier, rather than turning to self.
Emily: I think that really segues us to our next question, because I know we've talked a lot about our future hope—the truth of the gospel, the beauty of the cross— but what should our expectation be about what joy in the midst of grief could actually look like? We talk a lot about that as Christians—you can always have joy. I believe that that's true. What does that tangibly look like in the midst of grief?
Matt: Again, just thinking about the words of Paul: "Sorrowful, but always rejoicing." Thinking to myself—I'm not sure that I always know what that looks like. I will say just experientially first: when I have been in deep periods of grief, I find myself moving toward other people who have been in deep grief because there is a beauty in that. I think it's Angela Gorrell. There's a book called The Gravity of Joy. She calls these people "her cloud of witnesses." There is a sort of mutual strengthening in our capacity to share our griefs with each other.
We find ourselves doing this at funerals, right? We sit around with loved ones, and we share stories about our memories of this person. There's as much tears—there's as much laughter as there are tears in those moments, right? I think that the body of Christ is really a means of grace for us in that situation. But that means that you have to be vitally connected to the body. And you need to find your cloud of witnesses. I don't think it's too late. I think you should, even before grief hits, be having these relationships in an ongoing way that can sustain you in the midst of it.
But even when you do have that grief, it's not too late to find other people who've been further down the path than you and to really lean into the way that Ephesians 4 talks about how each joint and ligament supplies growth for us. It's one of those things where joy, I think, is the outcome of a mature faith in suffering. I have not always been mature. Suffering has made me angry and anxious and all those things. I think that those are just natural responses to grief. I'm not condemning that, but I am saying that there is a better way.
That's a way that is rooted. It's rooted in the presence of God. It's rooted in the presence of a cloud of witnesses. It's rooted in gospel hope, in coming to embody the narrative of Scripture and living it out. I sort of see that as Christian maturity. My hope is that people are in intergenerational churches where people have been living it for decades and decades and can see exemplars of what that maturity looks like and can love it and give thanks for it and aspire to that sort of maturity where we can rest.
Laura: That's a great encouragement, Matt. Thank you. As we close here, we just want to speak to the mom on the other side of the speakers here of the microphones. Do you have just one encouragement or even one action step that you would encourage a mom who is grieving?
Matt: It's hard to boil it down to just one. I think I've said a few things, but maybe if I just pick one, I just say—don't underestimate the means of grace that you have in older women in your life. Please, just seek someone out who's been there. You want to choose that person wisely. Someone who shows evident maturity and someone who can empathize with where you are, but God has given us people to sort of sit on the borders of truth and experience, right? They minister gospel truth to us, but they also just minister presence to us. I think that we are image bearers in that way; we can mediate and show people what the love of Christ is in how we engage with each other. If I had to pick one, that would be my one, I think.
Emily: Yes, that's so good. Another hopeful thing in the midst of our grief is that God is hopefully preparing us to do that for others someday as well. With the comfort we receive, we'll be able to comfort others. I know that that's one thing that—as we receive that ministry from others, it's encouraging to me to know that someday—I know I don't do it well all the time—but I hope there is that maturity there. That it's like, "Hey, I can now pass on what that feels like to someone else." I hope that that's just a double-fold blessing for the listener.
Matt: That's 2 Corinthians 1:3-5.
Emily: Oh good; it's in the Bible. [Laughter]
Matt: Yeah, yeah, no that's literally: "With the comfort which we ourselves are comforted by God, we comfort others." The first guy I want to meet in heaven is Paul. His experience through suffering and the maturity that that brought about in him is just beautiful.
Laura: There's going to be a line, Matt, just be ready. [Laughter]
Matt: You're not getting in front of me, Laura.
Laura: Oh, it's a race. Oh, man. Well, Matt, thank you so much for coming on and just sharing your wisdom. We are incredibly grateful for you to take a few minutes out—a lot of minutes out—and just spend time to give wisdom and encouragement to women with Risen Motherhood. Thank you very much.
Matt: Thank you, guys.
