Ep. 005 | Love, Loss & the Unbreakable Spirit

In this deeply moving episode of SOS – Stories of Survivors, host Serina Dansker sits down with the extraordinary Dr. Mo Therese Hannah, Ph.D.—Professor of Psychology, author, and resilience expert—to explore the powerful journey of love, loss, and the indomitable human spirit. With warmth and wisdom, Dr. Hannah shares profound insights on navigating heartbreak, finding meaning in adversity, and discovering the strength we never knew we had. This conversation is a testament to the resilience of the heart and the power of hope. Watch now and be inspired by the courage it takes to heal, grow, and thrive.

To learn more about Serina Dansker, purchase her book S.O.S.: A Lesson on Love, Loss, & Survival, book her for a public speaking engagement, and discover more stories of hope, healing, and resilience, visit www.serinadansker.com.

S.O.S. Stories of Survivors — Where Survival Sparks the Soul.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Hi, and welcome to SOS Stories of Survivors. I'm Serena Dansker, your host, and today we are going to be talking about some amazing stories of resilience, people who have faced unimaginable challenges in their life, how they cope. And today I have a special guest. I'm so lucky to have Dr. Mohanna, and she's going to talk to me about how she's healed and sought out truth and is such a fierce advocate for survivors. She's not only a professor of psychology, she is a champion of people. She's had such a great career for decades. She studied the profound impact of trauma on the human mind from intimate relationships to grief and loss. She's the co-founder of Battered Mothers Custody Conference, an expert in intimate partner violence. She's dedicated to the practice of induced after-death communication. She spent her life helping others reclaim the power and find light in the darkest of places. Welcome, Dr. Mo. I'm so blessed to have you today.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

I um I'm I our audience is so lucky to have you and I want them to understand uh everything about you. I guess, like, can you tell us um since you've dedicated much of your career to grief and trauma and healing, how you first became interested in this work?

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Well, you know, it depends upon how far we go back. Um what I've found, and I'm sure many of our listeners, as well as yourself, have found that when something happens to you that is really extraordinary and it's an extraordinary challenge, and it's very, very painful, and you feel like you can't bear it, there's really only a couple directions you can go, right? You can you can you can swim or you can sink, right? And it really takes sort of like mental strength to say, okay, I'm gonna take this experience and do my best to turn it into something good. I use the analogy of taking the lemon and squeezing the lemon juice out because a lemon is very sour, and you're not gonna just start eating a lemon, but the juice is actually very healthy. It's a very good thing to drink lemon juice. And to me, as as I've lived and encountered circumstances that I never would have expected to encounter, that I didn't plan. This was not on my agenda that I had set out for my life. I really have been faced with those kinds of questions and those kinds of decisions. And so this has happened to me actually a few times in my life. And I think we're gonna probably focus more on my grief with the loss of a daughter, uh, my 20-year-old daughter. But there's been other circumstances that have sort of led me down this path. And it's not an easy path, it's not like it was an easy decision to make or it was something that I was able to just naturally allow to evolve. It really takes a lot of, I think, deep spiritual strength and consultation with the higher power, however, we may think of that higher power. And sometimes things can turn out for the good, despite the fact that you would never have wanted that to happen. Oh, yeah. And so I think the more immediate, the more recent um circumstances that that you're referring to with with surviving is surviving the loss of a child. By no means am I alone in losing a child. This is unfortunately, since this happened to me, I've found it to be more and more a common experience for any number of different reasons, whether it's a young child, whether it's a young adult child, which is in my case, or even an adult child, that loss is an extraordinary loss. It's exquisitely difficult. And so when it happened to me, and and it was a it was a death by suicide. When that happened to me, as a mother, of course, first and foremost, but as a psychologist whose specialty area is mental health, it it was really um counterintuitive that something like that would would happen in my life. And so it sent me on a journey, a search, a quest for meaning, and for somehow being able to survive that kind of loss. She was my firstborn. So everybody who has children knows what your firstborn, all your children, of course, are equally valuable to you, but there is something about a firstborn because that's your first experience with giving life and with nurturing life. And the the fact that my daughter died by suicide is something that was really um contradictory to the my life work, which was as a psychologist. I was a psychology professor, still am, uh, teaching actually clinical topics. One of the uh courses I teach, and I'm teaching it this semester, is called abnormal psychology. So it's about you know mental distress. I don't like the term mental illnesses, I don't like the term mental disorders, but mental distress, human psychological suffering, emotional suffering, and how to how to understand it, where it comes from, how to how to help it, how to help those who struggle with it. So, like I said, it was very counterintuitive and um very much uh something that I would not have expected. And yet it did happen to me. What I can tell you is that it it, you know, you you're driving down the road and you can make a right or a left, and you know, it so I I I was almost driven to find meaning, to be able to take this experience and make something of it so I could survive, so I could get out of pain. And what I found is one of the things that I've seen happen, and I've seen this happen also with my clients. You know, I have a psychotherapy practice, I've had a psychotherapy practice for over 30 years, probably going on 35 years now. And I found that um I was starting to see a lot of clients for grief. Okay. Just as I was, you know, walking down this road and you know, a few steps ahead of a client, you know, here here comes somebody who needs help. And I've seen that pattern happen with a lot of people. And it's one of the things I talk about um in the grief retreat that I do, that I do a presentation at, which I'll I'll mention that. Um you know, you when you lose a child, I know people have probably heard this, anybody that's lost a child, you join a club you never would have wanted to belong to.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

I'm part of that club. I'm absolutely too.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Yeah, absolutely. You you you are um in a um aren't it's like it's like being in the middle of the ocean without a paddle or without a boat or without a a life vest or anything like that. You know, you really feel like you're swimming alone, you really feel like you're drowning. And so when this happened to me, um, and I have my ideas about what might have contributed to my daughter Monique. Her name is Monique, she was 20 years old. I have some ideas about what might have cost it or contributed to it. I probably won't get into it in this interview. If anybody ever wants to talk to me about that, they're most welcome to contact me and you know we have a more private conversation. And it's not about Monique, it's about the way we treat mental illnesses in this country, okay, and mental disorders, whatever you want to call it.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

No, no, but that's why I'm doing this show. You you know, this is a platform so we can talk about these things because so often it's well in the past it was always just brushed under the rug, you know, and and people didn't talk about it. It, you know, oh, mental illness, that's that person. But yeah, but it's it's much more than that. It's mental wellness, yeah, the way I like to think about it, you know. And we all struggle in one way or another. Yeah, you know, can can you tell me like you know, the effects that the trauma, I mean, you the grief, the trauma, what whatever kind of trauma it is, how you've seen it, how it affects your brain, your body, just as you're suffering through it, like you say, you're in an ocean, waves are crashing into you, you're sinking swim.

SPEAKER_02 9:14

And you have nowhere to turn.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

Yeah. Well, so you know, when you when you lose a child, um, you know, you lose a part of yourself. I mean, of course, you could say that about the loss of a spouse, the loss of a sibling, loss of a best friend. So there's there's certainly some validity to that, but there is something about the loss of a child, partly because if you're a normal parent, you have a fierce sense of protectiveness about your child, that that you're charged with protecting your child, whether that's accurate or not, you know. And so there's a uh a certain violation of the way life is supposed to go. You're supposed to have children, you're supposed to raise them to adulthood, you're you're supposed to die before they do. Yeah, and yet that doesn't happen sometimes, and things happen that are out of our control. My daughter um was uh one of these kids, and again, I've talked to a lot of parents who identify with this, very sensitive, very artistic, very poetic. She was actually an actress, she was studying acting at um NYU in New York City. Yeah, it was her dream to study at NYU, and she was fulfilling her dream of studying at NYU, and she was doing very, very well. And then she became depressed, or what looked like depression. And whereas I knew all the tricks of the trade, and I knew, you know, that she could get psychotherapy, and you know, there was we could hospitalize her, although again, I wouldn't always recommend that. But you know, I was a mental, I was a member of the mental health establishment. And at that time, this is 2007, at that time, I sort of believed in the system and felt that the system could help her. And she received a lot of help, uh, but not the right kind of help, to tell you the truth. She was um hospitalized in an inpatient setting a week here, a week there. Um I did not see any real improvement as a result of that. That does not mean that hospitalization can never help. I'm not by any means saying that at all. I'm saying in her particular case, it was though she was unreachable. This was a this was a kid who I was extremely close to. We were we were close pretty much our whole lives, uh, her whole life, and um wore the same clothes, okay? We wore the same clothes and loved all the same things, loved, loved the Beatles together, loved the same movie. So we were very, very close. When she became depressed, she pulled away, which often happens, by the way, in depression. And this is something that mental health professionals who work with suicidal people really need to understand is that when a child or even a spouse or somebody else you're close to becomes severely depressed, they will often alienate or push away the people that could that could help them, their loved ones. That is actually a symptom of severe depression. And unfortunately, I didn't find that the mental health professionals, maybe doing the best they could, did not really understand what was going on with with my daughter and how much she was distancing herself. Long story short, um she was prescribed medication uh with the antidepressants, the SSRIs. Right. Um, she I can't swear to how reliably she took the medication, but one of the things that um I learned too late was that the medications in some in some cases can make people suicidal. Okay. There's actually a black box warning, it's called a black box warning that the FDA put on antidepressants. Uh, I think it was a few months after she was, she she she took her life. Okay, a few months after she took her life, and they said that um at first they thought that it was um or they claimed that it was only people who were, I think, 25 and older that could have this suicidal ideation. And then they changed it after she passed. I think it was a few months after she passed to I think the age of 19. Well, Monique was 20. And we know now, of course, that you know, uh these antidepressants have um unpredictable effects.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Can we can we talk about depression a little bit? You know, because my son, too, um, he was depressed, you know, but it would it would ebb and flow, just like in life, you know. Um, people would say to me, Oh, I didn't realize he was so depressed, he was so, you know, happy, go lucky, always willing to help, always had a kind word, you know. But I think besides that, when something went wrong, he would just beat himself up. And that that that trauma that he would, you know, project on himself um really was something that was was hard for him to to come out of. And I think that's a form of depression, uh, if I'm not mistaken. I mean, I certainly don't have an education in it. Uh, you know, I I I'm not schooled in it, but I had had had him seen a therapist, and um, there were times he was just he was on cloud nine and and doing great, and then this something would go wrong, he would, you know, mess up as teenagers do, and he would just be so hard on himself and beat himself up, and it would really take a toll on his mental health. And that's true. Do you do you see that in depression a lot?

SPEAKER_00 14:20

In my yeah, that's one that's one flavor of depression, and that certainly characterized my daughter. She had very high standards for herself, very high achiever. And you know, when when somebody is, you know, a young adolescent or a young adult, um, you know, here's here's one of the problems. They can be thinking in very uh skewed ways, which is what you see with severe depression. It's actually a type of it's like the mind is hijacked, particularly in suicide. It's like the mind is hijacked, the mind is no longer under the person's control in a sense. Their mind is seeing suicide as a viable option, it's like an alternate reality, okay? And sometimes they don't even tell you that that's what they're thinking, sometimes they will hide it, okay?

SPEAKER_02 15:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Um, but I think perfectionism, um, you know, and being hard on oneself uh is is fairly common and it does cause a lot of mental distress. Uh it's hard to know, you know, in cases of depression, you know, a lot of people keep themselves alive. I've seen this with my own clients, people who are severely depressed but somehow manage to plot along. And then what is the difference between somebody like that and somebody who takes their life when they're in their teens or early 20s? Because we hear of this a lot. And the suicide rate has not gone down, it's gone up. Okay. And uh suicide is the second leading cause of death in college students, you know, and she was a college student, she was a sophomore. And you know, you say, you know, he or she had everything to live for. I've talked to so many parents whose child has taken their own life, they had everything to live for, and yet they couldn't see it. They couldn't see it. It that was not their reality. So there's a certain, you know, um mystery behind suicide. And why is it that some people, again, can somehow plod through difficult life circumstances and other people simply can't or they don't. I do not think that somebody who takes their own life is, quote, at fault. I think in rare occasions they may, somebody may logically make the decision to take their own life because of certain life circumstances. I I can understand that. But when it comes to somebody who is severely depressed, um it's as though their mind is not working right.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

It's an illness, you know, just like cancer or something else, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so it's as though, you know, it's it's if I say this, I don't mean it in a to be, you know, uh too casual about it, but in a way, suicide is just another way to die. Just like people die of a heart attack or people die of organ failure or or sepsis or any other means of dying. It's just another, it's just the instead of the heart getting hijacked or the liver getting hijacked or the pancreas getting hijacked, the mind, the psyche gets hijacked.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

So, so with that in mind, I mean, I know I've been to some of your talks, and you talk about, you know, people who struggle, um, you know, using meditation perhaps as a way to calm that mind, or sound therapy. Um, can you talk a little bit about that and and and as a way of trying to, I guess, um, to cope with the depression? I uh, you know.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

Well, grief is grief. You can't argue with it. And grief is not depression. It looks like depression, but it's not depression. It's an understandable, normal, expected reaction to the severing of the physical bond, not the not the spiritual bond, but the physical bond between uh two people who love each other. And, you know, it's gonna happen to all of us. All of us are gonna pass. We're all gonna lose loved ones. But there is something about losing a child or losing somebody when you are in the prime of life, okay? Or when that person is in the prime of life. What happened for me? I'm gonna tell you what happened for me, then I'll talk a little bit about the work I do and what I was led to do. Um, so I was literally in physical pain with this grief. It and I'm again, I think people who have gone through this will probably identify. It was literally, it was like having a physical pain syndrome that I could not escape. And so it sort of drove me to seek and seek and look under every rock and in every nook and cranny to find a way to heal myself. And I was a psychologist, so you're supposed to have the answers, or you're supposed to be able to access the answers through psychology. There was nothing in psychology that that would have helped me, okay. I think over time I've been able to integrate some things that I've learned as a psycho psychologist and a practitioner. I've been able to integrate those things into my healing journey. But at that time of the loss, there was there was absolutely nothing. It was like you, it's almost like you can't do it without God. Okay. So I felt like I was felt this kind of inner, kind of like urge to start seeking. And and um I talk about this in the grief retreat and also in the Netflix series. Um, I don't know if you've mentioned this to your um to your listeners, but there is a Netflix series um that is called Surviving Death. And uh there's an episode, there's I think there's six episodes, and in episode four, episode four uh shows the grief retreat that is sponsored by Forever Family Foundation. And it's it's they they literally recorded one entire grief retreat, and then in the documentary are little clips from the grief retreat. And actually, my daughter shows up in there. I say my daughter because she is the one that got this little tiny segment where I'm talking about her and and about her passing and about messages I got from her. And what's so ironic to me is you know, a documentary, when they make documentaries, they shoot probably 10 times more footage than what they're actually going to use. Right. Somehow, this interview with me, and so you can see my daughter on the screen because I was giving a talk about my loss and so forth. Um, she showed up again. She was an actress. That's like I said, she was an actress and she showed up. That was one of one of the signs I got from her. But shortly after she passed, um, I was not a believer in signs, I was not a believer in the afterlife. I was just kind of, you know, I was kind of an agnostic, I would say. I wasn't an atheist or anything like that, but I was it wasn't really on my radar screen. And I woke up one morning and I had a message from her in my mind. I knew it was from her. It was it was a very strange message because it wasn't something that I would have thought of myself, at least not at that time. Not at that time. And the message was I woke up and I got out of bed, and what was in my mind was you have to change your state of consciousness. You have to change your state of consciousness. That was the message. Very brief message. A lot of messages are very brief, they're very brief and to the point.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 21:21

So I said, What the heck is that about? And that was really sort of like a benchmark for me. It was like a pointer, and I began to seek ways of whatever I could understand to mean changing my state of consciousness, which is stop focusing on the what if, stop going over the details of what happened, stop blaming myself, stop blaming her, stop being investing in anger. Not that there's anything wrong with anger, there's nothing wrong with emotion, okay? Right, but it's not productive to go over and over and over and over and over and over again. And I'm sure your uh your listeners can uh uh identify with that. So I began to really study. I and a miracle of of all. This was that when I was in my 20s, I was a meditator. I learned transcendental meditation. It was, you know, it was a time when that was new. Okay. Meditation was new to the West and to the United States. It's certainly not new now. And uh so I began to practice uh transcendental meditation and I did it for a while, and I think I got a lot out of it, but then I dropped it and you know, got very busy with life and getting my my graduate degrees and all that stuff and having kids and and working as a and life got busy, right? Life got very busy, and I put all of that aside. And when Monique was depressed, it went on for about four months before she took her life, and I was like on her every minute, trying to help her and trying to help her survive, help her, help her recover. Right. And um, I was very, very stressed out during that period. I mean, I I was really like at the end of my rope, uh worried about her and trying to reach her, you know. So I remembered I used to meditate and I said, you know what, that's what I need. That's what I need. So I went to a transcendental meditation practitioner, uh like a trainer, somebody who teaches people, and I retrained in transcendental meditation because I hadn't done it in several decades. Okay. Right, right. And the next week, probably about five days later, my daughter took her life. Oh my goodness. So I had that in place. You see, it was a gift, it was a gift that I was given so that I would have that as one way of coping. So anybody who meditates will tell you that it really does have very powerful effects, that it's not easy. There are lots of different ways to meditate. I don't believe there's any one right way, and there are a lot of meditation aids out there that you can use to help speed up your meditation practice.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

I found meditation after my son took his life, and I would go to these retreats and they would do guided meditations, and I would I would just get into such a state where I would just fall asleep, and then I would wake up at the end and I struggled for a while. Now I'm able to do some of them, you know, and and really get into that state, and I find it so healing. How you know how how how would you um tell people or talk about how people who struggle can can um can use that trans transcendental uh meditation to to relax if they're struggling with with meditation?

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Well, you know, transcendental meditation it was was uh you know um introduced to the West through uh Maharishi Mihash Yogi. I'm not recommending transcendental meditation, it's a very, I mean it's it's like many other meditations, it's it's focusing on one thing. Okay, transcendental meditation has you focus on a mantra, okay? Oh, it's what the Beatles, it's what the Beatles actually popularized uh back in the 60s and 70s. Really? But yeah, yeah, the Beatles got into transcendental meditation and they popularized it. Um and it's simply focusing on one thing. And many types of meditation are simply focusing on one thing. You you know, you probably hear of people focusing on a candle or focusing on a sound or focusing on your breath, right? Or you can focus on a spot on the ceiling. It doesn't really matter because it's focusing on one thing, and it's allowing all the distracting thoughts to just drop. You see them coming up and you drop them, you see them coming up and you drop them, and you're focused on this one thing. What eventually happens as you've probably discovered is that one thing eventually falls away, and then you're just in this in a in a space of nothingness, okay? And that's probably where we are at our our center, our core. That's probably how we contact God. Who knows, you know? Um, but there are many ways to meditate. And I I was not good at it or anything like that. Uh, and I'm still not good at it, but as you practice, it does tend to get a little bit more familiar to you. There are uh lots of ways to meditate. You can meditate, and this is something that I strongly recommend to people because I found it helped help me. Meditate to music. I meditate to music. There's tons of great music out there. Uh, if anybody again wants to reach out to me, I can make some recommendations. But anything, you can you can meditate to rock and roll if you want. I don't, but I like I like them with the softer music and the more intricate music, more beautiful music, but you can meditate to anything. There also are, and you can just get these on YouTube, you don't even have to buy them, although you can buy them. They've engineered, um, you've probably heard of Binaural Beats. Um, yeah, they've engineered all sorts of sound, I call them sound files, where they send a frequency into your ear. And when you send two different frequencies, slightly different frequencies, into each ear, and there's a variety of different meditation um uh products where you can get these. They're they're binaural beats. Um, I use a system called HoloSync, which people can find online through Centerport Research. So there's the the we live in a time of great wealth when it comes to this. I call it spiritual technology, but there's lots and lots of different ways of doing it. Some people just say they just they just meditate to their breath, that's fine. Meditate to music, that's fine, meditate to sounds, that's fine. Um, and I'm not an expert on all the different ways to meditate that are out there because there's many, many different ways. Some people do, you know, crystal bowl meditation, some people do guided meditation, but I think all of it is helpful. And I found that to be extraordinarily helpful for me.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

Oh, that's awesome. I I I think it's a great way to calm the mind and really recenter yourself, you know.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

Yeah, that's right. And it also gets you out of your head, even though you're you're when you're meditating, you know, obviously you're gonna have thoughts moving through your mind. But the idea is to allow the thoughts to drop. And you know, when you lose somebody, and especially in a traumatic way, you the mind gets obsessed with the details. And I talk to people about this all the time. You can't stop thinking about the circumstances. People will have these flashball memories of the cops calling them or seeing their child or seeing their partner, whoever it might be. And meditation is a good way to train your mind to drop the thoughts that are not helpful and to focus on just that one thing that's more that's more centering and that's more calming and more comforting.

SPEAKER_01 28:27

Oh my gosh, that that's that's incredible. I I um I want to touch a little bit on that rapid eye movement. Um that I I saw you actually at the retreat uh perform on one of the guests that were there who was suffering from anxiety um based on the grief that they were going through. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_00 28:53

Yeah, so um just to back up a little bit and then I'll I'll talk about how I discovered that and began to use it. Um, so I went on this journey to heal, and I tried many, many different workshops. You know, I went to you know, different events and um studied different teachings and um listened to audiobooks. In fact, for about a year, a year and a half, I probably didn't do anything but have headphones on listening to some spiritual book, some self-help book. And I recommend that. I found that to be very helpful and it kept me out of my the wrong part of my head. But one of the things that happened, and I as I said, you know, I I had that first message, you have to change your state of consciousness. That was just a gift, that wasn't me. I mean, that wasn't, you know, it wasn't, I'm not I'm nobody special. It was just a message I got. I believe it was from my daughter because I was begging for help. And so a number of things came across my desk, as we say, really across my my you know, laptop screen. And one of them was um I I discovered the Forever Family Foundation just in time. It was about three months after her passing. I was in acute pain, you know. Um kind of fortunately, I had three younger children as well. Uh, Monique was my firstborn, but I had four children, and I was a single mother. And, you know, I had to, I had to stay sane. I had to stay sane for the sake of my children, which was probably a really good thing.

SPEAKER_02 30:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

But I was still in very, very much in pain and very, very much struggling. And uh I somehow heard of the Forever Family Foundation. I went to their, they had an evening. It's very interesting how the timing was because they hadn't done this very often. They had an evening for parents who had lost a child, and they had some incredible mediums there. This was way back, this was back in 2007, so it was quite a while ago. But uh Lorelyn Jackson was there, who's a very well-known medium, a very, you know, a very, very competent medium, uh, extraordinary, as well as a couple of other mediums. Um, I think it was Kim Russo, uh, mediums that uh became, some of them became quite famous, like Laurelyn Jackson, uh and known for their for their gifts. And uh I was read at that um retreat, or it wasn't actually a retreat, it was an evening, it was just an evening for parents who had lost children. I was read led by Laura read by Laurelyn and um got and as well as a couple of other mediums and got some really very accurate messages that I found very helpful. And that was my introduction to mediumship and especially evidential mediumship. Wow. And then I somehow I got kind of pulled into the Forever Family Foundation. I mean, when I say pulled in, it was like, you know, somebody was pulling me to that organization. I went to another, I went to one of the grief retreats, uh actually with my sister. And then after that, I was asked to be a presenter.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

And yeah, and um I think it was the first time I presented, I had tears running down my face while I was talking to the to the to the participants. That's how it was still pretty raw. Okay. That was probably about four years after, I think somewhere around there. But but I had experienced profound healing in the meantime through through meditation, through reading, through a variety of things. Like there were many bricks in the wall. So I was able to, I was able to do that. And and somehow the the folks at Forever Family Foundation, particularly Fran Ginsburg, who's since past, and we all miss her terribly. And she was like in, you know, she was like an angel in disguise. And she she invited me to do this, and I've pretty much been doing it ever since. And that became again, you know, it's not something I would have ever chosen for my life. I never asked to work with people who were grieving, and I never asked for this experience, but lo and behold, here we are. But you were chosen. It's been a gift, it's really been a gift because it's taking that pain and it's turning it around into something that hopefully does something good.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

It does, it does. I I've seen you in action, you know. I I really, it's it's just it's mind-blowing, and it's it's it it almost awestruck when I watch you and I see how far you've come. I'm uh gonna be at the four-year mark myself. And like you, you know, there are times when it's raw, but I too listened to a lot of tapes, went to a lot of retreats, have gone to my share of mediums, and all of it helps. It's all healing for me. But I'm always looking for more, you know, more ways to heal. And that's why I was interested in that the IADC and the rapid eye movement. Yeah, uh next venture.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

Right. So so the next so the next thing that happened um early on was um after I learned about Forever Family Foundation, I was listening to their um, I think it's Signs of Life Radio, was the show. They have that every week, or they have something every week. They always have something on uh on this topic on on the afterlife. And they're wonderful organization, Forever Family Foundation.org for anybody who hasn't heard of them before. And one evening there was a psychologist by the name of Al Bachan, who was on the radio show, and he was talking about his experiences as a psychologist. He was not a bereaved parent or anything like that, but he was a psychologist who had been working at the Veterans Administration Hospital in, I think in Illinois. He lives north of Chicago. And um it was interesting because I was a former VA psychologist myself, so I'd worked in that setting, and not the same VA, but I'd work in the Veterans Administration system. And so I related to Al, and he was talking about this methodology method, sort of a psychotherapeutic methodology or method called induced after-death communication. I mean, it was really intriguing, and it was based upon a uh a very well-respected psychological um psychotherapeutic technique called uh eye movement desensitization and reprocessing or EMDR. I had heard of EMDR, I knew about EMDR, but I hadn't been trained in it. So I'm listening to Al and he's saying that how he has helped people, first of all, how you know how how people report having after-death communication with their loved one while he is doing this treatment or right after he does the treatment. And of course, my number one priority was to make contact with my daughter. I think that's true of many, many, many bereaved parents. All you want to do is you want to connect with them, you want to know they're okay, you want to hear something from them, and you want to feel their presence in your life. Absolutely. And that was really my quest. So when I heard Al talk about this on the radio show, there was no question. I was, oh, well, I'm gonna go see Al. I'm gonna go get IADC, and then I'm gonna become a practitioner. I I knew it, it was like in a heartbreat. I knew I knew that that was what I was gonna do. And that is indeed what I did. And so I went to see Al probably a couple months later. I saw Al flew to Illinois uh to see him. Uh, he's no longer in practice, unfortunately. I mean, he's the originator of IADC, but he's trained a number of us to do the technique. And so I had a treatment with Al, and it, you know, it was only about five months after my loss. So it was pretty early. And um, I found it tremendously helpful. I had very powerful after-death communication with my daughter. Wow. It did not take all the pain away, but it made it livable, which is really what I was asking for back then to make it livable, and it really allowed me to put one foot in front of the other. So then um, and then about six months after that, I um well, actually a few months after that, I got trained in EMDR, which is some, it's funny because I've been for years I've been intending to get trained in EMDR, and I finally got trained in EMDR because I had to in order to become an IEDC practitioner. So I did the EMDR training, and then I was trained by Elle to do induced after-death communication and uh and I practice it now. Um, you know, I I have people that you know somehow hear about the technique. Sometimes they they get it off the website. Uh let me just give a little plug for the the website in case readers are interested. It's called Induced I-N-D-U-C-E-D ADC. So induced ADC, which stands for afterdeath communication and uh induced ADC dot, I believe it's dot org. So inducedadc.org. Um, or you can just Google induced after death communication and you will find the website, okay, in case I've got uh a couple of the um uh the website um address uh and this is something that can be done remotely, you don't have to do it in person, right? Well, you know, the well let me let me put it this way. I don't I don't want to speak for um the organization. There's actually an international organization that I'm a part of, International Organization of Induced After Death Communication, and I can't speak for other practitioners. Um, let me put it this way when it when the model was first developed, it was always in person, okay? Okay, it was always in person. That's how I did it for myself. It's what I strongly recommend people do. Okay. Now, in in these days of telehealth and telemental health, which I do telemental health, don't get me wrong, I do I do more in person than telehealth, but I do do telemental health. And it's not ideal, but it's probably possible to get good effects from doing it that way. And I'm pretty sure there are IVC practitioners that do do it that way.

SPEAKER_02 38:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 38:24

If anybody's interested in in induced after-death communication, again, they can contact me. You're going to provide some kind of contact information. I'm sure. And they can contact me and I'd be happy to talk to them about it. So, um, so uh I've found that it is a technique where what it does is there's there's two purposes of it. But the most the most important purpose, the number one purpose is not to have an after-death communication, although that's what everybody wants. Okay. Of course. It's to heal the grief. And what we've proposed is that at the core of grief, you know, grief involves a lot of different mixed feelings like anger, resentment, hurt, you know, but at bottom it's sadness. The core of grief is sadness, and that's what a lot of us sort of protect ourselves against. We don't want to go there, we don't want to feel that deep sadness, okay? So some people get angry, some people, some people blame themselves, they feel guilty. Some people start drinking and drugging, anything to get rid of that pain. But what the IADC does is allows people to fully experience the sadness while you're doing what's called bilateral stimulation, which is we we use eye movement. There's different ways of doing bilateral stimulation, bilateral meaning both sides of the brain. You stimulate both sides of the brain. And with the eye movement, what you're doing is you're alternately you're moving your eyes back and forth. I use a little wand. I actually use at in my office, I use this little wand. This is actually a flower, a dried flower is called an alien. And I I do this type of movement while people are moving their eyes back and forth. This is what I demonstrate also, you know, at the grief retreat. Right. And um, and what what happens is the you could you sort of track it, it's a little bit more complicated than I can, you know, explain in in this brief period, but um it's it's sort of like a pared-down version of EMDR. EMDR is a much more elaborate step-by-step process. What we do is just sort of a pared-down version of uh EMDR, and we found that it works very well to help resolve that deep, deep sadness. So when you can get the sadness down, when we say down, we mean like it gets muted, it gets, I say it goes from color to black and white, it fades into the distance, it goes into the backstage rather than you know, center stage. There's lots of different ways of thinking about that. And after that point, and while you're doing your continuing to do the treatment, that is when people are most likely to have an after-death communication. Because we think when you have this really heavy grief, we this is the theory. Who knows how all this works? Nobody knows for sure. No, but we think that when you have really heavy grief that that blocks after-death communication. It may or may not for some people, but that's the theory. So, what you're doing is you're helping people to integrate in a sense, take that terrible traumatic experience and that traumatic sadness and grief, and place it in the proper places in the mind by doing that uh bilateral stimulation, just like EMDR does that. EMDR was originally designed for trauma, and I use it a lot too for trauma. There are many people I work with using EMDR not for grief, but for traumatic experiences. Yeah, yeah. So it's it's a very good technique, it's evidence-based. Um, so it's got some good research behind it. But we modified it to use it with uh with grief. And what Elle was finding, Al was finding when he was doing this, he was doing this with traumatized veterans. Really? Yeah, he was doing it with traumatized veterans. He was working at the VA. Again, I know that setting, and I know these the kind of uh patients he was working with were not new agey, fairy, you know, you know, they were not like that. They these were rough guys. They were primarily males at the time. Of course, there's a lot of female veterans now, and a lot of them were Vietnam era vets. And he was getting incredible success using IADC. Well, it was he was using EMDR at the time, and what he found is that people were spontaneously reporting, and many of them were something, something, some ridiculous number, like 95% of these veterans were reporting contact with the afterlife, contact with a spirit, contact with a woman.

SPEAKER_01 42:31

It's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 42:32

It is amazing, it's amazing. Uh, and there's a book called Induced After Death Communication by Dr. Al Bach. And I suggest people read this because he talks, he goes in more detail about how he discovered this. So he was getting this, like 95% of veterans were reporting this. So, what he decided to do, I mean, he thought he was going crazy, and he was not a spiritual type himself. This was not on his radar screen at all. But he began to sort of like refine it a little bit and sort of study how is this how is this happening? What am I doing that is amplifying these results? So then he he did that for a while at the VA and then he began to train people, psychotherapists who were already schooled, already trained in EMDR, which is why I had to get trained in EMDR. And he trained them to do the IADC technique. And so that's that's when I came in and you know, I learned the technique, and that was in 2008, and and I do practice it with people. And uh you know, I had that experience myself, okay. Um, here's the thing: you can't guarantee anything, just like when you go to a medium, you can't guarantee they're gonna contact the loved one you want them to contact, right? You know that anybody that's gone to a medium, an ethical medium will say, I'll do my best, right? Uh, you know, but but I'm gonna open myself up to spirit and see who comes through, and whoever comes through comes through, right? So it's kind of like that as well with induced after death communication, but we think that it makes us more receptive, it opens up the mind, it relaxes that trauma, you know, it kind of like integrates. The trauma so that you're more receptive and more open. And that was my personal experience. And you know, in clinical practice, we don't have as good of a success rate, like that 95% success rate that Al had. We haven't been able to replicate that in the clinical community. But then they say around 70% of people have some type, some type of ADC.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

Now, it's it also does help relieve the trauma, even if you don't have a communication with the other side. Do you use that as part of your practice? I know you've you work uh extensively with intimate partner violence, and and it does does this play a role there as well?

SPEAKER_00 44:37

Oh, sure. Yeah. Well, intimate that's a whole other that's like my other life, is and there are parallels because I went through an experience like that. And it it was it was profoundly uh it impacted my life and my my fire to try to correct whatever I could that was going on in our society with women being abused by their partner and having their children threatened and having their children having having their custody challenged. I bet you there are some of your listeners who have this experience themselves. It's not uncommon, but you know, at the time I went through it, it was in the 90s, and there was virtually nothing being said about it, virtually nothing written about it. I mean, there were some books out there, but I couldn't access them. But then in the early days of the internet, like around 2000, 2001, you know, things began to become more available. And so I was able to connect. Fortunately, it was just in time I was able to connect. Actually, it was 1999, I think, when this started. Uh, I was able to connect with other women going through it. I was able to connect with a very good attorney, and I began to really get kind of the fire in the belly about this issue because I could not believe what I was going through. I could not believe it. Kind of like similar to the loss of my daughter. Yeah. And eventually what I did, it took me a few years. I had to heal. You know, I had to recover from that because it is profoundly traumatizing to go through domestic violence and a custody battle.

SPEAKER_01 46:12

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 46:12

As I began to recover, I got the idea to start a conference on this topic. I said, how could there not be a conference about this? How could that be? Because I found that many women were going through this. And some men go through it too, but it's more a female thing, more women that are being victimized in this way. But there are some men as well. So I did not in any way to disrespect males or fathers because there are many good fathers out there. We're not talking about good fathers. That's not what we're talking about. No. And um, so we started a conference. I I had I had a colleague helping me with various things, and we together we started what's called the Battered Mothers' Custody Conference. And the first conference was held in 2004. And then I thought it was going to be a one-off thing, a one-time thing, and people kind of clamored to do it again. So we did it again. So we did the second year, third year, and so we've done it for 16 years. And yeah, and you know, I've heard from many, many women that it was really for them, you know, it was really being able to connect with other survivors, being able to get this information, being able to maybe access some resources, um, you know, connecting with each other, getting solidarity. I mean, again, that was back in 2004, 2005. What I saw happening over the years, thankfully, is more books came out about this problem. Uh, I I myself edited a journal called uh Family and Intimate Partner Violence Quarterly. So we talk a lot about that, among other issues related to violence against women and violence against people, uh, in that journal. Um, but there's been a lot more this problem has been exposed in ways it hadn't been when I first was working on this issue. And I'm very grateful for that. Women are still very much struggling with this problem. I get emails, I get, I get all, I get texts, you know, I get messages left on my voicemail, people needing help. I'm just a psychologist. There needs to be more attention paid to that problem, and we've been working on this now for decades. Wow. And although there's much more public knowledge, there's been some laws that some really wonderful female, female and some male um advocates and activists have gotten legislation passed in different states. I mean, I I'm awestruck by some of the things my my my cohorts, my colleagues have done. But we still have these problems for individual cases with women who are not given justice and not their children are not protected by the system.

SPEAKER_01 48:37

What what um would you recommend that communities or or society can do as a whole to help the these women that are going through this?

SPEAKER_00 48:46

Take a wrecking ball to the system. Yeah. Okay. This I don't think the system as it stands really is redeemable. And that that's I know that's a controversial statement because a lot of my colleagues work on reform.

unknown 48:58

Right.

SPEAKER_00 48:58

Okay, the more like the incremental reform. Um, I've been looking at this. Some people say, you know, you've been looking at this for too long. That's kind of like what it is. I've been looking at the problem for a very long time. And women who were working on this issue when I was just married and clueless, okay. Um, they were working on this issue, trying to get, you know, women lawyers, female lawyers, for example. I have a lot of colleagues who are who are lawyers and you know, they're the best of the best. They see this for what it is, and they could not get the system to change, okay? So I say, you know, kind of tongue in cheek, take a wrecking ball to the system. I don't really even have any answers because, you know, we used to think it was education, um, because maybe domestic violence wasn't fully understood 20 years ago or 30 years ago, but by now domestic violence has gotten enough press where everybody, especially judges and lawyers and law guardians, attorneys for children, evaluators, they should all know all about this and understand how domestic violence shows up in these custody battles. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 50:01

Oh, sure. I mean, it's it's just incredible. I I've just met someone recently who's become an advocate for that, who's also struggling and going through it. And so the law, it's it's very, very difficult still. Change needs to happen, change for mental health, change for for battered women. I mean, there's there's so many topics that you know we can discuss over and over again, you know, just things that that need change. It's that's right.

SPEAKER_00 50:29

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, that that's like another realm of my life. And it's it's interesting the parallels because there's a trauma associated with the child custody battles as well as with losing a loved one. There's trauma, it's traumatic grief, you know, there's injustice at times. You know, I've talked to so many people who feel their loved ones were mishandled by the medical system. I sort of feel the same way in my own case. It's not something I cling to because it's pointless, you know, it's a done deal. Uh, but I think people need to be really aware of the flaws in our society, both in our legal system, in our educational system, in our, you know, in our in our um uh medical system and as well as in our mental health system. Uh mental health is um, and I'm saying this as a mental health practitioner, it's uh it's deeply flawed, our mental health system. These days, ever since COVID, and I can tell you this as a as a practitioner, since COVID, uh the the the demand for therapy has exploded, okay. And there may be multiple reasons for that. Uh talking about the past five years. So I mean, there's always been a fairly high demand for therapy, but it's really, really amplified.

SPEAKER_01 51:39

Well, it's just the loneliness. I mean, I know, you know, uh it was amplified during COVID. And you know, I I it's just it's incredible, you know, and and yes, the mental health system has always been broken, but it's even it's it's more apparent now than ever before.

SPEAKER_00 51:57

Yes. Um, one thing, one thing, if you don't mind, I want to say this to listeners because I wish I'd heard this myself. You know, you hear that people say that I wish I knew this. I wish I knew then. What I would say is if you have a depressed suicidal child, do not entrust your depressed suicidal child to the mental health system, okay? Because that's what I did. I mean, because I was a believer. I was trained in mental health, I was trained in psychiatric drugs and psychotherapy and you know, inpatient hospitalization. If somebody is, you know, acutely suicidal and all that stuff. None of that did any good. And I think we need other answers. And what we need is community. We need people to help each other. We need parents to band together and and actually monitor suicidal kids until they're no longer suicidal.

unknown 52:41

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 52:42

And if you're a working parent, that is virtually impossible, right?

SPEAKER_01 52:45

But but but it takes a village. I mean, it truly does, you know, and the community has to come together before it's too late, you know, before you know something terrible happens.

SPEAKER_00 52:56

And yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 52:57

I've seen it firsthand. And um, yes, I know I I know we're running short on time, but I I do I I still have so much I want to say and talk to you about and takeaways, but I I absolutely um want to talk about struggle and my son Scott, who's passed, and the reason why I have this platform is to of course keep his memory alive, but also bring to the forefront our our society and our mental uh wellness issues that need to be talked about. And he at 15 years old, he he knew he knew what was going on around him. He would write poetry. He was in the arts too, like your daughter. And he wrote this poem and he called it the struggle. And uh he says, the way I feel can't be described into words or rhymes. Get with the times. The kids I once knew are developing, not relishing in the innocence they once had. I can't handle the weight on my shoulders as heavy as boulders that pulls me down to the ground, making me pinned flat down, losing air as lies fill my lungs. My body speaks the opposite of my mind. I can't take control of the situation at hand for my body and mind don't communicate, they can't agree on a compromise, so therefore can't synchronize. This is a child writing this at 15. Yeah, I mean, he heard it.

SPEAKER_00 54:28

Yeah, what a g what a gifted kid. And he, you know, what I say is this was true of my daughter, and a lot of people I've talked to with with young people who take their own life is these kids feel too much, they see too much, they understand too much, they're deep thinkers, they see things clearly, unfortunately. They see the way the world is. You know, not all of them by any means. Obviously, there's individual differences, but there does seem to be a tendency with these kids who are poetic and artistic and feel things. I used to say Monique had nerves on the outside of her skin, you know, that's how that's how deeply she felt things, you know. The other thing is, you know, um this may or may not be true, um, but I've heard um, you know, spiritual speakers talk about uh some very good spiritual speakers too talk about um how you know some people are not meant to live 80 years on this planet. Some people come in and they have a brief lifetime learning, apparently learning whatever they need to learn. Um, I I had uh one speaker said, you know, those of you who have lost a child to suicide. Um let's say you lost the child at 25, okay. Well, this may be a lifetime in which they lasted longer than any other lifetime, okay? That if you believe in the reincarnation idea, you know, which some people, of course, firmly do. So there's so much of a mystery to all of this. And all we can do is try our best to make meaning and make good out of it if we can.

SPEAKER_01 55:58

It's it's that's so true. And um I would like to ask you what takeaways um you have for our listeners, maybe books, resources, and most importantly, how can they reach you to get in contact with you?

SPEAKER_00 56:17

Okay. There's a wealth of resources out there. There's many different things that um that I've used myself, and there are many, many more things that I haven't even learned about, and much less used. So we live in a time of great wealth of this kind of information and technology. I mean, a few authors that I've been very much helped by, and probably people will relate to this. Maybe there's authors that other people know that I would also relate to that I haven't yet learned about, but Eckert Tolly is one of them. I found his work profoundly helpful, especially at the time when I needed it. Eckhart Tolly, Michael Singer, and Ady Ashanti are three authors that I found very helpful. Um, I've used the various meditation techniques, one of them being, as I mentioned before, HoloSync, which is a technology. I think it's a very well-engineered technology. It really helps, it apparently really amps up, speeds up the process of your brain changing. And they have found under meditation, with meditation, the brain literally changes. Okay, literally changes structurally.

SPEAKER_01 57:19

And how do they reach you? How do people Okay?

SPEAKER_00 57:22

So to reach, so to reach me, um, I have a website. Okay, it's so this it's one word, Mo Therese Hannah. So it's M-O, which is Mo Therese T-H-E-R-E-S E, and then Hannah H A N N A H. So Motorese Hanna P H D.org.

unknown 57:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 57:39

I'm sorry, I'm sorry, dot com. This one's dot com. So mo Teresahanna P H D.com. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 57:44

MoTerese Hannah P H D.com.

SPEAKER_00 57:46

And it has my contact information. I'll give my e I'll give my email address. You're welcome to email me. It's M Hannah. So M-H A N N A H 413 at Gmail.

SPEAKER_01 57:58

Excellent.

SPEAKER_00 57:58

And if you reach out to me through through email, um, I'd be happy to respond to you.

SPEAKER_01 58:03

Oh my gosh, Dr. Hannah, I cannot thank you enough for the wealth of information and for joining us today. So, so grateful. And I'd like to tell our listeners, please reach out to Dr. Hannah. She is just amazing. And I'd also like you to please tune in next week on SOSRadio. And if you've enjoyed today's show and want to support us, by all means, donations, advertising are always welcome and support the show. And remember, SOS, Stories of Survivors, where survival sparks the soul. Thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_00 58:54

Thank you so much. You've been a del it's been a delight to be with you and your and your audience.

SPEAKER_01 58:59

Oh, thank you. Thank you.