Edy Nathan is a licensed psychotherapist, AASECT certified sex therapist, and internationally recognized expert on grief, trauma, and sexual healing. She’s spent more than 25 years in private practice in New York City, and she’s been thinking about grief — really thinking about it — since childhood, when she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t supposed to bury the goldfish.

In this conversation with Jenn Turner, Edy opens with a practice she calls embodied curiosity: a few minutes of soft attention to the breath, a swallow, and the warmth of hands placed on the neck or shoulders — an invitation to be with yourself rather than to calm yourself down. From there, she and Jenn move through Edy’s definition of grief (not just the loss of a loved one, but anything we’re hungry for that can’t be sated), her eleven phases of grief, why she replaced the word “closure” with “grace,” and what the Timex watch she still carries tells her about integration.

They talk about the hero’s journey of grief, the role of emotional armor, the cardinal/mutable/fixed personality framework from her book It’s Grief, and the people who’ve had to perform sadness when what they actually felt was relief. Jenn shares her own experience losing her father — the grief of letting go of hope, and the unexpected liberation that came after. Edy names it: the dance of differentiation. Holding on to yourself without needing the other person to change.

This is part one of what became a two-part conversation. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.