Can a Home Help You Heal? – With Psychotherapist Julia Samuel MBE

0:01Hello, welcome back to Homing. Today's guest is the psychotherapist Julia Samuel MBE, who's one of Britain's leading experts on grief and trauma. Julia has worked with hundreds of families navigating bereavement, including members of the royal family. She was a close friend of Diana, Princess of Wales, and supported Prince William and Prince Harry following her death. In this conversation, Julia tells me about her own family's experiences of loss and how they shape the emotional atmosphere of her childhood home. We explore the role that home plays in early life and how our earliest experiences become embedded in the nervous system.

0:46We discuss belonging and why some people never quite feel settled where they are. And she explains why changing a home can sometimes help us process grief, as well as regaining a sense of agency and making sense of difficult experiences. I found this to be a really fascinating and surprisingly hopeful conversation, and I very much hope you enjoy it as well. Happy listening.

1:10Julia Samuel MBE:Hi, Julia. Hello, Matt. Nice to meet you. Yeah, you too. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. Pleasure. So what I'd really like to do today is look at your work through the lens of the home very specifically. So I think it'd be kind of interesting. So my first question for you is how would you personally define that word home, do you think? For me, I think it is where I feel both physically and psychologically kind of rooted and a sense of belonging. Like it's a door I go through where I can feel myself and all the different versions of myself and feel safe. Yeah, exactly.

1:55That's a great answer. And when you say belonging, do you mean belonging as in you belong to the physical structure of home, do you think? Or do you think it's belonging in the sense of the sort of wider community, country, earth and beyond?

2:10Julia Samuel MBE:I mean, I think it is. So when I kind of walk towards home, I can feel my nervous system dropping and the sort of sigh of relief. You know, I've been busy working, doing out. And then so there's I think it's in the country. And so it is rooted in the country and nature. And that green environment has a big part of it. and the garden is part of it, but it is really that sense of relief and few. It's like, hello, home. It's like, honestly, home is really, this place is really important to me and it feels like a person. And it feels like a person who, I mean, occasionally is really a pain in the ass when things go wrong, like the roof leaks or, you know, things are broken.

3:06Julia Samuel MBE:but on the whole it's always pleased to see me it doesn't have bad moods it's where I rest and eat and play and I really it means an enormous amount to me I love that are you suggesting that does it have almost a human character to it then well there I mean there's something called the object relations where you have you store inside internal objects and sometimes they're your mother figure, your father figure, important people in your lives. And I have home as an internal object, like thinking of it and being here, automatically I feel safer and happier. I get homesick very, very quickly. So I like, I love going away and I'm so happy, like when I step off the plane and it's sunny and you feel the warm air.

4:02Julia Samuel MBE:And then after about four days, I kind of already want to get home and the relief when I get back and I'm like my head on my own pillow my own bed is huge yeah even if I've had a really nice time well it's interesting that isn't it actually because don't you find that on holiday well you know we get to the point where we start saying things like oh I think I'm ready to go home now you know and actually and then and then as you're coming into land on the plane if you've been abroad for example you see it with fresh eyes somehow I think and everything looks slightly like it's an eye definition and then you walk through your front door and it feels different somehow.

4:38Julia Samuel MBE:It does and I think you know when you're talking about does it mean the UK it's that relief of landing at a British airport. I know where I'm going. It's the familiarity you know I get into the traffic even is familiar whereas when you're stuck in it abroad you kind of feel more anxious because you don't really know what on earth is going on. So I think there's, and what we know psychologically is that as human beings, we are pattern meaning making beings, and we create maps in our minds. And we have a particular part of our brain that is wired for evolutionary reasons for home, so that we could remember home to go back to when we've been hunting, or home to go back to when we've been in danger.

5:25Julia Samuel MBE:And so home represents more than just a roof and bricks you know that thing of your home is your castle is that the right is that what it is I think for those of us that are lucky enough to feel safe in our home and that is by no means for everyone and of course not for people who are refugees or homeless but I think it really has an enormous psychological impact yeah I agree I want to ask you about attachments because obviously you know there's a lot of well there's John Bowlby in his attachment theory which is the idea that we attach to our early caregiver and those attachments somehow shape our relations sometimes into later life but also of course we attach to places as well so I wondered if you had any thoughts on place attachment and those early childhood experiences of home particularly the first couple of years and how those shape what comes after.

6:19Julia Samuel MBE:I mean, I think Bowlby and attachment, we hold places as feeling embodied emotional connectors to those people. But also in early development is Winnicott. And what he talked about was a holding environment. So if you put kind of Bowlby and Winnicott together, you have this idea of insecure attachment and good enough parenting. The home that you're in is more than shelter. It's a secure base and place where you can develop and recover and often heal. but also if it's negative and every kind of negative input also has the negative output if that makes sense yes it does so that therefore what what to what extent do you think we sort of you know try and recreate or react against that early environment that we all had well i think it's very interesting and very individual and even when we've had very difficult environments often we repeat patterns and external environments because they're familiar and again that link between familiarity and safety is what is the strong link is it if it's familiar even if we somehow know it isn't safe familiar is better than unknown but I think some people do literally intentionally do the reverse like if they were brought up in a very messy and chaotic home they become manically tidy, or if they were brought up in a very tidy home, they can go to the extreme of being messy and kind of everything in between.

8:04Julia Samuel MBE:But I think subliminally, we are also influenced by what colours are okay, and what's allowed and what isn't allowed by our external environment, you know, like, somehow subliminally pick up what your parents get, oh, that's a really awful colour or you know what I mean certainly with my parents and that influences you kind of unconsciously and then you suddenly find you're not using orange or yellow and then you think actually do I personally actually like yellow oh yes I do but you've been refusing to have yellow because you've somehow banned it without even knowing that you were banning it I think that's so true I've been writing about that funnily enough Julia actually I've also been writing about the idea that so in my family we were brought up with the idea that you should never buy a flat or a house that someone else has has done up because you're in inverted commas you know acquiring slash paying for their input and their taste which I've always thought is such an interesting one and actually I've really questioned that in recent years because of course you know doing a refurbishment project is very stressful it's very expensive it's not great for your health takes you away from the children even more so now um so i love that that thing of you know trying to maybe just take a moment to question those preconceived ideas that you've carried through from your childhood you know so where does that taste come from and really check be aware awareness is of course the portal to expansion the more we're aware of what's going on in us what isn't going on in us what we allow what we don't allow then that gives us choices and the minute we have choices we can get out of our comfort zone and begin to experiment with new shapes colors sizes you know you could have been brought up that everything modern is disgusting or the vice or vice versa and then discover actually I really like a mix exactly right I want to pivot to grief because I think this this is obviously you know your real area of expertise and I'm interested first of all as to how that came about and what were your personal experiences as to why you ended up with that specialism so I mean I think there were a lot of reasons I think the most sort of clear biographical one is in a way, and it's photographs.

10:34Julia Samuel MBE:So both of my parents, by the time we were in their mid-twenties, my mum was an orphan. Her mother, her father, her sister, and her brother had all died traumatically by the time she was 25. And my father, his father, and his brother had died traumatically. And we vaguely heard their names. And there were these black and white photographs of some of the people. So there was a photograph of my uncle Tony, who was killed in the war, and my aunt Aileen, and my grandmother. But I didn't see photographs of my father's side. I did of my father's father. But there were no stories really that went with them.

11:16Julia Samuel MBE:And they never really talked about the death or the sadness they felt or the trauma. there were a couple of kind of mini clips and I think in the way that you're talking about home there was a lot on top above the waterline that you could see in our family and home that looked kind of happy and jolly and then below the waterline which is two-thirds if you talk about emotions there was so much that was unprocessed unspoken and that pervaded I think our whole family system all of us differently I mean if you spoke to each of my siblings they would tell you a completely different story and wouldn't even necessarily agree with me.

11:54Julia Samuel MBE:But for me, that pervaded what was unspoken and unfelt and unacknowledged. You know, in transgenerational trauma, what we kind of say is the pain that isn't processed in one generation passes down to the next generation until someone's prepared to feel the pain. And I think I picked up on that. So then unconsciously, I was drawn to working in bereavement before way. I mean, literally, probably 10 years before I really realized what the kind of underlying reason was. So interesting. Thank you for sharing that. I find that so fascinating. How would you describe how you took on some of that grief and why you felt it and how it manifested itself?

12:40If you hadn't personally experienced it, how could someone try and understand that?

12:45Julia Samuel MBE:I think I felt it by feeling nothing. So there was a kind of numbness. So there was a thinness of emotional experience that I felt. And, you know, if you block pain, you also block joy. So I was actually quite good at playing, but I didn't really know how to kind of have a big emotional, in our world we call a window of tolerance to big emotions. I had a narrow tolerance and I kind of functioned very effectively, but not deeply emotionally. And so I think a lot was cut off. And then as I've been having therapy and, you know, I've been a therapist now for like, I don't know, 37 years. I've probably had therapy for like 45 years.

13:35I've processed a lot of stuff and done every time a bloody course.

13:39Julia Samuel MBE:If I haven't dealt with it now, I'm never going to. But actually, stuff still comes up. I don't know if now is the time to say it, but I walked past my childhood home. I'd driven past it often. This is in London. But I walked past it with my best friend only about two months ago. and it was deeply emotional looking outside that house and walking around it and see there was a little hole in the wall where my twin brother and I would play put things through and that was still there and the front of the house looked the same the back looked very different but I mean I remember every single thing about that house and we I got married when I was 20 so I left when I was 20 and I've barely been back they sold it when I was 23 but I could tell you every colour every step every room my bedroom all of it the little squeak on the floorboard outside my bedroom that I tried not to step on when I kind of crept out of bed all those things I remember like it was yesterday and it was like that 46 years ago how would you describe the emotional atmosphere of that place I mean, I think it was a bit like I was describing the kind of myself.

14:53Julia Samuel MBE:So I think above, it kind of looked quite jolly. My parents were very social. We were five children. It was quite noisy. But I think there was a lot that was complicated, that was emotional, that didn't, that we could sort of all feel somatically in our bodies. and there were lots of you know I was brought up in a very old-fashioned way there were lots of rules then where children were seen and not heard I didn't have a front door key I was only had to use the back door I had to use the back stairs you know it was a different time yeah yeah a lot of what you're saying resonates with me because in my family we had a major family trauma so before I was born my parents had a daughter who died at a young age what was called cot death in those days I think it's still called cot death I mean exactly and it but I suppose I suppose I say yeah I suppose I say in those days just because it did seem to happen a little bit more I don't know maybe I'm wrong about that but it it's slightly better now yeah because we've understood more what is protective but I mean it still happens cot death unfortunately yeah so it's obviously you know you you'll have seen it a lot but it's obviously incredibly traumatic for a parent that and then I think in that emotional climate I was born and I think that I can imagine that my parents would have been going through a lot emotionally and a bit like you I've sort of sought to try and make sense of this because their way of dealing with that trauma really was to not talk about it and I think I have huge respect for them as parents they gave us an extremely happy childhood and in many ways it was the best way to deal with it because it's how they got through it and they're brilliant you know brilliant parents to us but of course there has to be some sort of low simmer somewhere that finds its way through and I always wonder whether that found its way a little bit into my own nervous system through pregnancy and early years so you mentioned the word somatically and epigenetic and epigenetics so tell us about epigenetics and also the somatics of somatic nature of trauma as well so i mean just as an overarching kind of what research shows is that not every traumatic event gives you PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.

17:23Julia Samuel MBE:Probably 20 % of traumatic events give you PTSD. So a single event that is traumatic that isn't linked to insecure attachment of lots of kind of small mini traumas before, people can recover between six and eight weeks. They're kind of very disturbed to begin with, have flashbacks, and then they process it. if they get the right support at the time. And so PTSD is often linked more to chronic trauma, where it's continued injury and shock. And trauma, the Greek word for trauma is wound. So it's a wounding of the psyche. When you're talking about epigenetics and pregnancy and your mum, when a baby dies, that tears up the rule book of life.

18:16Julia Samuel MBE:That moment, everything that you believed and trusted in is torn up and you don't know, what did I do wrong? Did I fail? Was it the milk I fed her? Was it because I took her to the park yesterday and she got some infection from another child? This terrible regret, like what did I, because if you have a child that doesn't thrive and dies there's this inevitable feeling of failure as a parent there's an absolute kind of definition of failure as a parent when your child dies but also it completely reverses your trust in yourself and your body in the future because it has torn up your future as you believed it should be you should never bury your own child and I think cot death is you know, like every death has its unique difficulty, but cot death, because it's silent, because there isn't an infection, because it's invisible, I think leaves so many gaps.

19:13Julia Samuel MBE:And where we have gaps, you often have terror and fear and lots of complex emotions that you don't know what to do with. So your mum, when she was pregnant, I imagine both of them during that pregnancy, and they may have talked about it, may not have talked about it, felt that you can know your belief system is forever and irrevocably changed. I can no longer trust that everything I expected to be okay will be okay. I now know in a way that no one can deny me that a baby and a child can die. So this pregnancy could die out of the blue for no reason. But then also there's this fear that maybe you'll get meningitis.

19:54Julia Samuel MBE:It opens the window to fear that those of us who are lucky enough not to have that happen kind of see it happens to other people. And so epigenetically, it heightens your emotional system, your nervous system. And epigenetically, the heightened state will change your genetic coding as a baby to be in a heightened state so that you may say to yourself why am I like this just because I'm 10 minutes late or so that your response to manageable stresses is higher and you could be probably defined as a highly sensitive person so that everything that distresses you rather than just a three or four it's a 10 and there are lots of ways of learning how to build resilience into your nervous system i mean the first is obviously to recognize it that's a very long answer i'm sorry it's a fantastic answer well if the first one is that what are the other ways well the first one is recognizing i think everything somatically is again about awareness so what we suppress persists what we repress persists if you see that thing that your body is doing.

21:17Julia Samuel MBE:And we tend to want to push it away. So we work faster at pushing it away and get more done. But actually, that heightens our emotional system into code red 10. But actually, if we pause and take a breath and say, what am I feeling in my body? Where am I feeling it? How stressed do I feel from 0 to 10? What is that about? Just even doing that connects your mind and your body, but also when you're not suppressing it, because emotions are signals of information to say to yourself, something is up, watch out. And if you're ignoring the signal, it just keeps pushing the signal faster and harder. But when you're paying attention to the signal, then you can have your cognitive brain online and go, okay, well, hang on, take a second.

22:07Julia Samuel MBE:Maybe I can do this. Maybe I can do that. And then you're more creative about the response to the difficulty and your whole system goes back down to kind of a two or three now obviously this is a podcast about the home and some people may think well what does this have to do with the home but for me the reason I've called it homing is because it's this idea that there's also a link between our physical homes and our bodies and our minds which are homes of sorts as well and i'm always really interested to probe that that link and well they in do you know about the polyvagal theories dr stephen porges so deb dana and um well deb certainly talking about glimmers but they all of them talk about going back to the home in the safety and the nest of your body of your calm you know the green zone in your body in polyvagal theory and that when you're in a heightened state finding the ways that take you back home to safety exactly exactly and thank you for pointing that out that's exactly how i see it and i suppose to push this slightly further i mean my parents as an example as when i was young they bought and sold a few houses and they would do them up and they would improve them and sell them on partly as a way of frankly making a living because my dad was an architect but also I've always wondered is for all of us that do that are we also trying to process something are we trying to make sense of the world what's your view on that I mean probably not all of us but I think one of the great things about our external world and doing up a house is that grief is invisible emotions that we feel are invisible but when we can paint a wall build a wall reshape a room it gives us that active sense of agency and that you can see the impact of what you're doing and that can feel internally such a relief and so you can be motivated I mean one of the things I loved about moving here was that after 20, you know, I think I'd been a therapist, maybe 16 years when I got here.

24:29Julia Samuel MBE:And then my husband and I, we, and our children were growing up, we did quite a lot of building and decorating. And because everything I do is invisible, doing something external where I could see the impact of saying, okay, let's paint this green, or let's build this wall here, or move this window here. I got such a sense of agency and power because grief you feel so I mean unbelievably powerless doing a room you go woo and you can do it and it lasts and it isn't going to die I mean it can get dry rot and all sorts of things but basically buildings are very reliable you know like I said about this home and I think that it can be a real anchor for one's emotional self they kind of don't spit at you and turn away from you and horrible to you yeah exactly well you've raised a good point there actually as you're talking i was thinking it's very rare but sometimes of course that primary territory of ours is compromised through a flood or a fire or a natural disaster or something like that and that or burglars or burglars and that's why it feels so horrendously personal yes it really does so that it causes you to sort of question everything in a way It literally tears up your foundations.

25:52And I think that insurance companies, when they tend to spend two years not giving you the money you've spent years paying for, don't recognise the psychological trauma of having your home turned upside down, whether it's a burglary or a fire

26:07Julia Samuel MBE:or a flood. but also everything in your house is imbued with memories so that our body is imbued but you know I look behind me and I can see a photograph that was taken by Don McCullen he's a great friend of mine he's a neighbor so that photograph reminds me of Scotland where he took it where we've spent time together of lunches we've had everything that one owns has a story and so when that's rune two you feel like you're the story of yourself has been flooded or burned or robbed and that's very very distressing yeah well exactly well let's ask about that then i mean if if we lose someone in our life what what value do those objects hold that remind us of them and contain the memories of them i think it's both so i think the thing that's most powerful is the presence of absence, you know, dad's chair or his desk or bed or, you know, where all the clothes, all of those things that are in the home, whether it's your brother, your partner, your father, your mother, they represent and they smell.

27:17Julia Samuel MBE:So we, most of our emotions are initially ignited by sound, smell and what we see taste and touch so stuff does all of that touching your dad's jersey smelling it looking at the chair the place in the dining room table or the kitchen where they sat the half empty mug that they used before they had a stroke all of those things are both used both kind of give you a wave of grief and the task of mourning is to face the reality of the loss so it updates your brain like he is not sitting in his chair in the kitchen so every time I recognize that and face the reality of that feel the pain of that I incrementally adjust to the fact that this person has died and as you continue through your grieving process the things that you do to block the pain are the things that do you harm over time so if you allow the pain to be your healer those things over time become touchstones to memory in a positive way so what initially is extremely intense and painful then becomes I'm going to sleep with that jersey wrapped around me or I'm going to particularly sit in that chair because I want to feel close to that person so it becomes the touchstone to memory because when the person dies our love for them never dies and then objects are again the portal to connect to them as they were the portal to recognize their loss at the beginning that's so interesting um i watched a very powerful documentary recently about parents who had lost children in america in in school shootings oh gosh yeah it was very beautiful quite harrowing but what it was this filmmaker had gone in and filmed and photographed the empty bedrooms of the children and they were well it it was it what was so interesting was it was sort of without exception they were perfectly preserved almost as shrines with the posters on the walls and and the bed made and all the reminders of those children I guess the question there is at what point are we able to let go of something like that?

29:45Because they are obviously, as you say, the child is still there and the smell on the bedclothes and everything in there reminds them of that person. How do we know when to let the objects go?

29:58Julia Samuel MBE:I mean, it's very subjective and it depends on the person, their psychological history and their history of loss, their relationship with the person that died, the circumstances of the death, the support that they get at the time and after the death. All of that will predict how much we hold on to what we can hold on to. and I never think about grieving as letting go but it is about accommodating like building your life around the loss and so when I've worked with families and I've worked with you know huge numbers of families where a child has died some families within two or three years want to change the bedroom want to maybe the other sibling will go and live in there but they'll put some of their clothes in a trunk that's in the sitting room that's inside the trunk so people can't see them or they'll make patchwork covers from the shirts and the pyjamas and the top so that they're still there but they're kind of re not purpose but kind of reinvented so you can feel close to them without actually just being the shirt and some people you know like in this Havisham in Dickens never move a thing and it becomes a shrine that this is Matt's room and nothing is moved.

31:21Julia Samuel MBE:Sometimes people go in and sit there and remember and be sad. Sometimes it's the door that's closed that no one goes in there. And so it really is subjective and different with each one. And I don't think there is a right or a wrong way. I think what's important and helpful is within a family system to talk about it together. So if when things are not addressed, I think they can get stuck and so then no one does anything. But actually, if you give members of the family to allow them to be different and to have thoughts and want change and then work out together what you're going to do as a family, I think is really helpful for the family system to adapt and accommodate the loss of this person.

32:08So when it doesn't get discussed enough and it gets stuck, to use your word, then what?

32:14Julia Samuel MBE:So grief is naturally adaptive and we can get stuck in being restorative, like pushing on, like completely wrecking the room, not thinking about it, not being sensitive to it or holding on to the loss, like not touching anything in the room. and what you want is an oscillation, a movement between the two because then you're adapting and changing and grief is a form of learning. You're updating your mind to know that I will love this person forever and the reality is they're no longer physically present and so you can keep that room and still be adaptive but it depends on your relationship to it.

32:54Julia Samuel MBE:So if it's still like very frozen fossilized grief then that can become chronic grief that isn't naturally adapting and that is often influenced by trauma but also very influenced by how much support you get at the time and after the death. I recorded a podcast a few years ago with Ruth Rogers who has the brilliant restaurant the River Cafe in London and it was not long after the death of her husband Richard Rogers the architect and I recorded it in her home which was really humbling in some ways because she talked about how so many things within the home reminded her of Richard and I was interested by that because I also know other people who've sort of had the opposite experience where everything reminds them of that person kind of in a bad way or in a negative way and they feel like they hear that person's voice around the place and they sort of don't want that and they smell them and they somehow feel, okay, I need to sort of shed myself of this place in order to move on.

34:00What are your thoughts on that? Why do we have different responses there and what do we do with that?

34:06Julia Samuel MBE:We have different responses because we're different people. We're as different on the inside as we look on the outside and there isn't a right response. And I think it can also depend where we are in our life. You know, if you're older and it might be that moving forward and getting on with life and living and loving, even when you're grieving, has a very different external appearance, like holding on to all your stuff, to when you're in your 30s, where moving forward might be more like, I really need to change everything. I may have to move or I may have to redo everything because, you know, I've got another 50 years or 60 years of life.

34:49Julia Samuel MBE:And I really so I think it can be that. So there isn't a right or wrong. Yeah. OK. Do you have any thoughts around how we might use our home environments to help us through a period of grief? I mean, are there any particular things you think we can do? I think what really helps with place in this dual process of loss orientation and restoration orientation, I think we can develop rituals, which are habits with soul, that give us opportunities to do the loss work, remember and connect to the person that's died. So it may be looking at a photograph, it may be touching their clothes, it may be making their favourite dish in the kitchen, It may be sitting in their chair.

35:37Julia Samuel MBE:It may be, you know, holding on to their teddy or whatever it is where you connect your grief and allow yourself to emote and grieve. And that could be in a particular room that you regularly go to. So we're habit forming beings and place becomes part of how we associate with habits. So the minute you step into a particular room that you use in a particular way, your system expects you to do it. so that supports the processing but then you could use another room to like this is where I'm going to be restorational where I'm going to have new ideas I'm going to contact people I'm going to be social I'm going to go out into the garden I'm going to move I'm going to move forward with my life and let myself have fun and give myself permission to love and live and so I think place can really be a holder where we can have the container to allow both, and then the specificity where we move towards a particular aspect of it by using a room or an object and a habit.

36:43Julia Samuel MBE:You haven't heard that before. I just think that I think you put it very succinctly. I completely agree with you. And as you're talking, I was thinking, you know, some of us are lucky to have space around us and others of us live in quite constrained constricted environments I wondered about how important it is for us to try to find some personal space within the home that we're living in and how we kind of go about that what do you think about that? I mean I think you know and in eastern culture that definitely happens in very small spaces where there's a shrine with an image and a candle and maybe flowers that are in a small you know it can be on a table it can be in a little alcove it can be in the corner of a room and that's where that holds the spiritual connection to the person that's died and all their ancestors and so I don't think you need rooms to do it you can choose spaces within a small space to do that I just want to sort of move on to this idea of belonging why do you think some people spend a lot of their lives moving around a lot trying to put down roots but never quite managing it never feeling settled somewhere what do you think on that i think that's a lot to do with their early developmental years of anxiety and insecurity and unpredictability and so when you talked about bulby at the beginning and winnicott you know if we have reliable predictable good enough parenting we have that sense of security that gives us as an idea.