Navigating Grief, Trauma, & Sexuality with Edy Nathan on The Healers Café with Manon Bolliger
In this episode of The Healers Café, Manon Bolliger, FCAH, RBHT (facilitator and retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice) speaks Edy Nathan, a licensed psychotherapist and certified sex therapist, discusses her work on grief, trauma, and sexuality. She defines grief broadly, including emotional responses to losses beyond death, and introduces the concept of “sexual grief,” which encompasses the impact of sexual trauma.
Highlights from today’s episode include:
Edy and Manon discuss the connection between trauma and physical health issues, such as arthritis, gut issues, and autoimmune disorders.
Manon thanks Edy for the conversation and emphasizes the importance of addressing the whole being in therapy, including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects.
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Edy describes the five quadrants of the liberation protocol: emotional, physical, social, community, and psyche
ABOUT EDY NATHAN:
Edy Nathan, MA, LCSW, CST, is a licensed psychotherapist, certified sex therapist, and grief expert who guides people through the terrain most avoid—grief, trauma, and sexuality. With master’s degrees from NYU and Fordham, and certification in sex therapy from the University of Michigan, Edy brings clinical depth and grounded compassion to the conversations we’re often too afraid to have.
She believes healing begins in what “the innermost cave”—a place where one meets their greatest obstacles and finds the tools for deep transformation. “Being in the cave means you’re daring to live with your loss,” she says. “It’s where the shadows of grief, mourning, and the traumatic imprint reveal themselves. And given the chance, it will transform you.” This is the heart of her work: not just surviving grief, but partnering with it, dancing with it, and emerging changed.
Edy is the author of It’s Grief: The Dance of Self-Discovery through Trauma and Loss, and is currently writing her second book, Dare to Live: The Sexual Grief Effect — Reveal the Shadow Wounds from Loathing to Liberation to Love.
Her message is clear: It’s time. To Dare to Live. You have the power—you’ve had it all along.
Core purpose/passion: I believe healing begins in what I call “the innermost cave”—a place where one meets their greatest obstacles and finds the tools for deep transformation. Being in the cave means you’re daring to live with your loss, It’s where the shadows of grief, mourning, and the traumatic imprint reveal themselves. And given the chance, it will transform you. This is the heart of my work: not just surviving grief, but partnering with it, dancing with it, and emerging changed.
ABOUT MANON BOLLIGER, FCAH, RBHT
As a recently De-Registered board-certified naturopathic physician & in practice since 1992, I’ve seen an average of 150 patients per week and have helped people ranging from rural farmers in Nova Scotia to stressed out CEOs in Toronto to tri-athletes here in Vancouver.
My resolve to educate, empower and engage people to take charge of their own health is evident in my best-selling books: ‘What Patients Don’t Say if Doctors Don’t Ask: The Mindful Patient-Doctor Relationship’ and ‘A Healer in Every Household: Simple Solutions for Stress’. I also teach BowenFirst™ Therapy through Bowen College and hold transformational workshops to achieve these goals.
So, when I share with you that LISTENING to Your body is a game changer in the healing process, I am speaking from expertise and direct experience”.
Mission: A Healer in Every Household!
For more great information to go to her weekly blog: http://bowencollege.com/blog.
For tips on health & healing go to: https://www.drmanonbolliger.com/tips
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* De-Registered, revoked & retired naturopathic physician after 30 years of practice in healthcare. Now resourceful & resolved to share with you all the tools to take care of your health & vitality!
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction 00:00
Welcome to the Healers Café. The number one show for medical practitioners and holistic healers, to have heart to heart conversations about their day to day lives, while sharing their expertise for improving your health and wellness.
Manon Bolliger 00:17
So welcome to the Healers Cafe, and today I have with me Edie Nathan, and she’s a licensed psychotherapist, certified sex therapist and grief expert who guides people through the terrain most people avoid, which is grief, trauma and sexuality, with master’s degree from NYU and Fordham and certifications in sex therapy from the University of Michigan, Edie brings clinical depth and grounded compassion to the conversations we’re often too afraid to have. So welcome and let’s not be afraid over here, this is the whole point of this. Of this podcast is really to discuss what most people, or, you know, illuminate that one can discuss these subjects. Because why should they be silent anymore? And why should people not realize that what they’re experiencing might just be what people experience, you know. So, so, yeah, welcome. And I think, yeah, the first question I would ask you, though is, how did you get focused in this? And I’m understanding from you a little bit that grief is one thing, and then you have also this component, the sexuality grief chapter. They’re, they’re sort of the same, but separate. Yeah, let’s go from there.
Edy Nathan 01:52
Okay, so to to define, I’ve got the grief piece, and then, and then I’ve got sexual grief. And sexual grief has it does have to do with sexuality, just like grief. Often, when people think of grief, straightforward grief, it’s because we’ve lost a loved one. What I’ve done is expanded the idea on both, on both accounts and sexual grief is actually this, what I call the sexual grief effect is mine, and I will explain to your audience what I mean by that grief. I don’t know that I need to explain it, except to say that that some sometimes the thought is, oh, we only think about grief, or are affected by grief when we’ve lost a loved one, when we’ve lost a friend, a companion, a partner, a child, an animal. But grief is so much more than that, and I think it came to light actually during those years where we were, you know, inside and protecting ourselves and scared and and that, that people realized maybe I can’t be with myself, and there was grief in the understanding and the knowledge of I am afraid without my busyness and I don’t know how to manage my life. And in that, they met the complexities of grief, no anxiety can look like grief and and and and or grief can look like anxiety, and grief can look like depression or malaise. And grief can can unfold in a myriad ways and is layered and it doesn’t follow a path. And you asked a question, How did I get into this? Well, you know, it’s, it’s, there are so many stories in my life that have led me here I can, I can share with you and with your audience that when I was 27 I I lost my partner, and that really leveled me emotionally. And I had nowhere to go. I had no one to talk to, and the insides of my emotional world were in they. I was in shreds, and the embodiment of that, that shreddedness kind of left me not able to know how to function in the world. And because this this partner, taught me about love and taught me what it was to actually know how to be nurtured and to be able to accept it and to feel and understand that I was worthy of that. Because up until that time, I didn’t have that companion with me, that sense of i i could hold on to.
Manon Bolliger 05:00
Love, yeah, that’s a huge, it’s a huge part, right? And when you figure that you actually are worthy, right? And then need to lose that person who, who’s the messenger, that was the messenger.
Edy Nathan 05:17
That’s right, he was the messenger. He was the holder, he was the container. And when I was with him, everything was okay, yeah, and, and so that kind of gets me into the whole sexual grief piece, except that I I must share that the sexual grief effect did not come to me until much, much later in my work and in my process. And it happened, you know, right right before we shut down and we had to face parts of the South that we didn’t really want to face, or didn’t even know how to face, and and I am a survivor of a predatory event that happened when I was nine, and though, though in other aspects of my life, I may not have experienced a sexually traumatic predatory event, I certainly met events and experiences that were more developmental, that created a sexual grief within me that I did not have a label for, or didn’t know how to accurately name, and it’s through my work in trauma, in grief and in the collaborative sex and sex, not as sex of the kind of sex that we might have with a partner, or that we might have, perhaps even with ourselves. It was the idea going back to kind of this old sage person named Freud who talked about the sexual driver, and that that sexual driver could lives within us, and when it is flattened, it affects our ability to feel that we can participate in life, and that We have hunger and desire to go to work, to to dream, to to to get engaged in in in our lives in such a way that we feel alive. And that that driver, when it deadens in our brains, in our prefrontal cortex, is that when it deadens that we’re flat, and when we are flat, we don’t know how to hold on to love. So I’m going full circle now, because it was my inability to hold on to love back when I was 2726 25 and I had that partner who who taught me about it didn’t mean I knew how to ..
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hold it. And when there is an absence of of the memory of love, that we can feel it when it’s there, but when it’s gone, we don’t remember it. I believe that that’s what happens with the sexual grief effect, which is the natural response to a sexually traumatic predatory event or developmental experience like not being wanted, or as a child, or the first sexual experience goes wrong and it alters us, or there’s teasing as a child, or there’s the aging process, or there’s medication that changes our desires and our urges and changes how we think about ourselves. And what results from that is a kind of imprisonment, and that imprisonment affects that driver, right, right? And that driver is affected. And we feel imprisoned, our functioning deteriorates. And so when you’re imprisoned, you need to find a way to get liberated. And what I’ve created and borrowed, very frankly, from Chris voss’s Amazing hostage negotiation strategies, but I’ve taken those hostage strategies and I’ve allowed the teaching of those strategies into the liberation protocol so that we, any of us, as survivors or survivalists, as I like to call
Manon Bolliger 09:47
myself a better word,
Edy Nathan 09:51
that that we, that we learn how to be negotiate with that which keeps us stuck.
Manon Bolliger 09:57
Mm. Wow, beautifully explained. I’m just going to reiterate a couple points to make sure
Edy Nathan 10:05
I just get a mouthful here. It’s
Manon Bolliger 10:09
great. It’s poetic and beautiful, and you I sense what you’re saying. But just to be clear for me, it’s another way of looking at it could be simply that there’s like a deadness from a traumatic experience, any of the ones you mentioned to do with some form of sexual whether it’s rejection or any of Tory event, basically, so that when you find somebody who is giving you love and that you you realize that you haven’t really learned how to receive It’s like you are absent in that process. And so what I’m understanding is that it wasn’t right at the same time as you had the loss, it was later you reflected that it’s connected because you didn’t, you couldn’t develop that part, so you could only receive it if he gave it. But once the giver was gone, it’s like all the work had gotten worse. Is forgotten. There was nothing else so that, you know, in a sense, everyone has to work on themselves. That’s right, yeah, okay,
Edy Nathan 11:37
it’s, it’s, it’s about attachment. You know, I and I am not an attachment therapist, and we need healthy attachments. We need healthy relationships, not relationships where, if we’re fused and we’re like walking around, where we’re just attached at the hip. We can’t really see ourselves, and we really can’t see the person that we’re with. We need more of what I call this figure eight, and in it’s the in between. It’s what goes on in the in between, between the two circles, so that we are individuals, and then we we have a place where we are joined and a place where we are separate, and it is in that separateness that when you have experienced a predatory event that was, you know, an experience, an event that happened to you, or a developmental experience, that that kind of sexual grief. And it is, it’s a grief. It’s a deep grief, because some part of you got lost. Yeah, has died. The hope in the work is to bring your the different aspects of the self and the soul back online.
Manon Bolliger 12:58
So let’s talk about this hostage theory. Because I know, I you know, I’m sure you’ve written about it, and you know, it’ll be hard to summarize in a short time, but if you could give the main lines of that,
Commercial Break 13:12
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Edy Nathan 14:21
I call it the liberation protocol, and I really, for your listening audience. You know, hostage is a really tough word these days, and we’re living in a in a critical time right now, and so I had to, actually, just to be very unveil my process. I needed to rethink, how am I going to present this? Because that word is, is, is a, is a tough word for so many, and it’s a sad where we’ve got people who are in, in, encased in, in a situation where they cannot really extricate themselves, and they are being hurt. How. So I am really wanting to say, okay, so you’re imprisoned by something that hurt you. You’re I’m hoping that you’re not continuing to be hurt, although in domestic violence situations sometimes it does continue, but there is this sense of, I can’t get out. I’m stuck. I’m stuck, and we sometimes we don’t even know that we’re stuck or we can’t. We don’t even know that we’re not remembering the love of another once they’re gone, either they’re gone or they’ve left for work for the day, and we don’t hold it, and we could, you know, that’s where myself and Freud break, because I’m not saying, Oh, well, that attachment didn’t happen, you know, in those tender moments with with, with the primary mother or parent, but that it happened after the loss of yourself, after an abusive situation, that predatory event, or that developmental, you know, experience, and that the liberation protocol, I look at an embodied curiosity. How do you become curious with the self? And that curiosity, you know, this becomes very kind of involved, if you will. But if you think that we, we all have kind of five quadrants that we live in. We live we have an emotional life, we have a physical life. We have a social and community life. We we have a physical life, and, and, and we we have the the life of the of the psyche, and we have all of those aspects of the self. Some of them are more developed than others. When we are looking at this liberation protocol, we’re looking at within each strategy of the liberation protocol, being curious about the self means that embodied curiosity goes to, where am I, spiritually, psycho, spiritually, where am I physically? Where am I emotionally? What is going on with me, in in my, in my, in my psyche, and you’re asking the question within all of these five quadrants, within each of those those strategies. So the first strategy of embodied Curiosity will look at those five quadrants, and it is the curiosity is, if you think about being stuck and being imprisoned, you’re talking to the part of you that is imprisoned, which is kind of the taker. It’s the it’s the prison guard. And you’re talking to the prison guard, and you’re saying, Okay, I’m going to be curious, why are you holding me prisoner? Why have you taken me? Why have you taken some part of my spiritual beliefs? I need to understand what’s going on here and how it serves you to have taken this from me, and it’s then the body. Maybe there’s been weight gain or weight loss, maybe there’s lack of sleep. Maybe there’s been over sexualized behavior, out of control, sexual behavior, maybe and we, the list could go on. So you’re looking at each of these liberation protocols from the lens of these five different quadrants.
Manon Bolliger 18:50
So talking to the prison guard like, as far as self it’s the the I mean, it’s an act of taking full responsibility doing this, like I see that, but it’s, it’s like the the victim. You to a type of perpetrator of your prism, when you’re talking to the guard, right? And so
Edy Nathan 19:20
the guard is that, in a way, it’s the perpetrator, but it’s the perpetrator that that, that that results, it’s like the hostage taker, right? Exactly, really, it’s, it’s, it’s really what’s going on here, and this hostage taker is holding you imprisoned and and it’s because of the experiences or events that you’ve heard, right and need to get out. You need to free yourself. Does it mean forgetting? No, yeah. It means, how am I going to learn to remember this more peacefully,
Manon Bolliger 19:56
right? Yeah, and stop. The endless suffering about it, which
Edy Nathan 20:02
and wait absolutely and and, and relate less to the victim, the role of victim, and relate more to I’m a survivalist. This makes up part of me. It doesn’t have to make up my whole psyche and soul and physicality. You know, people who have been survivalists of a predatory event or a developmental experience. Sadly, there the amount of gut issues, the amount of arthritis, the amount of illnesses they have, poor teeth, issues with their jaw. These are often the result of these predatory events that have the trauma, the complex trauma. And more and more studies about arthritis and long term devastating effects of arthritis and trauma,
Manon Bolliger 21:08
yeah, well, I don’t know if you’re familiar with homeopathy, yes, yeah. So that’s was a big part of my practice as a naturopath. When I was in practice, I have to always state that publicly. But anyway, yeah, and absolutely, that’s the case, you know, because the the types of remedies that show up are grief remedies are, it’s, it’s, it’s very clear, you know. And when we ask questions and people have arthritis, it’s like, okay, there’s probably a loss, there’s probably, you know, an unresolved grief. That’s
Edy Nathan 21:49
right, it’s those autoimmune disorders, yes, and they are being tracked more. And I’m so happy that the scientists and the psychologists who are studying this, are actually gathering this data. I’m not I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a researcher, but in all of my years of working with clients who come in time after time with these issues, with autoimmune immune disorders, with, you know, such as arthritis, such as gut issues, then the question must be asked, what is there a memory? Is there anything that happened? And maybe there isn’t, but then, and maybe there is, but then we need to start to have conversations with their gut. And that’s where the embodied curiosity comes in. I want to have I want to have conversations with their arthritis. I want to have conversations with the part of them that does not have words, right? Yeah, and that’s the embodied curiosity. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah,
Manon Bolliger 23:00
well, it’s a big, big tip, yeah, it is because, I mean, once you start down that path, then so many doors open, so many doors open, yeah. So, yeah, it’s just a question, which door first, you know, that’s what I found. It’s like, you know, people find different therapy, different therapists, that’s right, it’s all there, you know, and it’s just a question of, yeah, willing to make a positive step forward, no matter what the pain was, the trauma, the story, you know,
Edy Nathan 23:36
I don’t want anybody to walk around saying I’m A victim, I’m a victim. I’m a victim. I want to help them get to a point where they’re saying I’m a survivalist. I was in, I was in the middle of a black forest, and it was dark and it was scary, and I didn’t have the tools to get out, but I am. I sometimes I go back in, but I’m not in as much as I used to be, and that’s makes me a survivalist, and I can feel things in ways that I never felt things before. And I’m so excited to be able to do this. So this perspective is not a therapy in and of itself. It is a yes and to whatever therapeutic work anyone is doing, and that’s what I want to say to the lay person, and that’s what I want to say the therapist. This is a yes and perspective,
Manon Bolliger 24:28
yeah, yeah, very much. So, yeah, well, we’re almost out of time. I’ll give you a couple more minutes. Anything that’s happening in the near future, or any books you’re about to write, or
Edy Nathan 24:42
so I am this, this theory that I’m talking about. I’m in the process of looking for a publisher. The working title right now is dare to live, liberate the self from sexually traumatic events and thrive and so. So hopefully by 2026, I will have a publisher, and that book will get out there, because it needs, it needs to fly. And I would offer that people come to my website. The grief website is edinathan.com and they’ll find some things on sexual grief, and then I have sexual grief.com and that site continues to grow. And all I want to say, and I’ve got conferences listed, so if they just go there, I’ve got a wonderful project where I’m going to be talking to a conference on trauma, complex trauma, and it’s for an audience in the Ukraine, and if you know, as I get more information, I will certainly give it to you, and it’s also will be on my website. Great.
Manon Bolliger 25:52
Well, thank you so much for spending time having this conversation and letting people know you know what you do and what is out
Edy Nathan 25:59
there, especially Absolutely, thank you for having me on the show.
Manon Bolliger 26:03
Thank you. So with my conversation with Eddie Nathan, I think what, what applies, really, to the whole Bowen community, is reinforcing the fact that, you know, we are a whole being, right? It’s not just physical, it’s mental, emotional, psychological, spiritual, it’s it’s all of it and and it’s how we’ve interpreted and also experienced, you know, whether it’s abusive situations, or, you know, crime basically to to ourselves. So what we’ve how we’ve decided to deal with that in internally, right? So I think all of that becomes so relevant when we’re giving any type of therapy is just to be really aware that physical pain, whether it’s arthritis that you’re helping people with or not, there’s more to it. There’s always more to it. So for those of you who are practicing that is why we have these moments where people will feel like they can relief, release some of this grief or some of this pain. So it’s there. And, you know, sometimes it’s bone therapy, sometimes it’s other therapies. It you know, we all have a path in our healing journey. So I found this in a very interesting to from a psychological point of view, to really notice that there’s such a connection.
ENDING:
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* De-Registered, revoked & retired naturopathic physician, after 30 years of practice in healthcare. Now resourceful & resolved to share with you all the tools to take care of your health & vitality!
