00:00 Introduction to Continuing Bonds
01:00 Reviewing the Mindfulness & Grief System
10:00 Why Continuing Bonds comes later in grief work
11:30 Repeating the story of the loss
13:00 “That relationship does not end. It changes.”
14:00 Realizing you can still have a relationship
15:30 Why continuing bonds are not toxic positivity
16:00 Wearing a loved one’s clothes after loss
19:00 How continuing bonds evolve over time
20:00 The “taiko taco” remembrance story
21:30 Why people say “move on”
23:00 Replaying the story of the death
24:30 The fear of forgetting someone
25:00 Focusing on the story of their life
26:00 The imprint meditation practice
27:00 Continuing bonds with complicated relationships
31:00 Heather’s experience with the imprint practice
33:00 Grief, abuse, and trauma-sensitive care
35:00 Learning to care for yourself
36:00 Holding multiple truths at once
38:00 “It wasn’t toxic positivity. It was honesty.”
41:00 Mother-daughter relationships and guilt
43:00 Trauma, grief, and healing
45:00 Trusting yourself in grief
47:00 “How am I going to get through this?”
49:00 Preview of Step 7: Allowing Transformation
53:00 Continuing bonds and choosing what to carry forward
54:00 Closing reflections

Episode 64
The Relationship Doesn't End:
Continuing Bonds (Step 6)

Amanda Palermo: Hi there. Welcome back to the Mindfulness & Grief Podcast. I’m Amanda Palermo, Heather’s co-host, and I’d like to welcome Heather to this beautiful space.

Heather Stang: Thank you, Amanda. It’s good to be back.

Amanda Palermo: It’s great to be back.

Heather Stang: We have made it through five of the eight steps of the Mindfulness & Grief System.

For those of you who are new to the podcast, you can go back to the very first episode in this series, Step 0, which is about why we have a system or framework in the first place.

I thought it would be nice to briefly review where we are now before we tell them what we’re diving into. So what if I toss out the step number and the name of the step, and you toss back what you think is the reason we address or offer the practices in that step?

Amanda Palermo: This sounds like a good challenge.

Heather Stang: I think so. For those of you who have been following along, this will be a good review, and maybe you will come up with your own reasons.

One of the things that is really important to me about this work, and I would venture to say it’s important to any grief counselor, professional, or coach, is that the tools we offer give you enough support so that you feel like you have direction, guidance, and hope. But they also need to be broad enough that you can grieve your way, in a way that’s aligned with your values, your needs, and your relationship to the person who died, or whatever you have lost.

So Step 1, conscious relaxation.

Amanda Palermo: Conscious relaxation is about calming our nervous system and getting us into our bodies a little bit more.

The idea is that perhaps we are in the acute stage of grief. We might be feeling numb. We might have brain fog. There are a lot of symptoms that come with acute grief in the beginning stages.

Conscious relaxation really works to help with those physical and mental symptoms. It works on the nervous system to calm it, to get us back into our bodies, to help us focus, and to help with mental clarity. So we learn focusing practices and relaxation practices.

Heather Stang: Beautiful. Step 2, mindful awareness.

Amanda Palermo: The way I like to think of mindful awareness is that once we’ve gotten into our bodies a little more and we’re able to focus a little more, maybe the brain fog has lifted and there’s a little more mental clarity.

Now we’re able to work on being more present, becoming more aware of our bodies, noticing sensations that might be arising in the body, and becoming more aware of the outer world too. It’s being mindful of what’s going on internally and emotionally.

I think of it almost like a waking-up process. We’re getting out of the fog a little bit. We’re feeling our bodies more and noticing what’s coming up emotionally.

Heather Stang: Step 3 is compassion for all, but let’s focus on the self-compassion part of this.

Amanda Palermo: Once we start to become more aware of what’s happening, and we’re practicing mindful awareness, we start to become aware of a lot of feelings that come to the surface because we’re not so numb anymore.

We have this awareness, and we start to feel more. A lot of feelings that come up may require self-kindness and self-compassion. We start to turn toward those feelings with gentleness, kindness, and compassion.

Heather Stang: Oh, so important.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah.

Heather Stang: So you led us right into dealing with difficult emotions, which is Step 4, skillful courage.

Amanda Palermo: Now we start to feel emotions that might be difficult. They begin to arise. And we can make a decision about whether we’re going to turn toward those difficult emotions or turn away from them.

That’s going to depend on the day and the situation. We might feel like, “Yes, I can lean toward this difficult emotion today. It feels safe enough.” Other days we might say, “This isn’t right for me today. I don’t want to go there.”

When we decide whether we’re going to turn toward those emotions or not, that takes courage. It can be scary. Turning toward those emotions with self-compassion does require courage.

Heather Stang: Then we arrive at Step 5, which is getting unstuck.

Amanda Palermo: At this point, we might feel like we’re making strides. We may feel like, “Hey, I have these tools now. I know how to implement them when I need to.”

Maybe life starts to feel more manageable. Maybe we’re not having grief waves as much. We’re moving forward in life, and everything seems to be going well. We think, “I’m moving forward. I’m doing great.”

Then, out of nowhere, we get hit with a huge grief wave, like a tsunami. It feels like the person just died, even though it may have been three years, several years, or several months.

We feel like we’re back at square one again. That can leave us feeling stuck in grief, like a vicious cycle. But really, it’s not being stuck. It feels that way, but we have tools to look at what’s causing those feelings of being stuck. Which mental hindrance is coming up? What’s making me feel this way?

Because really, you’re not stuck. It’s part of the process of grief. It’s a journey.

Heather Stang: Absolutely. Beautifully done. You sailed through that challenge because you embody this work, both personally and professionally.

Now we arrive at Step 6, which is a really big one.

If you look back on all five steps, there’s one really big part of grief we have not mentioned specifically. It always shows up. It’s always going to show up. We just haven’t named it yet, and that is continuing bonds.

That is the connection we have with the person who died. Or, if you’re working through non-death loss, the connection you have to the meaning of the thing you lost.

It can be questioned why this is way down at Step 6 out of 8, but here’s why. Number one, I don’t need to remind people to think about, talk about, or stay connected with their people. That’s natural. That’s what we do as humans.

But before we dive deep into it in a group or private session, it can be really helpful to have those other tools in your toolkit because it allows you to approach your precious story and narrative about the person in a different way.

So many of us tell the story of the loss of our person over and over again, myself included. That is completely normal.

I don’t know if you experienced this, Amanda, but I certainly did the many times I’ve had a major loss, where I felt like I was telling the same story over and over again to many different people.

The first couple of times, there’s a lot of emotion. It’s hard to tell. You can hardly believe it. Telling that story helps us address William Worden’s first task of mourning, which is accepting the reality of the loss.

But sometimes that story starts to feel like the same story over and over, and it doesn’t serve us as much as it did in the beginning.

In the getting unstuck step, we talked about telling our stories through a different point of view and different perspectives. A lot of times, people are talking about their loved one there too. So it’s not like they aren’t talking about continuing bonds.

But in this step, you have all those tools under your belt, and now you are invited to really focus on the relationship you had, have, and will have with your person ongoing, because that relationship does not end. It changes.

This is a really important step in the process, and there are many tools we use for this. Most of you are probably already doing it on your own in some ways.

Still, it can be helpful to try different ways of thinking about your person, honoring the relationship that remains, and considering mindfully how you want to spend their death anniversary or birthday. How do you want to weave them into the holidays?

That’s really what this step is all about.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah. To me, this is really about realizing that I can still have a relationship with the people I’ve lost.

In the beginning, if you had said to me that there’s still an ongoing relationship, I don’t think I would even have been ready to hear that. I would have thought, “What? I’m still accepting that this person is gone.”

It took me a long time to get to the point where it was like an epiphany. I realized, “Oh, I can still have a relationship. Physically, they’re not here, but the relationship hasn’t ended.”

I can still have a relationship with my mother. I can still have a relationship with my father. It’s just going to be different.

Heather Stang: I think early on, if somebody says that, it matters how they say it. Because I agree, it sucks that they’re gone. This is not a consolation prize by any means. This is not saying, “Oh, it’s okay. You can still have the relationship.”

It’s not that.

But it is saying, “Yes, they’re not here physically, but their wisdom, their heart, their love, their views, there are ways you can connect to that.”

Most people are going to do it without even trying. It’s just natural.

Amanda Palermo: When my father died, I think I slept in his pajamas. He had these flannel pajama bottoms and a shirt he would wear. I think for a year I slept in those pajamas. It was a long time.

It was just something natural. Very early on, I was wearing the pajamas at night, and then I continued for a long time. Eventually there came a point where I thought, “I’m ready to move on from these pajamas.”

But subconsciously, there was something very comforting about wearing something that was his, something he wore, something that made me feel cozy.

Heather Stang: I’m laughing because there is a thing that happens where sometimes we take on physical aspects of a person after they die. A lot of people wear the clothes.

I remember one day, probably about six months after my stepfather died, I inherited his car and I was wearing his hat. My mom, he, and I all had the same hat from this vacation place we would always go to down in Sanibel Island. But I was wearing his hat, not mine. Mine was a medium. His was a large.

I was wearing his hat, his green rain jacket, no makeup, and I don’t even know what my hair was doing. All I know is I looked in the reflection of the driver’s side window as I was getting into that car and thought, “Oh. I’m becoming Tom.”

I was carrying his camera bag too.

There was something very comforting about that until, at some point, I was ready to relinquish those physical memories and come back to myself, knowing he was still in me.

When we have these creature comforts, or linking objects, as they’re called, we may wear their clothes, keep their jewelry, or hold onto objects that make them feel close.

And after a while, they may still feel close even if you are not wearing their clothes. That doesn’t mean you need to get rid of those things. It’s personal preference.

You decided you were done with the pajamas. I decided I needed to get back to myself some. That’s part of it too. It doesn’t mean the relationship goes away.

Amanda Palermo: Right. And I think it changed over the years too.

That’s what’s so cool about continuing bonds. The ways I still connect to my dad change all the time. He’s been gone a long time, maybe 14 or 15 years. So it has changed.

Sometimes it’s listening to the music he loved or the bands he listened to. Certain things make me feel close to him in that moment. It evolves. It’s always changing, how I feel about this relationship with him.

Heather Stang: Some things change, and some things stay the same if you decide to keep them.

Another continuing bonds story I’ll share is about my mom and her father, and also me and her father, my granddad.

The first time my granddad had tacos was in 1979. He had come from North Carolina up to Maryland, and we had just moved here. We went to a Mexican restaurant, and he said, “Taiko? What’s a taiko?”

It was just so precious. He was Southern, and somehow he had missed tacos. I don’t know how, because they’re everywhere, but he had.

Then he wound up dying on Cinco de Mayo, which was completely random. He died in 1988.

Every year, my mom and I would wear red, which was his favorite color, and go to that same restaurant. We did that for decades until she moved away. Even then, we would both have tacos and wear red on his death anniversary.

It’s been a long time. The intensity is not the same, but there are things we miss about him and things we like to remember about him. That is completely normal.

I think talking about the normalcy of this is very important.

How many grieving people have had someone who just did not understand say, “Well, I think you need to stop thinking about them,” or “I think you just need to move on,” or “I think you need to get over this”?

It feels so hurtful and isolating. Usually that is someone who hasn’t had a loss, and they don’t really know any better. I don’t think they have ill intent. They just want you to feel better. But it can make you feel really angry, for sure.

Amanda Palermo: I still talk about my mom often. Somehow it always comes up in conversation. I wonder sometimes if the people in my life are tired of hearing about it. Like, “Oh my God, I’m still talking about this?”

That’s just my own stuff coming up, because I know the people in my life are very supportive and happy to listen. But I still struggle with that a little bit.

After she passed, I went through a period where I was constantly talking about how she passed. That week in hospice, the days leading up to hospice, and then when she died. I kept talking about it and talking about it.

I wondered, “Why am I still talking about this?” There was something my brain was trying to work out by continuing to talk about it.

I always felt weird about it, talking about it so much. But it was a traumatic event, and I think my brain was trying to make sense of something that was nonsensical.

Heather Stang: That is exactly what your brain was trying to do. It was trying to figure out what happened so it could prevent it from happening again.

It’s also a way of remembering them. It’s that most recent impactful memory.

We often say there comes a time when you stop talking about their death and start talking about their life. That’s a tipping point. It doesn’t mean you’ll never talk about their death again.

A lot of people are afraid of not feeling the pain of grief or not talking about the story of the death because they fear they will be dishonoring the person, or that they’ll forget the person, or that it means they don’t love the person.

But I can tell you, you never forget. You never stop loving. You never stop remembering. It just changes.

That story is what we are working with here in continuing bonds. We are focusing not only on the story of their death. We’re not saying it doesn’t matter. It matters. Sometimes that does come into it. But we’re starting to look at how their life matters to you.

That’s really what it’s about.

There are several practices we do here, but one of my favorites is the imprint practice that comes from Vickio and Niemeyer. Both have written about it in various publications.

It’s basically a reflection practice on how this person affected your life biologically: eye color, hair color, mannerisms, if they were related. Although sometimes partners pick up mannerisms too, or they start dressing alike, and that counts too.

It also looks at hobbies, career, beliefs, religion, politics, worldviews, whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. Some of these things may not come from them, but some will.

It’s really taking a holistic view of who they were and who they still are through you.

Amanda Palermo: I did the life imprint meditation recently. I hadn’t done it in a while, so I decided to do it in preparation for this episode.

It can be really intense.

The person I was using for the meditation was someone I had a loving relationship with. So what if it’s someone you had a complicated relationship with?

Heather Stang: I’m going to address this in two parts.

First, the intensity of this practice. This came up in my Mindfulness & Grief Coach Certification program a couple weeks ago when I taught it. It was like, wow, this is big.

It’s powerful. It’s healing for many people, but not everybody is ready for it. It is definitely a practice that should not be sprung on anyone.

As with everything I teach, there needs to be trauma sensitivity, choice, and permission for people not to do it or to put it off.

I’ve had people in my grief support group, Awaken, put it off for a year or a year and a half. They said, “Oh yeah, I read the introduction of that, and nope, I’m not there.”

As we talk about it, there is definitely choice in where, when, and how you do it.

Now let’s get into if it is a difficult person. If you had a difficult person in your life and you want to think about how they impacted you, you first have to wrap yourself in self-compassion. That means you don’t do anything that causes you harm.

This is not about suffering so that you can make peace with someone. That’s never going to work.

If we look back to the Buddhist roots of mindfulness, that’s not what we’re asking at all. Self-compassion means you take care of the person you can care for the most, which is you.

I would recommend, if it feels edgy, doing it as a writing practice instead of a meditation practice. Your eyes are open. You have the pen or pencil, or your fingers are moving. There’s that embodied piece where you are present, and for many people, that feels a little safer if it’s a challenging relationship.

If it was an easy, beautiful relationship and you like daydreaming about or remembering your person, the meditation is a great way to do it.

You could also do it in parts. Today you might think about how they impacted your career. Another day, you might think about how they impacted your worldview.

Some things are going to feel stickier than others. If somebody forced you into the family business and you spent your whole life in a grueling job that you hated because you felt a duty, and then they died and there’s resentment, you might not want to think about career yet. Maybe you do, but that’s a real thing too.

The biggest piece is this: just by noting how they impacted you doesn’t mean you have to keep holding onto those ways they impacted you.

That was the most powerful thing for me when I did this practice.

The first time I experienced it was at Hood College, where I got my master’s degree. I had already graduated, but Robert Neimeyer came back to do a workshop training there. He led us through the imprint meditation.

My stepdad had died probably two years before, and as listeners know, he had bipolar disorder, so there were challenges in that relationship. I loved him, though. Obviously, I dressed like him. It was one of those very complex relationships.

When I got to the part where he had us reflect on what we did not want to carry any longer, that changed my relationship with my stepdad. I no longer felt highly ambivalent, like, “I love him and he was difficult. I love him and he was difficult.”

That felt like a tug-of-war.

It shifted into, “I love him. It’s difficult.”

The texture of that really changed for me.

So that’s how you handle it: very gently, with self-compassion, and with your eyes wide open.

There are other ways you can continue the bond too.

Now let’s go a step further. If the relationship was abusive, not just challenging but toxic or harmful, then you probably want to do more work on your relationship with yourself and reparenting.

I do this with Integrated Attachment Theory. I’ve trained under Thais Gibson, who created the Gibson Integrated Attachment Theory protocol. This is really about repairing those core wounds that the people who have power over us, knowingly or unknowingly, wire into our subconscious mind.

It’s learning how to meet your own needs, communicate, and set boundaries.

I’m also estranged from my biological father, so I’ve had to do this work on that loss. Even though he’s still alive, it’s a loss. When he dies, I have no idea how I’m going to feel. No idea.

So I’ve been doing the reparenting work on myself, and I help clients with that. It is powerful work too.

If the relationship was abusive or highly toxic, I would not recommend the imprint meditation unless someone said, “I’m ready to do that,” or “I’m curious about it.”

This is a big part of our work as Mindfulness & Grief coaches, letting our clients let us know if something is okay or not.

I am at a point now where I can look at my biological father, and even though he is alive and I do not have that relationship, I’m at a point where I can look at the imprint.

I’m kind of forced to because, as I get older, I’m starting to look more like him, which is really odd. I look in the mirror and I see him.

Learning to appreciate those features rather than hate them has been part of my work. I’ve never said that out loud, but being able to look in the mirror and not be like, “Ugh,” that’s powerful stuff right there. To own it myself.

Amanda Palermo: When you were talking about your stepdad and said it was complicated, but you love him, present tense, I think that’s important to say.

Even about your biological father, there are these multiple truths you start to realize. These people who are losses in our lives bring not just the emotion of the loss, but all the complexities of the relationship too.

For example, when my mom passed, there was so much guilt. Sometimes there was resentment and hostility. But I loved her, and I love her. Those things can both be true. They can live together side by side.

I think that’s part of continuing bonds.

Heather Stang: It’s accepting them as their whole person.

Are any of us perfect? No. I am sure I am both delightful and challenging because that’s how we are as humans.

Being able to really see your person for who they were, and choosing the part you want to give your attention to, whether it’s the part you need to let go of or the part you want to keep, is very real.

There’s that phrase, “Never speak ill of the dead,” and there may be some arguments for that, like not dwelling in the negative. But I don’t think it’s necessarily real, true, or helpful for a lot of people.

It goes back to this: grief is about the individual relationship you had with that person.

Do you choose, because of who they were and who you are, to focus on the ways they imprinted on you that you want to carry forward? Or do you choose to say, “That didn’t work out so well for me, and I need to figure out how to view myself, communicate, and set boundaries to make myself healthier”?

At the end of the day, it’s what do you need? What’s important to you?

As I illustrated with the story about my stepdad, Tom, being able to name the parts of him that I did not like freed me from having to hold onto them.

Now, when I talk about Tom, the only reason I ever say he was difficult is when I’m talking about this, when I’m talking about continuing bonds and trying to help people understand the complexities.

In my daily life, when I think about Tom, it’s all pretty good.

Even my mother has forgiven him for some of the things he did, and that is huge. I would have never expected that.

But we’ve been able to let go of who he was when he was alive and really savor the good he brought into our lives: the dog he helped us adopt, Brandy; the photography he did because he was a great photographer; the restaurants we went to; the fun we had on the boat.

When I think about him now, there are so many good memories. But when I was thinking about him in those final months before he died, when he and my mother were going through a divorce, he was a very challenging figure in my life.

That’s an interesting thing.

But it wasn’t spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity that got me here. It was honesty.

Amanda Palermo: I love that you’re saying that because I’m a big believer in being really honest about the relationship.

In the beginning, I had feelings about certain things with my mother. I would think back and be like, “Oh God, that was just so infuriating.” She would infuriate me sometimes. I would remember scenarios or conversations, and then I would feel guilty about having those feelings.

I would say, “No, I shouldn’t feel like that. She’s not around anymore. Don’t speak ill of the dead.” Then I would feel guilty about it.

Eventually I thought, “No, this is part of my process. I have to sit with this for a little bit.” It was the truth. Those things happened. Those things were said. It wasn’t a perfect relationship. It was a mother-daughter relationship.

But it was sitting with those two truths, that it was complex and difficult, but it didn’t take away from the fact that we had a beautiful relationship and I loved her, and I still love her.

Heather Stang: Can you have a beautiful relationship with someone you’re not vulnerable enough to go into those difficult places with? Maybe. But for most of us, it’s the people we’re closest to that we have challenges with because we’re exposed. We’re vulnerable. That’s part of love.

I want to circle back and make this very clear. If the relationship was abusive, if it caused you physical or emotional harm, if there’s trauma, there might be a chance that before you even work on your grief, you need to work on your trauma, because the research shows that the order matters. You do your trauma therapy and then your grief therapy.

There have been times where people have shown up to see me for grief work, and in that first conversation, there were signals that there might be actual PTSD or CPTSD. At that point, I suggest they get screened by someone who can work with that.

It doesn’t mean we can’t work in tandem together, but I want to be very ethical. I am going to change how Step 6 is addressed because there is no need to force yourself to feel a certain way about someone who did not take care of you.

But there is every reason in the world for you to be empowered to learn how to care for yourself, which is hard. I know how hard it is, but it’s really liberating when you get there. It’s a path worth walking.

Amanda Palermo: That makes me think about people who have lost someone important, whether it’s a parent or someone close to them, who was abusive toward them, and the complexity of how that person might feel about that loss.

Heather Stang: Yes. And then people come up to you saying, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and you don’t even know what to say.

So there’s a continuum of relationships.

To go back to the thing you and I both always say, your grief is as unique as your relationship with the person who died.

So don’t let anybody, even me, even Amanda, tell you what you should do. Everything we have here is an offering, and you listen to your inner wisdom and inner knowing.

Do I feel like doing the imprint meditation, or is that a hard no?

Trust that.

Amanda Palermo: I agree 100 percent. I’m so glad you said that.

Heather Stang: I was doing some writing earlier today about what I do, just trying to get really clear on what I do.

The more I do this work, the more I teach professionals, the more new people come in with questions, and the more I see the collective grief we’re all experiencing in this world politically, environmentally, socially, digitally, one thing I realized is this:

The through line is that I want to help people learn to trust themselves again.

And that’s probably because of the work I’ve done on learning to trust myself again.

Amanda Palermo: I think that’s beautiful.

Heather Stang: I think that’s a big part of grief work.

When we’re grieving and everything has been shattered, roles have changed, identity feels lost, and certainty has been taken away, we ask ourselves, “How do I even make a decision?”

“How do I even decide what I want to eat?”

That’s one of the first hard decisions. I don’t feel like eating. What can I eat?

Then there are bigger questions. What do I want to do for this funeral? What do I want to do with their clothes? What do I want to do about earning money? What do I want to do with my life? Who am I now?

These are big questions that ask us to start trusting ourselves because the person we often would have leaned into isn’t necessarily here. And even if they were, they might not know what’s best for us.

That’s one of the hardest but biggest truths of this work, I think.

Amanda Palermo: When you lose someone who is a significant, profound loss in your life, the first thing you may think is, “How am I going to get through this? I can’t get through this by myself. What am I going to do?”

I think all these steps that we recapped earlier are helping us learn to trust ourselves and lean into our inner world a little more.

Heather Stang: I’m glad you brought it back because, as you said that, I thought, that’s exactly why we have a framework.

Why have a system for grief when grief is so messy and chaotic? That is exactly why. So you can learn how to live with the loss while still getting to be you.

Amanda Palermo: Definitely.

Heather Stang: Which brings us to Step 7, our next conversation.

Step 7 is allowing transformation. Do you want to give a summary of that?

Amanda Palermo: Allowing transformation is kind of what I was talking about before, about holding two truths or multiple truths at once.

Once you learn to live with this loss, and I’m not talking about accepting it or anything like that, but living with it, you start asking, “How do I go to work? How do I get up in the morning? How do I raise my children and still have this loss that I’m dealing with?”

Allowing transformation is really about looking back and asking, “Who am I now? What’s different? What has changed since this loss? What’s changed in my life?”

And maybe nothing has changed. Maybe things still feel somewhat the same, and I think that’s okay too.

Heather Stang: I’ll say we cheat a little with this Mindfulness & Grief thing.

We cheat by giving people tools like compassion meditation, journaling, and self-care, because it hasn’t happened yet where I’ve run a group or worked with a private client, and we’ve gotten to allowing transformation, and they haven’t found something they can point to and say, “This sucks. I wish it did not happen. I would like my person back, and I also learned how to do this for myself,” or, “I view things like this now, and that’s not so bad.”

I always feel like we’re stacking the deck by giving people transformative tools. I say that jokingly because that’s what those tools are there for. They not only help you cope with the pain, but also help you adapt and build resilience.

Meditation, mindfulness, and self-compassion practices build resilience. I also have a lot of stories from clients and from myself about how they’ve helped, both neurologically and psychologically.

When you know you have these tools, the next big thing that happens, I’m not welcoming it, and I’ll probably be tipped over some, but I at least know I have things I can do to ease some of the suffering.

You summed up allowing transformation beautifully.

I’ll add one piece too. In that assessment of looking back and seeing where you were and where you are now, you also get to make choices about who you want to become.

Continuing bonds comes before allowing transformation because a lot of times, it’s the things handed over from your person. If it was a good relationship, it might be values or outlooks you want to carry forward. If it was a difficult relationship, it might be the way you treat yourself moving forward. Maybe you stop self-abandoning. Maybe you start speaking up.

There are so many different things that show up in allowing transformation, and I’m really looking forward to talking to you about that next time, Amanda.

Amanda Palermo: Me too. It’s a good one.

Heather Stang: Aren’t they all?

Amanda Palermo: Yeah.

Heather Stang: We always say, “This is my favorite.”

Amanda Palermo: Yeah.

Heather Stang: I want to thank you for sharing your stories, and your full, honest reflection of your mom, who I know you love so much and who I know loves you so much.

Any mother-daughter relationship is going to have something. Any relationship that’s deep enough is going to have something.

To sum up continuing bonds, it’s really letting that relationship keep going however it shows up, but then putting that mindful twist on it, where you get to choose where you want to put your attention.

Amanda Palermo: Yeah. Thank you for having me, as always, Heather. I appreciate it so much. I appreciate you very much.

Heather Stang: I appreciate you too. And thank you, listeners. I feel like this was a little bit of a therapy session today for me.

Thank you for witnessing that.

Amanda, where can people find you?

Amanda Palermo: Instagram, AmandaPalermo108.

Heather Stang: And you can find me at HeatherStang.com. We will see you next time.

Amanda Palermo: Bye-bye.