You can't think your way out of grief. It lives in the body — and no amount of rationalising, staying busy, or being "so strong" will move it through you. In this deeply tender conversation, Amanda sits down with Lou Hynes, The Grief Guide, to explore the part of grief we almost never talk about: what's actually happening in your nervous system when the worst has happened, and why "just feeling your feelings" is impossible when your body has gone into freeze.

Lou knows this from the inside. In 2022, her husband Pete went from feeling a little unwell to dying of meningitis in a matter of hours — leaving Lou, at 40, to go from planning Christmas with her three children to planning his funeral. What followed was sixteen months of doing everything "right": functioning, coping, being told how strong she was — until one Mother's Day weekend her body simply stopped. She woke unable to move or hear, in what she'd later learn to name as a dorsal vagal collapse. That was the moment everything changed.

This episode is a masterclass in grief literacy — for those who are grieving and for everyone who loves, works alongside, or wants to show up for someone who is. Lou and Amanda dismantle the invisible "hierarchy of grief" that ranks whose loss counts, unpick why our society goes silent exactly when connection is needed most, and offer genuinely practical language for supporting someone (hint: stop asking "how are you?" and start asking "how are you this morning?").

And underneath it all runs a thread of real hope. Not the tidy kind that promises you'll get the old you back — because, as Lou says with striking honesty, you won't. But the kind that says grief can be alchemised: that the version of you on the other side can be more authentic, more purposeful, and more fully yourself than the one who came before. If you've ever carried a loss you weren't sure you were "allowed" to name, this one's for you.

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