At a loss for words: on grief and communication
“How do I stop losing my words?”
It’s one of the most frequent audience questions we get asked. It always makes me wince a little inside when I’m asked that, because for the past few years my words have gotten so lost it feels like they need a “MISSING” notice on the back of a milk carton.
Sometimes whole sentences disappear while I am speaking, like a train getting sucked up off the tracks by an alien spaceship. It’s not a moment of memory loss (although that has happened too). Those words often reappear —- sometimes seconds, sometimes minutes, and sometimes (rarely, but it has happened) DAYS later. I will be honest —I don’t love those moments. Up on stage, I feel incredibly vulnerable. I have the sneaking inner thought that losing my words loses me my credibility as a professional on stage . . . as though I am unprepared, instead of having a brain glitch.
I try to use it as a teaching moment: the goal of communication is not and has never been “perfection”. Both my personal and Vital Voice Training's philosophy is about developing the skills to navigate the complex world of communication, to be charismatic, to be engaging, and most of all to be understood. This is surprisingly rare in the world of public speaking: there, what I call the Tyranny of Toastmasters has taught us a vocabulary to evaluate our public speaking that has very little to do with being understood. Instead, it tells us that measurable mistakes are the death of your gravitas. That our words only count if they are concise, with no mistakes or ums or uhs. This hyper-focus on audible perfection has the effect of approximating humanity: we hit our marks, our tone of voice is “varied”, but it ends up divorced from the context in which that communication is happening.
My context was grief.
My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2018. We were extremely close. The next three years were consumed with watching her shrink, like a star that just gets smaller until it burns out. There was just less of her every time I had the opportunity to see her. I won’t go into too much detail other than to say that I’m so sorry if you’ve experienced what I’m talking about. As she continued to decline, the perfect storm of her health and the Covid shutdown and isolation created a nightmare situation where her husband overrode her wishes, manipulated and forced his way into full control of her health and legal care. And I was powerless to do anything. It was one of the most painful things I have ever experienced, and sent me to the absolute edges of my emotional capacity, including my own concepts of power and agency.
She passed in February of 2023, which brought relief in some ways, but left a hole in my soul. Not hole, lacuna. An absolute nothingness inside.
We can and do experience grief for so many reasons: from losing a pet or a loved one to the loss of our systems, security, ideals, and dreams. After losing my mother, I learned that grief is not just sadness —it’s an entire web of instability, emptiness and pain that takes orders from no one. It’s thinking a window is broken, and realizing, nope, oops, that was in fact a support wall.
There is a concept in the movement training world called “postural sway” that refers to the small motions we do to find our balance at any given moment. If you stand up and close your eyes, you will start to notice small movements that rebalance you toward your center over and over again.
For me, grief is like trying to find that center while regular life is jumping on the trampoline next to you.
It’s pitching forward and swinging backwards — you don’t FIND balance so much as drive by it, like in National Lampoon’s European Vacation, when the Griswold family gets caught in a traffic circle by Big Ben in London. Over and over they pass it, Clark Griswold calling out “hey kids it’s Big Ben!” each time as day turns into night. There was nothing I could do to reduce grief’s amplitude. I just had to sway with it. And also go about my life and run a business (which I deeply love) while my entire body and brain desperately worked to knit together proteins into resilience.
Lisa Shulman from the American Brain Foundation writes: “Traumatic loss is perceived as a threat to survival and defaults to protective survival and defense mechanisms,” says Dr. Shulman. This response engages the fight or flight mechanism, which increases blood pressure and heart rate and releases specific hormones. Grief and loss affect the brain and body in many different ways. They can cause changes in memory, behavior, sleep, and body function, affecting the immune system as well as the heart. It can also lead to cognitive effects, such as brain fog. The brain’s goal? Survival.”
In short, the grieving brain is neurologically incredibly active: the deeper the sense of loss, the more of the brain needs to rebuild itself to honor this new reality. Literally every neuron that contains the thing or person we are grieving has to reform to a world without them. The process is energetically expensive, and a big contributor to the glitchiness of the grieving brain; resources are being used elsewhere. Oh, and your brain is doing all of this while the entire nervous system is aflame, which in of itself reduces activity in our prefrontal cortex (or, as I like to call it, “the thinky brain”). It’s not just losing your words, we can discover a whole palette of different surprise weirdnesses during this process.
I am a professional public speaker, so if I wanted to keep working, that meant this entire grief / brain-rebuilding process was going to happen in front of other people, whether I liked it or not. So I want to share some things that have helped me, as well as de-shame one of the most fundamental and primal parts of our existence.
So here it is, the big solution. Are you ready?
Step 1: Just Stop. Full stop. Stop trying to fix it, stop trying harder, stop watching yourself, stop criticizing yourself, stop bracing yourself. Because of how our nervous systems work, almost all of the tactics we employ when we force effort or “try harder” are counterproductive. You’re going to be better off practicing how to manage nerves in your body than focusing on never making a mistake. We can’t demand the impossible just because stakes are high. Instead, take a breath.
Step 2: Self compassion. I know, I KNOW that doesn’t seem like an actual practical solution. I promise that it is the ONLY practical solution. The data on the benefits of self compassion is extensive, and positive. (If you want more ways to practice and learn more, check out Self Compassion by Dr. Kristin Neff or The New Happy by Stephanie Harrison).
The gifts of self-compassion are rooted in neuroscience. It blows my mind that there is such a robust amount of data that supports self compassion as the most effective resiliency tool for ambitious people, and yet, most (if not all) people I’ve ever met credit their success to their “discipline”. This usually means beating ourselves up, and other forms of self abuse.
It may feel counterintuitive, but those in-public awkward moments where it feels like the world has frozen and all eyes are on you are the most important to practice leaning into self compassion. The truth is that there is no world in which beating yourself up in that moment is going to help you in ANY way. But it even goes beyond that: the glitch is happening from an overtaxed amygdala that knows it needs its resources elsewhere. That inner disciplinarian voice actually starts to act like lighter fluid on the flames of that nervous system, igniting it into permanent, self-sustaining activation. And when we are in nervous system activation, the prefrontal cortex goes offline, exponentially increasing the probability that we will have a mini brain melt.
We cannot control whether or not our amygdala is going to sound the nervous system alarm. And standing in front of a group of folks while you have lost your word feels VERY similar to that dream where you find yourself in front of your high school class stark naked. That’s going to cause our fight or flight mechanisms to go into activation. What we can work on developing as a skill is not letting those nerves be the whole story.
Grief breaks your normal compass — and while that compass is broken, self care and self compassion are even more important. In its confusion, your brain may resort to some very anachronistic coping skills, strategies, or stories for what’s going on, creating some monstrous inner critical voices. When that amygdala gets activated, you may also experience extreme negativity bias: basically when we are in danger, our brain puts on its “threat goggles” where neutral faces, voices, words, and body language appear negative, creating a skewed perception of reality. We’re already not thinking as clearly; this phenomenon can distort even further.
What does self-compassion look like in practice?
Picture this: You’re on stage in front of 80 or so individuals teaching a day-long workshop. You’re up there explaining something you could explain in your sleep, but about a third of the way in . . . blankety blank blank brain. There are two possible directions we can go.
A) An inner monologue dark spiral that starts with “Oh my god I forgot my words. Everyone can see me. They must think (whatever your fear story is) and therefore that means (whatever your worst case scenario of cause and effect might be– something like “I will not get a good response/ the deal will fall apart and I will be put on a PIP/fired/never work again, etc, etc, and then my dreams died”). This causes us to hyper-focus on ourselves, and makes this moment very very difficult to dig ourselves out of.
B) The self compassion approach, which might look something like “I have lost my words! I feel my armpits starting to sweat, my face is red, and I am BLANK. But I know losing words isn’t the worst thing in the world, and I am noticing way more than other people. They don’t know my script! I’m going to take a breath, remind myself why I am here, and either my thought will come back to me… or it won’t.” Then turn your attention back to your audience and think of what they need. It really does work, and pretty soon, all is forgotten.
(When you are finished, do your future self a favor and give yourself kindness and a treat. When we beat ourselves up — even after! — it sends deep signals to our nervous system that yes, it was as bad as we thought it was going to be. This builds our wall of nerves even higher for the next time.)
A very important note: Our communication is always our voices plus our context. If the context is stressful or toxic, no matter how good or prepared or competent we are, it is highly likely that our nervous systems are going to become activated. That alone (nevermind in addition to all the other possible causes) is just not a battle that is solved by fixing yourself. We cannot fix ourselves out of grief.
Truly, losing your words is not the end of the story, just as GRIEF is not your whole story.
Losing your words can feel icky, but it is not the death of your dreams. The more you can accept that it may happen, practice self compassion and self forgiveness, the faster the aliens will return your word train to the brain tracks. You ARE going to find those tracks again. So breathe. Remember why you are there and what you are doing. And don’t let anyone (including yourself) feel shitty about it when you're a goddamn warrior fighting hard battles out there.
Above all, you are more than this moment. You are more than your grief. This is not forever. Please be gentle with your tender heart.