Grief, Trauma & Evolving Faith | Megan Malick

What do we actually mean when we talk about grief—and what happens when the beliefs that once grounded us begin to shift?

Megan Malick shares experiences from across her life that connect to different forms of grief—some recognised at the time, others only understood later.

From early disruption and loss of stability, to navigating bullying and coping responses in childhood, through to uncovering trauma in adulthood, changes in relationships, and the physical and emotional impact of infertility, her story moves through multiple moments where something changed, ended, or no longer felt the same.

Alongside this, her relationship with faith evolves. What begins as a structured, inherited understanding is questioned, challenged, and gradually reshaped through personal experience, spirituality, and practice.

The conversation explores:

• different forms of grief, including those that are not always named
• how experiences can live in the body before they are understood
• shifts in identity within relationships and changing roles
• what happens when faith no longer feels stable or certain
• losing both parents within a short period of time

This episode reflects both the many forms grief can take, and how a person’s relationship with faith can shift, expand, or be redefined through lived experience.

About: Megan Malick is a therapist turned grief and logistics coach, author, and speaker. She is the founder of A New Path, where she supports grieving hearts and soul-o-preneurs through the sacred terrain of life, loss, and legacy. Blending Brainspotting, spiritual care, and deep listening, she helps clients meet the practical with presence—transforming paperwork into ritual. Rooted in her own journey through grief and transformation, Megan’s work invites a slower, wiser way of living, where even endings become portals to meaning, memory, and mystery.

Connect at Substack, Website

Transcript

Intro

Megan Malick 0:00

People say, oh, I have cancer on Facebook, and people do the cryouts, but people aren't posting regularly, oh, I've had a hysterectomy, and then to give yourself permission to grieve that it's okay. It's it's okay to grieve, it's okay to ask for help. It's called ambiguous and disenfranchised grief. It had like it has names. These griefs have names. And unfortunately, disenfranchised and ambiguous griefs are harder, not only for ourselves, because it's like you can't kind of see it in the same way as this person died or this, but also our world doesn't credit it.

Regina Sayer 0:34

Today's episode runs the huge spectrum of the things in life that we can experience as grief. It gives a name to things that we don't even think of as grief. I'm sure that many of us will sit back and think, oh well no, I consider that trauma. But trauma can be grief. Change can be grief. The loss of friendships can be grief. The loss of your country can be grief. The loss of your childhood can be grief. And as Megan said in the opening comments here, the loss of your womb as a woman is also a grief. And these are all griefs that we don't really name them, yet we all experience them throughout our lives. So this episode looks at a huge spectrum of the ways that we experience grief throughout Megan Malick's life. She shares with kindness and with compassion with love with openness in the hope that it can help you too as you experience these same things that she speaks about. She reconnects with her faith, which is another kind of grief. The grief of losing something that you believe in so much that it's what tethers you to the earth. And I have had that happen to me. I've lost my faith. It's not the same kind of faith that Megan speaks about. It's a different type of faith. So this episode, please feel free to pass it along if you think that it will help somebody. And thank you so much for listening. Thank you for your support. And I wish you a beautiful day wherever you are in this vast, vast planet. Hi again, everybody, and you are listening to another episode of Wisdom Without the Guru. I'm your host, Regina. What is it like when your home is rebuilt after a disaster but it never feels like home again? What do you do when your faith seems to waver? What holds you steady? Has your body ever remembered a terrible truth that your mind is hidden? And how did you survive it? Have you ever felt that the life you planned is gone and questioned if what's left is still worth living? What do you do when grief comes repeatedly in waves, carrying paperwork in one hand and heartbreak in the other? How do you stay afloat? For my guest, Megan Malick, these questions aren't abstractions. They're only some of the chapters in her life that she's lived that we'll be speaking about today. From a teenage house fire to spiritual upheaval, from the unearthing of buried trauma to losing both parents within months. Through the many paths that unfolded along the way for her, Megan now finds herself guiding others through the emotional and practical storms of loss. And she has a rare mix of candor, tenderness, and I'd say hard-earned wisdom that she's going to share with you today. So welcome to the show, Megan.

Megan Malick 3:42

Thank you so much for joining us. Regina, it is my honor. My honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

Regina Sayer 3:50

Well, I think that you have a lot of things that people can relate to that happen to you. And as you know, you didn't always handle them in the best way, which is true for all of us.

Megan Malick 4:02

Yeah.

Regina Sayer 4:03

So I just really important for people to hear that, you know, everybody handles things in different ways. And it's not always the best way. So can't keep beating ourselves up about it. We do the best that we can with the tools that we have at that time when, you know, stuff hits the fan. So

Megan Malick 4:24

it's true. Very true. Yep.

Regina Sayer 4:27

Okay. So let's just move right on into telling us all about your story because you have quite a few things that are pertinent. So let's just start in because it's going to be a while. Okay. So talk about where you were born and how you grew up and, you know, your family that you had. Try to see it through the eyes of a kid, because you know, when we look in hindsight, you know, we always say that happened and that happened. But try to see it through the eyes of a child. But what were your safe places or your safe people and the dynamics that were going on in your life with the different parts of it family, friends, schools, religious institutions? And was there any difficulties that you experienced as well?

Early life, family dynamics, first loss, displacement & first sense of responsibility

Megan Malick 5:15

So I was born and raised in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, which is about an hour outside of Philadelphia, born to middle class professional parents. I didn't know at the time, but my mom uh was the first woman hired in her department at Merck Pharmaceutical Company. And so I had a career mom. And my my dad also was founding his own business and running his own business. So I had two very career-oriented and modeling parents. I'm the eldest. And as a little kid, I remember feeling like a lot was on me. I didn't so much cognitively think that, but I remember feeling inside myself a sense of like care for my younger sisters, just wanting to kind of brood with them and feeling that. But we had a lovely sitter named Ida. So she was a safe person. We lived in a small little town, and that felt good. And my grandmothers, I also felt very connected to my grandmothers who would come and my blanky. I loved my blanky. And um, you know, we I walked to the local elementary school and we had a church that we went to. I would say the first big shift was when I was in second grade, my parents started to look for a new home and they found one and it was in the same school district, but I wouldn't be going to the same elementary school. I did not want to move at all. Like I was very clear at eight that I was like, no, I like this house, I like this school, I like these people, I like this stuff. I didn't have the word grief at the time, but I had a tremendous amount of grief when we moved. A school that we moved to, I was a kind of a very small, more um homey feeling. And this was larger and it, you know, I'd never had anybody care about what I wore, what my hair looked like. And um, I played with the boys at recess at my old elementary school. And at this one, it was like, no, you don't do that. And why are your clothes like hammed? I wore hammied clothes from people like, why are they like this? And I just had no idea how to reckon with any of that and um would cry and be upset when I would be home. And um remember my mom, I was nine and I was I grew early. And she asked, she like taught me about periods and things. And it's like I was grieving. I was a grieving, sad little girl, probably also feeling the grief of our whole family, given who I am as a person, because I think everybody probably had some lost feelings.

Regina Sayer 7:43

Gosh, as you're talking, I'm starting to feel a bit bad because the number of times that we have moved and the number of times my son has moved schools, and he really did not want to leave Singapore to come back to Belgium. You know, he had his friends, he was going to a different country. So there was that. And then when my husband got the acute leukemia, he was in sort of a private Montessori school that was quite small and expensive. And we couldn't afford it anymore. And he had to move. And so we started looking for other schools. And I remember going to one school. I mean, I felt terrible because it was just big. It was a big public school, you know, in the city. And he I could just see he looked like he wanted to cry. And he was about 11 years old at the time. And I thought, no, I just can't do this to him. So we kind of found something that was in between. What you're saying, I can see in my own son how difficult that was.

Megan Malick 8:40

Well, and as an adult, I've moved a lot. It's interesting. That said, the sitter that had been with us till I was eight was also didn't do that transition with us. And so we were at what it was a preschool, but that had a pre and post. And one of the teachers there kind of took me under her wing, and she became a safe spot. And there was a guinea pig Snowball in her room, and snowball became my assignment. It was my role when I got there in the morning to feed and water snowball. And I did that after school, and like Snowball got to come home with my family. Like, they got the yes over the Thanksgiving vacation. It was like four or five days. It's amazing how that tenderness and that anchor and that animal ended up becoming something. And then actually, our family ended up getting a guinea pig of our own because like we all liked having a pet.

Regina Sayer 9:34

It's it's interesting you say that because we already had two cats. And so to try to help my son, because you know, he was facing the fact that his dad was in the hospital going through the leukemia and that he's going through all this horror with a new school, a new country. And so we got him his own cat. And I think that helped.

Megan Malick 9:54

It's huge. And a year after we got the guinea pig, we also got a cat. Like we became a pet family for me personally, but I think for each person in our family, there was really something about having a beloved animal that loved us, that we were responsible to, that, you know, it just was really a life-saving, life-giving thing.

Regina Sayer 10:14

Yeah. Animals are amazing. How they hold the space for us.

Megan Malick 10:19

Yeah. So, and I would say likewise, the house we moved to was in the woods. And so that also became a real source for me. I would walk to the creek and sit on a log. And as like a 10-year-old, I just knew I felt the sense of peace, calm, presence. Adult me would say that was when I was really developing a relationship with the divine or the universe or something larger than myself. I mean, I went to Sunday school and we had the cutouts and we talked about Jesus and God and all of that. But my felt experience of something larger really formed in the woods.

Regina Sayer 10:56

Yeah. You're not the first to say that. Their connection during their childhood was outside in the yard.

Megan Malick 11:03

In the fields. In the fields and like in the butterflies, and I mean, it's still a place that I when I feel lost, I go to the water or I go to the woods.

Regina Sayer 11:15

Yeah, I go to the woods. We're not close enough to the water, sadly. So what happened in school? Because you said that you gained some weight.

Megan Malick 11:24

I did.

Regina Sayer 11:25

So for people who are listening, Megan is gonna say she has big lips .

Megan Malick 11:31

Okay, I don't want to be activating uh to folks.

Regina Sayer 11:35

But she has got Cindy Crawford lips, okay? If anybody knows who's a supermodel Cindy Crawford is what when she first told me this, I was like, oh come on, you have like Cindy Crawford lips.

Bullying, body image & coping through food

Megan Malick 11:46

It's true. You know, we did the move and there was critique of my appearance really for the first time. So I kind of became self-conscious about that. And I would say I started to accommodate with sugary things. But then when my growth spurt became even more pronounced, I physically developed by like the age of 11 and my lips were really prominent. And um, on the bus, I was teased by boys. Um, I was called N-word lips, but they also made gestures of things like now that I I had no idea even like what oral sex was or like what this was at like age 11, but they were basically sexually coming on to me and things. And I just didn't want any of that at like fifth grade. That felt, you know, it's funny. Like looking back now, I can be like, of course I didn't want that. I was a kid. I was a kid. Yeah. And so subconsciously, I was like, well, if I get bigger, that's not gonna happen. I didn't know that at the time either. But I think in addition to the food being comforting, people paid less attention as I got bigger, or they paid attention to the bigger. But that felt a lot more comfortable than um people sexually coming on to me when I was 11 or 12. There was a summer picnic that we were at for church where, you know, older, like college age, like, oh, is that Megan Malick? What happened to Megan Malick? Like, and that sort of like you're being noticed for the first time as a sexual being. That felt incredibly uncomfortable to me.

Regina Sayer 13:12

And did you ever speak to anybody about this discomfort that you felt?

Megan Malick 13:16

No, I didn't.

Regina Sayer 13:17

Like your mom? You didn't you didn't go to your mom and say, my, you know, these boys are saying these things to me?

Megan Malick 13:23

No. It actually would not have occurred to me to go to my mother for that.

Regina Sayer 13:27

Because you just didn't have that kind of relationship.

Megan Malick 13:29

No. My mother was very practical and very pragmatic. The person that I went to for emotional support was my dad. But this was sexuality related, and that felt like not where I would want to go. But to just give an idea of like, as a young adult person, if I were to call home and I'd chit-chat with my mom, it would be fine. My father could hear the words, hello, huh? And he'd be like, What's wrong? I hear it. Something, something's there. And I did as an adult develop a connected and compassionate relationship with my mother. And her first instinct wasn't that you needed to be very clear with her, like, this is what's happening for me. Um, and at 12, I definitively did not have that. I mean, actually, if there was anything, it was concern about Megan's weight that I got put on a diet. And like, so nobody thought to ask, like, well, why? What's happening that this is happening beyond like Megan just likes to eat a lot of food.

Regina Sayer 14:25

What about your sisters? Where are your sisters? Do you talk to your sisters at all? Because are they similar in age that you would discuss this type of thing with them?

Creative outlets: theatre, music & journaling

Megan Malick 14:33

We're two years and two years apart. I didn't discuss that with them. I think as an oldest and as the role that I said, like I kind of had like two dads and I was the mom. It felt inappropriate of me to talk to my sisters about it. Instead, I behaved inappropriately with them by doing things like taking their Halloween candy and eating it, which isn't very kind. There was so much acting out and it was all behavioural led. I mean, I just thought I had the I had this problem with food and I couldn't stop. And that's what it was. And it didn't even get associated with some of the comments that had been made, both about my lips and about my developing body. Although here I sit today and I'm like, oh my gosh, the trajectory is so really clear. Like my weight from the end of fifth grade to seventh grade was like whooshi. It's like, huh. But it was just put on development and Megan overeating.

Regina Sayer 15:27

But you also turned to some other life-saving outlets instead of food.

Megan Malick 15:32

Yes, I did. Theatre, music, journal writing. I did a lot of theatre. I did a lot of singing.

Regina Sayer 15:39

Who taught you to journal write? I'm always curious when people say that as kids, they start journal writing. I mean, we have this concept of writing in diaries, but what exactly were you writing in your journal?

Megan Malick 15:51

I wrote a lot of free form kind of poetry, whatever would come up. In first grade, we were sent home with a little free notebook thing, and we had to write in it some. And periodically I would just have these thoughts about what to write, and I would just write in it. Today, looking back, a way that I communicate with my higher self or something larger is through writing and pulling down some of that stuff and like channeled writing and things like that. And I would suspect that that was happening to me as a little kid. I just had no idea. And I knew that it helped me feel better.

Regina Sayer 16:25

So you started doing that when you were what, 10? Something like that?

Megan Malick 16:29

Yeah, probably I think more consistently, like 11 or 12, I can remember like having it and being like this, and I'm gonna write in this, and then 13 and 14. And, you know, often like the big spiral notebooks in school, there'd be part of it that I'd just kind of like make that be my spot. Because sometimes stuff would happen during the day and I'd just feel like I need to, I need to write about this. I need to get this down. And yeah.

Regina Sayer 16:55

But this was your way of providing an emotional way of expressing because you didn't feel like it was permitted anywhere else.

Megan Malick 17:02

Yeah.

Regina Sayer 17:02

And then also through the theatre as well.

Megan Malick 17:05

The theatre I permitted and it would have been corrected. So what would have happened would have been all the reasons that I shouldn't think or feel the way that I think or feel, and or how to feel better about the way that I think or feel. And what most helps me is actually somebody that just is like with me in it. It doesn't mean that that second part isn't going to happen. It just means I need mirroring and witnessing and validating before I can get to that part.

Regina Sayer 17:32

And that wasn't happening at home?

Megan Malick 17:34

No. It didn't really happen at church, it didn't really happen at school. I was in a very left-brain perfectionist performing. I think, given my the trajectory of my professional career and listening to people and studying, what I'm describing isn't abnormal for middle class, academic-minded people that live on the East Coast in the United States of America.

Regina Sayer 17:57

But you also went through the theatre, were able to put on these different personas and express in that way as well, which is fantastic for when you think about it. I mean, I never actually thought about it before you were before you mentioned it to me.

Megan Malick 18:10

I thought, wow, that's really a great way for you to really, you know, get out anything that's inside my and and like literally in all of the roles I was a care I was always cast in one of the character roles. Again, I didn't know it at the time, but I'm like, oh my gosh, I got to like be angry, be mean, be a like all the things that you're not supposed to feel and be. I got to be and the roles that I played. So it's like sublimating it. But I mean, I, you know, 15-year-old me was 17 when I was one of the witches in Macbeth. I could not have told you that one of the benefits of being one of the witches in Macbeth was that I got to like enact this and embody this character. Or at 13, I was Miss Anagan and Annie, and then I got to embody this, these shadowy sides.

Regina Sayer 18:53

And did the eating drop off at all when you were doing theatre work? Do you remember?

Megan Malick 18:59

It's a good question. I don't know that it dropped off, but I remember not thinking about it as much.

Regina Sayer 19:05

Just curious. So go on to the fact that you had a fire in your house. And the way that you handled it.

The house fire at 17 & loss of stability

Megan Malick 19:14

When I was 17, it was Monday morning, October 25. It's one of those, you know, snapshot imprint memories. Um the house caught fire, but we didn't know it was an electrical thing, and there was a circuit fuse and all of that. And um, I can hear the cacophony of hairdryers because I have two sisters and a mom. So they were like, everybody was getting ready. I was also getting ready. And my dad was very concerned after the snap. Like I blew him off, but then smoke started to come out of our heat vent, and obviously there was a problem, and we all left the house, and it was rush hour traffic. So it's like standing there and waiting, feeling very powerless to do anything at all. My two younger sisters went next door to the neighbors who were a retired couple that let us in and called, and the fire company was on the way, and the fire company got there. This took probably about an hour, all of it. There's just nothing to do. And so I actually looked at everybody and I was like, our school was in walking distance. So I was like, I'm gonna walk to school. Um, because that actually, and school really was overall a safe, contained space for me. I felt like it felt powerless. It felt scary. I didn't feel like there was an adult in the room that I could turn to, so to speak. So I walked to school and I get in there and I remember seeing the person, I will not use her name. She was a very good friend of mine who sat in front of me, an AP American history class. Something about her face, I just got a little teary. And I sat down and um, I just said, My house is burning down. And the teacher, like, you could just like that, like, holy, holy shit, the moment. And he goes to move toward the like the little classroom phone. And he's like, Do you want to go to the guidance counselor? And I was like, No, I want to be here. Pulled out my notebook, dissociated, switched gears, and was there. It's funny, I at one point have been hard on myself for that. Like, oh, you shouldn't do that. But I think, wow, how like my little 17-year-old self knew that right then being in that space was probably as good as it was gonna get to because to be perfectly honest, what was the guidance counselor gonna do? Like, I hadn't had a lot of good experience with people just being able to be with me in the muck. I would say I am somebody who my whole life has been able to feel like the entire piano range of emotions. My emotional bandwidth is pretty big. And that takes somebody equally big to hold that coming out of you. Um, and so I think I chose what was going to be in that moment. Okay.

Regina Sayer 21:45

So your family pretty much got displaced for a while after that.

Megan Malick 21:49

Yeah. Yeah.

Displacement, independence & early questioning of faith

Regina Sayer 21:50

So how did that affect you?

Megan Malick 21:52

I mean, felt very uprooting, felt very disorienting. Again, I kind of felt back in that, like, okay. Who's the adult here? And not that my parents had so much going on. And like what happens when crisis happens and the world demands that we continue to go on like nothing happened. And we have all of this additional paperwork to deal with. And we have all of this. So that was happening to my parents. So, but for 17-year-old me, it was like, who's taking care of the house? Who's taking care of all of this and that? And so um I kind of pulled out of a bunch of theatre things actually, because I was like, I don't have time to do this. I don't have capacity to do this. Kind of turned inward a little bit. And I really went into a faith crisis in many respects because I didn't, it was like, what the actual, like, if God is good and all this, and we were doing this, how did this happen? And I will say our faith community was very much by our side in terms of like showing up physically doing things. And the associate pastor who did youth things was over with us a lot. We had a lot of pizza that year for dinner and a lot of takeout Chinese. So I think she brought pizza that night. And somehow the conversation turned to prayer. And I just said, I don't pray. I don't, I don't even know if I believe there's God. Both of my parents and the youth pastor looked and said, Yeah, that makes pretty much like there. I got my first validation. I got my first witnessing. I got my first, like, uh-huh. Yeah. And then they each actually shared some of their own experiences with wrestling with that. And it didn't take away my doubt. It didn't take away my wondering. It didn't take away my anger with God. But what it did was give me permission to be with that and not feel bad or wrong or like I needed to keep that in the silent. So I was able to do that and also felt better able to continue to like go to youth group and show up and do things. And, you know, the youth pastor was like, Yeah, you like still caught. Like, yeah, this is part of the faith journey. And my parents pretty much affirming that also. Having these doubts, wondering if this God is there, wondering if this is part of what it means to be a person of faith, having spiritual formation. So that happened. The other piece that I didn't realize until later is we didn't move back in. This was my junior year. So we didn't move back into the house till right before senior year. And it almost didn't feel like going home. Like it felt like I kind of jettisoned into that college y, quasi-young adulty phase in October of my junior year in some respects, because I wasn't even home a full year before heading off to college. And it was with like my bedroom was different, it smelled different, it was different things. Like I got to pick all the things out and it was awesome in that sense, but it wasn't my my like rootedness and these artifacts of like all the playbills from the plays that I'd been in that used to be up on my wall. And then when I got to go to see theater, like I loved to get to go to see that those are my room decorations pre-fire. Post-fire, I didn't have wall decorations.

Regina Sayer 24:54

I just want to go back for a sec to something that you were said about when you expressed that you didn't pray or believe in God. How long had that been happening? Had that been happening for some time before the fire?

Megan Malick 25:04

I think there had been inklings of that before the fire, but the fire, the fire was like, okay, I don't know about this anymore. Like I've I have these wanderings, I have these doubts, I'm not sure. They kind of are in my little orbit, like a planet that comes around to being like, no, we're moving in. We are not in the orbit. We're settling down with you on the planet and saying, hey, we have to be like this has to be reckoned with.

University, identity & becoming a teacher

Regina Sayer 25:27

All right. So going back to the fact that so you moved into your house very, very briefly, and then you pretty much left again and were on the move. So you went to college/ university, you studied English education. Is that?

Megan Malick 25:44

I did, I studied education.

Regina Sayer 25:46

With what thought in mind? Becoming a teacher?

Megan Malick 25:48

Yes, becoming an English teacher. I had wanted to be an actress, but when I was 13, my mother said, Well, how are you going to make money? Well then, my plan had been to teach over the school year and then just try to do theatre over the summer. And that's not how it ended up playing out in my life. And the reality is teaching English is very theatrical. So I studied English education. And there's also the writing of it. And, you know, we had to write a piece in my junior year about like what was our philosophy of pedagogy? Like, what was it about? And for me, out came this piece about voice, and that what teaching English was all about was helping people to find their voice and use that. And that, you know, you are the author of your own life story. And claiming that, of course, little did I know who who was I writing that for as myself, right? We teach what we most need to learn.

Regina Sayer 26:38

Yeah, very interesting. So you went to school and university, excuse me, and you met your husband to be there.

Megan Malick 26:48

Yes, I did. He was also an English education major, and we were thick as thieves.

Regina Sayer 26:53

And then you went on and you actually did teach. So, unlike a lot of people who actually go to university to study something, you actually did what you studied in university.

Megan Malick 27:01

I did. I did. And he did, and we actually, you know, when we were graduating in the United States, education jobs, teaching jobs were hard. They were hard to come by. There were not many available.

Regina Sayer 27:13

How is that possible? It seems to me that in every country I've ever lived, that it's so hard to find enough teachers for the school systems.

Megan Malick 27:22

Yeah. I think back, right? I'm Gen X. So the baby boom had a lot of those jobs already, and they weren't going to be retiring anytime soon. Being a teacher had had been seen as differently then, I guess, than it is now. And/or, I mean, I saw this over the course of my teaching. What it meant to teach changed. Over the course of my teaching, the freedom that I had to influence how I taught what I taught, and why do we read and why do we write? And that this is about empowerment and this is about self-discovery, and this is about how do we communicate, and this is about how we build relationships. And this is became about a test, became about the world marketplace, became about how do we already at seventh and eighth grade begin to develop these people who are going to have this career that are going to make us competitive with China. And that's not why I became a teacher. Yeah. And you know what? That's not why most people become teachers. So I say all of that to say also, in everything I do, I have stayed connected to my now ex-husband. And he's no longer teaching either. He and I talk about how much goes back to teaching. Like, no matter what we're doing, like when I'm working one-on-one with a client, I'm like basically I'm still your teacher. Like, I still think lesson plan, unit plan. I still think like there are these. And how do we match up where you are and this? And like, what's the creative process to get there? And with teaching, you just have like a whole host of people where you're trying to be like, how do I finesse this in ways that like each of you gets fed a little bit every day?

Regina Sayer 28:51

It's an interesting way to put it.

Megan Malick 28:53

Well, when you have 30 people, you can't meet everyone's learning style every single second of your class. The gift of that is you are also teaching the world is not going to meet your learning style every single second. It should always get some. But maybe there's a gift in not having it always met and learning, hey, the person next to me is getting fed right now. Isn't that good?

Regina Sayer 29:15

Yeah, but when you're a kid, you probably don't think like that.

Megan Malick 29:18

No. But well, and I guess I was really fortunate. Not that there were not challenging issues with teaching, and I developed how I interacted. But overall, I didn't encounter a lot of behavioral issues in my classroom. And in general, I think if students felt like there was room or space for them that was able to be navigated and negotiated.

Regina Sayer 29:37

Was it you that you went and you're teaching in a relatively small school?

Megan Malick 29:41

I taught in a very small rural school, like the complete opposite of what I grew up in? It was like such a good learning experience.

Regina Sayer 29:47

That was something else that was really different.

Megan Malick 29:50

So different. I mean, they hunted meat, and I got like meat as gifts, my first holiday season that had been like killed. And I was like, oh my God. Which is really quite a lovely gift. And to 22-year-old, 23-year-old me, I was like, oh.

Regina Sayer 30:07

But both you and your husband were teaching in the same school.

Megan Malick 30:09

Yes. He went to the high school and I was at the middle school. We were, I mean, super small. We were like the it couple and you know, the cool young couple.

Weight loss, emotional shifts, therapy & uncovering trauma

Regina Sayer 30:16

And all this time with your weight, were you dealing with your weight? Because I think you started going on weight watchers, and that's when everything started to fall apart.

Megan Malick 30:24

Yeah, I did. I mean, I had my weight, but by this point in time, I wasn't really, I didn't think it just was what it was. Um, I will say I wasn't overeating or I wasn't eating in the same patterning that I had been when I was growing up. And I was busy with teaching and there was food around, it was more like that. So three or four years into teaching, we hit that summer, and I was like, you know what? I really want to lose this weight. I just really do. So I went to Weight Watchers and it just like, I mean, I followed the plan. I didn't do anything miraculously different. My husband was super supportive of what I was doing, but not controlling at all of it. So I had lost 30, 40 pounds by like November, and I felt great. I still actually go to Weight Watchers fairly consistently because it just helps me stay grounded with taking care of myself. I go because it helps me honour my body, honour what how I treat my body, help me that exercising is valuable, that sleep is valuable, that I'm a being that is worthy of love and care. Anyway, I felt great. And then by the summer, spring, summer, I was like, I was having these like very big, untethered emotions where it was like, what is happening inside of me? But I was also feeling more comfortable in my body, more sexual in my body, all of this stuff. And I went to counseling. And to make a very long story short, I started to uncover memories of child sexual abuse with all of that, as well as my husband, who kind of discovering slash us talking together, slash wondering that he is a gay person. And so for where we were when, it was a really, really good fit. But for moving forward, it was not going to work for either of us because he couldn't be fully himself in our marriage, and I couldn't be fully myself in our marriage. And so we separated. We are friends today. I think both of us would say it was a very hard season in that we couldn't turn to one another. Like I needed to find support for the things that I was dealing with, not just the loss of the marriage, but the uncovery of the memories, the trauma that was there, the processing of that, the how do I even talk about this with people that weren't him? And he needed to reckon with himself and his sexuality and what does that look like with people not me? And we were each other's best friend.

Regina Sayer 32:52

And was it quite shocking when you made that discovery? You uncovered that memory?

Megan Malick 32:56

Very shocking. In fact, when I went to my therapy appointment, the therapist asked, she didn't say were you, she said, when were you sexually abused? And I said I wasn't. And then in the next session, she asked the question again. And I was like, okay, I wasn't. And I'm not like, like, I'm not lying to you. So why did you ask that question? And she pulled out a book. This is this makes me cry still. All of these symptoms. And I had every one of like, what are the signs that you might have a sexual trauma that you haven't expressed, processed, and lived through? And from like the the overeating and the hiding and the shame and the I mean, it was like all of it. And I was like, how do I not know this? Um, and I said, Well, what? Like, I'm I'm not lying to you. I'm not like sitting here thinking you're not safe to tell. I'm like, I literally don't know this about myself. What should I do? And she said, well, just be like open to things coming. And apparently that was enough because then I started to have versions of memories and images and writing. And, you know, what I would say to anybody listening, my abuse was before the age of seven, which means that my memory is very different than what it would be after the age of seven. So from like four to seven. So I have very imagistic, sound, smell-related memories because that's how memories in that time period of our lives are. So it's not just that, oh, these were hard memories, but it's also your episodic memory hasn't formed yet. And so I think partly because it stopped and there was nobody talking and all of that, like everything just went boom, boom. Um, and so I've become much less about finding the right memory, finding the this to being with myself and the experience that's happening and learning to love myself and my body and ask for what it needs at the time. Most of my memories are body-related memories.

Regina Sayer 34:54

And I wonder if that's why you had such a strong reaction when the boys later when you started to develop and you didn't really understand your reaction.

Megan Malick 35:04

It would make complete sense. I think it makes sense that after I lost the weight, this happened. And I mean, this is still true. Like, right, so writing is a way that I process, but like so is movement. You know, I will sometimes feel like I need to weep when I'm doing a physical exercise. Or, you know, when I got into doing yoga, I would be crying. And I remember the yoga instructor was like, this is just letting out the trapped emotions that are living in your body. And so I had a lot trapped in my body that isn't linked up here, but partly some of it never was there in the narrative memory the way that we think of it once we're an adult.

Regina Sayer 35:42

And did your therapist advise you on different ways to release this memory through body movement? Or was it more talk therapy?

Megan Malick 35:52

It was more talk therapy, and we're incorporating journaling, or she invited me to get into like painting, not for painting for paint this painting, but like just to see what would be. So um incorporating more of the arts.

Regina Sayer 36:07

Did you speak to your family about this?

Family conversations & rebuilding relationships

Megan Malick 36:09

I did. I talked to my mom first, talked to my dad, and I talked to my sisters, and there was belief, but then a desire to not like go there, pretty much. I will say, my mother, this was a turning point. Makes me miss her. They really showed up. Like she started to come out and spend time with me. I got involved in a community here, uh, a support group, and we had like a whole take back the night. And I was a speaker and wrote poetry, and my mom came out, listened, and took me out for dinner, and was open to hearing me just how hard it was, like, and was so supportive of all of that. And I'm I'm teary talking to you, Regina, because I miss my mother. So I got to develop in adulthood a relationship with my mother that I didn't have as a kid. And I want to really say, you know, my mom went to therapy the year of our house fire. And my mother grew and changed. And I always tell people, my mom is my inspiration because she modeled for me, not sending me to therapy, but going herself when the hard thing was happening. I think my mother's therapy journey, I mean, I saw it change her and open up her ability to have different conversations. But then that gave her the ability to be with me when I was doing my trauma work and uncovery and to receive the mothering that I so desperately needed as a little kid, but I was able to get it as a young adult from my mother. And it was like we got a do-over.

Regina Sayer 37:42

And were you able to tell her at this time how you felt before when you were using food as the way to remedy the situation?

Megan Malick 37:51

We did talk about that. I don't know that it was like, and this was this and this was that, but I mean, it was like the missing piece of the puzzle. So for she herself, the pieces started to come together for her, kind of like you just asked the question. And she actually apologised and said, I, you know, I remember and I thought this, and oh my goodness, I see that. And I mean, we don't know what what we don't know.

Regina Sayer 38:13

Yeah, it's true. I think when you finally start to have a relationship with a parent and you start to tell them things, they just had no idea. You know, I've had a similar conversation with my own mother for something that I felt that she was doing because it suddenly came to a head. And when she found out, she was so upset because she's like, I had no idea you felt that way. And I guess it's just, you know, how do you have those conversations with a parent? Because you we all know that it you we can't always, it's not always possible.

Megan Malick 38:46

No, and you know, well, a host of things. And the culture that I live in, we don't have a lot of good modelling for how to have any of this. You know, I say, you know, I'm grateful to my mother. She went to therapy when I was 17. It changed the trajectory of my relationship with my mother. And that doesn't take away the first 17 years. Like both are true.

Regina Sayer 39:08

Yeah. But you still always have that kind of wounded child inside.

Megan Malick 39:12

Yeah. Yeah. And so to be able to do that, and you know, thankfully, I think both of my parents grew and evolved and changed. I witnessed them do that. It doesn't take away what the wounded child got. And then, but I got to see how they were formed by that. And um, as an adult person, better able to see and appreciate that. And so holding both, how do I love me and not devalue, not do to me what was done, while also holding, you know, here are these two people who didn't do what so many people do, which is like, this is your problem. I'm not willing to listen to you.

Regina Sayer 39:51

Yeah. But it's quite interesting what you say, because I found out for myself going through, I was just, you know, with my what happened to my husband, I lost myself. And so after about four or five years, four years, four and a half years, I finally found somebody that I felt that I could talk to. And somebody who wasn't going to poo-poo my spiritual views or, you know, the way I view the universe and source and whatnot. The one of the interesting things I remember that she told me, it's equivalent to what you're saying, is that so a lot of stuff that happened in my own childhood. I always felt like, okay, well, yeah, I can understand that this is now as an adult that this happened because, you know, my parents, they uh had their own vicious cycle that they couldn't step out of and whatnot. And she looked at me and she said, Yes, that's true. You can forgive them and you can understand them, but you still were hurt by it. And you do not belittle your hurt at all. It's the first time anybody has said that to me.

Megan Malick 40:57

That's so huge to not to belittle the hurt. And I, oh gosh, I never thought of this until this moment. But I the gift that I received from my mother saying, I'm so sorry, I would do differently now. I mean, it doesn't take it away. And it meant I wasn't alone having to hold my hurt. Here was this person, my mother. While at the same time, here's this four-year-old who had this hurt and didn't have her mother. And for the first 17 years didn't feel like I mean, you were like, Well, did you talk to your mother about this? No, it didn't even occur to me that I would talk to my mother about this. Right. And you said, tell the story from the kid perspective. So I'm telling you from the kid perspective. Whereas from the adult perspective, she would have been the first person that I would call. Yeah. That in and of itself is just an example of how like everything that you're saying.

Regina Sayer 41:49

Yeah. So if you're if you're hearing this, take note, please.

Megan Malick 41:54

Yeah.

Regina Sayer 41:55

Okay, so let's move on. So you pretty much took like almost two and a half years to process that trauma. Yeah. And yeah, so it was a continual process. So then for some reason, you then decided to get a master of divinity degree.

Turning toward spirituality & seminary

Megan Malick 42:13

A large part of my healing process was reckoning again with my relationship with spirituality, source, universe. Like, how did this happen? How did I get here? Who are you? All of the things. So, and I was I was part of a faith community out here, and I was really kind of wrestling inside myself. I had a lot of meetings with my pastor. I was in therapy, and the my spirituality became part of what I could talk about in therapy, as well as what I could talk about with my pastor. And I will say, you know, I alluded to the teaching thing. Well, the testing thing was starting to ramp up in the backdrop of all of this, too, where I was seeing that this thing that I loved to get to do was changing in these very seismic ways. So that was a little bit, and plus, I was the teacher that all the students came to talk to and wrote about their problems. So I thought I wanted to be a guidance counsellor. But the guidance counsellor said, No, my job is becoming really, really testing. Yeah. So all of this is testy related, or a lot of what I'm doing now is moving toward administering the test, test all of that. And I was like, oh, well, that's definitely not what I want to do. So I started to be open. Um, and my pastor said, Have you thought about going to seminary? And I looked at her and I was like, Have you met me? Like, I don't know what I think or believe. I'm like totally irreverent. Like, it just sounded so awful, this thought going to seminary. I was at a church function where there was a woman sharing her story. She was she was in the process of becoming ordained. And in our tradition, you have to stand before a group of folks and give your faith journey and talk about what you. believe and then people can ask questions and you get authorized to move forward. So I was there and hearing this woman and her journey sounded enough like mine that I was like, hmm, like the thought, the thoughts just started to pop in my head. And there was a time for the questioning or affirming. I don't remember what I said to her. All I remember is that an older gentleman who I didn't know at the time, but he was a retired professor from the seminary. And he said, what when are you going to do something about your calling? And I just felt very blown away by all of it. And I went outside to the trees because I just needed to be there. Well darn if the person that just presented, she was also out by the tree, just kind of like grounding and coming into herself. And I thanked her and we we had a little exchange and I thought okay well it can't hurt if I like make an appointment and we have a local seminary here if I make an appointment and go. It's affiliated with the United Church of Christ which was my denomination that I was part of and the doors just like flew open with I mean not just did the interview feel good like the way to go came forward the coursework sounded good I spent a day shadowing and I got to sit in on classes and they were like trying to remember what the theology class was exploring like the nature of good and evil with God I think was that day. And I was like this is what you do here? This is fantastic. And in the the biblical interpretation class she was talking about like reading the Bible like a piece of literature where you would engage the same way you would look at a good piece of literary writing. I'm sitting there and I'm like I mean I'm a I'm an English major like that's how I engage and I was like why has nobody told me that I could do this with the Bible and suddenly this book that felt like an albatross became this book of wisdom that had endless ways of reading it, endless ways of interpreting it. Oh I get to look at the community that it came from oh I get to look at the history. Oh I get to do all this stuff when you can like I mean just just like all of the pieces that I was taught about when I was in university and that I had the pleasure of trying to engage with my students with. And so I took the leap.

Regina Sayer 46:20

Where did that lead you that leap?

Megan Malick 46:22

The seminary that I went to also had a nonprofit part of it that was called Leadership Now Spiritual Formation with youth. And I quickly got affiliated with them and a part-time job working for them. And that was all about celebrating and cultivating questions of faith and spiritual formation with young people. And so helping them do this kind of deep diving work and also looking at what faith commitment meant in a global context. And I mean I felt like I mean I found my home. So I worked for them you know it started as very part-time and then it expanded so by my senior year I was interning with them. And it just so happened that one of the co-directors was leaving. So I applied and got the job of the assistant director. So I would be moving into that role as I graduated from seminary and it was wonderful. And it was grant funded and I graduated seminary in the spring of 2009 and that was the year of you know the fall of 2008 is when stock market tanked and then in 2009 the Great Recession there was a grant renewal process and we received the grant that would cover for four years but also came the news that like this is the last like we're not going to be offering these grants going forward. And just funding in general was difficult. I mean there was there was so much economically in the backdrop there. So you know we continued we existed I loved the work the director ended up shifting so I became the sole director and the there was a whole big restructure but the writing on the wall was your job is going to not be here. I also met my second husband over this time period and was falling in love and he had daughters from his first marriage. My summers when I was working for leadership now were like it was like being back to being a camp counsellor. I was like overnight at the seminary for like a month pretty much and sometimes international and I wanted to be more local. So I got a role as a solo pastor in a local congregation. I was only there a short while it was not a great fit for me personally.

Regina Sayer 48:35

So with your current husband you said that you met and then you both were practicing kundalini yoga and transcendental meditation. Yes, okay so when I hear you know I love it when I hear the word faith and minister and Bible and kundalini yoga and transcendental meditation sort of all in the same paragraph. So how do you how do you explain that you've melded those together in one person? Well two, your husband as well.

Megan Malick 49:07

Right. So I think it actually partly goes all the way back to that when I said so my first real encounter with something larger the divine universe source was outdoors and in the trees right so some of my actual feeling trauma work was being like, oh this God that I've known that I don't know that I that I kind of knew is like my like spiritual companion that I felt like I needed to keep on the down low is the same one as this God that we talk about in church. I would say most of my process in seminary was reckoning with am I actually a Christian? Because my faith view was big going in my understanding with the divine was broad the whole way. My roots are Christian. And so that did form and inform how I see and know and experience God. And for me personally, it just was never that narrow but I didn't talk a lot about that publicly. My husband was born and raised Catholic went to Catholic school by the time that we met, he was still very actively practicing Catholic, but had what he would call higher power and this like developing relationship. And so a mutual friend of ours is a Kundalini yoga teacher and she kept inviting us to come and we we went and we're like we had transformative experience. And I would say both my husband and I have wrestled with slash made peace with the fact that like for us this is all one and the same or I know I don't feel as wedded to the Christian language but I know for him there he was like I just think like this is Christ or I just think like this is Holy Spirit and they're calling it this and I call it that. And it just doesn't really matter. I mean it matters to the people that say that it matters but our experience of it is that it didn't matter. And so that would be how I would say it kind of has all been one thing. I think um religion exists for humans, not for God. Spirituality and religion are different things.

Regina Sayer 50:59

Did you also uncover other types of practices that you incorporate into your life that were not traditionally Christian? Like for example Reiki.

Megan Malick 51:09

Yes yes also the very interesting thing is one of the professors at Lancaster Seminary at the time was a Reiki master and wrote a book on Reiki and the healing touch of Jesus. And so I would say even when you say that my introduction to Reiki was through a Christian was through Christianity and not to see them as separate.

Regina Sayer 51:30

So interesting.

Megan Malick 51:31

Through my both seminary experience as a student and then as a staff person, I had the opportunity to go to India um a couple of times and to learn and be there. And you know if you're in India there is a belief that Jesus actually traveled to India. So in scripture there's this gap of like he's 12 in the book of Luke and having this encounter where like didn't you know where I was mom like a smart ass kid. And then he like comes back at 30. So like where was he for these however many years? Some Christians in India are like he was here.

Regina Sayer 52:06

He was here and learning our ways. It's not the first time I've heard this actually I've heard this from another guest. She lives in California and she went to someplace that talks about that and that they had all these different pillars that represented all of the different religions around the world which was pretty pretty much to say that we're all saying the same thing but just calling it labelling it differently.

Megan Malick 52:28

Yeah. So on the southern tip of India there is a centre called the Peace Trust Institute or at least this is back in 2008 it was there. They were really dedicated to creating like a pluralist community because their community was they had people practicing Islam. They had people practicing Christianity they had people practicing Hinduism they had people practicing Sikhism Buddhism Jainism. And it was like they need to not kill each other they need to learn how to get along and this was after the tsunami of 2004 and so learning to live collaboratively was vital for their literal survival. So I don't know that Jesus was actually there. I just know that that is a myth or a legend. And so for me Reiki hasn't been separate. But yes Reiki is part of my tradition I have trained in Reiki I incorporate Reiki with myself and for those that I work with if they would like I incorporate that and I don't think of it as separate. And then when I meet people who do I'm like oh that's right.

Ministry work & challenges within institutional structures

Regina Sayer 53:29

So going back to you actually you said that you were ministering.

Megan Malick 53:34

Yes ministering

Regina Sayer 53:35

yeah so what exactly does that mean?

Megan Malick 53:38

I was the person that put on the robe and stood up in front of the church and preached the sermon and led the worship and officiated funerals, officiated weddings, visited people in their homes, taught Sunday school community engagement involvement, running a board I mean it's like basically you're the director of a small nonprofit.

Regina Sayer 53:56

Okay. What happened there? Because you said that that just didn't work out.

Megan Malick 54:01

Well there was a staff person for whom there were numerous behavioral related challenges. Some of them sniffed of sexual predatory in nature. And so I was working to address that and getting judicatory involvement and that's the like the people up above me support for how do I do this, right? I'm like a 33 year old young woman at the time and a very patriarchal system, even though the United Church of Christ is working to do it a different way I experienced it as hierarchical and patriarchal and how everything like the behind the scenes on the paper it looks this way, but the lived experience of it and it was activating a lot of my own trauma to be in this system that here's this person, that now I feel I'm silenced, that now I feel like we're not being able to address it, that we're saying one thing, that we're doing another I have a board chairperson. The judicatory came to a board meeting and the chairman of our board was, you know, like my dad's age and he was like screaming at me and the judicatory representative who was also my dad's age sat there and watched this all happening. I mean I just I froze and I felt stunned and I was like I don't want to this is a lot I had a young family that I was navigating that was binuclear going back and forth between homes and I didn't know where to go for support. Like I had gone to the judicatory and this was the support that I was getting. And like how I was coached to be in the situation, the person that's now done therapy training could say like literally they set you up for this because like it wasn't savvy. It was as things were being uncovered and we were discovering some of these pieces that were going to be activating to the congregate or to the the board there are ways that we could have engaged with this differently that's just not how it happened. And so I was like I don't know how this is going to happen but I can't stay in this. At the same time my mom actually started was having health problems. She was uh diagnosed with something called acromegly which is where she had a large tumor on her pituitary gland and they had removed it, but they weren't able to get all of it. And she had been working for my dad she had retired from her job at Merck and was working for my dad doing bookkeeping and light administration part-time but her health was starting to be a thing. And so it sort of became this like okay I can help out with that stuff with my parents and I have a like a part-time job that'll give me some sustenance. It'll let me take some breathing space, get out of this. And so all of that happened and without trying I started to officiate do premarital counselling and officiate weddings for spiritual but not religious couples.

Regina Sayer 56:43

So I'm just curious because you said your husband is Catholic and you know in the Catholic faith women just don't do the ministering... don't doing the priesting. What was that dynamic with your husband as you are doing what is basically what the priest does in the Catholic church.

Megan Malick 57:02

So unbeknownst to me in the early stages of our dating this was a large part of what he was reckoning with inside himself because he is who he is and comes from the family and I don't I don't want to share his stories not mine. But let's suffice it to say that by the time that we were even meeting and dating enough of those rules had been challenged and provoked within him that he was doing some of that uncovering and discovering and all of that. And I would say similarly kind of the view of a wider view of God than what just the Catholic Church taught. And you know at this point in time well he he doesn't participate in the Catholic Church at this moment in time and hasn't for wow um much since COVID.

Regina Sayer 57:47

Okay. And going back into your marriage because you became the mother of two daughters and then you have your own motherhood issues that then transpired. So talk about that.

Marriage, step-parenting & evolving identity

Infertility, hysterectomy & embodied grief

Megan Malick 58:00

Well first it was like am I the mother am I not the mother? What's this role that I'm in? Because I was in a mothering role in our home and they were someone else's daughter. And so that was very tricky and layered and nuanced as well as kind of navigating like their push pull with and toward me and the role that I would take and who was I with Joe and you know kind of us learning together that like in some ways he's going to be stepping in because he's the primary parent. And so we needed to not have quite as gender normed in that sense of a way especially related to like intervening or kind of setting loving limits and things like he would need to lead and I would support. So that was tricky and complicated. I would also say you know like as maturation happened and so they're getting to be like ages 11 and 12 and periods are coming and all of that and um kind of seeing some things and wondering like well how do I want to go about doing this and it was hard but it was also the gift was I I called my mom and I was like so this is happening and I'm trying and what do you think? And so for her to be like oh I remember that I would do that so differently today. I was like well how would you do it today? And so we kind of like talked through that. And so it was very healing to get to be mothered by my mother as I was learning to mother.

Regina Sayer 59:23

And in terms of your own becoming a mother?

Megan Malick 59:26

okay yes so also at this time well I discovered that I I always had very heavy periods and difficult periods and since uncovering the sexual abuse I kind of just chalked it up to that was how my body operated. There's potentially truth in that and truth in that the I developed fibroid tumors that were causing me tremendous pain, tremendous bleeding as well as making movement difficult. And in meeting with my doctor because of where the largest fibroid was hysterectomy was what was suggested. And so my husband and I we had previously started to think about having a child of our own and this was going to take that off of the table totally. On one hand it felt okay because well one I physically felt sick a lot and here were his daughters and on the other it was like I this is giving up a thing that I thought would be like how I conceived that my life was going to go was going to not be birthed, so to speak. And so a tremendous season of grief. The grief of infertility is enormous you know the questions of are you and your husband going to have kids or when are you going to have kids and feeling like I don't feel like I need to owe you or pay you the story of my journey, the pain of literally my my chart says I have a hysterectomy and then to be asked repetitively when my last period was when I go to the doctor I feel like is one of the most insensitive and mistrustful which I actually you know I've said to them I was like so you know your feel has a has a trust problem. Well let me tell you as an infertile woman who has no uterus to be asked what my last period was does not give me trust in you caring for my body or knowing about me.

Therapy, somatic work & spiritual support, other healing alternatives

Regina Sayer 1:01:13

So how did you process this whole grief that you went through?

Megan Malick 1:01:17

So I went back into therapy this therapy was internal family systems therapy and so what combined with somatic experiencing.

Regina Sayer 1:01:28

What made you choose that?

Megan Malick 1:01:30

Well at the time I was working part-time for my parents and doing the premarital counselling and the weddings and sort of like well what's next with me God? What do you like why why did you the concept story why did you take me down this path and then this turn out like this shit show. What the actual but I you know I had many couples that who I officiated that they were like hey can we see you more and I was like I'm not trained to see you more. So one thing led to another and I was dipping my toe in studying marriage and family therapy. These modalities were some that I was reading about as I was kind of dipping my toe in the water in the summer of 2015. And I was like these sound really good as well as the friend of ours that teaches Kundalini yoga had experienced some of this and was like this is life changing stuff. It's good. So that's why I chose that and it was life changing stuff and it was really good.

Regina Sayer 1:02:20

I'm curious because you reached out to a therapist but where was your spirituality supporting you?

Megan Malick 1:02:26

In the faith communities that I come from there's something called spiritual direction which is somebody that you seek with and you wrestle with and so I did have a spiritual director and she was a person that was doing that. And so the spiritual support at the time was less an answer and was more in feeling like I was not alone and that it was okay to have these feelings and that it was okay to feel grief and that it was okay to be with grief and it was okay it was okay to not be okay. Yeah it was okay to be angry too yeah it was okay to be angry it was okay to be hurt it was okay to be despairing it was okay all the things were okay. By the time that I was moving through this phase I had developed a relationship my spiritual life had evolved in such a way that I didn't need to be okay all of the time and that feelings were welcome. I might not have known how to exactly be with all of the feelings in every moment but they were they were okay. My kundalini practice really was instrumental from a spiritual perspective because it incorporated in Reiki the spiritual and the movement of the emotion. And again I don't know that I knew this at the time either but the head oriented thing was not enough or even my writing I needed to kind of move with my body and these practices allowed that to be happening and be kind of more of an integrative way of dealing with it.

Regina Sayer 1:03:57

As you're talking and you're you're asking that question I think well when you have a hysterectomy that's such a part of your body that's being removed so you have to be with your body you know you have to kind of sit with that missing bit.

Megan Malick 1:04:13

Yeah literally yeah well I'm kind of like learning who is this body now and how does my body function now and I guess a certain amount of emptiness. Yes. I mean there are some very practical challenges that I mean my uterus was the size of a five month pregnant woman when they removed it, which gives you the sense of how large my fibroids were. So that's quite a missing piece. Yeah. Like literally so in terms of like musculature and core so there's being with that but there's also kind of strengthening up around that and loving that and yeah.

Regina Sayer 1:04:49

Did you turn to any holistic therapies in terms of because obviously that then affects your thyroid as well. So in terms of like nutrition or things that manage the hormones in your body other than you know everyday pharmaceutical medicine type of thing did you turn to any other types of medicine or alternative medicine?

Megan Malick 1:05:11

I wouldn't say medicine but definitely um focusing on nutrition in a different way like definitely like whole related things like some supplement supplements like magnesium, B12, things like that. I went through a large and I mean I still like massage but massage therapy became a really important modality for me in terms of just like allowing my body to work it in. I also did chiropractic because there was like adjusting that was needing to happen. He would give me some recommendations from the grocery store of things like to mix in with water that were over the like not as involved as some of the supplemental roads that people go down, but in terms of like rebalancing electrolytes and things like that. And that was very helpful.

Regina Sayer 1:05:58

That's really an interesting point that you just brought up there about going to a chiropractor. I guess in the womb you have a lot of nerve endings also that connect into the spine. So gosh. I wonder how many people out there who've had a hysterectomy actually have gone to a chiropractor after.

Megan Malick 1:06:16

Oh, actually, this is a really I think this is super important. Western medicine did my hysterectomy. It worked very well. The follow-up I did because I'm me and I like to do things, whatever, I followed it. Drinking the water, not lifting the things, taking the walking the way that I should, doing all the walking, building back in. There was nothing that I was told about core strengthening. A year after my hysterectomy, I was doing, like I did a very robust day of yard work and I hurt my lower back badly, very badly. And it was really difficult. That is what led me to both massage and chiropractic. And the chiropractor, when he was doing the intake, said, Well, what core strengthening did you do after hysterectomy? And I looked at him and I was like,

Regina Sayer 1:07:04

Yeah, because they usually tell you to do that after you've had a child.

Megan Malick 1:07:07

Yeah, yeah. Well, that was not included.

Regina Sayer 1:07:09

And why the massage?

Megan Malick 1:07:10

Well, partly for my back that was just sore and the musculature was tight. My massage therapist, who also believes in energy medicine and Reiki and things like that, and was spending a lot of time not massaging my abdomen, but doing energy healing on my at like where my uterus was and healing in that way. And it I just noticed so much of a difference. Like it it was profound.

Regina Sayer 1:07:35

Interesting. Okay. Thank you for sharing that. Okay, so let's move on ahead because you lost both your parents in 2022.

Megan Malick 1:07:46

Yes.

Regina Sayer 1:07:47

So talk us through that.

Losing both parents, shifting sibling relationships

Megan Malick 1:07:49

So in January of 2022, you know, I was working as a psychotherapist in private practice by this point in time. And life seemed very good, actually, in in every respect personally. We were kind of coming out of COVID. It had been the holidays. My spouse and I were working from home, my husband virtually. My dad had been trying to call, came down for lunch, and I saw my husband's face. And I just I knew I was like, oh, my mother died. I guess I should start with I opened sacred space before I work with anybody. I had done that that morning. I felt very good, very aligned. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw my mother sparkly and like lit up and like almost like iridescent. I worked my day. I didn't necessarily code it as anything beyond like, isn't this really cool? I've heard that like if you're really connected to people, you can sometimes see them or experience them. I also know you can see them when they pass. And then when I came down the stairs, I was like, my mom died, didn't she? And he nodded his head. I I collapsed. I mean, just it was not expected at all. She was not undergoing any treatment for anything. The autopsy was inconclusive. So then my dad, who was who found her and be was probably equally shocked or more shocked, became ill with pneumonia. And in less than three months of my mother dying, he went on a ventilator in the hospital with the pneumonia at one point. And my sisters and I, because he was declining and everything, made the decision to withdraw him from life support and he died. You know, I am no stranger to grief. I am no stranger to trauma, both personally and professionally. But this was like nothing I'd ever experienced because it was like so. Well, I guess maybe because also I've done all that I've done. So I had this knowing of what was happening, but I couldn't not have it happen. And I guess I don't mean my parents not dying. I mean the effect that it was having on me, what it is when the rug gets sweeped out from underneath of you and you become disoriented and the younger parts of you kind of fragment and are like, hello, we're here for attention. And the sort of the blending of time and space when you are in your hometown and with your parents and your siblings who maybe you haven't been with, and like it's very um, very surreal. And like I I knew that. Like I wrote a lot about it. I knew it at the time. So it really unmoored and untethered younger versions of me.

Regina Sayer 1:10:26

You had to make that decision as well.

Megan Malick 1:10:28

It's the the decision no one should have to make. Such a hard, hard call.

Regina Sayer 1:10:34

What did you do after that? How did you take care of yourself after that when you were basically crumbling?

Megan Malick 1:10:42

I did a lot of walking. No, in all seriousness, I um some very good therapist friends of mine reached out and were like, what do you need us to do? So I had a virtual assistant between my virtual assistant and a couple of very good therapy connections and a larger agency here that's good. My people that needed to get placed got placed. I stepped in to do the things that I like, I held on to some folks to kind of do some of the transitioning. And um, I spent a lot of time walking. I spent a lot of time drinking water, I spent a lot of time journaling. I guess the the gift of being the fields that I come from is that I have a couple of very amazing friends who could fear and hold my deep grief and despair, and that I was okay to not be okay with them. A lot of that is how I kind of navigated. And then I also discovered our local hospice has a group for parent and sibling loss. And I started to attend that, and that became a real lifeline also. Um, as well, I had the spiritual director, and she was very supportive and helpful and with all of that as well.

Regina Sayer 1:12:00

And what has been your relationship with your sisters all this time?

Megan Malick 1:12:04

Well, before everything with mom and dad, my youngest sister and I were around one another because we lived closer to my parents and had kind of the how was your week? What's going on? What book are you reading? What TV show are you watching? Relationship, and the, you know, we're on vacation with mom and dad together. And our um middle sister lived further away, and I didn't have as much of a relationship with her. Since the deaths of mom and dad, we've gotten closer. I would still say I'm not with the two of them as close as like calling every day or being in all of this. And they are, I feel, known by them in ways that were not possible before the deaths of my parents and able to revisit some places from childhood and reckon with some of that for myself. And I hope maybe with them. My youngest sister, who lives about an hour and a half from me, you know, trying to build in more time to get to be with her. This summer I went and stayed there for a couple days to just, you know, get to be. And in that sense, deepening all the different things. Like that when on that visit, we revisited the year of the fire. And, you know, I was 17. She was even younger. And like, what was that like for her? And what was it like for me? And like the things we didn't know and the things we didn't talk about, and we didn't talk at all like that prior to the deaths of my parents.

Regina Sayer 1:13:28

Thinking back to my own family, because I have two brothers, and well, I had a sister, but my sister passed away when I was uh 40, 41. Um, she's only four years older than me. My mother passed away on the exact same day, six or seven years later.

Megan Malick 1:13:43

Oh my goodness.

Regina Sayer 1:13:45

What is the universe trying to tell you? It feels like, especially since my mother passed away, my relationship with my brothers has shifted into something else. We didn't necessarily speak to each other, kind of like you. I mean, they live in the States. I've lived all over, you know, different outside of the States, but it just felt like after my mom passed, there was more of this revisiting, like you say, of things in the past and kind of finding out things that you didn't know about before.

Megan Malick 1:14:19

Yes. I believe with grief, as we allow it to flow and process, it opens us up not only for feeling more compassion and more love, but there is a freedom also. I think there's also a freedom in my relationship with my with everybody, including with my sisters. And an appreciation for here are these two people that maybe we don't always see eye to eye, and maybe we conflict, and maybe we wouldn't even choose each other to be friends because we're enough different. But there's something about you that knows me in a way like no other human on the planet. And I think having lost both your parents, who also maybe have some of that, it's like, oh, okay, you know me, you know this, or you hold this. And there's something, there's something there about that for me.

The complexities of navigating the system after a loss

Regina Sayer 1:15:08

Yeah. After that, you had to take over the executor role of both estates.

Megan Malick 1:15:14

Yeah. Yeah. That's that's really what did me in. I mean, the grief was unpleasant and big and consuming, but I had done that differently. But what I had not ever had to do, well, I've never settled an estate before, but also the big losses that I had been through, I was young enough when I was divorced there logistically, wasn't a whole lot to tend to. We were two teachers who taught in the same school district in our 20s. We hadn't amassed much of anything. It was like, you take yours, you take yours. And it was not contentious. So it was literally like, how simple can we make this? How little money can we pay for this? So I had not ever been through anything where I needed to use the system in order to resolve something that was ending. I was blown away by the complexity of dividing things three ways evenly between three people who might have normal sibling conflict, but who aren't mad at one another? No one's challenging anything, nobody's saying, I deserve this and you deserve that. Nobody's saying, like, when do I get my money? What we were saying is like, when do we get to get back to our life? And why was I not given a playbook for this? And how come this is so confusing? And who's the people that help you with this? And why are the four of you that are the professional, the attorney, the financial advisor, the estate, the accountant, you're all giving me information, but it's slightly different. Can you come up, like, can you coordinate care for me? Like from a therapist perspective, I was like, I need my professional team to coordinate things, develop a treatment plan, and tell me what to do. Why is this not happening? Who created this and why is it like this? This is awful.

Regina Sayer 1:16:59

So after going through all of that, coming to where you are now, you now help people with that?

Megan Malick 1:17:06

I do. I help people with that. Grief in general has kind of become my wheelhouse. And I say that because I think we think grief comes with bereavement, but it comes with hysterectomies. It comes with remarriage, it comes with house fires, it comes with job loss, divorce, recovery of childhood memories and things. And our world, when we're losing a job, when we're divorcing, when we're navigating help things, also has often a long list of things that you need to do. And so I work with people who are having all of that, but then are also like, how do I, like, what do I need to do just this week?

Regina Sayer 1:17:44

So you're coming at it more as a support, both emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and practically.

Megan Malick 1:17:51

And very practically. Because I also believe in the practical is where the big emotion lives. For me personally, once I got clear that, like, what made the work of the tasks for mom and dad difficult, beyond that I didn't know what I was doing and I felt like a kindergartner expecting to give a doctoral dissertation regularly and the time of it, was like each of these pieces is tied to these traumatic deaths and my grief. Like, no wonder this is so hard. There's a lot of emotion tied up in this piece of paper. Yeah.

Regina Sayer 1:18:25

You developed an expertise. I'm not sure if you developed it, if it existed already. Something called brain spotting.

Megan Malick 1:18:33

I did not develop it. David Grand is the discoverer. It grew out of EMDR. It's a modality that I've been trained in as a therapist that also has been a profound part of my own healing journey in terms of even in one of my sessions when I was receiving, and it's actually one of the trainings, that was when I became most clear. I'd already been like, oh, work is tied to the grief of my parents. But brain spotting, we say where you look affects how you feel. So it connects an eye-gaze position with a spot in the brain with a somatic experience in the body. And you process on that spot or another spot, you can go between spots, and the subconscious mind kind of starts to process on it and get that neural, help the neural networks get relinked up, right? That helps the fragmentation reintegrate. For me, for my brain, this connects to this, connects to this. So the felt sense in my body when I would receive an email from the IRS is the same felt sense as the day that I learned my mother died and the day we let my dad go. Same felt sense. So no wonder I feel activated. But then when I processed on it more, where my brain went to was loving memories of my family, my parents, my sisters, and how grateful I was for them and this deep appreciation for the gift that this finite life is. And then I'm a lover of the film, It's a Wonderful Life. I see the last of like It's a Wonderful Life. And Jimmy Stewart's like ecstatic and he's screaming Zuzu's pedals. And I looked at the practitioner and I was like, okay, so not only do I have the same feeling and do I have this appreciation for life, I am resentful that the system makes me spend all of this time on paperwork because all I want to do is love the people that I love and like live my life to the fullest. If I have to do something, fine. But I should just have to fill out this form once and be done with it. I should not have to submit the death certificate five or six times to the same institution. And I resent that I have to do that because this is getting in the way of me living a life of joy and loving my people. And I see that life is short and I just want to love people.

Regina Sayer 1:20:38

And sadly, it's like that everywhere. I remember when my father passed away because my mother was from the Bahamas, she lived in the Bahamas. I was born and grew up in the Bahamas. She was getting his social security, his retirement. And then it stopped coming. She kept having to go to the US consulate there. And it's still by the time she hadn't had something like a year and a half, two years coming to her. And then she passed away. And so then my brother had to go in and get that. And, you know, it was just like, okay, so my mother had to deal with this from my father's death. And now we sort of have the train end of it linked to my father's death, and now my mother's death. And yeah, I agree with you. But no, no system, I swear, no system makes it easy.

Megan Malick 1:21:37

No. The other piece that I would say over the last five years, I mean, it's not just the estate system that's that's tricky. It's like for getting help, they're very complicated and they're getting more complicated with fewer humans to help. So it just makes space for people if they're frustrated or irritated, like, of course, of course. And how can we build some capacity and be in that and all of the different things? But it's it's it's really, yeah, it's painful.

Regina Sayer 1:22:07

That brings us to what it is exactly that you do, because all of these paths, all of these things that we've talked about have led to what you do.

Supporting others

Megan Malick 1:22:16

To what I do now, right? So one of the things I do is create resources for people. So I published a book called A New Path, which is a practical workbook and planner that walks with you through the first year of grief and doing the estate settlement practices.

Regina Sayer 1:22:33

Let me just interrupt right there, because we are going to have a special episode with you to actually talk about that book. But just so let's just so you know, um, if you're interested in that book and you're interested in the process that went behind writing that book, and obviously some of the processes, some of what Megan actually went through herself, please listen in because that will be a very special episode that we're going to do where Megan will do some readings from that book and talk about, you know, why maybe somebody could find this book useful and exactly what it is.

Megan Malick 1:23:06

Yeah. So there's that, there's some free content and other lower price point on the website because I know in the midst of the crisis, sometimes you just need a thing. Meeting with somebody's not a doable thing. And then I meet with individuals virtually, one-on-one, to kind of hear where they are. And I use brain spotting, I use some other practices, breathing, meditation, all of that to help them kind of ground and orient, come back into their body. And then also, like, okay, so now what? And I say, like, bring your to-do list, bring all of you on your task list, because I also know you have to go back out into the world. I think in our world, you know, we can be so siloed of like, here's the 3D practical world, and that's separate from the spiritual, emotional world is over here. And the reality is we live in this, an integrated world, or we live in a world where, like I said, I want to spend all this time, but I still have to deal with this IRS paper, or I could choose to not, but the consequences of that I don't actually want. And how can I bring my whole self, my heart to this? When can I step away? Who can I turn to for help? But we we start with where you are and I try to validate and feel into the emotions. And oftentimes answers come from there. You know, I've actually also worked with some small business owners who get stymied with doing some of the paperwork with small business running or with kind of the process, like you're saying. And I incorporate those practices, brain spotting and all of that. And in several instances, what happens is, like my example, up comes this thing. It doesn't take away the pain point of doing the process, but it helps understand why is this exceptionally painful for me? Or like what's making this even more of a sticky point for me? Oh, this makes so much sense. This is reminding me of this. Okay, what does that need? How can I help you take care of that? How can we break this into the smallest steps possible that you can do this? And that's what I do.

Regina Sayer 1:25:10

How can people connect with you?

Megan Malick 1:25:12

You can connect with me via my website, unnewpath.com. You can email me at Megan at a new-path.com, or you can find me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and I have a Substack called The Accidental Matriarch. So you can find me there too.

Advice and Tools

Regina Sayer 1:25:29

Okay, great. Thank you. So now just before we close, I'm gonna ask you for a little bit more information, some advice. So what would you give to somebody who is transitioning through a hysterectomy? What advice would you give to somebody who is facing that or who has been through it or maybe hasn't processed it yet?

Megan Malick 1:25:53

Yeah, I think the first piece of advice that I would give would be if she just had the procedure and it was outpatient and her body's healing well, but she's feeling bereft. And like everybody just goes back to work and goes about things. What's wrong with me? I would say there's nothing wrong with you. First of all, your physical body is now absent something that was there. So your physical body is healing from the trauma of having that loss. Then the womb represents creativity, life, birthing. And a lot of times in women's circles, it is birthing metaphors that are used. So that can feel ouch in ways you might not recognise. And so if you are finding it difficult, that makes good sense. People say, Oh, I have cancer on Facebook, and people do the cryouts, but people aren't posting regularly, oh, I've had a hysterectomy, and then to give yourself permission to grieve, that it's okay. It's it's okay to grieve, it's okay to ask for help. It's called ambiguous and disenfranchised grief. It has names. These griefs have names. And unfortunately, disenfranchised and ambiguous griefs are harder, not only for ourselves, because it's like you can't kind of see it in the same way as this person died or this, but also our world doesn't credit it. But that doesn't mean you can't. And there are ways to move forward, even in terms of including ritual and ways to honour the loss that's been.

Regina Sayer 1:27:26

Okay. Thank you for that. And one last when you were dealing with your own grief, what is a tool that you use that maybe somebody else could profit from as well?

Megan Malick 1:27:36

There's two. I'm gonna talk more about brain spotting on Monday and give like a way to do that with a guided practice. But the other tool that I used was writing. I used a lot of writing, not to write a thing to be a thing, but to write out what was there to allow myself to express what was going on inside of me. Sometimes that felt like it wanted to happen with a keyboard, and sometimes it wanted to happen with a pen or a pencil and a notebook. Again, to say what helped me wasn't necessarily having a product or a an outcome that's like, I'm going to share this writing with you, but a like just to get it out and down. And so for me, the writing was the way and is a way for you to help language what's happening in the body and with the emotions. And we know that languaging things helps us integrate and helps our brain start to kind of come back together. And I'm going to talk about brain spotting, which is an eye-gaze position that can help kind of harness that, that can lead into the writing. And you can kind of do the two together that really enhance that.

Regina Sayer 1:28:46

Okay, so we will be talking about that when we talk about the book.

Megan Malick 1:28:49

Yeah.

Regina Sayer 1:28:50

Okay, cool. All right. Looking forward to that. Okay. Well, that is going to bring us to the end of our discussion. And thank you so much, Megan. You've shared such a lot. Thank you for being able to hold the space for others also as you're walking through your own life that's happening.

Megan Malick 1:29:09

You're welcome.

Regina Sayer 1:29:10

So, listeners, I hope that you have been able to take something away from this talk, either if it's for yourself or for somebody that you know. Please feel free to share the recording, obviously, and leave a comment, reach out to Megan. And please do join us again for the special mini episode that we're going to have, where Megan will be talking about her book and also about this tool of brain spotting, which you can also then try for yourself. Until then, I hope that everybody has a beautiful day wherever they are in this vast world. Thank you. And until the next time. Bye, everyone.