A Place For Us

About A Place For Us

A Place For Us In short, personal reflections, Brian D. Smith shares thoughts on everyday living — on love, loss, presence, uncertainty, gratitude, and the quiet moments that shape us. grief2growth.substack.com (https://grief2growth.substack.com/s/a-quiet-place?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Brian D Smith | Grief Guide and Healing Journey Podcast Host

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

31 Dec 2024

Latest episode

15 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 110 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   15 Aug 2026

   Return to Innocence

   A song comes on. Three minutes later, you don’t know if you just got sad or got healed. Maybe both. That’s what a handful of songs do to me. Earth, Wind & Fire’s “That’s The Way of the World.” Enigma’s “Return to Innocence.” Supertramp’s “The Logical Song.” Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” Four different decades, four different sounds. Same wound. Each deeply resonated with me at various points in my life. I never knew exactly why at the time. Now I do. Every one of them is about a kid who shows up wide open, and what the world does to shut that down. Oh, how I can relate to that. I’ve linked to the songs referenced in the article. You can read the article without listening. If you can find the time, go down the rabbit hole with me and give them a listen. The World Has a System, and the System Wants You Quiet “The Logical Song” reads almost like a case file. A kid starts out amazed by everything, magical, mystical, alive with wonder. Then he gets sent off to be educated. Somewhere along the way, the wonder gets swapped out for something more useful to everyone but him. Logic. Responsibility. Straighten up and fit in if you want to succeed. Pink Floyd names the same thing and turns it into a chant. “We don’t need no education”. No subtlety about who’s doing the shutting-down. The institution grinds kids through a system built for control, not curiosity. In the movie, there’s even a meat grinder as the kids are turned into something pliable and void of individuality. Extended movie version linked below. Both songs are diagnoses. They tell you where it went wrong and who did it. Neither one tells you what to do once you know. And honestly, that’s where most of us stop. We spend years confirming the diagnosis. Yes, the world did this to me. Yes, I can point to the exact moment. We go to therapy, and they tell us why we are the way we are. I was inspired to write this after seeing someone claim our entire personalities are just trauma responses. Yeah. It can seem that way, huge parts of them anyway. Naming the wound is real work. It’s just not the whole job. Now that we know, what do we do? Earth, Wind & Fire Named the Machine “That’s The Way of the World” isn’t a diagnosis so much as a lament. It describes what the world rewards and what it costs you to keep up. This is the view from inside the compromise. The song doesn’t ask how you get free of it. It just tells the truth about what playing along does to you. Supertramp and Pink Floyd show you the wall going up. That’s The Way Of The World shows you what it’s like to live inside it, knowing the game is rigged, playing it anyway, because everyone around you is doing the same thing. Only One of These Songs Talks About Getting Back I went back to all four of these songs years into doing grief work, and here’s what got me: only Enigma talks about the way back. Not backward. You’re not un-learning anything. They call it a return to innocence. The video is brilliant, showing a life going backward, Benjamin Button style, as the old man becomes a baby again. But the truth is more subtle. It’s forward, into something that got buried but never actually left. The song barely has lyrics. It’s more chant than statement, more feeling than explanation. No instructions. Just an insistence that what got taken from you wasn’t taken forever. It’s still under there, somewhere beneath everything the world piled on top. I didn’t understand why that distinction mattered until I found the word for it. There Are Two Kinds of Innocence Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century theologian, drew a distinction that has captivated me since I first heard it a few years ago. I think it’s the missing instruction manual for all four of these songs. He said there are two kinds of innocence. The first is the innocence of infancy. The wonder-filled child Supertramp sings about, the beautiful creature EW&F talks about. The uncorrupted kid Pink Floyd names. They're all about the openness the world eventually shuts down. But look closely, that innocence is really ignorance. Ignorance is not used as a pejorative here. It’s literally not yet knowing. I think, in the case of our returns to Earth, it’s a matter of forgetting. Starting with a relatively blank slate. It’s not earned innocence. It’s a starting condition, handed to you before the world gets a chance to test you. You come in wide-eyed and open. The second innocence is a different animal entirely. It only exists on the other side of experience. You can’t fake it, and you can’t stay young enough to skip needing it. It shows up after you’ve been out in the world, after you’ve lived what “That’s The Way of the World” describes, after you’ve felt the wall go up brick by brick. And you choose it anyway. Not once. Over and over. It’s what awaits at the end of The Wall album by Pink Floyd when the Wall is torn down. The first innocence gets lost the moment life happens to you. Nobody has a say in that. The second innocence you build. On purpose. Slowly, and it costs something. This is what Enigma is pointing at, whether the songwriters knew it or not. Not a return to not-knowing. A return to you, carrying everything you now know. What This Has to Do With Grief If you’ve lost someone, you already understand the second innocence. You just might not have had a word for it. You don’t get the first innocence back. You don’t get to unknow what loss taught you, how fragile this life is, how fast it can change, what it costs to love someone all the way through. But something else opens up. Not the return of what was. The emergence of someone who has metabolized the damage instead of being defined by it. Someone still capable of wonder, not despite what happened, but because they walked all the way through it and came out the other side still able to feel. The world becomes magical again. You begin to trust again. Not out of ignorance. But out of experience. I call this planted, not buried. You are not who you were before the loss. You are also not only broken. Something in you can grow into a shape that couldn’t have existed any other way. That’s the second innocence. You Can’t Go Back. But You Can Go Through. Supertramp, Earth Wind & Fire, and Pink Floyd are right about what happens to us. The world closes something in us. There’s a machine. It builds a wall. But Enigma got hold of something they never touched. The way back isn’t back at all. It’s through. Through the grief, through the disillusionment, through everything the world piled on top of who you actually are. Out the other side, into a self who knows what you know now and stays open anyway. What would it take for you to return to that kind of innocence? Not the one you had before the world got to you. The one that’s only available now, on the other side of what you’ve already survived. A Note On The Wall- P.S. Another Brick In The Wall, the song I referenced, is just one song from an album that is a masterpiece. Released in 1979, I was a sophomore in college when I heard the album. I knew there was something special about it. I listened to it at least once a day for months. But I don’t think I fully got the album's arc until I saw the movie. The album is about the return to innocence. Our hero, Pink, is bandied about by the vicissitudes of life- an overprotective mother, an absent father, a school system that stifles him, a wife that cheats on him, and a music career that only cares about what he can produce on stage. He spends his life building one brick at a time on a wall to keep the world out, only to find out the wall has become a prison. The last song is about life on the other side of the wall after he is forced to destroy it. Brian D. Smith is a grief guide, certified grief educator, and host of the Grief 2 Growth podcast. After losing his daughter Shayna in 2015, he has dedicated his work to helping others find evidence-based hope in the face of loss. 📣 Join the First 100 — Founding Member Rates Substack promotes its bestsellers. Bestseller status helps me reach people who are hurting and don’t yet know this community exists. You can help get me there. 90 of 100 seats are filled. 10 remain. Click the tier to sign up 💛 (https://grief2growth.substack.com/67746561)The Lightbearer (https://grief2growth.substack.com/67746561) — $2/month ($20/year) You believe this work matters. That’s enough. 💚 (https://grief2growth.substack.com/328bb6e6)The Steady Hand (https://grief2growth.substack.com/328bb6e6) — $4/month ($40/year) Present, consistent, quietly holding space. 💙 (https://grief2growth.substack.com/ebf18833)The Shoulder-to-Shoulder (https://grief2growth.substack.com/ebf18833) — $6/month ($60/year) Walking beside those who are carrying the most. After year one, your subscription renews at the standard rate — cancel anytime before then. No penalty. No guilt. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe (https://grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   7 Aug 2026

   Why Your Brain Keeps Dialing Someone Who Isn’t Picking Up

   A few weeks ago I was talking with a client. I’ve changed some of the details, but this happened. I’ll call her Pat. Her husband Frank passed about a month ago, after thirty-two years of marriage. She spent more than half her life with him. She can barely eat now. Sleep comes in fragments. The house they built their whole life inside feels unbearable to sit still in. That same week, she had a job interview. For a couple of hours she sat across from someone answering questions about her experience, her plans, her future. And something happened she couldn’t have predicted. She forgot. Not forgot the way you forget where you set your keys down. Forgot the way a body forgets, when it’s busy, that the world has changed underneath it. She walked out of that building feeling good. Hopeful, even. So she did what she had done for thirty two years every single time something good happened. She pulled out her phone and dialed Frank. It rang. And it rang. And that’s when she remembered. Your Brain Never Filed Him Away. It Built a Map. Here’s why that happened, and I want to be careful with how I say this, because Pat wasn’t in denial. She hadn’t stopped accepting reality. Her brain was doing precisely the job it was built to do. We tend to assume the people we love get stored as memories. Filed. Finished. Set on a shelf somewhere in the back of the mind. That’s not how it works. Your brain stores the people you love as a map. A running, constantly updating map of where they are, how to reach them, and what to do the second something good or something terrible happens. The neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor calls the attachment system what it actually is. A locator. It’s the same system that made you, at five years old, check where your mother was every few minutes in a crowded store without ever deciding to. It doesn’t run as a thought. It runs as infrastructure. For thirty two years, Pat’s locator had one job. Something happens, find Frank, tell him. A good interview triggered that. Not a decision. A reflex, and one of the oldest ones you own. If I asked you right now to think about your spouse or your child, your mind would go somewhere. At work. Downstairs. On the road. Somewhere. THE RESEARCH BEHIND THIS Who she is: Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Grief, Loss, and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab. Her work looks at the physical side of emotion, including the yearning and isolation people live with during bereavement. The core idea: O’Connor describes attachment as a set of invisible tethers. Ask someone where their daughter or their partner is right now and they’ll have a sense of where, how to get there, and how long until they see them again. Your brain holds three dimensions for every person you love. Here. Now. Close. Death removes all three at once, and the brain keeps running the old prediction anyway. Why it takes so long: She frames grieving as a form of learning. Your old habits automatically included your person, so every day your brain has to update its predictions, one at a time. You can no longer expect them home at six, or expect them to pick up when you call with news. Where to read more: The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss (2022) covers the neuroscience. Her follow-up, The Grieving Body, takes on what loss does to the heart, the immune system, and the endocrine and nervous systems. That second one lines up with everything in the next section The Error Message That Won’t Stop Running The locator system has no idea how to process gone. It was built for temporary separation, the kind our ancestors survived by finding each other again. We needed the tribe. We needed the people who’d protect us and who we’d protect back. When someone wandered off, the search ran until they came home. So when the query comes back empty, when it returns the equivalent of a 404 error, the system doesn’t shut down. It runs the search again. And again. That’s the phone call. That’s turning toward the door when you hear a car outside. That’s reaching for your phone to tell them something a hundred times, a thousand times, long after they’re gone. Every one of those searches costs energy. This is a large part of why grief leaves you so tired that showering feels like a project. You’re not failing to accept anything. Your locator is doing its job in a world it wasn’t designed for. Part of Him Was Living Inside Her Then there’s Pat’s body, which is where grief stops being only emotional. She can manage a few bites at a time. She’s drinking protein shakes to keep her strength up. And this part you can nearly measure with a blood test. When you live with someone for decades, your bodies stop being separate. Research on long-term couples shows that your microbiomes converge. The bacteria in your gut, on your skin, in the air you share. Part of Frank was, in a literal sense, living inside Pat. It goes further than biology. Your nervous system doesn’t only love a long-term partner. It borrows stability from them. Oxytocin. Cortisol regulation. Heart rate and breathing that gradually sync with the person sleeping next to you. Psychologists call it co-regulation. You end up running a second nervous system that lives partly outside your own body. You Didn’t Just Lose a Person. You Lost Your Regulator. Picture someone in the middle of a panic attack. Heart slamming, breath ragged, thoughts running over each other. Then someone they love wraps them in a hug, or just says their name in that voice. Low, steady, the one reserved for them alone. Watch what happens. The breathing slows. The shoulders come down. The heart rate drops, often within seconds. That’s one nervous system reaching over and physically recalibrating another. Touch and a familiar voice are two of the fastest-acting regulators we have, faster than most of what’s in the medicine cabinet. That’s what thirty-two years builds. A person who walks into a room and, by presence alone, tells your body it can stand down. When Frank passed, that went offline. No warning. No replacement. The sleeplessness. The appetite gone. The house feeling wrong under her own feet. That’s withdrawal, and it shows up on brain scans looking a great deal like what researchers see in addiction studies. Her body spent three decades building its chemistry around this man’s presence, and now it’s detoxing from a relationship it never agreed to lose. The Cruelest Design Flaw in Grief I talked with another client once about losing his wife. He said the person who carried him through every other loss, every other grief, the one who told him it was going to be okay, is the exact person he needs now to tell him it’s going to be okay. Sit with that for a second. Your body loses its regulator at the precise moment it needs regulating more than it ever has. The storm to end all storms arrives, and the shelter you’ve always run to isn’t standing. I think about the people I know who are living inside that right now, and my heart breaks for them, because they feel so completely alone in a way that goes past emotion and into chemistry. What the Reaching Actually Means So here’s what I want you to take from Pat. If your brain keeps dialing a number nobody will answer, that’s evidence of how thoroughly that person was mapped into you, and you into them. If you can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t sit still in the space you used to share, that’s evidence of how deeply your chemistry rewired itself around another human being. None of that makes it fair. It makes it explainable. The volume of this grief exists because the bond was real and is real. Not as a metaphor. Biologically. Your brain built a map for them. Your body built its rhythms around them. What you’re feeling is what happens when that gets pulled away. The Error Message Does Stop Here’s the part I most want you to hear. The locator eventually catches up. It stops returning the error. And somewhere in that process, something shifts, because you start to understand that they aren’t nowhere. They’re everywhere. As close as the air moving in and out of your lungs. When I think about Shayna now, I don’t get the error. I know she’s still with me. I know she’s all around me. That took time, and it took my body catching up to what my soul already knew. You’re going to reach for the phone for a while. Your locator doesn’t update on anyone’s schedule, and it will not accept not found gracefully. You’re not failing at grief. You’re not broken. You’re not going crazy. Nothing lasts forever, and that includes this. You’ll weather this storm too. Listen to the full episode of A Place For Us, “Still Dialing,” wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’ve caught yourself reaching for the phone, hit reply or leave a comment and tell me about it. There’s a whole lot of us doing the same thing. Brian D. Smith is a grief guide, certified grief educator, and host of the Grief 2 Growth podcast. After losing his daughter Shayna in 2015, he has dedicated his work to helping others find evidence-based hope in the face of loss. 📣 Join the First 100 — Founding Member Rates Substack promotes its bestsellers. Bestseller status helps me reach people who are hurting and don’t yet know this community exists. You can help get me there. 89 of 100 seats are filled. 11 remain. Click the tier to sign up 💛 (https://grief2growth.substack.com/67746561)The Lightbearer (https://grief2growth.substack.com/67746561) — $2/month ($20/year) You believe this work matters. That’s enough. 💚 (https://grief2growth.substack.com/328bb6e6)The Steady Hand (https://grief2growth.substack.com/328bb6e6) — $4/month ($40/year) Present, consistent, quietly holding space. 💙 (https://grief2growth.substack.com/ebf18833)The Shoulder-to-Shoulder (https://grief2growth.substack.com/ebf18833) — $6/month ($60/year) Walking beside those who are carrying the most. After year one, your subscription renews at the standard rate — cancel anytime before then. No penalty. No guilt. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe (https://grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   9 Jul 2026

   Where Is She?

   Ask me where my wife is right now. I’ll get it right, down to the couch cushion. Ask about my daughter Kayla, and I’ll get that right too. Her drive to work. Her Tuesday. I don’t have to think about it. I just know. But when Shayna passed, when I asked myself “Where is she?”, my brain glitched. It returned a “that does not compute.” Researcher Mary-Frances O’Connor’s describes it this way: we build a map for the people we’re attached to. Not a metaphor. An actual neural map, running underneath everything else. It tracks the people we love along three lines: space, time, and closeness. Where they are. When we’ll see them again. The tighter the bond, the more detailed the map. That map is active right now, in all of us, for everyone we love. It’s why you can feel your spouse in the next room without looking up. It’s why you know, without checking a clock, that your kid is at practice until 5:30. The map does this work silently, constantly, in the background of an ordinary day, so quietly you never notice it’s there until it breaks. Here’s the problem when someone we love passes. The map doesn’t shut off. It doesn’t get the memo. It keeps generating the exact same predictions it always has, for a person who is no longer where the map insists they should be. Six o’clock comes. The map expects the sound of the door. The door doesn’t open. The map doesn’t know what to do with that. So it runs the prediction again. And again. Not because you’re irrational. Because the map is doing its job. It just doesn’t have the one input it needs: an update it was never designed to receive. That’s the part nobody prepares you for. Not the sadness, though there’s plenty of that. The malfunction. The part of your brain built specifically to locate the people you love, spinning, searching, coming up with nothing, over and over, for months, sometimes years. That’s why we write books called Finding Him. Looking for Her. Why the entire language of grief sounds like a search party. Why so many of us feel, quite literally, lost. We’re not choosing that word for effect. Lost is the most accurate word available. We’re not being poetic when we say that. We’re lost, and the oldest part of the brain, the part that has nothing to do with logic or belief, is still checking coordinates that no longer exist. The brain can’t find her in space or time, so it returns ‘nowhere.’ We can’t accept that answer. So it runs the search again. “Nowhere” was never the right answer, and it was never true either. It was just the only answer the map could give while it was still looking in space and time. She’s not nowhere. She’s everywhere. She’s everywhere I put my attention. Wherever I stand, if I look for her, she’s already there. In the kitchen. In the car. In the middle of a sentence I didn’t finish. That’s not denial, and it’s not a nice story I tell myself to feel better. It’s just where the map points now, once you stop asking it to find a single location and start letting it find her everywhere at once. The door still doesn’t open at six. But I’ve stopped waiting for it to. I look somewhere else now, and she’s there too. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe (https://grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

Inside a recent episode

The Invisible Load of Sudden Loss: A Guide to Showing Up for a Grieving Spouse

Published 4 Dec 2025 · Transcript excerpt

[…] And when we talked before we got started, you talked about the loss of past kind of present and future. Can you frame that for people that are listening now? Yeah, you know, you know, it depends on, I guess, how long you've been with someone or, you know, the closeness of your relationship. But, you know, as I mentioned, I was with my husband for over 20 years, 21 years. So that's my formative adult, my adult life. So at this point, I have my memories before him, like teenage memories. You kind of pick and choose your memories the older you get. And so, so much of my past involved him, whether he was directly involved or he facilitated something, but he was always in my past. […]

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