Catherine Napoli Bruce is a hypnotherapist and neurolinguistic programming practitioner specializing in grief recovery and inner resilience. Her book, Conversations with My Dead Husband, chronicles the loss of her husband to glioblastoma and the unexpected conversations that followed, offering comfort to anyone who has lost a loved one.
Website: conversationswithmydeadhusband.com
LinkedIn: Catherine Napoli Bruce
Host: Richard Lowe | Guest: Catherine Napoli Bruce
Summary of Transcript
Introduction
Richard Lowe: Hello, this is Richard Lowe, The Writing King, and this is the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I’m here with Catherine Bruce, who’s going to talk about her new book and hypnotherapy. Catherine, take it away.
Catherine Napoli Bruce: Thanks for having me. I just completed my book. It was five years in the making, and I’ll get into why it took so long. The initial writing was pretty quick. It’s called Conversations with My Dead Husband.
The Story Behind the Book
Catherine Napoli Bruce: Almost five years ago, my husband passed away rather quickly from glioblastoma. The book is about how we met, how we created this life with joy and gratitude, how I built up the resilience to get through that time, and then the conversations he and I had after he passed. Are they real or imagined? I don’t know.
I would go on long walks and scream, curse, cry. That’s the usual process when you’ve lost someone so close. I would ask all kinds of questions, everything from “where did you put the blank?” to “how do I use the remote control on the TV?” And surprisingly, I would get these download inspirations. His famous joke was, “I’m not teaching you how to use the remote.” He built computers, he built the sound system, the whole entertainment system. He’d say, “I’m not showing you how to use the remote because then you won’t need me anymore.”
And then there were the more intense questions. Where are you? Will I see you again? Why can’t God turn back time so we can catch this and have more years together?
Magical things happen. I have a light over my desk, this used to be his office, and it just turns on sometimes. There’s a whole story in the book about that. The goal of the book is not to make you believe in life after death. The goal is to say to people: if you’ve lost a loved one, if you’ve lost a pet, and you think you catch something out of the corner of your eye, or you think you hear their voice, and then you dismiss it because people will say you’re crazy, that’s on them. That’s not on you.
One of the most comforting things as a widow is the idea that some piece of the person who passed is still right there with you.
Shared Grief
Richard Lowe: I know what you mean. I’m a widower. My late wife passed away about 18 years ago after a long illness, eight years long. Very harsh. I’ve had a lot of therapy on it. I went through the same thing. I would go to the arboretum and just talk to her, and it seemed to help. I don’t know whether I was talking to her, to a figment of my imagination, or to a butterfly. But at first I thought I must be bonkers for talking to somebody who’s not there. But they’re there in one form or another, at least in my mind.
Mine was more anger and depression, the whole range of emotions, until I finally came to terms with it and didn’t need to talk to her anymore.
Catherine Napoli Bruce: And coming to terms with it is a lot harder if you’re forcing yourself to fall in line, telling yourself it’s just your imagination, or that you can’t express this emotion. Pushing it down works against the healing process.
The Weight of Being Told Not to Feel
Richard Lowe: I’m a guy, and guys don’t show emotions. My dad used to hit me every time I cried. “I’ll give you a reason to cry, son.” So I learned not to cry. At the funeral, I gave a speech without shedding a single tear. But when my cat passed away two weeks later, that was the last straw. I lost it in the middle of a business meeting.
Catherine Napoli Bruce: We compartmentalize to deal with things. And when it’s someone close, a parent, a child, a spouse, we feel like we have to compartmentalize even more because we’re comforting everybody else. But comforting everybody else is not entirely great for us. Allowing other people to comfort us is healthy.
I got the same thing growing up. “Don’t cry, I’ll give you a reason to cry.” When my father died, I was told, “Don’t cry, this is all about your mother.” I was 11.
Richard Lowe: I got that too. “This isn’t about you, son.”
Catherine Napoli Bruce: We need to make it a little bit about ourselves. We always need to put our own oxygen mask on first, as flight attendants remind us. When you really think that statement through, you see how important self-care is. The automatic reaction is “no, I have to put the mask on my child first.” But if they freak out and panic while you’re helping them, neither one of you has a mask on.
Why the Book Took Five Years
Catherine Napoli Bruce: The first rough draft came out pretty quickly. My minister, Reverend Michelle, who had lost her own husband two years before mine, told me to jot down every appearance, every experience. And I did. That became a big part of the book.
But after writing it and sending it to an editor, I sat down to go through the edits and couldn’t get past page two without falling apart. That happened constantly, for a couple of years.
As a hypnotherapist and someone who works with neurolinguistic programming, you’d think I would have told myself to do some self-hypnosis. The thought never occurred to me because the emotions, as big as they were, were comforting in a way.
I’m part of a mastermind, and my mentor just said, “Why don’t we do hypnosis around it?” Once she said it out loud, it made all the sense in the world. We did a session, and at the end I pulled up the manuscript on my computer, read through it, and was able to make changes and start the process again.
When Writing Gets Too Emotional
Richard Lowe: Sometimes I run into ghostwriting projects that are very emotional for the client. One of them, her parents sold her into slavery when she was 14. She spent 15 or 20 years in that, and then she met a man who got her out. They got married and had kids. She’s doing well. She just wanted to write a book about it.
We couldn’t get through it. Finally I said, “Look, I’m not your therapist. I’m a ghostwriter.” And she agreed we needed to stop. It was too emotional and she didn’t have a way to turn it off. I didn’t want to leave her crying after every session. That’s not my job.
Catherine Napoli Bruce: No, that’s my job. Hypnotherapy and neurolinguistic programming work with what your unconscious mind has heard and programmed. Having somebody else do the session for me definitely worked. It’s about finding what emotion surrounds the block and pulling something positive from it, not burying it the way we were taught growing up. We want to show our brains it’s okay to react in a way that’s kinder to ourselves.
On Writing Books
Richard Lowe: You’ve written a book on your own without a ghostwriter. You know how hard it is. I’ve written well over a hundred in 11 years. And I’m working on my own book right now, The Ghostwriting Advantage, written from the client’s perspective about ghostwriting. I haven’t found any books like that, so I figured I’d write one. I thought it would be 30,000 words. I’m up to 60,000.
Editors are essential, by the way. I’m a ghostwriter, not an editor. They’re different. A lot of people think editing means proofreading. You need both. You can find an editor who does it all: proofreading, grammar, line editing, content editing. The one I have does everything, and editors don’t cost much compared to a ghostwriter.
Final Words
Catherine Napoli Bruce: Your emotions are important. Your emotions are yours and yours alone. Don’t let anyone tell you how to feel about anything. And when the reaction to your emotions gets in the way, not the emotions themselves but the reaction, that’s when you want to talk to someone. A therapist, a hypnotherapist. There are so many people who can help you heal the reaction. Don’t ever let anyone tell you how to feel about anything.
Richard Lowe: You can control your reactions. You can control the way you act. And that’s the important thing.
How can people reach you?
Catherine Napoli Bruce: The website for the book is conversationswithmydeadhusband.com. They can also reach me through my hypnosis and grief recovery websites. And on LinkedIn, Catherine Napoli, spelled like Springsteen.
Richard Lowe: I’m Richard Lowe. This has been the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. You can reach me at thewritingking.com. Thanks for listening.