What if coping with rejection is less about surviving the loss and more about surviving what you decide the loss says about you?

Alice is joined by Dr. Jessica Zucker, Los Angeles psychologist in women's reproductive and maternal mental health, founder of the #IHadaMiscarriage movement, and the author who miscarried alone at 16 weeks while her doctor stayed on the phone. For anyone sitting with grief, loss or the self-blame that follows, Jessica's thesis is unsparing: the route through it is to stop treating yourself as the reason it happened.

This episode discusses pregnancy loss, miscarriage and medical trauma in some detail.

Jessica's reframe: grief isn't a failure to fix — it's a place to live in for a while. "I'm going to swim in it," she decided. The one question she asks patients caught in self-blame — "What if you did absolutely nothing wrong?" — opens the floodgates. Alongside it: a running critique of "at least" phrases, toxic positivity, and how women are groomed, from menstruation to perimenopause, to blame their own bodies for whatever happens inside them.

Whether you're grieving a loss, coping with rejection from your own body, or sitting with someone who is, this is a clear-eyed reframe of what grief is actually for.

In this episode they explore:

• "What if you did nothing wrong?" — the question that unlocks the grief

• Why "at least you can get pregnant" needs deleting from the zeitgeist

• Coping with rejection when it's your own body: grief, self-blame, magical thinking

• "I'm going to swim in it" — refusing the cultural push to get back on your feet

• "It's like a murder scene in here" — the words grievers never forget

• How #IHadaMiscarriage started with a calligrapher's sign and went viral

• The Beef scene and the shame of "the one thing women are supposed to do"

• Groomed from menstruation to perimenopause — where self-blame comes from

  
  

Connect with Dr. Jessica Zucker:

Website: drjessicazucker.com

YouTube: @ihadamiscarriage452

Instagram: @ihadamiscarriage

Books - wherever books are sold!

Chapters:

00:00 Miscarriage statistics and why the topic stays silent

04:14 How Jessica's miscarriage differed from the typical experience

09:16 The home miscarriage: cutting the cord and getting to the doctor

13:07 Hemorrhaging, the clot, and choosing an unmedicated D&C

15:30 Toxic positivity, "at least" phrases, and what to say instead

24:52 Research on self-blame after pregnancy loss

30:12 Writing the viral op-ed and starting the #IHadaMiscarriage movement

38:14 Cultural conditioning: shame from menstruation to perimenopause

42:46 The clinical question Jessica asks patients caught in self-blame

50:26 Identity beyond motherhood and the role of community

This episode discusses genocide, war, racism, death threats. Listener discretion advised.

What if the rejection that cuts deepest isn't a stranger's hatred — but the silence of the people who swore they loved you?

Alice is joined by Lena Derhally — licensed trauma-informed psychotherapist, bestselling Palestinian American author, and a white-passing Christian Palestinian who ended friendships of forty years when the people closest to her went silent about Gaza. Lena grew up the daughter of a Bethlehem-born father and a small-town Indiana mother, with a message about her Palestinian identity: be careful who you tell. What makes her story impactful is her refusal to hide.

Lena's reframe: the sharpest rejection she's known came not from enemies but from friends of forty years who went silent when it mattered — what she calls "the great betrayal." She traces the messaging that first taught her to disappear (a father whose name changed from Odeh to Eddie in high school), and the day her son asked her to take the signs out of the yard. Her answer to all of it: "Integrity is bearing witness."

Whether you've hidden a part of yourself to fit in or watched people you trust go quiet when it counted, this is a raw reframe of what solidarity looks like.

In this episode:

• "The great betrayal" — why Lena ended friendships of four decades over silence

• Being "white passing" as both privilege and burden

• A father nicknamed "Camel," and how internalized racism is handed down

• Intergenerational trauma, defined plainly

• The sign in the yard — a son's fear, a stabbed child in Chicago, and a mother who wouldn't take it down

• The neighbor who rang the bell — "where can I get a sign like that?"

• "This is child's play compared to Gaza" — the sentence that still makes her emotional

• "Do you think I'm a monster for bearing witness?"

• How to fact-check a war — interrogate the source, read first-person accounts, weigh both sides, trust your gut

• Christian, Palestinian, white-passing — and the judgment she got for marrying a Muslim

• "Nothing is permanent" — her advice for anyone being othered in a place they can't leave

• Her books — and whether the Iraq War would have happened with social media

Connect with Lena:

*Author website

*Books

Chapters:

00:46Welcome, Lena Derhally

01:06A Bethlehem-born father, a small-town Indiana mother

04:51"Be careful who you tell" — white-passing and living undercover

05:55A nickname, "Camel," and a name changed from Odeh to Eddie

06:52Intergenerational trauma, defined

08:25The pull to assimilate — and the defiant streak that refused it

10:43"We have to be out and proud right now"

11:23Owning your identity: freedom, isolation and becoming a target

14:00When your children pay for your visibility

14:39The "full ceasefire in Gaza now" sign

16:11"I'm afraid someone's going to come to our door" — a son's fear

16:53Why she wouldn't take the sign down

17:23The doorbell — and the neighbour who wanted a sign

18:18Tracking down the "prank"

19:04"This is child's play compared to what's happening in Gaza"

20:31October 7th and the friends who didn't know the history

22:07"The great betrayal" — a best friend of 40 years and one Instagram story

24:51Do they see Palestinians as people?

27:04"Do you think I'm a monster because I'm bearing witness?"

31:44Alice's fact-check method — sources, first-person accounts, equal weight

33:12Gaslighting, and trusting your gut

36:23The Instagram Maps exercise

37:09A Christian Palestinian — privilege and leverage

38:26Solidarity across faiths — and judgment within the family

40:12The psychology of being othered

41:33White passing: "they think I'm like them"

42:03Black families, white schools and always being othered

45:58Parenting children through othering and racism

48:34Where to find Lena

49:31Her first book: what if there are no red flags?

50:49Gaza, social media and the limits of protest

52:02"Liberation takes a long time"