Day 41: Dosing Grief The theme of oscillation in grief is on the front of my mind lately. Another word for oscillation in grief is “dosing.” What sets grief apart from some other struggles is that our system already knows how to do it, and in fact, begs us to engage with the difficult feelings and then take breaks from them. Early on in grief, this rhythm of dosing can be massively confusing—“how could I ever feel anything other than despair and dread and terribleness?

Day 40: Morale Boost I’ve noticed the heaviness of my posts over the last few weeks. Even though this is reflective of a grief process, it isn’t the complete story. When grief is allowed to move through us, our system understands we need breaks from the heaviness, a reprieve. This natural oscillation in grief is what allows for us to catch our breath, get a tiny bit more rest, re-group for the next wave, connect with others, and maybe even enjoy a laugh at something. W

Day 39: Antidotes to Despair As I walk with people in their grief, I am in awe of how humans keep getting out of bed and navigate the pragmatic difficulties of their new reality (most name that there isn’t much choice in this). Yet in this work, I have come to see humans as incredibly gritty and stubbornly hopeful without even knowing it. One pattern I have noticed that sets some grief journeys apart from others is when people engage with something generative. When I s

Day 38: Grieving and Living Many of my clients arrive worried they are either 1) not getting grief right or not grieving enough or 2) not able to engage in life at all because of how they are grieving. The reality I have come to observe in grief is that if you get out of bed in the morning, you are living. AND, you are also grieving. Unfortunately, the two cannot be separated from one another. The maddening truth about grief is that it cannot be contained to a neat and tid

Day 37: The Mornings In grief, I often hear about that moment one wakes up to a pleasant fuzziness or comforting unknowing. This usually lasts less than a second, and early on in grief, can be violently ripped away by the sinking feeling of how different one’s world is, forever changed, and far from the expectation. It is that “is this is really my life? moment.” There is no fixing these moments. There is just having them, as painful as they are. Time allows for tha

Day 36: Guilt in Grief There are many ways we humans complicate our grief experience, and one that I see often is in our tendency to have emotions about our emotions, with guilt being at the top of this list. One reason guilt arises (almost universally) in the initial phase of grief (acute grief) is that during this time, our brain is trying to make sense of the loss. Our brain’s way of attempting to make sense of something that is nonsensical is by mulling over the details

Day 35: Grief PSA Knowing what to say and even more importantly, what not to say, to grieving people can be tricky. Even as a grief therapist with years of being with grieving humans, I mess it up sometimes. I don’t tend to offer a ton of “what not to say” or “what to say” lists because at the end of the day, grieving people are intuitive enough to know if 1) you genuinely care no matter what words you use and 2) if you actually want to hear about how they are doing, even if

Day 34: Grief is Physical I have been searching for years for a worthy description of the physicality of grief. I have finally found one in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s recent work, Notes on Grief , which she wrote following the sudden death of her beloved father in 2020. Thank you @chimamanda_adichie for your raw and honest account (see below). Finding words for such an experience is usually impossible. “I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising

Day 33: Simply put, grieving at each developmental stage means grieving at each life transition. Such transitions might include marriage, a breakup, a move, a new job, becoming a parent, losing some physical functioning, navigating a chronic illness, or some other change that affects your daily life. Processing grief is not simple because our current grief can invite and even uncover grief from current, past, and anticipated life transitions and events. Knowing that our grief

Day 32: Where does my grief belong? With the current horrors and terror in Afghanistan, I have been asking myself a question that I hear clients ask so often. What makes my grief worthy when others are suffering so immensely in such extreme ways? When we ask this kind of question, many things may be happening: · Perspective taking: Being able to see our situation from a larger vantage point provides us some distance from ourselves in order to gain further insight. This i

Day 31: Something to Hold On To The reality of deep grief is that it often leaves us in a surreal fog, in which the world is unrecognizable and at times, we are unrecognizable to ourselves. Acute grief can be so intense that it can wipe out the capacity to hold onto hope, let alone being able to access a vision for the future. While people live in the intensity of this initial phase of grief, I often ask—“what do you have to hold on to?” The question is vague on purpose.

Day 30: In grief, the unknown evolves Living during a pandemic has highlighted for me how much we humans don’t know, and how we have been stretched to sit in the unknown—and how what we don’t know seems to evolve. The unknown is already one of the most challenging parts of a grief process, coming up often in circular thought patterns such as, “what will the future be like without my person, if this could happen, then what other terrible things might shift in my life, an

Day 29: Grief Bursts What distinguishes grief from depression and anxiety (and truly any other experience) is the oscillating ups and downs of feeling ok, and then not ok at all. I have also come to observe grief as the confusing experience of feeling oddly functional amidst living in deep pain—which offers a surreal sheen to one’s life. One of the experiences within this surreal sheen that I see often is what I call “grief bursts.” Simply put, these are those moments w

Day 28: Grief and Trust In the book, About Grief, Ron Marasco and Brian Shuff, call out grief as “largely a crisis of trust.” This has always stuck with me as such truth. In the initial phase of grief, we are relearning our world, and a big part of this includes relearning what “trust” means to us. On a daily basis, most of us have some sense of trust in something—whether that is waking up, having our people nearby, a sense of something larger than ourselves, our own ab

Day 27: Grief Terminology When we have a have a name for something, it can help provide a sense of control, especially in a time of massive uncertainty and strife. Grief is derived from the Middle English word, Gref, which means weight. I came to learn about in one of my all time favorite grief books, About Grief by Ron Marasco and Brian Shuff. What I have learned from the people I sit with everyday is that grief is not one thing. At its core, it is a reaction to loss a

Day 26: We Don’t Get Over Grief While this may sound terrifying and pessimistic, the adage that we don’t get over grief is a truth I have learned and observed in my work. We don’t just get over what we have loved, and we are not supposed to. We don’t just get over what we have envisioned for ourselves, and we are not supposed to. We DO learn how to live with our grief. Our grief is not separate from us. It is part of our biological attachment bonds—to people, to our hopes,

Grief naturally places us in the rawness of life, begging us to reorient, reprioritize, and discern what fits and what does not. I encourage people to take advantage of the raw clarity that often comes with the depths of pain in grief. This clarity typically brings to light an opportunity for what I call “pruning.” What relationships no longer serve you? What habits have weighed you down? What modes of thinking are making your grief worse? What can you allow yourself to not

Fatigue in grief is like no other tiredness. It sits deep in the bones. I believe it is not the same as depression’s downward pull towards the ground. Instead, I have observed it more as an internal weightiness that emanates out into all directions of our bodies, our minds, and our hearts. The weightiness seems to be the ever-present buzz of living with what has always been unbelievable. And it is more draining than anyone might imagine who has never felt it. I also believe t

It’s a thing in grief. In fact, most people, no matter if they are atheist or deeply religious, ache to remain connected with the person they loved and lost. Finding a way to honor a continuing connection with someone who dies is one of the most healing phases of a grief journey. Doing so honors what I have come to believe—just because someone has died, doesn’t mean we stop loving them. In fact, our love lives on, and in my opinion, the relationship does as well. What the rel

Since grief does not show up as an outward, physical wound, grieving isn’t allowed the same grace or time that other physical ailments tend to receive. When we grieve deeply, we are trying to learn a new world that can feel unbelievable for a long time, re-working what we think of ourselves, rexamining what we believe in, and how (if at all) we can connect to a sense of hope. This exploration process is a full body, mental, emotional, and at times (and for those who this fits