Day 89: Healing in Grief is Confusing Many of my clients report that their experience of grief is not like anything else—that it is almost impossible to put in words: it comes suddenly; there is no preparing for how it might be; and, there is no actual fixing it without bringing the person back or pushing some button to reverse the massive change in their life. Being that grief is so confusing, healing in grief can also feel like a mystery. Most people say healing woul

Day 88: November in Grief I turned around this morning after making breakfast at a ridiculous hour due to daylight savings to find my 4-year-old hard at work updating our November calendar. I think she nailed it. (That, or she’s just ready for Christmas). In grief, November can be one big storm. No need to delineate the days. #grief #bereavement #grieftherapy #griefcounseling #groundedgrief #acutegrief #traumaticgrief #disenfranchisedgrief #miscarriage #suicide #homicide

Day 87: In Grief, Long-Term Thinking Doesn’t Make Sense Around the second month of the pandemic, I began to have a new relationship with time. I noticed that I could only think in blocks of one day at a time. This one-day-at-a-time thinking was not the flavor of being present in each lovely moment. It was different—it was more about survival. The energy towards goals and hopes and dreams and risks and future time markers did not only fall away—that kind of thinking just

Day 86: We want our suffering to mean something… There is a term in the grief world called “meaning making.” It used to bug me because when I first heard it, I interpreted the phrase as an over-simplistic prescription for how people should go about their grief—I thought it meant that all grievers should find meaning in the most terrible thing that happened to them. And frankly, that sounded tortuous and impossible. I have come to terms with “meaning making,” only becau

Day 85: We were Born Knowing How to Grieve I would say that 75% of my work is being with people as they unlearn the gamut of perceptions or beliefs they once learned to hold about grief. As I watch people shed some of these, I notice how they 1) gain access to a fuller range of emotions and 2) begin to have a higher tolerance for distress. Many of my clients learn that grief in and of itself is not the enemy—it is the not having it or dismissing it or judging it or lis

Day 84: Acute Grief—A Treacherous Landscape Acute grief is the term that refers to the initial phase of bereavement. Acute grief is the grief experience on steroids—the phase of grief in which every part of our bodies, heart, and minds are overcome with our human biological and psychological system’s desire to 1) figure out what happened and 2) assess if what happened is actually real. Acute grief is peppered with so many landmines including post-traumatic stress symptoms,

Day 83: What Does “Progress” Mean in Grief? A couple days ago I mentioned the words that don’t seem right when it comes to grief. These include “healing, recovery, getting better, and progress.” To someone who is grieving, especially early on in a grief journey, each of these words are a bit absurd. However, as time moves forward, I have noticed that many want to understand what constitutes “progress” when it comes to their journey. “Progression” might look to the outs

Day 82: Holidays can be Hard Halloween kicks off what most of my clients find to be a nightmarish feeling of “how am I going to get through this whole holiday season?” Holidays, or any special day, automatically forces reflection—a reflection towards the past and memories of what was happening last year when our person was with us or the last time we were all together. Holidays highlight absence. In my Day 54 post, “Dreading Days,” I spoke of how these days are often th

Day 81: We don’t grieve to “get better.” We grieve to feel differently. What does “getting better” even mean in grief? What does “healing” mean in grief? What does “recovery” mean in grief? What does “progress” mean in grief? All of these words are so imperfect when it comes to grief and usually make me bristle because they are rampant in our progress driven society. I believe that the only “healing, recovery, or progress” in grief is a matter of feeling differently, one

Day 80: Showing Up Can Be Scary Clients share the experience of their induction into the club of grievers they never wanted to be a part of…and I hear often “wow—I had no idea,” or “whew, I really said all the wrong things,” or “I know so much more now and wish I knew these things back then.” It is normal to feel so scared of someone else’s pain or even paralyzed in how to act. Yet, there is still enormous value in trying, because I promise you, you’re not the only one

Day 79: “Just-Show-Up” Ideas In my day 49 post, “JUST SHOW UP,” I tried to offer a framework for how to THINK about how to show up. I didn’t give actual answers, because there really is not one right way. Ever. However, there are ways to try. Here are just a few ideas. Have courage. Take a risk. Do something that resonates with YOU. It’s ok that your showing up will look different from how others show up. Thanks to my dearest friend @gowhillikers who was born knowing

Day 78: The Yearning for One Last Moment I’m reading Katherine May’s book, Wintering, and enjoying her words which encourage the sitting with and allowance for sadness. Her offering on grief is something I hear so often. If I had one more moment… The yearning for that may never leave us. Yet our relationship to that yearning can and will evolve. What does that yearning mean? At the end of the day, it means we loved. And we lost. And we miss. And we hoped for something diffe

Day 77: Grief & Depression Many years ago, I asked an acquaintance of mine who was open about living with major depression, and had lost his beloved partner a year prior, what is the difference between grief and depression? Without hesitation, these words were his offering—“in grief, the worst thing has already happened. In depression, you never know where the bottom could be.” While this is not representative of everyone’s experience, I’ve found it to be one helpful d

Day 76: Types of Pain in Grief This need not be an exhaustive list yet these are the ones I hear about the most. How does your grief pain show up? #grief #bereavement #grieftherapy #griefcounseling #groundedgrief #acutegrief #traumaticgrief #disenfranchisedgrief #miscarriage #suicide #homicide #infertility #nondeathloss #divorce #petloss #complicatedgrief #griefeducation #ambiguousloss #childgrief #selfcompassion #bereavedparents #bereavedfamilies #bereavedfamilies #bereavedm

Day 75: Where and how does your grief show up? One potential maddening (or at least perplexing) question I ask folks is where does their grief show up in their body? And then I go further—if that grief had a color or shape or movement or could even be visualized as some object or figure, what would it be? The reality is that the answer doesn’t ultimately matter. The mattering is in the person observing their grief in this way, and then building a relationship between t

C.S. Lewis wrote A Grief Observed after his own experience of losing his partner. This small book has always stuck with me. His observation that grief feels like fear is something I hear from folks every day. When we lose someone significant to us, our sense of trust in ourselves, others, and the world can feel obliterated. This shattering of that trust often shows up as increased fearfulness, anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and the urge to cocoon or run. Increased fearfulness i

I wish any of us could actually know and prepare for our grief journey. Here are some truths I’ve come to believe about grief timelines: There are 3 Phases in Grief : 1) Learning that the loss happened; 2) The Head and Heart connecting on the reality of the loss; and 3) Learning to live with this reality in one’s ongoing life. 1) The first phase is learning that the death, the event, the loss, actually happened. And that takes time. Learning that something happened can be

In grief, we are growing in two [seemingly] opposite directions. One growth direction is towards accessing our own strength and power and truth. This is the one that society recognizes as “healing.” The other way we are growing is towards our capacity to access and tolerate our own pain. This direction doesn’t usually feel like growth or healing; it is hard and messy, less sexy, less spoken about, and might even be mistaken for regressing or moving backwards. However, it is j

When we are grieving, we tend to remember how we felt in someone’s presence (if we are seen and heard OR not) instead of the exact words someone said. However, words can and do matter. The time of acute grief is filled with harder and easier moments that cycle rapidly. It is such a different experience from depression and anxiety and can feel so unfamiliar and unsettling. Easier and Harder have been the words I have found that best describe the cycle of these moments and the

Disloyalty in grief is that experience of feeling badly for feeling ok. It tends to happen in those moments that you chuckle at something and then get that drop in your stomach—how could I have any other emotion besides the devastating ones? I have yet to meet a grieving person who doesn’t have this experience. We humans swim in emotions about our emotions. This second layer of emotions, namely the self-punishing and diminishing ones, is where disloyalty lives. I have come