Stuck in Grief
Welcome to the club that nobody wants to be a part of.
It sucks.
Not quite the introduction you were probably expecting, huh? If you’re reading this then you’ve either experienced a significant loss, or you’re curious to know more about grief. It’s one of those experiences that you just can’t bypass. There’s no way to effectively swoop around grief, which means the only direction to heal, is to feel it all, is to go entirely through it.
Sound scary? It makes sense. It can feel like a system overload. When emotions start to feel out of our control, it can feel completely scary to not know how intense they’ll get, how long they’ll last, or at what inconvenient time all the feels might show up. Have you ever resisted the urge to do what your body seems to want you to do? Maybe you’ve swallowed that lump in your throat to prevent your eyes from welling up with tears. Maybe you dove into overworking instead of taking care of yourself. Ever notice when intense feelings come up there can also be an intense urge to cry, scream, hit, run, or just shut down? Our bodies are working in conjunction with our emotions to figure out the best ways to reconcile the new reality after someone dies. We cannot heal the brain without honoring what the body needs as well. Our emotions need space in our bodies to expand, to be acknowledged, to be held, and when ready - released.
At first (and often for a long time), the new reality just doesn’t make sense. How could it? You’ve spent years, if not your whole life, knowing this person. It will take some time to adjust to the fact that they’re physically gone. Grief can certainly show up at super inconvenient times throughout your day and sometimes you will feel the need to compartmentalize. But what does it mean when you’re all by yourself and you’re still struggling to tap into your feelings?
Well, a lot of different things.
Here are some common things that come up for my grievers:
Denial
Sometimes you’re just not ready to let the full reality sink in. It can still feel surreal for such a long time. You might be unable to accept and integrate the new reality of your person being gone yet. This takes time for many. Death is so permanent. A LOT can come up and when our nervous systems are too overloaded, it can push reality away, including loss.
Shock
Along with denial, shock can occur when feelings are too big to process. Our bodies are big protectors, when you let them coordinate with what’s going on in the brain, they might determine that it is just way too much to process all at once. This is also true if there is violence or some sort of tragedy that has occurred around someone’s death. It’s not going to be so easy to make sense of something terrible or senseless attached to loss.
Anger
Relationships can be loving, and also complicated. You may feel anger towards the person who died. You may wish someone else died instead of them. You may feel overwhelming anger towards the world in general. You may even feel anger towards others who seem to be happy, who seem to have moved on. It’s ok to feel angry.
Sadness
The realization of permanency starts to sink in. Sadness can feel like it digs deep into your bones and builds a new home inside you. What once was an emotion that came and went, can now feel like a permanent fixture in your day to day life after someone dies. Even as we move forward in grief, joyful memories and moments can often be felt with a pang of sadness. A gratitude for life can be forever swirled with a dull ache of the heart.
Guilt
Guilt is a big one that comes up with people. It seems to be our brains way of playing out every possible scenario ever. It can come with the thoughts of: ‘What if’s’ or ‘If we only had more time’ or ‘I wish I could change what I did/said.’ Sometimes there’s validity in those thoughts. More often, people are forgetting to zoom out and look at the whole picture - to take into account the full context of what was going on. It’s so easy to look at one isolated event or conversation and forget everything else that was going on in your world at that time. Have grace and be gentle with yourself here.
Learning how to trust your bodies natural responses and allowing emotions to flow is the most cathartic way to grieve, or to feel anything for that matter. I’ve always believed that our bodies do a pretty good job of letting us know when it’s too much. I don’t think we’re meant to grieve all of it, all at once. I honestly couldn’t even imagine feeling grief in one full swoop. Could you? I don’t know that our bodies and brains could handle the full intensity of loss all at once, so it begins to make sense why we feel in bits and pieces, and sometimes go for periods of not feeling much at all. Knowing the difference between avoidance and healing is super important. Take your time here.
