Dear Grief Guide, I Expected Grief To Feel Different

Hello and welcome to Dear Grief Guide,

A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost,

Stuck,

Heartbroken,

Or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

My name is Shelby Forsythia.

I'm a grief coach and author,

And I'm here to help you create a life you love from the life loss forced you to live.

Let's get to today's letter.

Dear Grief Guide,

It's been six months since my young son passed away,

And I find myself lost in an unexpected place.

When he died,

I thought grief would be a torrent of sadness,

Rage,

And burning emotion eating me alive,

But instead it's like a numbing fog has settled over my life.

I guess I expected grief to feel different.

Instead of the intense emotions I anticipated,

I feel a constant dullness that blurs the edges of everything.

I have no violent outbursts,

No crying fits,

Just a heavy,

Pervasive numbness that coats everything.

I go through the motions of daily life,

But everything feels muted.

My wife and I barely talk about our son.

I know she's hurting too,

But we seem unable to connect in our shared grief.

At work,

I'm just a shell of myself.

Tasks that used to engage me now feel pointless.

I'm distracted and distant,

And my colleagues have started to notice.

They offer their condolences,

But their words seem hollow,

Bouncing off the thick fog enveloping me.

Friends and family try to reach out,

But I find it hard to engage.

I feel disconnected from everyone and everything,

Like I'm watching life through a pane of frosted glass.

Their well-meaning advice and attempts at comfort just remind me how different my experience of grief is from what I imagined.

I'm not sure how to navigate this emptiness.

How do I find my way back to feeling,

Even if it's the pain I initially expected?

How can I support my wife when I can't even seem to support myself?

I'm desperate for any guidance you can offer on moving through this numbness and finding a way to truly grieve.

Sincerely,

What the Heck.

Hi there,

What the Heck.

Thank you so much for that signature,

Because that is a big shared emotion in the aftermath of loss.

What the heck?

I hear you.

I have seen so many clients through the years,

And even in my online course,

Life After Loss Academy,

Who share the sentiment of,

I thought grief would be different.

I thought it would feel different.

I thought it would look different.

I thought it would sound different.

I thought,

Metaphorically,

That it would taste different.

I just thought the experience of grief would not present itself like this.

And this is something I want to offer you today.

Not only are you grieving your son,

The devastating loss of your son,

You are also grieving the way grief was supposed to go.

And this is something that I have not heard any grief expert talk about.

That's not to say that people don't talk about it,

But it's something that's really discussed in the grief community is,

For so many of us,

Whether we have an education in grief or not,

Before our loss,

We have expectations of how grief should go.

Society tells us,

Teaches us,

Our friends and family teach us and tell us,

The media teaches and tells us,

What grief should look like,

Or what grief does look like.

You may have learned a model of grief from family members.

I remember listening to my mother cry behind closed doors after her father,

My grandfather died,

And kind of internalizing the story of,

Huh,

Grief is big emotions behind closed doors.

And so that was one expectation I had of grief and loss.

But then of course,

I watch movies and TV shows,

Steel Magnolias is one of my favorites,

And Sally Fields outburst at the grave of her daughter,

This hysterical reckoning with life after loss,

Almost wanting to hit something,

For being so angry,

I was like,

Oh,

Grief can look like that too.

Violence in the safety and presence of close friends,

That could be a version of grief too.

And so we take all of these iterations of what grief looks like from society,

Our friends,

Our family and the media,

And when we actually grieve,

We expect it to look like that.

And sometimes it does.

And sometimes it doesn't.

And when it doesn't,

It becomes another thing that we must grieve.

The expectation of what grief was supposed to,

Quote unquote,

Look like,

And the reality of how it's actually presenting.

So this is what I want you to do first,

I want you to grab a blank piece of paper,

Any size will do,

And set a timer for five minutes.

I like setting timers when making lists,

Because that way your experience,

Your emotions,

Your deep diving in this does not go on forever,

We pull you out of it.

But to make a list.

On one side,

The left side,

How I expected grief to go.

And on the right side,

How grief is actually showing up for me.

And you might find that some things are the same,

I expected grief to go like this,

And it's going like this.

But in a lot of ways,

You might find that I expected grief to go like this,

And it's actually going like this.

And see what emotions,

If any,

Come up for you while doing this exercise.

And for every expectation and reality that you list for every pair,

These are things you can grieve and release.

And this is something I'd love to help you do in Life After Loss Academy,

Because we go through a step by step framework of putting language to the thing you need to release,

Developing a ritual for how to release it,

Big or small,

And then actually doing the work of releasing it,

Following through with that ritual.

I will say that what you are experiencing sounds a little bit like shock.

So it could be that the going through the motions,

The stuck behind the trapped glass,

The feeling confined in this fog for now,

Could be temporary.

This is certainly still not how you expected grief to go,

To be in this state of numbness perpetually or dullness perpetually.

But also,

I say perpetually,

And this is a state of being that can change,

And for many grieving people does.

Shock is a protective mechanism that our bodies,

Our nervous systems deploy when we are in states of extreme stress or extreme devastation,

And loss is included in that list.

It could be that your nervous system is still figuring out how to do life with grief,

How to go through the motions,

How to be a person who has lost their child.

And when you feel safe enough,

It could be a month from now,

It could be a year from now,

It could be five years from now.

And when it feels safe enough,

You will start to feel feelings again.

You will have the energy,

Your nervous system will have the capacity to feel big emotions.

And I hope you know there is absolutely no shame in grieving a major loss months and even years after it happened,

Because so many times,

What we have to do first,

What our body demands we do first,

Is be in shock,

Is be in this cushioned fog of numbness while we try and figure out simply how to stay alive in the aftermath of loss,

And then we can get to the other stuff,

The big feelings,

The violent outbursts,

The crying fits,

Whatever the case may be,

Then we can get there.

But right now,

Your body may be telling you that you don't have the energy for that.

You don't have the capacity for that.

You don't have the ability to rest enough to recover from that.

And so for now,

The baseline is shock.

And that's okay.

I cannot tell you how many grieving people I've worked with who are mourning something that happened 2,

5,

10,

12 years ago,

And they feel distress because the emotions are only coming up now.

But when we dig deeper into their experiences,

What we find is they often experience many great losses at once,

Where they lost multiple people,

Or there was a death and then a breakup and then a major move.

There's many transitions that happen in the aftermath of loss.

Or world events,

Hello COVID,

Were so big and so great and so dire at the time that there was no space to grieve.

The focus on was just surviving.

And then the work of grief,

The heavy,

Heavy,

Hard and hard work of expressing and releasing grief,

That needed to come later for their survival.

And the same may be true for you.

I want to offer you one more thing,

And this might be a little pigeonholey,

But I want you to follow me for just a second and see if this resonates with you.

If it does,

Great.

If it doesn't,

Absolutely discard it.

No pressure ever to take on anything I tell you as the right way to go,

Especially when you're grieving.

Not because I,

From your letter,

You make it clear that you are a person who identifies as a man,

Somebody who is raised by society,

As a male person,

Whether that is your sex assigned at birth,

I do not know,

But,

And,

There's a lot of grief research that shows in Eurocentric or Westernized societies,

The US,

Canada,

Europe,

Australia,

A lot of people in those cultures,

Women tend to be demonstrative,

Emotional grievers,

Talking about feelings,

Feeling more intuitive,

Kind of plugging into telling the story and expressing the emotion of the experience.

While men tend to put on a strong or brave front,

As society teaches,

That's what men should do.

So it might be worth examining what you learned about grief as a man,

What you know about grief as a man,

What you've seen about grief as a man,

And it might not be very much because men are told to not show any emotions,

Even grief,

But it might also be worth tapping into as a strength,

As a man,

That maybe what you need to express your grief is not the grief support circle of folding chairs with a box of tissues on the ground.

Maybe it's something more action-oriented to do something with your hands or to do something with your voice.

Singing is a very common coping mechanism and can be very beneficial for men because it's a way to physically move grief up and out of your body without actually talking about an emotion and expressing it and storytelling it with other people,

Which can feel too vulnerable or too uncomfortable.

You might play a sport,

You might go on more regular walks,

You might start to lift weights,

Throw heavy things around,

Throw punches,

And I really am pigeonholing you on gender and as a queer person that always makes me feel weird,

But and also if you identify with this of like the emotional space of sharing stories about my child,

About sharing my emotions openly,

Even putting words to them is really tricky for me.

Sometimes tapping into your emotions can look like going to the physical first,

Breathwork,

Yoga,

Swimming,

Basketball,

Whatever it is with you.

And it might also look like,

Here's another thing you could turn to,

Thinking about grief instead of feeling your way through grief.

So this was actually helpful for me as somebody who identifies as and was raised as a woman.

I really tuned into and loved learning about frameworks for grief.

I liked thinking about grief probably even before I started really feeling my grief.

It was like I needed a safe structure to feel my grief,

But I liked thinking about it first.

So there are so,

So many frameworks for grief in the world,

Structures that help you understand what it is that's happening and how to move through it.

Of course,

If you want to work with me,

Life After Loss Academy is always open year round and we do the five-step grief framework,

G-R-I-E-F.

So first we ground,

We show you how to feel safe in a world where anything can happen.

Then we release,

This is the part I was talking about earlier about rituals and doing the hard and hard work of naming emotions,

Expectation versus reality,

And then turning them into rituals to quote unquote,

Let them go.

Although that's not everybody's chosen language for that.

Third,

We integrate,

We talk about how to fold grief into your life,

Finding signs and symbols to connect you with your people,

Carrying their memory forward with you.

Then we establish,

Step four is to look at your relationships with other people.

So you have coworkers,

You have friends and family members,

How are you talking about and doing grief with them and how might you like to do it differently?

And then we foster a lifetime partnership with grief.

How do we talk about grief in the long-term?

And so it's not the five stages of grief,

Which is a popular and not always helpful framework for grief.

That was actually intended for people who are dying and I can do a whole other podcast episode on that.

It is intended to how do we start essentially at ground zero of grief,

The devastating thing has happened and I'm trying to figure out how to move in the world again,

To how do I live the entire rest of my life with grief?

It's like starting underground and then growing up and out of the soil.

And finally,

How do you cultivate a lifetime with grief in the grand garden of your life?

I love plant metaphors.

So if you'd like to work with me,

You can certainly do that.

You can come join us in Life After Loss Academy.

There are other professionals in this space who have their own frameworks for grief and loss,

And it might be helpful to you to think about grief or to think about death and dying or to think about how you might like to proceed through the rest of your life in a framework-y way,

In a way that has structure.

So then within the structure,

There are containers,

Designated containers for working through your feelings.

The very last thing I want to offer you,

What the heck,

Is affirmations.

Because as fluffy as they may be,

They can be so reassuring to tell yourself in the midst of your grief.

And one of the myths of shock and numbness and feeling doled out to the world is having other people look at you and judge you and say things like,

Wow,

He really must not care.

If he's not showing any emotion,

He must not give two shits about what's happened in his life.

He must not be capable of feeling.

And you might even be telling some of these stories to yourself,

You might be waking up and wondering,

Do I care?

Do I recognize that this has changed my life?

Do I actually give a crap that this huge life changing thing has happened?

Am I an emotionless monster?

So what I want to offer you before we say goodbye today,

Is three simple affirmations.

I still care.

I'm still affected.

The death of my son is still life changing.

Even if it doesn't show on my face.

And even if I can't feel it yet,

In my body.

I still care.

I'm still affected.

This is still life changing.

Even if it doesn't show on my face.

And even if I can't feel it yet,

In my body.

Know that that is true.

Know that you are still someone with feelings,

Even if it feels like you can't feel your feelings right now.

Know that you are someone who still deeply cares as evidenced by the language you used in your letter,

And how much this concerns you.

Notice how much this has changed your life.

Even if it's not outwardly showing.

All of this is happening right now,

Under the surface in a way that you haven't found yet to express.

But trust and know that you are still impacted.

And that you can know you are still impacted.

You are not an unfeeling monster.

You are not a soulless man.

You are not someone who has experienced extreme devastation,

And has gotten over it and is just out there living life,

Same as always,

Routine.

You are someone who is likely in an enormous amount of shock,

Doing the very best he can to tap into what feeling his feelings might look like in the future.

Because you know that in some way,

That is a doorway to your next steps of healing.

That never ending,

Ongoing process of healing from the hardest things that have ever happened to us.

You have my support.