What Does It Mean To "Grow Through Grief"?

This podcast centers on grief and loss,

Which may bring up strong emotions.

As you listen,

Take care of yourself as needed.

Please know this podcast is not meant to replace professional grief support and makes no scientific claims.

Thank you for listening.

And grief growers don't leave grief behind.

They don't force themselves or give in to society's pressure to leave grief back there,

But make space for grief in their lives every single day,

Both on the milestones and in the day-to-day.

They don't see grief,

In other words,

As like a divergence or an obstacle from normal life.

Grief is a part of normal life.

It's a path,

A part of the path that they're already on.

Hi there,

Grief growers,

And welcome back to this inaugural episode of Grief Grower,

This podcast that has been on my heart for quite some time.

As always,

I am so honored to be here sharing space with you.

If you've been growing alongside me in my work for a while,

Welcome back.

If you are new to me and my work,

Hello,

And welcome again to the first episode of Dear Grief Guide.

My name is Shelby Forsythia.

I'm a grief coach who has helped thousands of grieving people stop feeling stuck in grief and build lives that they genuinely love from the lives loss forced them to live.

On this show,

We believe that grief is not something to get over.

It is something to grow with and alongside,

And that by treating grief less like a problem to be solved and more like an invitation to live more deeply,

We can build rich,

Meaningful lives that not only honor the losses that we've been through,

But also help us get a bigger picture and a bigger appreciation of what it means to live and to be alive right here and right now.

Today on the show,

We're going to be talking about what the heck does it mean to be a grief grower.

This is the name of the podcast.

This is what I call members of my community,

But there's not any sort of dictionary definition for what it means to be a grief grower.

This is a term that I invented many,

Many years ago,

Many moons ago,

When I started doing grief work back in 2016.

Just sort of out of default intuitive habit,

I started calling my community of people that I was talking to and with and growing alongside grief growers.

And the very first group that I created that was a community of grievers was called the Grief Growers Garden.

And apparently alliteration is my thing.

And we came together to talk about what it was to be grieving people,

But also what it was to choose to see grief as something to grow through instead of something to get over.

So let's dive into what it means to be a person who is growing through grief,

What it means to be a grief grower.

And here's the deal.

For the most part,

Society treats grief like an inconvenience.

For most of our lives,

We are met with,

After a loss,

This pressure to move on or find closure or let it go.

And people around us say things like,

Oh,

They wouldn't want you to be sad,

Or you have to be strong and keep going.

And even workplaces,

While they grant you three meager days to cope with your loss,

There's this sort of like pretending that we're all doing,

That grief is this time-limited thing,

And that it can end or go away at some point.

And then people,

Friends,

Family,

Co-workers,

Neighbors,

Sometimes even people who've never met us before,

Are frustrated or surprised or even start drifting away when we continue to grieve past their expectations of how long we're allowed to grieve.

And as grievers,

This is like mind-boggling of like,

How are you not understanding that this is a thing that keeps going?

And to the people around us,

I imagine that we are mind boggling of like,

How are you still here?

How are you still hung up on this?

How is this still such a problem for you?

How is this such a thing that is impacting your life?

But we as grieving people know,

Yeah,

This is one of the hardest and worst things to ever happen to me.

Of course,

It has an impact.

I often tell people,

Especially when I'm guesting on other people's podcasts,

I would be surprised if loss didn't have an impact on your life.

Like for people to look at you and expect you to return to normal or get back to business as usual,

As if you didn't just experience one of the most devastating things to roll through your life,

That's just baffling to me.

I'm always surprised when people say,

Well,

I want to go back to normal.

I'm like,

It's as if you're expecting the worst thing that ever happened to you to not have an impact on your life.

I would be genuinely surprised if loss did not have an impact on your life.

And I'm talking death of a loved one.

I'm also talking about death of a less than loved one.

I'm also talking about divorce,

Breakup,

Major diagnosis,

Cross-country move,

Job loss,

Pet loss,

Miscarriage,

Abortion.

I'm talking about all the things that influence our life.

I mean,

The list keeps going on and on.

Geographic move,

Financial loss,

Having to relocate,

Whether it's your choice or not,

Living through a war or some other sort of political strife,

Having land that you love be taken over,

Whether,

Again,

By your choice or not by your choice.

There are so,

So,

So many things that we grieve and I would be surprised if they did not have an impact on you.

But again,

I'm kind of losing myself,

But I want to get back to this notion of people and society gives us this timeline for how long we're allowed to grieve or how long grief is supposed to last.

So to me,

There's no surprise that there's a lot of grieving people,

Including myself in the early days of my mother's death that feel lost and alone and abandoned and left behind and broken.

And something that I try to relay so hard in my work and the reason I'm starting this podcast,

Hi,

Welcome to episode one,

We're all here together,

Is that I believe that there is another way to approach the concept of moving forward in life after loss.

And it's everything this show is about.

It's what if instead of having to get over your grief,

You allowed yourself to grow with it.

And this sentence,

That singular belief is at the core of what it means to be a grief grower,

Somebody who's committed to growing through grief.

Grief growers are people who don't see grief as a problem to be solved or a wound that you can put a bandaid on,

But something that's a lifelong companion.

And grief growers don't leave grief behind.

They don't force themselves or give into society's pressure to leave grief back there,

But make space for grief in their lives every single day,

Both on the milestones and in the day to day.

They don't see grief,

In other words,

As like a divergence or an obstacle from normal life.

Grief is a part of normal life.

It's a path,

A part of the path that they're already on.

And more than that,

Grief is not something that's wrong with them.

It's not a bug in their programming or something that needs to be taken out,

Examined,

Dealt with,

Medicated,

Treated,

Solved,

Fixed,

Any insert word of your choice here.

It is something that is a part of them and belongs to them.

And part of growing with grief involves weaving grief in and honoring grief's presence in every moment of their lives.

So if you've ever felt this pressure to hurry up and forget your grief,

But your heart is like,

That doesn't make sense.

It doesn't make sense to let go of this or leave this back there or put this somewhere else other than right here,

Right now,

Then you might be a grief grower.

So today on the show,

I want to run through three traits of what it means to be a grief grower.

Okay,

Number one,

A grief grower believes that growth is happening even when progress feels slow or inconsistent or nonexistent in the aftermath of loss.

Because society does this thing where it treats grief as like a period of stuckness,

Or again,

Like a retreat or a detour from normal life.

And then this pressure to like,

Well,

Pull your car back on the road,

Got to keep going.

This pressure is really big,

Especially in a world like ours,

That's so rooted in capitalism,

That prioritizes this constant,

Like visible up and to the right progress growth at all times.

But grief growers know that grief is not being stuck or having taken a detour or this stagnancy,

You're not parked in your car on the side of the road.

And grief is certainly not doing nothing.

Grief is doing a whole heck of a lot.

And a grief grower is somebody who is willing to believe,

Even in small bits,

Even hesitantly at first,

That something is still happening,

Growth is still happening,

Even in the darkness and the hardness of grief.

This growth might be invisible,

It might be slow,

It might feel like it's impossible for growth to be happening on some days.

And yet,

With so many grieving people that I've met deep down,

There's this,

Like trust,

Almost like a weird warped divine faith,

That even if they don't understand how or where or why,

Grief is taking them somewhere.

There is something happening with grief.

And there's this sort of belief,

Even in the presence of suffering and despair,

That one day I'm going to be able to look back on this and recognize that things were shifting.

And I was adapting,

Even if I can't see it right now,

Even though that I would have identified as the worst season of my grief.

Grief growers inherently believe this.

And I see this through so many other spaces I work in as well.

We often talk about tracking progress in grief,

Not as societies up and to the right,

Constant improvement,

But as how our shifting needs and focuses and priorities change over time,

Because that is a kind of growth too,

To kind of be dabbling in one thing for a little bit and then be exploring one thing in another season.

So perhaps in one season of your grief,

You're trying to figure out how to sleep through the night.

That's the biggest,

Number one priority you've got on your plate right now.

Whereas in another season of your life,

You might be doing the really hard and gritty work of renegotiating your relationships with people in work,

At home,

At school,

In your love life.

You might be trying to figure out where grief belongs in relationship to other people.

That is another sort of project.

And so you can be growing not necessarily in one thing,

In one way,

But in multiple things in multiple ways all the time.

And the growth might be slow.

The growth might be weird.

The growth might be non-linear,

But grief growers know the growth is happening.

Okay,

Number two.

Grief growers see grief as a long-term relationship instead of as a short-term problem.

So,

So many times people are taught that grief has an expiration date,

Whether it's a year after a death or six months for a pet loss or one month for something medical or diagnosis that happens to you.

But grief growers reject this idea because I got to tell you,

And so many grieving people will tell you that there's no such thing as like popping out of bed one morning and declaring,

All right,

I'm done with grief,

Done with done grieving now.

I am finished thinking about grief,

Being a person who is grieving.

I am,

I am done with that task.

There's no such thing as checking grief off your list.

Grief growers understand that grief is here for the long haul,

Not as an enemy or dictator like this force that's over your shoulder all the time and trying to tell you how your life should go,

But more kind of to the side of you as a lifelong companion.

I've often described grief as a roommate of sorts that has this like noticeable influence on how you live.

You may have not wanted this roommate to move in,

But this roommate is here for the rest of your life regardless.

But treating grief like a long-term relationship,

It doesn't mean you're signing up to be sad forever.

It's just acknowledging the presence of that grief roommate and that your relationship will ebb and flow over time.

And just like having a human roommate,

There will be joyful milestones and there'll be hard milestones.

There's getting through the day-to-day and then getting through when one of you is gone or one of you is traveling or one of you has a big thing that's due.

It's very much letting grief be a living entity that's in your life.

And students that I work with have told me once they shifted their energy from fighting grief,

Being against grief and using their energy to push it away,

To collaborating with grief,

Bringing it alongside,

They suddenly had so much more energy to work with.

There is a great fatigue and exhaustion.

There's a big amount of energy that it takes to push grief down and away versus to allow grief to be something that is in collaboration with you or cooperation with you or united in moving forward with you.

It takes a heck of a lot more energy to resist grief,

To push it down and away,

Than it does to sit beside it,

To ask it questions,

To create intentional practices in your life where grief is allowed and welcome to show up.

A practice I've seen in grief growers and something that we enjoy doing together is making room for grief instead of trying to banish it or put that away or leave that back there or put that up on the shelf and then I go live my normal life.

Instead of forcing grief to be somewhere other than they are,

They let themselves be in the same room as grief.

They let grief be in the same room as them.

They coexist with it.

They honor it.

They weave it into the life that they're already living.

They know that grief is going to appear in their present.

It's already here and it's going to keep being here,

So why not dedicate space and energy to being alongside it?

Grief growers understand that grief is a long-term relationship and not a short-term problem.

Grief's in it for the long haul.

Okay,

Number three.

A grief grower understands that the work of grief is never finished and that's okay.

In fact,

That's how it's supposed to be.

Again,

Kind of like number two,

We know,

Grief growers know,

That grief isn't something to fix.

It's not a disease that can be cured with a pill or a math problem that has this like final certain solution.

There's a right answer and everything else is a wrong answer.

Grief is this lifelong process that changes and grows with us.

Many people believe that over time,

Grief gets smaller,

Like it shrinks in the amount of pain or sorrow or sadness or influence it has over time.

Grief's not all bad all the time,

But a lot of people describe grief as like the waves come and then the waves lessen or they happen less frequently and that's not a framework that I necessarily agree with.

Grief growers know and I know from my own experience having lost my mom,

My best friend,

A broken engagement,

Saying goodbye to my cat last year.

Grief growers know that grief stays the same size throughout their life.

It's not a thing that shrinks.

It's that we are people,

Our lives expand around it.

We grow to encompass that grief and then some.

We are getting bigger all the time.

We are growing all the time and this idea is not mine.

It's not original to me.

It's perfectly visualized in Lois Tonkin's model of growing around grief.

She created this in 1996 and she originally developed this like visual,

This illustration after talking to a grieving mother who described her own grief experience like this.

She said,

At first grief was everything.

It filled all the space in my life,

But over time my grief started to grow around it.

My world got bigger even though the grief was still there and I've seen this diagrammed in so many spaces and so many places online.

She showed an experience or a reality of gradually expanding circles where grief is like this dot in the middle and the grief doesn't get any smaller.

It's that the larger circle,

You,

Your life,

Grows around the grief and so the dot of grief stays the same size as you go,

But your life expands around the grief and this is why,

Especially in the early days of loss,

It can feel like grief is so intense because for the most part grief is all there is.

Your life is consumed by,

Rightly so,

Through no fault or problem or default or defect of your own.

Grief is the thing you're focusing on and then gradually as living with grief becomes not necessarily more comfortable,

But maybe more predictable or maybe more familiar.

You may never be able to predict grief,

But it can become more familiar to you.

You start to kind of do what society would say is get back to normal life,

But be able to ride the waves of grief a little bit better,

To be in cohabitation with it,

To do things like go to work,

Go to school,

Cook for yourself,

Clean yourself,

Interact with friends,

Family,

And loved ones,

And your life is growing around the grief.

You are having new experiences,

You're traveling to new places,

And life grows around grief.

You have new experiences,

You build new relationships potentially,

And you might even experience the return of things like happiness,

Hope,

And joy.

Grief itself,

Again,

Does not get smaller.

It stays the same exact size,

But because you are continuing to live life around it,

It's like this giant boulder in the center of a garden.

It continues to exist,

But the size of the garden and the plants that grow there and the seasons that are happening,

Those all change.

And this is what it means to grow around and through and with grief,

And so much of the,

Going back to my boulder metaphor,

The cornerstone of what we're up to here on Grief Grower.

And I am just so excited to have you here as a listener on the podcast.

I will say,

Some days in your grief will feel just as intense as they did in the beginning,

Because that grief has still taken up a honking amount of room in your life.

That big boulder does not go away,

And there are so many authors,

Writers,

Podcasters,

Researchers that say,

Yep,

Grief doesn't go away.

Grief,

Again,

Rule number two,

Grief is with us for the long haul.

It's a long-term relationship.

But other days,

Especially as your life grows around grief,

As that circle of your life and you get bigger as you expand to grow around and encompass that grief,

It can feel softer.

You might have a day where you're spending most of your time on the outskirts of that garden,

Tending to other plants,

Interacting with other elements of your life and who you are in the world.

Your interactions with grief are not only softened by time and distance,

Being literally away from that rock and having practice being away from that rock in the middle of your life,

But also the time you've spent tending to your grief and taking care of it,

Planting things around it,

Learning the role it plays as a major cornerstone and character,

For lack of better phrasing,

In the cast of your life,

In the world of your own grief garden.

There will be days when that rock is the biggest and most obnoxious thing that you can see.

There will be sorrow,

There will be heartache,

But there are also days that bring sunshine and laughter and joy and not to get too cheesy,

But I'm thinking like rainbows and unicorns,

There will be days when yes,

The grief is present because it's always a part of the garden,

But it's not the center of your focus.

And that is a huge,

Huge life changer when it comes to how you see and interact with grief,

Because society would tell you,

All right,

How do we excavate the boulder?

And that's not possible.

That's not a real way to co-exist with grief.

Oftentimes what happens when society demands that of us is that we try and lift this heavy thing and relocate it somewhere else.

And even if we succeed,

We know it's there and its presence,

For lack of better phrasing,

Almost haunts us.

We are reminded of it.

It keeps popping up.

It keeps getting in the way in ways that we often wish it didn't.

And so by allowing it to exist in the garden of our lives day to day,

Where we are already living,

Where we are already existing,

It is such a big difference.

Again,

An energy of from fighting,

Resisting,

Pushing away,

Ignoring grief,

To allowing grief to be a part of the life that we are already in the process of building.

I'm not saying you have to be okay with your loss.

I'm not saying you have to enjoy the fact that grief is there.

I'm not even saying you have to appreciate or be grateful for it.

Do not mistake me here.

What I am saying is that grief growers recognize that it's normal to have the presence of grief and to coexist with the presence of grief and grow around it for the rest of their lives.

And not only that it's normal and okay,

But that's exactly how it's supposed to be.

This is exactly how grief is supposed to work.

You do not have to force grief away or move on and leave loss in the past or leave it back there or cordon it off from every other element of your life.

Instead,

You can notice all the ways that you are expanding and growing around it,

Allowing grief to be this significant part of the greater,

Fuller,

And richer story of your life.

I want to close out by asking you,

Are you a grief grower?

Is this an identity that you would assign to yourself?

And I would suspect the answer is yes.

If one,

You believe,

Even if you can't see it right now,

That you are making progress in the depths or the darkness of loss,

That there is something happening here,

Even if you can't explain why,

Even if that just feels like faith,

Believing without seeing.

If you believe that you're making progress,

Even in the depths of loss,

You might be a grief grower.

Two,

If you understand that grief is with you for the long haul,

That this thing is not going to go away,

And it probably isn't supposed to,

Then you might be a grief grower.

And then finally,

If you know that it is possible to build a beautiful life around loss,

Even if you can't see how right now or why that would be possible for you,

Then you're probably already a grief grower.

And I need you to know,

As more episodes of this podcast come out,

As we grow this garden of grief together,

I am not gonna tell you gotta let things go.

This is not the space for that,

Regardless of what society or the media or your friends and family tell you.

You do not have to meet any single person or any large forces expectations for how you grieve.

You get the autonomy and the power to carry grief with you in a way that makes sense for your loss,

And a way that makes space for your loss,

As well as everything else that makes up the grand ever-evolving garden of your own life.

You get to decide what goes there.

You get to decide what stays there,

And for how long,

And how you want to honor the things that cannot be moved or uprooted.

And as we close this out here,

I want to say I am so,

So honored to have you here for this first episode of Grief Grower,

And for all of our episodes to come.

There are so many ways that we grieve,

And there are so many ways that we can honor our grief and grow with it,

Instead of trying to,

As society continues to tell us or demand of us,

To push it down,

To stuff it away,

To get over it,

To let go,

To find closure,

And to move on already.

It is simply not a sustainable way to live.

And I am just so grateful to share space and time with you each week.

This is the place where we're gonna grow through grief together.