Dear Grief Guide, I Can't Start Grieving - Content Warning

*Contains discussion of suicide* After the suicide of their mother, a listener struggles to move through numbness and shock and begin to feel their emotions. I read their anonymous letter and then offer them practical tools and compassionate wisdom for growing through grief.

Dear Grief Guide is a weekly advice podcast where I answer anonymous letters from people feeling lost, stuck, or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

Music © Adi Goldstein, Used with Permission

Transcript

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 nearly a year since my mom died by suicide,

But I'm still unable to start grieving.

Whenever I think of her or my loss,

I just go numb.

Even at her grave,

I can't seem to connect her death to my reality.

I've tried looking at pictures or telling stories about my mom,

Because even though I can't feel my grief,

I still feel uneasy most of the time,

Like I'm just waiting for it to come.

I listen to and read a lot about grief,

But it always seems as though grief comes naturally to other people,

While I don't know how or where to even start.

I feel like I'm stuck at the very beginning,

Where my reflex is to use all my power to fight off the small problems,

Like not starting to cry or not thinking about things that feel too painful.

It's exhausting.

But I don't know how to give up fighting,

And instead confront the source of it,

The death of my mom.

So my question is,

How could I progress from this point of feeling stuck at the beginning of grief?

Do you have any tips on how to start grieving?

I also want to say thank you for all the work you do.

Your podcasts have been a great resource to me during the last few months.

Yours,

Stuck at the Start.

Okay,

Stuck at the Start.

I want to acknowledge a great many things for you here at the top of my response to your letter.

First,

Almost a year is not a long time in grief land.

Almost a year versus what I often put in all capital letters,

The entire rest of your life is pretty short in the grand scheme of things.

People who come to me and say,

It's been a year,

Why haven't I started grieving?

I'm like,

That's,

That's about right.

That's normal to feel as if the grief process has barely begun or not even begun.

Because here's the thing,

Especially for sudden unexpected or tragic loss,

Such as a suicide.

Oftentimes the first place we go in grief is not processing the loss because that's too much for our brains and our bodies and sometimes even our spirits to handle.

It's shock.

It's shock.

And in using this word numbness or numb,

I can recognize in you through your words,

That the house that you're living in right now,

The space in which you inhabit in your grief is shock.

And something I want to reframe for you here today is that shock is grieving.

By experiencing a loss,

By feeling numbness,

By feeling shock,

You are already grieving.

I think a lot of people,

Including you,

But also including me when my mom died,

Use this language of,

I'm not,

I'm not grieving yet.

If I'm not crying,

If I'm not working through my emotions,

If I'm not expressing pain,

If I'm not digging deep into the story or the reality of what happened,

If I'm not finding a way to accept it,

Then I must not be grieving yet.

When in reality,

Every single breath you take,

Every minute that you continue to exist after a devastating loss,

You are grieving.

It just doesn't necessarily look the way that society tells us it's supposed to when we're grieving.

So stuck at the start,

I want to acknowledge that since your mother's death,

And maybe even before it,

Depending on the circumstances surrounding her loss,

You are already grieving.

You are an experienced griever.

What you are experiencing in your grief right now,

Or in the recent past,

Is numbness,

Shock,

And an inability to engage with emotions.

But that is also grief.

It all falls under the umbrella of grief.

So I think what you're asking me in this question,

And it's a really valid question,

I get this a lot from new clients I work with,

People who join my online course,

Is,

I know that I'm grieving.

I know I've experienced a loss,

But I can't seem to engage with my emotions.

I can't seem to dig into what I'm feeling,

To name what I'm feeling,

To excavate it,

To process it,

To release it,

To get it out of my body.

There's a sense sometimes of a stuckness,

Or a stagnancy,

Or an inability to move forward,

An inability to kind of grease the wheels of grief and get something moving,

Get your emotional experience unlocked,

And in some sort of thing that feels like motion.

So I want to offer you what I teach my students in Life After Loss Academy,

And they are grieving losses like yours,

Like suicide,

To things like divorce,

And estrangement,

And an empty nest,

And a recent diagnosis,

All sorts of things that shatter us as people,

And can often put us in this space of shock.

And it's not a series of stages,

As is so often portrayed by society,

The five stages of grief,

Which is a myth,

That's a topic for a separate podcast.

It is a series of steps,

A predictable path that so many of my grieving students and myself follow in order to process grief,

Move through grief,

Grow through grief,

And build individually to all of us a good life after loss.

And because what I think you're talking about is wanting to express emotions and wanting to figure out how to start to move emotions through your body,

That's,

For me,

That's step two in Life After Loss Academy.

Step one,

The thing that I will ask you to do first,

Especially because your current status is numbness,

Shock,

Inability to go deep without feeling exhausted,

Is to ground.

And in Life After Loss Academy,

I take grieving people through a series of about eight to ten short,

Impactful,

Easy-to-implement exercises to create spaces and rituals and routines that feel safe and calm and grounding and centering,

Even for five to ten minutes a day.

It doesn't have to be a long time.

It doesn't have to be,

My whole day feels peaceful,

Because that's pretty impossible when you're grieving.

But to create these pockets of calm or peace or just feeling like there's earth underneath your feet,

When you're in this place of everything feels upside down,

Everything feels too intense,

It starts to operate as this home base for you and your grief.

And it tells your brain,

It sends a message to your brain that even though this awful thing has happened,

I have a safe place in the world to return to,

To process my grief when I am ready to go there.

And a lot of my grieving students find that even just starting to do these grounding practices,

It gives their grief,

It gives their emotions space to surface.

Oftentimes we're so busy or we're so distracted or we're so tired that we don't give our grief space to appear.

And oftentimes just creating this space that feels peaceful,

Calm,

Grounded,

Grief starts to show up and say things,

Offer things,

Things we miss,

Things we want to do,

Things we love,

Things that we're yearning for,

Things that eventually need to be processed.

But first,

Before we do the work of processing,

We must ground,

Get grounded,

Reassure ourselves through our five senses,

Again,

Through routines and rituals,

That it's possible to feel safe,

To create pockets where you feel safe in the world,

Even for five to 10 minutes a day.

In a world where loss has tragically taught us that anything can happen to anyone at any time.

Because let me tell you what,

Recognizing that truth of reality,

That anything can happen to anyone at any time,

For so many of us,

Including myself after my mother died,

It sends this message of whether we acknowledge it or not,

The world is not a safe place for me.

And to construct for ourselves some sort of safety,

Some sort of ground underneath our feet again,

After loss,

And say,

I can't control what happens,

But I can be a place for myself that is secure and stable,

That's a beautiful place to build foundation again when everything falls apart.

And then,

Stuck at the start.

Then we do the hard work,

And often I call it the heart work,

Of releasing.

And I think this is what you're pointing to,

Is this sense that I need to work through everything that's happened.

I need to figure out how to feel it,

I need to figure out how to express it,

I need to get it up and out of my body,

Yes.

This is what so many students refer to as the hardest part of Life After Loss Academy when they work through it with me,

But it's often the most gratifying because finally,

Finally,

Finally,

After people saying you just need to move through your grief and grievers saying how,

They have a path,

They have a response,

They have a toolkit to do so.

So in releasing,

In Life After Loss Academy,

I teach you how to not only name what has been lost,

But grieve it and release it.

To let it go,

But not in the way that insists you forget.

To let it go in the way that allows you to set it down.

To say I don't have to carry this anymore,

I can memorialize it,

I can ritualize it,

I can say goodbye to it in a really meaningful way,

I can allow myself to be wounded and then retreat to the space I've created to ground,

That first step,

And then gradually I can find ways to move forward from that.

But it is the place,

The release module,

This step two,

Is the place where we figure out and begin to excavate all of those emotional experiences that society so often associates with grief.

And then the lovely thing that happens after releasing is that there's more.

There is more beyond feeling and expressing and releasing the emotional pain of grief.

There is integrating,

Finding ways to remember.

There is establishing,

Gathering and founding a support network around you of family,

Friends,

Supporters who can be there for you as you grieve.

And finally,

Fostering a good,

Long lifetime partnership with grief,

Adapting to waves of grief that you know are coming over time,

Forming a relationship with grief that feels less like fighting and more like collaborating.

There is so much more beyond this releasing and moving through of emotions,

And I teach it all in my online course.

So Stuck at the Start,

I hope you'll reach out to me to become a student.

In the course,

I'd love to have you there.

I think what you're asking is something that so many of my students have asked through the years,

So much so that I created this whole course in response to those questions.

And know that,

I just want to validate again,

You are already grieving.

By experiencing loss,

You are already grieving.

You may not be grieving in the way that society says is grief or looks like grief,

The sobbing,

The rage,

The emotional aspect of it.

But in experiencing shock and numbness and a resistance to anything that feels intense or extreme,

That is a part of grief.

I gotta tell you.

It was a part of my grief for sure.

And it's a part of so many other people's grief that I work with too,

Is this,

This phase one,

This early months of,

I don't even know how to feel yet.

So that grounding comes first.

First you create a secure place in the world,

Something that feels like a home base,

Something that's predictable and reliable.

And then you can do that really hard work and heart work of feeling.

You can do the work of starting to grieve.

And I'll tell you why that comes second.

Because when things do get overwhelming,

When things do get too intense,

When things feel so extreme that you feel like you might lose it or go crazy or,

Or not be able to come back from it,

You have already done the groundwork of creating a safe pocket for yourself in the world,

A place that feels calm and peaceful and secure and welcoming of you and all of your emotions,

A place where it's okay to rest.

And God,

That is a beautiful thing when you're grieving.

So stuck at the start,

Know that even though you can't see it,

You are already grieving.

You're already doing the work of grief.

I think you know that more work is next.

And the fact that you're asking this question tells me that you are ready in some way to start pursuing it.

Maybe not all at once,

Because that would be holy crap overwhelming,

But maybe in small ways and small pieces.

So I hope you'll join us in the group.

I would love to see you there.

And thank you so much for listening to Dear Grief Guide.

I really appreciate it.