Hey friend,
I hope this finds you well. (Nathan coming to you directly, here.)
As you may already know, in addition to someone who's supporting folks with deep emotional processing and healing everyday, I'm also someone who is going through a season of grieving the loss of one of my closest people.
And while I wouldn't wish this experience on anyone (and it has invited in me even more empathy and compassion for those navigating it), my journey and research around it (because we all know I'm going to be researching until I am gone) has also been such an incredible and elucidating pedagogy. I am learning some of life's most terrible and essential lessons...
So, here’s one of the (many many) things they don’t tell you about grieving – the grief itself is just the tip of the iceberg.
I used to tell my clients, “Grief is long.” or “Grief is layered.” but I didn’t know the half of it…
In our culture, people allude to the messy, perpetual project of grieving with that timeworn and tidy 5-stage model: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And when they want to be more emotionally evolved, they bookend those standards with “shock” and “processing the grief” in the more comprehensive 7-stage model.
But what both of these systems belie is the ways in which we cycle through, and eddy around in, and leap back and forth between these and really all manner of emotional states in the excruciating educational process of neuropsychologically coming to terms with the loss of a close loved one.
Grieving isn’t just going through the loss. It’s surviving the grueling and gruesome trial by fire of the brain learning life’s most appalling truth: my loved one is never coming back from this.
Depending on how close we are and how long our identity has been tied up with the person we’ve lost and are now grieving, our synaptic wiring, our memories, our concepts of self, our sense of belonging, our neurobiological sense of safety, even our fundamental understanding of being in the world and what we can predict therein must be *reordered*.
It’s like a concussion of intense experience the brain has to heal. A capital-T trauma – even from thousands of miles away, and even without seeing what happened or the actual passage of the person’s life.
Grief is a feeling. It comes and goes. It flits into and out of moments like breath.
Grieving, in contrast, is the longest labor. And as in childbearing, they don’t tell you about the afterbirth. *Unlike* bringing a life into the world, bringing a death into the world comes with a lifetime of secondary deaths.
Daily, weekly, seasonly, perennially, forever we bear the grieving without finish.
Too often, we and the world want us to rush onward from the contractions of this painful personal revolution. (Understandably, it’s a lot. And none of us have many tools or much help. And there isn’t any giving away or undoing of what’s been done.)
But there’s no fooling time. There’s no tricking the nature of us in birthing or in grieving.
We have to do the work. We have to breathe and cry and howl through the original loss, *and* all the tiny and terrible afterdeaths. We have to nurture our self through this perpetual labor, with all our tools, and our wits, and our communities.
That’s the only way through this awful learning.
💛
For me, the biggest feeling has been sorrow, not grief, per se. There’s also been surprise, shock, panic, indignation, apoplexy, rage, regret, mortification, guilt, sadness, woe, hurt, aversion, disgust, confusion, perplexion, bewilderment, gratitude, affinity, admiration, and love, to name a few…
I also noticed myself going through all the Survival states too: Fighting, Flying/distracting, Freezing up/playing dead, and Appeasing. I still can’t believe how many times and for how many days I had to endure some version of the thought, “Well, *maybe* it’s not true…?” flashing through my mind.
💛
If you’re grieving, I see you. I feel you. I know what it’s like to look around and not know that many people who get what’s happening through you.
I’m breathing with you. I’m holding space for all that I’m bearing in losing my brother, even amidst holding space for others like you and me.
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
And I wouldn’t be able to do the work I do, or survive the reckoning and rewiring happening in my own brain right now, if I didn’t have the tools and support that I do. I don’t even want to try to imagine where I’d be without them...
If you want some help with the grieving process you're going through, I'd love to gift you a complimentary "Feel Better Already" strategy session with me. We'll spend 40-60 minutes – talking through what you've been experiencing and where you'd like to be with it, and then I’ll offer you some tools, strategies, and/or ideas that could help you have an easier time navigating your grieving. (This offer is for folks I'm not working with already. If we are working together already, let's talk about this in your next session!)
Keep breathing, keep going, keep learning.
Big love to you,
Nathan
💛
And, if I can be of any support to you at all, let me know. It’s what I do!
I am ready to gift you a Feel Better Already Strategy Session for you and your grief.