what we are not taught to expect in the midst of achievement and almost never given permission to feel
is the very real grief that hides just beneath positive life milestones.
Instead of seeing happy milestones only as wins, you had a baby who graduated, you got married, yay!
What if you also recognized the things that are being left behind?
[Music]
Hi there and welcome back to GraveGrower. I am so honored to be with you here today as always.
If you have been growing alongside me in my work for a while, welcome back.
And if you are new to me and my work, hi there.
My name is Shelby for Scythia, I am a grief coach.
Two times soon to be three time author and the founder of Life after loss academy, which is an online course and community that has helped hundreds of grieving people stop feeling stuck and start moving forward, including building lives that they genuinely love from the lives that loss forced them to live.
This of course includes not only death related losses but also losses like breakup and divorce, major diagnosis and every single other major transition that changes your life.
Here on GraveGrower, we believe that grief is not something that we are intended to get over.
It is something that we grow with and alongside and that when we stop treating grief less like a problem to be had and more like an invitation to live more deeply, we can build rich, beautiful and meaningful lives that are integrated
with the struggles that we faced.
We get to tell the truth about everything that has ever happened to us, the good, the bad and everything in between.
I want to remind you of some events that are coming up before we get into the show today.
If you are local to Chicago, you can join me this coming weekend, October 26th, for the talk, Death Scavenger Hunt that's happening at Graceland Cemetery.
This is something that's happened in years past and I am so honored to co-sponsor it with other death and grief care professionals here in Chicago.
It is going to begin, the scavenger hunt officially begins at 1.30 pm, but if you'd like to come sooner, we are doing things like cemetery walkthroughs where you can do the cemetery tour of Graceland and learn a bit about its history and the people who are buried there.
We'll also be doing some Q&A about death, dying, grief and the importance of cemeteries in honoring our loved ones who have died and why it is meaningful for those who are living to continue to visit cemeteries as the years go on.
I will be there, Angel Luna of the Death and Friends podcast will be there, Grace Robbins of Coimbat Romania will be there, and Jensen Allen, the director of Graceland Cemetery will be there as well.
If you're just interested in this scavenger part once again join us there at 1.30 and the organization talk death will share a list of clues to find on Instagram and its website and from that starting point you have 45 minutes to find and photograph is many of the cemetery clues as you can before submitting your findings online and then winners are announced 45 minutes after that start time.
We'll be looking for things around the cemetery like iconography on headstones, items that are commonly found in cemeteries and then potentially interesting or unique names or dates.
Talk death as an organization I know tries to keep clues inclusive of a wide variety of locations because the cemetery scavenger hunt if you're not in Chicago is happening across the United States on October 26.
So you can look at talk death's website and find a cemetery scavenger hunt near you and it also includes a lot of clues of different cultural backgrounds as well.
So not every cemetery will have every clue but you find as many as you can in the 45 minutes and prizes will be awarded to whoever finds 13 clues first, the highest number of clues found and accolades such as most creative photography.
Just in case I didn't mention it this event is free and open to the public registration is not required but if you'd like to register and let me know you're coming I would love to see you there and you can find all the information to do that plus more information about the lineup of the day who else is going to be there at Shelby for Scythia.com/events and it wouldn't be a spooky talk death event without some merch so you will find talk death merch there as well as other spooky items available for purchase.
I would love to see you there and all proceeds from this event benefit the black cemetery network.
And the next event I would love to see you out that I'm doing in person is the grief test book fair.
This is coming up on Friday November 21st in LA so if you're on the west coast I am coming to see you.
This is just like the scholastic book fair that you may remember from elementary or middle school as a child but sadder.
So myself and more than 40 grief authors are going to be live for one day only at the Lux Hotel in Los Angeles and this is like one of a kind gathering devoted entirely to grief books.
It's one of my favorite events to have learned about in the past few years and I'm so honored that my second book your grief your way was chosen to be featured at the Grief Tastic Book Fair this year.
So you will attend and enjoy an entire day full of conversations and panels one of which I am leading and immersive experiences that are all related to how we use words to talk about and describe our grief and you will come away with a souvenir tote bag called a sad sack which is one of my favorite things in the world.
And just really have a day of connecting with other grieving people through the medium of books and writing other writers there besides myself include Rachel Cargill Rebecca Sofer who is a guest here on grief grower David Kessler hope Edelman and Jennifer past a lot but there of course including myself there are 40 plus authors that are going to be featured at the Grief Tastic Book Fair.
And that is happening Friday November 21st again in Los Angeles it starts at 10 the VIP brunch if you want to come early and kind of rub elbows with all the authors that are there and then the book fair itself as well as a couple panels and things like that I believe begin at noon.
Of course you can go to shall be for city.com/events to read more details on this and if you go to shall be for city.com/events you can get my code for the Grief Tastic Book Fair and that will give you 15% off whichever ticket you choose whether you want the brunch and the book fair or if you just want to come.
To the book fair and for this event all proceeds benefit an organization called our house which is a grief support center based in New York and LA.
And if you're attending the end well conference in LA the day before November 20th you can also use the code griw25 to say 15% on your ticket and I will be at that event as well I am not speaking this year but I will be in the audience so please come up say hello.
We can all sit around each other in the audience and talk about what we're learning as we listen to dozens and dozens of celebrities end of life speakers caregivers people who are really thought leaders in the grief and end of life space tell us about what they're learning and what it is to be alive and to die and to end well right now in this the year 2025.
I would love to see you at any or all of these events and do send me an email shall be at Shelby for city.com if you choose to come to any of these and I'll be sure to be on the lookout for you.
Okay. This week's episode is all about hidden grief specifically the type of hidden grief that comes along when we accomplish something when we succeed at something when we achieve what I think a lot of society would consider a positive milestone.
And this is something that really does not get talked about societally in big overarching ways and so I want to start the conversation here very similar to the episode we did on met a grief about grieving about grieving this is a conversation about like a grief that lives under the surface that a lot a lot of a lot of people feel but we are just now beginning to talk about as a society so I'm hoping we can wrap some words around this together and also maybe reframe some of the feelings you might have a great deal of what you're doing.
And the feelings you might have around life's biggest and most significant positive events that also contain grief so I'm calling this episode something akin to every gain includes loss the hidden grief of growth success achievement and new beginnings because we live in a culture that is really obsessed with progress.
And so constantly to be better and to do more and to keep going and reach for our dreams and achieve achieve achieve and there's this relentless push to grow as you may have heard me say in the past like up into the right like a like a perfect line on a graph.
Encourage to sort of goaded or expected to chase new jobs to get bigger and better homes to have better relationships with a romantic or platonic to grow larger platforms to achieve bigger wins and to somehow manifest for ourselves brighter futures.
And sometimes I don't want to I don't want to dunk on this too much but sometimes we genuinely want to achieve success as society defines it you are listening to somebody who has always wanted to be an author I wanted to write a book that lots and lots and lots of people read and achieve some level of right early fame since I was five that is a goal that society would say yes that's a good and wonderful thing to do similar to wanting to graduate or wanting to have a baby or being the first in your lineage to have a master's degree or to.
Open a business or to find love or or win literally or metaphorically gold medals blue ribbons for your talents or your hard work these are things that many of us genuinely want and I have read many places that part of being a human being is our unique ability to envision the future we are able to not only reflect on things that have happened in the past and hold memory of that but also to sort of extrapolate out in front of us of like what could the future be.
What could the future possibly look like and to ponder also consider what achievements would mean the most to me what defines a fulfilled and successful life for me and it is true and I don't want to discount this by by publishing this episode into the world it is true that any accomplishment of any of our goals is a good and valid reason for joy and pride and celebration.
I want to say that right out of the gate here but and this is where the real crux of this episode lies what we are not taught to expect in the midst of achievement and almost never given permission to feel is the very real grief that hides just beneath positive life milestones.
As I said before it is a form of hidden grief and it lives inside of every gain so I want to offer you sort of this new perspective that every beginning includes an ending every ending includes beginning and it's sort of a cyclical thing that feeds into each other so instead of seeing a society sees happy milestones only as wins you had a baby graduated you got married yay what if you also recognized.
The things that are being left behind and what if as a society we understood as a both and that accomplishments are major happy life milestones are celebrations but they are also goodbyes because that is what is actually happening in every single one of our lives and I think it is possible to mourn success
and to mourn changes that you very much wanted for yourself this is a term I invented I'm calling it gain grief GAIN grief and this is the heartache sort of emotional residue that sits that lives underneath positive milestones and achievements even when the positive milestones and achievements are generally considered good you're happy you did this you wanted this for yourself you chased it you've been training for it you're not going to be a good person.
You've been training for your whole life you've dreamt of since you were a child but and sometimes there's there's grief underneath it there's something that you've said goodbye to in order to make that true or make that possible in your life but I think because it doesn't like typical grief no one has died you haven't broken up with anybody there's not a major diagnosis no other major life transition in a negative sense has happened gain grief this grief that comes at success it like flies covertly under the radar like
sneaks in the back door and I've heard graving people talk like I'm irritable and I'm overwhelmed or I'm feeling deflated I feel like something's off as they're sort of like gas lighting themselves into pretending that everything's fine and they're a hundred percent happy that they've achieved this thing you might feel like there's something about your milestone or event that's not being said like a like a deeper truth or a larger portrait something's really going on but you're not exactly sure what that is.
And the reality is what is going on or what might be happening for you if I can offer this is the grief that comes with gain and it is okay to feel things like that and I want to say this is not like brokenness or you're not being willing or able to see the positive and it's not like a flaw in how you're wired as a human being.
It is just real normal every day loss unacknowledged loss that is woven into growth and I talk about on the show a lot of and my tagline is even through grief we are growing it is inevitable that we as humans grow we grow we change that's how we know we're alive sometimes those changes are good sometimes those changes are bad and we have emotions around that accordingly.
But a lot of what we don't recognize in categorizing changes is good or bad is that we forget that oftentimes good changes have good buys in them and bad changes have gains and we'll get to that in a second.
First I want to give you some examples of what this hidden gain grief looks like inside of life's wins and successes and I want to see if any of this resonates for you because it is certainly resonated with or has been brought up in my interactions with grieving clients and students so here's some really common gains successes.
Yeah you did it you would get a congratulations card for doing this that come with layers of hidden grief the first one I will say is graduation so for instance you are extraordinarily proud of your diploma.
You might also be grieving your campus your classmates and your identity as a student you might feel disoriented about who you are now that you're not in school that is an identity I am in school.
And if you are no longer in school well what are you you may grief shifting from the certainty of classes and routines and scheduling for next semester to the uncertainty of like well here you go into the real world.
And of course you might also carry grief on behalf of your family or ancestors or friends who did not or could not for whatever reason have access to a college education so you might be carrying grief that in a way belongs to other people as well.
Second one I'll share with you is marriage and love and celebration of love is extraordinarily real and I would argue right now more important than ever and what you may be grieving inside of marriage is the loss of singlehood or independence or living alone or not always sort of checking in about your whereabouts or what you're up to in the world or what time you'll be home.
And in celebrating joining lives with another person you are in many ways saying goodbye to freedoms or rituals from your old life or even ways of being perceived in the world it is different to come into a workplace and be perceived as a single person and then be perceived as a married person especially if you are a woman or someone who was raised by a woman in our society and people approach you perceive you view you through the lens of who your partner is as well.
You are no longer just a single person out in the world you're a person attached to another person and so it's not what are you doing tonight it's what are you and your partner doing tonight and that's a big shift of big difference that we don't necessarily acknowledge is also or can be a grief event.
You may grieve friendship things related to getting married as well so disconnection from friends who are still single or being the first in your friend group to marry that's one kind of isolation or being the last in your friend group to marry that is another sort of isolation or can be when it comes to grief.
Another one that many many people mention and I'm so happy that this is becoming part of cultural conversation right now is parenthood the grief of becoming a parent a mother father parent anything a caregiver for a child in your life and welcoming a child into your world whether through birth adoption fostering is an extraordinary thing to have but parents often grieve especially new parents the loss of pre parent identity or lifestyle autonomy and even sleep sleep is a thing you can absolutely grieve and there's grief and anxiety.
And there's grief and recognizing that your life will never be just yours ever again sort of like marriage will always include this other being but more importantly this is a being that you are
obligated and and duty bound to care for and to nourish and to raise into a good person in the world there can also be grief in being seen as before anything else a mother a father a caregiver or a parent before any of your other identities for instance you may be perceived as a mom when you may absolutely have interests and desires and hobbies and questions and pursuits outside of being a parent.
Again the world sort of sees you first through that lens of motherhood or parenthood and that is a big conversation that's happening culturally across much of social media at least what I've seen these days and that's something that's worth talking about.
Another one number four here is a new job or promotion you may have worked really really hard to land a new role at your company or to shift into one or a different company or to open your own business but now you might be grieving old co workers or rhythms or commutes or your professional comfort zone like I'm going to do.
I'm going to do a different effort zone like I knew what that job was I knew what that role was yes I left it I wanted to leave it but who that was cushy back there and where I am now is not so cushy there is uncertainty and moving into what's next and identity shifts can happen here as well and I will say especially with jobs although it can apply to parenthood graduation marriage things like that if if finances are involved you might grieve on a money level too there is grief that comes with a pay cut of course but there can also be a lot of money.
But there can also be grief and having more money to manage especially if other people are dependent on you financially I'm thinking children family members if you're caring for those who are outside of the country things of that nature having more money is not always a blessing and it can be something worth craving.
The next one I'll mention is moving to a new house maybe your new house is your dream home but it also still means saying goodbye to wherever you lived before familiar neighborhoods routine smells sounds again commutes walkable things even joyful moves that you very much want come with grief you may have moved just down the block or cross town or to a whole new country but a change in your metaphorical nest is taxing on your brain and heart and mind and body.
And this can leave you feeling unsettled for much longer after the boxes are unpacked you think why haven't I settled in it might be grief it might be that there is something here that needs to be mourned that needs to be released.
Other one I'll say and this is more of a product of the internet age but I imagine it was true mid century turn of the century even before that and that is fame or going viral and I will say that it's very easy to glamourize attention and influence but there is also a sort of grief in losing privacy or the invisibility of not really being known the way people see you changes and you may mourn in big ways and small ways.
Having endless free time to create or exist without eyeballs on your every move or keeping track of how long it's been since you've been online or been in public spaces.
You might also grieve not knowing whether or not connections with other people friends family members people who come into your life are rooted in are they trying to gain something from me do they just want to be close to me or have proximity to me in order to get something for themselves or do they actually want real genuine relationship to me.
You may also feel a constant pressure to record or document your life where you didn't before and that is grief worthy and you might miss having the ability to have experiences just away from a camera.
And the last thing I'll say on this one is if you have an agent or a publicist or a manager you might also mourn a time when you were only accountable to yourself when of time where you were like pre handled.
There was a time when you and only you handled yourself and now someone else is handling you your affairs potentially your money potentially your schedule potentially your relationships to other people there can be a grief for a time missing a time before that despite being grateful for or very happy about success or fame.
The last one I'll say is personal growth and this is one that surprises a lot of grieving people because many grieving people want to be out of the immediacy and the sort of the acute pain of grief and like I want to grow I want to heal because it means I will not be suffering.
But I think a lot of grieving people are surprised that they also sometimes miss the early days of their grief there is sort of a healing heartbreak and saying goodbye to old versions of yourself even the version of yourself that was struggling there is a kind of loss a kind of mourning in letting go of survival patterns or friends or rituals or coping mechanisms that kept you safe at some time or another.
And set another way there is grief in the process of out growing in the process of growing up or healing even if that healing is taking you in a direction that you very very much want to go.
I know this episode can kind of come across as a bummer so what I want to acknowledge is that this does not mean you shouldn't celebrate the incredible accomplishments of your life your wins recognizing hidden grief of like oh in gaining this or achieving this I'm saying goodbye to this it does not mean you need to stop wanting more or start fearing good things a lot of grieving people talk about waiting for the other shoe to drop and I do not want to give you any more shoes to be afraid of in the future.
What it means is simply this is that every gain in your life includes a loss and that every loss includes space to be felt it is not a bad thing it is not me piling more grief onto your plate you can have a graduation party absolutely and feel so on top of the world and so puffed up with pride for everything you achieved and also cry about the fact that this is the last time you will be with your very close college friends potentially ever again especially if you're all moving to different places or have job offers a different company.
And so on and so forth it does get harder to stay in touch when you're not in the same geographical location all the time that is something worth grieving you can feel incredible deep love for a newborn for a baby for a child that is come into your life and also long for your pre baby self and you can toast to your promotion at a big fancy restaurant and also miss and grieve the relationships you had with old co workers being in the loop of the water cooler gossip for instance.
Or having that one co worker you knew could always be counted on for a good joke or to stand up for you in meetings you can grieve all of that in addition to being happy for the things that are happening in your life and this is what emotional honesty telling the truth about as my wife says the all of the everything that is what that looks like.
Society sadly still has this mindset and I'm hoping we're close to breaking it that more is always always always better there's nothing bad about more that's consumeristic its capitalistic its individualistic into so many things that are not necessarily good for us and a lot of the reason that hidden grief this game grief hurts so much is that it is invisible or unspoken about in a culture in a society I'm talking about the United States largely here that is obsessed with growth.
Because we're told that success is linear that milestones are only ever good and that if you've leveled up or glowed up you should be grateful not sad but that is not how human emotions work we are all complicated people and loss and gain are not opposites they are two sides of the same coin.
And when society only acknowledges the gain the loss has nowhere to go so it shows up in sneaky ways through fatigue or numbness or irritability or even shame and you might be grieving again without even knowing it and what I want to reiterate here is this is not meant to add to your grief this perspective is meant to free you because if you are already grieving something big and I sense you are here listening to this podcast divorce death diagnosis break up
you might be thinking oh yeah great thanks Shelby for pointing out even more loss that I did not ask to process I want you to know this this perspective is not meant to overwhelm you to add more grief to the pile this is meant to empower you because if I can flip the script a little bit on you if you have made it through any major transition in your life positive or negative you have already survived grief you have done this before you grieved your child with your heart and you have been on this for a long time.
you grieved your childhood when you moved through adolescence you grieved your school life when you graduated whether that's high school or college or something bigger you may have grieved your singleness when you got married you may have grieved your relationship when you experienced our platonic or romantic breakup you grieved your freedom potentially when you became a caregiver whether that's for children or parents or pets and you have probably if I had to guess
grieved a role or a title or a home or a place or a dream many many times over said another way this is not your first grief rodeo your past hidden losses your past gain griefs served as experience as a sort of training for the losses that you're facing today you have grieved before
whatever you're grieving right now or whoever you're grieving right now you have done this already even if you didn't know to call it grief at the time that means you already know how to survive change and that you are not as so many grieving people say and fear starting from square one in some form or fashion you have grieved before in some iteration of your life before loss and this goodbye that you are grieving right now whatever it is again death divorce diagnosis
this is not your first goodbye this is not your first time having to part with something precious to you I hope that prompts you to think a little bit because you could go back and ask yourself okay if I grieved my college friends in a way after graduation
what lessons from that can I take into my grief for my best friend now or if I have grieved the breakup of an engagement in the past how can I take that into grieving singlehood into marriage if that's applicable to your life how can you take past lessons of grieving and surviving things because you've already done it you have already had some experience with grief whether or not you knew to call it grief at the time
how can you take the things that you learned in the ways that you coped in the people you looked to for help and inspiration and guidance how can you pull them forward into the future where you are right now
and another reframe I'll offer you before we go today is that there is also gain within your losses so just like every gain includes a loss every loss includes a gain
and this is not I want to be overclear here this is not a toxic positivity message being like okay with your loss your person who died your divorce you went through whatever diagnosis the value we can just say look at the bright side or look at these gain this is not me toxic positivity messaging painting over your grief
this is about widening your field of view how can you tell the entire truth of what's happening right now and so asking yourself in the midst of what I've lost what is the other side of the coin what have I gained in this experience in this loss even if it's small or invisible to other people so for instance your person may have died your relationship ended your health change your dream dissolved and still some new things or some gains may be possible
many many grief or show this experience of I am no longer caregiving so now I have time and energy to go back to school to rebuild friendships to potentially return home if you were caregiving in someone else's house or to care facility or in another country or state
if a relationship ended whether through break up or divorce you may be rediscovering your own autonomy or reconnecting to parts of yourself that you lost while you were trying to keep the relationship together
if you have received a life changing diagnosis you might now have clarity or the validation to prioritize what really matters especially if there's a time limit now a clear one on your life
if someone you love has died you might find yourself living more honestly more tenderly or with greater urgency than before one of my clients in life after loss academy once called grief the great reprioritizer and I thought that was a really great way of her recognizing that a loved one's death really made her recognize this is what matters this is what's important and this is really what's not
and that can be counted as a gain inside of grief again these perspectives are not replacements for the pain of loss this is not me trying to like reach into your suffering and take that away from you because that is not a power that I have
they're not successes that make the fact that you're grieving magically okay but they are real they exist alongside the pain alongside the suffering alongside the grief and naming them can feel like a lifeline or like something sturdy
when it feels like everything else is crumbling underneath your feet before we wrap up today I want to just say one more time that naming the hidden gain grief matters naming what we are losing as we succeed and achieve and accomplish and begin again that matters
when we ignore the hidden grief underneath life's successes and achievements we deny ourselves a full picture of what's really going on in our lives and when we try to rush past our emotions or focus only on the positives in a milestone we bypass reflecting
and that kind of reflection is one thing that helps us honor all the places that grief shows up in our lives the little quiet things and honestly the really big things too
and when we name hidden grief we get to tell the whole truth about what's happening and that's one of my favorite things to do in grief it really breeds an authenticity and a whole human portrait into what's happening in your life right now yes you get to acknowledge and celebrate and be overjoyed and so proud of what you have gained
but you also get to name and grieve and have conversations about and release what you miss what you're going to leave behind or what you've already left behind as a result of this gain
and I will say if you want to explore this idea in greater depth or just gain some more tools for living life after loss and kind of seeing the both and of everything
I encourage you to check out my free workshop on my website if you go to Shelby for Cynthia dot com it's just in the right hand corner there it's this free workshop and you can sign up with your email and I'll email it to you
so you can watch it at your leisure you do not have to like sit through something live right away because I know that's something a lot of crevars do not want to do I will email it to you and you can watch it whenever you're ready
and inside the workshop I basically give you three tools for one stabilize yourself after devastating loss so you can explore your grief from more solid ground
two use two words so another word tool because we all know I'm very passionate about words on this show use two words to give yourself instant self compassion even on your hardest days so a lot of times we find ourselves judging ourselves in grief
this will ease up the pressure on that and to three shift your perspective from grief as an obstacle or something to get over to grief as a long term relationship so that you can build a life that feels meaningful to you
as I often say on the show you build a life you love from the life that loss forced you to live because whether we like it or not this is a non-consensual part of being alive you will be changed
that's for certain death taxes and being changed life inevitably changes us some of those changes we want and crave and aim for and other ones are the most heart-wrenching things we ever go through
some of these changes we celebrate and some of them we mourn but and every single one of them carries the echoes of the gain and the echoes of a goodbye sometimes hundreds of goodbyes in a single change
and recognizing them giving name to them acknowledging that gain grief exists does not mean that something's wrong with you or that you're incapable of joy or happiness or gratitude
what it does mean is that you're aware of the full portrait of life and the gain and the loss and the growth and the grief and the both and the end and that is one of my favorite beautiful human things
so again if this episode resonated with you check out my free workshops called "Grow Through grief" three ways to stop feeling stuck and start moving forward at ShelbyFursity.com
and I'll also put a link in the show notes I would love to know if and how this episode resonated with you if you have accomplished something or achieved something or won something and you're like I think there's a little bit of grief here or you saw some of yourself in this or you've been having conversations about this with friends and family do get in touch and again you can do that at ShelbyFursity.com
thank you so much for being here with me today and for acknowledging taking time to acknowledge the grief within the gains and I hope in the midst of the celebration or maybe in a small pocket of devoted time after the celebration you will also make time for your grief.
that's all for this episode of "Greef Grower" thank you so much for joining me today if you're looking for grief support beyond this show you can find free workshops blog articles and my signature what's your grief support style quiz at ShelbyFursity.com/links
and if you'd like to get support from me for your unique loss experience you can join us in Life After Loss Academy which is my online course in community.
as a student I'll walk you through my five step grief framework for rebuilding life after loss and you can get live coaching from me every single week to answer your questions.
Replays are always available if you can to tend life.
if this podcast felt validating comforting educational or otherwise helpful to you and your grief please subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify I love reading what you write and be sure to share grief grower with a friend
because you never know what someone you love is going through. Grief Grower is hosted by me ShelbyFursity with the music by Addy Goldstein.
until next time grief growers I see you I am so proud of you and the work that you're doing in the world and I love you because even through grief we are growing.
[Music]