When grief storms its way through your life, some of your friendships shift.
Some of them go radio silent.
Some absolutely disintegrate and fall apart at the seams.
It is a devastating byproduct of loss.
It is a loss on top of loss.
And at a time where you are already mourning so much, it is so painful and so
distressing to grieve the friends and family and neighbors and co-workers that you
thought would be there to support you.
In this episode, I'm going to cover eight common reasons that grief,
fractures, friendships and relationships.
Why it is usually you or us, the grieving people who end up doing the work of
teaching others how to show up for us.
How you can start renegotiating relationships.
So they honor both you and your grief and for supporters who are listening,
what it actually looks like to be a good friend to someone who is grieving.
[Music]
Hi there, Grief Growers.
I am so delighted to be here with you as always.
If you've been growing alongside me in my work for a while, welcome back.
And if you are new to me and my work, hello.
My name is Shelby for Scythia.
I am a grief coach, a three time author and the founder of Life after loss
academy and online course and community that has helped dozens of grieving
people stop feeling lost, stuck, broken and alone and start building lives that
they genuinely love from the lives that lost forced them to live.
This includes not only death related losses, but also non-death losses like divorce
and breakup, major diagnosis and every other loss and life transition that
changes the course of your life.
Here on Grief Growers, we believe that grief is not something we get over.
It is something that we grow with and alongside and that when we stop treating
grief like a problem to be solved and start treating it like an invitation to live
more deeply, we create meaningful lives that are rich with the memories we carry,
the struggles that we faced and the precious awareness of what it is to be
right here and right now.
You are joining me on this episode.
It is number 11 and what I am referring to as the supporting someone series.
This is a series for supporting someone that you care about their major
laws. There have been 10 episodes prior to this and they are all inspired by my
new book. Of course, I'm here right now.
Three actually helpful things to say to someone grieving through every supporting
someone episode, through every episode of this series.
You will learn something about being there for somebody you care about who is
grieving, whether you are a friend, a family member, a coworker, a neighbor or
a professional who supports grieving people as a part of your job.
And today on the show, I want to talk about the absolute soapbox statement that I
believe that every griever knows to be true and that is that grief changes your
relationships.
I'm going to be taking you through eight reasons why friendships and relationships
often fall apart after loss.
The language that I'm going to be using in this episode is more geared towards
griever. So like, here's the eight reasons your friendships might be falling apart.
But if you are a supporter, you will find this episode helpful as well.
You may able to pinpoint like, ah, here's why I may be hesitant about supporting
my grieving friend or here's why I might feel a little bit awkward or
strained when it comes to supporting a grieving family member.
So I encourage you to stick around and see if you see yourself in this episode.
If you are a griever or a supporter, oftentimes we are grievers and supporters.
At the same time, I guarantee you will identify or notice some of yourself
somewhere in this episode.
What I want to begin with is that if your friendships feel different after a
loss, whether that is more distant, more strained, more surface level, more quiet,
than they used to be, you are not imagining it and you are not alone.
Something that I know in the depths of my soul to be true that I just mentioned is
that grief inevitably changes you.
But if you are grieving a devastating loss, you probably already knew that.
The part that society does not talk about enough is that grief also inevitably
changes your relationships with everyone else around you.
Said another way and I've said this before on grief grower, grief never happens
in a vacuum. Your loss doesn't just live inside you and your heart and your
experience of your grief.
It ripples out.
It impacts every relationship in your orbit, whether your loss was a death,
a divorce or a breakup, a diagnosis or the death of a dream.
When grief storms its way through your life, some of your friendships shift,
some of them go radio silent, some absolutely disintegrate and fall apart at the
seams. It is a devastating byproduct of loss.
It is a loss on top of loss.
We talked about secondary losses on another episode of grief grower,
the loss of friendships and relationships or the changing of friendships and
relationships after a devastating loss is a secondary loss.
Maybe the number one secondary loss that grievers grieve on top of or in
addition to what I would call like the primary loss or like the big one, the one
that society names.
And at a time where you are already mourning so much, it is so painful and so
distressing to grieve the friends and family and neighbors and co-workers that
you thought would be there to support you.
In this episode, I'm going to cover eight common reasons that grief fractures,
friendships and relationships.
Why it is usually you or us, the grieving people who end up doing the work of
teaching others how to show up for us.
How you can start renegotiating relationships.
So they honor both you and your grief and for supporters who are listening,
would it actually looks like to be a good friend to someone who is grieving.
So let's get into why friendships and relationships fracture after a
loss and what we can do about it.
The thing I want to say one more time before we get into the eight reasons is that
grief doesn't just change you.
It changes your relationships.
Again, loss is not limited to the person, the relationship, the thing, the dream
that you lost.
Loss reorganizes how you see the world, how much you can tolerate, how much
energy you have and what you need from the people around you.
And your friends and family are not exempt from this devastating,
griefy reorganization of your life, whether they're grieving the same person
issue.
So maybe you all lost a family member that you haven't common or whether they
have never experienced a loss before, it can feel like the closeness or the ease
of your friendship or relationship before loss has been turned upside down.
Many grievers describe feeling like grief has moved their game piece like clear
across the board from the people they care about.
So they're way over here and their friends and family members are way over here.
Other grieving people say that they feel like they are standing on one side of a
vast chasm and they are screaming for help at the top of their lungs.
Well, their friends and family on the other side's strain to hear them.
They're trying very hard to be supportive or sadly, like move on and go ahead,
go back to their normal lives without them.
One of my students in life after loss academy, which is my online course and
grief support community, painted a picture of being untethered or cut loose from
everyone who is back on planet earth while she was sent a drift and floating in the
endless void of outer space.
This gap that keep talking about a gap between where grieving people wind up after
loss and whether friends and family are located, whether that's emotionally,
mentally or even spiritually, this is the place where a lot, a lot, a lot of
friendships start to strain and even break.
So let's get into the eight reasons that relationships tend to collapse or
fall apart after loss.
See if any of these resonate with you.
Number one is that you have experienced a life changing loss and they haven't yet.
After significant loss, the death of a parent, a spouse walking out on you,
a diagnosis that rewrites your entire future, you carry an awareness of the
world that other people in your life simply have not learned yet.
You know in your body and soul that life is fragile and endings are real.
And as I mentioned in a previous episode of grief grower about why it's
impossible to go back to normal after a loss, anything can happen to anyone at
any time for any reason or no reason at all.
You know that now intimately to be true.
Friends and family who have not been through something similar may still be
operating from a place of assumed permanence.
They may assume they still have time.
They may assume that tomorrow is guaranteed.
They may assume that nothing about the core structure of their lives will
change.
They may still believe things that you can't believe anymore.
For example, the world is fair.
God rewards the faithful.
The good guys always win or everything happens for a reason just to name a few
and that mismatch in lived experience and foundational beliefs about the world
can make even loving and caring friends feel like they are speaking in a
different language than you.
Even if you are brave enough or courageous enough or extroverted enough to
openly share about how grief has changed your view of the world,
the people around you may accuse you of talking crazy or not having faith.
Or being morbid or giving into cynicism or despair.
And this is the perfect recipe for fractured relationships.
It is literally you and the other person no longer seeing eye to eye.
Number two is that your friends say hurtful things or they disappear because
they don't know what to say.
This is like so much of the entire basis of my book.
Of course I'm here right now is about the words that we use to support and
comfort each other in grief.
And some people say really garbage things.
Some friends and family will reach for platitudes and cliches like time
heals all or what doesn't kill you makes you stronger or God needed another angel.
Other people in your life express covert or overt judgment through phrases or
words like aren't you over it yet or it's been a year.
I think you need to see someone to help you move on.
Still other people will try to fix you with the latest greatest self-help workshop
or assume they know exactly how you feel or try to keep you busy and distracted
or out of the house or ask awful and invasive questions about you and your loss.
How did they die?
How long has it been?
Are you going to try for kids again?
But but but but most often though friends and family and the people around us do
something that most of my grieving clients and students say is the worst offence of
all they go silent.
They stop texting and calling.
They quit inviting you to spend time together.
They avoid mentioning your loss altogether often out of fear.
Fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of making you cry or making your grief worse or
fear of bringing up a subject that they do not have the emotional capacity to sit with.
All of these garbage responses from cliches to silence.
There's a big spectrum there.
They come from the same root cause and that is most people are never taught how to
support someone who is grieving.
So your friends, family members, coworkers, neighbors, they are all fumbling their way
through it or just avoiding it entirely.
They are like putting that over there and not dealing with it at all.
And this leaves you the grieving person feeling dismissed and abandoned in one of the
most difficult seasons of your life.
And that is truly heartbreaking.
Number three is they expect you to be the person that you used to be.
As I said already, you are not who you were before your loss.
Loss inevitably alters you.
This does not mean that you are broken or weak.
It means that you have been changed by something enormous.
But plenty of people in your life will keep reaching for or trying to access the
version of you that existed before, whether that is the easygoing friend or the life
of the party sibling or the reliable coworker.
So when you do not slot back into that role, it creates tension or distance or
unspoken disappointment on both sides of the relationship.
I'll give you an example.
After my mom died, my college girlfriend broke up with me in part because I was
too sad. She could not handle the despair and heaviness that accompanied my grief and
did not know how to cope with me, not being my former sunny, optimistic self.
I felt her sort of emotionally trying to pull me to that place or trying to
understand like why I was not that person anymore.
And when I couldn't be that, that was one huge reason why we ended our relationship.
A student inside my online community life after Loss Academy was emotionally
pushed out of her church after her daughter died by suicide.
Her congregation told her that her grief was too much and that she needed to take
her feelings somewhere else.
Another student that I worked with in life after Loss Academy named Julia shared
that her workplace expected her to show up with like business as usual while
managing a declining parents increasing care needs in a nursing home.
They were dying in a nursing home during COVID lockdowns.
She left that job shortly afterwards and found work somewhere that was more
willing to be flexible around her griefs, emotional and logistical needs.
Suffice it to say this, when you are not the friend, family member, coworker or
neighbor that you used to be, people take notice sometimes a lot of notice
and how they feel about the ways in which you have changed can cause friction in
your relationship. Here's number four, society runs on an invisible grief clock.
So in my third book, of course, I'm here right now, three actually helpful things
to say to someone grieving.
I write about a concept called the hidden grief clock.
And this is the unspoken timeline that society holds grieving people to.
This could be six weeks.
This could be a year, whatever the socially acceptable window is for still being
affected by your loss.
Some of this gets reinforced by pop psychology as well.
So things like the five stages of grief, which is a framework that was never
designed to define how people grief yet it is regularly tossed around.
I've seen it in TV shows, movies, sitcoms as a checklist that you're supposed
to complete and order people even joke about like I'm only on the anchor stage,
I'm only embarking, I'm still in denial.
And when you are still grieving past whatever invisible deadline that a
friend or family member or a coworker has in their head, they may start to look
at you and wonder whether quietly or out loud, why you're still not over it yet.
And that pressure can make it really hard to feel close to them or
meaningfully talk about your loss with them.
They are showing up with invisible or visible expectations of you.
And you are expected to adhere to that hidden ticking grief clock.
Reason number five that friendships and relationships fall apart after a major
loss is one of my favorites because it gets talked about a lot, but in articles or
like lists like these, a lot of people, I think, forget to mention it.
And it is you look fine.
So people assume you are fine.
That's a very simple one.
But like, oh, you're upright.
You're standing.
You're talking.
You're making dinner.
Like people assume you're fine because you are presenting as fine.
You can be functioning and functioning well, showing up to work, cooking dinner,
cracking a joke and still be in pain, genuine, griefy pain underneath all of it.
When grief doesn't look the way that people around you expect it to,
I'm thinking like stereotypical, like tears, visible distress withdrawal,
even anger, your ability to like hold it all together or keep your shit together
can be mistaken for being okay.
Friends and family members stop checking in because you seem fine.
Or your boss and coworkers add more things to your task list because you're
seemingly on the outside doing all right.
And while these people may not have cruel intentions towards you,
the impact of their actions, this disregard of your grief,
can feel ignorant and dismissive like they do not see because they don't
or care about because they might not your grief.
They don't know that they need to.
Or the alternative of this is that they only support you when you are
performing their expectations of what grief should look like.
You're crying, you're on the floor, you're lashing out,
you're talking about your person or you're withdrawing from other people.
But something that I believe is that you should not have to be breaking down
in tears 24/7.
You should not have to be visibly grieving to other people.
You should not have to be pretending or performing grief to receive care
from other people.
And yet that is how so much of society treats grief.
Number six is grief comparison,
aka the suffering Olympics creeps into your relationship.
Sometimes the people around you confuse comparison with comfort.
And this is what many people call the suffering Olympics.
It was originally coined to describe how marginalized groups of people
can get into the weeds of comparing the awful things that they faced historically.
And it is a phrase suffering Olympics that essentially means one uping
somebody else's pain with your own.
So here's how it often shows up in life with grief.
So say a friend responds to your loss by relating it to their own,
saying something like, I totally get it.
My grandma died last year too.
Or at least you didn't lose a spouse in the war like my aunt did.
Or you think that's bad.
I went through a breakup, had to sell my house and lost both of my dogs all within one year.
That's all comparison of grief.
And while some grieving people, especially people who are neurodivergent,
say that they appreciate hearing someone else's grief story in direct response
to their own, most grieving people I encounter prefer to have their loss
acknowledged first, even if the other person's story follows it,
acknowledge your loss first, acknowledge my loss first.
Even well-meaning comparisons can leave you feeling unseen like your specific
loss got entered into a competition against your will or became a measuring stick
against somebody else's story.
This can make your relationship or your friendship feel less like a source of
support and more part of my French, like a pissing contest where nobody really
wins.
Number seven reason why relationships often follow part in the wake of loss
is that your capacity for socializing has changed.
This is a huge one.
Grief is effing exhausting.
Small talk that used to be effortless might feel like run in a marathon now.
Parties, happy hours, concerts, group chats that once brought life to your life
might now feel really draining and even going to crowded restaurants or
live sports, things that you used to enjoy can feel like too much for your
grieving body to handle.
This is not you suddenly becoming anti social.
It is your nervous system conserving energy for the much bigger and constant
task of grieving.
But people who do not understand that shift will take your reduced capacity for
socializing personally.
I remember very strongly a student from life after loss academy who dreaded
going to her company's holiday party after her son died.
She did not have the energy to like work the room for hours and make small
talk with her coworkers like she used to.
And during one of our weekly coaching sessions, I suggested that she make a new
grief honoring rule where she goes to the party, but only for 10 minutes.
And she reported a few weeks later that she was able to stay at the party for 15
minutes and felt proud of herself for making the effort, especially during
and emotionally difficult season.
The holidays are often so hard for people who are grieving.
While this was a success for her, I know for sure that there are so many other
friends, family and coworkers of grievers who struggle to cope with or
understand their grieving person's new reduced capacity for what my wife calls
people.
And when your ability to be social is reduced, it understandably has an impact
on your social life.
Last one here, number eight.
And this is not going to apply to everybody, but maybe it applies to you.
And that is that shared loss does not equal shared grief.
This is me talking about people who've experienced the loss of the same person
or experiencing the same loss event.
So for instance, apparent stuff or a corporate layoff or shared diagnosis in
the family, but no two people grieve the same.
And oftentimes two people, even if they have lost the same person or have gone
through the same experience, they grieve completely differently.
So for instance, a family member might find meaning or silver linings related
to the loss faster than you are emotionally able to.
You might want to talk about it constantly while a friend who also went
through the same thing never wants to talk about it again.
A coworker who also face the same loss might choose to join a therapeutic
walking group that meets and walks together on the weekends while you would
rather listen to a grief podcast alone on your commute.
When these differences and grieving styles and preferences go unspoken,
it is super easy for one person in the relationship to expect the other to
grieve on the same timeline in the same way with the same conclusions or
outcomes.
And this can lead to a dynamic where you are always letting them down or they
are always letting you down.
And disappointment and resentment do not a healthy relationship make.
Okay.
So now we've covered the eight reasons that relationships often fracture,
collapse fall apart after a devastating loss.
Now I want to get to why it is usually you, the grieving person who has to
teach others how to support you.
It is for this reason.
Most supporters do not lean in and ask you what you need first.
This is for a ton of reasons, including a whole bunch that I just mentioned.
So not knowing what to say, fear of making you feel worse, falling prey,
to the grief clock consciously or unconsciously comparing losses and equating
you looking fine with you being fine.
There is also the familiar but very, very unhelpful phrase.
Let me know if you need anything, which disguises itself as support,
but isn't actually supportive because this phrase puts the burden of thinking
of a task onto you, the griever and leaves your friend or family member available
for anything, which is not a true or or fair reflection of their time or skills
or their willingness to help.
In addition to our individual relationship dynamics, and this is something kind
of zooming out from the picture of your individual grief, we live in a
capitalistic patriarchal and able to society that prioritizes that values that
celebrates progress, strength, success and constant productivity over paying
attention to those who are struggling or anyone who needs extra care.
And at least in the United States and other Eurocentric cultures, we are not
socialized. We literally are not raised or educated to pause and notice the
suffering in the room with us.
So it makes sense, then, that our workplaces, that are religious institutions,
that our friend groups and even our families do not operate with that option
as their first default response either.
The bottom line is whatever they're reasoning.
Most of your friends, family or coworkers will not initiate a conversation
about supporting you through grief.
They will wait for you to bring it up for you to explain it, for you to correct
them for you to give them resources or for you to set a necessary boundary.
This means this results in that the person with the least capacity, aka you,
the griever, often ends up doing the most relationship labor, naming what
hurts, asking for what you need, sharing educational articles and tools and
teaching the people around you how to show up for you after a loss.
That is very real and very hard labor and it is not fair that it falls on
grievers by default.
And yet that is the world that we live in right now.
Here is how to start to make things different, how to start
renegotiating your relationships after loss.
Inside life after loss academy, the established module, the fourth one in my
grief method, the grief ground release, integrate, establish and foster.
So this is the fourth one.
This is where we practice what I call doing grief with others because again,
grief never happens in a vacuum.
This is where I give you the scripts, the structure and the support to do
grief with others instead of trying to guess at how to scaffold or support
your relationships after a major loss in the course and community through a
series of on-demand video lessons and journaling prompts.
I will help you get clear on one, who is and is not a safe person to share your
grief with.
Two, which painful behaviors or words feel the most hurtful to you after loss,
not just all these things hurt and here's why and blah, blah, blah, but
like what are the exact behaviors that you really want to stop in your
relationship?
Number three, what you actually need from the people in your life, what would
actually feel helpful to you because it's different for every grieving person.
Number four, how to craft kind, but firm boundary scripts to ask for what you
need. Number five, what to do when someone shows you that they cannot honor
your grief and how to grieve the friends and family who fall away or the
relationships that break in fracture or the jobs that you end up needing to
leave. Number six, how to strengthen already supportive relationships so
they become stronger and more supportive.
And lastly, how to make new friends as a griever when you are ready to do so.
This is my absolute favorite module to teach inside of life after loss
academy because it is where you and every other griever inside the community
stop feeling like you have to cover up or put away your grief in order to have
good and healthy relationships with the people around you.
In the established module, you learn to create sturdy and vulnerable
friendships that honor both you and your grief.
And that in my opinion is what you deserve.
No matter who or what you are grieving or how long it has been since your loss
occurred. Here's the part of the episode that's for supporters.
If you are supporting someone who is grieving, here's what I want you to take away.
Here's how to show up. If you are listening to this as someone who cares
about a grieving person, a friend, a family member, a coworker, a neighbor,
a professional who supports grievers as a part of your job, here is the short
version of how to be the person who sticks around. Start the conversation first.
Do not wait for them to bring it up.
Say out loud that you know that things are different now and that you are
sticking around as they figure out life after loss.
Here are three easy scripts to do that.
I bet grief has changed a lot for you lately.
I'm here for you. Of course, this loss has made insert thing here.
Work concerts, romance, different.
And three, I'm open to talking about how our relationship needs to expand to
make room for grief. That's all you need to say to support someone who's
grieving to start the conversation, to changing your friendship, to support
grief. Here are other ways to help that are crowdsourced from grievers inside
life after loss academy and across all of my social media platforms,
plus a few that are featured in my books.
You could say, I don't know what to say, but I'm here instead of disappearing.
You could send a thinking of you text or a photo on major grief days,
holidays, whenever the grieving person crosses your mind.
You could offer a phone call or one-on-one time if group chats or large
get-togethers are hella overwhelming.
You could make a menu of your gifts so that your griever can choose the type
of health they need from a list of what you are actually able and willing to do.
Or you could extend gentle, low-pressure invitations that do not require a
yes, and that you won't take personally if the answer is no.
If you want the exact words to use while supporting somebody who is grieving,
again, whether you're a friend, a family member, a coworker, a neighbor,
a professional, my book, of course, I'm here right now.
Three actually helpful things to say to someone grieving is the book for you.
It is a short and practical guide that is chock full of scripts for showing
up for someone in your life, no matter the kind of loss they're navigating.
You can learn more and grab your copy in the show notes for this episode.
And you can also access the entire free supporting someone series at that link as well.
The thing I want you to take away from this episode today or that I hope you will
take away from this episode today is that the best friendships are the ones that
honor both you and your grief.
Loss inevitably changes your relationships with every single person in your life.
That is not a flaw in you or a sign that you're not strong enough or an indicator
that you are getting grief wrong.
It is simply what happens when an event, a huge life changing event like a death
divorce diagnosis, other major transition permanently reshapes your life.
What I, hmm, what I hope that you will remember is that the way that your relationships
are today, the way they look right now is not how they will stay forever.
Friendships can be renegotiated. Family dynamics can adjust company roles can shift.
Needs can be spoken boundaries can be set.
And especially when you are grieving, the people who are willing to learn and grow alongside
you become over time and with consistent practice, some of the deepest and most meaningful
relationships that you have.
If you are ready to stop trying to figure out friendships and relationship after a loss on
your own and start building relationships and friendships that actually honor your grief,
I invite you to join me inside Life After Loss Academy where inside the established
module, I will walk you through exactly how to do that step by step and you will get
customized coaching from me for your unique losses.
We can build scripts together.
We can talk about boundaries together and we can talk about how to grieve the friends,
family members, co-workers that maybe don't know how to show up for your grief in
addition to figuring out how would you like if and when you're ready to explore making
new friends after a devastating loss.
If you are not sure if Life After Loss Academy is right for you, you can take my free
one minute quiz to find out and you can also find a link to do that in the show notes.
Griever or supporter, I am sending you so, so, so much care and compassion as you figure
out where the hell grief belongs in your friendships.
I guarantee you it is already there.
Your invitation, your doorway, your mission, your project.
However you choose to frame it is figuring out how to hold and honor it.
I'll see you next time.
That's all for this episode of Grief Grower.
Thank you so very much for joining me today.
If you're looking for grief support beyond the show, you can find free workshops, blog articles
and my new book.
Of course, I'm here right now, three actually helpful things to say to someone grieving at
Shelby for Scythia.com/links. And if you'd like to get support from me for your uni-gloss experience,
you can join me anytime and site Life After Loss Academy, my online course and grief support
community. As a student, I will walk you through my five step grief framework, GRI-EF,
for rebuilding after any kind of loss and you can get live coaching from me every week
to answer your questions. Replays of those sessions are always available if you can't
attend life. It's just $33 a month to join or $22 a month if you are a marginalized or
financially stressed griever and you get to pick the price that works best for you.
If this podcast felt validating, comforting, educational or otherwise helpful to you in
your grief, please subscribe and leave a review. 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, Shelby for Scythia with The Music by Addy Goldstein. Until next
time, Grief Grower's I See You. I am so incredibly proud of you in the work that you're doing
in the world. And I love you because even through Grief, we are growing.
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