Coming back to life after loss does not mean pretending that those very hard, very true
elements do not exist.
It doesn't mean getting over it or moving on or arriving at some fixed state of "I am
healed now" to me and to the hundreds and thousands of gravers that I've worked with
we all agree.
That coming back to life after loss means learning to live alongside the awfulness, the horror
of what happened, to carry your loss with you in ways that are meaningful and sometimes
bearable and even occasionally on your best days, beautiful and meaningful to you.
That is what rebuilding after loss, coming back to life after loss actually looks like.
[Music]
Hi there grief growers, I am so grateful 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, three time author and the founder of life
after loss academy.
I have had the distinct honor of helping thousands of grieving people stop feeling lost, stuck,
broken and alone and start building lives that they genuinely love from the lives that
loss forced them to live.
This includes not only death-related losses but also losses like divorce and breakup, major
diagnosis and any other loss that changes your life.
Here on Griefgrower we believe that grief is not something to get over.
It is something that we 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 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.
Now onto today's topic.
This is, I really wanted to create an episode on how to come back to life after loss.
This is a rebuilding guide for grieving people.
My first podcast ever was called coming back, conversations on life after loss because I
think a lot of people in our society ask like how do I come back to life after loss.
Again, it's a very common question.
And recently a listener of Griefgrower emailed me after finding the podcast in the weeks following
his son's death.
He said, "Shellby, I lost my son three months ago.
He was 34.
There was no warning.
It was a heart attack in his sleep.
I identified his body.
I planned the funeral.
I handled the insurance calls, the apartment and his belongings.
I did everything that needed to be done because someone had to and I am his dad."
Now that the dust has settled, I don't know what to do with myself.
I wake up at three in the morning and can't go back to sleep.
I cry in the car.
I hold it together at work and fall apart the moment I walk through the door.
Everyone keeps telling me I'm strong but I don't feel strong.
I feel like I'm just going through the motions of being alive.
I found your podcast, Griefgrower, and I've been listening during my morning commute.
It's the only time of day I feel like someone actually gets it.
I guess my question is, how do I actually come back to life after something like this?
Is that even possible?
So if you are listening right now and you have asked yourself a version of that question,
how do I come back to life after loss?
Whether your loss is days old or weeks old or years behind you, this episode is for you.
What I want to start with is a sort of disclaimer.
The honest truth about coming back to life after loss because coming back to life after loss
is not what society portrays it as.
In other words, coming back to life after loss is not a comeback story.
The way society tends to frame it is you suffer, you heal, and then you emerge from the
wreckage stronger, maybe with a fun sword in your hand.
You're shiny or you're better than before.
There is this narrative I talk about at my book, of course, I'm here right now.
I refer to it as triumph porn, and it works beautifully in movies and memoirs and other
forms of media, but for most grievers, it doesn't reflect reality.
The truth of grief is that some things will always be real.
Will always be true about your loss.
Some things that break your heart will never fully come together again or heal.
There are absences and empty places that you will carry with you forever, whether that
is at the dinner table or in the car or during the holidays or in moments where you least
expect it.
There are elements of your loss that will be as true in the future as they are today.
And coming back to life after loss does not mean pretending that those very hard, very
true elements do not exist.
It doesn't mean, as we talk about so often on grief, where we're getting over it or moving
on or arriving at some fixed state of I am healed now to me and to the hundreds and thousands
of grievers that I've worked with, we all agree, that coming back to life after loss means
learning to live alongside the awfulness, the horror of what happened, to carry your
loss with you in ways that are meaningful and sometimes bearable, and even occasionally
on your best days, beautiful and meaningful to you.
That is what rebuilding after loss coming back to life after loss actually looks like.
And in more than 10 years now of walking with grievers through devastating loss, I have
noticed that rebuilding tends to follow a consistent pattern.
This is regardless of the type of loss, the timeline, since the loss or the circumstances
surrounding the loss.
This pattern, I have encapsulated into what I call my five step grief method.
I've talked about it here on the show before, GRIEF, and this is the framework, the structure,
the outline of my online course in community life after loss academy, which is the program
that I teach and the live support group that I lead every single week.
So here is what it looks like based on the grief method structure, GRIEF, to come back
to life after loss.
First, G, ground, feels stable and safe again after loss.
Because one of the first things that grief does to any of us is knocks the ground out for
under us.
Lost shatters the assumption that life is predictable and safe.
Suddenly, a world that was relatively stable feels like a place where anything, including
the worst thing, can happen at any moment.
I often talk about a life after loss academy that lost teaches us that anything can happen
to anyone at any time for any reason or no reason at all.
This is why so many grieving people describe the early days and weeks and months of loss
as feeling untethered or adrift, like they're moving through life in a fog or going through
the motions without really being present in any of them.
I once had a student in life after loss academy say it feels as if the ground is falling out
from under me all the time.
So before you can do anything else after a loss, the thing I teach is that you need to
get grounded.
This means creating small anchors like rituals or routines or sensory touchstones that help
your nervous system, your literal body, remember that it is stabilized in this moment even
if the larger world feels unpredictable.
And grounding does not and probably should not be elaborate.
It might look like a cup of tea that you make the very same way every morning.
It might look like a five minute grief ritual that connects you to your person who died
or the thing that you lost.
It might be a specific chair or a playlist or a corner of your home that feels like a
safe or stable enough place.
It might be a daily practice like journaling or breathing or walking that signals to your
body you are here and you are okay in this moment.
The goal of this first step ground is not to feel happy or all the way healed.
It is simply to feel sturdy enough to keep going and to build a stable in a foundation
that the deeper work of grief can eventually happen when you feel more ready.
Number two in the grief framework is release R. This is to let yourself actually feel
and grieve your loss.
Because grief is not just about the person or the thing that's gone.
It is about everything that's attached to them.
The future you imagined and the identity you built around them, the version of yourself
that you were before lost steamrolled through hopes, expectations, daily rhythms that
made life feel like it belonged to you.
All of those things deserve to be grieved and not just acknowledge once and like file
the way over there but genuinely, massively, repeatedly felt and released.
So the release step inside life after loss academy is where I teach you how to give yourself
permission to grieve the full scope of what's been taken from you.
This includes creating rituals, so intentional acts of releasing that honor what you have lost
beyond just the loss itself.
This step or this part in the course is often the hardest according to life after loss academy
students because it asks you to sit with the weight of grief instead of distracting from
it or running away from it or pushing it down.
It is an invitation, a very open invitation to feel rage and guilt and sorrow and longing
and despair without immediately trying to fix it or talk yourself out of it.
It also asks you to grieve the person you used to be before loss changed you because
loss never just takes people and futures.
It takes versions of who you are to and that version of yourself, those many, many versions
of yourself that can no longer be deserve to have space to be mourned.
Giving yourself real intentional mindful space and place to release griefs biggest and
heaviest emotions, what that does is gradually shift the way your feelings move through you.
They transform from things that knock you on your ass, pardon my French, to things that
you can survive and process and carry forward.
In life after loss academy we talk about over and over again, the goal of releasing is not
to feel your grief so that you can be done with it.
It is to feel your grief so you can have a continual place for grief to go.
It is to allow it to move through you over and over and over again because so much of
what society teaches us is to block against grief.
It is to push against it or to push it down or to file it away or to hide it out of sight
from ourselves or from other people.
The release module is like here, let's literally construct a place for grief to go through
some sort of ritual, some sort of meaningful thing that has intention and purpose for you
and that's different for every student who comes through the course.
It's different for you and you're coming back and depending on the loss as well can
all change so your ritual is very unique to you.
The goal of the release module is not to create the ritual so you do the ritual once
and never have to do it again.
It is so that each time this grief comes up, grief for the person you used to be, grief
for the person you lost, grief for the life you can no longer have, grief for the future
that can no longer be, you now have created a channel, a road that those feelings can
go down so that they are not stuck existing inside of you.
It is my all time favorite section of life after a loss academy to walk with griefers through
because once you get through it, once you give grief a place to go, there's so much relief,
there's so much opening, there's so much more space to do the other things that are necessary
for coming back to life after loss.
The third section in the grief method is I, integrate and this is honor your loss while
rebuilding your life.
One of the most persistent myths about grief is that healing requires living the past
behind.
It does not.
In fact, some of the most powerful grief work I have ever witnessed and had the honor
of coming alongside people doing has happened not in letting go and never thinking of the
loss again, but in weaving in.
Integration of loss into life in a way that says, this happened, this person existed, this
chapter matter, this is part of my life and I insist on carrying it with me.
An integration looks different for everyone, but for you, it might look like talking about
the person you lost without apology or shame.
It might be continuing a tradition or ritual that connects you to your loss.
It might look like folding in or even wearing meaningful symbols, objects or dates into
your life.
It might look like allowing your loss to inform how you make decisions or form relationships
or show up in the world, essentially for this loss to have some sort of meaningful legacy
in your life.
What I want to stress here is that integration is not about keeping grief front and center
forever.
It is about making room for grief as a permanent, honored thread in the fabric, the larger
picture of who you are, so that moving forward does not feel like abandoning the loss, that
chapter, that significant element of your life and your story.
This is the part of life after loss academy where so many grieving people realize that moving
forward and honoring loss, they're not opposite things, they're not fighting.
They can both be happening at the same time.
It's also an opportunity to get really, really creative of how do you want to carry your
loss, your person forward into the future with you, because you can insist that it happens
because that is your right as a griever.
And so you get to create how that goes.
That can give you so much of your power back at a time in your life when it can feel like
grief is really taken everything away from you.
Number four in the grief method framework is e. Establish.
This is navigate relationships and set boundaries with other people while grieving.
The first three sections ground release and integrate are all about doing grief with
you.
The fourth section, establish, is about doing grief with others because as I like to say
grief never, ever, ever, ever, ever happens in a vacuum.
Loss changes everything about your life, including your relationships with the people around
you.
Some people show up with tremendous care and consistency.
Others more frequently disappear after the funeral or after the flowers die.
Some people are really wholesome grief and say things that leave you feeling more alone
than companion.
And most people, even people who claim to love you and claim to support you, have their
own weirdo discomforts with grief that can make it actually harder to get the support
that you need in the aftermath of loss.
So the established section in the grief method framework is about creating grief honoring relationships.
These are friendships, family dynamics and workplace interactions that make room for
and honor who you are now as a grieving person, not holding you to the standard of who you
used to be before loss stormed through your life.
This looks like setting kind but firm boundaries, not the punishing kind, but the compassionate
kind.
Things that say, "I need you to show up differently for me," or "I need this kind of conversation
to stop," or "I need this kind of conversation to start," or "I need more time than I used
to," or "I need less time than I used to," or "I need you to remember my loss even when
you assume that I've moved on."
In the established section of Life After Loss Academy, we work to identify your grief
allies.
These are people in your life who can actually hold space for your grief without flinching
and leaning on them more deliberately and also setting boundaries of people who have shown
themselves to be hostile to your grief in ways where you can either put the relationship
on pause or bring it to some kind of conclusion.
What I want to make clear here is that establishing grief honoring relationships is not about becoming
difficult or demanding or some sort of grief princess on a high horse.
It is about recognizing that grief fundamentally changes all of your relationships.
In my new book, of course, I'm here right now.
I talk about how grief changes your rules of engagement with everyone in your life.
As you are recognizing that all the relationships that you're in from co-workers to your closest
family are filtered now through the lens of loss.
We talk about in Life After Loss Academy permanently wearing grief glasses.
This is not a problem to be fixed.
It is simply a new truth of your life that deserves space and honoring.
And it really honors that like grief is never just happening to you and with you.
It is also rippling out to all the relationships in your life.
The last element of the grief method framework F is for foster.
And this is find peace and joy again while living with grief.
This step tends to be what my students call like the longest one, the lifetime one, because
it never really ends.
Fostering a long-term relationship with grief means sort of gear shifting the way you see
grief itself or reframing it.
Grief is no longer an enemy to defeat or a problem to solve.
It is not a phase of your life or a season of your life to push through or get over as
quickly as possible.
Grief is, and we really drive it home in this section, a companion, a teacher, an unpleasant
roommate, a permanent part of the landscape of your life.
This section is where many, many of my clients and students begin to notice something surprising.
It is glimmers of peace or moments of laughter or pockets of joy that coexist with the sadness
of grief.
These are not signs that grief is gone.
They are signs that you are living alongside grief.
So in the foster section we talk about seeing your grief as a living thing that evolves and
changes shape along with you.
And it also means building your capacity to hold joy and sorrow, love and loss before and
after all at once.
It is very much a yes and section.
It means fostering a lifetime partnership with grief means that accepting grief will still
arrive in waves sometimes years and decades down the road.
But it also means knowing that when it does, you have the tools, the ritual, the community
to meet your grief with compassion and even expecting it to arrive.
Hello, Mr. Hardick.
I've been expecting you as one of my favorite songs from the Chicks goes instead of dread.
This is not the same as closure.
There is no such thing as closure as I spoke about in a previous episode of Grief Grower
and wrote about on my blogs.
You can go find that by searching Shelby for Zythea Closure.
But there is integration.
There is folding in.
There is meaning making and there is a life that is full and rich and beautiful and profound
to you.
It is different than it was before, but it is full nonetheless.
That is the goal of the foster section.
Before we go, I want to offer you a note on the timeline of what it means to come back to
life after loss.
The Grief method, the five steps that I've laid out here is not a linear checklist.
This is not something you go through.
G-R-I-E-F, all in order.
And then you're done.
You do not graduate from the Grief method.
You do not complete any of these sections and then leave it behind never to think of it again.
The five steps in this framework weave in and out of each other throughout your life
with Grief.
You might find yourself circling back to the ground module after a really hard Grief
anniversary or returning to release after a new loss maybe reopens things about an old
one that you'd never even considered.
None of this is a failure.
This is Grief being the living, breathing, lifelong companion that it actually is.
There is no finish line.
There is only the next step and your willingness to keep taking it, to keep practicing everything
that you learn in the Grief method framework.
As we wrap up today, what I want to remind you of, especially if you were this listener
who wrote this to me, what does it mean to come back to life after loss?
How do I come back to life after loss?
You do not have to figure out the whole road ahead of you.
You do not have to know the entire rest of your life.
You just need to take one step.
You do not have to have life after loss figured out.
I think if anything, probably Grief taught you that you can't figure it out because
again, anything could happen to anyone at any time for any reason and that is a very
neutral statement.
You could have horrible things happen to you with the same frequency and probability as
you could have wonderful things happen to you.
You do not have to know what life looks like from here and you do not have to be further
along somehow than you are right now.
You just have to be willing in any sort of capacity, even very small, to take a step in
the direction of your own survival in life after loss.
This could be like the ground module establishing a tiny daily ritual or release allowing yourself
to cry without a time limit.
Establish.
It could look like texting one person who actually gets it a member of your Grief allies community
or integrate considering one way you might fold loss into your life.
The path back to feeling fulfilled and rebuilding after loss is never, ever, ever a straight line.
But it is a path.
It is a process.
You were already on it.
You were already doing it.
I never want to call Grief a journey because I know so many people don't like that.
But like people say how do I come back to life after loss and my answer is you're already
doing it.
You're already doing it.
It is not something you need to opt into.
You can do it more consciously, sure, but you are already living life after loss.
You are already returning to life after loss.
And if you are looking for a guide, a community, this framework, GRIEF ground release, integrate
established foster to help you navigate it, to wrap words around it, to have exercises
for processing it, that is exactly what life after loss academy is here for.
I have designed a free two minute quiz to find out if you are ready to join life after
loss academy.
There's less than 10 questions.
And even if life after loss academy turns out not to be your next best step, and I will
be honest with you, there is a quiz result for yes and a quiz result for no.
You will still receive resources for coping with grief and coming back to life after loss
again.
And you can find the link to that quiz in the show notes.
I hope this has helped you get a better grasp of what it looks like, what it actually
means to come back to life after any sort of devastating loss.
I'm so glad to have joined you today.
That's all for this episode of GRIEF GROER.
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 new book, of course I'm here right now, three actually helpful things
to say to someone grieving at shellmeforSythea.com/links.
If you'd like to get support for me for your unique loss experience, you can get in life
after loss academy, my online course, and community.
As a student, I will walk you through the five step grief framework for rebuilding after
loss, and you can get live coaching with me every single week to answer your questions.
Replays are always available if you can't attend life.
If today's show felt validating, comforting, educational, or otherwise helpful to you,
please subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify.
And be sure to share GRIEF GROER with a friend.
Because you never know what someone you love is going through.
GRIEF GROER is hosted by me, Shelby ForSythea, with the music composed by Eddie Goldstein.
Until next time, grief growers, I see you.
I am so proud of you in the work that you're doing in the world, and I love you.
Because even through grief, we are growing.
[Music]