many of us absorb the idea that healing means returning or getting back to normal or going
back there or getting back to who you were or getting back to the way things used to be.
And across all of my work and inside my grief support community life after loss academy,
I regularly challenge that idea.
Healing is not getting back there.
Because back there or back to normal assumes that there is a version of normal to return
to a safe or stable or predictable world that is waiting for you somewhere mythically
on the other side of your pain.
But grievous know, you know that the world you once knew and existed in no longer exist
isn't there anymore.
It is not that you haven't found your way back to it.
It is that it literally no longer exists in the way that you once experienced it.
[Music]
Hi there, grief growers.
I am so grateful to be here with you today 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 Frissithia.
I am a grief coach, a three time author and the founder of life after loss academy where
I have 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 of course not only death related losses but also losses like divorce and breakup,
major diagnosis and any other loss that changes your life.
Here on grief grower we believe that grief is not something that we get over.
It is something that we grow with and alongside and when we stop treating grief like a problem
to be solved and start treating it like an invitation to live more deeply, we can create
lives that are meaningful and rich with the memories we carry, the struggles that we have
individually and collectively faced and the preciousness of what it is to be right here
and right now.
As we go on the show, I want to have a mini teaching about what it really means to be grounded
in grief and my thesis for this is the firm and hard and true statement that you will never
feel completely safe or back to normal after a loss.
And what I want to do is teach you on this episode today is how to feel grounded in grief
anyway because this sense of stability, security, safety, semi-normalcy, even peace or calm
is something that so many grieving people crave but they don't know how to access especially
when life before or life as you know it has essentially died as a result of the loss.
And this is something I see across social media, inside support groups even in my online
support group life after loss academy.
It's the one thing that grieving people wish that they had and it seems to take priority
over everything.
It's this sentence I just want to get back to normal and it comes up in so many other ways
but it really is reduced to.
I just want to get back to feeling normal.
And this longing to go back to the way things were can creep into your heart or creep into
your mind as this exhausted voice that is wondering why can't you find your footing again?
Why even though time has passed and all these garbage people say time heals all, why does
the ground keep shifting underneath you instead of settling down and why do some parts of
your grief feel like they found a rhythm, they have a movement, they have a calendar, they
have a sense of predictability while other elements of your grief remain completely unknowable
and guessable to you no matter how hard you try to pin them down or understand them or
stabilize them.
So if you have ever asked questions like or made statements like I want to feel okay
again, how do I feel happy, peaceful, hopeful again?
I want to feel like the world is a safe place again, I want to put the ground underneath my
feet again.
If these are true for you or if you've ever said something similar, you are in the right
place.
And maybe as a grieving person your friends and family have asked you point blank directly
when are you going to go back to normal and whether they use those exact words or not,
you probably get the sense that they want you to get over your grief which we don't believe
in here on grief grower or pick up where you left off as if you can simply remove or shed
the weight and the impact of loss and step right back into your life before the worst thing
happen to you.
I want to validate that the desire to get back to normal after loss is extraordinarily
human and understandable.
This is deeply understandable to me and it is so frustrating and so hard because I think
as I said at the top of this episode, every grieving person comes to know this unshakable,
permanent, unchangeable foundational truth.
The world does not and cannot feel safe anymore after a loss and no amount of time or positive
thinking or attempts at getting back to normal are going to change that.
And this may not be what you were expecting to hear on this episode of grief grower today,
but I want to invite you to stay with me because what I am teaching and talking about on this
episode is not how to force or contort the world back into a shape that feels secure to
you.
It is about how you create a sense of something sturdy that doesn't depend upon the world
or life around you because those things can be unpredictable and loss filled and like
they cannot cooperate with what you and your heart need at all.
The first thing that I want to establish is that loss doesn't just take your person or
your relationship or your health or your identity.
Loss is never just the one big thing.
We've talked about this on grief grower before.
Loss also takes your worldview.
It robbed you of a way of seeing the world.
Inside life after a loss academy, we talk about this as permanently wearing a set of
grief glasses.
You are now walking around, looking around existing in the world, seeing now and forever
through the lens of loss because before your loss, like all of us, every single one of us
does this.
You likely operated consciously or unconsciously on an unspoken set of assumptions.
These are things that clients have sent to me before and things that I even believe before
my mother died in 2013.
Bad things happen to other people or in my perspective, if you're good enough good things
will happen, if you're bad enough bad things will happen.
You have a God or a world that punishes and rewards.
That was a young thing to think.
I know that now.
Here's another one.
If I do everything right, my person will be okay or I will be okay.
My relationships are stable.
That's something we tell ourselves a lot just to get through the day.
My relationships or my job is stable.
My housing is stable.
The world is stable.
Or the world is mostly fair, mostly predictable, mostly safe.
Things work out for the best.
Everything happens for a reason.
These are very real things that people have believed in their life before loss.
But loss destroys these assumptions.
No matter what kind of loss you're grieving, a death, a divorce, and a strangenment, a diagnosis,
a tragic world event that hits way too close to home.
And suddenly, you know something that you didn't know before.
And I say this often, anything can happen to anyone at any time for any reason or no
reason at all.
This is why so many grieving people describe feeling like a different person after loss.
It's not just that your life changed.
It's that your entire operating system for understanding reality changed with it.
There is a really awful motivational quote that circulates on social media.
And even on sympathy cards I found while googling around researching for this episode insert
barf emoji here.
It goes like this.
Everything will be okay in the end.
If it's not okay, then it's not the end.
But to anyone who has faced a life changing loss, this quote is the most hollow ringing
saccharine bullshit, unhelpful advice that exists.
Grievous know or come to know with time and experience that endings are often the least
okay of our experiences.
We can keep going and never be 100% okay again.
We or other people can get to our respective ends and be so many things, but okay is not
one of them.
Holding this perspective is not pessimism or catastrophizing or being a Debbie Downer.
Like lost turn you into a Debbie Downer.
It's not any of those things.
This is data.
You have lived it.
Anything can happen to anyone at any time for any reason or no reason at all.
And once you know this, once you are seeing through the lens of grief glasses, you
cannot unknow it.
You cannot go back to the version of yourself who believed the world or your relationships
were safe or predictable because that version of you required a worldview that lost came
in and took away.
I learned a ton about this concept of a shattered worldview while I was training with their
piston author Megan Devine in her grief care professional certificate program last year
in 2025.
And it reinforced so, so much of how I teach the concept of getting grounded in grief inside
life after loss academy.
And this is what we're going to get into for the rest of the episode.
Essentially the maximum is this.
Rebuilding after loss is not about getting back to the way things were.
It is about grieving the normalcy and safety that you once knew so that you can orient
your new and loss informed reality around things that are true for you now.
Here is why getting back to normal is never ever ever a good goal for grieving people.
Some are along the way, many of us absorb the idea that healing means returning or getting
back to normal, going back there or getting back to who you were or getting back to the way
things used to be.
And across all of my work and inside my grief support community life after loss academy,
I regularly challenge that idea.
Healing is not getting back there.
As back there or back to normal assumes that there is a version of normal to return to,
a safe or stable or predictable world that is waiting for you somewhere mythically on
the other side of your pain.
But grievous know, you know that the world you once knew and existed in no longer exist
isn't there anymore.
It is not that you haven't found your way back to it.
It is that it literally no longer exists in the way that you once experienced it.
And chasing the dream of getting back to normal after a devastating loss is a little bit like
trying to find your way home after your house has been destroyed by a storm or a natural disaster.
We talked about this in the is grief selfish episode of grief grower, which you can check
out by going back in the history of the podcast, either on your podcast player or on YouTube.
Just look for the episode called Ask Shelby is grief selfish.
And I talk about how grief and trying to get back to normal or trying to take care of
yourself is like taking care of a house that has been destroyed by a storm.
And in it, I talk about yes, you can rebuild.
You can create something new.
You can create something meaningful.
You might even create something beautiful, but you cannot go back and undestroy the house.
You can't go back and prevent or protect the house from being taken away or blown away
by the storm or flattened.
The sooner that you can release this impossible pressure to return to something that's gone,
that literally is inaccessible to you.
The sooner that you can start building whatever comes next for you in life after loss.
This wrestling with changing worldview in life after loss can be a moment for so many
grievers, maybe including you, where you feel stuck, not because you're not trying hard enough.
Grievers are some of the hardest working people I know.
I write about this in my book, of course, I'm here right now.
But it's because you're aiming for this goal that society tells you to want of getting
back to normal or getting back on the horse or getting over it.
You are not failing at grounding in grief because there's something wrong with you.
You are failing because others are telling you that it's possible to get back to normal
when you know for sure that that is not available to you.
And it is really freaking tough to grieve a worldview, a reality that you know in the
depths of your heart is gone.
While everyone around you is telling you it's perfectly possible to go back to the way
things used to be.
And I just want to validate that here for you now.
I want to take a side detour also for a second and put an asterisk here because there are
grievers for whom the world has never, ever, ever felt safe or normal.
And what I don't want to do is assume that every single grieving person who's listening
to this or watching this on YouTube has had a stable life before.
And in my new book of course I'm here right now, I describe when I'm working with grieving
people I often will picture them in their life before as someone tethered to their life by
golden cords of stability, their job, their beliefs, their home, their routines.
Around them there's these little colorful bubbles of light that are people who know and
understand them, friends, co-workers, family members.
And even on hard days in life before I often picture people as having invisible wheels
underneath their feet that are carrying them steadily towards a future that they're
generally looking forward to.
These three things are how I picture grievers in life before tethered with stability surrounded
by people who know and understand them and moving forward into a future that they are
generally looking forward to.
Then lost crashes in and I picture golden cords severed, stability severed, lights of community
dim or muffled by the fog of grief kind of tornace under and the wheels of forward movement
disappearing replaced by something more like quicksand.
But something I love that as I was working on this book I was taught by my sensitivity reader
her name is Elisa Forneray and she was on some episodes of coming back my very first podcast
way back in the day.
She reminded me she said, "Shall we?
Not everyone has golden cords of stability to begin with."
Many many grieving people come from backgrounds that never once ever included stability.
Wildtards marked by poverty or abuse or constant relocation or divorce or early early loss.
People have lived lives that are shaped by ongoing crisis rather than a single one time rupture
of loss.
And for grievers like this, there is no sense of steady before or normalcy to grieve the
loss of because normal, safe and steady were never fully available to them to begin with.
So if this is you and you're listening or watching right now, please know that your grief
is not less valid because it doesn't follow the clean dramatic, societally pictured before
and after story arc that was beautiful life before and then there's terrible life after.
Your story may be more complicated than that.
And what you are also allowed to grieve that not every griever will experience is not just
the safety you lost but the safety that you never ever had.
And everything that I talk about in this episode I hope will still apply to you because
you are trying to ground in a world that is informed by loss.
And what I want to share with you is that you may even be more skilled at this because
you might have more practice locating stability within yourself than grieving people who are
encountering true instability for the very first time.
Okay, back to how do I ground when I am deeply grieving?
The truth of the matter is something I learned after my mom died and don't say out loud very
often because it really really hurts to hear when you're in the most awful and painful
parts of grief.
So take care if this is you is that the world was never actually as safe or as steady as
you believed it to be.
Loss is not the thing that made the world dangerous.
It is the thing that revealed a truth to you about uncertainty or injustice or death that
was always there.
It was just underneath the surface of your daily life or irrelevant to you or in someone
else's orbit.
Before loss you may have had the privilege of not knowing this yet.
You may not have been born into this world where in grief coccles.
Now you know that and that knowing while it is incredibly painful and it is so painful
to grieve a worldview.
This knowledge is not your enemy.
It is simply your new foundational starting point.
It is the new thing that you know for sure to be true.
The thing you know without a shadow of it out.
So this might have you asking and this is the whole purpose of me creating this episode.
If the world was never guaranteed to be safe and it's not going to become safe just because
I want it to be then where does that leave me?
What do I do?
And my answer to you is that it leaves you needing to build safety, normalcy, security
stability somewhere else.
So where does safety, normalcy, security, stability actually come from in life after
loss.
This is the locus of this episode because if the world could not be your source of
certainty anymore.
You need a new anchor.
And the good news is you'd have to go out and buy one.
It's that you already have access to one and that is you.
It is not the world.
It is not other people.
It is not circumstances that you cannot control.
It is you.
The person who has lived through this loss who is still here and still breathing and still
capable of getting through the next hour or the next day or the next week even when
that feels impossible.
Grounding in grief, getting grounded is not about finding safety somewhere out there.
It is about locating safety within and inside of yourself as the one constant that has
been present through every single version of your life so far.
Think about it this way.
Your identities shift constantly through life and especially through loss.
You may have been a spouse and now you're a widow or a widower.
You may have been someone's baby and now you're navigating the world without a living
parent.
You're not being parented.
You might have been relatively healthy.
And now some part of your body is diseased, unwell or even missing from you.
You might have worked one job and now you're in a totally different field.
You might have been close with your child and now you're grieving a relationship that
is sporadic or distant or strange or outside your control.
You may have lived geographically in one place and now you live geographically somewhere
else, whether literally or figuratively in loads of areas of your life.
Identities change.
Roads change.
Relationships change.
Systems change.
Rules of order or engagement change.
Problems change is absolutely change often without consent or a heads up warning.
But you, the one living through all of it, the one noticing, adapting, surviving, integrating,
you are the thing that remains.
You are the thread of your life that connects every chapter of your life, including the
chapter, the excruciating one called life with grief.
What I want to make clear is that this does not mean you feel steady all the time.
It means that you are the steady thing in a much deeper sense.
You are the thing continuing to exist in your life, your mind, your heart, your body,
even as everything else around you keeps shifting.
Grounding in grief does not look like having certainty about the future.
It really does not look like feeling calm all the time or trusting that nothing bad will
ever happen again.
Those are old world life before pre-greeth glasses promises.
And remember, as you now know, they were never fully true.
Instead, grounding through grief, and this is what I teach in my after-loss academy, often
looks like making a list of things that are still true about you, things that lost did not
take away.
These can be as simple as physical attributes or as deep as things you know and value and
believe to be true, no matter what.
It looks like building small rituals and routines that remind your nervous system that
you are still here for you, even if those rituals need to flex around circumstances that are
unpredictable or timing that is unpredictable.
It is learning your own patterns of griefs you can anticipate and care for yourself through
all of the waves and all of the seasons.
It looks like reconnecting with your own values, preferences, instincts, separate from what
the world or another person is or is not able to give you because those things are uncertain.
And it is recognizing that you have already survived every hard day of your life so far,
which is real, tangible, actionable evidence of stability and consistency that you can
lean on and look back on and be like, "Well, damn, I have survived this far.
I have been the constant thing so far.
I may not have enjoyed living inside of these experiences or living inside of myself,
but it is true that I have been here the whole time."
None of these practices require the world or another person or even your day-to-day life
to become predictable or sturdy again.
All of them just require you to build a relationship with yourself that can hold steady and grounded
even when everything else cannot.
This is a different kind of stability than the one that you are grieving.
It is not about the ground never shifting again because you don't have the power to change
or control that.
It is about learning that you can be your own source of safety or peace or normalcy
or security, no matter what else shifts around you.
I can't leave you today without giving you this.
Also, if the word "safe" doesn't resonate or "normal" doesn't resonate, try a different
word.
And this is inspired by one of my life after a loss academy student's named Kim.
She is just as much of a word nerd as I am and she's like, "Shall we?
I can't do the word safe."
Life has never felt safe to me.
She's one of these people who experience so much loss.
She's like, "I don't know that safety is ever possible for me."
So instead of safe, maybe a grounding word or a goal word for you might be something
like stable or oriented or calm or planted or anchored or steady or even home.
That's one of a lot of grievers in life after a loss academy use.
And the goal of this language is not to find the correct word.
It is to find the word, a word, a collection of words that helps your body and your mind recognize
this is what I'm reaching for.
This is the aim I'm going for right now.
And I want to encourage you to experiment until one of them feels right or you find a
new one that feels right enough for you.
Life is personal so is language.
So please, if the word safe doesn't resonate, you've been itchy the whole time I've been
talking.
Find a word that works better for you than safe.
What I want to acknowledge for you and what I want to urge you towards is that you are
allowed to stop waiting for the world to feel safe again.
Because if you are waiting for the world to feel safe again in life after a loss, you might
be waiting a very, very, very long time, possibly forever.
But when you shift this goal, if you start building your sense of stability from the inside
out instead of outside in, something can change in your loss.
You stop needing the world or another person to cooperate with you or what you need in order
to feel okay again.
And you start anchoring.
There's a good word anchoring into the one relationship that will never leave or be taken
from you.
And that is the relationship you have with yourself.
To be extraordinarily clear, grounding in this way does not erase or take away your grief
or the pain of it.
It doesn't mean that you will never feel afraid or uncertain or shaken up again.
It just means that you have something solid to come back to when you do.
A place that is steady, aka you, in the face of loss's chaos and overwhelm.
So do your grief grower who is listening to this today.
I need you to know that you are the safe, grounded, constant that you have been looking
for in your grief.
When you ask will life ever be back to normal again or when will I get back to normal again?
It's like life may never be back to normal, but I am true across every chapter of my life.
Lost teaches you this hard truth that the world was never as safe or normal as you believed
it to be.
And it is sure as heck not going back to the way it was.
But loss also teaches you something else.
That is just as true.
But perhaps much more empowering, it is that you are still here.
You are the constant thread that is running through every chapter of your life, including
the one that you're living right now.
And grounding is not about the world or you, finding a way to go back to normal, heavy
air quotes around that.
It is about you seeing and trusting yourself as the safest and steadiest place in the world
that you have.
You do not need the ground to stop shifting and you do not have the power to make that
so.
Lost guaranteed that it shoved that truth right in your face.
You need to know that you are solid within yourself even as the ground keeps moving.
If this episode resonated with you or if you want real, practical, tangible tools for grounding
in the face of grief, what are the nervous system tools, what are the lists you can make,
what are the practices you can start doing?
I hope you will join us in "Side Life" after loss Academy.
After what I call my 5th Step grief method, ground release, integrate, establish, and foster
GRIEF, you will learn how to, step 1, ground yourself even when life feels uncertain or
unsteady.
Step 2, release what you are carrying, including versions of yourself or your loss that
loss robbed you of.
Step 3, integrate your losses into your life in a way that's meaningful for you that makes
sense to you.
Step 4, establish grief honoring relationships with others.
And step 5, build a future that feels peaceful and hopeful again, even with grief and
tow, even with the wisdom brought by grief glasses.
If you want a preview of this work for free, you can watch my workshop.
It's called "Grow Through Grief."
You can find it on my website or in the show notes for this episode.
I will walk you through the three student favorite tools that have really resonated with so
many folks over the years.
And you can start using them right now to feel steadier in life after loss.
Plus you will get a look inside the course itself.
I'll walk you through each of the modules and everything that you get inside and you
can get that for free at ShelbyFersathea.com.
What I want to reassure you of is that you are more resilient and resource and capable
of grounding yourself than you may believe to be true right now, especially with loss giving
you all of these painful reminders of how the world really works and what is really
possible to be taken from you.
If you are looking to ground through grief, I would love it so much if you would join
me inside life after loss academy.
I would really appreciate seeing you there.
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 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
ShelbyFersathea.com/links.
And if you'd like to get support from me for your uni-class experience, you can join me
inside life after loss academy.
As a student, I will walk you through my five step grief framework, G-R-I-E-F, for rebuilding
after any sort of devastating loss and you can get live coaching from me every week to
answer your questions.
Replays are always available if you can't attend life.
If this podcast 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 "Greef Grower" with a friend because you never know what someone
you love is going through.
Greef Grower is hosted by me ShelbyFersathea with music by Addy Goldstein.
Until next time, Greef Grower's, I see you.
I am so proud of the work that you're doing in the world and I love you.
Because even through grief, we are growing.
[Music]