grief is more than just love with no place to go.
And if you're grieving somebody who wasn't a source of love,
like an abuser or an estranged family member,
or maybe someone you never personally knew,
but were connected to in some way in your life,
the grief equals love equation can feel incomplete,
like there's some context missing,
or at worst it totally invalidates your loss.
(gentle music)
- Hi there, grief growers.
I am so honored, delighted, grateful, all of the above
to be back here with you as always on grief grower.
If you have been growing alongside me in my work
for some time, welcome back.
And if you are new to the grief grower podcast
and my work in general, hello.
My name is Shelby Frasithia.
I'm a grief coach, two time author,
and founder of Life After Loss Academy,
which is an online program that has helped dozens of grievers
stop feeling lost and stuck in life after loss,
and start building lives they genuinely love
from the lives lost 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.
Because here we believe that grief is not something
to get over as quickly as possible.
It is something that grows with us and alongside us
for the rest of our lives.
And by treating grief as less like a problem to be solved
and more like an invitation or a doorway or a pathway,
or a portal as I heard in another podcast recently,
to live more deeply, we can create lives
that feel meaningful to us.
And meaningful for you can mean something entirely different
than it does for me, maybe your meaningful life
feels peaceful or purposeful or happy or joyful
or like you have a place that you are going in this world.
Maybe your meaning is a little bit more along the lines
of Mary Oliver's letting this soft animal of your body
want or love what it loves, want what it wants,
and love what it loves.
But regardless, this grief with us for the long haul,
the long-term relationship with grief,
helps us build a life that we genuinely love
and that we are eager to live in the wake of devastating loss.
And today on the show, I want to present to you
one of my most controversial opinions.
And it is that grief is not just love with no place to go.
This is a quote that floats around all over aesthetic posts
on Instagram, especially on these big grief accounts.
It's written on the pages of grief journals and workbooks.
It's shared in these moments of deep heartache
and contemplation in therapy circles and group circles.
And at first glance, grief is love with no place to go
is a comforting thought.
This sense of all these overwhelming emotions
that are all coming up together can ring
as if like the other side of that grief coin of like,
well, of course it's love, it's love that can't be expressed.
It's love that has no outlet.
It's a place or it's a feeling,
it's a collection of emotions that used to have a destination
in the world, but now is for like a better phrasing destinationless.
It speaks of grief being a testament to love
that is no longer active on earth
and sort of this residual evidence
that our bonds with our loved ones keep going even after death.
And that I agree with, but is grief really just love
with no place to go?
I think for a lot of people this phrase resonates really deeply
because it helps them describe the way
that they are continuing to foster and hold on to love
that they still feel for the person that they lost.
And it sort of brings this like depth and logic
to the pain that they're feeling.
If grief is love, ah, that makes sense.
That I can grip on to, that is a doorway for me to understand grief.
But for me and for a lot of other people,
this idea of grief is just love with no place to go
doesn't quite fit because for as big as the container of grief is
and as big as the container of love is,
grief is more than that.
Grief is more than just love with no place to go.
Grief beyond love includes connection, attachment,
loss of identity, shattered dreams,
unmet expectations and sometimes,
in a lot of cases, even relief.
And if you're grieving somebody who wasn't a source of love,
like an abuser or an estranged family member
or maybe someone you never personally knew
but were connected to in some way in your life,
the grief equals love equation can feel incomplete.
Like there's some context missing or at worst,
it totally invalidates your loss.
If my grief is not love with no place to go,
if I would not describe my grief as love,
then what is my grief?
Does this belong to me?
Am I grieving wrong?
Am I bad for not producing feelings of love for this person?
And I gotta say, I posted a blog about this around Valentine's Day.
It shall be for sathea.com/blog.
You can go read it and check it out.
And since then, this grief is not just love with no place to go,
has caught on like wildfire to date.
It is the most red piece of information that is on my blog
because I think it resonates with some people.
Some people want to know about the controversy
of like who is this bitch and why is she saying
grief is not just love with no place to go
because that feels like it invalidates my grief
if I do feel that grief is love with no place to go.
But for other people who don't feel seen inside of that quote,
who don't feel like it tells the whole picture of your grief,
welcome, it is an open door to finally say,
grief is not just love with no place to go,
it's so much more than that.
And so many people have told me I see this and I click yes.
This is something that I haven't been able to put my finger on
that finally someone is out here describing.
So let's talk about who first said grief is love with no place to go.
So like a lot of popular grief quotes,
I did some googling and the origins of this phrase are unclear.
A lot of people attribute it to Jamie Anderson,
but it's unclear whether Jamie Anderson
is the writer and producer of Doctor Who
or the Canadian author or somebody else whose name is Jamie Anderson.
Regardless of that, here's the quote in its full context
according to what I could find in my research.
Grief I've learned is really just love.
It's all the love you want to give but cannot.
All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes,
the lump in your throat and in that hollow part of your chest.
Grief is just love with no place to go.
And as an author and a self-proclaimed word nerd,
you're going to hear a lot about words on this podcast.
We did a fair bit of that last week when we talked about the difference
between loss, grief, bereavement and mourning
because there is a difference between those four.
It is actually very frustrating to not know where a quote came from,
where did it originate?
Who thought of this?
Who put this out into the world?
So if you are or if you know, the Jamie Anderson,
who this quote is attributed to, please contact me
because I would love to update my blog and update this episode accordingly
to give them due credit.
For now, I guess how I would like to think about this quote
is that it's one of those timeless grief sentiments
that's been reworded and reshared so many times
that the true origins of it have been lost.
So regardless of which Jamie Anderson first said this quote,
the phrase has truly taken on a life of its own.
Again, it's printed on sympathy cards
that shared in funeral homes on their little brochures.
It's spoken aloud in grief support groups
and therapy sessions is a way to offer comfort to somebody who's grieving.
And while it might be meaningful for some people,
it truly is not the full picture of what grief is.
And I want to get into what I mean when I say that.
What I mean is grief is more than love
for as big of a container as love is.
Grief is more than love.
It is everything surrounding the loss.
When this quote comes up, grief is often talked about in terms of love.
The love that goes missing, the love that wells up in the corners of your eyes.
But love is just one aspect of like the multifacetedness of grief.
And when someone that we're in relationship to dies,
we can grieve so many other elements of them.
We don't just lose them.
We lose everything attached to them.
This can include the role they played in our lives.
Maybe they were a parent, a child, a friend, a partner,
a listener, a family historian, the class clown.
We might be grieving the way they made us feel safe or seen or challenged or inspired.
We might be grieving the future or the events that we imagined having with them.
So like holidays, milestones, everyday routines.
We might grieve the identity that we built around them,
who we identified as because of who they were.
This could be things like spouse, sibling, child, friend, caregiver, coworker.
These are things we often grieve when someone dies.
And grief is the brain embodies response to these losses.
Last week we talked about loss is the thing that happened.
Grief is everything that comes after it.
And while love is a huge part or can be a huge part of that everything that comes after.
So are other emotional experiences like longing or anger or regret,
confusion, nostalgia, and again, as I mentioned at the top of the show,
sometimes even relief, especially here this a lot from caregivers
or from people who had an abuser, a toxic person,
somebody they were estranged to die.
And this gets me to my next section.
What about grief for people that we didn't love?
And these are the people that are the most marginalized or most left out of the story
when it comes to this quote.
Because the grief equals love phrase is totally hollow, is totally shallow.
When it comes to mourning people who did not or could not show us love in life for whatever reason.
And so when it comes to this quote, a lot of my students in life after loss academy
ask things like, what about the grief that comes after an abusive parent dies?
Am I allowed to grieve a toxic ex partner?
If we didn't really love each other, it was a co-dependent relationship
or it was a narcissistic relationship.
Am I allowed to grieve that even if it never really felt good or aligned with my heart?
I never got to meet my biological parents.
I was adopted.
Can I still grieve them?
I wouldn't call it love.
I would call it something else.
Am I allowed to grieve the relationship I had with them?
And in these cases, these are just three examples.
Grief is not rooted in love.
It's rooted in longing or unmet needs or the loss of what could have or even should have
been.
Some people grieve the relationship that they wish they had or an apology that they never
received or the ways in which they were wounded or hurt or the hope that things would
someday be different.
These can relate to love, but they're not always grounded or foundationally oriented around
love.
And in situations like these saying grief is just love can feel dismissive or harmful
to people because for many grievers, grief has a lot of layers of complexity to it and that
complexity deserves a lot of space.
And I want to get into talking about why this doesn't mean the quote, grief is love is
wrong.
I don't swear it off.
I'm not telling you you can never say it again.
And I'm certainly not telling you it can't be true for you.
It's just a sentiment that exists out in the world.
It's been massively comforting for to what I would imagine are millions of grievers maybe
more.
And if it brings you peace and if you don't push it on to other people who are grieving,
please do not do that.
Hold on to it.
Allow that to be true for you.
I also want to put a big asterisk here.
There is a book called grief is love by Marissa Renee Lee.
And this is a powerful and beautifully written book that has helped countless people feel
validated in their grief and honor their loved ones.
This podcast is not an attack on that book.
I am so glad that this book exists in the world.
What I do know for sure from more than eight years of working with grieving people, both
one-on-one and in group settings is that grief is bigger than any single one word, even
a word that is as big and as encompassing as love.
grief is super personal and it's also universal.
It is layered and multifaceted and sometimes it doesn't fit neatly or tidily into the framing
of just love, just love with no place to go.
So if grief isn't just love with nowhere to go, what the heck is it?
And as we talked about last week, loss is the thing that happened.
grief is everything that comes after.
But it is also exhaustion, overwhelm, longing, disorientation, numbness, guilt, rage, loneliness,
and please insert your own words of choice here and in grieving someone, you're not just
grieving the fact that they're no longer here.
You're grieving all the ways that they impacted your life, the good, the bad, the in between.
You might be mourning hopes or dreams or processing should have could have what is.
You might also be grieving the fact that loss forced you to change in some way, loss so
often makes us become people that we never thought or never imagined we would ever be.
And that is also something worth grieving.
On top of all that, here's some more layers for you to think about and to validate that
this exists and this can be true for you.
grief is also integration, meaning making, rebuilding, finding ways to be creative in
the midst of loss and ultimately as we do and talk about so often on the show and we're
going to keep talking about into the future, figuring out how in the hell do I move forward?
You're figuring out how to hold both the reality of what happened and the reality that you
must keep going.
You might be building rituals that help you remember your person.
You might be getting into therapy or seeking coaching for extra support.
You might be learning tools that help you make each day feel more survivable.
Shout out to my daily guidebook, your grief, your way.
You might be in a place to start considering how you might feel hopeful or happy whatever
a meaningful life feels like to you or you might just be doing your best to live right now
in this present moment because goodness knows that is hard enough when you're grieving.
Grief is all of these things.
It is like worlds biggest umbrella and when we acknowledge it in its full complexity,
we make space for every grieving person, not just the ones whose grief fits neatly into
the category, albeit a big category of love with no place to go.
So if the quote, "Greep is love with no place to go," doesn't quite sit right with you.
Know this.
Your grief is valid.
No matter what shape it takes, whether or not it looks like love with a love plays a little
role or a big role or no role at all, whether that includes love in any stretch or capacity
and you are most definitely not alone.
This is a phrase that has come up so many times when I've worked with students, one on one
clients of like, "This is true for me," or "This doesn't feel quite true."
Let's talk about it.
And I want to talk about too.
As I do on so many of these episodes of grief grower, there is a place for your grief to
go.
If grief is love with no place to go or if grief is all of these other things with no place
to go, the follow-up question suddenly becomes, "Okay, so where the hell do I put my grief?
Where should that belong in my life?
Where should that exist?
Where do I set down my grief?
Have space to look at it?
Process it.
Talk about it with other people."
And this is the part where I tell you about life after loss academy.
I know I talk about it a fair bit on this show and mention stories of students and things
like that.
But if you are in a place in your grief where you are looking for tools, community, space
to define grief in your own words, I hope that you'll join us in life after loss academy.
This is my online course and community for people living life after all kinds of loss.
We talk about grief as love, but we also talk about all these other messy, beautiful, complicated
layer cake emotions that come along with grieving a loss that ultimately changed your life in
some way.
So again, whether you're grieving the death of a loved one or as somebody once said to
me, "A less than loved one," your grief is welcome.
Inside this program, we have people grieving death absolutely, but we also have divorce
and break up, life changing diagnosis, astrangement, natural disaster, especially the wildfires in
California in earlier this year.
And things like invisible losses, like creativity, identity, safety, and faith.
These are all things we learn how to grieve and grieve together in life after loss academy.
And if the phrase grief is love with no place to go, "Does it resonate with you?"
And you want to figure out what else is there?
What else is inside the experience of my grief that's not love that I'm struggling to define?
Or trying to figure out how to release, so I'm not holding on to it or carrying it inside
of me.
Or I want to figure out how to relay it to other people so they understand what I'm experiencing.
I'm talking about your relationships with friends, family co-workers, and total strangers
who you might interact with and tell your grief story to.
We also do all of that inside life after loss academy.
So I hope you'll join us there.
I am so glad that you tuned into this episode of "Greef Grower" today.
This is truly one of my favorite topics to talk about.
It's one of my favorite tables to kind of flip over.
And like, see what else is here.
It is this "and" and it's never a cancellation.
It's never a "I'm going to come in with a red pen and mark out this quote and say, "This
is invalid and it can't apply to your life."
What I will do is take my tiny little red pen and put a little plus sign and just a big
blank next to it.
So grief is love with no place to go and what else is true for you grief grower because
growing through grief involves not just identifying where love is or was or the lack of where love
was supposed to be in our lives, but everything else that comes along for the ride, no matter
who or what you're grieving.
And I am so glad to have shared space and time with you today.
That's all for this episode of "Greef Grower."
Thank you so much for joining me on the show today.
If you're looking for grief support beyond this podcast, you can find free workshops,
blog articles, including grief is not just love with no place to go and my signature "What's
Your Grief Support" style quiz at shallbeforsitia.com/links.
If this show felt validating, comforting, educational, or otherwise helpful to your heart, please
subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify.
And be sure to share grief grower with a friend because you never know what someone
you love is going through.
A huge thank you to the grief growers community for supporting the show on Patreon.
And if you'd like to join them and keep this show ad free because grief is hard enough
without commercials, head to patreon.com/shellbeforsitia.
As a Patreon supporter, you can help me choose new topics and guests for the show.
And you're the first to get behind the scenes access to every single one of my upcoming
projects, including a new book that is coming your way in 2026.
If grower is hosted by me, shallbeforsitia and the theme music is composed by our own Addy
Goldstein.
Until next time, 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.
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