I cannot tell you how many grieving clients, grieving students I have worked with through
the years, who have said, "I feel like my grief is making me self-centered or I've been
accused of being selfish or making my loss all about me."
Is this true?
Is this real?
Is there something to being selfish in the aftermath of loss?
So I wanted to get into this topic.
Is grief really selfish?
And my answer might surprise you.
[Music]
Hi there, grief growers and welcome back to grief grower.
I am calm today.
I don't know if you can hear this outside where I am, but I am recording in the middle
of the thunderstorms.
My hope is that there is some sort of ASMR rain thunder sound happening in the background
as you listen to this.
And that is something that is soothing to you as it is for me.
I am grateful that you're here.
If you have been growing alongside me in my work for a while, welcome back.
If you are new to me in my work, hello.
My name is Shelby for Scythia.
I am in grief coach, a two-time author and founder of an online course in community called Life
After Loss Academy, where I have helped dozens of grieving people stop feeling lost, stuck,
broken and alone.
And we're going to get to talking to a bit of that today and start building lives that
they genuinely love from the lives that loss has forced them to live.
Here on grief grower, we believe that grief is not something to get over.
It is something that we grow with and alongside for the rest of our lives.
And that when we stop treating grief less like something that's wrong with us and more
like something that deepens our humanity, we can create rich, meaningful lives that include
our grief, that allow our grief to come along for the right.
And today on the show, we're going to be talking about a question that I get asked more often
than I would like to admit.
And that is, is grief selfish.
And I cannot tell you how many grieving clients, grieving students I have worked with through
the years, who have said, "I feel like my grief is making me self-centered or I've been accused
of being selfish or making my loss all about me."
In Life After Loss, is this true?
Is this real?
Is there something to being selfish in the aftermath of loss?
And so this is inspired by a question that I received via email from a podcast listener
named Anjan.
He wrote, "Thank you for all the work you do for grievous.
It seems to me that some people think that grief is due to self-love, essentially saying
that grief is selfish.
I do not know whether you have made content on this but would request you to consider this
as a topic."
So Anjan, this one's for you.
This question is so thoughtful and honest.
And again, like I said, it is, it's far from unique.
I get this question from grieving people all over the world, especially those in Eurocentric
cultures, I'm thinking like the United States, Europe, Australia, because these societies
are focused a lot on individualism, but we want your individualism to serve the masses.
And so that when you focus on you or yourself, you're not being productive.
You're not contributing to the economy or to your household.
And selfishness is often a verbal weapon that is lobbed at people who are trying to focus
on their healing.
Let me concretize this.
Let's bring this down into the ground.
Statements like, "You're not the only one who's hurting, you know."
Can we talk about something else for once?
Well, I didn't say anything when my dad died.
I just powered through.
If you really loved them, you'd celebrate their life instead of wallowing.
Oh, people just use grief as an excuse to be lazy.
The implication under all of these statements is that you are somehow selfish for grieving.
You are making your loss all about you or that you are not grieving correctly.
And these statements sort of fall under this icky umbrella of shame that says, "You're
making this loss about you."
This, the details of your loss, how you're getting through it, this conversation, you are monopolizing
it and controlling it and taking hold of it in a way that I don't like.
So I'm going to point the conversation at you and accuse you, griever, of being a selfish
person.
So I wanted to get into this topic is grief really selfish?
And my answer might surprise you.
If you've been around my work long enough, you may have received an email to this effect.
Yes, I believe grief is selfish.
But before you turn this podcast off, not in the way that you think.
Here's the thing, grief to me is selfish in the same way that tending to yourself after
a natural disaster is selfish.
When a natural disaster like a flood or a tornado or a hurricane or an earthquake or a wildfire
or a snowstorm, something tears through your life, it makes sense that you were focused on
your home, your power outage, your broken windows, your next meal.
Yes, you have an awareness of your neighbors and your friends and your larger community that
has been impacted by this disaster.
But largely, your focus is centered on you and your small corner of the world because you're
the one who's small corner of the world just fell apart.
You are not selfish in society standards for being upset that your roof is gone.
You're the one who has to deal with it.
It makes sense that you are self-centered.
It makes sense that you are the focus of your life right now.
You are the one in the wake of your loss making decisions about next steps while also figuring
out how to survive the moment that you are forced to live in right now because you are
simultaneously the center of the chaos and the one who is responsible for rebuilding from
it.
People on the outside might say, "Shouldy things like well, at least you got some time off
work or other people had it worse."
But that doesn't change the fact that your life, your life, the life that belongs to you,
the life that you were living here on planet earth, just got turned upside down in a very
major, life altering probably permanent way.
Grief is self-centered.
Grief is selfish because the weight of it is personal.
The fact that your grief is all about you is not or should not be a source of shame.
It is a recognition of humanity.
Like yes, my grief is all about me.
The person I love is gone or the life I thought I was building vanished whether slowly bit
by bit or overnight.
I am the one left in the rubble of the pieces of my life before.
I am the one standing here in the aftermath of the destruction, having to survive in the
aftermath of destruction and then also rebuild again.
To the question is grief selfish.
I say, "Of course grief is selfish.
How could it not be?"
What I want to talk about specifically though is that Anjan in his question also sent me
a link to a YouTube video that was a Buddhist reflection on grief.
This kind of presented me with a compassionate but also challenging lens to see grief through.
I won't replay the YouTube video here but I did link to it in the blog on my website
under the same name.
It is grief selfish.
If you search, "Is grief selfish?"
Shelby for Cynthia on Google, you will find the blog article.
It is from a 2001 Dama talk by Anjan Brahm who is a Buddhist monk who is teaching to explore
things like non-attachment and impermanence and peace through surrender.
There are a lot, a lot, a lot of Buddhist teachings focused on these things.
The talk, the YouTube video is about three and a half minutes or so.
It references a Buddhist teaching called the Salasuta which offers this reflection.
I am going to read a little bit from the Buddhist reflection.
Not abandoning grief.
A person suffers all the more pain.
Be wailing one whose time is done.
You fall under the sway of grief.
Having your own happiness, you should pull out your own arrow, your own lamentation, longing,
and sorrow.
This is a powerful teaching.
It is one that encourages a healing by letting go of grief.
Not because grief in and of itself is inherently wrong but because attachment to what cannot
be changed or what can no longer be can make suffering more painful.
If that is the focus of your grief, this part is ended and I can't change it.
A lot of the Buddha Kura Shura is that can make the pain that comes with loss doubly painful.
It can double and triple down on the pain you experience in the aftermath of loss.
This teaching and a lot of Buddhist teachings are teachings that resonate deeply with a lot
of people.
If this resonates with you, like the non-attachment and grief is letting go, wonderful.
I hope that you take that and I hope that you let it guide you.
For other grieving people, such as myself, maybe you as well, listener, especially in the
raw or acute or early days of loss, teachings like this can feel invalidating to your grief
and even shaming because they can be interpreted as you are clinging too hard to your loss,
you're bringing more suffering onto yourself, move on already.
And that is not a helpful message when your heart is like already screaming in pain
because it makes it seem as if the reason you are in pain is because you can't detach
from this.
You are making this loss all about you.
You are so selfish.
This interpretation that grief is selfish in a negative sense that grief is about control
and ego and a refusal to let go or the illusion that there is separation between us.
This can make people feel defective for doing something as natural and as human as mourning
a person or a life that they've lost and can no longer get back to.
I often refer to grief as a threshold you can't cross back over, the door is closed to
you and you can't get back through to the other side.
Any grief or loss event is a threshold or a doorway like that and it is normal to look
back at the door and say, "I will never get to access my life before again.
I will never get to go through that door and we live that part of my life."
And that is sad.
That is hard.
I have attached to that or I have attached to them in some way and it is very normal to
grieve that thing.
And once again, in many Eurocentric societies, cultures where individual emotions are already
policed, people want you.
If you're going to be an individualist, you must also be serving capitalism or patriarchy
or white supremacy of the masses.
It is very easy for grievers to absorb this message of, "You are so selfish.
We're making this all about you."
Like a sponge, this message of shame just like soaks in like a sponge.
Try and say that five times.
That's the message of shame, soaks in like a sponge.
It sounds like a vocal warm up for choir.
It is distressing, I'll say.
When society calls grief self-centered, I'll give you some other examples of how this sounds.
I can't believe you're still not over it.
You need to move on and you're making this all about you.
One of the biggest reasons that these judgments sting with people is because they strike or
they get to the heart of this very core fear that so many grieving people carry, maybe
there really is something wrong with me.
Maybe I'm bad at grieving.
Maybe my grief or my loss or my feelings about it make me so other from other people that
I no longer belong to my family or my friend group or my community group anymore because
they all think I'm too weird or too sad or too self-absorbed or too angry or too selfish
for grieving.
When your grief doesn't look acceptable to other people, when it takes too long, when it
gets too loud, when it becomes too inconvenient for other people to carry, society, friends, family,
loved ones, the media, bosses, co-workers, calls itself fish.
To my brain, from my perspective, as a grief-coaching person who's been doing this work and as a
griever who's been grieving for going on 12 years now, at least, in my view, this is not a reflection
of your grief or something being wrong with you.
It is a very clear mirror reflection of society's inability to sit with pain and death and uncertainty
and vulnerability.
Something is not wrong with you.
Something is wrong with all of this.
Still, society, we do not do grief well yet.
We're getting there, baby steps, but society does not do grief well yet.
Its current solution still is to point at grievers and call them selfish when they are grieving normally.
I do want to touch on this topic, though, going back to the Buddhist ego-death non-attachment
sentiment that Anjun shared in this email and answer the question kind of a secondary
question is grieving about ego because some people or philosophies or religions might
argue that grief is really just the ego's way of saying, "This should not have happened.
I did not consent to this.
I want my person back and I want to be in control of my life, not God and not fate."
And yes, absolutely.
Grief can have this flavor, this existential of like, "Why is this my life?
Why me?
I am a cursed person.
I want all of this back and I should be in charge of my life and not this other being.
I have belief in a not fate and not destiny and not pointlessness, not nihilism."
But if this is a part of your grief, I kind of have to say like, "So what?
We are biologically wired to want connection and stability and when this door, when this
threshold, this closes to you and you cannot access your life before.
It makes sense that you missed your person or that you resent death for existing or you
should have could have would have all the other paths your life could have taken instead
of forcing you through this door that is now close to you.
If again, for my view, does not and should not be explained away as a failure of spirituality,
you are not a bad Buddhist, you are not a bad Christian, you are not a bad Jew, you are
not a bad Muslim because you are grieving.
It is not a lack of enlightenment or a clinging to attachment that has gotten you here.
You are not broken because your grief feels overwhelming.
Grief is overwhelming.
You are not failing because your sad or angry are still missing somebody who died months
or years or decades later.
We all, if we are willing to talk about it, miss someone who died months or years or decades
later.
And you are not egotistical for noticing all the ways you have been impacted by loss, whether
or not society can put words to it or not, we are noticing the ways we have been impacted
by loss.
Back to episode, I think it's episode four or five with Rebecca Sofer where we talk about
the five year anniversary of COVID, society has been impacted by COVID.
We haven't quite put language to it yet in a lot of ways, but a lot of people know that
sense that time something has changed.
And you are not egotistical for being a person who notices it.
You are simply highly sensitive or highly aware of taking that tally of here's tick, tick,
tick, all the ways that grief has changed my life.
You are doing exactly what every human does after loss.
You are grieving and taking an inventory and a kind of a status report of what are all
the ways that grief has impacted me.
The invitation I want to offer you in this episode and kind of as a response or an action
to Anjana's question is to reframe grief as a form of self-compassion, not something that
makes you selfish.
So instead of seeing grief as a selfish expression of poor miserable me, why me I'm cursed
by the heavens or I'm overly attached to XYZ, you can choose if you want to see grief
as an expression of love and remembrance that lives on through you.
That is something you can stay attached and connected to.
You could choose to see it as pain that is worthy of attention.
A lot of times in my after loss academy my students would be like, my grief is a signal that I need
to pay more attention to something.
And so if I'm getting a lot of like grief activators in the grocery store or songs coming
on the radio, it's a signal to me to pause and tend to that pain.
Grief could also be a signal of longing that reveals how deeply you can connect to people,
places, things, relationships.
And it can also be a arrow pointing towards healing that requires a slowing down and attuning
in.
Yes, grief is centered on the self, but not in this harmful, egocentric way that society
often accuses us of.
Grief is self-centered in the sense that you must turn inward.
You've got to look at yourself in many, many ways, more than I can even tally on this podcast
in order to heal.
You must.
You have a mandate to care for the one who is still here on earth and that person is you.
And that is not a shameful thing.
That is a sacred thing.
I propose to you, everyone listening out there, that being selfish in grief is actually
very necessary.
So if we flip the script, what if being selfish in grief is not a character flaw, you are
not broken or defective, it is a survival strategy.
You are not grieving to make a scene or cause drama at the family barbecue.
You are grieving because your entire world just changed.
One of those is a lot more in character for you than the other.
You are not emotional because you are dramatic.
You are emotional because your body, heart and soul are processing something massive,
which one feels more true for you.
You are not remembering your loss or reliving your loss to get attention.
You are remembering your loss because the person or thing you lost mattered a lot to you
and it's important to you to keep it close in memory.
In Life After Loss Academy, which is my online course in community for moving through grief,
I walk you through what I call my five step grief method, GRIEF and the first three modules,
GRIEF and RELEASE and INTOGRADE, are entirely focused on you, the grieving person and how you
would like to rebuild your life after loss.
We don't even talk about doing grief with others, setting boundaries with friends, family
co-workers until the established module when we establish boundaries and better relationships
in life after loss.
So these first three modules, GRIEF and RELEASE and INTOGRADE, go as such.
GRIEF is about regaining your sense of stability in a world in a life that has fallen apart.
GRIEF is about processing and expressing your difficult emotions, sadness, anger, guilt,
despair, hopelessness, whatever you want to throw in the mix, we'll release it together.
INTOGRADE is about folding loss into your life, weaving it in, in ways that feel nourishing
and connecting to you, such as remembering a lot of one through signs and symbols.
And so these first three modules is helping you feel safe, helping you release emotions,
helping you weave grief into your life in the ways that resonate best for you.
And the grief method as a whole, what I teach in my course and what I bring to you here
on the podcast, this is not about narcissism or control or selfishness.
It is about you reorienting to your life after loss came in and just punched your compass,
the thing that was orienting your life right in the face.
And yes, that means the focus is on you.
But that's not because your grief makes you more important than anybody else.
It's because your nervous system, your identity, your beliefs, your memories, your
memories and your daily life were all impacted by your loss.
Self-centered does not mean selfish.
In the context of grief, it means self-focused and having a focus on the self is crucial for
your healing, for your coming back to life after loss.
Here are some next steps and some scripts because I can't leave you without some very
practical boundary setting statements to take into the world with you.
Most times someone accuses you of being self-centered or selfish for grieving.
See if you can reframe it.
This helps you stop receiving the word selfish or self-centered as a curse word, which it can
feel like in life after loss, and start appreciating it as a very core reality.
This is a true thing in life after loss.
In other words, you are centering yourself because you have to.
Loss has happened to you, so it makes sense that you are selfish or self-centered in this
season.
So here are a few scripts to respond when someone just boob lobs a selfish statement in your
direction.
For I can't believe you are still not over it.
You can say, "You're right.
I'm not over it because that's not how grief works."
If someone says, "You need to move on."
You could say, "A lot of people say you need to move on when they don't like how someone's
expressing their grief."
What exactly is it am I doing that's upsetting to you?
I would genuinely like to understand.
If somebody says to you, "You're making this all about you."
You could respond, "My grief is all about me.
It's my grief and my loss that happened to me."
The good news is, "You have your own grief."
And that's all about you.
That one's a little sassy, so do with that what you will.
If somebody says, "You're not the only one who's hurting, you know."
You could say something like, "I'm aware that my mom's death has affected a lot of people."
And I get to grieve her as much as everybody else does.
If somebody looks at you and says, "Can we talk about something else for once?"
You could say, "I'll never stop talking about my diagnosis or their death or the pet loss
that changed my life."
It is something that is going to stay with me forever.
That's a boundary-setting statement.
If somebody says, "I didn't say anything when my dad died, I just powered through."
You could say, "You may have powered through, but I'm choosing to address my grief
head on.
It feels more healing to me."
If somebody accuses you of being selfish by saying, "If you really loved them, you would
celebrate their life instead of wallowing."
You can say, "I can celebrate their life and feel sad that they're not here.
I am capable of having more than one emotion at a time."
And finally, if somebody says to you, "People just use grief as an excuse to be lazy."
I encourage you to say, "Lasiness isn't real, and I can't believe you just said that."
If you think I'm using my grief to get out of something, let's have a conversation about
what you think that looks like.
This is very much an invitation for curiosity and a clear statement of what your beliefs
around what they said are.
I want you to remember through all of these that grief is not something that makes you
broken, it's something that makes you human.
And in a world that often tells you to ignore your pain and hurry up and be okay already,
reclaiming your right to grief or kind of interrupting somebody else's thought of
grief as selfish, you putting a boulder in the road of that thought for them is an act of
self-compassion, both for you and for them whether they notice it or not.
Here's my final thoughts for you, for Anjan and everyone else listening.
Is grief selfish?
Yes, but not in the way that people mean it when they say it to shame you.
grief is selfish in the way that healing is selfish.
When you are healing, you are focused on your needs, you are reaching out for help from
other people, you are oftentimes taking a break from pouring from your cup because you do
not have the energy or capacity to do so.
Grief self-centers you because you're still here on planet earth, something devastating
happened, you got shoved through that door and that door is permanently close to you and
you are now tasked with getting through today, getting through tomorrow and getting through
the rest of your life.
And even loss cannot change the fact that you and nobody at loss took a lot away from you
but loss cannot change the fact that you and nobody else is in the driver's seat of your
life.
You may not have been able to control the weather, you still can't.
You may not have been able to control the GPS navigation, maybe still can't.
You really can't control the bumpiness of the road that you're driving on.
But you are in charge of how you respond and where you're going next.
That's about all we have power over in life after loss.
And I say that's about all we have power over and sometimes that feels like nothing and
sometimes it feels like everything.
But when you're grieving, you do not need to be and I hold this so firmly in my heart, it
is not helpful for you to be shamed and belittled for focusing on yourself.
You need to be encouraged by the people surrounding you to dive deep into your losses, to your
stories, to your values and your heart as you pursue this process of putting the pieces
of your life back together in the way that makes the most sense for you.
In other words, you need to be allowed to explore who loss is turning you into without harmful,
hurtful labels like selfish slap to cross you.
Inside life after a loss academy, if this resonates with you, I can help you ground in
a stability, get you that compass back, release emotions like shame, sadness, guilt, and
rebuild a life that feels meaningful to you even with grief and tow, even with grief
as a passenger in that car.
You do not need to do this alone.
You just need support that does not judge you for being a human person who is trying your
best to heal.
If this speaks to your experience and you want to center your healing, you are in an
era of your life where that is true without shame, without being called selfish, I invite
you to join life after a loss academy so we can figure out your next steps where you drive
it next, what's your direction together.
And that is a space where I would just love to welcome you to take your questions to acknowledge
that grief is inherently selfish, but maybe that's kind of a radical, cool thing and we can
all be selfish about our grief in tandem together.
And you can find more information about how to do that in the show notes.
On John, thank you so much for your question for writing in for these Buddhist teachings
that I did not know existed until your letter.
And if you'd like to submit a question for me to answer on a future episode of grief
grower, you can also find contact information for me to do that in the show notes.
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 this show, you can find free workshops, blog
articles and my signature, what's your grief support style quiz at shallbeforcithia.com/links.
If this podcast felt validating, comforting, educational or otherwise helpful to you and
your grief, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify and be sure
to share this show with a friend because you never know what someone you love is going
through.
A very, very big thank you to the grief growers community for supporting the show on Patreon.
If you'd like to join them and help me keep this show free from ads from mattresses and
delivery kits because grief is hard enough without commercials, head to patreon.com/shellbeforcithia.
As a supporter, you get to help me choose new topics and guess for the show and you're
the first to get behind the scenes access to all of my upcoming projects like my new book
coming out in 2026.
Grief grower is hosted by me, shallbeforcithia and the theme music is composed by Addy Goldstein.
Until next time, grief growers, I see you.
I am so proud of you and the work that you're doing in the world and I love you because
even through grief, we are growing.
[BLANK_AUDIO]