Tears are not the only sign of grief, but when you can't cry or when tears will not come,
it can feel like something is deeply wrong.
And especially if you're grieving a death-related loss or a breakup, you might start to wonder
if you didn't love the person you lost enough, or maybe you're afraid that tears not coming
means the loss hasn't hit you yet, and when it does, it will be a cascade, like a tidal
wave of emotions, that you will not be able to survive.
But the truth I know is a grief professional and a griever is this.
Tears are just one expression of sadness.
They are not the definition of sad.
If you are not crying after a loss, it doesn't mean you're not grieving.
It doesn't mean you don't care.
And it absolutely doesn't mean that you're doing grief wrong.
[Music]
Hi there, grief growers, and welcome back to another episode of Grief Grower.
I am so honored to be here with you again today, as always.
If you have 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, which
is an online course in community that has helped dozens of grieving people stop feeling
lost, stuck, broken, and alone, and start building lives that they genuinely love from
the lives that loss force them to live.
Here on Grief Grower, we know that that includes not only death-related losses, but also losses
like divorce and break up, major diagnosis, and any other loss that changes your life.
Here on the show, we believe that grief is not something to get over.
It is something that we grow with and alongside, and that when we stop treating grief like a
problem to be solved, and instead start treating grief like an invitation to live more deeply,
we create meaningful lives that are rich with the memories that we carry, the struggles
that we faced, and the preciousness of what it is to be alive right here and right now.
Before we get into today's topic, which is all about crying and why can't I cry in Life
After Loss?
Just a quick reminder that released day for my book, of course I'm here right now.
Three actually helpful things to say to someone grieving is coming up very soon on March 31st.
This little guidebook, it's a very thin book, I'm showing it here on YouTube, is the toolkit
that I created to teach you how to support a grieving person in your life with the best
free tool that any of us has, and that is our words, so that you will never enter another
conversation with someone who's grieving, wondering what do I say to comfort them.
As an author, and I mention this every single time pre-orders are super helpful when it comes
to getting this book seen by bookstores and the marketing powers that be and the creators
of the bestseller lists, so you can find a link to pre-order, of course, in here right
now, in the show notes for this episode.
If you have already pre-ordered the book, thank you so incredibly much.
You can submit your receipt number from Bookshop, Amazon Bards and Noble, or your local
indie bookstore on my website, ShelbyFersedvia.com, to access my free six week book club where
we will read.
Of course, I'm here right now in its entirety and discuss it together as a group.
This book club kicks off in mid-April, so make sure you have the book in your hands digitally
or in hard back before then.
And if you would like to celebrate the launch of this book with me, I am hosting two launch
parties that I would love to see you add.
The first one is taking place here in Chicago on March 30, which is the eve before the book
comes out, so if you want the book in your hands before the rest of the world, I encourage
you to come to that one on March 30.
The second one is the day the book comes out March 31 on YouTube, so no matter where
in the world you live, you can tune in to hear more about the clients and interactions
that inspire to creation of this book, plus what to say to someone grieving, and of course,
I will be taking your questions live.
And if you cannot attend the virtual event at the time it is scheduled for on March 31,
the replay will be available so you can watch it the next day.
You can save your spot for both launch parties at the link in the show notes.
Now, onto today's episode.
Here's or not the only sign of grief, but when you can't cry or when tears will not come,
it can feel like something is deeply wrong with you or with your grief experience.
So many of my grieving clients and students worry that if I can't cry, that something is
broken or defective about how I am dealing with my grief, you might feel things like detached
or numb or even guilty for not having tears spring for to your eyes.
And especially if you're grieving a death related loss or a breakup, you might start to wonder
if you didn't love the person you lost enough or maybe you're afraid that tears not coming
means the loss hasn't hit you yet.
And when it does, it will be a cascade, like a tidal wave of emotions that you will not
be able to survive.
But the truth I know as a grief professional and as a griever is this, tears are just one
expression of sadness.
They are not the definition of sad.
If you are not crying after a loss, it doesn't mean you're not grieving.
It doesn't mean you don't care.
And it absolutely doesn't mean that you're doing grief wrong.
So today on the show, I want to give you five reasons why you might not be able to cry
after a loss.
Okay, so today's episode is all about crying and why can't I cry even though I'm sad, even
though I'm grieving.
This is such a commonly Googled question by grievers and one that is asked on like anonymous
Reddit grief support groups.
And it's something that as a person who doesn't necessarily cry to cope with grief is
something I feel uniquely qualified to answer.
So kind of as I mentioned, tears are not the only sign of grief, but when you can't
cry or when tears will not come, it can feel like something is deeply wrong with you
or with your grief experience.
So many of my grieving clients and students worry that if I can't cry, that something is
broken or defective about how I am dealing with my grief, you might feel things like detached
or numb or even guilty for not having tears spring for tear eyes.
And especially if you're grieving a death related loss or a breakup, you might start to wonder
if you didn't love the person you lost enough or maybe you were afraid that tears not
coming means the loss hasn't hit you yet.
And when it does, it will be a cascade, like a tidal wave of emotions that you will not
be able to survive.
But the truth I know is a grief professional and as a griever is this, tears are just one
expression of sadness.
They are not the definition of sad.
If you are not crying after a loss, it doesn't mean you're not grieving.
It doesn't mean you don't care.
And it absolutely doesn't mean that you're doing grief wrong.
So today on the show, I want to give you five reasons why you might not be able to cry after
a loss, even if you're sad, even if you're heartbroken.
And each of them will have a little reflection question at the end to take with you beyond
this episode.
So I encourage you to write them down or journal about them or return to this episode again
and again as you need.
Okay, the first reason you might not be able to cry after a loss is that crying is not
your grief language and it never was your grief language.
Some people cry easily and often.
For other people, tears are just not a part of their emotional toolkit.
So it is very much worth asking yourself, do you have a history of crying when things
feel hard or bad or sad or overwhelming?
Has crying ever been a natural or default response for you when you are facing sadness
or anger or longing or nostalgia or even joy or overwhelm?
If not, it makes sense that tears would not be your first stop in grief either.
A lot of people think like, oh, this person died.
So now I should be sad and now I should be crying even if they've never cried before in
their lives, but that's not necessarily the way that grief works.
You might express grief in other powerful cathartic ways.
You might scream or shriek or punch a pillow, do something physical with your body.
You might journal or rant out loud alone.
You might sort of contain yourself in a way and listen to sad music or watch emotional
movies.
You might take yourself out into the world to like a theater performance or poetry reading
or an orchestral symphony, something of that nature.
You might find yourself zoning out into escapism or going numb or diving into productivity,
sort of like putting any tear jerking emotions on the back burner and doing something else.
Or you might be channeling all of your emotions into your hands, like arts craft spreadsheets,
cleaning.
You might be doing something with the energy of that grief.
If it might not be the energy comes up by crying, it might be that the energy goes out another
way.
And perhaps you're a person who only expresses big emotions like crying or anger or rage
or any grief related emotion under very specific circumstances.
For instance, I will never forget a former coworker of mine used to cue her emotions and
make herself cry by watching military reunion videos, people coming home from a long time
of service.
After grieving people I have connected with cry only at live music shows, but never at funerals.
And I personally will take myself, I've told this story before on Griefgrower, to appear
here in Chicago and scream out into the water when emotions are so great and big inside
of me.
I might sound unhinged to other people, but it is my body's way of releasing the overwhelm
of everything that has built up inside.
It is really important to remember that crying is one of a thousand expressions of grief.
And it is not the proof that you are grieving.
So my reflection question for you here on our first stop is, do I usually cry when life
feels hard?
Number two, reason you might not be crying is that you are still in shock or some kind
of numbness after a loss.
Grief absolutely has layers and cycles and it is a puzzle to figure out.
And a lot of times for a lot of grievers, shock comes first.
It is the first sort of emotional experience that many grieving people have in the immediate
aftermath of a loss.
Whether your loss was sudden or something that you expected, it can take a lot of time for
the weight and the permanence and the impact of it to fully thud and land in your body.
The initial days and weeks and months after death can feel really quiet or very flat, sort
of like a pond with no creatures or life on it.
You might feel like you are watching your life from outside your body, like going through
the motions but disconnected from your feelings.
I talked about that either last week or the week before here on GriefGower in the episode
where I talked about why year two of grief can often feel harder than year one and so
much of it is because shock and numbness is the first thing that so many grieving people
feel.
Basically, you might not be crying because your nervous system still has you in a kind
of lockdown.
Or instead of sadness, you might be feeling rage or panic or confusion or exhaustion or
irritation.
With their default being snippiness or knee jerk reactions instead of as one student put
it lying in a puddle of tears on the floor.
Grief is not a thing that moves in a straight line and while the emotional response of crying
might make logical sense to you, it would make so much sense if I could just cry.
Your grief may have other plans.
It makes so much sense to just snap with the customer service rep on the phone as opposed
to breakdown in tears.
The thing I know for sure is that there are no clear and correct timelines for when tears
should arrive in your life.
There is only what's happening in your body right now and whatever that experience is for
you, that deserves your trust and not your judgment or your criticism.
So my second reflection question for you is, could I still be in shock from my loss
and am I still in the immediate impact or the immediate fallout of it?
If so, then tears might not be the first thing coming to the surface for you.
Number three is one that is especially close to my heart.
Number three reason you can't cry, you don't feel safe enough to cry.
And this is something that we don't talk about enough as like a larger society, but it's
that tears require safety a lot of times in order to be expressed crying is a vulnerable
act, especially in a society that perceives tears as a sign of weakness or femininity or
an inability to hold it together.
Tears are a release that asks your body to literally soften.
And if the world around you doesn't feel safe, softening cannot and will not happen.
So here's a few examples of environments that may be blocking your tears or stopping them
from happening.
One of them could be an unsupported family or a friend group or your grief is judged
or minimized on a regular basis.
Everyone is a workplace that expects you to just be productive and power through.
Another one could be a friendship that has changed after loss and is not welcome of your
grief.
Another one could be a therapist or support group that doesn't really feel aligned with
your loss or what you need from grief support.
And a last one that is so huge for so many people right now is global or political trauma
that has already pushed your nervous system to the edge.
All of these situations say and then combine together say it is not safe enough for you
to cry.
And there is too much going on, too much pressure, too much pain, too much survival mode.
Your body will not let you collapse into tears.
It is not a personal failing.
It is your body's way of protecting you from being vulnerable in a place where it is not
safe to be vulnerable the best way that it knows how.
And the number one instance that I can story tell about this is in 2020 when worldwide
COVID shutdowns happened.
And I got a massive wave of new grief clients who told me that because their lives were
finally slowed down, they had time and space to grieve losses that happened years and
years ago without the daily grind and frankly the daily stress of commuting running errands,
attending work meetings, caretaking for themselves, other people pets going to social events.
They finally felt safe enough and slow enough to allow their grief to come to the surface.
Of course, absolutely this was not everybody's experience during the pandemic, but it was
true for a lot of people. It was like life slowed down enough and there was time and space
enough and sort of security stability enough amidst the chaos of the pandemic.
But like people were home, people were not going anywhere.
They were not traveling.
They were not seeing other people.
They were not caretaking possibly in ways that they had in the past.
There was so much more predictability to the days.
There was a bit of a monotony that it was finally safe or finally stable enough for grief
to come to the surface.
But again, I know this is not everybody's experience of COVID-19, but it was so many people's experience
that I saw it through my work.
People were coming to me, like this happened three, four, five, ten years ago and now that
my life is slowed down enough or gotten stable enough to process this or predictable enough
to process this now is when I'm ready to cry, now is when I'm ready to process these
emotions.
That another way tears may come when the world quiet down or when your body feels like it
has the stability and security it needs to let go or when your to-do list gets smaller
or when your calendar gets less cluttered.
Basically crying can sometimes wait many years, sometimes even decades for the safety that
it needs to really let go.
So this third reflection question for you is, do I feel safe enough to cry and if not,
that might be in the way of my tears.
I'm not asking you to have any sort of control over that.
Sometimes you can't, especially with the political upheaval of the world, natural disasters,
more things of that nature, but there are other things that you might consider turning
down the volume of so that you can hear the needs of your grief above that stress, if
it's possible in this season.
Okay, number four reason that you cannot cry even though you're sad and this is a big,
big, big, big one I see and hear and read from grieving people all over the world is that
you are afraid the tears will never stop coming.
This is one of the most common statements I hear and see from clients who are not crying,
literally quote, "I am afraid that if I start crying, I won't be able to stop."
There is something about the depths of grief that I think for a lot of people myself
included feels like a black hole.
It is so easy to imagine that if you give in, if you start crying even for a second, you
will collapse into that black hole of grief and never see the light update again.
But the good news is that science says that is not how tears work.
Studies show that most crying episodes last anywhere between eight and twenty minutes
before they naturally come to an end.
And even when you are crying hard, your nervous system is working behind the scenes constantly
to bring your body back to a study baseline.
Back in 2016 when I was being trained as a grief recovery specialist, which is a method
I no longer practice and you can read more about that on my website, the most helpful thing
that I learned from that initial training was that it is physiologically impossible to
cry forever.
Just like a teapot runs out of steam to whistle eventually and is just blowing hot air.
So do we humans.
Any extreme output at that high, high levels such as crying or sobbing or screaming or
yelling can only be sustained at that extreme output level for a few minutes at best.
Yes you may cry again later and yes you may cry again and again and again.
But each new instance of tears has a peak end of release, a high and a back to baseline.
Said another way, you will not be stuck in the middle of a cry forever because it is
literally not possible.
It is not like the hiccups where there's like Guinness world records of like this guy
had the hiccups for two years or four years or whatever the world record is.
I have no idea do not quote me on that.
But it is literally physiologically impossible to be crying forever.
My very best friend Tammy who I talk about a lot on the show and I wore the sweatshirt in
honor of her today.
It says my best friend died.
That's why I'm like this.
She died from COVID in 2022.
She was a member of the frequent cryer club and she often joked about crying hard.
You either run out or you pass out.
Basically, you either run out of tears or you pass out from lightheadedness from crying
so hard.
And so essentially in some form or fashion your body will bring your crying session to
an end naturally.
And the reflection question I have for you in this section is this.
Is my fear of crying forever stopping me from giving myself permission to cry?
The last one I have for you grief growers.
Number five is that you're telling yourself that crying equals caring.
Somewhere along the line we learned or were taught by society that if you really cared
about something or someone you would be crying about it.
But the problem with that logic is that it assumes that grief looks the same for everybody.
And I want to draw your attention to an equally ridiculous parallel.
Imagine this.
Someone plays a song at an event and people start dancing.
You love the song and you close your eyes to enjoy it.
Maybe you sit down so the full awesomeness of the beats can wash over you.
You are feeling all kinds of emotions and really vibing in the moment.
Does your lack of dancing mean you don't care about the song or that you aren't enjoying
yourself or that you're not having a good time?
Of course not.
Just like dancing or stillness or laughter or rage or silence or singing or drumming
or clapping or daydreaming are all valid ways to engage with a song.
Grief too has infinite expressions of being.
Some people cry every day.
Other people have not shed a single tear and still ache with longing.
Some people laugh while telling stories about a loved one who died.
Other people cannot speak about their loss at all but hold the people who died in their
hearts or display pictures of them in their homes or keep their articles of clothing
hanging in their closet.
None of these expressions of grief are wrong.
Others do not equal proof of love or caring.
Only you can decide for yourself what counts as proof.
So here's my final reflection question for you.
Other than crying, what ways do I show that I care about my loss?
What emotions or practices or rituals or conversations do I have that show that my loss
matters to me even if no one else is around to see them?
The thing I want you to take away from this episode is that failing to cry does not equal failing
to grief.
If you cannot cry even if you're devastated, no, that you are not broken.
There is nothing wrong with you.
You are not a heartless and unfeeling person and you are certainly not failing at grief.
You are responding exactly how your body and your nervous system need to respond to your
loss right now.
And that could change in the future.
Tears might come later.
Crying may sneak up on you later.
You might have a planned cry.
Sesh later.
Tears may never come.
Either way, tears do not define the depth of your love for someone who died or the reality
of the pain of your loss.
So the next time your inner critic says, "What is wrong with you?
Why can't you cry?"
Consider responding back.
Tears or not?
My grief still counts as grief.
There are other ways I express my emotions or process my losses or take care of my
heart.
Say that as often as you need to to ease up on the pressure and the judgment of that inner
critic that is present in so, so many of us.
And if you want support figuring out how you uniquely grieve and what that looks like for
you, I hope you will join us inside life after loss Academy.
This is my online course in community where you can access to on-demand video lessons and
live grief support for me every single week.
Some of my favorite lessons related to this topic of why can't I cry are about navigating
sticky emotions like anger or guilt or developing personalized rituals based on your specific
losses and folding grief into your life in a way that makes the most sense for you.
You can include tears in that.
You cannot include tears in that.
But the thing you will walk away with or come away with inside life after loss Academy
is this assurance that there is no one right way to grieve, but the way that works best
for you and you can design that.
We can design that together inside the community.
You can learn more about life after loss Academy, read student testimonials and join at any
time at the link in the show notes.
Whether your eyes are wet or dry grief growers, I am wishing you so much care as you navigate
your loss.
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 always find free workshops,
blog articles and my new, what's your grief supporter strength quiz at Shelby for SETTEA.com/links?
And if you'd like to get support from me for your unique loss experience, join us again
in Life After Loss Academy, my online course and community.
As a student, I will walk you through my five step grief framework, G-R-I-E-F, for rebuilding
after loss and you can get live coaching from me every single week to answer your questions.
Replays are always available if you can't attend life.
It's just $33 a month to join or $22 a month if you are marginalized or financially stressed
griever and you can cancel at any time.
If this podcast episode felt validating, comforting, helpful or educational to you, please
subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
I've read every single one.
And be sure to share Grief Grower with a friend because you never know what someone you love
is going through.
Grief Grower is hosted by me, Shelby for SETTEA 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.
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