The thing I love about studying secondary losses is that they give your grief the depth
and the significance that it deserves beyond the single sentence of my mom died or I got
divorced or I lost my job.
Grief is never, ever, ever just about one thing, and identifying your secondary losses
can help you capture this full picture of what it is that you're going through.
Hi there, Grave Growers. I am so grateful to be here with you as always.
If you've been growing alongside me and my work for a while, welcome back.
And if you are new to me and my work, hello.
My name is Shelby Fiersitia. 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 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 meaningfully changes your life.
Here on Grief Growers, 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 start treating it like an invitation to live more deeply, we end up creating
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 right here right now. Today on the show, I am so delighted
to talk to you about something you may not have heard of before, secondary losses. But before we do,
I've got a few events coming up here in April. On April 20th, you can join me and the DeadMom
Therapist Miranda Malone for a workshop called How to Re-Write Your Inner Grief Story.
If you are someone with a DeadMom, this workshop is all about the internal, often painful stories we
tell ourselves after our mom's die, and how we can rewrite them so we can be more compassionate towards
ourselves as we grieve. This is so, so helpful in the lead up to Mother's Day. And on April 30th,
you can join me and the founders of GriefTastic, including my friend Megan Reward and Jarvis,
for a facilitated discussion about my new book, of course I'm here right now,
three actually helpful things to say to someone who is grieving. You do not have to have bought the
book to attend, so if you're looking for a more low-key event about the book that's not a book club,
this event is a perfect match for you. You can find the link to RSVP for both of these upcoming
events in the show notes for this episode, or it shall be for sathea.com/events.
Okay, let's get to that word you may or may not know, secondary loss. The purpose of the show today
is to define secondary loss, and then I'm going to give you examples and tell you how to process
them because odds are, you have them. And here's how I like to start talking about secondary losses.
If someone asks you about your loss, you can probably sum up what happened in a single sentence.
So maybe you say, "My mom died or my best friend died or my cat died or I'm going through a divorce
or I've just been diagnosed with insert illness here." Maybe you say, "I've experienced a
myths carriage." Maybe you say, "I just lost my job or I got laid off." Maybe I've been forced out
of my home by a natural disaster. I have just had a breakup with a friend. But perhaps somewhere
along the way, you recognized that your loss is so much more than that one single sentence. You didn't
just lose your mom. You didn't just lose your job. You didn't just lose your home. You are never. No
griever is ever just grieving the person or the relationship or the health or the thing that you lost.
You are grieving the routines and rituals that no longer exist or the identity or the role that
you held for years or the future that you had already started planning in your head, the version
of yourself that felt safe or creative or certain about where your life was going.
Said another way, you are probably grieving things that have no obituary, that nobody writes a
sympathy card for and that no one won't bring you a casserole to tend to. If this resonates with you,
there is a name for that and that name is, you guessed it, secondary loss. An understanding secondary
losses can be one of the most validating and clarifying things that you do for yourself in your
entire grief process. But before I get to secondary losses, it can be helpful to figure out like first
what is a primary loss because if there's a secondary loss, there's got to be a primary loss.
By and large, a primary loss is defined as the central defining loss, the one that is the most
visible, most nameable and the most recognized by society or the people around you.
Primary losses are the losses that society tends to have language for. These are the losses that
prompt people to send you condolence cards or start meal trains or even the losses that are
written down in bereavement leave policies on a state or provincial or federal level. These are losses
that make it into the subject line of a company-wide email or a family group chat. Examples of primary
losses can include the death of a parent, a child, a partner, sibling, relative friend or pet.
It could be a miscarriage or pregnancy loss. It could be a divorce or the end of a significant
relationship. It could be a life-changing or terminal medical diagnosis. It could be a job loss or
the end of a career. It could be losing a home to foreclosure, disaster or displacement.
And what I want to circle around here is that primary losses are significant. They are real.
They deserve to be grieved fully, but they are rarely the only thing that you lose.
This brings us to secondary losses. What is a secondary loss? Secondary losses are the losses that
follow in the wake of a primary loss. Set another way they're kind of like the ripple effects
that spread out work from the original loss event. And these ripples can happen months or even years
down the road. So if you were to say like my primary loss is the stone that dropped into the water
of my life, secondary losses are all of the rings that expand from that point of impact.
Sometimes they are quieter or less visible. They generally go unacknowledged by society.
And sometimes we fail to acknowledge them ourselves because we don't recognize that they're happening.
Secondary losses can come in a lot of different flavors. They can be practical or relational or
financial or social or personal. They can show up right after a loss or they can be things that
sort of sneak up on you or emerge gradually over time. They can be things that you expect. Well,
like of course when I lose my mom, I would also lose that. Or they can be things that catch you
completely off guard, arriving long after you thought you had accounted for. Everything grief
had taken from you. Simply put, secondary losses are wildly layered and multitude-ness. There's a
heck of a lot of them. I have never tried to count all of my secondary losses. I have never met a
griever who's tried to do that either. But if I did, if I tried, I bet my secondary losses from the
death of my mom alone, not just from the death of my friends, the death of my cat, the breakup of
an engagement chronic illness diagnosis. I bet my secondary losses would number in the hundreds
or even the thousands. And here's what's important to understand. Secondary losses, as we'll keep
getting into it, are not a sign that your grief is excessive or complicated or too much. They are a
sign that your loss was significant, that the person relationship identity or future that you lost
was deeply woven, deeply embedded into the fabric of your life. Naming your secondary losses does
not necessarily make your grief bigger or harder or more complicated. It makes it more honest. The thing I
love about studying secondary losses is that they give your grief the depth and the significance
that it deserves beyond the single sentence of my mom died or I got divorced or I lost my job.
Grief is never, ever, ever just about one thing. And identifying your secondary losses
can help you capture this full picture of what it is that you're going through. Knowing your
secondary losses can validate why your grief feels so enormous or life changing and even can help
you give yourself more permission to feel all of the emotions that are arising inside of you as a result.
It's truly one of my favorite things to look at in life after loss is not just what's the big thing
you lost, but what are all the tiny little things underneath it that you have not yet named or
recognized that need grieving too. So what I have developed in my 10 years as a grief coach, I presented
this for the first time on the 2019 grief cruise is a three part framework for understanding and
naming secondary losses because not all secondary losses arrive at the same time or in the same way.
Some again show themselves right away, some sneak up on you and some arrive like bam lightning bolt
completely out of nowhere. Long after you thought you had identified everything that you lost.
So this is my three part framework for naming your secondary losses. If you're in a place to have a
paper or pen or in the notes app of your phone, you can start listing them here or you can save this
podcast to come back to later when you have time to journal. This is true especially for all of you
out there who are driving as you listen to this. Please do not write and drive. That is not something I can
tell. Okay, three categories of secondary losses. First category, immediate secondary losses.
These are the secondary losses that you experience right away often simultaneously with the primary
loss itself. These are the things that disappear or that you lose. The moment the primary loss occurs.
So this might look like losing the ability to touch or talk to a person or a pet who died. This could
look like losing your identity as a healthy person. Air quotes here. The moment that you receive a
life altering diagnosis. This could look like losing a sense of safety or security. The moment of
relationship ends. This could look like losing a daily routine or sense of purpose after a job loss.
And it could look like losing your role as a caregiver when the person you cared for dies.
To share an example from my own life, one of my first immediate secondary losses was my ability
to hug my mom. As soon as my mom died, I knew for sure that I would never be on the receiving end
of one of her hugs again. And while there are many wonderful people in my world that I can receive
a hug from at just about any time, I know they will never be anything like a mom hug for me ever
again. It is a secondary loss that I continue to grieve the instant sense of home that I felt as her
child being touched and held by her. If you've experienced parent loss, maybe this is bringing up
some things for you too, but in the moment of her death, I knew I will never experience a mom hug
ever again. I was grieving the death of my mother, but a secondary loss for me was being able to hear
her voice, hug her, touch her, hear her laugh, watch her walk into a room, kind of all of the physical
things that were associated with her presence. Immediate secondary losses often overlap with the
shock and the acute pain, like the immediate pain of the primary loss itself, which is why sometimes
they can be so hard to separate or tease out and name in the early days of grief, but they are there
and they deserve their own separate acknowledgement. They deserve to feel significant too.
The second type of secondary loss is what I call gradual secondary losses. These are losses that
accumulate or build up or make themselves known slowly over time. They do not appear all at once.
They often reveal themselves in increments, sometimes over the course of months or years. Examples of
gradual secondary losses can include the gradual fading of memories, like the sound of someone's voice
or the specific details of their face or the way that they laughed. Other gradual losses, and this
is really significant for a lot of grievers, especially if you're kind of in charge of the administrative
stuff after someone dies, is financial strain, gradual financial loss that builds in the months and
the years following a death or another significant loss, like a divorce or a diagnosis.
You might also include, under gradual losses, the erosion of friendships that could not hold or
demonstrate to you that they were not safe for the weight of your grief. You might also experience
as a gradual loss losing skills or confidence or professional momentum after an extended
leave from work or after being laid off. And you might gradually lose your sense of who you are
outside of their relationship or the role or the identity that was lost. One more thing you might
lose gradually is the disappearance of over time, traditions, rituals, routines that no longer make
sense without the person or the relationship or the life that you lost. After my mom died, one of my
gradual secondary losses was the loss of, and I've talked about this on the show before, my lifelong
identity as a morning person. After my mom died, I found myself sleeping in as late as and as often
as possible. My energy was so low, which I did not expect after loss, it was all I could do every day
to go to class, to go to work, and then to chip away at my thesis before crashing into bed. And I
didn't know or like the version of myself that wasn't air quotes here, but like the phrase my
mom used was "up with the sun." I was always up with the sun. And I had this bizarre thought that my mom
wouldn't recognize me as a sleeper in her person. Even though she was dead, I was like my mom wouldn't
recognize who this person is, and that makes that even more sad to me. And ever since I was little,
my mom loved to tell the story of her oldest daughter who arose with the songbirds and sang to
herself and her crib until someone came to get here. So when I ceased to be that person,
gradually, I was like, I'm sleeping more and more and more after my mom's death. I'm no longer a
morning person. I was like, my mom wouldn't recognize me anymore, am I still her daughter. Those were
the thoughts that were coming up for me in the wake of this secondary loss. It wasn't my mom died,
am I still her daughter. It was, I'm no longer a morning person that my mother knew in life. So am I
still her daughter? Am I still her morning songbird? It was a different kind of secondary. You could say
smaller loss that got me to that train of thought. So secondary losses aren't necessarily smaller.
They're just byproducts of the primary losses. Something to know about gradual secondary losses
is that they can be particularly disorienting because they tend to make themselves known or obvious
right when you might be expecting things to be getting easier in grief. Instead of things getting
easier, you find yourself grieving something new and wondering why the losses keep on coming.
In which case you might fling open the metaphorical door and say, "Well, hello, gradual secondary
losses come on in." I guess there's room for you too. The third type of secondary loss is what I like
to call surprise or unexpected secondary losses. These are the secondary losses that arrive
unexpectedly. The ones that you could not have predicted or prepared for. They often surface when
you encounter a situation or a milestone or even a new version of yourself that grief has quietly
or subtly transformed. Then suddenly the volume of what has changed or what you have lost is cranked
up to like a hundred. Examples of surprise or unexpected or sudden secondary losses include
losing a sense of safety in the world after a traumatic or sudden loss. Not just grieving what
happened, but grieving a sense of safety. It could also for so many of my clients looks like
losing a sense of creativity or focus or ability to engage with work or hobbies that you once loved.
It could look like losing relationships with people who could not show up for you in the way that
you needed and that being suddenly clear to you out of the blue. It could be going through major
life milestones like graduating or getting married or having a new baby without the person or the pet
who should have been there to support you through that. It might also look like discovering that
grief has changed your relationship to faith or community or a sense of meaning in the larger world.
And the last example of secondary losses I'll give you is one of my surprise ones. It is something
I grieved that I never even knew that I wanted. Mother's Day brunch with my mom and this is
particularly appropriate in the Lehighptom Mother's Day. More than four years after my mom died,
I was working as a server at a white tablecloth restaurant here in downtown Chicago.
And I already knew I suspected that the Mother's Day shift would be hard for obvious reasons.
I'm like I'm working on Mother's Day and my mom is dead. That record's constantly playing in the back of my
head. But what I never saw coming the thing I could not have predicted was my anger, my rage, my
like absolute heart on fireness at not getting to take my mom to a Mother's Day brunch. But here's
the thing my mom was not a brunch person. My family generally spent Mother's Day at home. It made no
sense that I was suddenly so angry that I didn't get to do this thing I never wanted to do in life
with my mom who was now dead. But being surrounded by happy moms and daughters and grandmothers and
seemingly intact families, this was my brain's assumption. This was not necessarily reality. But in
that, the weight of what I could never have and having it appear right in front of me, it whacked
me like an anvil, like a cartoon anvil right over the head. And this might be true for you too.
Surprise secondary losses can feel like a second gut punch after a loss of reminder, an unpleasant
reminder that grief doesn't follow a schedule or a checklist. They are not a sign necessarily that
you're going backwards or that something is wrong with you. They're just a sign that losses woven
into your life. And that grief continues to show up as life continues to unfold the two continue
forward into the future together. So let's get to now how on earth do you grieve secondary losses?
Once you can name your secondary losses, once you've got your list in place, you can begin to
grieve them. And inside life after loss academy and here I can teach you four different ways to do
that. The first one is to list them out loud on paper or both. There is very, very real power in the
act of naming what you have lost. When you give language to a secondary loss, you validate it. You say,
"Yep, this is real. This matters. It deserves to be grieved." So I invite you to do that to make a list
of your secondary losses, not for the purpose of overwhelming yourself, but to bear witness to
notice the full scope of what you have been carrying, what is all that you know to be now, that you
have lost. You might be surprised by, and I see clients and students surprised by a lot,
what kind of relief comes, simply from seeing everything you have written down all in one place.
It's another way of showing yourself, this is as hard as I think it is. I have lost as much as I think
I have lost. And you can name or organize your list using the immediate gradual and surprise
framework that I mentioned, or you can simply let your secondary losses exist on the page without
any particular order. There is no wrong way to do this. I will say that if writing feels like too
much, you might try saying your secondary losses out loud to yourself, or to a trusted friend,
or to a therapist, or grief coach, or even to the person or pet that you lost if you believe that
you can communicate with them. If you are spiritual or religious, you might also consider talking about
your secondary losses to God or your version of a higher power, or the universe, only and if that
resonates with you. The second way that you can cope with secondary losses is to create a ritual
to grief them, because grief always needs somewhere to go. Rich and wall gives grief a container.
A ritual for secondary loss does not have to be elaborate or very expensive. It just has to feel
meaningful to you. It is a deliberate action that you take that says, "I am acknowledging this loss
because it is important." And examples from clients and students that I've worked with over the years
look like. Maybe you rearrange or donate items from a closet to mark the end of an identity or the end
of a role in your life. Maybe you write the names of your secondary losses on leaves or dissolving
paper and you float them in a pool or down a river or somebody of water. Maybe you break plates or
dishes in a safe, intentional setting as a physical release of accumulated grief. Please be sure to pick
up after yourself. If that's something you do, that can be a ritual as well cleaning up. If that resonates
with you, you might light a candle and sit quietly with the thought of a specific loss or the memory
of a specific loss for a few minutes. You might write a letter to the version of yourself or the life
that you lost and then you could burn it or you could bury it or you could keep it and make a
point to look back on it six months or a year from now. Something to remember about creating a ritual
is that it doesn't have to make sense to anybody else but you because usually it will not be witnessed
by anybody else but you so it just has to make sense to you. The third way to cope with the secondary
loss or to process it is to connect with people who get it. Secondary losses can be really isolating
to share with people because they can sometimes sound to outside observers or friends and family
members or co-workers like complaints or focusing on the negative. When you try to explain that you're
not just grieving your person, you're grieving the Sunday night calls with them or the identity that
you had with them or the future that you dreamed of with them or the version of yourself who
existed in proximity to them. People don't always know how to receive that and this is a direct
result of living in a society that is grief illiterate. This is why community and loss matter so much.
Finding people who understand the full complexity of secondary loss and how much it matters,
the weight of it, the full picture of your loss, who will not ask you to simplify your grief
back down to that one sentence, my mom died I'm going through divorce, I just got diagnosed with cancer.
This can be one of the most healing things that you do for yourself so find community when and
however you are able. The fourth one is to give your secondary losses the same compassion and
support that you give your primary loss. This one, this last one is extraordinarily simple but it
matters because despite their name and I mentioned this a little bit before, your secondary losses
are not lesser losses. They do not require an apology or a disclaimer of you. You do not have to
preface them with I know this sounds small or I know this sounds little or I know this sounds weird but
grieving a secondary loss is not dramatic it is not excessive it's not you complaining it's not
a sign that you are stuck or broken in grief it is a sign they are a sign that you loved or were connected
to something or someone deeply and that the loss of them had an impact on your life that is all
secondary losses are here to show you. The thing I want to leave you with from this episode today
is that your grief whether or not you see it now or whether or not you knew the words for it
coming into this episode is that your grief is bigger than the one sentence of your loss.
Your grief is bigger than the primary thing that you lost so if you have been wondering why your
grief feels so big or so vast or so layered or so much heavier than the words that you have been
given to describe it secondary losses are the reason why you are not just grieving one thing
you never were none of us is secondary losses are a testament to how significantly your loss has
touched your life naming them does not make your grief heavier it makes it more true it tells the
whole picture it shows the whole story it says this loss mattered in more ways than I can count
and every single one of those ways deserves to be acknowledged you do not and probably cannot
grieve all of your secondary losses all at once but you do deserve space to name them and to
grieve them all of them eventually if you are looking for support grieving your secondary losses
my online course in community life after loss academy isn't a great place to start inside of it and
I've mentioned this on grief grow before I teach something called the grief method framework it's
made up of five parts g-r-i-e-f and the second module release r is dedicated entirely to grieving
the person you used to be and the life that you thought you would have this includes all of your
secondary losses the identities the futures the relationships the versions of yourself that grief
has taken from you you can join life after loss academy any time at the price that works best for you
and the link in the show notes and if you would like a preview of what life after loss academy is like
you can always start with my free grow-through-grief workshop all you have to do is go to shelbyfirst@thia.com
and then you'll see in the upper right hand corner free workshop and you just enter your email
address and I will send the workshop straight to you and you can watch it whenever you are ready to
what I need you to know today is that your grief deserves and warrants more than the single
sentence of your loss and so do you thank you so much for listening today I hope you learned something
on this episode of grief grower and I will see you next time
that's all for this episode of grief grower thank you so much for joining me today
if you're looking for grief support beyond this show you can find my free workshop
blog articles and my new book of course I'm here right now three actually helpful things to say to
someone grieving at shelbyfirst@thia.com/links and if you would like to get support from me for your
unique loss experience join me inside life after loss academy my online course and community as a student
I'll walk you through my five step grief framework 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
to 10 live it's just $33 a month to join or $22 a month if you're marginalized or financially stressed
griver and you can cancel your membership in the group at any time 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 grief grower with a friend because you never know what
someone you love is going through grief grower is hosted by me shall be for sitia with theme music
by addy coldstein 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
[Music]