BW 044 - audio
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Emily Jones: [00:00:00]
Emily Jones: Welcome to The Brave Widow Podcast. I'm your host, Emily Jones. We help young widows heal their heart, find hope, and dream again for the future.
Emily Jones: Hey guys. Welcome to episode number 44 of The Brave Widow Show. Today we're gonna talk about why it feels like you get stuck in grief. Now, this is something that I hear commonly from widows or people who are grieving a loved one, is that they feel like they're stuck. Maybe it's been months or years or decades, and people just feel like they're as stuck almost as much as they were in the very beginning or even worse, that at times they're healing, they're getting better, they're getting better.
Emily Jones: And then all of a sudden they're going backwards and that thought is really overwhelming of how can I be getting better and feel like I'm healing and feel like I can smile and laugh a little bit. Then the [00:01:00] next day feel like I've gone three steps backwards. So today we're gonna talk about why is it that you feel that you get stuck in grief?
Emily Jones: And this is actually a course in our Brave Widow community, and this is a live event that I've been hosting during the month of August and September. Not only why you feel like you get stuck in grief, but what are some of the signs that you might be stuck without? Realizing that you are and six different things that you can actually do about it.
Emily Jones: So if you're feeling stuck, if you feel like you're going backwards, what are those things that you can do about it? You can learn all about that in the live event that I'm hosting. If you wanna be on the email list to hear about when the next live event is, just go to brave widow.com/free and sign up for our free resources.
Emily Jones: You'll get on the email list and you'll get to hear about when the next live event is. And also if you're part of the Brave Widow community, then this is a course that's listed inside of the community for you. So, alright, let's dive in with why [00:02:00] we feel so stuck in grief, and as I've talked to others and I've really thought about how I would break down categorically, why people feel stuck.
Emily Jones: There's three main areas or three reasons why we often feel stuck. We're gonna deep, we're gonna do a deep dive into each of these. So the first one is our knowledge. This is, what do we actually know about grief and the healing process and what that should look like. The second area is expectation. So expectations about what we've been told the grieving process should be like, what life should be like during that process.
Emily Jones: Expectation around our social circle and what we thought it would be like when we lost our loved one. And then the third area or category is guilt. Guilt. That we've we're leaving our loved one behind guilt, that we can laugh again, that we can dream again, that we could experience any kind of joy in life when our person is gone. So knowledge, expectation, and guilt. Those are the [00:03:00] three main areas of why we often feel stuck in guilt. So let's do a little deep dive into knowledge. Culturally, we don't know a whole lot about. How to effectively process loss. There's a lot of really great information in the Grief Recovery Handbook, and I recently became certified as a grief recovery specialist through this specific method, and it talks a lot about.
Emily Jones: Why is grief and loss so hard for us to process? And if you think about, even from the time you're a small child, oftentimes you are not validated for how you feel about a loss. You're told things like, oh, just get over it. Or, oh, you can get another one of those or shake it off, go cry in your room.
Emily Jones: You're taught a lot of incorrect and isolating ways to process. Loss or a grief of some sort as you've grown up, most likely from a child through a teenager or an adult. And so culturally, this is just really not something that we teach people [00:04:00] how to handle and how to process in a correct way.
Emily Jones: So you also may have heard about the five stages of grief, and this is something I saw and I see it all over the place where people will post pictures and images and memes and everything else about how the five stages of grief, looks like. It's a very linear process, but ultimately it feels like you're pinging ponging around and there's actually a very good reason for this.
Emily Jones: Would you be surprised to know that the five stages of grief weren't meant to apply to people who had lost a loved one? It wasn't built for someone who was grieving a death of a spouse or a significant other. So there's a very good reason why you may not feel like the five stages of grief apply to you because it doesn't So, If you're not familiar with the five stages of grief, this is a model that was developed by a lady in the late sixties named Elizabeth Kubler Ross, and she developed this grief model when that became famous after she published her book called On Death and Dying, and she developed this [00:05:00] model to describe how people with terminal illness face their own death.
Emily Jones: And how they move through acceptance to that. So you may have heard of these five stages of grief. It starts with denial. Anger, bargaining, depression, and ultimately acceptance. And it has somewhat of a bell curve, as you look at it through these five stages, but it's because it became so popular.
Emily Jones: It's often applied to anyone who's grieving or processing a loss, which can cause a lot of confusion. So again, this is because of our knowledge. Of what the grief process should be, or because of what's popular being put out there. We think that we're supposed to heal in a linear fashion and that it's supposed to move from denial to anger, to bargaining, to depression, and then acceptance.
Emily Jones: But here on the show we've talked a lot about how that just simply is not the case. Grief is not a step-by-step process where. Week by week and month by month, things are getting better. Grief can [00:06:00] feel all over the place, and some people never even go through all five stages. Some people may never be angry.
Emily Jones: I was never really angry. Some people may not ever feel like they're bargaining or that they've gone through depression, or they may not have felt like they went through denial. So when, from our perspective, Our knowledge base is that we should be moving through these five stages of grief when that doesn't happen, or, and when we get to a point, let's say we've gotten through anger and bargaining and we're depression, we're trying to move into acceptance, and then we wake up one day still in shock and denial that our person is gone.
Emily Jones: It makes us feel like we've gone backwards. It makes us feel like we're stuck. Because we should, we, we should have already known that. The grieving brain is another book that does a really great job of just articulating why and how, from a scientific perspective our brain can wrestle with to opposing concepts that it.
Emily Jones: Understands at the same time. So on one [00:07:00] hand I can accept and understand that my person's no longer here, they're not coming back, they're never gonna walk in the door. On the other hand, at the same time, I can be struggling to grasp how is this possible? How is Nathan never gonna come back and walk through that door?
Emily Jones: How is this really gonna be, what my life is like? And this is very confusing. It's very confusing and frustrating because you often can, over the course of time, feel that you've moved to a logic and rational understanding, acceptance. You maybe aren't happy with the fact that you're moving into a new era of life, but you've accepted that and you're going to do the best that you can to make the best of it, or.
Emily Jones: At least not live and wallow in grief and depression, and then a certain scent or a song. Or any small thing can trigger a lot of those feelings of sadness, of grief, of denial, of just [00:08:00] confusion around how I know this is my life, but how was, how did I get here? How is this possible? What is happening?
Emily Jones: So it's this pinging ponging around of emotions that can cause us to feel like we're stuck or to feel like we're going backwards in grief. Again, this is just about perception. The only reason you may feel like you're going backwards is because you're experiencing more what we call negative emotions like sadness or depression.
Emily Jones: Maybe you have these periods of time, like waves where you have several days that are happy and joyful, and then you have a couple days or moments where it's really sad and disheartening. So in your mind, Because you feel like grief is this linear healing process that you should be moving forward, you should be getting happier and less sad and grief.
Emily Jones: I don't even think that's a word, but you should be feel less sad over time when that doesn't meet your expectation than you say, well, I'm stuck, or I'm moving backwards, or I'm not making any sort of progress. It really [00:09:00] is impossible to go backwards from a healing perspective. So as you've healed and as you've processed things, those don't magically just come undone.
Emily Jones: But unfortunately grief isn't something that we can easily measure. It's not, there's not an easy way to look at it and say, okay, today, yeah, I'm on a happiness scale of five. By next week I'll be a level six next week, a level seven, and that sort of thing. Because there are so many different emotions that come along with that causes us to feel like we are going backwards or that we're stuck.
Emily Jones: A apart from the five stages of grief, there's another reason why our knowledge of grief and the grieving process is really tricky. And one of those is because it, healing through grief is a complicated thing and there's no easy way to give someone a timeline and say, Here's where you should be at six months.
Emily Jones: Here's where you should be at a year, two years out. This is what your life should look like and here's how we're gonna effectively gauge whether or not you're healing and you're [00:10:00] processing these emotions. And the reason there's no great timeline is because the healing process is different for each person and.
Emily Jones: Especially as someone who's newly widowed, it's extremely frustrating. I was frustrated when I heard that over and over again. It's different for everyone. Well, great. How can I be one of those people where the runway to healing is shortened? Unfortunately, there's no magic wand that could be waved to transport me there, but I do understand better now why there's different timelines for.
Emily Jones: Different people. And I'm gonna share with you three of those. One is that different people have different past traumas. So even though someone might've been in my situation, they were married almost 20 years, they have kids together. They, had a great relationship with their partner, their spouse.
Emily Jones: Ultimately, their experience is unique and their past experiences are unique. Maybe they didn't have a loving family. Maybe they have attachment issues that they've never worked on or tried to resolve. Maybe they've had other losses in their life that I [00:11:00] didn't have, or vice versa. So because they've had different past traumas, some of those, especially if they've not been processed and healed, can bubble up to the surface and cause more issues as you suffer a loss of this magnitude of losing your spouse.
Emily Jones: The second reason why it's so complicated in thinking about a timeline is because there are different secondary losses. So when you lose a spouse, you could lose things like your income, you could lose your sense of security, you could lose your social circle and the support you may have had there. You could have lost infrastructure support with your family or your home, or just that general.
Emily Jones: Partnership and being part of a team, but everybody's secondary losses could be different. So as I think about what all work needs to be done to heal a past trauma or to heal a secondary loss, that timeline looks different for each person. Someone may have a lot that they need to really dig down deep into versus another [00:12:00] person maybe who hasn't.
Emily Jones: The third reason why this is such a complicated thing is because healing is a choice, and I wanna make sure that you really hear what I'm saying there because there are people that 5, 10, 20 years from suffering a loss feel as depressed and miserable and volatile as they did their first year. And. It's not to say that's the path that should be there for them or that they're always gonna have to suffer in that way, but there are people that choose not to heal.
Emily Jones: And we're gonna talk about why some people may choose to do that a little bit later on. But just know that healing is a choice. It's something that must be proactively done. Think about let's say that you got into an injury, an accident and. You broke a bone, you broke your arm. You have a choice whether or not to heal your arm, to go to a doctor, to go to a hospital, to have the bone corrected and set to have a cast put on.
Emily Jones: You could choose [00:13:00] not to do that. Now, that would be a terrible choice. I think most of us would agree with that. Who knows what would happen? You could get an infection. You could end up having to amputate. Part of your arm, you could, you're certainly gonna have a miserable life choosing not to heal that broken bone.
Emily Jones: If it's a really small break, it might kind of heal on its own, but, losing a spouse is not a small break. It's a big deal. And there are people who choose not to heal or rather don't choose to proactively heal. By not making a choice, they are choosing not to heal and doing the work and being proactive with healing and seeking the care that you need and seeking the support you need and communicating and surrounding yourself with people who love you and will support you, and will listen to you.
Emily Jones: Those are hard things. Those are not. It's not an easy choice to decide that you wanna heal and that you want to be able to find hope and live a great life. Again, doing [00:14:00] the work is hard, but if you don't do it, then you're stuck with living a life that's numb, that feels meaningless, that is just miserable.
Emily Jones: Unfortunately, some people do make that choice. So when we struggle with saying, how long should it take for someone to just move on from this or to heal or to be able to make clear decisions, these are the reasons why it's so complicated. Past traumas, secondary losses, and the fact that healing is a choice.
Emily Jones: All right, so we've talked about knowledge and how knowledge can make us feel stuck in our grief or make us feel like we're going backwards. Now let's talk about expectations and managing expectations. So, we have expectations around what other people say is acceptable or what their thoughts are, and it always.
Emily Jones: Tickles me because you can have 10 different people surrounding the same widowed person and get 10 different opinions on how fast they should, move forward. Or if they're not [00:15:00] moving forward fast enough, or if they should date. They shouldn't date. They should wear their ring. They shouldn't wear their ring, they should do this or that.
Emily Jones: People, for whatever reason with grieving and widowhood feel, Strongly opinionated about things they have zero experience with. And again, this is just something in our culture that's just inherent in how we're taught to handle loss and handle grief. And we come up with all of these wonderful platitudes like.
Emily Jones: Oh, they're in a better place. Or, oh, you'll find you're young, you'll find someone else. Or at least you have kids, or at least you didn't have kids. You get both sides there. But feeling like you're second stuck in grief is hard because there are expectations that other people have that they may try to place on your shoulders.
Emily Jones: They may try to influence you with. This is also hard. Managing expectations is also hard because of changes in our social circle, which typically we don't expect. So I definitely experienced [00:16:00] this and pretty much every widow I've talked to has expressed the same when we've talked about our social circle, which is the people that you would expect to be there and to show up for you and to be consistent.
Emily Jones: Surprisingly aren't, and. Sometimes alternatively, the people that you wouldn't have really expected to be there, maybe you thought they might send you a card or some flowers, they end up showing up in a really big, consistent, persistent way, which is amazing. You may have friends that you had as a couple, and now it's just awkward.
Emily Jones: Being around them when you're not a couple, or it's awkward for them, or maybe they had a closer relationship with your person than what they had with you. But either way, there are big changes in your social circle and who's around you. Maybe you have to find a completely different social circle and other communities of people that you want to have around you.
Emily Jones: I had kind of a mix. I had a mix of people that I was fairly close to before. New people that really [00:17:00] stepped up in my life that maybe were just mere acquaintances before, lost, not really lost, but maybe distanced with people that I wasn't expecting to find that with. And then finding new friends, mentors.
Emily Jones: Colleagues, community leaders, who understand, who have shared visions. So I really had a mix here in the overall social circle. But it's hard with grief because again, you have these expectations about your social circle and what would continue and what would change, and often reality may not meet what your expectations were or are.
Emily Jones: Another reason that. We can feel stuck in grief around expectations is because in many cases you have a severe loss of identity and questionable future plans. So for those of you that know me very well, I'm a planner to a fault. I love to plan. I love to think about the future. I'm a daydreamer, I'm a visionary.
Emily Jones: I'm, I just have really big plans for the future and I like knowing [00:18:00] what those plans are. Nathan has helped me become more spontaneous through life because I used to be a planner that was very rigid and I did not want to, Move away from whatever those plans were, even if it was just Saturday plans around the house or whatever.
Emily Jones: If I thought I knew what the plans were, I wanted to follow through with that. So while I have learned to become more adaptable and spontaneous, certainly that doesn't make it easy around expectations for the future. For me, I felt like I was just drifting aimlessly in this big ocean. Whenever I lost Nathan, it was a very strange feeling like I, I felt like I'd been anchored to what I knew, anchored to our future plans, whether or not I love them all, or was excited about them, or whether or not I.
Emily Jones: Loved everything about all of my relationships and friendships and current environment. I knew felt like I knew what those were gonna be. I felt like I knew what my retirement plan was going to be and where we were gonna live, [00:19:00] and what we were gonna have and do, and how we were gonna spend our time.
Emily Jones: And just all of that was so clear to me. And in an instant it was vaporized and. It's not that I couldn't still do some of those future plans. It's not that I couldn't still do the same retirement plans, but it really took me back because it makes you think, do I still wanna do that? Those are things that Nathan and I wanted to do together.
Emily Jones: So if it's just me or it's me and someone else, Would I still want to do that in the future? And for a long time I just didn't know. I wasn't sure. I really questioned, well, what does the future hold for me? And certainly we realized very quickly how fragile and quick we ca how fragile our lives are and how quickly all of that can be lost and gone or changed.
Emily Jones: So managing expectations around grief and the healing process is hard because you had expectations for what your life was gonna look like. You had [00:20:00] expectations for knowing who you are and what you enjoy and what you like and what you would like to do, and you may wake up and have found yourself questioning if you're even the same person.
Emily Jones: I didn't even feel like the same person. I don't. I don't feel that I've changed a hundred percent. Certainly people that know me well I'm sure can pick up on things that are the same, but that loss changed me in a, to my core in a way that is not returnable. I. I am no longer naive to death and loss and how much of an impact that makes on a life and relationship, both in a way that is sad because I do feel I have changed and I'm a different person, but also happy.
Emily Jones: I'm more grateful. I'm less irritable about things. I'm less rigid about things I. Value every moment, every minute, much more than I did in the past. I am more generous with my time and more generous with doing things with other people [00:21:00] than I was in the past of wanting my own time, downtime, alone time. I still need those things to an extent, but at the end of the day, I'm a different person, and from what many of you have shared with me, I.
Emily Jones: You're a different person too, and that's okay, but it makes it difficult because now you're trying to rediscover who you are and recreate who you wanna be. Maybe you wanna create a whole different new future for yourself. Maybe you wanted to live in the country, now you're gonna be a city girl. Maybe you know, you wanted to travel and now you wanna stay at home and a cabin in the woods.
Emily Jones: Who knows? But. It's difficult to navigate grief in the healing journey because at times we feel like we don't even know who we are. How can we move forward if we don't even know who we are and where we are and where we're going? It can feel like you're just aimlessly drifting and completely unsure of where you're going.
Emily Jones: Alright, so we've talked about reasons why. We feel stuck in grief. First being knowledge, [00:22:00] second being expectations. And the third area here is guilt. And guilt is very commonly associated with loss of a loved one and especially with widow hood. And there are many reasons why people feel guilty. So I've listed out a few of them here and I'm gonna read them to you.
Emily Jones: One is my spouse died instead of me. So there's survivor's guilt. Sometimes it's called a second one is I could have done something to prevent this. I struggled some with that, thinking that I could have made an extra phone call. I could have called the ambulance. I could have pushed the doctors harder.
Emily Jones: I could have pleaded with the nurses more like there's something I could have done to prevent this. Number three, we have unresolved issues or conflicts. Although Nathan and I didn't have unresolved issues or conflicts, there were a lot of things I felt like were left unsaid, unresolved things that I hope he knows I wish he knew.
Emily Jones: And over time I've been able to close a lot of those loops and feel very lighter, but this guilt can feel [00:23:00] very heavy. Number four is moving on means I'm betraying my spouse. They're not here. They don't get to enjoy life. They're dead. And if I move on, if I laugh, if I, try to rebuild a life, then that means I'm betraying the love I have for that person.
Emily Jones: And, the sadness, I feel that they're not here with me. Number five, I should prioritize everyone else, not myself. Especially for widows who are caretakers and mothers and sisters and daughters, and you're taking care of other people in the family or friends, this definitely may resonate with you. Number six, I feel relieved now that he's finally gone.
Emily Jones: Maybe your person was suffering or maybe they were abusive or. They had addictions I struggled with, or they were just miserable with life. And you feel some relief now that they're gone and they don't have to suffer, they don't have to go through that. Or if they were abusive in some way, that you don't have to go through that anymore.
Emily Jones: But that also [00:24:00] brings guilt because you feel that way. And then number seven, I didn't get to say goodbye and I lost them on bad terms. So there's a lot. Of reasons why we feel guilty when we lose a loved one. And the good thing is that you don't have to live with that guilt again. You can choose to heal, you can choose to be proactive.
Emily Jones: You can choose to resolve those things that never really got said to that person, and have that burden lifted off of your shoulders like I did. It was one of the best. Going through that process is definitely one of the best things that I did and have done through my healing journey. So as we think about guilt, that's a very heavy word that we associate and that we put upon ourselves.
Emily Jones: And in the Grief Recovery Method Handbook, and in the process that you walk through, They really, the authors really do a nice job of explaining why guilt is not an accurate word to describe what you're really feeling. Guilt often implies malicious [00:25:00] intent. So I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm pretty sure if you're listening or you're watching that you didn't have malicious intent or ill will towards your person, you.
Emily Jones: Didn't want them to die. You weren't trying to help the process along so that they would no longer be here. Therefore, you don't need to feel guilty. Instead, a way to look at it is as you look at your relationship that you had with your person, which is you unique and special to your circumstances only that you wish that things were better.
Emily Jones: They were more. Or they were different. And this concept can be very impactful if you spend time thinking through it. So there are things in Nathan's final days that I felt guilty about that I wish I had done or said, or, I just wish it could have been different. So as I think back on those things, instead of saying, well, I feel guilty, or instead of living under a cloud of guilt, I can look back and say, I [00:26:00] wish that things would've happened differently, or, I wish I would've said this more, or, I wish that the way he left as the E M T team was carrying him out, that it was better than what it was.
Emily Jones: And those things are perfectly normal. They're easier to deal with than to live with this overwhelming feeling and sense of guilt. And again, there, there are ways to process these things so that you don't constantly live looking in the rear view mirror. Looking back, thinking back, wishing that things were better, more, or different.
Emily Jones: You can close the loop on some of those things and not have to live under that burden anymore. All right, so what if you are not sure if you're stuck in grief or if you are. Not healing. If you're not processing, if you're suppressing, what are some things to watch out for? So there are some behaviors and some common [00:27:00] ways that people tend to, not practice in moderation.
Emily Jones: So things like over drinking , things like not sleeping enough or oversleeping, overeating or undereating. We're talking about things not in moderation here. So some of those areas are sex, drugs, gambling, smoking, shopping, video games, workaholism, internet usage, gaming, isolation, and keeping busy, by themselves.
Emily Jones: Some of these things aren't bad. Sleeping, eating, exercising, shopping. Those things on their own aren't. Bad activities or things to do when done in moderation, but if you find yourself doing them excessively or avoiding doing them altogether, then that can be an indication that you may be utilizing that as a distraction or that you may be struggling to move forward in your, overall healing journey.
Emily Jones: So then I'm gonna share with you just a little bit about complicated grief. This is actually from an article [00:28:00] that Mayo Clinic had posted where it just talks about signs and symptoms of. Complicated grief, may be noticeable if you're experiencing these sort of things. And I'm just gonna list a few that I see most commonly.
Emily Jones: And if you want the full list or you wanna learn more please join us for our live event or join us in the community. We would love to have you there. But some of the signs and symptoms are intense, sorrow, pain, and rumination over the loss of your loved one. Inability to focus on little else but your loved one's death.
Emily Jones: Problems. Accepting the death numbness or detachment bitterness about your loss. Lack of trust in others. Feeling that life holds no meaning or purpose. Having troublecarrying out normal routines, isolating yourself. Deep depression, sadness, guilt or self-blame, believing that you did something wrong or could have prevented the death, wishing you had died along with your loved one, and feeling that life isn't worth living without your loved one.
Emily Jones: So if you're experiencing these, especially beyond six month, Mark, I [00:29:00] believe this article references then these are signs that you may have a complicated grief or that you may be struggling to move forward in your healing journey. So, All right. We've talked about why it is that you may feel like you're stuck in grief or that you're moving backwards.
Emily Jones: So some of the things that can cause you to feel that way, some of the signs that you may be struggling with that. So some things to watch out for, and complicated grief as well. And if you want to learn more about what to do to get yourself unstuck, Then again, I have six different areas or six different things that you can focus on to help get yourself unstuck outta grief, and I would love to share those with you in the live events that I'm hosting in August and September.
Emily Jones: And you can sign up for those by going to brave widow.com/free and you'll get to hear about when all of the live events are, tend to do different ones throughout the year. And of course, they're free to attend, so there's no, no cost to join, and you can [00:30:00] join live, or you can watch the playback after the live event has happened.
Emily Jones: I would love for you to join us in. Of course, if you'd love to join us in the Brave Widow Membership Community, then you'll be able to find this as a course that slowed it in, so, all right.
Emily Jones: Hey guys. Thank you so much for listening to the Brave Widow Podcast. I would love to help you take your next step, whether that's healing your heart, finding hope, or achieving your dreams for the future.
Emily Jones: Do you need a safe space to connect with other like-minded widows? Do you wish you had how-tos for getting through the next steps in your journey, organizing your life or moving through grief? What about live calls where you get answers to your burning questions? The Brave Widow Membership Community is just what you need.
Emily Jones: Inside you'll find courses to help guide you, a community of other [00:31:00] widows to connect with, live coaching and q and a calls, and small group coaching where you can work on what matters most to you. Learn how to heal your heart, find hope, reclaim joy, and dream again for the future. It is possible. Head on over to brave widow.com to learn more.
