Wouldn’t it be lovely if you knew what you were doing wrong before you found yourself elbow deep in misery? Great news – this week, we’re naming the five biggest mistakes grievers make so not only can you prepare yourself for what’s to come, but you can support your friends who are grieving in a new and more healthy way, too.
Are you still listening? I hope I didn’t lose you with my tongue-in-cheek intro. Because darling friend, this is a bait and switch! There are no mistakes we make as grievers. Did you really suspect I would suddenly offer a linear, error-free pathway through loss?
That’s okay if you did. Honestly, I suspected I could come up with something for a minute there. I tried to believe I could move away from trauma-informed, holistic grief support and offer up a pithy marketing-worthy episode. Alas, we are stuck with me as I am. We are committed to the process of grief work with our integrity intact.
But don’t worry! I do have a list of five things I’d like to share with you about how we grieve and how we can do it with compassion, kindness, and that same integrity we were just talking about.
Rather than list five things grievers are doing wrong, we’re going to name five things grievers are doing well. If you find yourself in this list, that’s a green flag for you! It’s also a sign that you are in a healthy place to support someone else in their grief process, be it a child in your household, a friend at work, or a family member who doesn’t really share their woes.
Ultimately, we all want to grieve well. We all want to feel better, more relaxed, more regulated, and more in control of ourselves in our public and our private lives. We’ve also been taught that it looks like remaining stoic, demure, and grateful for everything we experience – even when the roof is crashing down around us.
If you are struggling to find healthy grief support in your life, look for folks who demonstrate one or more of these behaviors I’m about to describe. No one is perfect, but these are at least going to be people who live with more of the both/and ethos we need to grieve well.
So the first thing I notice grievers doing well these days is by sharing their hearts. Whether we are grieving our inner world or the state of the world itself, people are becoming more honest about what hurts and why.
They’re able to say things as simple as, “This makes me really sad.” We used to believe and behave as if a lengthy explanation provided justification for the pain we feel. What we are beginning to learn is that within our whole selves, we exist on a multitude of layers. We are inherently complex, but have gone through so many ringers that we feel flattened and unable to name the layers that need care.
Grievers who share their hearts are learning to name the wrongs they’ve suffered without accusation, and without internalizing the entirety of the wrong. Grief work over relationships and situationships is not about laying blame and absolving ourselves. It requires humility – where we can consider what we are contributing to the scenario and that allows us to leave people in their context.
On the contrary, someone that might not be the most helpful supporter for you when you’re hurting is the person who clams up. The one that isn’t comfortable sharing or listening to what you have to say or how you feel. That doesn’t mean they’re the wrong friend for you. It just means that in this season, they might not be the most helpful partner to your healing.
Which brings me to the second thing I’ve noticed. What do I mean by leaving people in their context? Consider a politician you do not like hearing from or about. There may be policies you disagree with, behaviors, or any number of reasons why.
When you put them into YOUR context, it’s impossible for them to fit. You start reacting to their words and actions with phrases like, “Are you kidding me?” or “How could they possibly be proud of themselves for that?” While your disappointment and frustration is valid, you’re also entrenching your resistance by trying to relate to them where you are coming from – you’re not really trying to understand. You’re robbing the person of their context. Context is not absolution; quite the opposite. When we leave someone in their context, we allow them to be fully human. Flawed, in process, and probably full of contradictions.
When you first started your own grief work, you didn’t expect it would alter who you are and how you move through the world. And yet, here you are, following along with me and wondering how you became this version of yourself. Through a lot of self-reflection and care, friend.
But in order to do that, you had to remain in your context. You had to understand how your life experiences and assumptions shaped your identity and beliefs. You had to grieve the ways you witnessed your identity and beliefs causing harm around you or through your behaviors.
If you are wise, you are still in the process of examining how you impact those around you as a crucial aspect of your grief work. That is taking responsibility and owning your stuff as you heal. That’s necessary in grief work! We are learning as humans to honor our opinions and experiences, and to tolerate when we get new information that changes how we see the world. This is a healthy, flexible mindset.
Alternatively, it is reasonable to take a break from relationships where you are not allowed to remain in context. When someone requires you to share only good vibes, they are not likely to handle your full context right now, which includes discomfort and sorrow. That’s okay. Again, they don’t have to be fully removed from your life.
Which takes me to the third thing I see grievers doing well – finding flexible and healthy pathways through their grief work!
There are three kinds of boundaries we live with: rigid, healthy, and porous boundaries. Most days, we are all fluctuating through each boundary type in different scenarios, and that’s okay. Most daily interactions with others and ourselves are not so intense that our boundaries create lasting change for us.
But when we are grieving, those boundaries become more pronounced. Maybe we’ve allowed the grocer at the corner store to make comments we simply ignore, but now with a grief lens, we cannot tolerate the remarks and opt to push back.
This is where our regulated selves can practice healthy boundaries. Our rigid response might be to shout or react with mirrored rudeness; commenting in relation to what they said with a punctuation of, “Do you like that? How do you like those comments?”
A continued porous boundary might be to ignore the remarks, but complain to others about your new awareness and feel helpless to make a change. Healthy boundaries in situations like this, I’m happy to report, are happening left and right! When we find ourselves no longer willing to tolerate behaviors or remarks that make us uncomfortable, we are learning to pause and regulate ourselves first.
Maybe part of that work includes leaving the person in their context, right? Perhaps they’ve always made comments to everyone, and while that is not an excuse or permission, it is a sign that they’ve assumed they’re just being who they are and not causing harm.
Regulating ourselves before pushing back on what feels like harm is necessary for our own experience, too. This isn’t just so the other person thinks we’re nice. This is for us to meet our own needs of advocacy and inner peace without inviting an ongoing rumination over what we said and how it could have gone differently.
Regulation is as accessible as pausing, closing your eyes, inhaling deeply, and finding something beautiful to gaze upon or consider before replying. That healthy boundary sounds like representing yourself well without denigrating the other. Your dignity and humanity matter, and when you honor your boundaries, you can honor the dignity and humanity of the other person without compromising yourself.
This is about distress tolerance and learning to handle conflict. Admittedly, a very hard thing to do when you are in the middle of grief. But grievers who are addressing their inner worlds, full of distress and personal conflict, are able to embody that same gentleness toward others as well.
Becoming aware of another person’s tendency for rigid or porous boundaries on the regular can help you notice where you are able to create space for yourself – consider their behaviors a pathway of your own, away from that mentality while you work toward healing.
Beautifully, that approach toward ourselves leads us into the fourth thing I see grievers doing really well, and that is asking for help.
Maybe you’re in a situation where you can regulate and not jump to a rigid boundary response, but you’re not sure what to say next. That’s okay! And expected. And not a place where you must remain in order to stay aligned with your healthy boundaries or values.
Asking others for their input is a source of strength when it is not purely centered on venting or gossip. When we ask for support, we’re not asking for answers (and if you are, let it be known and cheeky). No one has your answers, but they do have questions that can help change the way you think about the scenario at hand.
We have options for support – our peers, our people, and professionals. Our peers are the folks we’ve seen in similar situations. Maybe they’re coworkers or neighbors. Maybe they’re a parent on our child’s sports team, and we happen to know they have similar experiences. The peers we can ask for help aren’t our best friends, and they aren’t professionals, but they are experienced and insightful people with whom we can begin to build trust. Again, they might be people we see who embody the earlier green flags we’ve talked about.
Our people include our best friends, our family members, or maybe even spiritual advisors or leaders. We want their experience and their insight from a different perspective than ours, and often this help feels a little more like a list of things to do next or to try.
And lastly, the professionals are people who won’t necessarily give you a list, but will have a list of questions you have not thought to ask. The benefit of grief professionals is not that they understand grief better than you. It’s your story, and you know it better than anyone. But they do have a grasp on how grief manifests, how to support you through it, and how to ask you to consider your context with a new lens or set of values.
Asking for help is a strength. It is vulnerability and healing on display. It is evidence that you recognize your context, and find it lacking without cruelty toward yourself. Your needs are valid, and as grievers, we have the chance to embody our healthy boundaries by asking for help when we need it and by standing on our own two feet with support nearby, too.
Here’s where it hits the pavement, though. What if we don’t have peers, the people, or the professionals to ask for help?
This is our fifth green flag for today. When we recognize our circle around us has grown a bit thin, we have options. We can reach back to people we once knew. Relationships that feel familiar but maybe aren’t as close right now. There are so many reasons we fall away from one another, and in grief work, we can start to consider if those reasons are worth exploring for a renewed connection.
But the harder work here is to name that sometimes, our relationships have run their course for a reason. We can’t ask this person for help because maybe they were part of the problem in the first place.
Grievers are not unfamiliar with this – if you’re listening and grieving, you know there are people in your life that cannot handle who you are right now or what you’re going through. We can’t return to them because they’re not safe as an option of support.
This sucks. I could say that with more eloquence, but really, that’s the meat of it. It sucks to feel overlooked, left behind, or unseen. So what is the green flag option for us when our relationships have run their course?
Remain with yourself. Remain, remain, remain. This is discomfort embodied; this is distress tolerance in action. We are quick to self-abandon if we think it will make a safe environment for us to heal, even if it is not ideal.
I’ve seen grievers change their environment frequently as a defense mechanism and as embodied wisdom. It is not mine to judge; it is mine to hold space for and to offer questions as to why the person is changing it up so often.
When you remain with yourself, despite feeling uncomfortable or isolated, you are honoring the process of reforming within you. This doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly have more friends all around. It does mean that when you are feeling more flexible and able to share, you will begin to attract the kind of people into your life who can tolerate your distress, too. People who are also living out these green flags; who are able to push back when needed, but soften more often than not.
We don’t need a huge circle of people to listen to us vent. We need the steadfast few who hold space with curiosity, compassion, and care. And until we can live that out for ourselves, finding those new people to do so is a pretty big challenge.
I see grievers who are doing this uncomfortable work of cocooning, and I am humbly asking you to trust the process. As much as it can suck, it will also be the very thing that brings you back to yourself with intention and the very opportunity for healing you want.
Thank you for listening to episode 200 of Restorative Grief. 200?! Are you serious? What a ride, 200 episodes. I am honored and grateful for having you here with me for so long. I hope you have found some new entry points in your grief work and when you’re ready, that you find the off-ramp toward a new sense of self. This is a lifelong work, and it is such a joy to see you learning to embody who you are becoming.
If this is your first time listening to the podcast, I’m so glad you’re here and you have a lot of great episodes to catch up on! Take your time – slow and steady is the work. You’re not in a hurry or a race. You can get more resources including workbooks for each episode at Patreon.com/MandyCapehart or you can follow along on social media. Check the show notes for all the links and if you feel like, it reach out on Instagram to say hello!
Thank you as always to the patrons of the show, it is a gift and an honor to bring this into the world with your partnership. And as always, before we go, one last thing. Please remember, the only solution for grief is to do the work of grieving. Thank you for listening. I’ll see you next week.
Links + Resources from this episode: