One of the most common questions I hear is: ‘Is it okay to grieve someone who is still alive? Regardless of the reason for relational distance, it often carries disappointment and, of course, grief. This week, we’re unpacking those boxes of disappointment you’ve lugged from relationship to relationship. Instead of reminiscing with a lens of guilt or shame, let’s talk about a new practice to help us leave disappointment behind as we learn to grieve and move forward.
Why do we grieve the living? When reflecting, most people cite disappointment as the biggest reason. It’s disappointing to know someone doesn’t want to be around us. It’s disappointing to feel like we’ve let someone down, or lost alignment. Maybe we’ve grown in directions they aren’t willing to follow. Most of us believe we know what a healthy relationship needs to thrive. So when a relationship falters, the disappointment of perceived failure can feel loud and confusing.
In romantic, professional, and platonic relationships, we know offering connection takes vulnerability. Over time, we expect the other person to pick up when we call, reply to messages, or make time for us when they’re in town. Having expectations in our relationships is natural, and so is feeling disappointed when they go unmet.
It’s also completely okay to disappoint someone else. Our expectations with one another need to be reasonable and communicated. But when they’re not, healthy relationships can navigate the pain of miscommunication with honesty and openness. In fact, if you want to hear more about the value of letting others feel disappointment with you, go back and listen to episode 132. Often, we insulate ourselves from honesty to prevent the pain of knowing we’ve let someone down…and that’s not a sustainable way to live.
But what can we do with the anger and disappointment of someone who has walked away from us? The reason they’ve left doesn’t change the pain, and this isn’t about naming why they’ve gone or who set a boundary that ended the connection either. The closeness factor is absent, and that leaves the brain swirling with rumination and attempts to uncover and solve any perceived problems.
The disappointment of someone’s absence is heavy. That box of expectations becomes weightier and weightier when we think about all the ways their absence affects us: less support, less companionship, and less insight. Combine that with more isolation, more frustration, and more hurt, and it makes sense why we want to avoid feeling disappointed at all costs.
Many of us grieving become hesitant to express expectations in future relationships. After all, they can’t let us down if we have dirt level expectations in the first place. I’ve even heard people celebrate the bare minimum as support, either because they expected nothing in the first place or because their past relationships taught them this was the safest emotional way forward.
That coping mechanism might work with acquaintances or strangers—relationships that aren’t deeply intentional or well-defined. In those cases, expecting little to nothing can be both self-protective and reasonable.
But keeping the bar at ground level for close relationships isn’t healthy for either person. Learning to communicate our expectations is how we develop a relationship in the first place.
For some, that type of communication is foreign because of our earlier life experiences. Our attachment styles are all shaped by the relationships in our childhood. In those early relationships, we practice and develop useful strategies for attachment, including when the natural expectations of our nervous system for connection are not met. Whatever strategies we develop are the first to show up later in life. So, if we expect to be gravely disappointed by a partner because that is how our earlier relationships turned out, then we start to repeat the cycles.
A concept that has gained traction online in recent years is the oversimplification of the dismissive/avoidant attachment style. It’s relatable, even if we aren’t operating with this attachment style in the majority of our relationships. To paraphrase: “The reason you don’t share your emotions with people you love now is because as a kid, you were expected to cry yourself to sleep at night” or “told to buck up, buttercup.” Some variation of minimizing your emotional expressions as a child led to recognizing that safety comes when you keep uncomfortable emotions on lock down.
Most people have experienced moments like this, but isolated incidents alone don’t usually result in a dismissive/avoidant attachment style. But the idea of becoming curious about how we move in connection as a result of what worked for us when we were younger is crucial for this conversation about disappointment.
We don’t start relationships expecting them to end years down the road. When we begin a connection, we’re filled with hope and maybe cautious optimism. As much as our inner-Eeyore may want to speak up, we tend to be positive as we get to know other people. In that time, we learn what we can expect from them and share our boundaries, too. The hard part is that most of the time, these expectations and boundaries are unspoken. As time goes on, we create little indicators of comfort or discomfort with people that change the expectations, too.
You’ve heard me say it before – everything we do moves us closer to or further from the person we are becoming. Nothing leaves us standing still. The same is true in relationships; toward or away – connection or disconnection. Remaining static just isn’t possible.
Over time and without intentions toward one another, we drift apart. Those distances hurt, but perhaps we can rationalize or name our part in the distance. We may even feel a comfort level that allows for reconnection. Sometimes we reach out and it goes great! Other times?
Enter disappointment.
How many times have you wanted to rekindle some flame of affection and you’re left with a burned-out match in the dark? Maybe you’ve been ghosted; maybe you’ve been dumped. Maybe your longtime community thinks you’ve changed and there’s no longer a seat for you at the table. Maybe a sibling can’t believe you’ve cut off your parents, or a coworker turned the team against you for siding with HR. Maybe you’re just not comfortable being honest with an old friend about how their behaviors and beliefs hurts you, but saying nothing at least keeps the peace.
Learning to grieve the very people you may see in the grocery store takes intention, embodiment, and a willingness to stop keeping the peace.
Let’s become intentional with ourselves together. Embodiment begins here and now. When you heard me say, ‘stop keeping the peace,’ did you feel anything shift in your body? Take a moment to scan yourself from head to toe. Do you feel tension, butterflies, or a change in your breath?
Any physiological response is perfectly normal – your body is likely responding to the threat of a lack of peace. And it is a threat – the idea that a place or person will not feel a sense of peace with us present might be scary and unknown.
Navigating that unknown is the mental exercise we engage in when we struggle to understand why someone left or what we could have done differently to keep them around. The rumination keeps the uncomfortable emotional energy moving through our body, dysregulating us away from care and comfort.
But if we could think our way out of disappointment, we would have by now. If spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity worked, we would all feel incredible all the time.
The embodiment you can experience in these moments of disappointment require safety, security, and ultimately result in a greater sense of belonging with yourself.
Let’s start with the idea of keeping the peace. What does it mean to you to keep the peace? What are the actions, the words, the feelings that go along with keeping the peace? This is a fine place to stop the episode and journal a bit until you really have a strong sense of how you feel when you are keeping the peace and how it serves you to do so.
Today’s conversation is not going to be about reconciliation with the other person, but about reconciliation within yourself. There are plenty of ways to approach a person and begin working through the discomfort and in fact, episode 132 that I spoke of earlier invites you into boundary work for just that purpose. Today’s conversation is around people who are alive and for any reason, want nothing to do with you.
When we think about keeping the peace with someone who doesn’t want to speak with us, we actually…can’t keep the peace with them, can we? I mean, you could say honoring the boundary and remaining away is keeping the peace, but if we’re not at peace…what is being kept, exactly?
Grieving these relationships means shifting from maintaining external peace to cultivating inner peace. No more “it is what it is” statements. No more global accusations of generational divides or blaming pop music. This is about taking ownership and responsibility within for the state of our own lives going forward.
Go back to the embodiment experience. What you felt points to what you need most in this moment. Your body is guiding you toward expressing what feels stuck, trapped, limited, or restrained from this particular relationship.
Somatic practices help release stored tension from past experiences by engaging the body in intentional movement. For example, if you were in a car accident and now fear getting into cars, a somatic practitioner might guide you to notice how your body feels when thinking about getting into a car. Perhaps your legs tense up, mirroring how you reacted during the accident, and you still experience pain there. The practice would focus on progressive muscle relaxation or similar techniques, rather than revisiting the event mentally.
In the same way, notice what part of this relationship feels most locked up in your body. Is it your throat? That could represent words going unheard or misunderstood. Or maybe your head feels heavy, burdened by unappreciation. In that case, it might be time to write affirmations of affection. Trust your intuition. While a somatic professional can help with your specific situation, you can also practice gentle self-awareness.
Grieving your way through life means giving your grief space to breathe. We do the work of grief by engaging with our grief stories, sitting with the discomfort, and offering ourselves compassion and permission to feel what we feel.
Just as we wouldn’t assign guilt or shame to someone afraid of cars after an accident due to automatic physical responses, there’s no need to place guilt or shame on yourself for grieving the loss of someone who is still living.
As you explore the sensations you experience, notice your emotions, too. Any coming to the surface? Can you name any of the emotions beyond happy, sad, angry, scared, or excited?
When you notice an emotion, give yourself a full 90 seconds to stay with it. No big reactions, no shifting your attention to avoid it. Let it be with you, let yourself feel how it moves through you. Emotions are a chemical response in your body, and the best part is that most of the time, that response takes only 90 seconds or so to metabolize and move through.
Grief becomes more complicated when we either ruminate on or ignore an emotional state. For example, when you think about the friendship that fell apart, you might notice the same feeling of isolation, anger, sadness, or rejection surfacing again. Now is the time to name those emotions, notice where in your body you feel them physically, and allow your intuition or a somatic practitioner to help you metabolize them through.
Grieving the living is possible if you are tending to your grief daily. In the same way you notice your hunger, you can notice your grief is on a spectrum of expression. The body will bring your attention to the need, and that’s when you get to be intentional again: You can choose to nurture your peace—or let it starve.
Thank you for listening to episode 188 of Restorative Grief. The grief we carry from a death might feel bigger or more urgent compared to the grief we experience in relationships like these, but listen: If it hurts, it hurts. If it matters, let it matter. We can experience relief from grief and release from trauma no matter the source, if we move with intention toward ourselves and what we need.
If this is your first time listening to the podcast, thank you for making space! I hope you feel inspired and empowered to try something new in your own grief story after today’s conversation. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and share this with a friend – you know, there’s always someone in your life that could use a little more intention, too.
Thank you to the patrons of the podcast for supporting this work, and if you want to support the work, gain access to exclusive content, and connect with others who are grieving, please join us at Patreon.com/MandyCapehart and you know that link will be in the show notes.
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:
- Read the transcript of episode 132: Okay, So They’re Disappointed
- Become a Patron!
- Learn more about coaching