Widow Grief: Everyone Thinks I’m Okay, But I Feel Empty | BW: 206

Brave Widow Resources  

• Brave Widow Academy (join the waitlist or book a call): https://bravewidow.com/academy
• Join Brave Widow Foundations (gentle, faith‑based support for the first seasons of grief):👉 bravewidow.com/foundations
• Join the free Brave Widow Community: https://bravewidow.com/free

Everyone says, “You’re so strong” and “You seem to be doing better”… but inside you still feel numb, hollow, or like you’re just going through the motions.

In this episode, we talk about why “functioning” can still feel so empty, how to know you’ve entered a new season of grief, and one gentle step you can take this week to feel even 10% more alive.

You’ll learn:
• Why your body has stayed in survival mode long after the casseroles stopped
• How life built on responsibility (not desire) slowly erases your joy
• Why dreaming about the future can feel like a betrayal
• The RISE framework to choose one area of life and bring it back to life, a little at a time

📍 In‑Person Events Mentioned:
• Held in Hope Conference – Jenks, OK – Oct 8–9, 2026: https://www.standinthegap.org/heldinhope/
• San Antonio, TX meetup (September 2026)
• Faith and Growth Summit – Miami, FL – Dec 3, 2026: https://faithbasedcoachingacademy.com/faith-and-growth-summit/

You don’t have to rebuild alone.

Chapters (10 max)

00:00 – “You’re so strong” but I feel empty
01:09 – My story: high‑functioning, hollow on the inside
03:40 – The four seasons of grief (where you might be now)
05:19 – Reason #1: Your body is stuck in survival mode
06:33 – Reason #2: Life is built on responsibility, not desire
08:00 – Reason #3: The future disappeared (and feels like betrayal)
11:05 – What “feeling alive” really means (hint: not constant happiness)
14:15 – The RISE framework to feel 10% more alive this week
18:45 – Why you can’t rebuild your life in isolation
20:40 – Brave Widow Foundations, live events, and free community invitations

Subscribe for more faith‑based, hopeful grief support for widows:
@BraveWidow on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram & Facebook

💬 If this episode helped you, please: 

• Hit Subscribe 
• Leave a quick rating & review – it helps more widows find this support
• Share this with a friend who’s facing grief or the holidays without their person

If you’re new here, my name is Emily Tanner. I’m the founder of Brave Widow and Brave Widow Academy.

I help widows move from barely surviving their loss… to rebuilding a life they can actually love again without feeling like they’re betraying their person.

By day (and for 20+ years), I’ve led large teams and complex operations in the corporate world. 

After my husband Nathan died in 2021, just shy of our 20-year anniversary, I took everything I knew about leadership, systems, and change — and started applying it to grief.

Since then, I’ve:

Shared my story publicly to make widows feel less alone.

Launched the Brave Widow podcast, now with 180+ episodes and listeners around the world.

Coached hundreds of widows 1:1 and in groups, and talked with thousands more through the podcast, communities, and events.

Built Brave Widow Academy, a 6-month coaching program with a clear framework for moving from deep grief to rebuilding a life you can love again.

I don’t teach “just think positive” grief tips.

I teach widows how to:

Heal their heart.

Stop waiting on “time” to fix everything.

Take small, brave steps toward a life that feels meaningful again.

How I Got Here…

2021: My husband Nathan dies unexpectedly. I’m 4 kids in, overwhelmed, and drowning in paperwork, decisions, and pain. Therapy helps, but I still feel stuck with no roadmap.

2021–2022: I start devouring books, interviewing widows, trying grief groups, and studying coaching — desperate to find something that actually helps me feel different.

2022: I start the Brave Widow podcast, recording episodes while terrified and crying between takes — but determined that no widow should feel as alone as I did.

Year 1: I begin coaching widows 1:1. Word spreads quietly. The same patterns and problems keep showing up, so I start building frameworks instead of one-off advice.

Year 2: I launch Brave Widow Academy — a structured, 6-month coaching program with a step-by-step path: from deep grief, to stability, to rebuilding.

Year 3: Brave Widow has listeners around the world. I’ve personally coached hundreds of widows and spoken with thousands more through consults, lives, emails, and DMs. 

Today: My work is simple:

Help widows stop surviving each day… and start rebuilding a life that makes them genuinely glad to be alive again.

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker: [00:00:00] You're so strong. You seem like you're doing so much better. I don't know how you do it

If everyone thinks that you're doing better, but inside you feel empty, numb, or like you're going through the motions, then this episode is for you

Today I want to show you why functioning can still feel hollow, how to know you've entered a new stage of grief, and one small step that you can take this week to feel ten percent more alive

By the way, I have some opportunities for you to join me at some in person live events, and I'm gonna talk about them at the end of the episode if you're interested. All right, here's the thing. People can see that you are functioning, but they can't always see that you're functioning from a place of obligation, not a place of desire

Just five years ago when Nathan died, I was a high-functioning, high-achieving, ambitious person. I was in a senior vice president [00:01:00] executive role in the healthcare space. I oversaw over 100 physical locations across the United States. I had 4,000 employees who reported up to me, and I was constantly traveling, doing things raising four kids, being married, having a, a great property, just, just doing all these big things in life.

And after Nathan died, like m- all of you, my world completely imploded and changed. Like, my reality of what I knew as life was shattered along with all of my future hopes, dreams, and expectations. And after he died, I still had all of those very high-functioning skills, leading, making decisions, fixing things, caring about other people, but after he died, those same skills kept everything running.

They kept my [00:02:00] life going, but they didn't help me feel alive. It was almost like my purpose went from this thing that lit me up on the inside, like, oh, I get to help make a difference in my employees' lives. Oh, I get to make the healthcare experience better for patients. Oh, I get to show my kids what it's like to work hard and to chase your dreams and to go after all these things.

Like, those were inspirational type of purposes that kept me going even though things were hard at times. To all of a sudden, those things that used to give me that inspirational purpose now became purpose out of obligation. I have to do this. I'm supposed to do this. I need to do this. Not I get to do this and this is amazing, but I have to do this out of a sense of duty and obligation [00:03:00] and responsibility for my kids, for my team, for everyone else who's depending on me, and not for myself.

I knew how to get things done and in many ways it helped give me a sense of normalcy. Like, it helped me feel like those hours I was at work that my life felt any sense of normalcy again. But I felt very hollow on the inside. I felt emotions very superficially. I didn't feel them down in my body, and I was somewhat afraid whether or not I would be able to feel things fully and completely again

So one of the things that I teach is called the four seasons of grief. And if you're not familiar with them, I'm just gonna give you a super quick overview because I wanna talk about it a little later in the episode. So the first season of grief is rawness, where you're overwhelmed, and you're trying to get your feet underneath [00:04:00] you, and you're really in survival mode.

The second one is isolation, where you feel very lonely and stuck, and you have your feet underneath you, but you're just wondering, like, now what? The third season is called self-discovery, which is all about who you are going to be now, what kind of life you wanna create, and you're starting to try new things again, which can bring up a sense of guilt and frustration and lots of big emotions.

And then the fourth season that I teach is empowerment, which is I'm clear on who I am now, I'm clear on what I want, and I am actively building those things up. So if you are at a place in your grief journey where you're functioning on the outside but on the inside you still feel empty, you're probably somewhere between season two and three, between isolation and self-discovery.

That's where a lot of people tend to find me in their journey of [00:05:00] grief

All right, so let's talk about three reasons why functioning still can leave you feeling empty. The first is that your body has learned to survive. Staying busy, taking on new tasks, scanning for danger, being hypervigilant, never slowing down.

Your body has come all about survival and being in survival mode. I think about it sometimes like our body becomes this little danger radar, and it's constantly scanning for danger, like beep, like a little radar looking for danger anywhere and everywhere, which can leave us feeling anxious, feeling amped up, feeling like we're in that fight or flight mode, and just having this general feeling of being unsettled and unsafe.

Survival mode and living in this season of grief leaves us asking, "How do I make it through the day? How do I get through this next hour? How do I get through this day, this week?" [00:06:00] Versus when we're actually rebuilding a life that helps us feel alive, we start to ask questions more along the lines of, "What do I want my days to look like?

What do I want my life to become?" The second reason why functioning can still leave us feeling empty on the inside is that your life is built around responsibility, not desire. So we have bills, we're taking care of the kids, we have work, we have paperwork, we have all of these tasks.

And so our life becomes this sense of duty and obligation and task completion rather than anything out of desire. It becomes, "I have to do these things because I'm responsible for them, and I have to take care of everything and everyone else in s- in f- front of myself," versus feeling that we can fill our cup up before we take care of other people.

Oftentimes, if I ask widows, "When is [00:07:00] the last time you did something for fun or you did something because it helps you relax?" They tend to space out because they're like, "Fun? Relaxing?" Like, those words seem so foreign because we've lived in this mode of survival and obligation and responsibility. We haven't thought about anything fun, and it may even be hard to think about anything that brings us peace or brings us moments of rest

As widows, we can also feel like we lost our sense of purpose. But here's the thing. You might not need a giant new purpose. You might just need to be able to want small things again in your life. And the third reason why functioning can leave us feeling empty on the inside is because the future has disappeared, and wanting a future again [00:08:00] can bring up a big sense of betrayal. We lost the future that we envisioned together with our person. We lost maybe our, our dreams, our hopes, our goals.

Like for me, I recognized that the things I used to want when I was married to Nathan, I didn't want anymore. I w- had apathy. I didn't care about those things anymore. And it was really hard to wrap my mind around, how do I go from thinking of it as we to thinking of it as me? And what does that mean for the future?

And the beginning, I d- I don't want a future. I want the past. That's very common for widows. So if you're wanting the, the past and not the future, just know that that's normal, especially in the beginning. And we can also think about the future and joy or anything good as a sense of betrayal. We hear things like, "Oh, [00:09:00] grief is the receipt of love.

Your pain is proof that you love someone. Your sadness is the price you pay for having loved someone," and that isn't necessarily true. Moving forward isn't moving away from your person. It's moving towards your next season. And if you believe that you will see your person again one day, moving forward also means that you're moving closer to the time that you will see them again, which I think is a beautiful way to look at it

Time has helped you survive what has happened in the past, and time can help take the edge off some of the pain. But time alone doesn't design what happens next in this season of life. And unfortunately, this is where I feel like so many grief recovery programs fall short. They're really great at helping people to [00:10:00] process grief, at helping people to heal their heart, at helping people to have tools to navigate grief, like grief recovery programs, therapy.

All those things are really great at helping people process the past, learn new tools, and learn how to start navigating a future with these new tools. But in many times, to me, that is just the start. That's the foundation. Those are the building blocks of what comes next, which is rebuilding your life from the ash And so what happens is so many widows go through therapy, they go through grief share or grief recovery type programs.

They go to group programs. They talk with other widows, and they're no longer in the acute sharp pain of grief every day. Um, they're no longer maybe struggling to function on a day-to-day basis. They can get out of bed, they can eat, they can shower, they can do things, [00:11:00] but they end up feeling like this empty shell of the person that they were.

And if you're like me, you probably find yourself asking the question, like, w- what do I do now? What am I supposed to do next? And those programs aren't designed to help you with that, which is why Brave Widow is so different. Okay? So what does it mean to feel alive again versus to just be functioning?

Okay. And I, I wanna be clear as I talk about feeling alive, what I mean by that. My goal or our goal in feeling alive isn't always happiness and joy, okay. Happiness is a positive emotion. It's a good one. It's one that we wanna bring into our lives, but happy is... if I were to do this visually, this up and down of [00:12:00] emotions, we have happiness up at the top, and then maybe sadness or sorrow at the bottom.

And life, in life we experience so many different emotions. They fluctuate, they come, they go. We can influence our emotions. We can learn things from our emotions. It's just very fluid, right? It's hard to sustain one emotion for a significantly long period of time. Even prior to grief, if you think about when you were just so happy and things were going so amazing and everything is wonderful and you're just happy, happy, happy, that doesn't last for forever.

Other things come up that are frustrating or annoying or that make you angry or make you sad or cause you to feel all these different things. So life isn't about just aiming for one emotion. My goal is to help guide widows to the middle, to baseline, if you wanna call it that, or to... I think of it more as like to a place of [00:13:00] peace.

Like, if there was an emotion or a mindset that I could describe to say that one is the goal, it's to find a place of peace where you feel grounded and purposeful and intentional in what you're doing. And you're gonna have moments where you feel happy and joyful, and you'll have moments where you'll feel sad or angry or fearful or whatever it is, but no matter what the emotion is, the goal is to come back to the middle, which is that place of peace.

So feeling alive, having a good life isn't always like, "Oh, I'm so happy and life is amazing and it's wonderful and I'm just excited about things and, and everything is going great." It's about coming to a place of peace, okay? Feeling alive is about having something small that you can look forward to. It's about being able to laugh without feeling like you need to immediately apologize.

It's about [00:14:00] being able to be present for a really good moment

It's about being able to feel grief and joy together, and to be able to hold both of those emotions together without feeling like one needs to cancel the other out. It's about being able to grow your capacity, expand your capacity to hold these big emotions at the same time So the goal with feeling alive isn't to erase grief or to pretend that it doesn't exist.

It's to build a life big enough that you can hold grief and gratitude. You can hold joy and sorrow, and feel alive in doing that

I wanna walk you through this mini exercise, and we're gonna use the RISE framework, like we used RISE for the four seasons of grief. We're gonna use RISE as this mini exercise to help you not fix your whole life, okay? We just wanna choose a place in our life where we wanna feel 10% more [00:15:00] alive.

That would be our goal, just a little bit more alive than what we feel like today, okay? Here's what I'm gonna invite you to do. So our R in our RISE framework here is going to be to reflect. So reflect on one area of your life where you wanna feel more alive.

Maybe it's being at home, maybe it's your weekend, maybe it's friendships, maybe it's parenting, it's faith, it's coming up with a future dream. Whatever it is, you could just ask yourself, where am I functioning but I'm not really living in this area? Just floating through the motions. I'm just going through life.

We could just- we're gonna start with just one. Not all of them. Let's start with one. Okay, I out of our RISE framework is going to be identify. Identify what is missing. Maybe you're missing true connection. Maybe it's rest, joy, [00:16:00] meaning, beauty, hope, freedom, choice, peace, any of those things Think of maybe one thing that you feel like is missing, and you could ask yourself, like, "What have I been waiting for before allowing myself to experience a little bit more of this?"

Maybe it's less guilt, maybe it's permission, maybe it's time. Like, what is the thing that you've been waiting for before allowing yourself to experience more of that? Okay, so we have reflect, we have identify. The S is gonna be shift. We're gonna shift our thought. We're gonna pick one small shift that we can make to move in that direction to start feeling a little bit more alive, okay?

So that shift might be something like, I don't have to know my whole future. I can notice what I want today. It might [00:17:00] be, enjoying this moment doesn't mean I'm erasing my grief. It could be, wanting more doesn't make me ungrateful. It could be, moving forward doesn't mean I'm leaving my person behind. I'm bringing them with me.

Our goal is just to make one tiny shift with how we're thinking about the future, how we're thinking about becoming more alive. Okay? So we had reflect, identify, shift, and then E is empower. So we wanna take a little bit of action to feel more alive. So here are some things that you might do. You could say no to an obligation that drains you.

You could plan something small. Say you wanna connect with a friend, maybe you wanna build a relationship. You could plan one small thing instead of letting loneliness decide for you that [00:18:00] you aren't doing anything. You could choose a restaurant that you wanna try. You could look at a class that you wanna attend.

You could call a friend and hold a conversation with them. My challenge for you would be to identify one action that you could put on your calendar this week that would make you feel even just 10% more alive, present, grounded in your body. One of the myths that we tell ourselves is that we should be able to do all of this on our own. We should be able to heal our grief, to get back to the way that we used to be, to get back to a normal place, to feel good again. Like, we should be able to figure it out. Especially now, we have YouTube, we have podcasts, we have all these things.

We just think we should be able to do some of these things on our own. But here's what people don't often tell you, [00:19:00] is that rebuilding a new life also needs outside perspective. It needs community. It needs a safe place to practice. And I didn't learn this until a year and a half after Nathan died. I did go to counseling. I went through a grief group, grief recovery. I did some of these things together, but it wasn't until I started to rebuild my life in community with other people who are rebuilding life, until I got perspective from a coach who had walked a similar path before me, until I started practicing and stumbling and trying different things and figuring out what works.

It wasn't until I started to do those things that I started to notice progress in rebuilding a life that I could actually enjoy again. And the thing about rebuilding is that you don't need someone [00:20:00] to come save you. Like, one of the things I get quoted by my students of saying often is that no one is coming to save you.

And here's the thing, you don't need them to but it is helpful to have someone beside you while you rebuild, to have people who are walking the journey with you to listen to what your struggles are, to encourage you, to inspire you to keep going, to watch and witness your transformation over time, and to give you a sense that you're not alone, that you are in this with other people.

So if this resonated with you today, I would love to invite you to Brave Widow Foundations. This is the type of thing that we do every week inside of Foundations, is as a community in our space of healing, [00:21:00] learning, and growing, we learn how to move from just functioning to starting to feel alive again

And if you would like to join us, you can go to bravewidow.com/foundations to join us. Inside Brave Widow Foundations, I give you everything that you need to be able to heal your heart and to start building a great foundation before you start to rebuild this next season of life. If you want a process, if you want evidence-based tools, if you want a community to walk this journey with you, then Brave Widow Foundations is the perfect place for you to get started.

Here's the thing. Everyone on the outside can see what you're doing. They can see that you're surviving. They can tell you you're strong. They can tell you that they can't imagine how you do it, that they're just so inspired by you. But the reality is that only you can answer whether you feel [00:22:00] alive or whether you still feel hollow on the inside.

And if there's something inside of you saying, "There has to be more. There must be something more that I can do. There must be more to life than this," then I would love to be able to support you, to guide you, and to walk with you on this journey of healing your heart and ultimately building a life that you can love again.

You can just go to brave widow dot com to learn more. All right. So thank you for joining me for that podcast episode. I just wanna share a few things about what's going on, some live in-person events, just timing-wise, some different things that are happening inside of Brave Widow, and invite you to that.

Okay, so we have the Held in Hope conference hosted by Stand in the Gap Ministries, which is happening October 8th and 9th, 2026, at First Baptist Jenks in Jenks, Oklahoma. Held in Hope is a [00:23:00] faith-based gathering designed to strengthen widows, equip ministry leaders, and mobilize churches to reflect God's compassion.

If you are anywhere in this area or if you can get there, I would love to meet up with you in person and also attend this event with you tickets to this event are just $25, and hotel room reservation rates are extremely reasonable. So if price is typically a consideration for you but you would love to join this event, you would love to join me and other brave widows who are going to be at this event, I would love to see you there.

I'm gonna put the link to this event in all of the show notes, and you can also find it at standinthegap.org/heldinhope if you are in the San Antonio, Texas area, I am going to be there in September, and I would love to meet up with you in person. Especially for any of our brave widows who are in the community, this could be an awesome time for [00:24:00] us to get together. So, if you're gonna be in the area at that time, shoot me a message, send me an email.

I would love to be able to meet up with you in person

And then lastly, if you are in the Miami area or you're like, "You know what? I need a trip to Miami," I would love to meet up with you for the Faith and Growth Summit hosted by my very own amazing coach, Dr. Betsy Guerra. This is a one-day summit where psychology and faith connect, where personal development conference meets a spiritual retreat to ignite your faith, unlock your greatness, and help you live your purpose to elevate humanity.

This is happening on December 3rd from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM at the Elks Lodge in Miami, Florida. Tickets start from just $200 and I would love to be able to meet up with you there and some other brave widows who I imagine will be attending that event as well. Lastly, if you [00:25:00] are not part of the free community, what are you doing? Inside the Brave Widow community, it is totally and forever 100% free. You get access to some of the courses we have in Brave Widow. You get access to our private group chat where you can connect with other widows and widowers, and you get access to me once a week on our Momentum Monday calls where I teach a different topic every Monday based on things that are coming up in coaching, based on things that are coming up that people are struggling in.

And it just gives you one little thing to focus on so that you can stay unstuck and keep that momentum moving forward. All of that is absolutely free. There's no credit card required. There's no debit card required. Name, email, and you're in. So to join the free community, just go to bravewidow.com/free and you're in. All right. I will put all the links to everything that I mention in the show notes for today's [00:26:00] episode, and I will see you inside the community.

Speaker 13: Hey, thanks for spending this time with me today. If you're listening and thinking, "I don't wanna do this widow thing by myself," I'd love to invite you into the free Brave Widow community. It's a private, faith-based space where you can connect with other widows who really get it, join gentle live calls, and get resources to help you take the next small step forward.

To join us, just go to bravewidow.com/free or click the link in the show notes. You don't have to walk this road alone. I'll see you inside