BW 185
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Speaker: Have you ever wondered if you're doing grief right? If so, this episode is for you. Welcome to episode 185.
Hey, I'm Emily Tanner, the founder of Brave Widow. I was widowed in 2021, became a certified life and grief coach, and now it is my mission to help widows find hope, heal their heart, and build a life they can actually love again. All right, so I asked my audience a few weeks ago to submit some questions that they have for the podcast topics that they'd like to hear about, that they would like me to talk a little bit more about on the podcast.
That just seems a little bit murky, and this is one of the questions that came in. I'm gonna read it to you. It says it's been 13 months. He battled stage four cancer for two years. He 100% expected to make it. If I would start stressing or worrying, he would say, don't worry, God's goddess. My question is, I've heard if you don't do the work of grieving, it will come back [00:01:00] and cause you trouble in a few years.
How do you know when you've done the work of grieving? What's the difference between moving forward with purpose and keeping yourself busy and not doing the work? Because truly I have a family to provide for and a team of people to support and lead at work. I must continue moving forward. I get this question a lot, although in many different varieties, it's an underlying fear of, am I doing grief right?
Am I doing it wrong? What do other people think? In fact, another question I got that's very similar and that's I'm gonna, so I'm gonna answer both on this podcast today is. Something that is a frustration to me is the way that some people seem to want me to stay sad and stuck. I try to use my voice to be clear that I'm not the same person anymore.
I have to find my way and create a new future for myself. It makes people uncomfortable, some people don't like change. Or only think of widowhood in one way. [00:02:00] I really get annoyed when people make assumptions that I'm frozen in time now and that I'm just waiting to grow old and die. And so really I read both of these questions as a question that gets asked in many different formats of, am I doing grief right?
How much am I supposed to be grieving versus building and moving forward and figuring out my life and. Even in some of our academy groups, I've had several clients who are, who often get caught up in the swirl of feeling like you need to have it all figured out. Will I move outta my house? Will I keep my house?
Will I get remarried? Will I not get remarried? Where am I going to be five years from now? What is my life gonna look like? And they'll ruminate and ruminate over wanting to know and have the answers. To all of these questions, and so I teach them how to get out of the swirl and really [00:03:00] how to lean into the piece of, you will get to decide.
We don't have to have all those answers right now. We don't have to know how, what life is gonna look like. We don't have to know. Where we wanna move or where we're gonna live. And unless there is an external factor, unless there is something that's forcing us to make a decision now, like maybe affordability on a house, maybe a sale that had already happened, maybe a child that is leaving the home, whatever that is, if there's an external factor, we walk through how to make decisions with peace, but.
For the most part, a lot of this swirl comes from just not having enough information, not knowing what you want your future to look like, which by the way, is very normal, how I tend to explain grief and work with my clients on navigating this crazy journey of grief is through the R.I.S.E. Beyond Grief model, which is my four seasons of [00:04:00] grief method that I've talked about.
And if I were to boil it down even simpler, here's how I would think about, am I doing grief, right?
So let me first put out the disclaimer that it's not my role. It's not anyone else's role to tell someone they're doing grief right, or they're doing grief wrong, or they're handling things the wrong way. There are things that will be helpful to you in your grief journey. There are things that will be harmful to you in your grief journey, and I'm gonna call some of those things out, but.
It's not my place. It's not anyone else's place to look at you and say that you're doing grief right, or you're doing grief wrong. So let me come back to this question. How do you know you've done the work of grieving or you're doing the work of grieving? What we know from places like Grief Recovery Institute and other evidence-based studies is that time on its own does not heal grief.
We [00:05:00] know that by suppressing our emotions, by distracting ourselves from them, by shoving feelings down into our body. That can actually prolong the grief process and it can start to manifest. Physical, chronic pain, it can manifest as illness. It can manifest as even accidents that happen out in the world.
When we shove our feelings down, whether it's grief or any sort of emotional wounds or hurt, when we continue to. Shove feelings down into our body over time that will start to manifest physically if that is not processed. Okay, so as we think about grief and are we doing the work, how I think about it, how I talk with my clients about it is just making sure that you are carving out time to focus on processing grief.
I don't just mean journaling or thinking about it [00:06:00] or looking at pictures or those types of things, but even as David Kessler says, grief demands a witness. And there is something very healing about talking to someone else about your grief, about your hurt, about not only what you experienced, but how it has emotionally impacted you.
This is really part of the power of the Grief recovery method, which is one of my favorite tools to use with my students and clients in being able to lay out the losses you've experienced, how they impacted you to say those words out loud and to emotionally process some of the hurt and pain and the weight of all of those losses you've experienced now.
Does that mean anyone who doesn't go through that particular method isn't doing grief? Of course not. For you, it might [00:07:00] be working with a therapist or a counselor to unpack and process those things. It might be being part of a grief group or a grief share. It might be talking openly with a close family member or friend, and really just.
Being able to safely and openly talk about things of how you're feeling and what you experienced and how you are trying to piece it all together now and what that looks like, but having someone, having a space, having another human to witness this with you, to listen to you. To help you process these things is really gonna help you in the long term, in quote, doing the work of grief.
Now, in the beginning, grief feels really overwhelming. And we may feel raw, we may feel like we're in shock. We may feel that we're in survival mode. And so as I think about [00:08:00] the simplest way, I boil these things down in how I help my clients focus through grief and what's the right, like allocation of grief time and rebuilding time is we have our four seasons of grief,
so the Four Seasons of Grief that I teach in the Rise Beyond Grief framework is Rawness, Isolation, Self-discovery and Empowerment. And within each of these seasons, we have methods and systems that we work through to help us move from one season to the next to know what to expect in that next season, and ultimately to have a season that we're looking forward to.
Because that feels impossible in the beginning. If I were to make it as simple as possible, am I doing grief right? Am I handling this right? The way I would think about it is, number one, we stabilize.
So what is needed for you to feel stabilized so that you can come out of survival Mode? Number two, we explore the possibilities [00:09:00] of what life could look like, what a full and vibrant life could mean for you. We look at rebuilding your social circle and figuring out who do you wanna be.
Now, as one of our question askers mentioned earlier, I try to tell people I'm not the same person anymore, and that can feel very unsettling. But our goal is to figure out now not for you to find yourself, you're not lost. It feels that way, but you're not lost, but to decide who you wanna be now.
So we cover all that in step number two, which is exploring. And then in step number three, we build. Okay, so in step number three, we're very clear who you wanna be, what kind of life you wanna have, what are the things that you wanna chase, what are the goals and the dreams that you wanna pursue? And we go and do those things and we build up this life that you can actually enjoy again.
So as you're asking this question of how do I know. Am I handling grief right or [00:10:00] not? I'm gonna walk you through the four Seasons of grief and what is most helpful to people during these four Seasons
so we have the first season, which is rawness. And that's typically the early days of grief. It may be the first few months. It may be the first year. It really depends on, of course, the person and what's been going on during that time. But in the beginning, in that season of rawness, you are in survival mode.
You are really struggling to see past tomorrow, to see past next week. Like your goal is to get through the day, to get through all the things that are required of you and to just survive. So when someone is in that first season of grief, especially. What I focus on is helping them stabilize, and I created a system called the Chaos to Calm Blueprint, that we cover in the Brave Widow Academy.
And so what we focus on are things like emotional healing, [00:11:00] creating a routine to help you stabilize,
getting you practical help for things that you might need, help around the house, help with getting things done.
Taking care of yourself, your basic needs like eating well, sleeping, physical, movement, all of those types of things, and spiritual connection. All of those things make up our chaos to calm blueprint. For moving out of the noise, moving out of the chaos, moving out of the overwhelm into a place that is calm.
Because ultimately what has happened when we experience grief and we've experienced the trauma of losing our person, is that the amygdala, which is a part of our brain, they call it the amygdala hijack, and so the amygdala, which is that part of your brain that keeps you alive, that runs off instinct, that keeps you safe, it essentially takes over.
Your normal brain functioning. So if you've experienced grief and you're like, it is I can't even think about five years from now, I can't even think about next [00:12:00] week. I can't make decisions. Everything feels foggy and hazy. I forget what I was doing from one minute to the next. All of that. Is because typically your amygdala has taken over and so that prefrontal cortex part of your brain, I know we're getting technical, bear with me, but that part of your brain that makes decisions that is, is in charge of executive function.
That is in charge of planning, that is in charge of decision making, that essentially becomes impaired because your brain is focused now on survival. It feels that you are not safe, that the world cannot be trusted, that it must do everything it can to keep you safe. And so we be, we often become hypervigilant.
We become anxious, we become fearful. So in this season of grief, this rawness season, my goal is to help clients focus on let's get you stabilized. Let's get you where [00:13:00] you are doing some emotional healing, right? So again, could be counseling, could be walking through grief recovery method with me, could be doing coaching, could be doing grief share or grief group.
It doesn't matter. The end result is that you do have time where you're processing and you are emotionally healing. Our second season is. Isolation. And so in the season of isolation, we have come out of survival mode and we are now in more of a maintenance mode. And this is the point in my grief journey where I was like surveying the landscape and realizing that most of my friends and family had disappeared.
And I was just looking around and observing that I. I have a new routine now I have my feet underneath me and I hated it. I just kept wondering is this it? Is this the rest of my life now? What a sad story. [00:14:00] I'm not even 40 at this point, and it's like my life is over. I'm just destined to be a ghost walking this planet until I actually die, because I'm just gonna be a hollow version of myself, like a shell of the person that I was before lost anchor, less drifting, directionless.
That's exactly how it felt. So in the season of isolation, we focus on building up confidence and we focus on connecting with other humans. ' cause in that first season of grief and rawness, we're shrinking back. We're turning inwards because we're just trying to survive. So in the second season, we're not just fighting for survival, we're not just trying to survive.
We're able to see past maybe the next day or two, but we still can't see very far into the future. So we're still in this stabilized step, starting to move into explore as our second step. And [00:15:00] so here we still have time carved out for grief, but we're not grieving all the time. So there will be moments where maybe we catch ourselves laughing at something funny in a movie, or maybe we go to a family get together and we get caught up in the moment and we experience a few minutes of just pure joy and we feel alive again for the first time in a really long time.
And then maybe we feel guilty. Oh no, I shouldn't be having fun. I shouldn't be laughing. What am I doing? I'm supposed to be sad. I'm supposed to be grieving, and we think that it's either or. But one of the concepts I teach my clients and that we really lean into is the word and which is, I am grieving.
I miss my person. I am sad and. I can laugh and I can experience joy and I can have moments that are fun. Who wrote this Grief Rule book [00:16:00] anyway? Who says that we're supposed to be sad all the time and we're supposed to be dressed in all black and have no, no life and no smiles and no laughter until what point?
Like what is it? Is it a year? Is it two years? Is it five years? Is it 10 years? The thing about it is. You could ask 10 different people and get 10 different answers. So as we're moving on this grief journey, what I teach my clients is how to embrace and hold multiple emotions at once. It's not about I'm sad or I'm happy.
It actually can be both. You actually can experience. Hold and have the capacity to hold both. And at some point your life will be, I loved the life that I had. I love my person and I miss them. And I love the life that I have now. In the beginning, I know it's feels too far of a leap. [00:17:00] So we're gonna start small, which is, I experience sadness and grief and I miss my person and.
I can have moments where my brain gets a break from grief, where I laugh, where I feel alive again, where I feel where I'm trying something new for the first time. So the things that I would say are helpful to you on your grief journey is that you're still consciously taking time to carve out time for grief.
But in the second season, typically it's not so overwhelming. It flares up pretty frequently still. It may not feel so overwhelming as it does in season one, in that season of rawness. So in season two, and even season three, which is isolation and self-discovery, you can start to delay grief a little bit or start to schedule grief more.
For example the person who asks this question, she says, I have a family and I have a team of people that I need to support. And I was working [00:18:00] a very demanding executive job for the first year after Nathan died, and I had a team of over 4,000 people that I was personally responsible for.
And so I didn't wanna be at work just breaking down, sobbing, and being overwhelmed by grief. So one of the things that I learned to do is in the beginning, I would delay my grief. Until later that evening. And so at first it was every night. Every night I'm going back to the hotel. Every night I'm going back home, or I'm alone at night and thinking about things and crying and processing my feelings and my emotions.
I also had scheduled times speaking with a counselor, and then ultimately I would end up working with a coach and. Having that time set aside where I could actually talk about, my feelings and what was going on, and I had those moments where I could process that later on in the journey. So more [00:19:00] like season three, where we're in self-discovery, we're exploring, we're experimenting, we're trying new things.
It becomes not a daily thing. It may be something that you start to do weekly or every other week, or you may. Have moments where you're like, I feel sad, but I can't get the tears to come. I feel like I'm not quite sure how to handle grief. And so one of the things that I would do is I would schedule 15 minutes.
I would say Thursday at this time is gonna be my grief time, and for 15 minutes I would play sad music and I would pull out the pictures and just really be in my feelings and allow myself to feel that. Then after 15 minutes was up. Turn the music off, put everything away, and I'm like, okay, now I get to step forward.
For some clients, they may have moments in these seasons where they have a hard day or a hard weekend, and they feel like they've gone backwards or [00:20:00] they've gone to square one, and that's a thought error that, we feel or that we tell ourselves like, oh, I'm starting all over. I feel like I'm starting from scratch.
It isn't true. It feels true, but it's not true. And so in those moments, we may give ourselves a day or a couple days and then we can say, okay, now it's time to step forward. So there is no perfect answer of am I doing the work? Am I doing grief right? And also trying to rebuild. But one thing that is really helpful is to make sure that you do have time carved out and set aside to intentionally focus on processing grease.
Now it may not be going to grief share. Some people go to grief share multiple rounds, and there's nothing wrong with that. But you may also wanna be in an environment where you're like, okay, I don't wanna continue to ruminate on some of these same things. I wanna be able to step forward. I wanna be able to take the spirit of my person with me in creating something [00:21:00] new.
Which is really why Brave Widow is very different than a lot of grief recovery or grief share type programs because the grief recovery and the emotional healing is our foundation. That is where we start, but that's far from where we end. We start with having a good foundation of emotional healing, and then that's where the work begins of rebuilding up the rest of your life.
Learning how to navigate the ups and downs and the emotional volatility of grief. With the spirit of we are continuing to take baby steps forward. Now, there are days that we sit. And we take a breath and we take a break because grief is overwhelming and it's hard. And maybe it's a milestone day, maybe it's a time of year where your person was terminally ill and really struggling.
And so maybe winter is a hard time for you, or summer is a hard time for you. And so we take a little bit of a breather. We [00:22:00] learn how to. Regulate ourselves and how to create space and safety that allows us to get through those really tough moments, and then we take another baby step forward and another baby step forward, and I'm right there with you through every step of the journey.
Okay, so if we, again, we think about the three steps. I think are helpful in navigating this grief journey. It's, we wanna stabilize, then we wanna explore what life could look like and then we wanna build, and how I do that is helping people through the RISE framework. So we have rawness. Grief is overwhelming and emotional healing and getting help and just stabilizing, getting you out of survival mode is the primary focus, right?
So emotional healing and processing grief is a huge component of that because it is so overwhelming. We move through to [00:23:00] isolation. We start working on additional skills like rebuilding confidence. Rebuilding our connection with other people. Then we move into self discovery where we're doing a lot more exploration and experiments and trying new things for the first time.
And navigating and we're still processing grief as it comes up, right? All the way to season four, which is empowerment, which is the best season in the aspect of. You are building, you are creating, you are clear, you are excited about the future. You are starting to build something and starting to see how your story isn't over.
Your life isn't over. It's a very grounding, purposeful place to be where life has purpose and meaning, and something that you can actually look forward to again.
So maybe how I would think about this question, this person submitted. Am I doing the work? Am I doing enough? Is it okay? [00:24:00] Is as you're navigating the ups and downs of life, grief is gonna come up just at different times. And so my question would be, how do you handle that? Do you have an outlet for when it comes up?
Do you have someone you can talk to? Do you take a few moments to process that? Or are you constantly shoving it down? Do you stay busy because you don't wanna focus on grief the whole time? Or is it that you, your intention is to try new things because you're trying to figure out what life might look like or giving yourself a break from grief, because that's really helpful at times.
Or what is the motivation behind trying new things, staying busy versus processing grief? It doesn't have to be. It isn't one or the other necessarily.
Again, your intention, your energy behind doing all of the things. Listen, I'm [00:25:00] an overachiever. I'm very ambitious, very self-driven, and I will burn myself into the ground to make sure that all the things get done to make sure that everyone else is taken care of.
My family, my team at work, my real estate partner. Like all of those things, I will make sure everyone else is taken care of before me. That was been the default pretty much my entire life until I just couldn't do it anymore. And until I learned that is actually not a healthy way to be able to show up for other people is when I am running on fumes.
So as I think about the balance of. Staying busy and getting things done and accomplishing things, is it to your own detriment? So there's nothing wrong with being someone who likes to stay busy and being someone who likes to do things, but are you doing it from a place of everyone else comes before me?
Are you doing it at a [00:26:00] place of being a martyr? Oh, I have to do all this work. I have to do all these things. No one else can do it. It has to be me. And so I will sacrifice myself. I will sacrifice my energy. I will sacrifice feeling like everybody's walking all over me because everyone else comes first.
Are you doing it? Because the moment that you slow down. Grief creeps in. And so you don't wanna feel any of that and you wanna shove it away and you wanna just distract yourself. Like those would be the ways that I would think about evaluating. Am I giving myself enough time really to unpack and process grief?
And really this extends beyond grief, even now as someone who is well in season four, in empowerment and building a life. That I absolutely love as a business owner of multiple businesses and ventures, I often have to step back and ask myself, okay, am I building in enough buffer [00:27:00] time for my own energy?
Am I allowing too many people access? Am I feeling like I have to respond to everybody that I need to stay up late and work on emails or that I need to. Flex my own boundaries and be available in the evenings and do all of the like. Those are things I have to evaluate. Even as I think about this latest academy group that's starting in April, I really had to think about being able to offer an evening time because evenings, my evenings are very full with the life that I have, and usually by the evening time.
My brain is very tired. I'm not on my A game, right? I'm tired. By the end of the day, my energy and my creative thinking power, my coaching power is more in the morning. That's really when I'm on my A game, and but I wanted to be able to offer an evening time, and so I had to be very intentional.
And not go down a path of being a martyr [00:28:00] and saying, but I have to help all these widows and they all want an evening time and I should do that, right? People who can only come in the evenings, they should have the opportunity to do that. I could have gone down that path and it was a path that I thought about considerably, but instead.
I came up with an alternative option that will still allow people to come in the evenings, but doesn't demand so much of my own time and energy and effort in the evenings. It comes through relying on one of my certified coaches who I've worked with for a few years and who will do a phenomenal job and I can attend some of the meetings and I can still be involved, but it doesn't have to require me flexing on my own boundaries.
Me sacrificing. My own energy and what I know helps me to come show up for you and for other people. In the right mindset, in the right heart set, in the way of being able to give back, I am able to come up with a solution that solves for [00:29:00] both. So even outside of grief, when you think about am I doing things to stay busy?
Am I doing things for other people? Is it too much? Do I have the right balance? My question to you is more of how is your energy. Like how is your energy? Are there ways that you are still doing things that fill your cup back up?
Does it come from a place of, I feel inspired and I wanna do this, and I get to do this and I get to get it done? Or does it come from a place of discipline and pushing and I have to do this and there is no other option. I just need to toughen up. That I think helps answer the question. Maybe even a little bit better than, am I doing grief right or wrong?
I hope that this was helpful to you. If you are watching or listening to this fairly real time, I do have a live webinar coming up on February 17th on the Four Seasons of Grief. So if you wanna learn more about the Four Seasons. There's [00:30:00] actually a quiz that you can go [email protected].
It's free to see what season of grief you're in and the things that I would recommend that you focus on. And if you wanna hang out with me live and ask questions live, then I would love to see you on February 17th, and you can go to brave widow.com/live LIVE to register for that free. Webinar and we're gonna do a deeper dive into the Four Seasons and one next step, just one clear next step that you could focus on based on which season you're in.
I would love to see you there. You can learn [email protected].
before we wrap up. If you're listening and wondering. Am I doing grief right? Am I stuck or am I actually moving forward? I made something just for you. I created a free quiz called The Four Seasons of Grief.
Speaker: In just a few minutes, you'll find out which season of grief you're in right now, and the one next step you can take today to move forward . Just go to brave [00:31:00] widow.com/quiz. Go take the quiz, find your season, and take your next step today.
