BW 213
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Speaker: If you have those moments where you thought grief was getting better, you thought things were improving, and then a wave of grief just hits you, and you feel like you've gone back to day one, feel like you're going backwards, and feel really confused, then today's episode is for you. Welcome to episode 213 of The Brave Widow Show.
I wanna share something with you that I've not offered in a long time. I've been focused a lot this year on building out our group programs, whether it's academy, it was standing up foundations for the first time. Even in our free community, I teach new content every single week, every Monday whenever I am teaching.
And so I've really been focused on the group programs, and it's something that I absolutely love doing. And I really have not focused on one-on-one coaching or invested a lot of time in [00:01:00] coaching people one-on-one because I really wanted to get those programs going. But today, I had a really powerful conversation with my one-on-one coach, and 10 minutes before the call, I almost canceled.
I almost did not go to the coaching call, but I'm glad that I attended, and I'm glad that we had time peer coaching each other because the conversation that we had allowed me to look at the next few months to the end of the year with a completely different lens. I was moving in one direction, and after one conversation, I felt like I was able to view the rest of this year in a completely different mindset.
It was really powerful, a powerful conversation, and it just reminded me of how valuable and powerful [00:02:00] one-on-one coaching is. And so I'm only opening up five private one-on-one coaching spots for anyone who wants to spend some time one-on-one between now and the end of the year intentionally taking steps forward.
This is not for most people, okay? One-on-one coaching is the most time intensive, the highest level of support. It's the most intense work that I provide to my clients. And I'm only able to effectively deliver that level of service to a small number of people. So this is really for widows or widowers who are that 1% group of people who know, " I could get so much accomplished, I could take so many steps forward if I was working one-on-one with Emily.
If she was in my corner every week, I had an entire hour to myself. I had [00:03:00] entire focus and support in between those weekly calls that I could make so much progress in that amount of time," this opportunity is going to be for you. I'm only going to be accepting applications for one-on-one coaching between now and October 1st, which I know by the time you hear this and see this is not gonna be a long amount of time.
But I wanted to make sure that you had the opportunity if you hear about this. I'm only opening five spots for one-on-one clients, and the cost for this one-on-one container is 5K if you hear this and you already know right away, "This is me. This is exactly what I want. This is exactly what I've been looking for," then the link to schedule a call with me will be in the show notes of wherever you're watching or listening to this, and I would love to help support and guide you.
I've shared many, many times that one-on-one coaching for me has helped me propel forward [00:04:00] the fastest. It's helped provide me the most clarity, the most confidence, the most exciting times of growth not only for myself as a person, but also in my business. And so I'm excited to be able to do this for a limited amount of time with a very limited number of people.
Again, it's not for everyone. We have our free community, which is available to everyone free forever. If you're not in there, what are you doing? Go get in the free community. I teach new things every week. We have our foundations program, which is really for widows who are overwhelmed with grief. They're trying to get their feet underneath them.
They are focused on healing their heart, on coming out of the chaos and the overwhelm. Foundations is the perfect container for that. And then we also have academy for widows and widowers who are ready to rebuild. They're ready to add more into their life, to start building a life [00:05:00] that they can actually enjoy and love again.
Our next group of academy starts in January. So those are the right spaces depending on where you are in your grief journey. And the one-on-one coaching is really for a very select amount of people who already know the power of coaching, who are excited about it, who want the one-on-one feedback and support.
And if that's you, I've got you. If you schedule some time with me between now and the 1st of October, we will lay out where you are, where you want to be. Or if you're not sure, I can help you define what that could look like, and then we will create a roadmap over this course of time together. Just schedule a call with me in the link in the show notes, and I would love to see if it would be a great fit for where you are and for where you wanna be.
All right. Now, let's dive into today's topic. One of the things that was really hard and confusing, not only for me, but for many clients, is [00:06:00] these moments in time where we feel like we're doing better, we're functioning, we haven't cried in a while, we're starting to make plans. Maybe we're even starting to enjoy parts of our life again. But then a grief wave hits, and all of a sudden, this overwhelm of sorrow or sadness or hurt and pain, that strong sensation rises up, and it feels almost like it felt when we initially lost our person.
We start telling ourselves a story that, "Oh, my gosh, I'm not doing as good as I thought. I feel like I'm going backwards. I feel like I'm going to, to square one, like I'm starting all over. Like, what am I doing wrong? Am I doing something wrong? Am I trying to do things too quickly? Am I not doing grief right?"
Like, what is it? We get confused and wonder if our progress was fake, or maybe there's something wrong with us, or if it's even [00:07:00] actually possible to feel better in the future. Today, what I wanna share with you and talk about today is when those grief waves hit us with a full force, what does it mean?
What does it not mean? And what can we do when that happens to get through those grief waves? All right. First of all, let's just talk about this myth of linear healing. Like, this myth and almost this concept we have of when we experience grief, we start in a very painful place and that over time we continue to heal.
We continue to get better. Like, somehow grief is like a, a broken bone, and it just needs to be healed. It needs to be set. Then it can heal, and we go back to normal of how it's supposed to be, and over time, it gets a little better, a little better. But grief actually can come in waves, [00:08:00] and the pain of grief can be like big waves, big ups and downs.
And there might be a big wave and then calm waters for a while, and then another big wave comes, and then it's calm, and then it's a small wave, and we're like, "Oh, we're getting better at this," and then another big wave. And it just feels really confusing. Grief also can come in different seasons one of the things that I encourage my clients to do when they're hit with a really big grief wave is to evaluate what might be triggering this? And you might have moments in time that you expect grief to be hard. Maybe it was your person's birthday. Maybe it's a holiday. Maybe it's the date they went into the hospital or the date that ultimately they died.
And so we know there are these milestones or these memories or these days that stick out that we can expect. We know that's gonna be difficult. It could be a season. For me, when [00:09:00] Nathan and I were so sick for that period of time, it was July. It was in the heat of summer. And in where we lived at the time, we had a pool that we could hear from our bedroom when we had the fountains running in the pool.
I could just hear, like, the water being sprayed. And I didn't really think much about it until the next year when I turned the pool fountains on for the first time and I walked back into my room from outside, and all of a sudden I just felt all of this sadness just flood my body, like literally like a wave that washed over me.
And I was like, "What is wrong? Why all of a sudden do I just feel so sad?" Like, I feel like I, I felt back then, what is it? And it really took me a while to put the pieces together that the last time we were together in person, that he was in the house, we had spent a couple weeks [00:10:00] bedridden, literally bedridden while listening to the fountains in the pool running.
And so even though consciously I didn't put the puzzle, the pieces of that puzzle together, my body remembered that. My brain remembered that. And it took me a while consciously to figure out exactly what was going on. So maybe for you it could be a season where grief was hard. Maybe the fall time is a time that you guys did things together, or that they became ill, or that ultimately they died, and so every fall just brings up those subconscious reminders and memories of what was happening during that time a year or two or three before.
It could also be new realizations that can trigger some of these grief waves. So a realization might be something like, " Oh, he would have loved to do this." And then it might be like, "Oh, maybe not." You know? Maybe he wouldn't have [00:11:00] wanted to travel with me and I'm actually enjoying it. Well, that's weird. You know?
Maybe it's a realization that you're doing something new for the first time that you enjoy and it's not something you ever would have tried or maybe even enjoyed with your person that was still here. And that can bring on some guilt. Like, am I a bad person for being able to enjoy something, but also recognizing that never would have happened if they were here, and how, how am I supposed to reconcile all of this together?
What does that look like? So instead of thinking of grief l- line- linearly, is that a word? In a linear way, thinking of grief like a stairca- case where each step we get better better, I like to think of, of grief as waves. Grief of waves. And as we are learning to ride the waves, we're learning how to stand on our feet again.
I love the analogy of [00:12:00] surfing. I've never actually done surfing or been very good at trying to ride a, any kind of paddleboard or surfing board, but I imagine that it would be very much the same. Like, if you had never gone surfing and you're trying... You're out in the ocean, you know, those waves can really be tumultuous, and hard, and can just feel really overwhelming and scary, and you can get disoriented.
And when you're in some big waves, and especially if you're not used to being in the ocean, you're not used to paddling around with a surfboard, uh, it's really quite disorienting and overwhelming. And so I think about this like learning how to, what to do and how to handle these grief waves is probably very similar to learning how to surf.
So now all of a sudden you've got this surfboard, you're out in the ocean, a really big wave comes, and maybe it just completely overwhelms you and pushes you below the water. And you get turned around, and you're just glad you're, you've got the [00:13:00] strap that goes from your ankle to the board, 'cause otherwise you would have totally lost that.
Maybe you gulped in some salty water, and you're coughing, and it's just... You come up, and you're just trying to breathe, and you're just trying to catch your breath. That can be what grief feels like early on. Like, oh, I just got totally knocked out by this wave of grief, and all I can do is just breathe.
Just breathe. Just breathe.
And then as we start to process our grief, as we learn to start practicing some tools, we learn about the surfboard, we learn how to utilize the surfboard. Maybe we're starting to hang onto it with our arms. We start to see maybe sometimes we can even anticipate a grief wave is coming. Like, we know, oh, here's coming this big wave, right?
I'm holding on my surfboard, and I'm just gonna brace for the wave. And so when the wave comes, we, we learn some small things that we can do to try to ride over the wave, or maybe we dive underneath the wave, or, [00:14:00] uh, we'll just, like, brace ourselves waiting for it to crash down. Like, we're just learning how to handle those waves, and that starts to become a little bit better than just being shoved down under the water and getting completely lost, right?
We just brace ourselves. It comes, it goes, and we're okay. But then we continue to process more, and we continue to learn. Okay, how now do I want to handle these waves of grief? What are the things I can do that are helpful for me? So maybe now I'm getting up on the surfboard on my hands and my knees.
Maybe I'm trying to start to stand on the surfboard again, and my legs are real shaky, and I don't have good balance, and it doesn't take much of a grief wave to just knock me back down into the water. But I'm okay. I'm not panicking. I know how to get back up to the top of the water, how to get back up to my surfboard, and it might take a while until this becomes somewhat of a routine [00:15:00] But I practice and I get better and I get better.
And it's not that the waves just go away. Maybe they don't feel as big and strong and powerful as they did in the beginning, but also you're learning how to navigate the waves. You're learning what these waves are. You are thinking about them differently than you've thought about them in the past, and you're learning some skills and tools to start to navigating them so that instead of being take- wiped out, instead of getting wiped out and taken out all the time by the waves, you're learning how to like start riding the waves.
You're learning how to allow the waves to move you in a direction, how to take that grief and the energy of that wave and move it in another direction so that it isn't I'm being overwhelmed and feel like I'm drowning in my grief, but I'm allowing myself to feel the pain, to feel that I miss my [00:16:00] person, and here's what I'm going to do with that.
I'm going to feel gratitude. I'm going to feel love. I'm going to be so grateful that we had the time together that we did. I'm going to help other people who are struggling with this. I'm going to do something with the energy that comes from that wave other than feeling like there's nothing I can do and I, it has nowhere to go.
I just get hit with the grief and it has nowhere to go. Now I know how to like channel that, that energy. And it doesn't mean that it becomes easy overnight or that there are no more waves. There's just no more waves, no more memories. Of course you still are always gonna remember your person and you're going to have times where you miss them or you think about them, but you also know that it's okay to experience those waves, how to navigate them, what feels helpful and supportive to you, and what can you do with the energy of [00:17:00] all those big emotions that come up So when we have a moment in time, maybe we have a week that's a really good week, I just wanna invite you to recognize that just because you're having a good week, just because you're having a good month, or you've had a period of time where grief wasn't hard, it doesn't mean that grief is gone.
And just because you've had a really painful week or a painful month, it doesn't erase all the good weeks. It doesn't erase all the good times. A hard day is just an event A hard moment is a hard moment, but it's not a prediction of your future okay, so why does a grief wave make us feel like we're going backwards or going back to day one? So as we think about whatever event it was, whether it's a s- a season, whether it's a realization of like, oh, I'm rebuilding this new life without my person. Whatever it is, [00:18:00] the, the trigger the wave is happening now, but the grief and the pain that we feel may be connected to the whole story of what has been.
So maybe it's a song that you hear that was your song. Maybe it's a something you smell. Maybe it's something that you see, like you see another couple walking together. And it isn't just seeing or hearing or smelling or remembering or realizing one thing, it's going back through the whole story. Oh, I miss my person.
I don't know what's my future gonna look like. Oh, I feel so lonely. I don't even know who I am anymore. I d- I didn't plan for this. How is this possible? This is my life. Like, it brings up all these other thoughts, and our brains are really, really powerful at recreating events and emotions in our body. Our brains are not the best, they're [00:19:00] not great at differentiating what's imagined versus what's really happening to us right now.
That's why, like, if you go to a scary movie, you might actually get scared, you might jump, you might cover your eyes, your heart might start racing. You might start, like, sweating. Or if you're reading a story or you have a nightmare or a bad dream, your body is physically responding to something that isn't really happening to you, but your brain doesn't view it that way.
Your brain is sending signals to your body the same way that it would if that was really happening to you. So when you remember, like, oh, hearing the, the fountains in the pool, I remember... My, remember my brain and my body took me back in time to that moment, and all the grief and the, the pain and [00:20:00] the sadness and the uncertainty and all that came back to memory.
And then I also started having all these other thoughts like, "Oh, all these bad things happened when the fountains were on." My brains made that association. When I hear the fountains outside, that means something bad is, is happening or it's going to happen, and this is gonna be the worst time of your life and, and now I don't know who I am and what I'm trying to do and why do I feel bad?
Does that mean that I'm going backwards? And all of those thoughts we ruminate on generate chemicals down into our body, and our body pushes up all the negative emotions And so this wave of grief isn't that there's something wrong with you. Your brain's functioning the way it was designed to function.
It's asso- it's still connecting, still following that neural pathway connecting those associations the way it always did. That's why it might feel wrong if you're at the Christmas family [00:21:00] get-together and you keep looking for your person that's not there. Because maybe you've had 30 years of sitting around the table at Christmas time means my person is right there with me.
That's been the association for 30 years. And now all of a sudden we're at the Christmas family get-together and my person is here. N- wait, no they're not. This is totally disrupted. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Why aren't they here? Where are they at? And logically we can know, well, they're, they're not here and they're not coming back.
But intuitively we've made those associations so many times that it feels wrong for that to not be the case, for that person to no longer be there. And so it's very, it's shocking to our mind, our body, our nervous system. And we have that, that feeling of dread and something is wrong and, and where are they?
And it's like, oh yeah, this event happened and we're gonna bring up all this [00:22:00] other emotion of, oh, they should be here and, and they're not here and they're never gonna be here, and it's never gonna be the same. And the cycle just keeps going. And so that's why it can feel like the reaction that we have is a little disproportionate to the one thing.
Like maybe it's just a song that you heard or something that you smell and you're like, "Oh my goodness, I about just got taken out by that huge grief wave over a song. It's just a song." It's not just a song. The song took you back in time, and by going back in time your brain's pulling forward what you were seeing, what you were smelling, what you're remembering, you being in the moment, and all the other things that have happened.
You're pulling all of that forward. And so of course, of course, it feels really big to something that you might want to dismiss as being small. You're not only grieving what happened during that moment, you're [00:23:00] also feeling the loss that's attached to what happened in that moment so here's what the wave does not mean. It doesn't mean that you're failing. It doesn't mean that you've started over, you're back at the beginning. It doesn't mean that you can't build a meaningful future. It doesn't mean that you loved your person less because you had a good day. It doesn't mean you're weak because you're hurting again progress is not never hurting again. Progress is knowing what to do when the hurt returns. It's learning how to ride the wave you can be getting better and still get blindsided. You can be learning how to surf, learning how to ride the wave, and still get knocked out by a tsunami wave that you didn't even see coming.
It can still happen so what can we do when the grief wave comes and it hits hard, and maybe we feel like it took us [00:24:00] out or it's almost taking us out? How do we learn to ride the wave? What are the things that we can do when that happens? So the first thing is to just acknowledge it, just to name it. Like, "Ugh, I'm just having a real grief-y day," or, "This is a hard day," or like, "Wow, I, I wasn't expecting this, but man, it's just really getting to me today."
Naming it, saying it, sharing it with people you can trust, just by doing that takes a little bit of the sting out of what's actually happening. In the emotional intelligence world, that's where you might hear people say you name it to tame it. So first we just wanna acknowledge, like, this is a grief wave, and when your mind wants to start telling you, like, "Oh no, we got hit by the grief wave.
We're going all the way back," we're gonna say, "No, I'm not going all the way back. This is just a big grief wave. This is just... It's just [00:25:00] hard." Like, wow, look at all the memory. Look at all the things this is bringing up. Of course it would be hard. It'd be hard for anybody. Doesn't mean that I'm going backwards.
It just means, like man, I got hit with a really big wave of grief.
When we get hit with that wave of grief, I always fall back to what we teach in foundations and in the academy around ca- in our chaos to calm blueprint, the fundamentals. We lower the expectations we have for ourselves. We give ourselves so much grace, and we focus on the five fundamentals that we teach in that section.
Things like emotional healing and processing, our spiritual connection, taking care of ourselves mentally, physically, nutritionally focusing just on the things that we need to do while that wave has hit us, knowing that once this wave passes, once this part of this difficult process [00:26:00] passes, that we will stand on that foundation that we have built and we'll continue to take our steps forward. It's a brief pause in time. It's not something that's significantly setting us back and we're having to re-walk some of the steps that we've already walked.
It's just a pause, a detour, a wave where we need to just, like, "Whew, gotta catch my breath. I'm gonna wait a few minutes before I stand back up on that surfboard. I just need a few minutes." And maybe a few minutes means a few days, a week, a few weeks. Maybe life's hitting you with lots of waves in, in different areas, and that's okay.
You haven't forgotten how to ride the wave. You haven't forgotten all the skills that you learned to ride the wave out
We also want to reach out for support. So inside Brave Widow, we have different private groups based on which program or which part that you participate in [00:27:00] where you can just message the group and say, "Hey, guys, I'm just having a really hard day. Here's what happened. Here's what I'm struggling with.
These are the thing that's coming to mind. Can you just pray for me?" And every time someone posts that, by the time I see it, like five or six people have already commented, "I'm praying for you right now. I'm so sorry this is a hard day. We are here for you." They're not trying to fix it. They're not trying to give each other advice.
They're not trying to say, "Well, it's been four years. You should be over this by now." Like, it is true we are in this with you support. And people are quick. They're quick to respond. I check Telegram multiple times a day, and every time I check it, people have already responded. It's amazing. It's amazing.
But if, even if you're not in Brave Widow, you need your support, your tribe, your group You need the people that you can reach out to when it's hard and you can say, "This is really hard," and just know that you're not having to be in that alone [00:28:00] you also don't need to solve for your future while you're in the middle of a wave. And this can be really challenging when we've already started to get clarity about what we want for the future or we feel like we are taking those little steps forward or we have made progress in some area. When we're struggling with the wave and we're trying to get back up on the surfboard, sometimes it's challenging to balance that with also feeling like we haven't made progress with thinking about the future and figuring it out and knowing how it's gonna turn out and knowing what it's gonna look like and how is this gonna work out.
And we, while we're experiencing the grief wave we pause, we catch our breath, we get our feet back up underneath us. And there's no rush, there's no pressure, there's no you need to do this within 24 hours. It's like let yourself rest and catch your breath. Let your legs stop shaking. Allow yourself to be at peace with, "Okay, I'm ready to [00:29:00] stand up on the surfboard again," and we're gonna keep taking those steps forward so what does it mean when we say things like, "My grief is getting better. I'm getting better. I'm doing better"? When we use the analogy of surfing, I don't know why, it's just one I love to use, here's how I think about quote unquote getting better, is redefining what does healing mean. Well, we've already said that healing doesn't mean grief doesn't happen, the waves don't come.
So maybe we redefine healing in that we can recover from the grief wave faster. We get more skilled at riding out the wave. When a grief wave knocks us down, the time it takes us to go from being knocked down to being ready and at peace with getting back on the surfboard, that time shortens. You start to understand what is triggering you.
You start being able to [00:30:00] quickly identify, oh, it's because it's this time of year. Oh, it's because this is coming up. Oh, it's because we had this conversation, or, oh, I'm going on this amazing trip and I just realized that I don't get to share this with my person. Like that, that is what's causing this grief wave to come up.
You stop treating pain as proof that you're broken. You start asking for help sooner. You start reaching out and connecting with your community sooner. You start carrying grief and gratitude or grief and hope at the same time at the same time. We don't have gratitude that cancels out the grief. We don't have hope that just makes the grief go away.
We carry them both at the same time
The goal isn't to become the person that you were before the loss happened. The goal is to become the person who can carry what happened and can still choose what comes next so what happened the last time grief hit you [00:31:00] unexpectedly? What are the stories you told yourself that it meant? What would change if you treated it as a wave instead of a complete setback
Who could you contact before the next wave?
If you would like support and guidance in learning how to navigate these grief waves, in learning the skills and the tools, and having the space to process so that you can learn how to ride the waves, you can become better at knowing what supports you when those waves happen, how you might be able to ride them, how they- you might be able to recover faster when it feels like grief has just knocked you down.
Having a group of people who pray for you, who check on you, who celebrate you, who sit in the struggle with you when it feels like grief is really overwhelming. If that's appealing to you, then I would love for you to [00:32:00] join us inside of Brave Widow. And you can ex- start experiencing this even in our free community.
To join that, you just go to bravewidow.com/free, and that's where I always recommend people just start. Just get in the room. Get around other people who are walking the same journey with you. Connect with other real widows and widowers who are in the room with you. See what kind of people they're like.
They're real people. And guess what? They also meet up together in person in different locations. I just, I have to give a special shout-out to Gail, one of our Brave Widows. I got to meet her in person in San Antonio, and that was ama- like, just being able to see each other and meet up with each other in person, it's amazing.
Like, who knows who's in there in your area? We have people from different countries that are part of Brave Widow. That's amazing. I would love to be able to support you and to help connect you with other people in [00:33:00] our community or in one of our programs, and I just always recommend you start bravewidow.com/free, get a feel for the vibe, get a feel for the people who are in the room.
And if that is your room and you're ready for more support, we have programs that meet you where you are and help take you where you wanna be. A final reminder, I have five spots for one-on-one coaching, and that last opportunity for that is going to be October 1st. So- if you're interested, if you're like, "I already know this is exactly what I want," then this is for you.
I'll put the link in the show notes, and we'll have a call. I'll learn more about you, what you wanna work on, what direction you wanna move, and I will help propel you forward
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 [00:34:00] 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
