5 Fundamentals for Overwhelming Grief
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[00:00:00] What do you do when grief is overwhelming and loss after loss after loss just keeps piling up? Hi, my name is Emily. I was widowed in 2021, became a certified life and grief coach, and now it is my mission to help widows heal their heart and build a life they love again. I'm gonna share with you the five fundamentals that I teach my clients in what we call the Chaos to Calm series, okay? These are the five fundamental building blocks that I go to, that I encourage and coach my clients to go back to every time life feels really overwhelming.
So the Chaos to Calm blueprint is all about looking at what are all of the unnecessary things that we can strip away. How do we boil all of our priorities and to-dos down to the basic, most fundamental things? When grief feels really overwhelming, I [00:01:00] think about rearranging our life temporarily, just like we would if we had a broken leg, if we had just had a major surgery, if we'd just given birth to a child.
Like, going through a really big physical injury or illness or experience, in those cases, we naturally rearrange our lives. We naturally lower the expectations we have for ourselves because we know we're functioning in a limited capacity. And when we're going through something really emotionally hard, like grief, we don't always give ourselves the same grace.
But I would think about it very much the same. So the first building block would Routine. Looking at what's on your calendar. Taking away everything that's not necessary, that's not helping you just focus on only what has to be done, on things that are draining you of energy instead [00:02:00] of filling your cup back up, and taking all of the to-dos, the tasks, the things, the big rocks, the things that have to get done, putting those on your calendar, but leaving space for time for you to rest, for you to recharge, for you to get your feet back underneath you
The second building block in chaos to calm is what I call self-care. Now, don't roll your eyes at the word self-care. Sometimes I get a little bit of that reaction. But self-care, what I mean by that, is really taking care of yourself. Prioritizing sleep, prioritizing nutrition, eating meals that are going to, help boost your immune system, that are going to keep you nourished, that are gonna be fulfilling to you, making sure that you're eating enough, making sure that you're getting some physical movement in.
And your physical movement, the best that you might be able to do is to sit out in the sun for 15 minutes or [00:03:00] to walk around your house and go back inside, and that's totally fine. But in self-care, we really wanna focus on taking care and prioritizing my own physical needs and health.
Number three is help. So help is all about asking for help, accepting help, reaching out for help, and being willing to allow other people to help you. A lot of times people are willing to help, they're willing to do things, 'cause it makes them feel good about helping you, but it can be hard for us to accept that.
So we want to prioritize allowing people to help us Number four is emotional healing. And when grief is overwhelming, we need the ability to process, to unpack what is happening, to talk about how lonely, and hard, and heavy, and painful that experience is.
So you need a community of people that you can talk [00:04:00] to. And in the beginning of grief, that community might be one or two people, and that's okay. We just wanna keep you totally out of isolation. We wanna keep you from having zero people that you can connect to and talk to. And even in Brave Widow, this is one of the reasons why we have a totally free community where anyone can come in and share with other people what's happening, what's going on.
Many of our members have talked on the phone, or met up in person, or become friends in real life, and that's been such a beautiful experience because humans need connection. We need emotional healing. Number five is spiritual connection, and this one sometimes is really hard for people because maybe they feel like there's a gap between them and God.
Maybe they're angry. Maybe they're frustrated. Maybe they're confused. Maybe they feel like God isn't trustworthy anymore. And so the point [00:05:00] of spiritual connection isn't to pretend that everything's fine. But it's about, our goal is closeness with God, bringing our pain, bringing our frustration, our confusion, our hurt, our anger, bringing all of that to Him, and reconciling to have closeness and connection through a very painful and confusing season of life. So again, those five fundamentals are looking at your routine and focusing only on what has to be done, self-care, taking care of yourself physically, help, asking for and accepting help, four is emotional healing, processing what's happening, and number five is spiritual connection.
Those are the fundamental tools that I recommend to all of my clients when grief just won't let up.
