Grief is Layered, Not Linear

It was a couple years after I did the training to help people with grief, that my education really paid off…

My daughter had her heart broken by her high school boyfriend.

Because of her age, at the time, it would have been common for me or anyone else to say to her things like:

• There are plenty of fish in the sea.

• You deserve better.

• You are young, you’ll be alright.

And other iterations of the same vein.

Is it true that there are plenty of fish in the sea? Sure.

Did she deserve better? Sure.

Was she young? Yes.

Would she be alright? Sure, but in the moment that may sound ludicrous to her.

just because those comments are relatively accurate, that doesn’t mean they are helpful.

Trying to redirect someone’s focus away from the loss and pain they are experiencing may seem like the nice thing to do for them. However, it can interrupt their emotional loop by dismissing how they are feeling about what has happened in the present, which doesn’t support them.

What I did do is listen to her, without adding my two cents (not easy at all btw), while she negotiated all of her feelings. And eventually, when she was ready, I offered to share a couple practical tools that I use, in my work, to help her.

Just because high schoolers don’t have a mortgage or kids to contend with, doesn’t mean it isn’t emotionally complicated.

Because when patterns end or significantly change…grief is a normal human response, no matter how old you are.

When adults have an intertwined life and the relationship ends, there are potentially more veins of grief involved, compared to a high schooler.

• The circumstances resulting in the breakup,

• End of familial or friend relationships, because of the split,

• Financial impact and changes,

• Legalities of ending a relationship,

• Moving,

• Having to sell property,

• Loss of normalcy,

• Loss of trust,

• Loss of emotional safety,

• Loss of the hopes, dreams, goals of what your future looked like together,

• Et al.

Break ups are destabilizing and can feel like a compounded weight has descended upon you.

And as an adult, there may be previous relationships that have changed or ended, that resurface, while in the midst of the present heart break…which can feel like being hit by a landslide.

Grief can and usually does, have a lot of parts to it.

If it were linear, we all could track what stage we were on or tick a box on a checklist. Then someone would come up with a ‘hack’, to skip over a few steps to get you to the finish line faster.

But that isn’t the case.

Sometimes emotions from events and experiences in your past linger and remain unseen, unfelt and unresolved. Or perhaps they were held onto for protection, from future hurt.

Then a seemingly unrelated event brings them to the surface, adding to the emotional weight, which can make finding your footing to move forward challenging.

So if you’re recognizing how grief has and is affecting you; and want to reconnect the parts of you and your life that grief has put on hold, just know that it doesn’t have to be a DIY project, let’s see what happens when you have a partner in the process.

An Incomplete List of Grief

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July 30, 2024

When you think of grief, most likely death is first and foremost in your mind. It is the most obvious and definitive loss experience equated to grief. Divorce may be the other life event that you think of. Yet, there are a multitude of other experiences that get overlooked as grief and loss events.