When life drop kicks you out of nowhere, like when someone we love dies, or something happens that shakes your sense of safety so deeply, it makes sense that trusting life again might feel like an impossible ask. It can be hard to plan for a future when you’ve now seen just how fast and wholly the future you were sure would unfold can be taken away. It can be hard to trust that joy or ease will come back, that you’ll find yourself in this somewhere, at some point.

As I write this, I’m on the island of Maui. Since my dad died I’ve been coming here with family once a year as this was one his favorite places on earth and a special place to come together and feel his presence.

And this week, my almost four year old officially learned how to swim on his own without floaties. He looked at me a few days ago while we were in the pool and said, “Mama, I want to take off my floaties. I want to swim by myself.” This would be a very proud mom moment all on it’s own, but this moment was also something else for me entirely - a completion of a difficult circle that started exactly two years ago, here in Maui.

Two years ago, we were at a beach I’d never been to before. We had been playing in the shallow surf all day, floaties on, calm waters, beautiful weather. And then it all went horribly wrong. I won’t get into the specifics, but I was suddenly pulled away from the shore and underwater by a rip current with my then almost two year old in my arms.

We’re okay. But there was a long moment when I was sure that that would not be the outcome. I sustained a shoulder injury that I ignored and avoided for too long, but the emotional and mental injury was the long difficult road I would need to begin walking very soon after.

That long road included EMDR therapy with my own therapist, but a majority of it has been learning to trust the water - mostly around my son - again. To anyone who knows me, or if you’ve been following along on socials for any period of time, you know that the ocean is my home.

Trust can be a slippery thing because - in my experience - the feeling of trust comes after taking the risk in order to gather the evidence that allows you the feeling of it.

I grew up in the water and I’m a strong and confident swimmer. So the experience afterwards of standing by myself near the shore and feeling my insides roll with slight nausea at even the sight of seeing waves felt … surreal. And the panic that surged in my chest when he was anywhere near water that wasn’t a bathtub (but also, sometimes a bathtub) was so foreign. I almost felt embarrassed at times by my reactions, even though I knew exactly where they were coming from. My body was responding appropriately to something that had been a threat.

My deepest fear, however, was that this experience had been equally as traumatizing for him. That his little body would remember, and would hold onto it. That he would forever fear and distrust the water. And I was afraid that I could control none of it.

After that trip, I did sense an immediate and new hesitation from him around the water. And although it broke my heart to witness, I knew his trust had to be earned. So I started gently offering experiences next to water. Again and again I would take him to the ocean or the pool and see his trepidation and listen to his ‘no’ when it came. It didn’t matter how long we were there without going in, or if he dipped one single toe, I just wanted to give his system - both of our systems - the slow collection of evidence that water can also be safe. That nothing bad happened this time.

It was exactly one year after that event, back in Maui again, when my son and I slowly walked into the bay holding hands as he looked up at me and said, ‘I’m not afraid anymore, mama!’ We gently bobbed and floated together, my body still bracing and hyper-vigilant.

And this week, exactly two years after that day, I’m watching him jump into the water, hold his breath and dive under the surface on his own for shells and coral and rocks 487 times in a row. Now he swims, and I brace less.

*And I want to pause here for a moment on something really important to acknowledge. I know that this is a story where the fear resolved - there was one isolated incident that did not end in the worst. Grief is not one isolated event, and it’s not something to ‘get over’. If you’re here, you’ve likely lived a story where nothing resolved that way. There’s no “whew, that was scary and now it’s over”. The part I want to emphasize is not the outcome, it’s the slow road it often takes for our systems to re-orient to safety in the ‘now’, however now looks.

Trust after loss, or trauma, or anything that has shaken you can take time.

Our systems need patience, understanding, and compassion. Water was a tangible thing in this particular experience that I could point at and say ‘I need to learn to trust you again’. But this applies to so much of grief and living after loss as well. I certainly experienced that after my person died, too.

Because it can feel impossible to reimagine. To picture a life where there’s access to ease or joy or contentment when the one where you had all of those things, is gone. And I get that, deeply. And it’s not wrong. It can simply be neutral information about what our systems need.

Maybe we do need more specialized support, or maybe we need permission to not feel any differently right now. Maybe we need to intentionally collect more evidence that safety can still exist, one toe dip into the water at a time. One moment of connection at a time.

In my personal and professional experience, so much of what living with devastating loss reinforces is this belief that we have to do it quietly, and mostly on our own. Most of us do have the evidence that keeping the tender parts hidden keeps some people closer or makes people more comfortable.

And so, often what we need is the evidence against this narrative. And that’s found somewhere that’s often hard to find for grievers - spaces where we feel deeply connected to others who we don’t have to wear the grief mask with. Spaces where our story is not too much and whatever tender parts we want to share, are welcomed and witnessed. Places where we can be known as this version of ourselves without the pressure to go back to the old version that others expect.

What we need is that space. Because the story or belief that our grief is too much or too intense or taking too long etc. didn’t form in our own heads. It comes from a relational dynamic. And what’s wounded or formed in relationship is also healed within relationship. And while friendship or a therapist is often needed and so helpful, those spaces aren’t always the same as community. With friends, there’s often a history of so much care there, meaning there’s often a layer of managing each other’s comfort coming from that place of care. And with a therapist, our systems are often aware of the professional agreement living alongside the support.

But when we’re with other grievers, in a container built for the safe exploration of what our culture often encourages us to tuck away and make smaller, there’s nothing we need to manage. We can simply be with what’s here. We get to experience the continuous message of, “It’s okay, this belongs, let’s walk this together.”

This is the foundation and genesis for the Grief Portal group. We blend IFS parts work, education, creative expression, and somatic techniques. It’s a small, intimate group of us who will meet for 9 weeks, and we come together on September 15th.

Join us here to learn more and save your spot in this small group for grievers.

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Reconstructing your worldview and rebuilding your life after loss, to me, feels more like a stretch of backcountry nobody has been on before, like a terrain you didn’t even know existed with no known destination at the end of it. And you’ll walk relentless switchbacks and climb boulders and cut through fields of spiky foliage and take frustrating detours and step over rattlesnakes sunning themselves in the middle of the path.

And then you’ll come around a bend and see a surprising patch of shade, and finally find that creek you could hear a quarter mile before you could see it, and be surrounded by wildflowers you’ve never seen before, and reach a long flat open stretch where you can finally lay down to rest your tired limbs.

When you first get there you’ll naturally reach for what’s in your pockets, the things that worked and got you through everything else and that used to be enough… but then you’ll look down and realize you’re holding tools that are completely irrelevant in this place. Against this backdrop, your trusty go-tos are almost laughable. Your compass is scrambled and pointing in a direction you don’t even recognize and don’t know what’s there even if you knew how to move towards it.

Out here, you’re just choosing your own footing every few feet.

And you’re doing all of this while carrying a backpack that’s incredibly heavy and you can’t put down. And although the straps cut into your shoulders and you have to constantly readjust and shift the weight, you wouldn’t trade it for reprieve. You most definitely wish you weren’t here in this terrain, but now that you are, you will never consider setting this down and some days it’s the only reason you’re still moving.

Sometimes on the flat open stretches you can see out across the ridges, and there are other people out there. You can’t always tell exactly how far away they are, but some of them may be close enough that you can yell a hello to each other, and that echo might reach another who neither of you can see, but whom definitely thought was alone out here until they heard you. Some of these travelers might even walk alongside you for a mile or two before their trail bends off somewhere you can’t follow.

But even when they can’t stay right there alongside us, it’s important for us to know they’re out there. Some of them came through country we will never cross, and they might know things we don’t. They might have spent time learning how to read a night sky, or know how to find water when there isn’t any in sight. They might be able to tell us where to find safety when the light goes.

And there will be more boulders to climb, and more overgrown places we have to find our way through, or around. Because this is not a maintained trail, no one has been on this particular part before, remember? So there have to be more hard parts, but also more flat stretches, and more wildflowers and more exhaustion.

But none of it is where we stay.

All of it, is.

I always say that you are not supposed to know how to do this part. The living with your loss. The enormous grief and pain and devastation. It’s all new, and requires so much learning - of ourselves, of others, of this version of life. And while the backpack is ours to carry, I want anyone going through this to have the right things in their pockets to reach for. I created a really intentional and heart-led resource just for grievers, and it’s the thing I wish someone had handed me, back when I was there, too.

‘So, This is Grief’ is a five-part private podcast series and companion workbook that covers some of the most foundational pieces I speak with my clients about every single week. It’s simply me, in your ears, talking to you about what’s happening in your body, your relationships, to your capacity to get things done, and some ways to navigate all of it. You’ll also get three bonus episodes of grounding tools and visualizations to help anchor you in any moment.

You can go at your own pace and listen wherever and whenever you want to.

You can access your private podcast here.

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And when we consider devastating loss, a sense of connection to some or all of these things can feel incredibly difficult to access in the aftermath.

Because for many of us, what used to feel meaningful was meaningful in part or entirely because of our person’s part in it (in part one, I talk about the many tethers leading back to our person). They may have been the person you shared a life with, who encouraged you to keep going, who made you feel witnessed and seen and supported in all that you were doing. They may have been interwoven into all of it, often in ways we don’t fully understand until we’re faced with their absence.

Additionally, the future can also stop feeling safe to look towards at all. We can experience very little desire to look at anything ahead of us, especially in the early months and years after loss because none of it includes them. We can feel a deep sense of guilt that looking forward means leaving them behind, or feel like we’re being asked to believe that there is a next year and that all the things we count on now, will still be here then. Which, after loss, we’re often acutely aware of is not guaranteed. The future can feel fragile and complicated and sometimes daunting to consider.

And, asking ourselves what feels important to us now or considering what we want at all when we’ve been through something that has left a total sense of disconnection from our sense of self and our identity now can also feel incredibly complex because the version of us that only they could reflect back to us is now… gone. It makes sense that when we’re holding questions like, “Who am I now? What’s important to me?” we find ourselves shrugging in exhaustion saying, ‘I have no idea’.

Lastly, sometimes against the vast backdrop of loss, there’s nothing that feels big enough to truly care about. Not because we aren’t also grateful for other parts our lives or our people who are still here, but because nothing can compare to the overwhelming sense of wrongness. We are allowed to rebuild a life with good days in it and still have a hole in the middle that we never call “healed”. And, it can take time to want to reach for the good days.

All of this is to say, finding meaning in life after loss can feel difficult or have a lot of question marks surrounding it, and that makes perfect sense.

But before we explore how we can intentionally go towards it (when we’re ready), I want to take a moment here to talk about what finding meaning in life after devastating loss is not.

Firstly, finding meaning in this version of life does not mean that we’re moving on or letting go of our person. It means we are carrying our grief and bringing their memory with us into this part, too. Finding meaning does not negate what happened. It doesn’t diminish the pain or the ache of their absence and it doesn’t mean we wouldn’t choose to go back in a heartbeat if we could. It can simply mean we accept that we are still here. And that life will not be what it once was, but different, and still important.

Secondly, it also doesn’t mean we’re finding meaning WITHIN death. I want to be super clear this is not ‘everything happens for a reason’ territory. For myself, I think of what happened as random and senseless. I will never know why him, why us, why now. And that senselessness is angering and mind blowing. And I don’t need to make it anything other than that. Utterly senseless.

Recovering a sense of meaning in this version of life is often not rebuilding what it was back there in that version. And I want to acknowledge the pain in that. Of course what has changed and how it’s changed is all wrapped up in grief and what happened. Because now, finding meaning or a sense of purpose and connection can take intentionality that it didn’t before in the same way. It can take courage we wish we didn’t need, or take risks that require the energy we often don’t have. It can also, as all things in grief, take time and begin miniscule.

For one client I worked with, losing her partner catapulted her into a season of needing to take care of herself and prioritize her health and energy in ways she never had to before. With slow consistent ways of showing up for herself over time, she learned to fiercely advocate on her own behalf in ways she knew her late husband would be so proud of. For her, that was one way she lived in this version, bringing what he valued (her wellbeing) alongside her grief.

For another client, over time she reconnected to her creative writing. Like so many grievers, what she cared about and wanted to put energy towards after loss had changed. She began going back to workshops and writing groups and found opportunities to read her pieces to others. I remember her telling me that this curious and creative part of herself felt so good to meet again after so long.

There are many ways to begin exploring what feels meaningful and what brings a sense of connection now. Living here, now, does not have be separate from your grief. It can be braided together in ways that feel important and meaningful to you.

An important note about "finding" meaning after loss - we can absolutely explore and have intentionality and reflect, but feeling a sense of meaning and purpose often doesn't arrive as one final decision we come to. It doesn't have to be a grand choice that changes the way we move through the world or one single moment where everything clicks into place. It's not something to force or rush, so please take this as gentle invitation and not pressure to figure any of this out.

One thing about meaning is that sometimes it's most recognizable when we're looking back at it. A personal example - when I decided to start sharing the comedic skits about grief on Instagram (sounds so random, right? You can check out my most popular one here), it didn't feel "meaningful" in that moment. It just felt like something I enjoyed and came easily to me, and that was enough for me to keep going towards it. But over time, it has become deeply meaningful because upon reflection (looking back at it), humor was a main connection point between my dad and I. He was incredibly sarcastic and never serious, and it feels so meaningful to me now to weave that part of him and us into what I do. So, you can let it start with a nudge and just follow the curiosity.

Some ways to begin exploring a sense of connection after loss:

ONE// For those that lost someone they want to continue feeling connected to, a beautiful frame to anchor continued connection in this life can be: our connection to our person or people didn’t end, it has changed form. Reaching towards them now in small or big ways can be one way we find meaning and not only comfort. Our bond with them continues to be a living source of connection, and here are a few different thoughts that can help this take shape: How are they woven now into your internal landscape? This can look like times when you consult with them, so to speak. Imagining their response to you and carrying their perspective into your decisions or how you show up for yourself or the world. This might also be acting in ways that honor their values (like generosity or humor or adventure). You can create meaning now by weaving their values into your choices or your day-to-day, and in this way, their influence continues to guide and shape your life.

TWO// One of my favorite areas to explore when it comes to meaning and purpose that might resonate for some and not at all for others - what lit you up as a child/ young person? What are the things you used to love or do for the sake of just enjoyment or curiosity and not for any external reasons attached to more adult feelings of obligation, performance, or "shoulds"?

What I like about this reflection is two fold: our childhood interests can be (not always) points of connection to ourselves that predate the current life that feels completely dismantled. They often aren't things tied in our current career or routines or whatever we've been working towards or planning for.

And, it can be a way of making contact with a part of ourselves that was intrinsicely drawn to certain qualities we've forgotten about. For example- for a time as a little girl I wanted to be a singer and performer. When I connect back to that version of me, it's the expression and feeling and sound that I loved being submersed in. It doesn't necessarily mean I need to literally start singing more regularly or publicly (god, no), but I can think about the qualities my little pre-responsible heart was drawn towards. Where can I get expressive? Where can I alchemize emotion?

THREE// And where you find yourself now, in recent days or months, it can be helpful to consider what has pulled you in any direction, if anything at all. Where does your attention naturally go now? What gives you energy instead of depleting it? This could be as subtle as noticing a pull towards being outside, or noticing curiousity about places you haven't been to, or wanting to be near your safe people more. Or it might be bigger, like the nudge to shift what you do for work, or how you dress, how you move your body, or a reconsideration of what deserves your time and attention. And it's okay if there isn't a pull or a nudge or any clarity here. Just asking the question can be like getting up to walk across the room to crack the door open, and then going to sit back down. It's open just enough for something to come through when it’s time.

🎙️ If your life has been turned upside down by loss and you don’t know where to start but know you need support or guidance or tools, I created a really intentional and heart-led resource just for grievers. It’s the thing I wish someone handed me back when I was there, too, sure that something was deeply wrong with me for not being able to handle it ‘better’.

‘So, This is Grief’ is a five-part private podcast series and companion workbook to integrate and implement all the tools and insights we discuss. It’s just me, in your ears, talking to you about what’s happening in your body, your relationships, to your capacity to get things done, and some ways to navigate all of it.

You can go at your own pace and listen wherever and whenever you want to.

You can access your private podcast here.

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Everything seemed to hold deep, profound meaning. My relationships weren’t just relationships, they were soul contracts. A day was not just a day, it was a mini episode. There was an entire plot line within a day. Each day seemed to hold love and heartbreak and possibility and despair. I have always felt the little things intensely and thought about them deeply.

And although my hormones probably leveled out a bit as I got older, and I became someone with more responsibilities and less time to sit in deep reflection of every moment of every day, the seeking and feeling and reading-into has never waned.

But when my person was suffering from terminal illness and then died, I was catapulted into completely unknown territory, one where my meaning-making structure I’d known all my life had been decimated.

Nothing that previously felt big or important felt big or important anymore. I would hear other people talk about their daily stressors or circumstances they wish they could change, and feel like an alien who was supposed to be able to connect with what they were saying, but could not anymore.

Every day felt covered in this unmistakable film of ‘What’s the point?’ What’s the point of working if we can’t know if next week is our last? What’s the point of plans? What’s the point of doing anything we don’t want to do? What are we all doing?

I craved to know a bigger ‘why’. My system seemed to never stop searching for answers and the reason behind all of… this.

There was a new flat spaciousness I didn’t know what to do with. I was moving through another plane in this life, yet everything looked the same. Above me, the sky was now a constant neon pink and I noticed it everywhere I went, but I never pointed at it because I knew other people were still seeing blue.

I believe it was, in part, this sense of urgency to “make it matter” that led me to a series of life events in quick succession: I accepted the offer to work as a bereavement therapist for a nonprofit only four months into my own bereavement experience, I decided to become a mother, and I decided to take my licensing exam at six months pregnant, right after I started leasing an office space and giving myself no option but to pass this rigorous exam and open my private practice right before having a baby.

People commented on how much I was doing, and all I could think about was how much time I might not have to do it. I needed to make all of it count, as quickly as possible. But part of it was simpler than that, too. Moving was safer for me then. Because as long as I didn't slow down, I didn't have to fully arrive in what had happened. The motion was seeking, and it was also very protective.

What took me years to wrap my head around was the idea that my threads to what felt meaningful were tied largely to my person who died, and with his death they had been severed.

My safe person, my biggest cheerleader, one of my best friends on this earth, he was where so many of the threads met because he was an integral part of how I understood the world and myself and safety and love. When he died, everything fastened to him went slack at the same time and I was standing in an empty room with fistfuls of rope.

What I know now about that following year of non-stop ‘make it matter’ was that I was largely just trying to tie those threads to new things. In those early days, for me, that’s what got me up, it got me moving, it gave the flatness some sort of texture and something to push against. Tying the rope to anything that would hold was partly how I survived.

Now, five years later, I’m not quite in that place anymore where everything feels incredibly pointless and too insignificant to care about. I find myself once again working and making plans and stressing over minor things that aren’t worth my energy. And, what does remain true for me is that my internal meaning-making structure has forever changed.

After years of working with other grievers, I know meaning-making after loss can be a very disorienting part of it. And, an important one.

So much of what gives us a sense of meaning is a sense of connection. A job isn’t just a set of tasks when it’s connected to your values and what you love. But it can absolutely just be pointless tasks, without that connection. Just like a meal isn’t just a meal when there’s someone across the table you want to share it with.

With significant loss, or anything that reorders an entire life, it can feel like meaning is just drained out of things that don’t obviously have to do with that person. But this brings us back to the many tethers that lead back to someone integral in your life. They were a part of how your day was structured, or what you looked forward to, or who you did things with and for. The future you assumed you were walking toward was with them. Those connection points were tied to them. It all meant something specific with them as a part of it.

Many people I work with in the aftermath of loss describe a sense of just going through the motions while feeling completely untethered from a sense of what to walk toward or care about, and often - more acutely - why.

In part two, we’ll explore more about what meaning-making after loss can look like, how it often arrives, and what research and work with grievers has shown about how we slowly rebuild a sense of what matters.

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It’s an instinct that isn’t unique to me, of course. About a month ago I asked 90k people (mostly grievers, a handful of therapists/coaches, I assume) what they would do if they could just pause everything right now without consequence. And out of hundreds of responses, the vast majority of them were the same - go to the ocean, or the mountains, or take a trip to nature somewhere. Be with the earth and away from spaces full of clutter and people-ness. All of it was a pull towards ancient, living things.

I’ve thought a lot about this, that in seasons of big pain and hurt, there’s this urge and need for SCALE. Not just nature only because it’s quiet, or pretty, or even grounding. But maybe we also have a primal need to be reminded our ache isn’t the biggest thing in the world, or, the only enormous thing. Maybe we need something so completely vast and mysterious to help us hold the vastness and unknown in our own hearts and bodies.

Because grief is, of course, massive and endless. It’s every emotion all at once, tangled and knotted around our limbs and words and interactions. It takes up ALL of the room, and for many of us it’s the largest and most complex thing we’ll ever carry. And these places we exist in - our homes and our rooms and the office and the stores… they’re just too fricken small.

The First Cathedral

I was listening to an Andrew Huberman podcast sometime last year that had something to do with the brain and how we process, and he talked about ‘the cathedral effect’ (2007, Meyers-Levy and Zhu), which was something I hadn’t heard of before. It’s a term from environmental psychology that describes how ceiling height (think of a cathedral) impacts our cognition. Higher ceilings = encourages abstract, creative thinking and wider perspectives. Lower ceilings = encourages concrete, detail-focused processing.

And although Huberman was speaking in terms of arranging our physical spaces to support our work goals, I think this concept could be applied to emotional and psychological states, too. When we’re in distress and activated, our internal world often mirrors a kind of low-ceilinged room. We can have a narrower focus, reduced cognitive flexibility (more rigid thinking), and a lower capacity for taking in and considering other perspectives. Our systems are focused on survival and our threat detection is on high. Our scanner for what is wrong and what could go wrong is working overtime and it can be hard to access feelings of possibility. It’s all protective and it all makes sense, and, what a beautiful idea that this is one piece we can often control in the midst of so much that we can’t - our environment.

And the one thing I want everyone to chase can often be found outside.

Awe is “the complex emotion we feel when encountering something vast that transcends our current understanding of the world. It is a powerful blend of wonder, amazement, and reverence, often accompanied by a sense of feeling "small" but deeply connected to something greater than oneself”. It’s the word for what moves through you when you witness something or experience something too big to fit inside your usual sense of things. It could be anything - an impossibly beautiful sunset, a painting, a performance, witnessing an incredibly kind act between strangers, looking up at ancient redwoods.

Awe, for me, feels like this moment where everything I think I know is suspended and the veil is lifted and suddenly I’m remembering. It’s a coming back to, or a coming home to some deeper truth that I feel immense relief to touch the edges of when I’m in pain, or feeling lost, or scared. It’s the truth that I don’t know, and I can’t know, and I’m not supposed to know how all of this is connected. But it is connected. And the connecting thread is… love. I don’t get to fully understand the miracle that is energy and life and love, and I’m reminded that I am just one small part of this great mystery.

Feeling awe doesn’t make my grief smaller and it doesn’t negate the pain, but it does let me feel like there’s more around me to help hold it.

I also think big open places are just easier on a worn-out mind.

Rachel and Stephen Kaplan spent decades studying something they called attention restoration. The condensed version is that the focused, effortful kind of attention we run on all day (the kind you use to focus on a task or filter out noise or make yourself concentrate) is a limited resource and often taxed by our modern day-to-day lives. And it doesn’t come back just from sitting still in those same environments. It’s resourced by being somewhere that holds your attention gently, without demanding anything, like water moving, leaves shifting, or colors in the sky changing. They call it soft fascination.

I think about this through the lens of grief because so much of the grief experience is exactly that - this enormous mental effort and labor to function in a world that needs you to keep going while everything inside of your experience feels foreign and wrong and too bright and too loud. Grievers are constantly running those exact systems all day - the effort of answering “how are you” and picking the version that won’t make the other person uncomfortable, or tracking who knows and who doesn’t and which subject to steer around at dinner, or getting through the grocery store or the pickup line or the meeting while some part of you is somewhere else entirely, and you’re spending a lot of energy masking that one.

So we’re headed outside, but where and for how long?

You don’t have to move to a beach town or get on a plane. In another study about nature’s impact on general health and wellbeing, and how much time outside it actually takes to move the needle, Mathew White and his colleagues at University of Exeter pulled data from almost twenty thousand people across England. The answer was: two hours a week. That’s it. People who got at least that much, like in a park, a beach, a patch of woods (they called it ‘green spaces’), were substantially more likely to report higher wellbeing and good health than people who didn’t meet the two hour criteria. And, the results held across basically everyone - men and women, younger and older, comfortable and struggling, healthy and living with long illness. And it didn’t matter whether you got your two hours all at once or ten minutes here and there.

Big vast places like the ocean or the mountains are wonderful of course, but they can also take a level of access, means, and physical ability that many people don’t have. What I found hopeful is that most of the visits to outdoors in this study happened within about two miles of home. It didn’t have to be far, or expensive, just a total of two hours a week of getting to something green or nature-focused and open.

So if any of this sounds interesting to you, or you’re curious, or this lands in your body in a way that feels inviting, this is your gentle encouragement to go outside if and when you can. Not to fix anything or even with the goal of feeling ‘better’, but to support your brain and system as it holds something as vast and mysterious as the sea.

See you outside,

Rio

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Basically anything that slows us down is seen as an interruption - losing someone we love, having a baby, deciding we need to change paths, going through a breakup, getting injured. You know…Life.

We have to ask for time off, and we apologize, and buy the things that will make us better, faster. Anything that will get us back to there where we’re told we need to be in order to be worthy of things like rest and peace.

But we are humans - creatures made of bone and water and organs, born from the natural world that knows no deadlines or goals or projects or competition. None of us come into this world as dandelions. We’re born tender and needing and magical and wise. We’re supposed to fluctuate and have slow seasons. We are meant to experience hurt, and then retreat to lick our wounds. We have sensitivities and require certain conditions to feel safe and aligned and alive.

We are meant to change, and then change again, and again.

But so many of us grow up conditioned for the dandelion world - we got really good at needing less, performing to the max, and are used to measuring our goodness by how much we can do. In Western culture, the dandelion is treated as the default human, and everything that isn’t that gets treated as personal defect.

And then grief comes for you, and it does the one thing a performance can’t survive - it strips your ability to pretend.

We often can’t push through the way we used to. The energy the performance ran on is going somewhere else now, and what’s left is a version of us that needs things like rest, quiet, slowness, and room to crumble and flail and be lost. In other words, the exact needs so many of us were trained to override. Grief can hand us a body and nervous system that stops cooperating with the performance, and sets us down in a world that only knows how to reward it.

What’s underneath is often an orchid - something that can’t thrive just anywhere and was never meant to.

For more on what it means to live as an orchid in a world built for dandelions, read my article, When Grief Turns You Into an Orchid.

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Ambivalent grief is the term often used to describe the experience of conflicting emotions around a significant loss. It’s grief that feels messy and complicated, as if it’s pulling you in different directions all the time. It could be an adult child of a neglectful or abusive parent who feels relief with their parent’s death, but also grief for the relationship they never had, and guilt for the repair that’s no longer a possibility. Or the ending of a relationship where the grief of dreams and expectations live right alongside the relief in the absence of betrayal and pain. It could be the loss of a person who you had any sort of challenging or complex or exhausting relationship with.

“Grief is just love with nowhere to go” is a lovely thought, but it’s inaccurate and incomplete for so many. Grief is also anger and resentment and confusion and hurt and guilt. We see and hear mostly about the grief stories that our already grief-illiterate culture is barely comfortable with - the ones where that person was great, and we’d give anything to have our relationship with them back.

But what if that person also caused harm to us? What if there’s a part of us that feels relief? Or feels nothing? Or feels resentful? What kind of condolences or cards are you to expect then?

Because all the cultural scripts sound something like…

“They’ll always be with you” no thanks.

“They wouldn’t want you to be sad” actually there’s evidence to suggest they’d feel pretty apathetic about that.

“You just need to focus on the positive” I don’t think you and I have the same definition of what feels positive here.

I don’t mean to sound flippant or casual about something as profound as a death, but what I mean to do is point out how narrow the platitudes and views on what grief and relationships ought to be, can be.

I use the phrase “part of us” because I think this is helpful in immediately framing that this isn’t an either/ or experience. It’s a both/and. One reason why conflicting emotions can feel so difficult to be with is because two different emotions (parts) have two different needs. And it can feel like acknowledging and meeting one of them means we negate the other.

For example, the relief that the relationship is over doesn't erase the longing for the relationship you deserved and never got. Relief and grief, anger and missing, hurt and guilt, all of it can occupy the same body in one moment. Meeting one does not actually cancel out the other, even when it feels like you have to choose.

It's easy to look at the parts that don't fit the typical script and clock them as evidence that you're doing it wrong. And it's easy for guilt to slide into the room amidst all of the confusion and start ranking and sorting out what's allowed and what it all means. Am I allowed to feel lighter? Am I allowed to be deeply grieving when we haven't spoken and I didn't want to see them? Am I allowed to still be angry and resentful even as they're dying? There aren't many books on that one - what to do when you're pissed at a dying person who is someone that should have protected you and loved you well, but didn’t.

And with all of this complexity, as the meaning making creatures we are, we experience all sorts of stories that our minds make up about why we're feeling what we're feeling.

Again, this is where I often use the lens of “parts work” to help grievers get curious about their experience before judging.

Here are some examples of what we can often quickly judge a part for, alongside what it might actually be communicating to us:

A story about feeling relief might be that we're cold or uncaring. We might hear an internal voice that says something must be wrong with us to feel lighter when someone has died. But when we slow down and get to know our specific relief, we may find it's a response to a body that braced for years finally getting to stand down. The part that stayed alert, scanning for the next call and the next disappointment, gets to stop. The relief can be largely because the bracing and the not-knowing is over.

A story about anger or resentment might be that we can’t “get over it,” or that we’re being too sensitive or focusing on the wrong thing when we should be focusing on the loss. We might hear an internal voice telling us it’s time to soften, to let it go, to remember the good. But when we slow down and get to know our specific anger, we may find a part that’s been keeping the record and saying ‘hey, something happened here that wasn’t okay’ when no one else did. Maybe it’s the part of us that has been holding the line on our behalf for a long, long time. The anger isn’t getting in the way of the grief, sometimes it’s the part insisting that regardless of anything else, what happened to us mattered.

And then there’s guilt.

A story about guilt might be that we did something wrong. That the guilt is proof that we failed them, or that we didn’t try hard enough, or that a better person wouldn’t feel the way we feel. We might hear an internal voice running every “family comes first,” and every “but that’s your mother,” we were ever handed. But when we slow down and get to know our specific guilt, we may find a part working hard to keep us loyal to a rule and narrative we never agreed to, that staying tethered no matter the cost is what love is supposed to look like. It’s trying to make sure we’re “good”.

But as we get curious about the other parts in the room, we might find that the anger, the not calling, the not visiting weren’t failures at being good or failures at love. They may have been the wisest, most caring responses we could have had for ourselves. Of course, we might have genuine regrets. We might have chosen to do some things differently with what we know now. And both can be true at once. We can carry regret wishing we’d done some things differently, and still know that the distance, the anger, the not calling were parts of us working to keep us safe in a relationship that asked us to abandon ourselves to keep the peace.

What can help

Our brains want certainty. To know this or that, black or white, this box or that box. It makes sense that we’d want to definitively know. But as we’ve just explored, there can be more than one knowing. So a more helpful frame might be: how do I make contact with what’s true for me right now? Where do I have clarity?

We tend to think of clarity as answers or figuring something out, when clarity can be one small thing that feels true. It can sound like, I feel angry and I don’t know what to do with that or where to put it. Good. That’s making contact with your experience. You’re not overriding it or making it into something it’s not. And how would it feel to let that be your truth right now, knowing it could shift by the end of the day?

And clarity doesn’t have to be about what you’re feeling at all. Sometimes confusion feels front and center, and the clear thing is what’s around it - what support you might have, what you can handle, or what you don’t have to decide yet.

The part we can always be clear on is what we decide gets to be true, regardless of everything else. That might sound like - I’m a good person who had a complicated relationship. How I’m moving through this doesn’t have to make sense or be clear to anyone else but me.

You don’t have to resolve the conflict to be clear. You can just keep making contact with what’s true for you, one moment at a time.

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Thank you so much for being here,

Rio

I’ve worked with a client whose parent died, and then months later they lost their home in a fire, and soon after, their job. And a client who lost their partner, and then in that same year, a parent. And through that experience, lost the relationship with their only sibling.

Most grief writing tends to be structured around one loss and speak to the experience of grappling with one absence to orient around, one person to miss, one trauma to process, and one story to tell about what happened.

So much of what we read and hear about is built on this premise that there’s a singular before and an after, and that the “work” is learning to live in the after. But what happens when there’s more than one organizing center? When there are multiple losses pulling our limited energy and resources and broken hearts in different directions?

Compounded loss, also referred to as cumulative grief, can be like a heavy rain that keeps falling on ground that’s already completely saturated from the storm before. There’s little to hold it so it pools and rises and overflows. “Grief coming in waves” doesn’t often apply here because there is no “between” this wave and the next. There are no calm stretches to catch a breath during. For many, this can mean that the grief experience is intensified and much more difficult to process because there are so many layers seemingly all tangled together.

If you’re already grieving a major loss, and then experience another, you’re not experiencing that second loss from the same baseline as the first. You’re grieving from inside the grief your system is still trying to process and integrate, which usually means your capacity is already so much lower.

You may not even know who you’re missing in any given moment, or you might think of one person and immediately the other loss is right beside it. It can feel like your entire year or certain seasons are relentless with triggers - multiple death days, anniversaries, birthdays. It can feel like there’s no safe place to rest, either within yourself or out in the world. And this can, of course, bring a profound sense of loneliness.

When there’s so much to track you don’t even know where to begin, it can make it that much harder to bring support into your world and be able to identify and ask for what you need, and when. It can feel like only you are holding the full picture at all times.

If this describes your experience, please know that the thing you’re inside of may be much larger than the frameworks you’ve been handed for it. Grieving more than one loss at once with little to no ground between them while the world keeps asking you to function is more than one body knows what to do with.

Practice #1

One tool I’ll offer clients who are experiencing compounded loss is this: help your system contain and organize a bit. Pick one loss, just for a few minutes, and let that one have your full attention. That can look like writing about it, looking at photos, talking to someone about it, etc. This is not about ordering losses by importance or pretending the others aren’t there. But your system may be having a really hard time trying to metabolize all of it at once. So by building some containment around it, you can help your brain and body go toward a part of what you’re holding without becoming overwhelmed.

And if going toward one starts to feel like too much, that’s your cue to come back, not to push through. The goal is never overwhelm. For many of us, having the right support like a trauma trained therapist or grief specialist is what we need as we learn how to be with this.

I also want to add one important note here - many of my clients who carry compounded loss feel a kind of confusion or guilt around who or what they’re thinking about, and when. For example, you might notice one loss seems to be at the forefront of your mind when the other loss is actually more recent. Or that you’re surprised at how you’re able to be with one experience more than the other. There can be a feeling like there’s a right amount of time or attention owed to each person or experience, and you keep getting it wrong.

But there are many reasons our systems might have more space for one loss versus another right now. Sometimes, it’s that one loss is easier to access. Maybe it doesn’t cause so much overwhelm the way the other one can. Or maybe one loss comes with layers of anger and a complicated history that the other doesn’t. All of that is normal. We may know why one is coming up more often or why one feels harder to go toward, and we may not. But we can trust it has nothing to do with who we are as a person, and more to do with what’s at the surface right now, our capacity, and what’s needing attention.

Practice #2

And, it can also be helpful to consider how you’d like to connect with each loss specifically (whether it’s a person, a relationship, an expectation, etc). Let’s say you lost three people. You might find that it feels right to have a remembrance corner in your home for one person where you have their photo and a few objects that remind you of them. For another person, it might feel aligned to write short notes to them and place them in a beautiful jar or a journal. For the other, you might go to the beach because it’s their favorite place and think of them as you listen to the waves crash. We can be really intentional here and ask ourselves, how do I want to honor or tend to each of them?

And maybe it all comes up at once and you have no idea what you need. If so, a simple question - ‘what’s here for me now?’ - can open the door just enough for something to come through that wants to be witnessed in that moment.

And maybe today, of all days, it’s a dad in your mind and on your heart.

This is going out on Father’s Day, which for many of you (like myself) is one of those days that just sucks, and is hard, and maybe it’s also complicated. Or perhaps a mixed bag of it all. For some, today might be about a father who died, or a father who’s still living but somewhere out of reach, or the one your kids are missing, or the one you became a parent without, or it’s the father grieving a child who’s gone.

However today lands, I hope you can meet yourself in it with as much compassion and gentleness as you can muster. I hope there are moments of ease, and that it is whatever kind of day you need it to be.

With you in all the complexity,

Rio

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I’ve thought about this so often myself. That there are parts of me I’m not sure I would have met or had to confront or unburden had my world not crumbled down around me. Somehow, there can be growth from scorched earth. Surviving what feels unsurvivable can birth profound shifts, and those are sometimes the very parts we wish our person was here to witness.

I wish I could share with him how precious life feels to me now. I wish more than anything I could tell him what I now understand, but couldn’t before.

And that sits right next to the truth for so many of us that we would hand back the wisdom or perspective or whatever beauty we’ve found in the “after” without hesitation if it meant having our person back.

It’s important to also acknowledge that not everyone experiences what feels like any kind of personal transformation or growth after tragedy. This is not proof that one person did grief “right” while the other failed. For some, grief doesn’t lead to perspective changes or new beginnings. Grief is not a race, and surviving is more than enough. Learning to carry the weight of what and who you lost, day after day, is in itself an act of incredible resilience.

You do not need to “turn pain into purpose”. At its core, this catchy trope reflects a cultural obsession with productivity and achievement as the ultimate markers of value. It’s implying that pain must be “useful” or transformed into something tangible (a cause, a project, a goal) for it to have meaning. It implies that simply existing with your pain - surviving, grieving, and feeling - isn’t enough. Which is furthest from the truth. We find meaning in life after death, but we don’t need to search for meaning within death and pain. I do not believe everything happens for a reason.

This week will be my sixth Father’s Day without my father.

That number sounds and feels and just is…weird. And impossible. And true. How can it be that I have spent this much time on this earth without a foundational pillar of safety and comfort and love looking at me with the big smile and eye-twinkle of a ridiculously loveable trouble-maker?

How? It feels as though sometimes, my brain still has a hard time accepting this reality. Sometimes, it all feels wrapped up in a sense of unreality. It can all feel like a terrible nightmare I haven’t been able to shake the morning after. Did that really happen? And sometimes he feels so far away it’s like my life before was the dream. Did I really have a whole life where I didn’t feel the way I do now? He was real, right?

That’s one wild part about grief that feels, like so much of this experience, so hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived through it. It is also neurological. Our brains are wired for routine, familiarity, and to go towards the mental paths we’ve walked so many times they’ve become automatic. Someone we love isn’t just in our hearts - they’re embedded in our brain’s neural mapping. Their presence was a part of how we anticipated the world.

So when they’re gone, the brain doesn’t know what to do with the gap. It keeps looking for them, keeps expecting them, and keeps moving toward the life that included them. I think that’s why so many of us describe the experience of loss as surreal.

“I know they’re gone, but it doesn’t feel real.”

I think of it like a well-worn trail through the forest. You’ve walked it a thousand times, you walk it every single day, and you know every turn, every tree, every clearing. Then one day the path is just… gone. Your feet still move toward where it used to be out of habit. Your brain tells you it should be there, because it’s always been there. But instead, you’re met with dense forest. There are no markers or directions and there isn’t any way forward that feels familiar whatsoever. It all feels foreign and daunting.

Eventually, though, the brain begins to adapt. A new path starts to form, and not because you wanted it, but because you needed it. You slowly and sometimes imperceptibly find ways to navigate this unfamiliar place, and over time it becomes more familiar.

And for me, on this sixth Father’s Day without him, I feel the grief in adapting, too. I am grieving the fact that my brain has mostly stopped looking for him there on that path that I used to know so well.

I am used to not seeing him now. And oh, that hurts to type.

I remember so well the early days after his death when I was convinced I’d never truly laugh again or truly feel joy again. I remember feeling angry at anyone telling me, “you’ll be okay.” Because one - how could they know that? That kind of positive prophecy was unwelcome and unhelpful (for me). And two - I didn’t want to believe there was a world where he was gone and I was okay. It felt like a betrayal to want that world. It felt like the way to honor what had happened to him was to never be okay again.

And yet, here I am. I miss him fiercely, and I feel deep gratitude for this life. I am okay, and I want to be okay.

Gratitude and grief, joy and longing - it might sound simple to say that “we can hold multiple truths and emotions at once”. I say it all the time to clients and it’s a helpful perspective shift. But you and I both know that the internal stretch to hold it all is not simple. It’s as complicated and unpredictable and wild as the ocean.

Where did this storm come from and why are the waves unrelenting today? I don’t know. It’s what the ocean does. Why is the water now so still and glassy with not a current in sight? I don’t know, it’s just what the ocean does.

We can’t control the sea, but there are some days we can suspect a wave is coming. And if Father’s Day is one of those days for you, too, it can be helpful to have a plan.

To help you make a plan, here are some gentle questions to ask yourself now:

• What do I actually want this day to look like? Do I want to mark it, or do I want to let it pass like any other day? (Both are allowed. Neither is more loving than the other.)

• Who do I want near me, and who do I want to be honest with about how hard it might be? Is there one person I can tell ahead of time, so I don’t have to explain in the moment?

• Is there something I want to do to feel close to him this year, or is that too much right now, and I need a little distraction instead?

• What’s my way out if I’m somewhere and the wave hits hard? Is there one person I can text, or a place I can step away to, or a person who already knows the plan?

• What do I give myself permission to skip or cancel, even if it’s last second?

None of these have a right answer, of course. They just might be easier to ask now rather than on the day of.

With you in all the complexity as you navigate it all,

Rio

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Important note: This is not therapy or coaching, and all views are my own. Some questions may include mention of death and dying, including suicide. Please take good care of yourself as you listen. If you need support, please do not hesitate to reach out to a professional or trusted person in your life, or you can contact: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline - call or text 988. Crisis Text Line - text TALK to 741741. 988lifeline.org - for online chat. For crisis support by country and worldwide, please visit this link.

Hello and welcome to Glad You Asked!

Thank you so much for trusting me with your questions. I am so, so grateful for the vulnerable, curious, and tender shares I receive. Talking about the hardest parts of being human isn’t easy, and living it is even harder. I hope this space reminds you that while only you can carry your specific loss, you are not alone in the experience of it.

Do you have a question? A curiosity? Something you want me to sit with and answer here? Submit it here. I can’t wait to hear from you 💛

You can listen to a sneak peek of this week’s episode below. For the price of one coffee a month, you can be a fly on the wall for our most intimate conversations about grief and living with loss - delivered every other week, right to your inbox. Sign up for a 7-day free trial to binge all Q&As right now.

How do I hold grief and rage for my parent at the same time without shutting down? (Part 1)

Is no contact the right move with family members after loss? (Part 2)

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I said the hard, scary thoughts I had been carrying around about my own capabilities and capacity, I named the what-ifs, I said things I didn’t even realize I was holding until they were spilling out of my mouth. I had reached a point where I couldn’t mask for one second longer, and my system’s demand for some congruence just so happened to take place in my bathroom on a Thursday morning while I was getting ready for work.

And what happened immediately after, before she even responded, was a kind of settling in my body. A softness spread through my shoulders and a calm came to rest in my stomach. In real time, I witnessed my activation go from an 8 back down to about a 4. Nothing about my circumstances had changed, but I had named it and witnessed it within myself.

I hadn’t realized until that moment that I had not been naming or acknowledging the thoughts and feelings I was having around this specific thing. Because of old stories that I shouldn’t feel this way, or that it shouldn’t be this big of a deal, and all of the other ‘shoulds’ and expectations that tell us we just need to push through.

And the energy it was taking to keep them at bay was incredibly taxing because incongruence can be energetically expensive. What I felt in my bathroom that morning is something I witness all the time in my work, too. The relief that can come with naming it, with acknowledging exactly what it is.

With those reorienting to life after a significant loss, I often refer to much of our experience as “grief masking” - the thing we often have to do to keep functioning and going in a world where there is little space for the honesty and rawness of the grief experience.

Congruence, therapeutically speaking, can be defined as when what’s happening inside a person and what they’re expressing outside are in alignment. Carl Rogers named it as one of the core conditions that allows one person to genuinely meet another - part of what makes real relational contact possible.

But I often think about congruence in relation to ourselves, because the same alignment that lets us be truly met by another person is what lets us stay in contact with our authentic internal experience, which is the starting point for being able to meet our needs.

When our internal experience and our expression of it are in alignment, even if the only witness is us, and even if it’s only for two minutes in the bathroom, our systems often register that as relief. The part of us that works hard to hold something out of view gets to stop working for a moment, and there’s often then more spaciousness inside. We might hear our own signals a bit better. We can locate where we are. And that contact with ourselves is part of what allows for greater self-trust, for greater nervous system regulation, and for the kind of internal steadiness that makes it possible to respond to our own needs rather than override them.

When we’re chronically incongruent with ourselves and the performance or masking is running even just internally, and we’re telling ourselves we’re fine while the body is saying something else entirely through discomfort, exhaustion, agitation, or a quiet ‘no’ that we’ve been overriding for long enough - our signals get a lot harder to hear. Self-trust can erode when we’ve stopped registering our own cues.

And once we can’t hear ourselves clearly, we often start outsourcing the answer to other people, or to what we think we’re supposed to feel. Regulation can get harder because the nervous system can’t settle what it hasn’t been allowed to acknowledge.

For anyone grieving a significant loss, or heartbreak, or holding great amounts of pain or suffering, all of this can compound. When we’re grieving, our whole systems - brain, body, heart, spirit - are being asked to hold an enormous amount all at once: the re-mapping of reality, the absence mirrored back to us over and over again each day, the waves of activation or collapse that can move through us in a single hour and make us feel like we’re on an infinite emotional roller coaster.

And most grievers are doing all of that while also running a second, parallel job: holding most of it inside while out in the world.

I assume we’re all familiar to a degree with the experience of saying we’re fine when we’re so far from fine. Or saying we’re doing okay at the grocery store when we can’t remember the last time we actually felt rested after sleeping. Showing up at school things, going to work, and all the daily stuff required of us to continue being a generally functioning human being.

And then we get home, or we’re finally alone, and the exhaustion is bone-f*ckin-deep because we’ve been doing both jobs - the grieving and the masking.

Of course, the incongruence can be very necessary. This is just what living in this modern world often requires - for us to “push through”. There are simply just things we have to do, or things we don’t have the capacity to feel right now, and that’s normal and okay.

Sometimes the mask is doing a lot of protective work, holding things in place when there isn’t capacity for anything else. I don’t believe we have to make the mask the problem, but I think we can let it soften, even for just a few moments a day, even just by ourselves. Small moments of congruence can do so, so much. Not because they make the grief lessen or make anything “better”, but because they give the parts of us that have been working overtime to suppress, perform, or hold things in place a chance to stop working for a moment. When they get to pause, even briefly, we invite a small return on energy we can use to keep doing all of this.

Language can be one of those small but impactful moments.

‘I’m annoyed’ is a way to describe an experience, yes. And, it can keep the experience a bit at arms length. Sometimes that distance is needed and like I always want to emphasize, there are all sorts of protective parts working to keep us from being emotionally flooded or overwhelmed.

And, sometimes that containment or the arms length isn’t serving us.

When this is the case, what might help is to get more specific and use language to really locate yourself in this. ‘There’s an edginess in my chest that gets bigger and more jagged when someone tries to soften it’ can do something that ‘i’m annoyed’ cannot. It locates, it names the shape, and is a kind of precision that can be regulating or relieving in itself. Because when our bodies and systems recognize their own state reflected back in language, the part of us that’s been holding it out of view can step back. This is a very detailed example, of course, and you can be as specific as you can or want to be.

And it’s important to note that when precision isn’t available or when the internal experience feels too far away to name, congruence can sound like exactly that - ‘There’s a fogginess, it feels out of reach, I don’t know what I’m feeling but I know I’m not okay’.

Naming the absence or confusion is also congruence.

So I want to offer a kind of menu, for whichever shape your internal experience is taking right now or at any time you want to try this. These are just options to practice using more precision in language as a way into this idea of ‘congruence’. I hope you can take what helps, or screen shot, or save this for later, and leave what isn’t helpful for you:

When sad isn’t the word: hollow. leaden. raw. wrung out. dulled. aching. heavy-chested. keening. bruised. dimmed.

When lost isn’t the word: unmoored. adrift. scattered. foreign to my own life. untethered. displaced. between. nowhere. blurred.

When lonely isn’t the word: unseen. unmet. echoless. surrounded but separate. invisible. exiled. untouched. unreachable.

When you can’t find the word at all: numb. vacant. foggy. far away. underwater. static. nothingness. can’t reach it. not right here.

You might place a hand somewhere on your body that feels okay to touch right now and just repeat the word that feels truest for you, whether it’s from the list above or a different one that comes to you. And notice what happens when you locate it and name it.

Remember that you are not failing because you’re exhausted and overwhelmed, and it is not wrong to be doing lots of grief masking right now.

You are human, and you are grieving, and I believe that in this modern, Western culture, some of this was always going to be this expensive.

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If you’re craving that kind of internal spaciousness and witness, The Grief Portal waitlist is now open. Join here to be the first to know when doors open this summer and receive a special gift for being one of the firsts to join.

Important note: This is not therapy or coaching, and all views are my own. Some questions may include mention of death and dying, including suicide. Please take good care of yourself as you listen. If you need support, please do not hesitate to reach out to a professional or trusted person in your life, or you can contact: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline - call or text 988. Crisis Text Line - text TALK to 741741. 988lifeline.org - for online chat. For crisis support by country and worldwide, please visit this link.

Hello and welcome to Glad You Asked!

Thank you so much for trusting me with your questions. I am so, so grateful for the vulnerable, curious, and tender shares I receive. Talking about the hardest parts of being human isn’t easy, and living it is even harder. I hope this space reminds you that while only you can carry your specific loss, you are not alone in the experience of it.

Do you have a question? A curiosity? Something you want me to sit with and answer here? Submit it here. I can’t wait to hear from you 💛

You can listen to a sneak peek of this week’s episode below. For the price of one coffee a month, you can be a fly on the wall for our most intimate conversations about grief and living with loss - delivered every other week, right to your inbox. Sign up for a 7-day free trial to binge all Q&As right now.

Q: After four years of grieving my daughter's suicide, how do I know if what I'm experiencing is still "normal" grief or if it's crossed into complicated grief?

Q: What is “widow's fire” and how do I not feel guilty about it?

Read more

It looks backwards at first glance - if this is one of my safe people, and I can tell them anything, and they've always been there for me and I know they love me...why does it feel like in grief, it's suddenly difficult to fully let them in?

It's because love can create interference in support.

The people who love you have something at stake in how you’re doing. This is not a flaw in them, it’s what love does mixed with a pain so big it can’t not ripple outward and through everything and everyone around you.

Over time, two people can become part of how each other regulates and orients and predicts safety and normalcy in the world. Your okay-ness has likely been woven into the fabric of their okay-ness. So when you’re not okay, it doesn’t just land as something they’re witnessing outside of themselves unaffected, it can move through them before they’ve had a conscious thought about it or decided how to respond.

Your pain likely activates something in them that love made automatic. And so they’re standing in front of you, holding that automatic nervous system response, while trying to hold you, too. They can become unconsciously activated when sensing your pain - their stuff (their attachment system, their own grief, their fear, their need and want for you to be okay) can get kicked up before a single word has even been said.

Which can mean that their capacity to be present with you may be shaped by how much your pain moves through them. And for someone who loves you, it can move through them a lot.

So there's something very different that can happen between grievers who've never met and who carry no history of each other and no personal investment in where the other lands in that moment. There’s no prior relationship with each other’s okay-ness, and because of that, no interference.

This is what I refer to as “unburdened” contact. There’s no context to manage, no one reading the room for signs of how you’re really doing underneath how you’re presenting, no dual processing happening on the other side of what you’re saying. When someone doesn’t know you, and doesn’t need you to eventually be fine, and who has no life threaded through yours - they can just… receive you without the weight of everything you’ve been to each other landing in the middle of it.

And to a nervous system that has been constantly scanning in the background after significant loss - reading faces, tracking subtle shifts in expression, bracing against the possibility of being “too much” in any given moment - that kind of contact or being received can feel like putting something down you forgot you were carrying.

It can be such a massive relief.

The fear of being too much is one of the loneliest layers of great loss. We carry it physically, in the body, before it ever reaches language. And while we can internalize this belief without it ever being handed to us explicitly, it can also significantly decrease when faced with direct opposing evidence. In a room full of grievers, or a grief group, or an online community, or in the comment section at 2am - where everyone is both the one speaking and the one holding, this fear is contradicted. It doesn’t have anything to grip here.

When the size of what you’re carrying is already known and already expected and there’s already a shared language, we don’t feel like an intrusion because our grief is the whole point of that space. And grief often does feel like it’s in the wrong room. Whether it’s at social dinners, at work, in group chats, at family gatherings… it can feel like something that wandered in from somewhere else and is quietly, very effortfully trying to take up as little space as possible.

So to be somewhere it was built for can be freedom, and permission, and real, true rest. We get to say the thing out loud, or acknowledge the truth in it’s entirety, sometimes for the first time.

You can be deeply loved, and have people at home who show up for you in real and sustaining ways, and still crave a room where nobody needs anything from your okay-ness. Where you can just... put it all the way down.

This is not a reflection of what your people aren't, it's just what “unburdened contact” is. And love from our favorite people doesn't make it unnecessary.

*As with everything in grief, this is not everyone's experience. For some, strangers can feel less safe, not more. The absence of history isn't always a relief, and history can be what makes a space feel safe enough to open. It’s all valid.

If you're craving that kind of room, a space that was built for (sweeping hand gesture) all of this, where your grief is the whole point - The Grief Portal waitlist is open. Join here to be the first to know when doors open this summer.

And as I was walking through the tunnel with my playlist on shuffle, one of his favorite songs came on, and I immediately and inexplicably knew that he was next to me.

I quickly glanced around to make sure there wasn’t anyone close by, and then I closed my eyes and held out my hand. And I kept walking like that, with my hand outstretched, tears running down my face as I so clearly felt his hand in mine.

As if he were back for just one moment to take this walk with me.

Part of me knew that anyone seeing me would likely have questions or concerns. But most of me knew that something very real was happening.

Whatever it was. However you want to name it or explain it or not explain it.

That moment, like others before and since, truly buoyed me. I later told a couple safe people about it, which let my whole system feel it all over again. And in this believing and telling and retelling of it, my whole being stores it as important evidence: my relationship with my dad continues. In ways that I create, in ways that I can’t explain, and in ways that continue to surprise me.

But we’ve been told, for most of our history, to go towards the exact opposite of this.

Continuing Bonds Theory was developed in the nineties by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman. And it fundamentally disrupted the Western models of grief that had long told us the “goal” of grieving was essentially to detach and disconnect, and that healing meant letting go.

It was Freud in 1917 that argued “healthy mourning” required withdrawing emotional energy from the person who died, and reinvesting it somewhere else. The idea was that you had to free yourself from the attachment to your person in order to move forward in your life.

And then came Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) which our culture interpreted as a linear journey through each of the stages toward “acceptance” as a final destination. And it’s a model that wasn’t even intended to represent the experience of the griever. It was developed to describe the experience of the person dying from terminal illness. Kübler-Ross herself tried to clarify that the stages weren’t linear or universal, but our culture loves a neat, tidy healing journey so much that we seemingly just… ignored all of that.

And it’s worth noting how recent and how specifically Western our understanding of grief has been. In Japan, ancestors come home every year at Obon and families set out food and welcome them back like guests. In Mexico, the dead return each year on Día de los Muertos for a celebration and remembrance. Many Indigenous traditions have practiced and understood their ancestors as present and influential to their lives now.

Connection across death is not strange or unwell or a failure to move forward. It is what so many humans, across ancient Egypt, China, Rome, Greece, Mesoamerica - for most of recorded history - have done.

What’s strange, historically speaking, is us.

Thankfully, our current understanding, grounded in research of actual grievers, tells us that maintaining an ongoing, evolving connection to the person who died - through ritual, memory, signs, objects, conversation - is how many people grieve well.

For many, continuing connection is how moving forward is bearable. We are not wired to sever attachment and forget a history and extract love from our bodies.

What continuing your bond looks like, what feels true and right for you can be as varied as the grief experience itself. It can look like voice notes every morning, or cemetery visits, or setting their chair at the table. It could be internal conversations with your person, or just noticing the sense that they’re somehow present in certain moments or days. It can be their stories that you tell and retell. Or the small daily rituals that say: you were here, you matter, you are still a part of my life.

When we are grieving a significant loss, we are often (for a time, at least) living inside a constant state of threat. The person whose presence helped regulate us and whose existence was woven into our sense of safety and predictability and normalcy in the world, is gone. So the attachment system, which exists to keep us close to the people we depend on, is sounding the alarm bells. We unconsciously continue to scan and search for something that can no longer be found in the same way.

So the internalized presence of someone who made you feel safe, seen, and loved is a more powerful resource than we’ve been taught to believe. The memory of being regulated by them can still produce something very real in your body now. I knew he wasn’t physically next to me on that walk, but my whole being knew exactly what it felt like as if he was.

It can be a tether and a foothold inside a relationship that has no choice but to change form. It can be something to reach for while the most disorienting experience of a person’s life moves through you.

For some, connection might feel like a natural thing to reach for, and for others, it may not. Some people report signs, some don’t. Some people have dreams about them, some don’t. Initiating connection with your person might feel clunky, or awkward, or foreign. It might feel odd or hard or new to write your person a letter, or talk to them out loud, or pause what you’re doing to imagine them wrapping you in an embrace.

And that’s okay.

But if you want to, and you can, let yourself have it, whatever “it” may be. Try to remind your logic brain that logic isn’t needed here. That what we need now and what we’re doing and enduring all lands below the neck, where words and “sense” aren’t useful.

If someone had come along on that path and offered me a rational explanation for why my dad wasn’t “actually” there, I would have had to throat-punch them.

Please let yourself have it. The feeling, the perfectly-timed breeze, the voice notes, the sunsets, the letter writing, the inexplicable feather, the cemetery lunches, the hawk on the trail, their picture next to your coffee spot each morning, the song that came on, the butterfly at that exact moment, the impossible thing that happened the second you thought of them…

It is them. You get to believe that without our narrow interpretation of “evidence”.

Love doesn’t require a living body to be powerful and present and honored.

If you love the idea of intentionally connecting with your person, but don’t know where to start…

One place to start is by creating an altar or sacred space. Here are some prompts to help you set it up:

Where do you feel most comfortable reflecting on and remembering your loved one?

• Is it a cozy corner in your home? A quiet spot in your garden? Your bedside table?

• If you could pick one place that feels peaceful, where would it be?

If this space were just for you, what would it need to feel calming and supportive?

• A soft blanket? A candle? A photo that brings a smile?

• What small items bring you comfort when you see or hold them?

When you think about your loved one, what colors, scents, or objects come to mind?

• Would a particular flower or scent remind you of them?

• Is there a meaningful item - like their favorite book or a small keepsake - you’d like to include?

What would you want this space to ‘say’ to you?

• Would it remind you of their humor, kindness, or love?

• Would it feel like a space where you could talk to them, or just feel their presence?

How simple could this be?

• Could you start with just one object that holds meaning for you?

• If creating a physical space feels like too much, could it be a small box with a few items tucked away for special moments?

• What feels manageable and meaningful to start with?

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If you're living with loss, whether you're in year one or year ten, and you know you're ready to deepen your understanding of how you've been changed by it, and to find your way toward something that feels more like integration than survival, I'd love to have you join my 1:1 waitlist here. Spots will be opening up soon and you’ll be the first to know.

Important note: This is not therapy or coaching, and all views are my own. Some questions may include mention of death and dying, including suicide. Please take good care of yourself as you listen. If you need support, please do not hesitate to reach out to a professional or trusted person in your life, or you can contact: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline - call or text 988. Crisis Text Line - text TALK to 741741. 988lifeline.org - for online chat. For crisis support by country and worldwide, please visit this link.

Hello and welcome to Episode 2 of Glad You Asked!

Thank you so much for trusting me with your questions. I am so, so grateful for the vulnerable, curious, and tender shares I receive. Talking about the hardest parts of being human isn’t easy, and living it is even harder. I hope this space reminds you that while only you can carry your specific loss, you are not alone in the experience of it.

Do you have a question? A curiosity? Something you want me to sit with and answer here? Submit it here. I can’t wait to hear from you 💛

You can listen to a sneak peek of this week’s episode below. For the price of one coffee a month, you can be a fly on the wall for our most intimate conversations about grief and living with loss - delivered every other week, right to your inbox. Sign up for a 7-day free trial to binge all Q&As right now.

Q: How do you explain the mental fog and having a hard time remembering things without coming across like you’re making excuses?

Q: What happens when your best friend’s life mirrors the one you had before your loss - and being around them is unbearable?

Read more

I had expected a kind of ‘Of course she is. Please send her our love’ response, but instead they said, “Still? I really thought she was stronger than that.”

It was shocking. Somewhere behind the tornado of anger and betrayal consuming my mind, I heard myself defending her (and really, myself) - trying to keep my voice calm and fight back tears.

The idea that there’s an allotted amount of time to intensely miss and be affected by someone’s death is not only baseless, it’s dangerous. And it only leads to feelings of guilt, shame, and isolation for someone whose world has just been destroyed. The idea of moving on is not only wrong, it’s incredibly harmful.

Grievers everywhere silence themselves and hide their experience because of this pressure to be okay and “be over it”. And psychologically speaking, this is absolutely the most detrimental way to cope with pain. When we suppress emotion, unresolved grief, pain, and trauma manifest in other ways - often as physical illness, mental health struggles, or loss of other important relationships.

Devastating loss activates our survival instincts. We do not feel safe, and many people don’t experience a felt sense of safety for years following a devastating loss. Your nervous system can respond to a death the same way it responds to a threat to your own life. It just knows something essential has been taken, and it reacts accordingly.

So what happens when they say 'get over it' when we're not feeling safe in the world? We stop feeling safe with them. And when enough people send that message, we stop feeling safe inside our own bodies. Because we've been told, again and again, that our natural responses to this soul-shifting experience are wrong.

This is how grief gets driven underground. We learn to disconnect from what we actually feel. And what's left is often anxiety, irritability, hopelessness, numbness.

So how did we get here? To this modern land of “Don’t make me witness your despair”?

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We are fundamentally death-phobic.

I think about this a lot as I sit with others in their loss experience, hearing story after story of the friends that pulled away, the family members that won’t acknowledge, the boss that shows confusion with the time off request (but it’s been 6 months…?).

We have seemingly built an entire culture around pretending that death doesn’t exist. Or that it’s a far away thing that happens sometimes in the movies, and sometimes to other people.

The language we use is curious. We often don’t say someone died. We say we “lost” them, like they wandered off at the grocery store and might turn up. We say “passed away” and “no longer with us”. We have created an entire vocabulary designed to soften reality.

And I wonder if death doesn’t just scare us because it’s sad, it scares us because it threatens the story we’ve been telling ourselves about what matters.

Think about how much we hear about and witness the hustling and building and optimizing and goal-setting and trying to get to the next thing. It feels like our entire culture runs on the assumption that effort leads to outcome and that progress is linear. If you do it right, things will work out!

But death says - no. Sometimes they won’t work out. Sometimes you’re dealt a really shitty hand. Sometimes the person you love most will be here on a Tuesday and gone on a Wednesday and nothing you did or didn’t do could have changed that. And that can be a threat to the entire meaning-making system someone has built their life around.

So when a griever shows up at the dinner table five months later and they’re “still” shattered…perhaps they are a living, breathing reminder that control is an illusion, that the future is not guaranteed, and that everything we’re running toward could be taken in a single exhale.

That’s a hard reality to sit with.

So instead of sitting with the griever and letting that truth exist in the room, people say things like “stay strong” or “they would want you to be happy” or “they’re in a better place”. And I know it sounds like I’m bashing everyone around a griever, but I really truly believe most people are not trying to be cruel or insensitive. I do believe intentions are usually positive. And, I think that your grief can activate their survival response. Perhaps your pain is reminding them of a vulnerability they’ve spent their whole life trying to outrun.

This is why I flinch at the phrase, “transform your pain into purpose” in any grief context. Because it puts grief back into the framework of productivity and says, ‘okay, this terrible thing happened, but you can still use it. You can still produce something. You can still climb!’

And that’s not healing. That might come after some time and space and feeling what needs to be felt. But what I largely hear in that is a culture saying, “Please package your devastation in a way I can feel good about.”

Death is not an interruption or a failure or evidence that someone didn’t fight hard enough or pray hard enough or want it badly enough. Death is the one thing every single human being shares, and we have made it almost unspeakable.

And all of us eventually suffer for that silence.

Because when you are living inside the aftermath of someone’s death, and the entire world around you is organized to pretend death doesn’t happen, you don’t just feel alone. You can feel like you’re losing your mind while everyone is moving and talking and planning and you’re standing in the middle of it thinking how is no one else seeing this? How is everyone just… continuing?

That’s not a grief problem. That’s a cultural one.

“Moving on” is an entirely made-up thing that makes no sense. Trying to control or keep grief on a timeline is like trying to contain the ocean in a teacup.

You are not weak. You are not taking too long. You are not missing something that others seem to understand. You are not too sensitive. You are not too intense.

You are human, and you are grieving.

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Important note: This is not therapy or coaching, and all views are my own. Some questions include mention of death and dying, including suicide. Please take good care of yourself as you listen. If you need support, please do not hesitate to reach out to a professional or trusted person in your life, or you can contact: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline - call or text 988. Crisis Text Line - text TALK to 741741. 988lifeline.org - for online chat. For crisis support by country and worldwide, please visit this link.

Hello friends, and welcome to the first “episode” of Glad You Asked!

Thank you so much for trusting me with your questions. I am so, so grateful for the vulnerable and tender shares I received. I’ve been searching for ways to deepen this space, to speak to nuance and complexity and for things to feel more… human and personal, and this felt like exactly that. I’m excited to see how this community blooms.

I intended to have this first episode out weeks and weeks ago, but alas, I was thrown onto the hamster wheel of toddler daycare viruses and haven’t been sans coughing every other minute until last week. Thank you for hanging in there with me as I’ve very slowly come to the acceptance that this is life with a small child - I now have an arsenal of preventative sprays and tonics and syrups and concoctions and feel ready for the rest of winter.

This first episode is available to everyone! These Q&As will come out twice a month, and all future episodes will be for paid subscribers only.

What happens when grief resources stop reaching you, but the need to be seen in your pain hasn’t gone anywhere? This recording includes mention of suicide loss.

Can grief and loss reactivate old trauma, even when you thought you’d already worked through it?

This listener question comes from a parent of a child who died by suicide. She wonders about the cultural assumption that death by suicide means mental illness, and where there is room for a different perspective.

Who is qualified to educate others on grief and trauma? (My recording equipment shut off before this one, so my apologies for the audio that sounds like I’m just sending you a voice note 😂)

If you’ve got something on your mind or that you’ve been sitting with, I invite you bring it here. You can keep it totally anonymous and share as much or as little as you’d like.

Submit your questions here for a chance to have your question answered by me, from the heart.

I’ll talk to you next time,

Rio 💛

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But yesterday morning, one of my best friends sent me a text that said, “Is there anything you would have wanted to hear on a day like today?” on her way to support another friend on a big grief day. (She’s amazing, I know.)

Remembering that day feels like a griefy dumbbell in my chest, wrapped in twines and threads of some embarrassment, compassion, heaviness. All of it.

I texted her back, “For me, in retrospect, hearing something like, ‘You’re allowed to be/ feel however you need to today.’”

There may be some people reading this that were there on that cold, overcast morning at the beach, in April of 2021. And to you I say, thank you. Thank you for being there then, and thank you for seeing me in this now.

I don’t remember explicitly volunteering to read and write my dad’s eulogy, but I know it felt like it was an assumed position I would take as the eldest daughter, a writer, and the historical emoter of the family. I was also honored to do it - for him, and for my mom. I knew that I could write something beautiful and meaningful, but I didn’t know if I could read it out loud.

I imagined everyone my dad ever loved, and everyone who ever loved him (that’s a lot of people), sitting and staring at me as I tried to encapsulate with mere sentences the epic shine of this man’s soul and the impact he’s made on us all. I imagined them crying, as I certainly would and have in similar circumstances, and I thought to myself, there’s no way I’ll get through it. My partner lovingly agreed to step in and read it for me if I needed him to.

But the morning of, I felt… almost nothing. I showered, got ready, and felt my limbs moving through motions on autopilot. The moment I grabbed the microphone to speak, a functional calm settled over me. I have the vague memory of floating somewhere behind myself, watching me speak and thinking… huh. I feel like I’m just reading someone else’s words out loud.

Afterward, there were more speeches and tender shares from his brothers and friends, and people hugged me with tears in their eyes, looking at me with so much sympathy and compassion. It felt so hard to let in - almost like I didn’t want it.

I remember thinking to myself that I should be crying, or feeling more “undone” in some way. I am, after all, a crier. I cry at everything. Literally at the drop of a hat I could burst into tears. My therapist once “wondered aloud” with me if I’m processing the tears of all of my ancestors before me who didn’t have the safety to cry, and maybe my role in this body and in this lifetime is to feel and help move all of our grief for us.

But no, I was not crying at my own father’s memorial/ celebration of life/ mid-pandemic funeral on the sand. Not even a little bit. Instead, I found myself almost compulsively comforting others, and making sure they all knew where we were meeting next to have some drinks and appetizers.

And it was then during the drinks part where the tequila began. And when I shifted from “I don’t feel much” to “(something where I actively wanted to avoid sadness)”. I wanted to have a good time with all these friends and family that were there, and I wanted everyone there to have a good time, too. And what an odd thing to type now as I realize it for the first time.

But also, that was my dad in a nut-shell. The really fun guy. Perhaps I was channeling his energy when I had nothing else I knew how to do. Quite probably, that’s exactly what he would have wanted.

And yet, that’s not quite it. With what I know about myself, and with how that day was feeling up until the very night before - I had been extremely irritable, angry, and anxious. This “fun” energy was not an intentional honoring of him, although it’s nice to think of it that way. It was an overwhelmed nervous system in survival.

Later that evening, a couple family members and my closest friends came back to my parent’s house. There’s a very itchy, uncomfortable memory I have of my ex partner talking with my mom and grandparents at the dining room table, while I sang and danced and laughed with others in another room. I remember my grandmother trying to flag me down to say goodbye, and I responded “Not now, Nonie, I’m in the middle of an interpretive dance!”

I really can’t recall if I just said that to make people laugh, or I really didn’t say goodbye. But I’ll never forget speaking with her on the phone about a month later and hearing her say, “It was so good to see you enjoying yourself and having a good time. That’s what he would have wanted.”

But I was not exactly enjoying myself. I was unconsciously performing. And I am so grateful to my friends and my partner for meeting me there - wherever there was. They danced and laughed and sang with me - never with worried expressions or questions of “how are you, really?”

What I know now is that my system could only make it through that day in costume. The “undoing” did come, but in the following days and weeks when the beautiful crowd of sympathy and compassion were back there in the distance.

I used to have thoughts about how I somehow wasted that day. Or missed a big, important moment. That I should have been sitting at the dining room table, solemn, communing with others over the death of my father. What if I confused people? Or worse - what if even let them down? It’s so easy to shame ourselves when we don’t understand that there’s a very real, very protective function behind all of our confusing or seemingly mismatched responses.

It did not feel safe in my body to crumble. People depended on me. My adrenaline was high. My cortisol and vigilance were high. I was managing and shapeshifting because that felt much safer than to be with the devastating reality that everyone is here, because he is dead.

Everyone is here to say goodbye to my hero.

No, that was too much.

I didn’t know then that I was allowed to be however I needed to be that day. And when the embarrassment tiptoes in, and the cringe creeps up my shoulders, I say, “Hey Goodtime Girl, thanks for buying me some time. I’m glad you got to dance because Lord knows my tears have filled a thousand oceans between now and then.”

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Thank you for being here,

Rio 💛

That Sunday morning my partner took our three year old son to the park across town so I could have a moment to myself. But when they left I just kept scrolling and taking in more trauma, and shocking to no one - it didn’t help. After another cry, I decided that a walk to the park and being with my family was what I really needed. A little movement and mostly, connection. I needed to get off my phone.

I sniffled most of the way there, and then fought back tears for the first few minutes as I put my ‘Mama’ hat on and hit the orange slides.

About ten minutes in, as my body began to settle into presence, a man came up to me and said his family was celebrating a birthday on the other side of the park, and asked if we would like to eat with them. He said they had homemade tamales, chicken mole, rice and jamaica (a traditional Mexican agua fresca made from hibiscus). I paused for a split second as my mind stuttered at this unexpected kindness and he said, “That’s a yes - come on let’s get you some plates!”

The tables were covered in pink sparkly cloths and balloons were tied on every corner. The young birthday girl was running between the swings and the people seated at the table, while her mother plated food for everyone. They asked the three of us to sit, and within seconds my son had a capri sun in his hand and we had mounds of homemade food in front of us. I made eye contact with an elderly woman as she scooped the rice. She smiled and nodded just once.

Every five minutes (or so it felt) the nice man asked us if we needed more, or wanted anything else, and reassured us there was so much for them to share. I looked across the table and had to fight back tears as I watched my pale, blue-eyed, blonde-haired child blissfully shoving giant chunks of watermelon into his mouth and bouncing to the beat of the Mexican music. I looked at my full plate of food and my partner chatting with the other family members and was overwhelmed with gratitude.

Sometimes it feels as though the universe hand-delivers the exact balm your heart needs in that moment. That morning I had been witnessing human violence and brutality and reading responses to it that were so extreme and utterly void of empathy or compassion. My threat detector was on high.

It felt as if forces conspired to remind me, and us, that the loudest, angriest, most violent parts of humanity we see again and again online are not the majority. That is not human nature - that is something else.

Our nature as human beings is to connect, to care, and to love.

This family’s kindness filled me with hope and gratitude. Their welcoming instantly changed my nervous system state, and offered my body opposing evidence to the story, ‘everything is dangerous’.

In my own therapy session the next day, my therapist and I were discussing the state of our country. I felt tense as we spoke about it - my body was in fight or flight as we discussed how I will support myself as I support my own clients through their own fears and responses.

When we came to a natural pause, I said, “Oh, I have to tell you what happened at the park yesterday”.

And as I re-told the story, my whole body softened. I smiled and cried happy tears and I watched my therapist’s face light up with delight and her eyes fill with a happy sheen.

Being a skilled somatic therapist, she of course was tracking my non-verbal cues and pointed this out to me. She said, “Rio, your whole body and face shifted telling this story. Can you notice what happens in your body as you remember the goodness?”

This is the beautiful thing about our beautiful brains and our beautiful bodies and their beautiful connection. We can intentionally recall and imagine something, and our bodies respond as if its experiencing it again. I didn’t just experience that family’s kindness once, I have experienced it every time I have remembered it and conjured the details and the feelings I felt - like as I write this.

And, as my therapist also pointed out, now her body has experienced it, too. Her system now also has that moment as evidence of goodness. She felt hope and connection and delight as she listened - emotions that shift us into a moment of safety and ease.

That family’s generosity has now traveled from a park in my town, to my therapist’s office, to whatever room you’re sitting in right now. Kindness becomes a transferable resource and it literally travels through nervous systems via story - our original curriculum. Story is how we learned to survive, to belong, and to be human before phones and screens became like another limb.

So, here’s another one you’ll want to read, passed to me this week, now passed to you.

I believe kindness is a wildly underrated medicine. And I hope we all use it freely, whenever we can, to remember again and again what we are.

With you in the complexity,

Rio

💛 If you jive with my vibe and you’re looking for real, tangible support as you navigate life after loss, please sign up for my 1:1 waitlist to work with me. Spots will be available soon.

💛 If you’re wondering where you are on your grief journey and what kind of tools and support might be most helpful for you, take the Understanding Your Grief quiz here.

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We talked about grief for six of those hours.

“Grief & Bereavement” was one Saturday class.

The same month I graduated from my clinical psychology program, my dad was diagnosed with cancer, and I could not have been less prepared for what was to come.

How is it possible that a life-altering, soul-shifting experience almost every single person will go through, is little more than an afterthought in mental health education?

How is it possible that I’ve had clients tell me their previous therapist suggested they were “stuck” and should consider medication because it had been a year since their loved one died? Or that I hear story after story of people in pain looking to professionals for help, only to be met with dismissiveness, or worse?

I once had a client who told me her last therapist met her grief with a ‘motivational interviewing’ approach. She shared her devastation and received questions like, 'What do you think is getting in your own way to moving forward?'

I wonder how often people leave therapy rooms or doctor’s offices feeling ashamed, or weak, or at fault. I wonder how many of them have the courage to reach out to someone else and hope they’re met with a different answer. Because honestly, when the professionals who “should” know how to help just hurt you more… why would you go back and expect anything different?

We have a massive, systemic problem.

Of course so many medical doctors and therapists are uneducated and unaware and unintentionally (my generous assumption) causing more harm. Doctors receive roughly seventeen hours of education on death and dying across their entire four-year education. But that is mostly end of life care and symptom management of the person dying, to my understanding. The experience of the griever may be a fraction of that, if covered at all.

Even leaders in the field, like Dr. Katherine Shear, a prominent grief researcher in psychiatry, has acknowledged that grief isn't meaningfully covered in most medical or psychiatric training.

So the people we culturally designate as “experts” on human suffering often have less grief education than someone who’s read a few good books on the subject. We assume where there’s authority, there is the necessary training.

But the training is absolutely not there.

When grief education is this sparse, what framework do clinicians have to understanding grievers?

It’s called the DSM, which is the ‘official diagnostic manual for mental health’. In 2022, ‘Prolonged Grief Disorder’, was added, which classifies intense grief lasting beyond 12 months as a mental health condition.

This is a controversial diagnosis and it’s understandable why. On one hand, having a diagnosis can help people access care through insurance, and can validate the severity of what they’re going through. On the other, it creates a man-made delineation and sends the message: after a year, your continued struggling isn’t “normal” grief, it’s a disorder.

This is the manual that clinicians use to assess their clients and patients, what insurance will pay for, how researchers design studies, and what gets taught in the next generation of training.

And all of that trickles down into cultural expectations, and then what we internalize.

This is why I'm so passionately relentless about education as one essential part of supporting grievers. Because when you don't know the system is broken, it’s very easy to assume you are. And, education can only go so far. You can know intellectually that grief doesn’t have a timeline and still experience frustration and impatience with yourself for not feeling differently.

This is why I don’t only teach, I also create spaces where people can experience what it’s like to be accompanied instead of fixed, and feel what it’s like be with that experience of frustration, for example, and help it move without needing words or analysis.

The goal is to be in relationship with all parts of ourselves. With our grief, and our nervous systems, and our fears, and our inner critics, and our hope, and all the many complicated layers we may carry all at once. It is possible to be with this without feeling overwhelmed. I see it every single day.

The Grief Portal is nine weeks of truly meeting yourself within your experience of loss. We start tomorrow, Tuesday the 27th, and doors close at 12pm PST same day.

This is the last chance to join.

Have any last minute questions about the group? I’m here to answer :)