Ep #309: Staying Busy to Avoid Grief

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 309: Staying Busy to Avoid Grief.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. If you have ever found yourself filling every hour of the day since your partner died, if people have told you, as they did me, to just stay busy or give it time, then this episode is for you. Because while staying busy can be helpful, it can also quietly keep us stuck. So let’s talk about when busyness supports us and when it’s a form of avoidance that takes us further away from the life we want next.

Before we get into it, a little update on my world. First of all, Coaching On the Couch was amazing. As I knew it would be because it has been every single time, but it was extra amazing this time. I think partly because I’ve been going through so much, to welcome a group of women into my home, a couple who have already been in my home before and who I’ve already met in real life and spent time with, but mostly new women who had never been to my house before and who I had never gotten to hug in real life. 

Man, it was cool. And what made it extra cool, and cool is maybe not the right word here, but extra nourishing is probably a better word, was that I gave myself the gift of being honest with you all.

And I know I have shared this in the last couple of episodes of the podcast, but it has been rough, y’all. Rough. And I’m so glad I did not try to go through that alone. And I’m so glad that I was honest with these women who were coming into my house about what’s been going on for me so that there was no sense of needing to be performative or fake, to put on a happy face, which made it so much easier to just genuinely be happy.

So, I continue to learn that the more honest I am, the more authentic I am, the more I am able to ask for what I want, the more I’m able to receive what I need. And that’s a beautiful, beautiful thing that I want for all of us. So it felt really good to me to just be honest about what was going on for me and not try to be something I’m not and just be who I am. Isn’t that great thing that we all want? I think it is.

If you are counting, because some of you have been joking with me about this, I am now up to 142 bags of mulch in my yard this year. All on sale. Thank you, Home Depot. I actually bought 180 bags. I still have 30 bags I haven’t picked up and I have 8 bags in my car that I haven’t put on the yard. But here’s what I will say. My yard needed mulch more than I thought it did. 

Secondly, and more importantly, it feels good to get out there and do something physical. Yes, I could pay to have somebody do that work. But man, it felt good to just schlep those bags of mulch around and put them in a wheel barrel and get them out there. And it also looked better. It’s just rewarding to see. So anyway, I’m going to finish the ones that I have, probably go pick up some of the rest of the ones, and then I’ll be done with that. Then I can start flowers because the good weather is here.

Easter was also amazing. That was yesterday. I’m recording this on a Monday. Usually I have a little more padding in my schedule, but Easter was amazing. Pretty much my whole family, at least the ones that live here in Wichita were there. And everybody’s healthy. 

My dad brought his new puppy, which was super fun. My daughter is in town. My ex even came, my first husband and his wife. I invited them and they brought her kids. And so I think all in all, between my youngest’s partner, my daughter’s friend, all the teenagers that we had, we had eight teenagers/young adults. So much energy and laughter and giggles. 

Big indoor Easter egg hunt because it was raining, and a scavenger hunt and a puzzle race that my stepmom put together and just massive food. My daughter helped me cook. It felt really good. It was a lot of work, but it felt really, really good. So, that’s what’s been going on in my world. A different kind of busyness.

But let’s talk about the kind of busyness that you might be a little worried about. If you’re listening to this episode, it might be something that’s on your mind. A lot of us are told some pretty distinct messages after loss. I remember hearing this at Hugo’s memorial service, which was, “Stay busy. Just stay busy, dear. Stay busy, it’ll help distract you.” We’re told that. We’re also told that time heals, right? And if we can just stay busy enough, time will pass and so we’ll feel better.

And I think people mean well when they say these things, but most of them, they’re not accurate and they’re not actually all that helpful. I wish it were as simple as saying that time heals. I wish that all we needed to do was just stay busy. And yes, time is necessary so that healing can occur. Time is necessary so that our brain can relearn the new reality and stop predicting the old one. That is a part of healing. And what we do with time really matters.

And so while busyness might distract us from an intense emotional experience that we’re not really particularly looking forward to, right? It might distract us from that pain in the short term, it can also really disconnect us from ourselves in the long term. It can cause an emotional buildup that can become problematic. You can truly stay busy for years and still feel stuck emotionally.

So, that’s why it can be problematic, right? And so much compassion for us, growing up in a culture that values productivity and simultaneously is terrible at grief and feelings. Both of these things are problematic. So it makes a lot of sense that if we’ve been taught that staying busy and accomplishing is a good thing, and we’ve been not really taught how to feel comfortable feeling the feelings of grief, and people don’t want to talk about it because they’re uncomfortable with our feelings, then we can kind of understand why we might turn to busyness and why busyness might feel so good.

And after a loss that’s so big, we’re doing everything we can to try to take care of ourselves. We’re doing the best we can with what we know. So I don’t want you to hear this and think I’m trying to shame you. I don’t want you to shame yourself. I don’t want you to blame yourself. I hope that this doesn’t come with any sort of right, wrong, good, bad, inferior, superior stuff. That’s not what this is. That’s not what this is.

Staying busy can feel like a way to stay in control. It can feel like a way to make things more predictable at a time when we feel out of control and everything feels unpredictable. It’s a coping mechanism. Staying busy can be very familiar. It can be something that we get praised for. So, I don’t want you to hear that it’s wrong. I don’t want you to hear that you should feel badly for it.

I want you to know that if you’ve reached the point where it’s keeping you from feeling what needs to be felt and it’s keeping you from building the next chapter of life that you actually want, that you can love, that it’s a pattern we can change. And you might be onto yourself. 

First of all, if you’re listening to this episode of the podcast, you might be onto yourself. But if you are, you notice yourself maybe overcommitting. And it’s not overcommitting to things that are not values aligned necessarily. It’s often overcommitting to things that are quite aligned. 

It’s maybe things that you might really want to do: volunteer projects, extra projects at work. You picked up a part-time job and it’s not because you need the money. Right? If you notice yourself overcommitting to kind of fill up your calendar, be curious about that.

If you notice yourself starting to worry about what will happen when you have empty time on your calendar, when you don’t have something planned, be curious about that. If even when you don’t have things on your calendar, you are looking to distract yourself from yourself, maybe you’re using social media, maybe you are, you know, using television. It doesn’t matter what the behavior is that you’re using, but you don’t feel comfortable being with yourself and so you try to distract yourself from yourself, then you might be experiencing the type of staying busy that is holding you back.

And so, I want to take this opportunity to say, you’re doing the best job you can with what you know. You’re a human on the planet doing her best job to survive. There’s nothing wrong with you. You are not broken. And nobody probably taught you any better, okay? So if your inner critic is showing up loudly or you tend to judge yourself for this, I just want to offer that judgment is so optional and you don’t have to listen to that inner critic. All right?

And I also want to use this opportunity to remind you of the dual process model of grief, which is Stroebe and Schut’s work, right? It tells us that healthy grief, that intentional healing really, is the oscillation back and forth, back and forth between two buckets of activity: loss-oriented and restoration-oriented. So loss-oriented means thinking about the loss, feeling the loss, dealing with the logistics of the loss, missing your person, remembering them, photos, dealing with their belongings, all of these things, crying, reflecting. That’s loss-oriented.

Everything else, basically, that isn’t the loss, that gives you a respite or a break from the loss, is the restoration bucket. That’s just like doing life. That’s going to work. That’s thinking about your future. That’s getting out there and having a laugh with friends. It’s gardening. It’s hobbies. It’s Netflix binges. It’s distraction. Okay?

So we have loss-oriented, we have restoration-oriented, and dual process model says healing is found in the intentional oscillation back and forth, back and forth. The problem isn’t only loss-oriented. The problem isn’t only restoration-oriented, right? It’s not that one of these are better or worse than another. The problem is when we don’t have any balance. The problem is when we are only in one or the other. We have too much of one or the other and no intentional back and forth.

And when we’re staying busy, it’s very possible that we are primarily in that restoration-oriented. And we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to go back and forth into the loss-oriented. Are you seeing here? Right? We want to feel a little bit about it, think a little bit about it, take a break. Deal with it a little bit, feel about it a little bit, take a break. That’s what dual process model says. It doesn’t say that anything is wrong or right. It says both/and.

So if this sounds like you, I want you to ask yourself a couple of questions just to kind of check in. Is your busyness coming from care and compassion? Or is it coming from fear and avoidance? And if it’s coming from fear and avoidance, how can we make it feel a little more safe for you to feel? Because if you weren’t shown how to feel feelings, if nobody taught you how to regulate a dysregulated nervous system, to literally create safety in your body, then isn’t it no wonder that it feels unsafe to feel feelings?

If you feel like you’re barely hanging on and you’re balancing all the plates, doesn’t it make so much sense that if you don’t have confidence to feel feelings and to create the safety in your body to do that, that you would be worried that the second you do, you’re going to drop all the plates? Or that you’re going to fall into a black hole and never come out? 

Doesn’t that make sense? It makes sense to me. And we can be compassionate about that and curious about that. And if that is us, we can learn what needs to be learned so that we can feel what needs to be felt, so that we don’t have to be busy all the time.

Because when we can feel what needs to be felt, I really do believe, and more and more as I do this work, I believe this. When we can feel what needs to be felt, that’s when that energy shifts. And that’s when we can start intentionally creating what we want in the future, which by the way, will always include feeling what needs to be felt and having our back about it, not making ourselves wrong for it.

Ask yourself, what do you notice when you stop being busy? Even just for a few minutes, what do you notice when you stop being busy? Does it start to get uncomfortable? And is it that discomfort that you’re trying to distract yourselves from by staying busy? Because that’s often what it is.

What might need tending to that isn’t getting space right now because of all of the ways that you are distracting yourself? Is there a part of you that really wants attention? Something that needs to be felt? But it’s not getting any space? Because you keep busying it away? Again, not wrong. We’re not shaming ourselves for that. We don’t do that here. But we do figure out, okay, what is it that needs to change so that I can feel safe enough to feel what needs to be felt?

So please hear me and repeat after me if it’s helpful. You are not broken. You are coping the best way you know how. It is okay to slow down, especially, especially when we live in a world that says it’s not okay to slow down. Especially when we live in the world that says slowing down makes you lazy and lazy makes you worthless. None of that is true. Your worth is fully intact. How much you produce has nothing to do with what you are worth.

And if you are like many of us and you were not taught how to use tools to create safety in your nervous system, body-based tools to help you feel safe enough to feel your feelings, you are not alone and those are skills that can be learned. You can learn them from me. I am not the only place. I think I do a pretty good job, but I am not the only place.

What matters is that you decide, I am going to learn those skills so that I can feel safe enough to be in my body so that little by little, in amounts that I choose, only when I feel safe, I can start to let myself feel so that this energy can move through me. And it doesn’t have to be a heavy weight or a burden that I am dragging around and distracting myself from. That is not what I want for you. That is not what you deserve. You deserve so much more than that. Okay?

These are things I teach in all of my programs, of course. Tapping, y’all know how I feel about tapping. Such a brilliant way to create safety in your nervous system so that you can gradually start to feel more confident about feeling feelings, so that you can let that energy shift and move. There are many other ways to do it as well. 

You can go to coachingwithkrista.com and click on the Work with Me tab, learn all about the programs that I offer. And also, remember, if there’s ever anything that I’m telling you I’ve talked about on the podcast and you don’t know what episode I’m talking about, go to coachingwithkrista.com, click on the podcast tab and use that search feature. You can search by keyword and it will take you right to podcast episodes that have similar subjects because here we are at episode 309. It’s a lot of podcasts. I get it. Okay?

That’s what I have for you this week. You don’t need to stay busy to be okay. It’s okay if that’s what you’ve been using to be okay, but let’s let that be temporary. Let’s let that be a coping mechanism that you’ve been using, but it’s not the only coping mechanism that you start using. 

You deserve more than distraction. You deserve space to feel, safety to feel, tools that actually help you. Okay? You deserve all of those things. Please do not only wait for time to heal. You are worth more than that. Remember, I love you. You’ve got this. Take care and I’ll see you next week. Bye.

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If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence. 

Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.