Ep #362: Why Grief Isn’t Linear

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, Episode 362: Why Grief Isn’t Linear.

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 the podcast. If you have ever wondered, “I was doing better, why am I falling apart again?” or, “Shouldn’t I be further along by now?” or even, “Am I sliding backwards?” this episode is for you. Today I want to talk about why grief isn’t linear, what that actually means, and why believing that it should be linear can make grief harder than it needs to be. And I also want to connect that to something I see happening a lot for widows, which is getting stuck in what I call a grief plateau.

So we’re going to talk about the myth of linear grief, why so many traditional grief models miss the mark, how my healing grief spiral offers a much more helpful way to understand what’s happening and where you want to put your focus, and why it can be so easy to plateau if we don’t have the right tools.

So, first, the myth of linear grief. Most of us were taught, either directly or indirectly, that grief should move in some sort of straight line or at least some sort of stair step. So maybe it’s not a completely straight line, maybe it’s not a neat straight line, but still, it’s supposed to be progress. It’s supposed to be a line. And as time passes, we think we should be getting better because that’s what a line looks like. We think we should be feeling better and hurting less and struggling less. And we think there should be some predictable progression. And that when that doesn’t happen, then our brain makes it mean that something has gone wrong.

It says things like, “I thought I already dealt with this. Why am I crying about this again? I was doing so good.” And then, “I was doing better last month. I shouldn’t be here. I should feel better by now. What’s wrong?” And that’s where we add a layer of unnecessary suffering. Not because grief is not supposed to be hard, it definitely is. It’s very much hard. You know this. But because when on top of grief, which is already hard, we add judgment, we add another layer of hard. We make ourselves wrong for having a grief experience that was never meant to be linear in the first place. We’re told wrong.

So a lot of people still think about grief through the lens of the five stages. I’m sure you’ve heard of the five stages of grief. When my husband died, it was the only grief theory I had ever heard. Right, and that work dates back to the late 1960s. The idea being that we would go through denial, and then anger, and then bargaining, depression, and then acceptance. And I’ve talked before on the podcast many times about how those stages were never intended to be a checklist for grieving people. They were never meant to be linear or prescriptive, they were never meant to be formulaic, they were never meant to say that if you’re having anything besides these five experiences that somehow you’re doing it wrong.

But somehow that’s what we absorbed. Somehow that’s what our culture absorbed. So we got this idea that grief was linear. We got this idea that grief ended if only we could get to this place called acceptance. And that if a certain amount of time passed and we were still feeling something other than acceptance, then somehow we weren’t doing what we needed to do or we had been dealing with grief incorrectly or there was something wrong with us. So if we felt anger, and then we felt it again after processing it already, or we had an intense sadness and then a stretch of feeling less sad and now we’re more sad again, we tend to assume that means there’s something wrong or that we’re doing it wrong.

But what I want you to hear is that grief is not like that. Grief isn’t tidy. It’s not sequential. It’s not linear. It doesn’t have an endpoint where you graduate and you’re done. It’s not golf, 18 holes, and then you’re done, right? It’s not that. Grief is layered. Grief is the natural human response to a perceived loss. We’re humans, we’re always going to have a response to that loss. And so that’s why we want to focus on not getting to some sort of linear end, but why we want to focus on integrating our grief, learning how to adjust to the loss that has happened, learning how to choose what we want to think about the loss that has happened, how we want to feel about it, how we want to relate to it, who we want to be given that this loss has happened, because it has.

And that’s why I created the healing grief spiral. I wanted to give a way to talk about grief integration that actually reflects what so many of us experience. And it took me a while to figure that out. Actually, I was kind of coaching on it in a way and didn’t really have the language for it and finally realized, oh, okay, this is what I’m saying and this is what it looks like. So I want you to picture a spiral. And at the bottom of that spiral, it’s narrow. And then as it rises, as it goes up, out, around, out around, it gets bigger as it goes. That’s the image I want you to have in your mind of this spiral, this upward spiral that gets wider and bigger.

Because that’s really what it’s like. Grief often brings us back to familiar emotions and familiar thoughts and familiar pain points or different levels, different layers, different aspects of those same emotions and thoughts and pain points. And yet, every time it happens, we’re not meeting them in the same place. We’re in a different place. Every time it happens, when we’ve been focused on this, we’re meeting those things with more awareness, with more capacity, with more skill, with more life experience. And that’s the spiral.

We’re never really starting over. We’re never really back at the bottom. We’re never regressing. We’re coming around again, but from a new place. And so the healing grief spiral has three steps, three recurring steps, and we do them over and over and over.

So step one is to settle the storm inside. And this is where we start because when your nervous system is overwhelmed, almost nothing else helps. We can’t really think about anything. This is the part where it all feels like too much and it’s too fast and it’s too big, and your body is activated and you feel flooded and maybe you want to shut down or you want to run. You just want to cry, lash out, maybe you feel frozen. But when you’re here, clear thinking is not the goal. We don’t even have access to the part of our brain that would allow us to think clearly if we wanted to. The goal is to settle the storm inside, to help your nervous system feel safe enough that emotions can flow through.

And that might look like tapping, which you’ve heard me talk about on the podcast. It might look like a breathing exercise, it might look like some grounding, maybe a walk, maybe crying, letting the sadness move or whatever the emotion is, instead of clamping down on it. It’s not about pushing the storm away or pushing feelings away. It’s about helping your body feel safe enough for the emotional experience to pass through. So that’s step one, settling the storm inside.

Step two, once the storm is settled, is when we can choose our thoughts intentionally. Once the storm has settled enough, that’s when we have access to the part of our brain that can help us relate differently to our thinking. That’s when we can think about our thinking. We’re not going to control our thoughts. We’re not going to stop thoughts from coming. We’re definitely not trying to force toxic positivity or think only happy thoughts. But we can notice our thoughts. We can see the difference between who we are and the thoughts that we have. We can see that we are the thinker and there are thoughts that we think. And then because we can notice them, we can question them. We can create that little bit of space between us and what our brain is saying.

And so thoughts like I should be further along or I’m doing grief wrong or I’m never going to feel normal again or nobody understands, I’m all alone, all of these thoughts that are common in grief and feel incredibly true when we’re thinking them, become things that we can choose our thoughts about. And that’s when, instead of just listening and obeying the thoughts that our brain offers us on repeat, we can actually start choosing what we want to think. We can ask ourselves, is this thought moving me toward the experience I want or is it moving me away from the experience? And if it’s not helping me, what would I like to think? What would be more useful? What would be more aligned? What would create a little more support, would help me move toward the experience that I want? And then we can talk to ourselves more than we listen to ourselves. We can start to choose our thoughts on purpose instead of just going with the thoughts that our grief brain offers us.

And then once we’re choosing our thoughts intentionally, step three is that we can begin to take meaningful action. So from that more settled place with more intentional thinking, we take action. And it’s not action other people think we should take, and it’s not action that we’re taking to prove that we’re okay. It’s not performative in nature. I’m talking about action that aligns with what matters to you. And maybe that is big and maybe it’s small. Sometimes that might be, I’m going to set a boundary. I’m going to say yes to something that feels a little scary but that I want. I’m going to go on the trip. I’m going to have the difficult conversation. I’m going to say no instead of yes. I’m not going to people please. It might be one little teeny tiny brave step toward the life that you want to create next.

Sometimes, frankly, it’s just, can I do the next thing on my to-do list because I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed? Can I take a shower? Can I answer one email? Can I go outside and let the sun shine on my skin? So it’s not about right or wrong actions, it’s about aligned actions, actions that take you toward what you want for your unique life, which might be different than what the widow next to you wants. Which is why I’m never going to tell you what to do. Sometimes I think people think that if they work with me or come into one of my coaching programs that I’m going to be telling them what to do and giving them advice. No. Because you have a unique set of values. You have a unique idea of what matters to you, and that might be different than me. I don’t know what’s best for you, but I can help you get rid of what’s in the way of accessing what’s best for you, right? I can help you find those thoughts that are holding you back from doing what you want, so that you can choose intentional ones and you can take meaningful action.

And that’s what we do. So we settle the storm, we choose thoughts intentionally, we take meaningful action over and over and over. And that is the spiral. Settling the storm once doesn’t mean we’re not going to have to settle it again. Of course, we’re going to have to settle it on a regular basis. The more we practice it, the more that muscle grows, the better we get at it, the faster we do it.

So when you understand the spiral, then those moments when grief shows up unexpected, they start to be less scary. You start to judge yourself less for them. And maybe you are crying again, and maybe you are feeling angry or lonely again. Maybe you do get knocked over by a grief wave or a grief grenade out of seemingly nowhere. But instead of thinking, oh, something’s wrong, what did I do? I was doing so good, you think, oh yes, another turn, another turn of the spiral. There’s more here to be felt. There’s more here for me to notice. There’s more support here available to me. Something else is asking for my attention.

And it doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. It just means that’s the way grief is, and you’re a human and you’re experiencing grief. And that’s such a different experience. It was never meant to be linear. We just heard that it was. We bought into the idea that it was, and then we measure ourselves against something that is inaccurate and outdated.

Okay. I want to connect this to the grief plateau because this is where I think the conversation can get even more helpful. So a grief plateau is where you’re no longer in the most acute, intense, all-consuming roller coaster chaos of grief, but you’re also not loving life again. You’re also not really living the life that you want. You’re functioning, you’re getting things done. If you wanted to go back to work, you did, you could have, you could, right?

To the outsider, you look like you’re doing fine. People probably stopped asking you how you’re doing because they think you’re fine. But on the inside, you don’t feel great. You might feel flat, you might feel disconnected, maybe stuck. It might feel like you’re on what I call grief groundhog day, where it’s like the same thing over and over and over, kind of looking at your life going, ugh, okay, well, I guess it’s better than it was, but is this as good as it’s ever going to be? And you don’t want this to be as good as it’s ever going to be. But maybe it’s not so terrible that you can justify asking for help. It’s just not good enough that it feels like you or that you are enjoying it. That’s the plateau.

Which by the way is a phrase that I came up with because there didn’t seem to be a term for it and yet almost every widow I’ve ever worked with experiences it. Almost every widow I’ve ever worked with gets stuck somewhere there. And then we can apply the healing grief spiral, right? Maybe you never learned how to settle the storm in a way that actually helps your nervous system feel safe. So you stay in a cycle of overwhelm. You stay in a cycle of avoidance and dysregulation or you learn to avoid your emotions with social media or food or wine or staying busy or all the myriad of ways that we distract ourselves because we don’t have the tools to settle that storm.

Maybe you never really learned how to choose thoughts intentionally. Maybe it’s kind of like trying to read the label from inside the jar, you can’t actually see that your thoughts aren’t facts, so you don’t even know to challenge them. So everything your grief brain says sounds like a fact and you aren’t choosing thoughts intentionally, you’re just being whipped around by the thoughts that your grief brain offers you.

Maybe you’re spending a lot of time waiting to feel clear or confident or motivated or certain before you act. And because you can’t choose your thoughts on purpose because you don’t know you have that ability and you’ve never really strengthened that muscle, you aren’t taking meaningful action toward the life that you want. And so life isn’t heading you towards what you want. It’s actually getting smaller and smaller, moving you away from what you want or staying the same. That’s the plateau. That’s how it happens. I guarantee you there’s nothing wrong with you. I guarantee you that you are capable of breaking free of the grief plateau. It has nothing to do with how much you want it or don’t want it. It has nothing to do with how motivated you are or are not. It’s that doing it requires a set of skills that most of us were never taught.

And I want to tell you that the grief plateau can be very sneaky because it doesn’t always feel dramatic. Sometimes it just feels kind of neutral. It’s like, eh, I’m okay. I’m doing what I need to do. It’s not terrible. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible. It’s so much better than it once was that it feels neutral. This is what breaks my heart, honestly, is when people stay stuck here. When people stay there, when people decide, when widows decide that’s their new normal, ugh, no. That does not need to be where you stay. But if you don’t know there’s another possibility, if you don’t know there’s actual tools for moving through grief differently, then of course you could stay there for a really long time. You could stay there forever. If you’re not willing to prioritize yourself, if you don’t believe that you deserve to love your life again, if you aren’t willing to put yourself in places where you can get the tools you need, you will stay there. And that’s why I care so much about teaching the work that I teach.

I want you to know that not only is grief not linear, but if you start to feel stuck, that does not mean you’re doomed, it just means you need some tools that you don’t have. So the next time you feel extra griefy, the next time your brain wants to tell you that you’re failing or that you’re slipping backwards or something, I want you to remind yourself, you are not sliding backwards. There is no such thing. You are not back at the beginning. You are not doing grief wrong. You’re just on another turn of the spiral. Grief was never linear. Then you can ask yourself, what would it look like to settle the storm inside of me right now? And once you’ve done that, what am I thinking? Are my thoughts moving me toward what I want or away? Do I want to keep believing these thoughts that just keep showing up?

And then once you choose your thoughts on purpose, what’s the next smallest meaningful action I could take? That is the work. It’s not magical. It has nothing to do with moving on or getting over it. It’s about meeting yourself with compassion, meeting yourself with intention, and choosing something different for yourself. So grief is not linear. It is layered, it is messy, it is human. When you understand that and you can stop using your experience as evidence that you’re broken, you can stop shaming yourself for having extra hard or grief-y days. You no longer tell yourself that a grief wave means that you’re failing, and you start supporting yourself differently. That’s when we create something different. And that’s how grief begins to feel more integrated, maybe never easy, but easier. And that’s when we can start loving life again.

If you want help actually applying this work in your life, not just understanding it conceptually, but actually doing it, go to CoachingWithKrista.com and click on the Work With Me tab and you can check out the programs that I have for you. This is what I do every day. This is what I love doing.

If this episode was helpful, make sure you’re following the podcast so you don’t miss future episodes. I would love it if you would take a minute to rate and review the show. That helps more widows find this support. That makes me very happy. That’s what I have for you this week. Remember, I love you. You’ve got this. Take care and I’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.

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.