Processing Grief: Giving it the Time and Space it Needs [Grief Series 3]
Complex emotions and experiences are a part of grief and loss. Whether you are in the midst of grieving or supporting a loved one through their journey, finding healing and peace during this difficult time is crucial.
In this episode, I discuss the complex internal roadmaps of grief and examine how it does not follow any one predictable path. Grief needs space and time to be integrated and it can show up unexpectedly. To prepare for events likely to bring grief to the surface, I talk about the importance of journaling and paying attention to important milestones, not just the day of death.
I also explore the five stages of grief, finding meaning in grief, and allowing yourself to experience and express your emotions fully, with the goal of helping listeners find healing and peace during a challenging time.
Resources mentioned:
Still: Making A Whole When Parts Go Missing: https://www.drkimber.net/books
The Five Stages of Grief (from On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross)
The Five Stages of Grief by Linda Pastan
Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief by David Kessler
Preparation (Article from The Sun Magazine)
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Please remember that this podcast is not a replacement for treatment by a healthcare or mental health professional. This content is created for education and entertainment purposes only.
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This transcript was created by A.I. — please forgive translation mistakes.
Welcome to, I thought I was over this.
I'm your host, Dr. Kimber, a licensed clinical psychologist, trauma healer, and fellow life journeyer. Every episode we dive into the science of humane. Whether you find yourself feeling like you've just hit an iceberg and don't know where help is coming from, or you're ready to trade in your raft for something bigger, you aren't alone.
Grab what you need, get comfortable, and let's do this.
Today's episode is sponsored by my newly released memoir, still making A Whole When Parts Go Missing. You can hear my author's note and parts of the first chapter in episode 50, which was really the unofficial start of my grief series, which I am going to continue today. But I wanted to share with you a reader who reached out to me this week said, I had to let you know how much I'm enjoying your book.
It's so well written, and another reader reached out to say, I'm sad it's over. When is your next book coming out? So, I'm so grateful to know how much it's impacting people and helping give space for growth. I love that. That was why I wrote it, is to really help people find parts of themselves. So I wanna review what has gone before this one in the series.
Episode one started with children and grief describing how to approach different ages of children, including infants as a grieving parent. And I reminded you that children pick up the emotions of the family and they need different supports depending on their age. The second episode of the series was with Sofia Montiel, where I interviewed her about being a middle schooler when her mom was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer and how she's moved into high school with her grief.
And her mom had died in 2018. It's a really beautiful episode, and if you know anyone who has a grieving teenager, this episode will absolutely be a blessing to them. Well, in this episode I'm going to address some of the internal roadmaps of grief. As I have been saying, grief is messy. It's wild. It doesn't have a path to follow.
And what I can guarantee you is that it shows up at surprising times, like when you're walking down the street and suddenly are struck with the finality of death when you hear sirens in the distance or when you're eating dinner, and that other person isn't there or hasn't been there for five years.
Yet there was something about today's dinner that hit you with your longing for that person. And the advice I want to leave with you is grief, needs, space and time in order to be integrated. And what this might look like is when you know there are events that are likely to bring the grief to the surface.
Family events like holiday gatherings, weddings, baby showers, trips. Give yourself time to do things like journal. Even if you might initially be unaware of the grief, but also pay attention to anniversaries of important memories, not just the day of death, but significant events in that journey. Well, if you've read anything on grief, you likely have come across Elizabeth Kubler Ross's Five Stages of Grief.
She was a Swiss psychiatrist and in her work she identified five different stages in which things come up, feelings, emotions, behaviors come up around grief. And I think in her work, she has been misunderstood at times as calling these stages prescriptive rather than. They can come and go, that once you hit what she calls the fifth stage radical acceptance, that does not mean that you're gonna stay there or that you have arrived and you're never going to grieve.
Rather, we would expect these stages to come and go depending on what is coming up. And so let me go over those and also to say like, her whole intention with these stages is to help people feel less alone. So if you might feel guilty about feeling any of these things, she really wanted you to know. No, these are all part of the normal process.
So denial, shock, and disbelief that the loss has occurred. You know, in denial we can escape by distraction. We might tell ourselves stories like it doesn't matter. We could even pretend that it didn't happen. I have, um, couple that has experienced baby loss and, you know, leaving the hospital, cleaning out the nursery, and then going on and.
That would be a stage of denial where you're pretending as if it all could be wiped clean with no looking back. The second stage that she describes is anger that someone we love is no longer here in anger. We can blame ourselves, blame others, and we can really feel like, why me in this stage bargaining.
All the what ifs and regrets are in this stage, stage of depression. We have sadness from the loss, and then we move into acceptance, acknowledging the reality of the loss Again. I would really expect these stages to be more like a circle where you can be in any spot at any time. I recently took a class from Merabi Star and she read to us this poem called The Five Stages of Grief, and I would love to read it to you.
Now, the Five Stages of Grief by Linda Pastin. The Night I Lost You, someone pointed me towards the five stages of grief. Go that way. They said it's easy. Like learning to climb stairs after the amputation. And so I climbed. Denial was first I sat down at breakfast carefully setting the table for two. I passed you the toast.
You sat there, I passed you the paper, you hid behind it, anger. Seemed more familiar. I burned the toast, snatched the paper, and read the headlines myself. But they mentioned your departure and so I moved on to bargaining. What could I exchange for you? The silence after storms, my typing fingers before I could decide depression came puffing up.
A poor relation. Its suitcase tied together with string in the suitcase. Were bandages for the eyes and bottles of sleep. I slid all the way down the stairs feeling nothing and all the time hope flashed on and off in defective neon. Hope was a signpost pointing straight in the air. Hope was my uncle's middle name.
He died of it after a year. I am still climbing though my feet slip on your stone face. The tree line has long since disappeared. Green is a color I have forgotten, but now I see what I am climbing towards. Acceptance, written in capital letters. A special headline, acceptance. It's name is in lights. I struggle on waving and shouting below.
My whole life spreads. Its surf. All the landscapes I've ever known or dreamed of. Below a fish jumps the pulse in your neck. Acceptance. I finally reach it. But something is wrong. Grief is a circular staircase. I have lost you. One of the next stages of grief that David Kessler has written about is finding meaning in grief and finding meaning to me isn't something that you really are on the search for.
It emerges in the work of grieving. There are many times that we think we can hurry through grief. We can get to the other side if we would just feel all the feelings. Now we can get through the pain and the hurt, and we have these fantasies of how we can quickly go through. But really with grief, you have to enter into it.
Say, come here, pull up a chair. And then find mini chairs to pull up as you find safe people to be with you in the grief and somehow, some way you do the impossible and experience the reality that you find yourself grieving. And we together as you have your community. Build a container to do in that moment what our minds and hearts have previously thought was the impossible.
And it is here that we can find meaning again. You know, when we're trying to do grief, we in our minds the right way. We can feel this pressure, something will emerge. Something that you didn't know was. Possible cuz you hadn't yet entered the Grief Club. And I really wanna remind you that grief is a natural response to love.
We love something and we enjoy it. And then when it's gone, when that person is gone, we feel that deeply Grief is a complex and multifaceted process that involves a wide range of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Grief comes rolling over as we experience the loss of the loved one, a job or relationship, any significant aspect of your life.
As I was walking the other day, I was grieving that once upon a time I didn't have to navigate hip pain like I do now from some of the. Chronic pain that I deal with. So there are always shifts, and though that kind of loss is different than the death, there's still these layers of loss. And so as we allow ourselves to navigate those and to somehow come to some acceptance of it, it really helps us.
Find our way in carrying what we didn't want to carry. I came across another poem on grief that I wanna write to you. This one is from the Sun Magazine, October, 2022. This one's called Preparation by Bill Gross. Sometimes I slip ice into the neck of my water bottle, long thin strips from a special tray whose cubes resemble icicles in the winter.
I step onto the welcome mat to taste the air and get a feel for how many layers I'll need. You can prepare for some things others fall on you. Like meteors, ripping, open the sky. My brain injured friend has difficulty forming coherent sentences. One day we were making plans to run the Disney World Marathon.
Then she was pushing a walker, finding it hard to navigate corners in her house. Life and all it grants us is, but a short term loan. Most acquaintances don't understand why I rise so early to pound pavement in neverending loops because I can. Both of those poems. So Rich, one of the things that I sometimes do with poems is just write down some lines or phrases that stand out to me, and you can pick those as a writing prompt and journal about them.
The most important thing about journaling is just keep the pen moving. Don't let any editor just allow the freedom to write whatever comes up. Well, back to grief. One of the most important things to understand, I think, is that grief is a process. There is no set timeline. There's no correct way to grieve.
Everyone experiences grief differently and what works for one person may not work for another. And some people may experience intense emotions like the sadness, anger, guilt, depression, while others may feel numb or disconnected from their emotions, kind of a walking shell, some people may seek solace in talking to friends and family.
While others may prefer to spend time alone. The important thing in grief is to allow yourself to feel whatever emotions come up and to find ways to cope that work for you. I had someone the other day say they just wanted to get through it, just feel it all at once so that they could get to the other side sooner, and I can so appreciate that sentiment.
No one, not one of us likes pain and suffering, especially our mind. Even, you know, if you're a cutter, you're cutting because you wanna control the pain. Most people, it's why they cut. You can control when the pain happens cuz life is so uncontrollable. But depending on our past history with grief and trauma, we may be angry that once again we are feeling pain.
And so we can wanna get rid of it, but this is developing a story that I would call a simple-minded, wanting to get out of feeling. Pain really isn't taking in that the pain that's there. It's because something good was lost. Someone who you love just gone, or maybe a community is now absent from your life.
Maybe you've lost your innocence. Grief is really a signal that you've lost something or someone of value, and your grief is proof that you still carry this person or place, or a thing, or a situation, whatever it may be inside of you. It's not lost, but it has needed to change or shape into whatever it is and whatever it will become.
By the process of grieving grief will always live inside of you, and in some way, if you let it, this is the signal that you loved and that that love is still inside of you. You're carrying whatever it is that you're grieving still inside of you. And that to me is why it's important to give grief the proper space that it needs so that you.
Can really deeply, deeply, deeply identify what it is you're carrying inside of you, the good that's there, along with the pain and the suffering. So how I advise this person is instead of focusing on getting through grief quickly, what we wanna focus on are finding healthy ways to cope. Healthy ways to support yourself during this time.
And of course, don't be. You can't be perfect. You're gonna do some unhealthy things too, but please don't do self-destructive things, even online shopping. Oh my goodness, in grief it you can run up thousands of dollars of bills or make poor decisions around substances that you find yourself grieving in even more things.
Don't put too much pressure on yourself to do it again. Exactly right, or always healthy or those kind of things. Some of the ways that you might find is that you can seek support from friends and family. Maybe you don't wanna talk about it. You can let them know that, but you wanna go for a walk, you wanna go for a hike, you can join a grief support group.
There are now grief support groups online in person. Many hospitals have them. If you're in Long Beach, I love New Hope, grief Support. They have groups that start and stop, and there are many places in Southern California that have grief groups. You can practice self-care like exercising, meditation.
Finding ways to honor the memory of the person or thing or situation that was lost. How can you help bring significance and closure in a meaningful way? And I'm always one to think, how can you process this creatively? Maybe you wanna make a collage, a poem, music, an essay. A book, you know that my book was my way of pouring my grief out onto the page.
If you don't feel creative, maybe do something that I would call like word salad. You're just naming words that remind you of this person or a thing or situation that you've lost. And if you're just numb and disconnected, well then find the words from another to express it. You know, these poems. You can Google, let Google be your best friend of Google poems, I found in the throes of grief that pros and sentences were just too much for my brain.
So I really leaned in to poems, and I created poems because I couldn't string together words on a page to make a sentence. So I would like to read to you a poem that I wrote that's in my book. It's on page 63. It's called, not Another Day a Funeral Motorcade Passed Me while I ran. Pain of an internal force caught my breath, tears mixed with sweat.
A Living Soul is no more gone. I find no peace in the idea of a future reuniting. I long only for the now for what I don't have. Well, in closing, I wanna remind you it's important to give yourself time and space to grieve, to be patient and kind to yourself throughout the process. And while it absolutely makes sense and is tempting to try to rush through the pain of grief, really taking the time to grieve can lead to deeper healing, can lead to finding something that you didn't expect to find that you couldn't have found until you carried the impossible.
What seemed to be impossible before you had to carry it, this loss, this huge loss. And I really wanna be clear. I'm not saying that you ever need to feel good or have peace, that you are in the proverbial grief club. You don't have to like this, that you're here. I think God has so much space for protest and dissatisfaction for being put here.
Why me? I think there's a lot of space, and yet when we find ourselves in the grief club, we're here. We can't, we can't change that. We can't bargain our way out of it. And so you're not alone. And that's I think, the most important thing about grief. I hope that in this podcast, you're carrying that away.
You are not. You're not alone. You're not crazy for having the thoughts that you're having if you can, oh, you're in the process of making peace with the reality, and we are grieving people. None of us get away with not grieving, so I hope. That as we allow ourselves, as you allow yourself to feel and process our emotions and to seek support from others and find those coping mechanisms that can bring us life, that we together can navigate the process of grief and move forward in a way that feels authentic and meaningful to us, to you making something the shape of grief.
Is my friend Jeff Jensen once wrote about. Well, it has been a blessing to be with you. You can find me at dr underscore K I M B e r on Insta or sign up for my newsletter@drkimber.net. D r k i m b e r.net n e t. Thank you. You are a sacred being. You matter. You belong. You are not alone.