Five Worthwhile Lessons to Help Shape Your Grieving

The journey of grief is ongoing. It changes over time but is part of the human experience.

What I share in this article is simply some lessons that are landing for me while I travel my own grief journey and walk alongside others on theirs.

Five Worthwhile Lessons to Help Shape Your Grieving

In reflecting, reading, working with grieving people, and learning to tell stories, I’m noticing several things as I continue to grow and change. I want to share five lessons I’m learning in hopes that one of them will land where you are — and you can add one of your own.

1. Grief and mourning go hand in hand and are both needed

Grief is the the collection of internal thoughts and feelings you experience when someone dies or something of value is lost. Mourning is “grief gone public” or “the outward expression of grief” (Wolfelt)

You need both!

2. When you want to tell you story “again,” don’t listen to that voice in your head that says, “People are tired of listening to my story.”

It’s true that many people don’t feel comfortable with your story of loss. But don’t worry about them — find those empathetic caring souls who will listen because they do care and they are comfortable hearing what you have to say.

We need to learn to work through our grief until our grief is worked through!

3. An empathetic witness feels and understands your pain and creates a safe place where growth and healing can happen

Talking to an empathetic witness creates the space and safety to let out what’s inside without fear of judgment. It’s also the place where we eventually start to see a shift into our awareness that helps facilitate growth and healing.

The whole notion of simply listening to how you feel, gives voice to things I’m not even aware of. — Curt Thompson

4. Our brain chemistry changes for the better when people tune in to where we are in the present moment

There’s a word that describes what babies need when they go looking for a safe and soothing adult — it’s attunement. Grieving people need attunement as well. It’s given when pure listening happens instead of problem solving, advice giving, or minimizing the grief.

When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. — Dr. Dan Siegel

5. Receiving support to mourn thoroughly this time creates a pathway to believe you can do it again next time

I know this process well. In 2011, when I had my motorcycle accident, I suffered multiple losses, grieved and mourned deeply, and reintegrated that experience into my life.

When Vicky died in 2020, I unconsciously had a pathway of hope that encouraged me to keep going — knowing I would grow through it and find the light of day at the other end of the long tunnel. My brain was rewired during my previous experience and set me up to realize that I’d be OK. Not free from the pain of loss and the difficult journey of grief but aware that I would navigate somehow.

What Have You Learned on Your Journey?

As you look at the losses you have grieved or are grieving, what’s a lesson you have learned or are learning now?