The world has always been changing but covid gave us more change in a few years than any of us ever dreamed of.

When change is small and incremental and we have time to acclimatize, we hardly notice the process … but covid wasn’t small or incremental, it stopped everything, all at once and we Noticed.

We noticed what we lost and we noticed what was suddenly out of reach…

Now we’re noticing the things that did not return to the way they were….  and for those changes and losses, both large and small, we are grieving.

We’re grieving plans that won’t come to fruition because of the ways the world has changed.   We’re grieving years lost trying to make old rules work and the new realization that new skills need to be learned and practiced.   Many of us are grieving the scarcity of folks who are safe to talk to about any of this.

The big lesson that covid taught us is that we need each other.   We are all more fragile than we were admitting and our emotional and mental healths deserve more care than they were getting.    As we learn to navigate this familiar-but-different world, many are looking for new and better ways to care for themselves and better skills to teach their children.

Recovering from grief is almost always about unearthing unspoken truths and speaking them with love and respect.

When you’re ready to talk, Grief Recovery Listens.

When life gets messy, emotions get messy and you may feel as though you’re a mess … even though intellectually, you’re doing okay…

The quality of our lives doesn’t rely solely on our intellect, it also depends on our emotional health and the support systems we’ve got to maintain that health.  Most folks aren’t taught how to maintain emotional health, instead they’re taught intellectual strategies for understanding, ignoring, or coping with pain so that they can get back to work and silently carry on.   Few of us ever learned how to name our emotions honestly and to heal our heart when it hurts.

In order to heal messy emotional pain you need tools that work on your emotions, not intellectual rationalizations for why you hurt.

Grief Recovery teaches people how to heal emotional pain using emotional tools.

… because trying to heal an emotional pain with intellect, is like trying to paint a wall with a hammer…

… it just makes a mess …

Have you added it up?

Are you honest with yourself about what the last few years have cost you… ?

… or the years before that?

Do you treat yourself with compassion and kindness,

… for all that you’ve been through?

When we don’t keep an accurate account of what it takes to get through each day, the tough times can find us with low reserves and we run the risk of falling into a kind of emotional overdraft.   From there, it’s easy to treat ourselves and everyone we meet with less love and kindness than they deserve.

The covid years showed us the cost of ignoring this basic accounting… and now many people are trying to rebalance their personal accounts.

People are looking at what they were taught to do, what they did and what they got from following the old rules.   Many are choosing to step off and find something different for themselves because of what they are seeing.

Even if your life isn’t changing much, the shuffling of others is a palpable and unsettling feeling

… and those unsettling feelings often loosen up unexpected grief.

Whether it is grief for the roads not taken… or for the old familiar, that seems long gone, your feels are real and deserve your respect.

Please be gentle with yourself.  xox

Grief Recovery teaches people how to take an accurate accounting and then, how to heal the hurts that have long been overlooked. xox

It can happen because someone died, we lost a job or a pet or a friend.   The loss pushes us to look at what’s important in life and we realize that we’ve been on the wrong path… for a LONG, LONG time.   It’s a frustrating and discouraging revelation.    We look back and see how hard we worked and how far we’ve come and don’t know whether to swear, or scream or lay down and weep.

This is a grief that isn’t often talked about.   It’s separate from the grief that started us looking back.

It’s the grief of stumbling and falling, trying and failing, learning who to trust and who we can lean on… and who we can’t.

One of the painful steps in Grief Recovery is accepting that people we trusted, gave us bad advice or set us on a faulty path.   They meant well…  but they were misinformed.   Worse yet is when we knew in our gut that what they were saying wasn’t right for us… but we were too young or inexperienced to step away from what we were being told.

The grief you feel remembering these moments is real.

Be gentle with yourself. xox

 

“It’s been a hard few years.”

Can you feel the truth rolling in your gut when you read those words?

They don’t need explanation or justification, those words speak volumes on their own.

It’s unfortunate that so few of us are saying those words…  Or talking honestly about how the covid years affected us.   Many are keeping their stories to themselves because of the crappy responses they heard growing up …

“What makes you think you’re so special?”

“Stop acting so Precious.”

“You’re Overreacting.”

Comments like those are hurtful.     They add shame to the pain we’re already carrying and tell us that our listener isn’t a safe person to talk to… but ready or not, we need to start listening to the stories around us.

After three years of coping with the effects of covid, we’re each dealing with our own collection of covid-related after-effects and emotions.  When you add that to life’s usual mix of change, grief and losses, it explains why everyone’s fuse is so short lately and why you may be feeling one inch from a meltdown more often than you’d like.

Pre-covid we’d grown accustomed to a system that exalted tireless workers and shamed anyone who “needed” a rest.   That’s how we learned to pretend that we were fine.   We learned to push through hunger and exhaustion, grief and sorrow as if none of that mattered.   We pushed ourselves to do more with less until we were running on fumes… and we didn’t say anything about it.

Like the townsfolk in the fairytale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, no one was willing to say:  this way of life is bad for us.   It’s bad for our mental, spiritual and emotional health…

Then covid arrived and pushed the system beyond its limits.  Things that we could “put up with” before were suddenly too much.   Some collapsed then, many more are only beginning to feel the effects now…  We need to talk about what’s happening.

There are a million things that need to change if we are to live our happiest, healthiest lives and balancing the needs of everyone, is a tricky thing… but not an impossible one.

It’s scary to be the one who speaks up when others aren’t.

But we’ll never find the solutions we need, if we don’t start talking about the problems.

xoxo

If you’re alive, you’ve known loss.   Until a few years ago most of us suffered our losses relatively quietly.   We would hurt for a bit and if we had an ear available we might kvetch for a bit but then we’d chalk the pain up to the realities of life… and toddle forward, largely along the same path.

And then came Covid.

Now that we seem to be past the worst of the covid years, folks are taking time to evaluate their losses and many are stepping off the same-old-path.

What used to seem important, suddenly doesn’t any more, what never crossed our minds is suddenly vital and what we used to put up with, is now intolerable.   There is a lot of change afoot.

This is what it’s like, to survive BIG Loss…

It gives us a new perspective.

… and with that perspective comes the grief we feel as we see the pain we put ourselves through along the way and all the things we tried that did not pan out the way we hoped they would.

Whether you chose to make be changes because of your new perspective or not, please be gentle with yourself as you grieve.

Your feels are real.  xoxo

We have always been tired.

We have all been doing as much as we could for as long as we could… and too often running at full speed to do it as fast as we could.

Then covid arrived.

Covid didn’t just add “one more thing”… it dumped a train-wreck of change and fear and loss onto already overloaded systems.

Sadly, as soon as the lockdowns were done many folks scrambled to jump back to the old routines of doing too much with too little… and all around us we are seeing the fallout from that.  Frayed tempers, rudeness and meltdowns.   We are all stretched beyond our limits.

This holiday season, please be gentle with yourself.  

Pare down the non-essential and do the things that you love with the people you love … and whenever possible, rest.

xoxo

November 11th is Veteran’s Day in the US and Remembrance Day in Canada.

It is the day that we remember those who gave their all in the world wars.

This year I would ask you to dare to remember others in November as well.

Remember yourself and all that you’ve been through in the last few years…. 

Remember your first taste of the covid years,

Remember those you lost to it.

Remember those we lost who could not be memorialize because of covid.

Do you remember what it was like when you thought you knew what your future looked like?

Remember the jobs and businesses we lost.

We have all felt things that went unsaid these last few years. 

We have all been through the wringer.

Make this November-remembering, your stepping-stone to self-care and kindness and self-compassion.

… and be gentle with yourself.  xoxoxo