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March 3 - March 26, 2025
Grieving people simply don’t have the energy to do any extra
work. You need the comfort of someone who gets it and tells you in the simplest terms possible what’s in store for you. Bitch, I got you.
Grief is a fucking nightmare, not just because of your heartbreaking loss, but because of the gazillion annoying, ridiculous, and frustrating symptoms that come along with it.
People don’t experience grief in a neat, linear fashion,
The paradoxes of grief are magical, because everyone’s grief is completely unique,
Attempting to shorten or avoid any aspect of your grief would end in disaster.
mean what happens to a human physically, cognitively, emotionally, and spiritually after the death of a loved person in their life.
Grief lives in your body, in your thoughts, and in your feelings. It’s in your behavior and what you prioritize. It’s in your choices, how much or little you sleep, and how much or little you accomplish in a day. It’s there when you brush your teeth, when you watch television, when you scramble to get to an appointment, and when you scream-cry in your closet. Grief is there in sad moments, but grief is also there in the happy ones as well. You even grieve when you are actively resisting grief. To me, grief exists in the life lived and the human experience as you try to fucking exist after your
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Thinking that grieving is being sad or having a hard time is a way we fool ourselves because our grief is much more holistic than that.
I want you to get used to saying to yourself, no matter what you’re going through, “THIS IS GRIEF.”
I am under the influence of grief at all times.
Functioning in grief is how well you are able to live your life the way that you did before the death.
Functioning is the fever.
Remember, grief is the lived experience after the death, so the grief never stops even if your temperature goes up or down just like the grief never stops if your functioning goes up or down. People often mislabel low functioning as
grief.
It’s helpful to know that grief is the constant companion, while functioning will go up and down because that’s what normal grief does to us.
The reason your grief is still bad when you’re having a good day/high functioning is because it’s still bad that your person is dead.
It’s understood in the grief world that two to five years to is the “average” expected amount of time it will take for you to return to the normal level of functioning you were capable of before the death of your person.
where the death was traumatic or violent, the estimate is more in the five-year range,
We consent to the grief we will experience when we agree to love someone. There is the love part, and then there is the loss part. You cannot have one without the other.
“You will never get over this, but you will learn to live with it”
Will the pain lessen? Of course. Will the signs and symptoms of grief lessen? Absolutely, but the grief will remain because your person will always remain a part of you.
when you recall them or experience an important life event without them, it will bring up grief in one of its many forms (sadness, laughter, bittersweet memories, gratitude, or love).
They will continue to influence your life in conscious and unconscious ways, for as long as you live. Your person will always be a part of you and your life, and that is NOT something to “get over.”
grief as a process of practicing living without your person here on the planet with you,
Take it one day at a time.
A lot of days, you will take it one hour, even one minute at a time.
“What’s the next right thing?”
How you’re functioning IS NOT YOUR FAULT, and it is not ridiculous that you have to take things a day at a time or ask yourself what to do next. It’s actually fucking brilliant. Proud of you.
Full permission to do what I need to grieve. I would treat each mood variation like a grief guest and allowed that expression to stay however long I needed it to.
Full permission to trust my grieving process. Whatever god-awful grief guest showed up, I’d be like, “welcome bitch, I guess we’re doing this now.”
When I say something is loaded, I mean it’s extremely emotionally charged, and people will go off at the drop of a hat.
Grief is a devastating difficult stressor on us physically, emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually.
You are fucking traumatized by death and grief, so you won’t be able to help it.
The trauma responses think they are coming to the rescue. Practice self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, and self-kindness.
the trauma responses, I teach about them extensively on my Instagram, YouTube Channel and TikTok (@advancedbitches).
HALT. Don’t allow yourself to get too Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. If an addict doesn’t heed HALT, they risk relapse. Honoring HALT while grieving will help you resist falling unconsciously into your trauma responses.
Also, if you “haven’t cried,” that doesn’t make you bad; it may mean that the numbness is preventing the tears
When you feel depersonalization, it’s as though you aren’t in your body; you feel like you’re almost observing yourself walk through life. If someone asks if you’re hungry, you may realize that you have no idea whether you’re hungry or not because you truly are not in touch with your body.
Derealization is when you feel disconnected from the outside world, almost like you are watching life as if it was a movie.
Get ready to feel completely and utterly exhausted because I think of the early experience of grief is very similar to when you have the regular flu
“The Grief Flu?”
The Grief Flu makes you extremely fatigued because your psychological immune system (Rachman, 2016) is doing the same thing as your physiological immune system; it’s helping you survive.
psychological immune system
You don’t ever have to beat yourself up, because you completely understand that difficulty concentrating, forgetfulness, numbness, and extreme fatigue will be your constant companions for a while.
They thought they might be grieving wrong, and the truth of “The Irreverent Grief Guide” is that grieving wrong is impossible.
Grieving isn’t a certain feeling, emotion, action or experience.
If you are alive and someone you loved died, every moment will be a grief-related moment.
(Important: there is no grief experience that is worse than another grief experience. Grief experiences are different.
It’s unhealthy to refuse to accept help. You can consider accepting help from others as a new part of your healthy psychological and/or spiritual grief practices.
