How to Process Grief When You’re Used to Pushing Through
There are many ways to learn how to process grief. Not all of them begin with losing someone you love.
Grief can come from the end of a relationship, the loss of a job, a dream that did not happen, or a version of your life that is no longer available to you. It can also surface when you realize that something you worked toward for years is no longer something you actually want.
Sometimes, you may not even recognize what you are experiencing as grief. You simply know that you feel heavier than usual. You may be more emotional, anxious, distracted, or find yourself crying about something you thought you had already moved past.
That is the place I found myself in recently.
While recording Season 2 of I Buy Myself Flowers, I had been moving through the reclamation work I was sharing with listeners. I was exploring the parts of myself that felt messy, needy, exhausted, and ready to want more. As I continued asking myself what I needed and what I truly wanted, I became aware of another part of myself that needed my attention. The part of me that was grieving.
Grief Isn’t Always About Death
For a long time, I had a very specific understanding of grief. I primarily associated it with losing a person. There were many other experiences of loss that I never thought to name as grief.
One of the first times that changed was after I was laid off. I remember telling my therapist that this was one of the first experiences in my life where I had encountered something I simply could not change. The job was gone, the decision had been made, and there was nothing I could do to get it back.
She helped me understand that what I was describing was grief.
That realization gave me a different framework for looking at other moments in my life. There had been experiences of deep loss, disappointment, heartbreak, and change that I had never truly grieved because I had immediately redirected my energy toward whatever needed to happen next.
I went back to work, made another plan, figured out my next move, and kept going. At times, that was necessary. When you are dealing with a layoff, a breakup, financial uncertainty, or another major life transition, there are practical realities that still require your attention. Life does not always create a convenient window for you to stop everything and process what has happened.
The problem is that being able to continue does not necessarily mean you have had the opportunity to heal. Eventually, the feelings we postpone still need somewhere to go.
When You’re Used to Being the Strong One
This can be especially complicated when you are accustomed to being capable.
If you are the person who gets things done, takes care of others, solves problems, and performs at a high level, there may rarely seem to be a good time for grief. There are deadlines to meet, responsibilities to manage, people who depend on you, and practical decisions that cannot simply be put on hold because your heart is broken.
Over time, it is easy to build an identity around being someone who can handle almost anything. I certainly did. There have been many moments when I essentially told myself that we did not have time to be sad right now. I treated heartbreak, illness, exhaustion, injury, and difficult emotions as things that needed to fit themselves around everything else I had to do.
Eventually, though, I had to ask myself an important question: Where does all of that sadness go when you are always the strong one?
We can compartmentalize difficult emotions for a while, and sometimes that ability is an important survival skill. But postponing an emotion is different from processing it. When “I’ll deal with this later” becomes a repeated response to pain, later can quietly turn into months or even years.
What we have not had space to process can continue shaping how we move through our work, our relationships, our bodies, and our lives. This is also one reason some high achievers can become caught in cycles of overwork and burnout. Productivity can give us somewhere to direct our energy while keeping us from having to sit with what we actually feel.
If that sounds familiar, you may also want to read When Success Is Costing You Your Health: Why High Performers Burn Out Even When They’re “Doing Everything Right”.
You Can Grieve Something and Still Be Grateful
Another realization I have had is that grief and gratitude are not mutually exclusive.
Over the past few months, there have been many positive changes in my life. I have experienced growth, transition, and new opportunities that I genuinely appreciate. Because so much of what was happening was good. There was a part of me that felt uncomfortable acknowledging that some of those same changes were also difficult.
But our emotional lives are more complex than that.
You can feel excited about your future while grieving what you are leaving behind. You can genuinely love the life you are creating and still miss pieces of the life you had before. You can feel grateful for where you are while acknowledging disappointment about what did not work out. You can even recognize that you want something different now while mourning the version of yourself who once wanted something else.
Grief does not make gratitude less sincere. Sometimes grief simply means that something mattered to you. Recognizing that truth does not diminish everything that is good about your life now.
How to Process Grief: Start With a Grief Inventory
One practice that has helped me create more intentional space for grief is something I call a Grief Inventory.
The practice itself is simple, although the emotions it brings forward may not be. Before beginning, I encourage you to create some space around the experience. This is probably not an exercise to squeeze into the five minutes before your next Zoom meeting when you know you will immediately need to return to performance mode.
Think instead about what would help you feel supported afterward. Perhaps you take a bath, make yourself a nourishing meal, or get comfortable in bed. Giving yourself a softer landing can make it easier to be honest about what comes up.
You also do not have to do this work alone. If there is someone in your life who knows how to be present without immediately offering advice or trying to solve the problem, you might invite them to sit with you. Sometimes what we need most is not someone who can make the feeling disappear, but someone who can witness us while we allow ourselves to experience it.
When you are ready, begin with these three questions.
1. What happened that I never really let myself be sad about?
Think about the experiences that hurt but that you may have moved through quickly because life required you to keep going. It could have been a breakup, betrayal, layoff, friendship ending, financial setback, rejection, abandoned dream, or even a comment or experience that affected you more deeply than you wanted to admit.
The goal here is not to judge whether an experience was significant enough to deserve grief. There is no threshold you have to meet before you are allowed to acknowledge that something hurt you. If it mattered to you, you can put it on the page.
Give yourself permission to write about the experience. Make it so you do it without immediately trying to make your reaction sound reasonable, mature, grateful, or appropriate. This is simply an opportunity to tell yourself the truth about what you felt.
2. What sadness have I been carrying that was never entirely mine?
Not all of the grief we carry originates with us.
Sometimes we are deeply affected by what happens to someone we love. We may witness a family member struggling, carry the emotional weight of our family, or experience the impact of injustice.
Being affected by another person’s pain does not make your own emotions invalid. It simply gives you an opportunity to notice how much you have been holding and where it came from.
You might acknowledge that an experience affected you deeply. Or that you have been carrying sadness on behalf of people you love. From there, you can begin considering which parts of that emotional weight are genuinely yours to continue carrying and which parts may need to be released.
3. What am I grieving because I’ve grown beyond it?
This may be the most unexpected question in the practice because we tend to associate grief with things going wrong. Sometimes, however, grief accompanies growth.
You may find yourself grieving a version of yourself you once loved. Perhaps a career you invested years in building or relationship that once made sense. Maybe it was a home where an important chapter of your life unfolded, or a goal you once organized your life around. You may even grieve a future that existed only in your imagination but nevertheless felt very real to you.
Growth does not require you to reject the person you used to be or pretend that the old dream never mattered. It simply means that the person you are now may need something different.
I sometimes think about these periods as a “lifequake,” a moment when the structure of your life changes enough that you are left looking at the pieces and deciding what still belongs with you. There can be tremendous possibilities in that moment because you have the opportunity to make more intentional decisions about what you want to carry into the next chapter.
At the same time, choosing what comes with you means acknowledging what will not. Even when leaving something behind is the right decision, there may still be grief in letting it go.
Give Yourself Permission to Be Human
Many of us have spent years learning how to keep ourselves contained. We want to be seen as professional, successful, strong, capable, and reliable, and we may worry that allowing difficult emotions to surface will somehow interfere with those identities.
So we learn to hold a tremendous amount internally while continuing to function externally.
But being human means that the things we experience affect us. Heartbreak affects us. Betrayal affects us. Change affects us. Disappointment affects us. Even growth and opportunity can affect us in complicated ways.
Learning how to process grief is not about becoming less resilient or allowing sadness to take over your life. It is about developing a healthier relationship with your emotional experience so that resilience does not require you to disconnect from yourself.
You can be strong while acknowledging that something hurt. You can be successful while recognizing that you need support. And you can look forward to the next chapter of your life while mourning something you are leaving behind. Gratitude and grief can sit alongside one another without either one invalidating the other.
You do not have to earn permission to experience the full range of what it means to be human.
Listen to the Full Episode
This conversation is part of Season 2 of I Buy Myself Flowers: The Reclamation Season.
In Episode 5, “Reclaiming The Part of Me That Is Grieving,” I share more about my own recent experience with grief. How being “the strong one” shaped the way I learned to move through difficult seasons. And how I am learning to create more room for the emotions I previously pushed aside. I also walk through the Grief Inventory practice in greater detail.
Listen to “Reclaiming The Part of Me That Is Grieving” on Spotify.
You can also find I Buy Myself Flowers on Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
This Week, Buy Yourself Flowers By…
This week, buy yourself flowers by giving yourself permission to grieve something you have been carrying for a while.
You do not need to immediately decide what the experience means, figure out how to move past it, or find a productive lesson in what happened. Instead, see what changes when you simply create enough space to acknowledge what you have not had time, capacity, or permission to feel.
Listen to what that part of you has been trying to tell you. Notice what still hurts, what still matters, and what you may finally be ready to put down. Then, when you are ready, you can decide what deserves to come with you into the next chapter of your life.
Reclaiming your life does not require you to pretend that nothing hurt. Sometimes reclamation means turning toward the part of yourself that has been carrying the pain and finally offering it the attention and care you were not able to give it before.
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