Tender Truths About Grief

Grief doesn't follow a schedule — and neither does your healing. In this episode, Patience gets honest about why grief moves in ebbs and flows, why the waves coming back doesn't mean you've failed, and how faith can hold you when you least expect to fall apart. Through real stories and practical tools, you'll leave this episode with permission to stop rushing your healing — and the courage to keep going anyway.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to another episode of Healing Her Halo, a women empowerment platform for women who've experienced trauma and the struggles of mental health. This is a safe space to gain guidance on how to navigate through the storms of life and how to stay present in the light when the sun shines again. Be sure to download, share, and subscribe so you can help heal another woman's halo. Now, here's your host, Patience Murray.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Welcome back to Healing Her Halo, a space where you don't have to be perfect and hold it all together, a space where you can feel broken and learn at the same time. And today we're talking about grief. And not just the kind that comes with when someone passes, but the grief that shows up after a relationship ends, after you lose a version of yourself that you thought you never would, or maybe your life just doesn't look like the way that you pictured when you were a little girl by this time. For whatever reason, we're going to be talking about all different kinds of grief and how we can navigate grief in 2026. Well, here's what most people don't tell you about grief. And it was never meant to be a five-stage process that you check off a list, right? So navigating grief is different for everybody, especially depending on what you're dealing with exactly. And research actually supports the idea that grief is not linear, it comes in waves, sometimes calm, sometimes crashing. And you can be completely fine at breakfast and then completely undone just from hearing a song during the afternoon. That's not a setback. That's grief doing exactly what grief does, showing up in waves. And when I lost my brother in 2020, every time I even say it, like the sentence, it just hurts my heart in such a way that I feel the heaviness of how I felt when I first found out that he had passed away. And those waves of those emotions still live in my body. And you may experience something similar to that. And psychologists call this the oscillation model, meaning you naturally move between processing the loss and re-engaging with life. Both are necessary, both are healthy. The problem is we've been taught that if we're still grieving six months later, something is wrong with us. But there is nothing wrong with you. You are not behind on your healing. The waves don't mean you haven't healed at all. They mean you loved deeply. They mean it mattered to you. And they mean your body is still doing the sacred work of integrating something that changed you. And that could be so different, so extremely different depending on the scenario that you're in. Maybe you're dealing with grief of not losing a brother or someone you love. Maybe it's grief of not being who you thought you were going to be by this time. And grieving the idea of what your life could have been. But no matter what you're navigating right now, I want you to know that it gets better. And that it gets better. And as you move through the waves, you can and you will, you will get to a point where you are able to recognize when you're going through a wave, so it doesn't feel so reactive, but you can give yourself the love, the support, and the tenderness that you need during those moments to help yourself. And sometimes, one practical takeaway before we get into the tips here is sometimes I'll hug myself and say, it's okay, patience. Maybe you're doing that, saying your name and holding yourself, giving yourself a hug and just rubbing your arm, right? Sometimes that can ground you to a space where you can feel present in the moment to be able to logically move through what you need to be able to get through a moment. And sometimes that little gesture with yourself, recognizing when you are going through something, and maybe trying to figure out and name what it is, but you feel the sensations of that pain and that trauma and that grief in your body. That's one practical thing that you can absolutely do. ASAP. Now, the first tip in moving through the waves of grief is absolutely naming what it is that you're grieving specifically. Grief without a name has nowhere to go. So get specific about what it is that you feel this heaviness towards. Is it the person? Is it the future you imagine with them? Is it the version of yourself you were when they were alive? The more specific you get, the more your nervous system can locate and release what it's holding. You can also journal. I journal every single day. I don't miss a day of journaling, but it's very important to establish routines, systems, and processes for yourself and really hold yourself to staying in your systems as much as you can and building the muscle memory. So when you are experiencing a moment of grief, you have the muscle memory of doing actions that are going to stabilize your nervous system. And you can try prompts, right? And the right prompts can bring you through and help you transition through a moment, even without talking to a therapist. If you can't access them, if you have to schedule an appointment, those things take time, right? But if you are journaling and you're talking about your emotions and your feelings, try using a prompt, I am grieving blank because it meant blank. Try doing that, starting in a place where you can name what it is that you are grieving and what it meant, and start that process of release. Tip number two is stop timing your healing. And to stop timing in general across the board is really a great life advice. Remove the invisible deadline that you've placed on yourself to be perfect, to be healed in your healed girl era, right? Remove that timeline. There's no you should be over it by now moment, right? And when you catch yourself saying things that are not compassionate toward yourself, replace it with I am still healing, and that is allowed. It's okay for me to go through my process in my own time frame. I am not broken. Reaffirm that your journey, as unique as it is, is still valued and it's still validated. You are going through your own timeline, and that's okay. Grief necessarily, it doesn't necessarily have an expiration date. It just continues to transform in how we experience it, but give yourself permission, full permission, to be and process. It's okay. You're okay. And if it's not 100% okay today, I promise you it gets better. And tip number three create a grief ritual. A grief ritual is like a container. Choose a certain time, maybe ten minutes in the morning, to feel, write, cry, or pray. Put on a song, then turn it off and reflect on how you feel. And if you are grieving a person that you've lost, maybe recently, and that pain is so great that it's stopping you from moving through your day, honoring that person that you love that you've lost right in the first moments of the day. It allows you to process that and move through it. But it allows you to put a moment, a boundary around these experiences with the grief. So you can deal with it in a safe place. Nothing is worse than being in an environment where you sort of have to perform through the grief, where you have to show up through the pain, and you don't have a moment to cry, so you hold back the tears because you absolutely cannot do that here, wherever here is for you. Having a space, allowing yourself a space, even if it's 10 minutes, to feel, to cry, to get it out, to journal, rage journal if you need to, about why you're feeling upset. And sometimes that anger is a part of the grief too, being angry as well. So allow all of that to come out because holding all of that in, it's it's like choking, you're choking yourself, choking your soul. And you need a safe place, a real routine way to navigate and get those emotions out. And journaling first thing in the morning is you're really, especially when you're grieving, crying, praying, those are all great releases that you can do to help you navigate through grief. Number four, let your body grieve, not just your mind. Grief, like a lot of other traumas, live in the body. Tightness in the chest, heaviness in the limbs, a lump in the throat. These are grief speaking somatically, okay? So move your body intentionally. You can go for a walk, you can stretch, you can place your hand on your heart, or you can hug yourself like I do and rub your arm and say that everything is gonna be okay. You can breathe intentionally, you can slow your breath down. Your body knows how to release it if you give it permission to do so. Give your body permission to release what it is that you're holding on to because you can't hold it in. And if you need to go outside and hug a tree, sometimes I'll go outside and place my hand on the tree, and sometimes I can feel myself just allowing the tree to hold my weight. And sometimes, especially if you're feeling alone and if you're feeling like there's no one around that can give you that support that you need right now, you'd be surprised how just going and placing your hand on the tree and allowing your weight to be held up by that tree trunk will allow you to feel a sense of deep safety and love that may be the exact thing that you needed to navigate through the day. Okay, and that brings me to the final point and tip, which is anchor yourself in faith when the wave comes. When the wave hits unexpectedly, in the car, in the grocery store, in the middle of a normal Tuesday afternoon, right? Have an anchor ready. Have a scripture, a prayer, a single phrase you return to, something that reminds you that this wave will pass, that you are held, that you are not alone in this. Faith doesn't make any hard thing disappear, especially not grief, but it gives you somewhere to put it. Right? Whenever I'm really going through something, especially when I'm thinking about my brother, and it just feels heavy. It's so heavy, and I recognize I'm present enough in myself and my body to realize that it's so heavy that I must hand it over to God. I must hand it over to a higher power that can hold it when I can't. And I love, I love, I love being a Christian woman in this day and age because having this knowing and this awareness that there is a God that loves you so much, that cares about you so much, that you don't have to do life alone, and you don't have to carry the hard things by yourself. It was the biggest, biggest blessing and realization for me that I didn't have to carry all of these things alone. And grief is no different. You can hand that over too. And if it's a verbal declaration that you're handing it over, Lord, I hand over my grief to you because I can't hold it. But I thank you for being, for being a God that loves me enough that you are willing to hold what I can, that you will never give me too much to bear. Okay? That's what it looks like in the moment when you are releasing it and when you're anchoring yourself in faith. Know that God already, already had a solution to the problem before the problem was ever created. And if grief, these waves are coming in unexpectedly, know that there's already scriptures in place, there's already words that you can speak over yourself to anchor yourself. Know that your steps are ordered, know that there's nothing too hard for God, know that God had good words planned for you long ago, and staying in grief and going through these ebbs and flows of grief is not the picture that He had for your life. So, in closing, I just want to leave you with this. If grief comes back today, you wake up and it hits you out of nowhere. That's not evidence that you're broken. It's evident that healing is still happening, and that is okay. The ebb and flow are both part of the same river, and that river is moving you forward even when it doesn't feel like it. So you don't need to perform, you know, you don't have to act healed all the time, but you can just keep going. And I want you to keep going, and I want to I want you to know, I want you to know that it does get better. It may not get easier, but it gets better. And I'm so proud of you. If anybody hasn't told you today, I'm so, so proud of you. Stay tuned for more Healing Her Halo episodes. I'll be bringing in more guests coming back soon to give us more tangible takeaways that we can use to put a spark back into our Halo.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Thank you for listening. Please follow our social media at Healing Her Halo for more updates. Also, be sure to share with a friend who needs a little spark put back in her Halo today.