Felling My Way Through Grief

Grief doesn’t care about your timeline and it definitely doesn’t care about what other people think you “should” be sad about. I’m sharing the truth of grieving my dog Benjamin, including how the pain knocked me into a depression, how shame kept me quiet, and why losing a pet can feel like the biggest loss of your life.

We get into the messy reality of anticipatory grief too: the slow decline, the constant vet visits, the bargaining that sounds like “if I do everything right, this won’t happen,” and the way perfectionism turns tragedy into self-blame. I also talk about one of my biggest roadblocks, intellectualizing. When you’re highly analytical or have interoceptive difficulties, it’s easy to understand grief without actually feeling it, and that gap can keep you stuck for years.

From there, we zoom out to the cultural problem. Western grief support often looks like discomfort, time limits, and toxic positivity. Phrases like “they’re in a better place,” “you can get another one,” or “everything happens for a reason” might be meant as comfort, but they can steal someone’s pain. What helps more is holding space, letting sadness exist, and allowing mourning to be real.

I share practical tools that helped me start integrating grief: treating grieving like a practice, learning how to “anger” safely (scream into a pillow, write the letter you never send), making room for crying and sadness even when an SSRI blunts tears, and acknowledging small everyday losses so you’re not blindsided by the big ones. If this connects with you, subscribe, share it with a friend who needs permission to feel, and leave a review so more people can find it.

Where to find me: 
Connect with me on Instagram
Check out my website 
Sign up for a free consult

Transcript

Coming Back After A Low

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Hey Bestie, how are you? I am as of right now, while recording, doing okay. However, I was not okay for a very long time, which is what has kept me away for so long. And I want to talk about it because I want to help others not feel ashamed of their low points. And I was really low. So the topic today is grief. I have been grieving the loss of my dog for 21 months. It has been the absolute worst pain I have ever been in. And that does include losing people. And honestly, I would have been ashamed to say that a few months ago, but my therapist has really helped me to accept the experience I'm having. And my truth is that I have never loved something more than I loved Benjamin. And I'm not sure I will ever love anything like that again. Why do I want to talk about grief? Well, one of the reasons is because I think as a culture, we don't do grief well. We are uncomfortable with other people's grief and therefore judgmental of our own. At best, we try to give ourselves a time limit on how long we're allowed to be sad about our losses. And at worst, we don't even allow ourselves to feel the loss. And the problem with this is that the pain isn't going to go away. It will just be transformed into something else. Emotions don't just disappear. I also want to talk about this because I want to further normalize negative emotion. I think I talk about this indirectly when I talk about goal setting and that sort of thing. I know I've talked about the importance of emotions like commitment and focus and determination and how they might not feel amazing, but they are useful. But I don't know that I've ever talked about things like sadness and anger and how important it is for us to allow those feelings. So after Ben died, I hit an all-time low. But I can see now the grieving process actually started before he died. He was very old. Um he lived till 19. And he was declining, but it was happening very slowly. And in this time, I was definitely experiencing some denial and some bargaining. We were at the vet constantly getting him chiropractic and this treatment called aqua acupuncture, where they inject vitamin B12 into the acupuncture points to stimulate nerves. Um he was on supplements and medications. Like I was really fighting with reality. He was old, he didn't have much time left, but I was doing everything in my power to sort of keep him going and sustain him. Also, in that time, my world got a lot smaller. As he became increasingly dependent on us, I found myself pretty much chained to the house. I stopped going out. I never saw friends. I basically just went to work and came home, and that was it. Near the end, I definitely experienced some anger, but I turned it inwards. One of the meds we had him on gave him seizures, which ultimately sped up the process of his decline. One day he was fine, and the next day he was dying. And I blamed myself for it, even though I was following the doctor's directions. My perfectionism kind of reared its ugly head and told me that I, for some reason, should have known better. All this was going on, and in some way I was processing it, and in other ways, I was not. Like on an intellectual level, I knew what was going on and I talked about it with my therapist, but in true Chris fashion, instead of feeling my way through it, I was trying to think my way through it. See, I have a tendency to intellectualize my feelings. That is one of my neurospicy defense mechanisms. I'm highly analytical and I try to think through everything instead of feeling through things. But I also have interoceptive difficulties, meaning I can't always tell what I'm feeling. So that's a roadblock as well. I was also definitely bargaining. The vet visits increased, and I was doing everything in my power to keep this little nugget alive. Like if I could just do everything right, then it would all be okay. We wouldn't lose him, or at least not until I was ready. But like I was never going to be ready. I was resisting this loss really hard. It's kind of weird though, because once we accepted that it was over, he actually passed on his own. It's almost as if he was waiting for us to be okay with it. But this is when the rest of the emotions arrived for me in full force. The first month I cried every day. Then I fell into a deep depression that lasted a very long time. We're talking like can't get out of bed, no interest in anything, zombie-like numbness. It's funny how looking back at it, I can see the five stages of grief so clearly. But while I was in it, I was not aware of it at all. Again, I think this comes back to not being taught how to grieve as a society. Other cultures definitely do it better. I think about Jewish people sitting Shiva. Like they have a ritual surrounding grieving. Growing up Catholic, we did have wakes and funeral services, but then it was like supposed to be all over once that day was done. Like time to move on. Let's get back to real life. And maybe that was just my family, but it didn't seem like we ever really gave time to be sad. And ritual or not, we're definitely uncomfortable with loss as a culture, especially death. All of Western society is trying to age backwards, all to avoid the inevitable. It's a bit of a problem. And when faced with death, we try to hurry people out of their feelings by saying things like, they're in a better place, or at least they're out of pain now. That's how people try to comfort us, otherwise known as making us feel better. And I think that's because we're so uncomfortable with our own pain that we can't just be there for other people in their pain. With a dog, the immediate implication is that we can just get another one. So we shouldn't feel so bad about this loss. The other one that gets me is the everything happens for a reason thing. Maybe, but also maybe not. It's really hard for me to believe that, especially right now as we are at war with Iran. Like, I don't think those deaths are happening for any other reason than we have a psychotic narcissist in power who is trying to deflect from how badly he's doing running this country. And like children dying ever. Like, I don't see that as having some bigger purpose. It's just sad and tragic. And we don't need to try to take away the pain of that by giving it some bigger purpose. We just need to grieve. So, what do we do about this? Well, we have to practice grieving. No, for real. Like it can be a practice. One of the things I learned in therapy is that I have a lot of old stuff to grieve, that I need to give present-day emotions to past losses, and that I need to fully feel my emotions for any losses that come up in the present. One of the ways to do this is by angering. We need to let the anger out. We should not do what I did and turn the anger in on ourselves. I don't know about you, but I was never taught how to feel anger. I was taught that I was not allowed to be angry, even though as I look back at my childhood, I had a lot to be angry about. So how do we anger? Well, first we need to acknowledge it. My therapist gave me these guidelines for fairness and intimacy. And they're basically like rights we have in relationships, like the right to be treated with respect and the right to make mistakes. One of them is that we have the right to be angry and express that anger non-abusively. That's where we start with acknowledging our right to be angry. Sometimes life is unfair and we can be mad about that. The next thing we want to do is actually feel the emotion. I struggle with this, as I mentioned, but I can do it when I actually focus on it. I know that anger feels hot to me, like I get hot around the face, my heart beats fast, and I feel like I'm going to explode. I can let all that exist and not do anything with it. I can just experience it knowing it will pass. And then it might also be helpful to express it. So, like with anger, like I like to scream into a pillow. You could also punch that pillow. One of my favorite scenes on Gray's Anatomy shows Joe throwing stuffed animals at a wall. This is a great option. Maybe you want to write it out. I've been instructed to write letters to people who have betrayed me, not to hold anything back. Like just use all the foul language, call them out on everything that you want about them, and then burn that letter. We're definitely not sending it to them. You can rip it up, whatever you want. The other thing we need to do in grief is cry. Yes, we need to cry. This has been particularly hard for me as I try to process through old losses, mainly because I'm on an SSRI that has stopped me from being able to cry. It just doesn't happen. I am lowering my dose to see if I can get some of my emotions back. But for now, I have to make do with feeling sad without the tears. But if you can cry, try making a sad playlist, lighting a candle, and just being with sadness and letting it out. Or watch a movie that you know will make you cry. Beaches always does it for me. That movie is fucking sad. And here's the thing: we're not going to wait for big losses to do this. We're going to start acknowledging small everyday losses and grieving them. Lose a shirt you like, grieve it. Don't win the battle over what to order for dinner, grieve it. But like grieve it appropriately to the size of the loss. Maybe you feel disappointed. It's a bummer to not get your way. This opens us up to be able to grieve the bigger losses that we tend to sweep under the rug, like not getting the job we wanted. That is something to grieve. Don't let anyone try to steal your pain by telling you things like it probably wasn't the right fit or they don't deserve you. That is some bullshit. It reminds me of the scene in Clueless where Cher tries to comfort Ty and tells her that she's better than Elton. And she's all like, if I'm better than him, how come I'm not with him? Like, see the ridiculousness in that? Come on, Cher. Let the girl have her feelings. We need to learn to be with our negative emotions. Let them in, acknowledge them. Be okay with not being okay. There's actually a great book about grief called It's Okay That You're Not Okay. I read it a long time before I'd ever had a great loss. Did I practice grief after reading it? No. Do I now wish I had? Yes. I'm not sure it would have made the pain any better from losing Benjamin, but perhaps I would have been better prepared to see the signs I was missing and be more mindful of processing my emotions sooner. I do think that after 21 months, the grief has integrated. It's a part of my life and no longer stopping me from living my life. This feels like progress. Progress I don't think I would have had had I not started actively and intentionally grieving. The other side of the coin here is that as a society, we need to be better at being with others in their grief. Toxic positivity is a real problem, and our discomfort with other people's pain does not help anyone. I was talking about this with a friend, and her take was that more than telling a grieving person what to do, we need to be better support systems for the grieving person. We need to learn how to hold space for people in their grief. I think we need both. We have a responsibility to ourselves to allow ourselves to go through the pain of loss. But that would be made much easier if the people around us were better at holding us in our pain and not trying to take it away from us. So I hope this helps you to kind of think about grief in a different way. I know for me, hearing other people's stories of grief is something that helps me to sort of normalize it, to know that I'm not alone, to kind of wrap my brain around it a little bit better. And I hope that I've done that for you today. That's all I got for you. I don't know when I'll be back. I currently have no plans for upcoming episodes, but if there's something you want to hear me talk about, feel free to reach out. I am the only Chris Hale on Instagram, or you can email me at chris at theonlychrishale.com. And I'd love to share my thoughts on anything that is coming up for you. I'd love to hear more about your own experience with grief. Um, if that's something you want to talk about, or just anything. All right, friends, have a great day.