Time Alone Doesn't Heal - What You Do With Time Matters

In this episode of Growth from Grief, Susan explores the familiar phrase “Time heals all wounds” and shares why, in her experience, healing after loss takes more than time alone. Using the analogy of recovering from a broken bone, she reflects on the emotional, physical, and mental work of grief—and how the scars we carry can become reminders of both love and resilience.

Time alone doesn’t heal grief.
Healing often requires intention, support, and a willingness to engage with what hurts. 

Grief affects the whole person.
Loss can impact your emotions, physical health, mental clarity, and sense of identity. 

Healing often mirrors physical recovery.
Just like a broken bone needs diagnosis, care, rest, and rehabilitation, grief often asks for attention, patience, and support. 

Avoiding pain can delay healing.
When emotions are ignored or pushed away, grief may continue to show up in other ways—through the body, thoughts, or relationships. 

Scars are part of healing—not proof you’re broken.
Emotional scars may leave tender places in the heart, but they can also reflect love, resilience, and the life-changing impact of loss.

Thank you for listening!   Visit www.sueandersenyoga.com for Yoga for Grief classes and additional resources.

Transcript

Hello, I'm Sue Andersen, grief guide and yoga teacher dedicated to helping individuals navigate the challenging journey of loss. Welcome to Growth From Grief, where I aim to offer strategies to transition from the depths of grief to the path of healing. Whatever loss you are grappling with, here you'll discover support to ease both the physical and emotional burdens of grief. Together, let's embark on a journey towards strength, peace, and healing. I'm so glad you are here. 

Hello, and welcome to this episode of Growth From Grief. I'm your host, Sue Andersen. It's nice to be with you. If you're new to this podcast, welcome. I hope you will find the time to go back and listen to other episodes that may meet your needs or attract your attention. There's a lot of great interviews. I do a-- did a series about different modalities that could be helpful in grief. And if you're a returning listener, thank you for returning. 

And, I'm curious, to hear from you after this episode around time healing. 

And so I bring you this question. So we've all heard this phrase, "Time heals all wounds." But does it really? So my opinion and my experience is that time by itself doesn't heal the wounds. That it takes more from us. We have to be an active participant in our healing. 

A great example of this for me happened a long, long time ago, many years ago, when my first husband died suddenly. And I was angry. I was very angry. I was angry at the circumstances. I was a young woman with a young child, and just angry about what happened. And at the time, I didn't really know much about dealing with grief. I mean, my experience has just been that you went to the funeral home, you went to the wake, you went to the church service or what, what have you, and then you kind of went on your way, and the expectation was that you were gonna just be fine. 

And maybe, maybe you had that same experience as well. Especially, again, especially a long time ago. So I'm talking about, you know, the, the '80s, the 1980s. And for me, I kept that anger. That anger was inside of me, and I didn't even realize it. You know, I would take out my own frustration or anger on other people over the years. My personality was, was different, right? I wasn't a, a caring... I didn't feel like I... Looking back, I didn't really feel like I was a, a caring person. I felt, again, looking back, that I was kind of self-centered. 

And I realized that when Ian died, when my son died, 14 years ago, I realized that I was holding all of this anger, all of this anger from 20-something years before. Because I never processed it. I just stuffed it down. And, you know, everyone that is experiencing grief knows that if you stuff those feelings down inside of you, that it's going to come out, and it's not gonna be nice. It's either going to be physical, some kind of physical issue that it may manifest. It could be like me, where you're holding onto anger. 

So, I think that time heals, mmm, but asks us for something more, right? We have to be that participant So what's this myth of, you know, time heals all wounds? I actually don't know where it came from, and I probably should have looked it up before I did this podcast, but I didn't. But I know that people say it with good intentions, right? They're trying to make you feel better, maybe for you to feel more hopeful. But on the other side of the coin, if you're the person grieving, you may be thinking, "When is this going to end? Why do I still hurt after all these months or years?" So that brings us back to time wanting something more from us, that healing is not passive. 

Healing asks us to participate. Time's gonna go on whether you're doing something or not. Healing asks us to participate. And I often think that healing internally, healing grief, at least this is the way for me, that I, I felt over the years, I felt comfort thinking this way, that I can think about it the same way that I might think about healing physically, right? So if you broke your arm or you broke your leg, nobody would say to you, "Oh, it'll be fine in a few months." Like, there-- It's just not something that people say. They might ask you what happened, what's, what's the treatment that you're getting, but they're not just gonna say, "Oh, just, you know, it'll heal in time." They don't say that. But you yourself, you recognize and acknowledge something's wrong with you. Pain absolutely gets our attention, right? So then we know that we have to act upon that. 

And just thinking about that from the standpoint of grief, you know, when you lose someone and you acknowledge that loss, right? You can admit to yourself, "This hurts. This really hurts me, and my life has changed." So getting back to our, our broken leg, you seek help, right? You go to the doctor, you get X-rays, they give you a diagnosis and a treatment plan. When we are grieving loss, we can think of support like support groups, individual therapy, healing modalities like yoga, breathwork, journaling. Maybe you seek spiritual guidance. 

So first, we recognize the pain, we recognize the hurt, we know our life has changed, whether it's a physical issue or it's grief. Grief parallel, right? And then we find the help that we need. If we hurt ourself physically, we go to the doctor, we get the X-rays, we, we get a treatment plan, et cetera. In grief, the therapy, the support groups, the yoga, the breathwork, the journaling over a period of time. And we have to wait. So whether we're waiting for six months or three weeks or whatever it is for that bone to set, progress feels really slow. When am I ever gonna get out of this cast, boot, whatever it might be? 

And it's uncomfortable too, right? Grief can feel heavy, uncertain, even stagnant, different times in your grief journey, right? Different times and, and, and it might not feel like you're getting anywhere. You're going to the therapy, you're doing the yoga, you're talking to people, you're doing journaling. Maybe it feels like you're stuck. But I encourage you to think about it this way. Not all healing looks productive from the outside. You might be surprised that one day, after some time, after you've been actively participating in this grief journey- After you've been doing your yoga, your therapy, your writing, your talking, all of a sudden one day you laughed. Why am I laughing? This is terrible. 

So even with that broken leg or broken arm, we can see the cast, but we can't see the healing. We can't see what's going on inside where the bone gets-- is healing. We can't see it. So think also about the next step from our broken, our broken bone. Maybe we have to go to physical therapy. We have to do some strength building. We have to learn to trust. Trust our body. Trust that we're going to be okay. 

Now think about this from the perspective of grief. Caring for yourself. Oh my goodness, we need to do that when we're in grief, and when you're in early grief, if all you can do is take a shower, that's all you can do. You have to care for yourself. Maybe you feel like you can do something else. Maybe you create lists to help you. Maybe you're able to express your emotions instead of numbing them. Numbing them, whether it's alcohol, drugs, just pushing it down, not dealing with it. That's not helpful. Maybe you need to do it for a little bit of time, but it's not going to get you anywhere, right? It's not how you will heal from this loss. 

We do relearn connection and joy and purpose because as these emotions are expressed, we open up space to allow ourselves to feel something else, to accept something else. And again, sometimes it's just all of a sudden you cannot believe that you just started laughing or that you felt a little joy, that you woke up with a smile on your face. It's hard to imagine that. 

So there are parallels between some kind of physical injury and experiencing loss and the grief that goes with it. And I think an important thing to think about, important in the sense that you want to remember it, right, is we need to take some kind of action. We need to help ourselves to express this grief, to allow these emotions to, to release. 

And there's many ways to do that. So what do we need to do? What are the actions that we need to take for healing? Well, first let's talk about where grief impacts us. Grief impacts us certainly emotionally. And you can ask yourself the question, you know, am I allowing myself to feel sadness, anger, guilt, fear? Or am I pushing it away? Am I burying it deep? Am I not dealing with it? 

Physical healing. Grief absolutely lives in the body. It can disrupt, disrupt our sleep. We can feel fatigued, tense. There can be changes in the digestive system or the immune system. You know, it is important to talk with your doctor after you've experienced loss and maybe you're starting to feel physical symptoms. Because the doctor can tell, or together you can figure out if your physical symptoms are due to your loss, the grief, or is there something else going on in your body. And that's really important. Really important. Some of the things that you can do are yoga, breathwork, any kind of physical activity, walking, getting out in, in nature, walking in the forest, walking on a beach. 

Also resting. Sleep is difficult sometimes, really difficult after a loss. So maybe you just allow yourself to take more naps than you ever did. You may be the person that needs more rest than another member of your family. Maybe it's a, a family member that's died, and your sibling or your parent or whoever it might be, they feel restless. They have to move. But maybe you feel like you have to rest. Honor that. Honor that. Don't try to do something that doesn't feel right, doesn't feel right for your body. 

How about mentally? How about that hamster cage, right? Or, you know, thoughts running around like a hamster in a cage. Racing thoughts, anxiety. I mean, there's a lot of things that happen as a result of a loss of a, a person, or a loss of a job, loss of a home. There's a lot of worry and anxiety that can go along with these things. Maybe you are feeling a loss of identity. "Who am I now that I don't have this person, or this job, this home?" These are all things that we need to be aware of. And maybe we talk to somebody about them instead of letting those thoughts just run around our, our mind. 

So- Think about the Kintsugi vase. And maybe you're not familiar with this technique of Kintsugi that's associated with, um, or I'm sorry, is a, is a Japanese technique to take broken pottery and put it back together with gold leaf so that broken vase or piece of pottery becomes now something new, something beautiful with that gold scar. And although in grief, our emotional scars are not something that people can see, it's also important to think and to know that these scars are not a sign of weakness. Instead, think about them as evidence of the love you had for the person that died, the connection that you had to that job or to that home, to that pet, to that relationship, that other person. Think about them as evidence of survival. 

Some places are always going to feel tender. I know for me that different times during the year, I will feel my heart feeling more tender. I will feel my chest getting a little bit tighter because it's coming up close to a birthday or the day that this person died. But there's nothing wrong with this, right? There's nothing wrong with it. There's-- There might be-- There might always be places in your heart that feel more vulnerable after a loss. But think about this vulnerability as you've loving deeply, not- that you're broken. 

So as I close this episode, I'd like to have you think about these three questions: 

• The first is, what part of my grief needs attention right now? What part of my grief needs attention right now? 
• Where am I avoiding pain? Where am I avoiding pain? 
• And lastly, what support might help me heal? What support might help me heal

Dear listeners, I want to leave you with this one takeaway: Time may create space for healing, but what we do within that time is what matters. 

If this episode resonated with you, I hope that you'll share it with someone who is walking through grief. And if you're looking for support through movement, breath, or community, I'd love to connect. You can find resources on my website, www.sueandersenyoga.com Thank you again for listening today. I wish you grace and peace.