When Grief Changes You

In this episode, Jennifer narrates her own book on estrangement and grief.

A reflective guide for anyone navigating loss, disconnection, identity shifts and the long journey back to themselves.

The e-book is available for purchase using the barcode here. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello, I'm Jennifer Morrison, and thank you for inviting me to be walking beside you for a little while. If you're listening to these words, there's a good chance that grief has touched your life in some way. Perhaps you've recently experienced a loss. Perhaps it's been many years, or perhaps you're supporting someone you care deeply about. Whatever has brought you here, I want you to know that you're welcome. This isn't a book about fixing grief because I don't believe grief is something to be fixed. I believe it's something to be understood, to be honoured, and over time something we learn to carry differently. I wrote this reflection journal because I know what it feels like when life changes in ways we never expected. Grief doesn't simply change our circumstances, it changes us. It changes how we see ourselves, our relationships, our future, and sometimes even our purpose. Over the years, through my own experiences of grief, supporting families, volunteering with carers and the bereaved, and walking alongside many people navigating loss, I have come to understand one simple truth. There is no right way to grieve. There is only your way. As you listen, I'd like to invite you to be gentle with yourself. There may be moments that bring comfort. There might be moments that stir emotions. Allow whatever comes to come. There is no expectation, no timeline and no judgment. If at any point you feel the need to pause, reflect, or simply sit quietly, please do so. This journal isn't a race to finish. It's a companion for the journey. My hope is that these reflections help you reconnect with yourself, find moments of peace, and gently remind you that even though grief changes us, it doesn't have to divine the rest of our lives. Thank you for allowing me to walk beside you. Let's begin. So that you can go back and you can look at again and consider how you're going, whether things have changed for you, or are there still things needing to be addressed? So chapter one, the leaving. I learnt that the most defining shifts often arrive swiftly, and not gently. The day my child walked away was one of those moments. There was shouting, placating, begging, apologizing, and silence. More shouting, more begging, more apologizing. Then just a silence that settled in the room like dust. Heavy and undeniable. It was a silence carrying a truth I had spent many years not wanting to face. The distance had been building for a long time. Small signs at first, attention here, confusion, a disconnect where we both felt we could not quite name. We tiptoed around each other, hoping time would bring bridge this widening gap. I rescued repeatedly. I reached repeatedly. A mother's instinctive hope wrapped around each attempt. But sometimes no matter how much love you pour into the cracks, something still breaks. And when it finally does, it really does break clean. Your reflection space. When life didn't unfold as I expected, can you identify a moment that changed the direction of your life? What did you lose during those experiences? What did you gain that you couldn't see at the time? How has that experience shaped the person you are today? And what are you still trying to make sense of? Chapter two Walking Underwater In the beginning I didn't understand. I blamed myself in countless quiet ways. I replayed moments, analysing conversations, picking apart years of mothering, with the kind of scrutiny only grace and grief can summon. When the leaving comes from your own child, it is a grief like no other. It's too hard to even explain. And it's also something that I kept to myself from shame. Those early days felt like I was walking underwater. People spoke and I nodded. I completed tasks by muscle memory, cooking, shopping, folding laundry, paying bills. I was present in the world, but I was totally absent in myself. There comes a moment when grief stops being something that happens to you and becomes something that sucks the very breath from you. There were moments of walking around the house just shaking my head, unable to comprehend the enormity of this loss. How did we get here? Is this really happening? What is going on? Can it be so definite? It certainly wasn't subtle. This walking around the house and being unable to comprehend what had happened suddenly hit me like a freight train. Your reflection space The losses we carry quietly What losses have you never fully acknowledged? Is there grief in your life that remains unseen by others? What emotions are you still carrying? How do you respond when painful memories surface? What would it mean to give yourself permission to grieve? Chapter three Waiting for the Before Slowly over many months the little glimmers of light started filtering in and making inroads into my numbrain. One morning, standing in the kitchen, my hands around a cup of tea, I realized I was waiting for my life to return to the before. The life where I had him and my grandchild in it, a life that felt normal. But that life I had lived, it was gone. And the woman and the mother I had been, she was gone also. Your reflection space looking beneath the surface. What has adversity taught you about yourself? What patterns or beliefs have grief exposed? Where have you been surviving rather than living? What truths have you avoided? And what are you learning about yourself right now? Chapter four When strength becomes armour. Loss had stripped me bare. For years I had worn strength like armor. It was heavy, it was rigid, and it was totally necessary. I believed my worth lived in what I could hold together. I believed that love meant endurance, that motherhood meant sacrifice, that being strong meant never breaking. But armor becomes unbearable when grief presses its weight against you. The change wasn't dramatic. It was weary. It was quiet, but it was so necessary. My courage began not as strength, but as surrender. And surrendering was such a hard space to go into your reflection space moving beyond coping. What does survival look like in your life? How do you know when you're merely getting through the day? What are you holding together that no longer needs your energy? Where are you exhausted from caring way too much? What would it look like for you to choose a different way of being? Chapter six. What grief taught me about love? Surrendering to the truth that I could not fix what wasn't mine to heal. Grief taught me that surrendering to the realization that love does not guarantee closeness. Grief taught me surrendering to the idea that I had value even outside my role as a mother was a myth. Pain does something unexpected. It shines a light on the parts of you that have long been left in the dark. The leaving forced me to face the exhaustion I had ignored, the self-sacrifices I had normalized, the guilt I had carried like a second skin, the ache I had buried beneath my busyness. For the first time in my life I could not push these truths away. I had to sit with them, not to analyze, not to justify, but to finally hear them. And beneath all of this noise and this clatter there was a softer voice, the one I had silenced for years. I started hearing myself. I started hearing you're tired. You're hurting. You've forgotten yourself. Come back. This time I listened. Your reflection space. Choosing growth. What brings you peace? What gives you hope? What parts of yourself are you rediscovering? What are you ready to let go of? What small step could you take today towards yourself? Chapter six The Woman Emerging Healing hurts all of your being. It's in the small shifts, resting without explaining myself, saying no without guilt, letting myself feel without shame. It's learning to walk with a different kind of weight, learning to breathe with a different kind of ache inside. Learning to live not through the role I once held, but through the person I was becoming. A space that becomes sacred, a reminder of everything that I shaped. Your reflection space. Becoming. What strengths have emerged through your challenges? What no longer defines you? What values guide you now? And what do you want the next chapter of your life to look like? Chapter seven Self forgiveness But there was an unexpected beauty in the rebuilding. I began growing again, not upwards but inward. I had deeper roots, gentler boundaries. I heard the steadier voice, and I learnt to reclaim myself. I became a woman who longer dis no longer disappears behind her giving. A woman who knows that love and boundaries can coexist. A woman who understands she can survive heartbreak and still remain open hearted. If I could speak to my younger self, the one who believed her worth depended on who needed her, I would tell her this. You will face a pain you never imagined and it will not break you. It will become the foundations, the rock that will sustain and support you. You will become softer, stronger, clearer, and much more whole. You will love the woman you become, the woman who you always were, long before your own child was hurt, dismissed, and abandoned. The truth is that this journey didn't come from choice, it came from necessity. The necessity to really look at myself and who I had been throughout the motherhood journey. My mistakes, my absences, my not being in the moment, my being unavailable, my aloneness, my being a lone parent, and so much more. So many little moments in time that shaped me and my relationship with this child. But what I chose was to grow through it, not pretend I had nothing to do with the outcome. Losing my child's presence broke something in me, and what emerged was not only despair, but a deeper self I had never truly met. It was a very, very hard thing to see. The self I had buried through my own wounded child journey. The woman and mother I'd hoped to be, but had failed by not being consciously aware. The self I live with now is not the same person. I've had to deep dive into my very core to learn, understand, forgive, and emerge in a new way of being. Now I see and recognise every part of me. I honour and allow myself to move forward with grace and with compassion. Your reflection space. Take a few moments to sit with these questions. There are no right or wrong answers, but do notice what arises. What challenges in your life have invited you to grow inward rather than to simply push forward? Have there been times when you have disappeared behind caring for others, meeting expectations or being needed? What parts of yourself have you neglected, forgotten, or even placed on hold? What does a reclaimed self look like for you? Where in your life do you need to set gentler boundaries? What have the hardest experiences revealed to you about who you are? Is there a part of your story that you are still judging rather than understanding? What mistakes or regrets are you viewing through the lens of compassion rather than criticism? And what lessons have emerged from your pain that you may not have discovered in any other way? So if I could speak to my younger self, what I would want her to know is what qualities have emerged through this adversity? What is she still learning about herself? And what does self-forgiveness look like? Where can this journey and this healing be defined with honour not with judgment? Chapter eight for the parent listening to this. My closing reflection for you is this. You can build a life from the pieces left behind. You can find a stronger, gentler version of yourself within the very places that broke you. Healing isn't loud. It is the soft return of your own presence. It is the boundaries you place around your peace. It is the moments that you choose kindly. Kindness over self-judgment. It is the way you begin to belong to yourself again. And if no one has said this to you before, let me say it very clearly. You are allowed to grow from the very place you were hurt. You are allowed to become someone new. You are allowed to be whole even with fractures. This becoming is already in motion. Trust its pace. Trust its wisdom. Trust the person emerging, for they are extraordinary. There's a few more reflection pages at the end of this book for you to consider and to just go back to in your own time and give further thought to where you are and where you are challenged and how you can help yourself go through this process. There's no time limit. It's certainly you're the only one that is going to be aware of what you're writing, and that is the most important person that needs to know. So a little bit about the author. Jennifer is a parent mentor, writer, and coach who guides parents through the quiet complexities of connection, disconnection, and rebuilding self-trust. After navigating her own path through family estrangement, grief, and profound personal transformation, Jennifer now supports parents in finding steadiness, compassion, and clarity within their own parental journeys. She is the creator of Parent to Parent, The Parent Connect Community, and the author of The Child Who Walked Away, When Grief Changes You, and the Book To Come Soon: Becoming the Woman Only Grief Could Shape. Jennifer hosts a podcast named Parent to Parent, Unfiltering Parent. This work blends lived experiences with gentle wisdom, offering a safe space to parents to reclaim their identity, strengthen their inner resilience, and rediscover themselves beyond the role of motherhood and parenthood. Jennifer also is a speaker to communities and mothers and parent groups. Thank you for allowing me to walk beside you. I wish you peace, courage, and hope as you continue your own travel to yourself and home. If you listened all the way through, I hope you've discovered something important, not just about grief, but about yourself. Grief changes us, there is no denying that. But within that change, there is also the possibility of greater compassion, deeper understanding, renewed purpose, and a different appreciation for what truly matters. If there's one thing I hope you carry with you, it's this. Be kind to yourself. Healing isn't measured by time. It's measured by the courage to keep living, loving, and remaining open to life even after loss. You don't have to have all the answers. You don't have to feel strong every day. You simply have to keep taking the next gentle step. I often say that becoming is a lifelong journey, and grief becomes part of that journey, but it is never the whole story. Thank you for inviting me into your life and allowing me to share this time with you. I hope these reflections become something you return to whenever you need them. Until we meet again, may you find moments of peace, hope, and quiet strength. Take good care of yourself.