Episode 10: If I Feel Joy Again, Am I Leaving My Child Behind?

What if the first moment of joy after the loss of your child doesn’t feel like relief… but betrayal?

In this episode of Beyond the Loss,I dive deep into one of the most unexpected and painful hurdles of the grief journey: the "loyalty bind." For many grieving parents, a sudden laugh, a moment of genuine connection with a friend, or a peaceful morning doesn't arrive as a gift. Instead, it arrives tangled up with intense guilt, confusion, and fear.

Subconsciously, we find ourselves asking: If I feel joy again, does that mean I’m leaving my child behind?

I gently dismantles the heavy, unspoken societal pressures placed on bereaved families and shares her personal reflections following the death of her son, Michael. She explores how suffering can easily be mistaken as the only remaining evidence of our love, and offers a beautiful alternative: that joy does not erase our relationship with our children - it expands it.

This conversation is not an invitation to force positivity or look for silver linings. It is a gentle permission slip to notice life when it touches you again, and to realize that pain is not the only way our children remain present in the lives we are living now.

In this episode, we discuss:
• The "loyalty bind" and why joy after child loss can trigger guilt.
• Why suffering can feel like the last remaining way to stay close to your child.
• Navigating the impossible double standards and expectations of the outside world.
• Honoring your child's life through what you allow yourself to experience, not just what you miss.
• Pattern-to-Practice: A somatic reflection to help you gently observe how your body and mind respond to moments of ease without judgment.

Transcript: Here

Connect with me:
• Website: https://sharonspano.com
• Podcast: https://sharonspano.com/podcast/podcast-beyond-the-loss/
• YouTube: youtube.com/@SharonSpano-BeyondtheLoss-Host
• Substack: substack.com/@drsharon

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Apply here to share your story:
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About Beyond the Loss
Beyond the Loss: Life and Identity After a Child Dies is a podcast dedicated to helping grieving parents, bereaved families, and professionals navigate the emotional, relational, and identity shifts that follow the death of a child. Through compassionate conversations and clinical insight, we create space for healing, understanding, and honest reflection after profound grief. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Beyond the Lost. This is a space for parents who have lost a child in any way at any age, where no grief is ranked, explained, or excluded. I'm Dr. Sharon Spano, developmental coach, systems thinker, and a parent whose life was forever changed by the death of my own son Michael. What if the first moment of joy after loss of your child doesn't feel like relief, but betrayal? There are moments after the death of a child when life starts to feel somewhat normal again. And this doesn't happen all at once, and often not in some big dramatic way, and may come through something very, very small. Maybe you laugh before you realize you're laughing, or you suddenly realize that you're actually enjoying a conversation with a friend instead of just watching her lips move. Maybe you notice the beauty of a new flower in your front yard, or you just feel a little lighter than you expected to feel. And then almost immediately something else may happen. Guilt, maybe even shame, rise up. And there's some kind of internal voice that says, you shouldn't be feeling this. You're grieving after all. Subconsciously, you might even have a question that you don't even realize is there. Is it okay for me to even feel in this moment? And underneath that question, there may be an even deeper one. If I feel joy again, does that mean I'm leaving my child behind? I think any parent who's ever experienced the loss of a child knows exactly what I'm talking about. And that's what I want to dive into a little bit deeper today. We've touched on this idea of leaving my child behind before, but I'd like to go a little deeper on this premise, because for many parents, joy after the loss of a child doesn't show up as simply joy. It's often tangled with guilt, loyalty, confusion, and perhaps even fear. Often the fear is expressed of, I feel like I'm forgetting who they were. I can't see them anymore. I can't hear them anymore. Now, if I start to experience more joyful moments in my life and create new memories, am I going to forget them altogether? None of this has to do with joy being right or wrong, but because after the loss of a child, even joy can feel complicated if not elusive. And I want to be very careful here because I'm not talking about trying to force joy. I'm not talking about looking for silver linings or pretending that you're feeling other than you are. And I'm certainly not suggesting that any parent should feel grateful, positive, or ready to re-enter life before they're ready to do so. That kind of pressure is not helpful to any of us. And I know sometimes it can feel like pressure because the people around us want us to be doing better. But that is not helpful. What I'm talking about is that unexpected moment when some small experience of life touches you again and you actually begin to feel and you realize that you are feeling something after all these many moments and months, perhaps, of being numb to life in general. You are feeling something again, even if you don't know quite what to do with that. You're not quite sure what this something is, much less what to do with it. So I want to share an example. I think I've spoken about this before on the show, but I want to expand a bit on it in this context. And it's a memory of going to the theater some years ago when my best friend's granddaughter was about four or five years old. You've heard me talk about my friend Jane, who also lost a child at five. And now she's blessed with this beautiful grandbaby, Presley. And I had bought tickets to the theater for Presley for Christmas or something. I think it was for the Little Mermaid, I can't remember. And here we are sitting in the theater, and Jane very promptly picks Presley up and puts her on my lap to take a picture. Very normal moment, a very normal response. And I have to tell you that in that moment, I literally felt all the energy in my body like panic and recoil, as in, please don't put this child on my lap, take her from me, take her from me. I know I didn't exhibit that. I didn't push her away. I held her, but it was what I was feeling in that moment, kind of a panic. And I remember thinking, oh my God, like what is wrong with me that I don't even have the capacity to hold this little girl? Like, how is this even possible that I'm recoiling from this energetically in this most beautiful moment? We were having such a great time. You know, I think we did this before the theater started, the whole show started, but it was, you know, that it was beautiful. The theater was beautiful. We'd had a nice lunch, and here I am having this panic. And it was then that I knew something in me had shifted in a way I was not aware of. And you'll hear me often talk to you about tapping into the somatic energies of the body. Those are all those things that we feel in the body often at a very subconscious level. So I'm asking you to start to notice when these things rise up based on a thought or a moment. But something in me in that moment recoiled. And maybe just like me, you find yourself enjoying something for the first time in a very long time. And then you catch yourself as I did in that moment, and you feel yourself pull back. You feel yourself recoil. You may find yourself laughing at something and then catching yourself feeling maybe guilt or shame that you shouldn't be laughing. And you pull back because some part of you wonders, how can I feel this when my child is gone? And I remember thinking there was a part of me that was afraid to love Presley, that was afraid to feel that joy and experience of holding a child again because I had shut all of that off during my early stages of grieving and didn't realize that it carried forward so many years later. So this is what we often talk about as a loyalty bind. And it's not logical. It is literally the body responding to the trauma and the missing and the loss. And it's literally that body and even your emotional and psychological state protecting you from being hurt again. And it's amazing how the brain will move to that place. So it's not something that most of us consciously choose, of course. It rises up out of love for our child who's no longer with us. Because when a child dies, suffering can begin to feel like one of the last remaining ways to stay close to that person that we love so much. And it's not because we want to suffer, but because we are suffering. And if we step into joy again, it can feel like betrayal. Suffering can also be construed as evidence that we haven't forgotten our child, evidence that the bond is still there, evidence of our love. The question then is not only can I feel joy again? The deeper question that I'm going to ask you to consider is can I experience life again and the joys that go with it without feeling like I'm abandoning my child? And it goes to that non-dual thinking that I've been talking about so much. Can I laugh and still love her? Can I experience beauty and still miss him? Can I move towards something meaningful and still carry the truth of what happened? And these are not simple questions, and they're not questions that I'm asking you to answer right now. I'm only asking you to be kind to yourself as you consider them. One of the things that I've come to understand is that suffering may be part of love after loss, but suffering is not the only proof of our love. Pain is not the only way our children remain present. And joy does not erase that relationship or that bond. It simply cannot. And sometimes joy may even become one of the ways that our relationships expand and continues. For me, this idea has helped me stay deeply connected to my son Michael. Michael was so much about joy, even with all he lived through and his disability, his illness, his limitations, the complexity of his overall life, there was something in him that was like a bright light. He loved happiness. He responded to joy. And over time, I've had to remind myself that when I experience a moment of joy, I know I'm not betraying him. I know I'm not leaving him behind. I know that in some way, some small way, I'm actually honoring something essential about who he was. And I want to be careful to say and add, that doesn't mean it's always easy, because again, we're holding all of this within us at once often. It doesn't mean the grief is absent. It's just different, it's ever changing. And every parent will come to their own version of how to experience joy in the midst of loss. For one parent, joy may come through grandchildren. That's very true, as I said of my friend Jane with her granddaughter Presley. For another, it may come through nature, and that's very true for me. I'm so blessed to live up here in the mountains of North Carolina. And I really feel when I sit out on my patio and I look out at those beautiful mountains, there's a huge part of me that knows Michael's here with me. And I just enjoy that peace and that quiet and that solitude. For someone else, it may come through meaningful work, and that is also true for me. For others, it may be music, prayer, travel, friendship, or just some quiet, ordinary moment that no one else would even notice. The form of how joy comes into your life isn't the most important thing. What matters is the meaning that we attach to it. Because often the moment itself is not really the issue. The meaning we give the moment is where the tension lies. Part of what makes this even more difficult is that the outside world often misreads us. If we're visibly grieving, people may worry that we're not moving forward fast enough. If we begin to look more functional, they may assume we're just fine and get on with it in their own way and sometimes miss an opportunity to be present for us when we need them. If we speak about our child too much or too often, people often wonder, is she still stuck? So as parents, we can feel caught between two impossible expectations. Don't grieve too visibly, don't appear too alive either, don't look like you've moved on too fast. And inside that tension, it becomes very hard to trust our own experience. When this tension arises, I invite you to simply notice is guilt rising up? Do I need to feel it? What might you be resisting? Can you honor the part of you that says, I don't know if I can let this in? Because that belongs to, that is a part of your system. So there's no need to rush toward joy. There's only the possibility of not turning away from it when it arrives. And I think this is where something important begins to shift. We begin to see that we were never meant to reduce our love to only one expression. And I think that's very important. Why do we try to do that when we think about a loved one? We don't do that in our everyday lives with our spouses or our children who are still with us or our parents. We know that our love includes many, many expressions, right? So it shouldn't be any different when we've lost a child. Those expressions, those many varieties of expressions are still within us. We begin to see that we were never meant to reduce ourselves then to only that one expression if we just start to pay attention to that possibility. And if we really think about our child as continuing to shape who we are, even in their physical absence, then perhaps our lives can carry more than sorrow. That's the one thing I want you to really think about today. Perhaps it can also carry something of who our child was, his values, her humor, her tenderness, courage, light. For me, joy is part of the equation because that's what my son brought into the world. For you, and maybe something else, but it might be also worth asking: is there a way my child's life continues not only in what I miss, but in what I now allow myself to embrace, to experience? As always, every week and we're getting ready, we're lining up guests now. So if you think you're someone that might be appropriate for the show, whether you're a professional or a parent, please go to my website, sharenspano.com. We have an application process there. And I'd ask you to fill that out and we will get back to you as soon as possible. But when I'm doing the solo cast, I want to always offer you what I call a pattern to practice. Because when we look for patterns in the system, remember I've said repeatedly the system never lies. Then we begin to know what we need or have an opportunity to work on. So for today's pattern to practice, I want to leave you again with something simple to notice this week. I'm not asking you ever to change anything, not trying to force you into feeling anything or healing beyond where you are, just to observe. That's the first step and a very important one. So over the next few days, if you get lucky enough to have a moment of joy, I want you to watch for them because sometimes we just pass them by, a moment of ease, beauty, laughter, peace, whatever positive feeling, thought, or emotion might rise up for you. Even if it's just a simple moment of relief where you just, I remember feeling one day, wow, this is the first day in a long time that I haven't thought of the trauma, the pain, the suffering, every moment. Like I actually in my work would find moments where I was so focused on the work itself, I wasn't living and thinking about all of that. So if you find that moment of release of pressure and just notice it and notice what happens inside of you. Again, that's that somatic experience, not what you think should happen, what actually happens. Observe the thought, the feeling, or the emotion, and just notice first the meaning that you give to it in that moment, and then notice where you feel it in your body. I do a lot of this work with clients, and most of them will say, I can't feel anything. Well, yeah, because we're not trained to tune into that somatic part of the body. That is one of your lines of development that is vital because the body gives us a lot of information. So I want to continue to encourage you to pay attention to what's going on in your body. See if you can name a specific place or sensation in your body in the moment. And then if it feels right, you might ask yourself, could this moment, this thought or feeling exist without meaning I love my child any less? What I'm suggesting to you is there's room for both. But could this joy at this moment be another way my love for my child expands? Just try that practice and let's see what's happening. I'd love to hear from you. Until next week, take gentle care. Thank you for spending this time with me. If this conversation stirred something for you, you don't need to make sense of it right away. There's no timeline for understanding and no right way to carry what remains. Beyond the loss exists to honor parents who've lost a son or daughter and all the complexity that this implies, and to support the professionals who walk alongside them without comparison, judgment, or explanation. Wherever you are in the long after, you are not required to arrive anywhere else. Until next time, take gentle care.