24: Delayed and incomplete grief - what, why, how, and what now?

Hello friends, and welcome to Grief Guts and Green Smoothies. I am your host, Melissa Dugalecki, and I am so excited to be here with you all to chat about ways in which we can all get through different adversities, challenges and loss and how getting outside of our comfort zone and maybe having a green smoothie or two can help us do so. We will cover different topics ranging from interviews to recipes to sharing my own stories of my grief journey and the loss of my daughter Layden. Honored to be able to share her light in hopes of helping you spread yours. Now, let's dive in. Hey everyone. I am so excited that this week I get to dive a lot deeper into grief. And grief is a widely misunderstood topic and I believe that it's through it being misunderstood, it feels really overwhelming. And so my goal is to use this week to break it down. And each day, Monday through Friday, I will have a short sprint episode hitting a different topic of grief. You can go back and listen to them. Let me know what you think and I hope that you will learn a lot of new tools that will support you or the people in your lives in managing this inevitable energy. Now, I think universally nobody welcomes in grief. Nobody wants it. For those of you just tuning in, my grief journey started in 2014 and it was this week, June 19, 2014. I lost my daughter Laden at Boston Children's Hospital. So I'm dedicating this week in honor of her life and in my grief journey to helping disempower the overwhelm of grief and empower each of you to manage and navigate it with a little more clarity and a little more confidence. Let's get started. Welcome back. We are in the final episode of our grief week. If you haven't tuned in, this is episode five, five of five of a sprint week. Five episodes really educating on different aspects of grief and grief journeys. And I chose it this week in honor of the loss of my daughter Layden. To start of my grief journey, I really wanted to offer something in her memory that can make an impact. So thank you for Hope you have learned something. Now let's dive in to this last episode, a topic that so many of you actually reached out and asked me about when I had put up questions in my Instagram story, wanting to know what you're curious about. I got a number of questions on what's called delayed grief. You'll see different topics about it. You'll say incomplete grief, delayed grief, very similar. So I'm going to reference it as what we call delayed grief. We're going to talk about it, how to navigate it, signs of it, without further ado. So delayed grief is considered an incomplete grief process. Now, I don't love this definition. You're going to find a number of them. I don't believe there's ever a completeness to our grief journeys. They're continual, they're evolving. So it's really hard to say we've completed our grief journey. I don't believe I've completed mine. My definition, the one that I like to identify with, is that we're moving forward in our grief journey with unattended to incomplete aspects of it. So I love analogies and I like to think of it as grief. Like we're pushing forward, we're plowing forward. And in the beginning, it's kind of like we have this rake and we're pulling this rake along, but everything's just kind of going through it, right? We're not in a position of power. We're not really moving things forward. We're just kind of continuing to move through. And in time, we begin to kind of close the gap between those little arms or legs, whatever they are on the rake, right? So just envision you're closing the gap. Now, I believe in delayed grief or incomplete grief, that those gaps aren't all closed, right? Or you've really moved forward and you're trying to shovel, but you still got those gaps. Even when you're shoveling, you're still on your grief journey. So let's not, you know, be misleading in our language, that you can complete your grief journey. There's no finish line. But as you begin to strengthen and process and, and take all of the energy that grief is and use it in a way that's going to move you forward, you turn more from that space of that rake, right, which is going to have all those holes in it, into a shovel, which is really going to be able to move things forward and make an impact. And remember, energy is not created or destroyed. So grief is an energy. And when it comes up and it's going to be the energy of anger, sadness, insecurity, fear, worry, all different forms and shapes it's going to take. And so when these energies move, they attach. Think about it. When we're sad, we hunch our shoulders forward. That's an energetic shift in our body based on what we're experiencing. When we feel victorious and proud, we open those shoulders up, we reach our arms overhead, those energies are surfacing and it's impacting our body. So we can't underestimate the impact energy has. You know, it's everything. I think energy is everything it is. So when these energies are coming up, we really need to process them, but we don't always have the tools to do it, the resources to do it, or the ability to do it. For example, quite often, if there is the loss of a parent and a sibling needs to or feels the need to, or is put in a position to really step up and do a lot more of the parenting, they may not fully process all of their grief. They may. That's just a common example. Another one is if both parents are lost and siblings have to step up. Another one could be in the event of child loss, and a sibling or cousin or a friend is afraid to grieve that loss because they don't want to upset the child's parents. So now they haven't fully grieved that loss. It could be as simple as being told to toughen up or to move on or to get over it. And that was what you were told to do. And so you weren't really given the space or the tools or the support to process. Could be guilt of feeling as though you are weighing on other people and not knowing how to enlist the support, so you just kind of shut it off and don't fully process it. There are so many limitless ways that we can all be vulnerable to experiencing incomplete grief or delayed grief based on the world we live on, the lack of resources, like, that's why we're here, right? We're having these conversations. You guys are all part of shifting that. So thank you. Like, let's. Let's shift it. So now that we understand what delayed grief is and where it can come from, and if you are listening and you feel as though, oh, that happened to me or someone you know, this is not a time to point fingers. Everyone does the best they can in any given moment with the tools, the resources, the information they have. So we're all done the best we can. So if there is delayed grief or if there is incomplete grief, that is not a time to start beating ourselves up, right? Because we're already in a space of low vibes. And so when we're in low vibes, we don't want to compound that with lower vibes. We've got to counter it with high vibes, with compassion, with trust, with faith, with support, with love. Whatever your low and high vibe choices are, we've got to yank you from low vibes into a space of at least neutrality. For right now, with high vibes until you're ready to move into a space of high vibes. We may not be ready for high vibes yet, but we got to get you out of there. And if we start beating ourselves up, we're only going deeper, right into the trenches of the space of low vibes. So we don't want to do that. So we identified what delayed grief is. We've talked about where it comes from and acknowledged that we don't want to beat ourselves up or point fingers or blame or get into any of that. We want to be able to identify it. So I'm going to hit on five very common signs and then suggested tools for moving forward. So one very common sign is intense anger and an inability to talk about the loss or difficult things in general. I like to envision, like the Great Wall of China, energetically, like this person has just put it up. They have been hurt, they have felt pain, and their walls are up and no one is breaking them down. Another sign is reliance on forms of numbing. So numbing can happen in so many aspects. It can be shopping, netflix, binging, food, drink, substance abuse. It can be over busying, over scheduling, over exercising. It can also be over parenting in the case of child loss, especially can over parent in another aspect. So numbing oneself out from feeling it by diving into these things. And now they can be tricky because some of them appear and present as healthy parenting, exercising, volunteering, time giving. But if we're doing it to a point of not allowing ourselves to feel, that's a major sign of incomplete or delayed grief. Another sign is high anxiety, essentially waiting for another ball to drop or assuming the worst. So kind of like living on eggshells, like, when is the next thing going to go wrong? Now, of course, we all go to that place occasionally, and we're all going to go to all of these places occasionally. But when it's habitual, when it's a pattern, when it's dominant, that's when these really become flags and signs. So that anxiety that just waiting for something else to go wrong kind of living in fear. The fourth sign of delayed or incomplete grief is living in emotional rewind. Again, of course we're all going to go back, certainly, but the inability to get out of that place, right? So complete emotional rewind, replaying over and over what happened, what should have happened, what could have happened, to the point of not being able to move forward, not being able to learn. So there's one thing to go back and learn, right? I like to say it's like film review. Just like in sports, we do a film review so that we can then learn how to improve and move forward. So in this case it's just doing film review and film review and not taking in a place to move forward. And the last, the fifth major flag, there are going to be others, of course, but the fifth major one of delayed or incomplete grief is codependent relationships can also be called love addiction, which is essentially a need to have somebody make you feel complete. So in healthy relationships, we have two whole individuals living their aligned paths and truths and goals that complement each other and they support each other and they promote growth. In codependent relationships, it's more of a leaning on each other. It's a looking for the other person's energy to validate you. Looking for the other person's energy to make you feel whole and loved and cared for rather than providing that for yourself. There are all different levels of it. And of course in any relationship there's a balance of give and take, right? So no one needs to go into panic mode here. But if at length, if the norm is more of a dependency rather than moving along together, that could be a codependent or love addicted relationship where essentially that hole, that void in a loss is being filled in other spaces. A lot to process, right? We're going deep here. I know, I know. Thank you guys for doing this hard, meaningful work. So we know what this is. We've identified why it happens. We know what not to do. We now know signs of it. So then what do you do now? Again, this is going to be different for everyone. But ultimately, bottom line is the grief process has to be tended to. I will always recommend you do that with formal support of a group, of a coach or of a counselor therapist. Always going to recommend that. It is scary. It's an investment of time, of money. But nothing is a better investment than your own wholeness, right? Your own self worth, self understanding and growth. I'm always going to recommend that there are going to be strategies such as doing writing exercises, right? You can find a lot of these online. I have some I'd be happy to share as like just a little test as to how it feels. It's going to include moving to what you're avoiding, right? Or what's been avoided or the person who's experienced a loss has avoided. It's going to take a change in behavior patterns based on what it is, right? So really finding out instead of repeating those same narratives that keep us stuck and replaying the story over and over starting to change the narrative, right? Starting to change the structure of a relationship, starting to work on trusting and not fearing the worst. So whatever it may be, right, however it presents, whatever the flag presents. So it takes a change in behavior, right? It's gonna take to leaning into that space that's uncomfortable. Like going into the muck, going into the swampland of grief and like feeling it, processing it. Whether it's writing, whether it's speaking, whether it's moving your body, right? Processing it and then letting the stuff that holds you back go so you can move forward. This is a very common process for anything. And I always say grief is an intense manifestation of life and of our biggest challenges. So whenever we face challenges, you may be listening to this and never experienced intense grief, but you've experienced challenge. So whenever we experience challenge, we need to sit in that challenge. We have to lean into it, we have to feel it, process it, make changes and move forward. And that's exactly what has to be done here. And I'm not telling anyone that it's easy. I'm just telling you it is so freakin possible and it is so freaking worth it. And of course, if you have any questions on how to do that, please reach out. No one should be trying to guess aimlessly here. There are enough resources and community to help each other out along this journey. You can find me on Instagram Grief and Guts. You can find me my website Grief and Guts. Found me on the podcast. Do not hesitate to reach out. And as always, if you are inclined to help share this message, please just take a minute, pop onto itunes, rate and review. It would mean the world to me. Not because I actually really care about the ratings or reviews as much, of course I do. But that's not how I measure the success of this. I want to measure it by our impact, right? Our ability to help others. Those rating and reviews are going to help us help others. So thanks for joining me shoulder to shoulder in my mission to do so. Shining Layden's light means the very most to me. Thank you all for being a part of that. I welcome your feedback and we will talk soon.