When Grief Finds You: What Nobody Tells You About Healing and Why You Can't Rush It

Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a process that needs to be honored, and it arrives differently for every person. And every time that it shows up in whatever form, it's asking you to do one thing. Be with it.

Don't rush it. Don't try to go around it. Let time be your greatest ally in this. Time's not going to make you forget, but time will give your nervous system the space it needs to rebuild the map of this new world you're living in.

Welcome to the Unblocked Woman podcast. I'm Amy Sanders. For years, I believed the next level of my life, the business, would come from a better strategy, working harder, figuring out that perfect plan. But eventually, I saw the real truth.

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We talk about identity, leadership, growth, and what it actually takes to become the woman who can truly hold the life and business she wants. No fluff, no performance, just honest conversation about stepping fully into your power. So go ahead and subscribe and follow the show. And remember, the moment you see the pattern, you can finally break it.

I'm recording this episode from a place that is honestly a little raw for me right now. And I almost didn't record it because sometimes the most human thing to do is sit with something before you try to say anything about it. But it has stayed on my heart all week. And so then I also decided that there's probably a lot of people that might be sitting with something too right now.

And I made the decision that raw, being raw with you was exactly right. So today we are talking about grief, not the pretty or tidy version of grief, but the real raw version. And I hope I can deliver it in the way that I want to because my heart is pretty heavy right now. So stay with me.

Welcome to The Unblocked Woman. I'm Amy Sanders. I'm founder of The Unblocked Method and I'm a pattern and identity expert. This podcast is where we show you what's actually happening underneath the surface of our lives and our patterns.

And today we're going somewhere a lot of podcasts don't. We are going right into grief. This topic is not comfortable, but it is real. And I think that, you know, you deserve someone who will sit with it with you instead of handing you just like a five-step version of how to fix it and then call it done.

We will be talking about the five steps, but we're going to be talking about a lot more than that as well. So first of all, I want to start by telling you why I'm talking about this today because it didn't start as a podcast idea. It started as a week I was having. This past week, my son's best friend lost his brother and his brother took his own life.

He left behind. He left behind a wife and two little kids, a three-year-old and a one-year-old. And he also left behind a family that is going to be forever changed by a Tuesday that they woke up to that probably started like any other Tuesday before they heard the news. And when I heard this, I held my son a little longer.

We talked about it. We went to a vigil with his friend. The family put together a beautiful vigil that we went to and we have been sitting with his friend more this week. And we're going to be talking about this and honestly, it brought up a lot for me that I haven't sat with in a while.

My sister died by suicide 36 years ago, the same week that my son's friend's brother took his life this year. My loss was 36 years ago. I was only 10 years old. And I want to talk to you about something that I think is important, something that I don't say loud enough or nearly as often.

There is a part of my heart that is still missing, not in the way that really swallows up my life and not in a way that breaks me anymore, but in a way that is just quiet and it's permanently there. A hole I fill that is always bigger around my sister's birthday, her death day, family holidays, and every June, she died towards the end of June, and every June I think about her even more, especially on her death day. And like clockwork, something in me remembers, even when my mind tries to move, my heart keeps that anniversary. 36 years and grief still visits and is still here.

Even though it's not nearly as big as it once was, the grief is not gone. And I say this not to scare you. I say this because I think we need to stop pretending that healing means forgetting and that healing, sometimes we think it's just totally complete. And so if we do remember something or if we do feel something that there's something wrong with us, and that's not the point.

Grieving, especially deep grief like this type of loss, isn't just done, complete, filed away. It doesn't work that way. And the sooner we stop long enough to expect it to be that way, the kinder we become to ourselves and also all the people who are around us that are in it. Here's the thing.

Grief doesn't wait for a convenient moment. It doesn't show up one at a time or when you're ready for it. Grief shows up unexpectedly. And a lot of times, when you least expect it.

Right now in Utah, we're watching wildfires tear through our state like I've never seen before. There are multiple fires all at once. It feels like our state is literally burning down. Families are waking up in the middle of the night with 20 minutes to grab what they can to carry and leave and abandon their house.

Homes are gone. Land that has held generations of memories, gone. My ex-husband and I, we've been living in this world for a long time. We've been living in this world for a long time.

My ex-husband's cabin, that is his family cabin. They built it. And when I first met my ex-husband, I would help them build this cabin every single weekend. We spent the weekend at the cabin, creating memories, building it.

And it's also the same place that I spent years making memories with my kids. And a place that holds so much of their history has burned down in these fires. I loved that cabin and the memories that I was able to create there. But what I carried there is a fraction of what my ex-husband's family has carried there.

What my kids carry there. The loss is layered and it belongs to each person differently. So we have loss that looks, loss and grief, that looks like a phone call on a Thursday. Grief that looks like watching smoke on a horizon.

We have grief that looks like ending a marriage. A friendship that has quietly dissolved and you don't know why. A diagnosis that you weren't expected to hear about. Maybe a dream that you've had for a long time.

That you finally let go of. Grief is the natural response to losing something that mattered to you. And so much of what causes it is completely outside of our control. You haven't chosen this.

You didn't get to choose when it shows up, how it lands, how loud it is, or even who it shows up for. The only thing that we can choose is how we move through it. So I want to give you an image of something that has helped me over the years. Because I have experienced grief in different ways, in different capacities, and nothing else has really quite helped me or explained it in a way that this does.

So I'm hoping that this helps you. I want you to imagine a big funnel. And at the very top, the widest part of the funnel, that's where grief begins. It's wide.

And it's all encompassing. It's like literally all you can think of. And in those first days, weeks, months, sometimes even, it's a year or more. Grief fills every room that you walk into.

It sits with you at breakfast. It follows you into the shower. It makes the ordinary feel impossible because nothing about your world feels ordinary anymore. It's completely changed you.

Your nervous system is trying to process something that is enormous, and it cannot do anything else at its full capacity right now because it is dealing with this grief. That's not weakness. That's biology. That's what it looks like when a human being is in a state of crisis.

A human being is working through real loss. And real loss is different for each person. But here's what this funnel shows us. Over time, and by the way, not on your timeline, unfortunately, not in anyone else's timeline, but just over time, the opening gets a little bit smaller.

Grief does not disappear. It doesn't go anywhere, but it starts to take up a different amount of space. You find yourself able to eat a full meal without it sitting across from you, looking at you. You laugh at something and you don't feel it.

You don't feel guilty about it two seconds later. You might go a whole afternoon without it flooding back in. And slowly, and by the way, it can fill very slowly. The spiral gets smaller.

Life starts to flow around the spiral and you start to build again. You start to love again. You start to show up more like yourself again and you're able to do the things you used to do without grief over empowering them anymore. But here's the thing.

The funnel doesn't empty. And it's not supposed to. At the bottom of the funnel, that grief is still there. It's smaller.

It's more integrated. But it's there. Because the love that was created, it doesn't go anywhere either. That grief is just the shadow of something that mattered deeply to you.

And you don't have to be ashamed of that shadow still existing. Even 36 years later, on a June afternoon, when something happens that brings it all back, which is what's happened for me this week. And this isn't being broken. This is being human.

It's broken. It's part of the human experience. It's part of the life we live. And we live it all.

All of the emotions, the good, the bad, the ugly, like that is being human. I also want to talk about the pressure that we put on grief. Because our culture is not great at sitting with it. If you were in the U.

S. , I am talking to you specifically. I think other cultures outside of the United States do this better than we do. But we try to rush everything.

And we want people to be able to be okay. And so we might say things like, at least, or everything happens for a reason, or maybe they're in a better place now because we're uncomfortable with the pain, ours, but also other people's pain. So we look for the lesson. We try to find the silver lining and find the thing that makes it make sense.

And sometimes those words do come from a real place of love. But sometimes what a grieving person actually needs is for someone just to sit down next to them and not say anything. For someone, just to give them a hug and show them that they see them. Just to be there with them.

To show them that you care. Grief needs time, not because time heals all wounds. I feel like that's like an oversimplified way to say this, but because grief is neurological. Like it literally changes the brain.

The loss to someone or something significant rewires your nervous system. And your brain has to rebuild its map of the world without that person, that place, that version of your life in it. And that process can't be rushed. It's going to take the time that it needs to take.

It moves at the pace that it moves and we cannot rush it. Or when you try to push yourself through it faster, you don't actually skip the stages. You just delay them. They don't go away.

The stages of grief are going to happen and they will wait for you. So right now, if you are in the wide part of the funnel and it feels like it's taking up everything in your life, taking up all of the space, I want you to hear this. You are exactly where you were supposed to be. Time is not your enemy right now.

Time is the most important thing you have. Let it work. There's a saying that time heals all wounds. And I do think that's mostly true with time you learn how to live with it.

But grief can linger forever. Like in my sister's case, there is still a hole in my heart. It still shows up. Most people have heard, what are the stages of grief?

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. And I want to talk about those two because I've been guilty of when I'm in the middle of something that has been just, has uprooted my life, that has just totally flatlined me. I've tried to like use them as a checklist. Oh, I'm in denial right now.

I'm in anger right now. I'm in bargaining, like trying to get through them, rush them. And what I have found that it does not work. They are not a checklist.

They are not sequential. They don't go in a certain order. They're not a ladder that you climb, from the bottom to the top. And then once you get to the top, you're done.

They're more like the weather. You can be in acceptance on a Tuesday and wake up in anger on a Wednesday for no reason that you can even name. Like you have no idea why you're freaking out or why you're so angry, but you are. You can feel like you've moved through something and then a song comes on the radio and sends you all the way back to the beginning in about four seconds.

You have a trigger that happens and all of a sudden you are angry or you're denying again or you're depressed. Like, when this happens, I think it's important to understand that this is not regression. This is just grief doing what it does. You might hit all of these multiple times.

I say might, but I actually think you will. For me, I hit all of them. I've even accepted something that literally killed me, about killed me a couple years ago. I've accepted at this point and yet I still will have anger, denial, bargaining.

I still have those come up. It's just grief doing what it does. Denial is the nervous system's first act of protection. It's usually the thing that starts first.

It can. It's not that you're lying to yourself. It's that your brain is buying time to try and figure out how to hold something that feels unholdable. Your brain doesn't know what to do with this and so you deny it.

It's totally normal. Your nervous system's trying to figure it out. Anger is often grief that has nowhere else to go and you're trying to point it at something. So it's just grief with an edge and it's real and it's valid and it doesn't make you a bad person for feeling it.

It's okay to be angry. Anger is actually a very important emotion for multiple reasons and it is part of the grief cycle. So when anger comes up, you can look at it and you can just say, you know what? Here it is.

Of course it's here. I am still in grief and this is okay. Bargaining is the mind just trying to find the back door to before. Like if only I had done this, what if I had done that?

I should have done this. I should have done that. Those are not facts. They are the grieving mind trying to find control in a situation where it feels like there's no control.

When my sister died, every single one of us family members thought it was our fault and we all started bargaining in different ways, even though it wasn't. I was only 10 years old. I was her little sister and somehow I thought the reason why she did it was because of me because the night that she did it, I got her sent to a room because she was actually, doing some mean things and I carried it for years. That's bargaining.

Thinking, well, maybe if I could have done this or I shouldn't have done that. Just part of grieving. Depression is the body finally putting down what it's been carrying and the weight becomes still for a moment and it's just as painful, but it's part of the process. It's part of moving through, not away.

You just have to know, oh, here this is. Unfortunately, depression can last a long time. Sometimes it's shorter. Sometimes it can last a lot longer.

And as you're going through, all of this, your capacity to hold more is less and it's okay. Acceptance, real acceptance is not I'm okay with what happened. It's I am learning to live in a world where this happened and I'm still here and that means something. The world might look different for me now.

There was a mark in the road and different turn I'm on now, a different journey I'm on now. How to live with this feels different, but I'm doing it. All of these stages are part of healing. None of them are wrong.

None of them mean that you're doing this badly. If you're revisiting them over and over, it just, remember, it's your brain. It's your nervous system. It's your whole body trying to figure out how to handle this.

So next I want to talk about what it looks like to actually show up for someone who is in the wide part of the funnel of grief because most of us have been taught accidentally how to do it wrong. When someone is in deep grief, the most powerful thing you can offer is not advice. It's not perspective. It's not a reframe.

It is your presence, your willingness to sit in the discomfort with them and try not to fix it. You don't have to know what to say. You really don't. A lot of times people avoid being there for someone going through grief because they don't know what to say.

You can literally say, I don't know what to say, but I'm here for you. This is one of the most honest and loving things that you can offer a grieving person. It tells them that they're not alone in this and you don't have to pretend, that you have answers that don't exist. You're just saying, hey, I don't know what to say, but I'm here for you, man.

Show up with food. Text them randomly on a Tuesday or Saturday, three weeks later when everyone else has moved on and they are still in it. Say the name of the person that they lost. People who are grieving are often terrified that the world will forget the person, that no one will say their name or his name, her name.

Say it. It matters. Let them talk about it. I remember that when my sister died, six months after her death, when the rest of the world was back to normal and moved on and they weren't making phone calls or dropping by anymore, we were still in it.

We were still carrying it every day. We were still struggling trying to remember that. What I'm saying is when someone's going through deep grief, they are going to be in it a lot longer than you think. So remember to continually show up for them and be there for them because feeling like you're not alone in it is so important.

Something that I've learned from my own experience on both sides of this is the grief you carry is yours. The grief someone else carries is theirs. And two people can lose the same person and grieve it completely differently. The cabin meant something different to me than it did to my kids and than it did to my ex-husband and his family.

None of those grieves are wrong. None of them are competing. All of them are real. They just are different.

Don't rank grief. Don't compare grief. Don't tell someone their loss is smaller because someone else's looks bigger. Loss is loss.

It takes what it takes and everyone experiences loss differently. I said earlier that grief literally changes the brain and I want to talk about that too because I think it's also important. We often talk about grief looking like something we go through and then coming out the other side unchanged. Like it's a tunnel.

Like you go in and then you come out and then you're the same person again. But you're not. You're different. Significant loss reorganizes the way we see the world.

It changes our relationship to time. It changes our relationship to love, to what we think matters. It can make us become more compassionate because now we know what that kind of pain feels like and we would never wish it on anyone. It can make us more present because loss has a way of stripping away everything that doesn't actually matter and leaving you standing in the face with what actually does.

The cabin is gone but every memory that we made there, every fire, every mill, every kid who fell asleep on the couch, the spiral staircase that we had that we had to go up and down, up to the loft, those memories are not gone. Those memories are still inside all of us who were there. Grief can take place but it cannot take what was held. My sister's absence has shaped me in ways that even 36 years later I am still discovering ways that this has changed me.

I think she made me more attuned to other people in pain. I think she's made me take love and family more seriously. I think that some of the work I do in the world has her fingerprints on it even though it's 36 years later, even though I don't say her name out loud all the time and I don't talk about her all the time. The people and places we lose didn't disappear from us.

They became part of how we love and how we show up in the world today. So before we close and end this, I want to just speak directly to anyone who is in the middle of this right now. If you are in those early days, if the funnel is at the widest part and you feel like it's all encompassing and you cannot see how life is going to ever feel normal again, I want you to hear this. You don't have to see it yet.

You just have to stay in it. You don't have to feel better today. You don't have to find the lesson or the meaning or the silver lining why this happened. You were allowed to just be in it.

You were allowed, to cry in your car, in your bed. You're allowed to say no to the dinner. You're allowed to eat cereal for dinner. You're allowed to cancel the thing because you don't feel like going.

You were allowed to be human while holding something really heavy. If you're watching someone that's going through it, if you're standing on the outside not knowing what to do, just go towards them. You don't have to have any answers. You just lean in.

Be there for them. And to the family of the young man that we lost this week, I know my son's best friend really well, but I don't know his brother who died. But I do know that you're surrounded by people who love you. And I am one more person in this world who is holding you.

You are not alone in this. And the love that is in the family is not going to go away. You don't have to hold this alone. In closing, what I want you to take away is that grief is not a problem to be solved.

It is a problem to be solved. It is a process that needs to be honored. And it arrives differently for every person. Every loss, every season in life, it shows up as smoke on the horizon.

It also shows up as a phone call on a Tuesday morning. It shows up as a June afternoon 36 years later that catches you off guard and you're just a little sadder that day. And every time that it shows up in whatever form, it's asking you to do one thing. Be with it.

Don't rush it. Don't try to go around it. Don't try and go past it. Just be with it.

Let time be your greatest ally in this. Time's not going to make you forget, but time will give your nervous system the space it needs to rebuild the map of this new world you're living in. To find out who you are on the other side of this loss and to discover that the funnel doesn't get smaller and that smaller doesn't mean lesser. It just means that you've integrated it now into your life.

It means that grief has become part of you in a way that you now can carry and hold as you move on. You won't be the same person after this. Instead, you will most likely be someone who has an even deeper way to love others enough to help them go through grief as well. And that's not something to be ashamed of.

That's something to be honored. If this episode found you at a moment when you needed it, I'm so glad it did. If it found you and you're thinking about someone who might need to hear it, make sure that you pass it along to them. Grief can feel like one of the most isolating things a person can experience.

When you know that someone else understands, even if it's a voice in your earbuds and you're listening to this, it can make a real difference. And if you're walking through something right now, reach out. You don't have to carry this alone. You can even reach out to me.

DM me on Instagram. Reach out to a friend and tell them that they need you because you absolutely don't need to carry this alone. With that, I know this episode was a little different than I usually do, but I will see you next week with something else. See it, shift it, and become magnetic.

Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Grief. Thanks for listening to The Unblocked Woman. Listen, you don't rise by waiting, you rise by leading.

So if this episode sparked a shift, send it to a woman who needs to hear next. And if you're ready to go deeper, join The Unblocked Woman Collective or begin The Unblocked Method at amysanders. co. And remember, see it, shift it, become magnetic.

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