Grief isn’t just sadness, and it doesn’t only follow loss. It can show up when we leave something unhealthy, when old childhood wounds resurface, or even when we let go of patterns that no longer serve us. I’m Tanya Stevens, Mind-Body Healing Guide, author, and creator of the Evolve Self-Healing Method, and in this post I’ll share three hidden truths about grief and a five-step practice to help you process it with compassion.

Key Takeaways:

• Grief is more than sadness and can show up in unexpected ways.
• Current emotional pain may be connected to unresolved experiences from the past.
• We can grieve even the changes and choices that support our healing and growth.
• Self-compassion and consistent emotional support are essential parts of the healing process.

Truth #1: Grief is a Triad of Emotions

Grief is actually a combination of three emotions: sadness, anger, and fear. Often, one of these emotions will be more prominent, and then step back as another takes the lead. If you are a visual person, try grabbing a journal and drawing a triangle, writing sadness, anger, and fear on each of the points. You will find that we often rotate through having one be stronger than the others.

Truth #2: Much of Our Grief is Rooted in Childhood

We can experience grief for many different reasons. It can be triggered by a current life breakdown, such as a relationship ending, a job change, or a financial situation.

However, a great deal of the grief we are seeing collectively right now is actually unprocessed grief from childhood. Growing up, many of the adults in our lives lacked healthy emotional skills and were unable to support us when we experienced trauma or wounds. In some cases, they were the ones whose actions caused the grief. Because of this, current situations are triggering old, stored grief that has never been fully processed. Processing this kind of grief takes time and usually releases in many layers.

Truth #3: Grieving What We Choose to Let Go

One of the most important things to understand is that you can experience tremendous grief even if you intentionally chose to end a situation or let someone go. People often think, “Well, you chose this, you shouldn’t be grieving,” but that is simply not true.

We can grieve over external situations, but we can also grieve internally over letting go of our own old patterns and behaviors. As we do deep healing work, we may realize how we have historically abandoned or mistreated ourselves, which brings up deep sadness, anger, and fear of letting those behaviors go.

For example, to heal from MS, depression, and anxiety, I had to slowly disconnect from my biological family over the last 10 years. Because they remain in denial about past abuse and haven’t worked on healing their own behaviors, it isn’t healthy for me to be in a relationship with them. Even though I have a wonderful partner and friends, I still experience profound grief almost every major holiday, such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter, because we used to gather for all of them. It doesn’t matter if the situation was unhealthy or if you chose to leave it—you will still grieve it.

How to Process Your Grief: Becoming a “Divine Parent”

Essentially, processing our emotions requires us to learn how to be a “divine parent”—a divine mother and father—to ourselves. Many empathic and highly sensitive people are wonderful at emotionally supporting others, but lack the tools to support themselves because they didn’t receive that modeling from their own caregivers.

Here are the basic steps to showing up for yourself as a divine parent to release grief:

1. Write about it: Grab a notebook and describe what caused or is currently causing the grief. Becoming the observer and writing about the situation and the emotions involved validates what happened to you.

2. Locate it in the body: Close your eyes, notice where you are physically feeling the grief in your body, and put your hand there. Acknowledge the sadness, anger, or fear, and simply breathe. Tell that part of yourself: “I’m here for you. I hear you. I feel you.”

3. Breathe and release: We often get stuck in a loop of grief because we aren’t consciously releasing it. Consciously visualize breathing the grief out of that area of your body, and then breathe in compassion for yourself.

4. Soothe with what is true: Ask this part of yourself what it needs to hear from its divine parent. You might need to say, “It’s normal and okay to feel grief over this,” or “You didn’t deserve to be treated this way.” Stay here feeling and soothing for about 5 to 15 minutes.

5. Write a letter: Give your younger self a voice by writing a letter to the person involved in causing the grief. You aren’t actually going to give them the letter; instead, read it aloud to a trusted, objective witness with no judgment. Once it has been witnessed, you can burn the letter to release it with compassion.

Continuing the Work

Remember, releasing deep grief, especially grief from repeated experiences, is not a one-time event. It requires carving out time to repeat these steps. For additional support, you can explore my guided therapeutic meditation practice and self-healing process when you receive my free Evolve Starter Kit, which provides samples of these tools. 

Thank you for being part of this community and doing the deeper healing work. Ultimately, this work not only heals you, but it raises the vibration of the entire planet. Namaste.