Chapter 2 • Why the World Avoids Grief—And Why Embracing It Is Key to Our Well-Being

Contents

Return to Week 2 Resources • Emotional Exposure

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If you turn away from the pain of “losing” your animal, you also turn away from their Love.

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When Mum Died, There Was No Space for Grief

I was fourteen when Mum died of ovarian cancer. She was everything to me. Saying we were close doesn’t begin to capture it. We didn’t fight, like most teens and their Mums do. She was kind and shy, and I think being a mother was both her greatest blessing and her most beautiful accomplishment.

The most common thing I remember people saying in the days and weeks after she died was, “You’re okay. You’re strong. You’re such a good girl.” And while those words were meant to comfort, what I really heard was: No one wants to see you cry. Don’t make this harder for others. Your feelings make people uncomfortable. Push them down.

Looking back now, I understand how unequipped everyone was. They loved me. They loved my mum. They just didn’t know how to make space for grief. But not having that space changed me. It shaped the way I related to myself, and to the world around me.

One of the clearest memories I have is from three years before she died, the day I found out she had cancer. I was eleven. My teacher asked me to stay after class. I sat alone at my desk while all the other desks had their chairs stacked on top. Eventually, my parents arrived. My stepdad told me that Mum had stage four ovarian cancer, but that she was going to beat it. And to help her, we all had to be strong. No tears. No fear. Just strength. He wasn’t crying. Mum wasn’t either. When I think about that moment now, I can’t remember what I felt, only the chairs stacked on desks and how strange it was. I remember the message clearly though: be strong so she can live.

But right now, as I write this, I can feel how impossible that moment must have been, for all three of us. I can only imagine that I would have wanted to cry. To tell my mum how much I loved her. To be held by her the way she always held me when something bad happened.

And I’m not sure I can even imagine how my mum must have felt. Or my stepdad. My mum was the softest, most maternal, most comforting and affectionate woman I’ve ever known. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to hear she had six months to live and then have to tell that to an eleven-year-old child.

So for the next three years, we all kept it in. I doubled down on the message I’d absorbed that day: Don’t cry. Don’t fall apart. Be strong—for Mum. As her body slowly broke down, I trained myself not to cry. I became a master at turning off the tears. I could feel them start in my belly, rising like a wave toward my chest, then catch them in my solar plexus and shove them back down. Sometimes they got stuck in my throat, that burning, clenched feeling. But even then, I found a way to hold them in.

Eventually, I got so good at it that I barely noticed the tears trying to come at all. I became a black belt in emotional suppression. I abandoned my needs, my fears, my feelings. I became who I thought I had to be: the girl who was strong and held everyone else together.

And while my story may seem extreme, the truth is that this is something we all go through. Whether it was loss, heartbreak, or the many ordinary disappointments and challenges that come with being a small human in a big world, we’ve all had moments when our big feelings weren’t received or cared for in the way we needed. And in those moments, we learned to suppress our feelings, distract from them, or get stuck in them.

So take a moment here. Can you remember a time when you were sad, hurt, or scared, and someone ignored you? Or punished you? Or made you feel like your emotions weren’t welcomed?

This is why pet grief can become such a profound turning point, one we never saw coming, but deeply needed. Because our animals are so pure. So innocent. So full of unconditional love. And somehow, in their passing, our hearts finally break open in a way nothing else ever could. It’s as if their love reaches into the deepest places inside us, the places where old pain still lives, and says, It’s safe now. You can feel this. I’ve got you.

And if we let it, grieving the loss of a beloved animal can open the door to finally releasing the pain we’ve carried since childhood. The tears we never cried. The heartbreaks we never had space to feel. The parts of us that have been waiting, so patiently, to be seen, held, and loved.

We Don’t Heal with Time, We Heal with Love

By the time I reached my thirties, I had been carrying unprocessed grief for over half my life. I didn’t know it was grief, I just knew I was exhausted from holding it all together. I looked capable and strong. But underneath, I was using anything I could to escape the heartache.

In my teens, I turned to food to escape and find the relief I was so desperately needing—a pattern that quickly spiraled into bulimia, which I battled until my early thirties. In my twenties, I added weed and party drugs to the mix. Later, it became alcohol, overworking, and overexercising. For nearly two decades, I lived in survival mode, using anything I could to fill the void and avoid the ache. Eventually, that life cracked open. My coping strategies stopped working. And I reached a point where I knew: I can’t keep going like this. (I share more about this turning point in 5 • Self-Compassion: The Missing Ingredient).

But what I want you to know here is this:

most people think time will heal their grief.

But time alone doesn’t heal.

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What time often does is push our pain deeper underground, where it gets buried in the unconscious. We wonder why we’re sick, addicted, exhausted, disconnected in our relationships, why we snap at our partner, why we feel lost, numb, or invisible. Often, it’s unprocessed emotion and grief.

When we don’t let emotion move through us, we have to double down on the things that help us avoid it, addictions, overdoing, shutting down. We wonder why we’re so triggered when our partner doesn’t listen. Or when life doesn’t go our way. But those triggers often touch older emotions or grief: the pain of feeling unseen, unloved, or abandoned. And over time, the real tragedy isn’t what happened to us—it’s how we learned to abandon ourselves.

Most of us didn’t grow up having our emotions met with care. Whether it was a lost toy or spilled milk, we were often ignored, dismissed, or even shamed for having big feelings. So we learned to turn away from our pain. And now, as adults, we often do the same thing to ourselves.

That’s the deeper cost of repressed emotion and unprocessed grief: we lose connection with our true self. When we’re young, we’re naturally in tune with our instincts, our passions, and our inner knowing. But when we stop feeling our emotions, we slowly begin to lose touch with that inner compass—our clarity, courage, and sense of direction (see References: Suppressed Emotion Disconnects Us from Instinct and Intuition). And then one day, we realize: we don’t even know what lights us up anymore, because we’ve lost connection with the fire, the passion, the intuition inside us. (There’s much more on this in 12 • Stuff, Signs and Synchronicities .)

But here’s the hope:

each time we allow ourselves to feel, we reconnect with a part of who we are.

When we meet our pain with kindness, we begin to shift the old patterns. And the more present we are with ourselves, the more we return to what feels like home.

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The Number One Lie that Robs People of Grieving and Healing

For most of my life I believed that being strong meant not crying. That it was brave and honorable to hide my feelings, to protect others from the weight of my sadness. But it’s just not true. Real strength isn’t in shutting your feelings down—it’s in letting them move through you. Courage is allowing yourself to cry, to express, to share your vulnerability, and to be witnessed in it (especially by yourself.) That’s not weakness. That’s humanity. And when we let our grief flow instead of stuffing it away, we don’t just heal, we open the door to gifts we can only receive when we feel, honor, and express our emotions:

We release the pressure. Emotions are energy in motion (e-motion). When we let them move, that energy is released instead of building up inside us as tension, stress, or even physical illness.
We grow closer to others. Grief is meant to connect us. Sharing our pain builds compassion and intimacy. We’re not meant to carry it all alone—we’re wired to connect.
We discover what we need. Emotions are messengers. When we allow them, they reveal what will help us—time, rest, comfort, a hug, a ritual, or even spiritual support.
We honor our love. When we acknowledge our pain, we’re really acknowledging the depth of our love. Ignoring it can leave us feeling heavy, even guilty, as if we’re denying the truth of how much they mattered. We honor our emotions because, in doing so, we honor the love we shared, and claim the miracle of it.
We reconnect with ourselves. Feeling our emotions keeps us connected to our life force. If we shut them down, we disconnect from our intuition, our gut instincts, and our deeper wisdom. </aside>

Researcher Dr. Brené Brown, who has spent decades studying vulnerability, calls it our most accurate measure of courage. Vulnerability, she explains, is emotional exposure, uncertainty, and risk. And there is no grief without all three.

Think about it: every morning you get out of bed after your beloved animal has passed, you’re stepping into risk and uncertainty. Your world no longer looks the same. Your routines are broken. A piece of your life, your heart, is missing. Just moving forward in that reality is an act of courage. And yet, instead of honoring that courage, most of us double down on hiding. We put on our “I’m fine” face. We swallow our tears in public. We cry in the bathroom. But heaven forbid we let a friend, a colleague, or even our spouse see the truth of our heartbreak.

Here’s the shift:

exposing and sharing your pain is not weakness—it’s the bravest, most beautiful thing you’ll ever do.

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It rewires the old messages we learned in childhood, the ones that taught us to silence our tears. And if there were ever a time to reprogram those lies, it’s now, when your beloved animal, your everything, is gone. If not now, when?

Hear this and let it sink in:

expressing emotion is courageous.

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Allowing yourself to cry in front of others isn’t just healing for you, it creates space for them too. Your tears give others permission to be human.

This is how we change the culture of grief:

one honest moment, one trembling tear at a time.

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Grief Is the Invitation We Need to Return to Our Authentic Selves

Grief touches us all when we lose someone we love. Yet most of us don’t know how to grieve. We’ve spent a lifetime learning not to be “weak”, not to feel too deeply or show our pain. We aren’t taught to grieve at home. We rarely see it in the media or movies. It’s certainly not part of any school curriculum.

So, like I once did with food, many of us lean harder into coping mechanisms to escape what we don’t want to feel. We might throw ourselves into work during the day and pour a drink at night. We might exercise obsessively or focus on helping others, while ignoring ourselves. But if we’re lucky, grief has a way of breaking through our Oscar winning performance of being okay.

Maybe we stumble on our beloved animal’s belongings and feel a sudden wave of sadness. In that moment, we have a choice: push the feelings aside or pause to feel and grieve. Or maybe a song plays, and suddenly the dam inside us cracks. Again, we face a choice: let it break us open or exhaust ourselves trying to hold it all in.

Ellie and I are here to guide you through that opening, to help you transform your grief into growth, healing, and beauty. But to do this, we need a new term. We need new language to reflect that grief isn’t only pain, it also carries the promise of renewal, purpose, and joy.

Grievealing: Grieving All the Way into Healing and Revealing

Most traditional sources define grief as sorrow, suffering, or mourning. Something to endure. Something to survive. But in my experience, both personally and through over ten thousand hours of supporting others, grieving is so much more than that.

So I created a new word:

Grievealing is the sacred, embodied process of feeling the pain of loss while also loving and caring for yourself with compassion—so grief becomes a path to healing and to revealing a deeper connection with your loved one and with your Self.

Rather than just surviving loss, grievealing invites us to:

Feel our emotions—consciously, somatically, and truthfully
Heal our past and patterns—through loving practices like compassion, forgiveness, and self-care
Reveal our path forward—and discover a clearer sense of purpose in our life </aside>

It’s not just about “expressing the pain”. It’s about meeting our emotions with tenderness, and learning to lovingly support ourselves in that space.

Sometimes we cycle endlessly in emotional loops, replaying emotional stories without actually feeling them in the present moment. Other times, we think and analyze our grief instead of vulnerably feeling it in the present. Grievealing calls us present here and now—where real healing happens. As we feel authentically we begin to release trapped pain. And as we open to Love, we begin to restore our bodies, minds, and hearts.

Way to go ❤️‍🔥 That’s Week 2 Reading Complete 🏆 🎉 😁 🙌

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