6 Things About Mother Loss That Every Therapist Should Know
Too often, I've heard from women that their therapist does not understand mother loss. They feel that their ongoing grief is frequently dismissed and that the wide-reaching effects of losing a mother are misunderstood by most clinicians.
Hope Edelman and I want to tell you about six surprising things about mother loss that all counselors should know.
- Grief for a mother lasts a lifetime. It is perfectly normal for a woman to continue to long for her mother throughout her entire life.
- The loss of a mother affects all of a woman's attachments, including her romantic relationships and her parenting.
- Approaching, reaching, and passing her mother's age at time of death is a significant and emotional rite of passage for daughters. Additionally, watching her child reach the age she was when her mother died can bring on complicated emotions, anxiety, and reactivate old grief.
- It's very common for a woman who lost her mother to feel a lack and deficiency around female identity and motherhood. Often these women will feel a sense of imposter syndrome around other women who have not experienced mother loss.
- Mother loss can lead to an intense fear of other losses. Health anxiety, catastrophic thinking, and fear of death or abandonment are common for women who have lost mothers.
- Women who have experienced mother loss often feel "stuck" in certain parts of their development, as if a piece of them never got to grow up.
If you are a mental health professional who would like to learn even more about working with mother loss, please join me and Hope Edelman for a six-week Mother Loss Certification program. Hope and I both bring a wide breadth of personal and professional knowledge to our work. Hope and I have worked with thousands of women and led dozens of retreats to help women who have lost their mothers.
The Mother Loss Certification is open to clinicians, therapists, counselors, graduate-level students, and any other professionals in proximity to grief. We look forward to providing you with the tools you need to support daughters through their journey of mother loss. Learn more and apply >>
Find books and online support for mother loss on my Grief Resource page.
Does Your Partner Understand Your Grief?
We've finally made it to February after the longest January ever! And with Valentine's Day around the corner I'm thinking about how grief impacts our romantic relationships. In all the years that I've been working to support people who are moving through loss, one of the biggest issues I've encountered is how grief and loss affects our relationships. Most people do not feel that their spouse or partner truly understands what they are going through when they are grieving, and this is something that can cause unnecessary strain and stress on the relationship.
Grief and loss can can also cause us develop anxious or avoidant tendencies in our relationships, making us fearful about opening up and being truly vulnerable with the people we love.
These are normal reactions, even when they are problematic. Of course it's scary to love someone when you've experienced loss. Being compassionate with yourself in this area is vital. Finding ways to communicate with your partner about how you're feeling, and what it's like to have loss in your life, is also important.
Overall, one of the best ways I've found to ease that tension in your relationship is to find other outlets for your grief. We tend to expect our partners to be fill every role in our lives, but that's not realistic and generally just impossible. Joining a local grief group, finding an online community, or reading books about grief that make you feel validated and nurtured can help take the pressure off your partner and help you feel understood and soothed through other outlets.
If you have lost a parent and would like to do more work around this area in relation to your partner, consider singing up for my online course Supporting Your Partner Through Loss. Using the included workbook and audio presentation, you and your partner work through the material together.
Love,
Claire
Meditation for Grief
Grief is an inescapable experience. Yet our first impulse to it is usually to run away from it. Facing all the painful feelings that come along with a loss can be overwhelming. Often we are experiencing this much pain for the very first time in our lives, and it's completely normal to try to do everything we can not to feel it.
Yet the truth is that when we can allow ourselves to open up to the pain of loss when we can create space to feel all the emotions that arise...that is when we heal. Sometimes people are afraid that if they open that door the pain will engulf them, or that if they start crying they may never stop, but the opposite is true - it is when we can let all the emotions come forth that they will eventually begin to ease.
Meditation is a beautiful way to make space for all the thoughts and feelings that arise when we are grieving. We spend so much of our days filling in any quiet space - we watch the news, we scroll through social media, we go to work, socialize with friends, keep busy with errands and tidying our houses - it's a wonder any of us ever sit still anymore. But sitting still when we are grieving is deeply important to the process, even if it's the last thing you want to do.
I remember when I tried meditation for the first time after my parents died - it seemed so hard and scary. I had spent years filling up all of my time so that I wouldn't have to feel anything. When I finally sat still it all came rushing forth. In the beginning, I cried a lot during meditation. But that was good! I needed to cry. I needed to release all the sadness I'd been carrying around. Eventually, I stopped crying and I was able to go even deeper into my meditation practice, something that led me to the peaceful place I'm in today.
Meditation has been the single-most helpful tool that I’ve learned in twenty years of struggling through grief. I know that for many, meditation can seem intimidating but the only requirement is that you have an open mind and that you don’t put pressure on yourself to do this perfectly.
In order to help you get started, I’ve created a meditation mini-course to guide you through the beginning steps of creating space for this in your life. Use the meditations in this course as often as you feel necessary and remember that creating space for all that you are feeling is what will see you through to a more peaceful place.
Love,
Claire
View my Meditation Mini-Course Preview
Support with Grief During Holidays
The holidays can be a complicated time if you are grieving—or even if it’s been a long time since you’ve lost someone, but they were a significant person in your life. Today I want to share some options for support and resources that may be helpful to you this holiday season.
Support
NEW and limited time! A Safe Place to Grieve: Release Your Anxiety (Live 6-week guided experience + Online Course with lifetime access)—Starting January 7th, I’ll be guiding participants live through my online course step-by-step, tuning in to interact with you every week, plus giving special attention to how anxiety can manifest after loss and how to find peace and progress with this challenge. I use this approach every day with my grief therapy clients. You'll be able to gain access to these tools and support from anywhere at any time. If you are looking for extra support with your anxiety and grief this holiday season, starting this program is a powerful place to begin.
One-Time Personal Consultation—I'm offering one-time consultations at this time. I'm currently based in Los Angeles and have been working with clients from around the globe over the past ten years. This might help you process a particular aspect of your loss or trouble-shoot bigger picture issues. I provide tips, tools, resources, and overall symptom management strategies.
Resources
Coping with Grief During the Holidays—In this podcast episode, I share my own experience on coping with the holidays and offer you actionable tips to help you cope this holiday season.
64 Tips for Coping with Grief During the Holidays—This is a very helpful list of tips and suggestions for coping with grief during the holidays.
Holiday Survival Strategies for Coping with Grief—A wonderful article on specific strategies you can implement this holiday season to help you with your grief during this time.
Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief—In my latest book, I break down anxiety, giving readers a concrete foundation of understanding in order to help them heal the anxiety caused by loss.
10 Helpful Tips for Resilient Grieving—In this blog post, I explore resilient grieving, which is the idea that we can take active measures and steps to find strength and learn coping tools in the face of loss, even when the pain seems unbearable.
Honoring Holidays, Anniversaries, & Birthdays for Loved Ones—There are so many difficult dates after you lose someone you love. In this blog post, I offer my thoughts on how to honor your loved ones during the holidays and other significant days throughout the year.
I hope this list is helpful for you. If you have any suggestions you'd like to share, please add them to the comments below.
Wishing you peace this holiday season. Remember, you are not alone.
Love,
Claire
Coping with Grief During the Holidays
Today I want to talk about grief during the holidays. The holidays are upon us and it can be a loaded time if you are grieving—or even if it's been a long time since you've lost someone, but they were a significant person in your life. The holidays can bring up so much, like sadness and reflection and other big feelings.
I know this is a time of year when my clients want to talk about the holidays. The actual day is hard, but sometimes the whole season can be hard. Even just the anticipation of the holidays can bring on a certain feeling of anxiety and sadness. The holidays can also be very sweet, with lots of great memories associated. So this is a time when things can be confusing and big feelings can come up.
In my podcast episode below, I share my own experience on coping with the holidays and offer you actionable tips to help you cope this holiday season. In this podcast, I share:
- My own recent experience with the holidays
- How to be kind to yourself this holiday season
- A list of things you can do to get through the holidays this year
- And a way to honor your person during this holiday season
10 Helpful Tips for Resilient Grieving
Resilient grieving is the idea that we can take active measures and steps to find strength and learn coping tools in the face of loss, even when the pain seems unbearable.
An evolving field of research has recently acknowledged our capacity for resiliency, the natural human ability to face trauma and loss by finding ways to thrive, become more in tune with our lives, and create new ways to make meaning out of our experiences.
As someone who has been through my own share of grief, and who has seen hundreds of others move through the process, I know that resilient grieving isn’t for everyone. I believe there are certain personalities and circumstances that more readily lend themselves to this philosophy. But I also believe that there are tools and ideas within resilient grieving that all of us can use. More importantly, many of these techniques can reduce anxiety.
Resilient grieving is about being proactive in your grief process. It’s about letting yourself cry and mourn, but also taking a look at your coping methods and earnestly beginning to reshape your life. It’s about not letting your world fall irrevocably apart as a result of this loss. For some people this may feel out of tune with your natural grief process – some people feel that dusting themselves off and getting on with their lives means letting go of their loved one, but that’s not what resiliency is about.
There are ways to stay connected to your loved one and also begin to live a new life without them, as painful as that may initially sound. I really do believe there is a way to balance the mourning process with resilience, and that building resilience will serve to reduce your anxiety and leave you feeling less overwhelmed.
So how do we go about doing this? Here are some basic ideas about resilient grieving that you can begin to employ in your life right now.
Re-establish Routines
Returning to a regular schedule and routine, despite the changes that you have incurred, immediately soothes the brain and lets our unconscious know that we are safe again. This has a calming effect on the body and central nervous system, leading us away from some of those bodily responses that can easily trigger a panic attack.
When my mother died I took a year-long hiatus from college. I had no sense of routine – I stayed up late, traveled on a whim, did nothing predictable. At the time this felt like what I wanted – my mother was gone; nothing should be the same. But in retrospect, I think it would have perhaps been more beneficial for me to remain in school and continue as planned, while still grieving. Being unmoored like that, out in the world, increased my anxiety and my sense that there was nothing to rely upon.
Examine What is Working
Dr. Hone encourages grievers to ask themselves if their behavior is “helping or harming.” This means paying attention to the thoughts you are focusing on. Are you obsessing on feelings of guilt, continually running through a list of “what ifs”, or replaying traumatic images?
These are all normal responses to loss. It’s as though our mind wants to turn the experience over in our heads like a Rubix cube, trying to make sense of it, trying to line up the events in order to reach a different outcome. Again, this is normal and expected, but after a certain period of time we must begin to release these thoughts and move away from them.
If you find yourself continually replaying certain thoughts stop and ask yourself if they are actually helping in some way. If they are not, then it is time to let go of these thoughts. We’ll cover more strategies for “retraining” your brain in Chapter Eight.
Ask for Help
This one may seem obvious but I can’t tell you how many people I’ve encountered who shrink from this in the face of grief. Either they assume that no one around them will be able to truly help, or they are afraid to ask for help. Letting the people around you know what you need – whether that’s household help, financial planning assistance, or simply someone to listen – can ease the burden you are carrying. I think you’ll be surprised by how ready your community is to help you once they have an understanding of how.
Nurture Your Physical Body
This is often the first thing to go out the window. When we are grieving it is common to experience a lack of appetite, lethargy, sleeplessness. Being proactive about your health during this time is vital. Healthy foods, exercise, and rest will greatly reduce your stress and anxiety levels.
Seek Positives
When we are grieving there is the tendency to look at the whole world through gloom-colored glasses. In the initial grieving process, or if you have let things stagnate for too long, we can become mired in seeing negativity everywhere.
For years I could only look at my life through the lens of having lost my parents. I saw only what I didn’t have, and all the ways in which my life was ruined as a result of their deaths. Finally I began to actively work to acknowledge the positive aspects of my life and doing this turned everything around for me.
This isn’t always an easy process – it requires diligence and focus. Sitting down and making gratitude lists, reminding yourself to bask in positive moments and experiences, and remembering that embracing life again doesn’t mean letting go of your loved one.
Distractions
The habit of dwelling on negative thoughts, or what psychologists calls rumination, can become exactly that – a habit. Actively working to break this cycle by distracting yourself with positive activities can help break this pattern. Go to the movies, take up gardening or some other hobby, beginning to socialize with people who make you feel comfortable, can have a profound effect on reducing negative cycles of thoughts that cause anxiety.
Create Rituals
Find ways that feel good to you to bring your loved one into your life. Our inner selves crave connection with our loved ones. Don’t deny this impulse. Create your own ways to continue that bond. Make their favorite meals, light a candle every night, tell stories about them, start a project in their honor or find a way to be of service for a cause that they cared about.
Connect with Others
Sometimes being around people can be difficult after a major loss. Finding the right people to share company with can make all the difference. Take a look at the people in your life and put distance between yourself and anyone that makes you uncomfortable right now.
Also, seek out people who understand what you’re going through. Join a support group, reach out to a friend who is also familiar with loss. Finding ways to feel a little less alone in your grief will be incredibly soothing.
Make Meaning
Finding ways to make meaning of the loss is invaluable to your sense of peace. This doesn’t mean making sense of why that person died now, but rather, finding ways to make their loss and your grief meaningful.
Did your loved have a cause they were passionate about? Continue the work in their honor. Has your pain made you more compassionate? Find ways to use that in ways to help others.
Accept the Loss
A lot of resilience work involves truly accepting the loss. For many of us this means simply facing our grief, opening ourselves up to the changes in our world, and working to genuinely step into the pain as a way of moving through it. This can feel incredibly frightening but doing this work is never as scary as we think it’s going to be.
*This is an excerpt from Chapter Five of my new book, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. To read more, order your copy here today!*
My Story of Anxiety and Grief
Today I want to share my own experience that you may be able to relate with. This is an excerpt from the introduction of my upcoming book, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief, which will be released next week.
I wrote this book to help as many people as possible to understand what anxiety is, how it’s related to grief and the process of digging deeper to move through the feelings that are causing the anxiety.
To get a better understanding of the whole picture, how anxiety and grief work together, I’d like to share with some of my own experience with anxiety and grief:
I was fourteen when both of my parents got cancer at the same time. I was an only child, and the prospect of losing my family was something that loomed over me throughout adolescence. While my father’s prostate cancer was treated easily and he quickly went into remission, my mother’s late-stage colon cancer took us on a rollercoaster of hospitals and doctors and seemingly endless treatments.
My parents were wonderful people. They’d met and married late in life, both of them each other’s third marriages. My father was an engineer and a WWII POW. My mother was a glamorous artist living in Manhattan. She was forty and he was fifty-seven when I was born, and even though my father had three grown children from his first marriage, my mother had always wanted one of her own. I was born in 1978 in Atlanta, Georgia and for a long time our lives were good.
But by the time I headed off to college my father was in his seventies and my mother’s cancer had begun to win the five-year battle she’d been fighting. She died midway through my freshman year at a small liberal arts school in Vermont. I didn’t make it in time to be by her side during her final moments.
My mother’s death rocked me. I was absolutely floored by it. Nothing could have prepared me for it. Not the five years we’d spent helping her combat her illness, not the talks my father had with me about her potential demise, not the school guidance counselor’s sessions. The truth was I never believed she would actually die. Because: Mothers don’t die. Bad things don’t actually happen.
I now understand that these beliefs were at the root of my anxiety. When my mother’s death disproved the two things I’d so fervently held onto, the whole floor dropped out. If my mother could die, anything, absolutely anything could happen.
I took a hiatus from school and moved back home to Georgia to help my father pack up the house. I got a job as a waitress and I struggled to relate to my old friends from high school who came around to check on me. No one I knew had experienced so significant a loss. Everyone was sympathetic but nonetheless, I felt very alone in my grief.
The anxiety attacks continued to surface. I lived in fear of having them, and I navigated a constant undercurrent of panic. I worried that my father was going to die at any moment. I worried that I would die. And less concrete than those fears, I simply felt a yawing dizziness at the idea that life was completely out of my control.
I turned to alcohol to quell the anxiety, and I attached myself to a young man who had recently lost a family member and who was deep in the throes of his own grief. Together we made our way to New York City, and it was there, in a college psychology class, where I realized for the first time, that what had happened all those years ago on the road trip with my high school boyfriend: I’d had a panic attack.
Understanding this was the first step in my healing process. Recognizing that I had anxiety as a result of my mother’s death actually helped me to better face the loss and enter into my grief. Losing someone we love is so deeply painful that we often turn away from the feelings, rather than letting them course through us. But when we choose to push away difficult emotions they don’t just disappear, they simply fester beneath the surface causing anger, frustration, and anxiety.
Find out more and pre-order Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief today!
Love,
Claire
Why I Support Others with Grief
Yesterday was a big day of loss for so many in our country. In honor of this time of remembrance, I wanted to share a bit about my own journey with loss and grief—and how I’ve dedicated my life to offering support and helping others get through their own loss.
I was fourteen when both of my parents got cancer at the same time. My mother died when I was eighteen and my father died when I was twenty-five. Life was hard after that. Being an only child, I felt that I had truly lost my whole family. I felt very alone in the world and unsure of my purpose.
I experienced debilitating anxiety, coupled with bouts of deep depression. For a while I drowned myself in alcohol and unhealthy relationships. But through it all I wrote -- writing had always been my outlet and eventually it became my salvation. From rock bottom to a yoga and meditation practice that finally cleared enough space in my head and heart to allow myself to really grieve for the first time, instead of running away.
And after that all I wanted to do was help others get through what had been so difficult for me. I got a masters in clinical psychology, trained in hospice, became a therapist specializing in grief, and wrote a of couple books.
Along the way I also got married and had two beautiful daughters. That marriage fell apart five years ago and I experienced grief all over again at the dissolution of my little family.
But even through the hardest weeks and months of that time, I held on to what I've learned to be true: that life is much longer and winding than we think and if we let the most painful moments break us wide open, we get to transform into something better than before.
So here I am at today at forty, in love and married again, unexpectedly pregnant with baby number three, and putting out my third book, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief, in a few short weeks. These days I find myself grateful for everything hard that's ever happened, and humbled by the life I've been able to live as a result. As scary as it feels some days I now love and live on a level that once seemed impossible.
I hope by sharing my story with you it will help inspire you to finding the other side of grief in your own life.
If you or someone you love is grieving right now, I have a few resources I’d love to share to help you:
- Read my post on What I Know About Grief
- Book a session to work with me directly
- Try my self-guided online grief program, A Safe Place to Grieve
- Listen to my interview on a recent episode of Dear Sugars where we discuss moving on after loss
- Read my recent article on Goop, which lists resources from my upcoming book, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief.
I hope this helps you. Please share this with someone who is grieving. We’re all in this together and it’s important to reach out to others during times of loss.
Love,
Claire
What I Know About Grief
Twenty years after the death of my mother and ten years after becoming a grief therapist, there's a lot I know about grief. I've lived it personally and I've also held the hands of hundreds of others as they navigate their own process of mourning. After all this time and all this experience, there are a few things I know for sure.
How Exploring the Afterlife Affects the Grief Process
Recent studies show that people who are either grounded in spiritual or religious practices, or the opposite - atheists, have less anxiety about death and the afterlife than people who have no firm beliefs.
I know this was the case for me. After my mother died I floundered for years to find a framework with which to understand her death. Why did she die at age 58? Would I ever see her again? Could she see me? I had no answers, and looking for them seemed even harder than not. So for a long time I just didn't believe anything.
But after my first daughter was born I was consumed with anxiety all over again. What would happen to her if I died? What would happen to me if she died? I felt compelled to search for answers. I talked to rabbis, priests, psychic mediums, shamans…you name it. I made time for anyone I thought could tell me the answer.
What I realized after a while was that I was really searching for was faith. For a way to believe in something bigger than me. Bigger than her. And each time I found glimpses of it I felt a little less anxious.
I still have yet to find a definitive answer, but what I have found is that letting myself be open about it, letting myself wonder about it, has had a profound effect on my sense of peace about the people I've lost.
When was the last time you really pondered what you think happens when we die? Have you ever? Do you have a belief about the afterlife? And if so, does it help you feel connected to your lost loved ones? If not, doing a little exploring and opening yourself up different ideas and ways you might still be connected, can bring great healing.
In my podcast interview with renowned psychic medium Fleur, we explore all of these things and so much more. It was a fascinating conversation and I hope you’ll check it out! You can listen here (it’s episode #4) on iTunes, Google Play, or Overcast.
Love,
Claire