Recipes for Resilience: I Didn’t Know This Was Grief
We are excited to share our new monthly series called Recipes for Resilience, meant to inspire you to reflect, connect, and develop tools that help you on your grief and loss journey. This month’s recipe is called I Didn’t Know This Was Grief. It’s a snapshot of the range of emotions that can be part of grief, and the range of experiences that can cause us to grieve. We might not expect job loss and new schools to feel like a loss, but this recipe offers tools for identifying feelings of grief, even when you might not expect them.
Like any recipe, start with the ingredients. These are the emotions, symptoms, and experiences that you might find in your personal pantry—and they are just a sampling. For this recipe, focus on any new or strong feelings you’ve experienced lately.
Ingredients:
- Disinterest
- Loneliness & Isolation
- Anger – Often Unprovoked & Unexpected
- Feeling Lost
- Disappointment
- Relief
- Uncertainty
Next it’s time for the directions. This is an exercise, reflection, or thought experiment to add to your resilience toolkit. In this month’s recipe, the reflection below strengthens our ability to link our emotions to the experiences causing them, which helps reduce our fear and uncertainty around loss.
Directions:
- Take stock of your feelings.
- Think about when you’ve felt those emotions before. When you moved schools? When your pet died?
- Observe the people around you. What have you seen grief look like in others?
- Reflect upon what changes are happening in your life.
- Identify that your emotions may be coming from change or loss. Grief can look like many different things.
- Recognizing your grief empowers you to seek support, learn more, and trust your feelings.
Save the graphic of this recipe to refer to when you need it, or share it with a friend and talk about it together. Each month, you can find a new Recipe for Resilience on our blog or on our Instagram.
