How to Be with the Overwhelm of Early Grief

Early grief does not whisper.

It howls.

It rushes in like a storm tide, breaking everything open.

Clients describe early grief to me in sessions like a disorientation, a panic, like disbelief & overwhelm.

You may find yourself staring at walls, forgetting how to breathe.

You may feel numb, or like your body is too full to hold the ache.

You may not recognize the sound of your own voice.

This is what it is to grieve at the beginning.

It is not just the loss of a person, it is the collapse of a world.

The future you imagined. The shared language.

The daily rituals that only the two of you shared. There is a whole world that gets built between two people and you are now finding yourself there, alone.

In early grief, time becomes distorted.

Morning and night blur. Your body feels tense and heavy.

The simplest tasks, eating, showering, responding to a messages can feel insurmountable.

You are not doing it wrong.
You are not broken.
You are grieving. You are surviving.

Grief in its earliest form is a kind of initiation.

It strips away the noise and leaves you face to face with love, loss, and the vastness of what it means to be alive in a world where everything ends.
There are ways to be with it. Ways to tend to yourself in that overwhelm that help you find your footing in this uncertain terrain.

You do not need to "move on." You do not need to be strong.
What you need is to let your grief breathe. To ride those waves & to take radical care of yourself.

And if all you can do today is survive, that is enough.
Because grief, especially in the beginning, is not something you heal.
It is something you carry, something you express and something you tend to.

And in time, it will soften. It will change. It will ebb and flow.
And the love that remains will become a forever part of you.

A Gentle Guide to Early Grief is a self-paced online course meant to help you find stability in the overwhelm of early grief.

Co-created with Amelia Bradaric, Grief & Trauma Therapist, of Adventuring Loss, it brings you our combined 10 years of clinical experience sitting with hundreds of grieving individuals. This is as close to a how to guide as you’ll find.

Find out more about the course here.

Marie