My beloved colleague and friend, Doreen Korba, joined me for this super-important conversation around grief. With a master’s degree in counseling and a background as a marketing executive, Doreen specializes in helping female entrepreneurs understand their nervous system and how to keep it regulated.

If you’ve listened to the podcast before, you know the importance I put on managing our stress cycles, and Doreen’s work helps us access the inner wisdom of our nervous system beautifully.

Doreen’s experience with grief is a tender one, so I want to give a bit of a trigger warning: we discussed her grief journey with the loss of her newborn baby, her grieving process, and how she’s living through it today.

If you’re not ready for that, please honor where you are and skip to another episode. But if you’d feel comforted by a girlfriends-over-coffee vibe where we’re openly discussing our losses, how grief affects relationships, and how we navigate it all, you’re invited to pull up a chair and join us.

Your grief deserves healing regardless of your loss

Often I coach on situations related to infidelity, and one of the pieces of that is the mourning and the grief of the marriage you had before. Even when you reconcile, it’ll be something else. So there’s essentially been a death of the former relationship.

But then there’s the PTSD, the trauma part where something rocked your whole life and worldview. We still have to resolve that, even as we process the grief that something you loved that was alive is now dead, and the whole emotional wake that comes with that.

Regardless of the source of our grief, we’re not really given the tools by society or our culture to know how to manage grief well. We’re expected to keep it quiet, to face it alone internally. We might tell ourselves we have nothing to be upset about, other people have it worse. We might not even recognize that we’re in a grieving process, much less know how to navigate it.

About this, Doreen said, “I think that we’re taught to shy away from talking about grief. The reason I’m open about my grief is because the more open I am, the more I see that everyone has experienced some level of grief, and it actually provides me more comfort than going into a corner, like we’re taught, and hiding our grief.

There’s a lot written about the stages of grief, and I did not find myself navigating the stages of grief.

I found myself staying in sadness for a long time, with no access to anger. And what I realized was that there’s grief, and then there’s trauma within grief. And so we heal the grief in the mind, but then there’s trauma that lives in the body around the grief. If we don’t go into the body and heal that, then it feels like you’re grieving the rest of your life.

We’re so good at finding ways to tell ourselves that however we feel isn’t okay. And the hardest part is recognizing that distraction and self-gaslighting is actually preventing us from the real healing that needs to happen and just being where we are. And that applies to little G grief, too.”

The two things Doreen wishes she knew when her grieving process began

Someone reading this is realizing that they’re feeling their own flavor of grief right now, finally putting a name to the unnameable feeling that they haven’t had the tools or labels to categorize. So I had to ask Doreen, what did she wish she knew when she was going through the depths of her own grief? What would have helped her the most?

She said, “The number one thing is knowing that you’re not alone. Grief feels so lonely because it’s something that you have to navigate inside of you. And there were a million people around us that loved us, and I still felt like I was the only person on the planet.

I had no one I knew who had been through something even remotely close, and that was so very lonely until I realized there are hundreds of thousands of people who have survived and gone on to thrive, and gone on to find joy again. And there was hope. One of the greatest things you can do is find a peer support group.

I’ll say it till I’m blue in the face: my healing did not fall in my lap. I have done nothing but devote myself to healing for eight years. It is my top priority. My husband knows it, my kids know it. If mommy’s not well, nothing’s happening. Allow yourself to go all in and really do whatever needs to get done to help you through it. Find the right people. If you don’t like the first therapist, find another one.”

How grief affects relationships when we all grieve differently

There’s no right way to grieve – logically, this makes sense. But navigating the reality of grief within a marriage, where two people might grieve very differently, is a difficult thing. And one way how grief affects relationships is that we sometimes make it more difficult (said with love) when we’re judging how our spouse grieves.

Doreen said she had definitely been there…

“Mike and I were only four years into our marriage and it felt like we were babies, still. Everything was great. Two jobs, a little boy who was perfect, and then boom… Harper died very unexpectedly. Very healthy baby, nothing wrong with her, it was just a knot in her umbilical cord, and within seconds she was gone.

I had come from divorced parents, so I had been through some things as a child, but Mike had not. And so we did grieve differently. We still do. Mine looked like a lot of outward grief, crying, not stringing sentences together. His was more internal where you couldn’t see it.

He wasn’t grieving like me, so I thought he wasn’t grieving.

I wanted him to cry as hard as me. I wanted him to feel as much pain as me as though it would take some of my pain away. But what I quickly became very thankful for is he didn’t judge my grief.

I was Judgy McJudgerson, but he so beautifully allowed me whatever I needed to do that I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to let him grieve however he needs to grieve, because he is modeling for me what it looks like to allow that [for someone else].’”

Notice when you’re feeling judgmental as a clue for what you need

Instead of getting wrapped up in judging yourself for being judgmental (you know we do), think about what the urge to judge might be telling you. Is it misdirection from something else?

Doreen uses these moments as opportunities to ask herself what she needs.

“I’m the most judgy when I’m in the most pain. And I remind myself, you’re just in pain. And you just want relief from the pain, right?

It really doesn’t have to do with anyone else. And I think that’s important to hear when it comes to grief, because I want everyone to think about that for themselves as like, when am I the most judgmental.

For me, it’s always when I’m in the most pain and I have to check in with myself. What do I need? Do I need a hug? Do I need to scream in a pillow? Do I need to go to therapy? Do I need to get on the phone with my trauma coach? What would bring me relief right now?”

Get the tools to build a stronger relationship

If you want to stop being frustrated with your partner’s behavior and how you respond to it, and start showing up as the person you want to be, I want to invite you to enroll in The Marriage MBA.

The Marriage MBA — the Mindset Breakthrough Activator — is the 6-month group coaching and mentoring program that teaches you the relationship skills you weren’t taught in school.

What you’ll learn inside draws upon cognitive behavioral psychology — how your thoughts and feelings impact your actions and outcomes — to equip you with the kind of mindset that activates breakthroughs in ANY area of your marriage that feels less than 5-star.

You have so much more power and influence in your marriage than you realize. In The Marriage MBA, you’ll build the skills and tools to and deepen the level of connection in your marriage, then use them over and over for the years to come.

If you’re ready to figure out how to have a stronger relationship for yourself and your honey, this program will help you.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Connect with Doreen on her website
• Follow Doreen on Instagram
• Listen to Doreen’s Healing After Baby Loss podcast
• Ep #60 – The Art of Holding Space with Adam Brady
• Ep #129 – The Basics of the Nervous System
• Ep #76 – Trauma, Resourcing, and Windows of Tolerance with Shelby Leigh
• Ep #105 – Processing Grief In Your Marriage with Rachel Nelson
• Ep #111 – Marriage, Mental Health, and Trauma with Dr. Joanne Sotelo
• Ep #33 – How to Be Married to Someone with A Mental Health Issue with Dr. Michelle Pearce
• Enroll in The Marriage MBA
• The Marriage Mindset Makeover