230: When You Don't Have Time to Grieve
Today, let’s talk about time and grief.
I hear over and over again from moms, I just don’t have time. I don’t have time to grieve in the way I want to. I don’t have time to take care of myself. I don’t have the time.
And I want to talk about a few things that I’ve learned about time, and also if you’ve been experiencing the place of not having enough time, some ideas on how you can make more time for yourself.
I also want to acknowledge time from a place of after-loss and grief. That time passing is incredibly painful, and each moment is excruciating. In one moment it feels like time is slow and in the other, it’s passing so quickly it’s terrifying. One because the pain seems to last forever, and the other because the more time passes the further you are away from when your child lived. And, also, it doesn’t go fast enough depending on what your beliefs are about where your child is and what you believe about the afterlife, that maybe you want time to pass so you can see them again. It’s all so confusing inside of grief.
In the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein determined that time is relative—in other words, the rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference.
So if you’re with someone you love and you are having a good time and enjoying yourself, time seems to pass very quickly. Or maybe you’re reading a good book, and the time just seems to disappear. But then, you put your hand on a hot stove, or you are grieving the death of your child, and time seems to slow down into microseconds.
I’ve many times felt overwhelmed and thought I just don’t have time for all the things I want to do. I still do that. But, it’s weird, how when I decide I have the time, I do. Somehow I get the things I want to be done. Do the things I want to do, and have time to do it.
So, now, when you don’t have the time to grieve. When you feel like you are in survival mode and you just can’t seem to get your feet underneath you.
The first thing I could offer is that you do have the time. We all have the same 24 hours in a day. All of us. No one is given more time than others. It’s how we choose to spend that time and use that time that is our own choice.
So, if you’re feeling like you don’t have enough time, how can you say no to things that you don’t need to do? This can be very challenging because maybe you believe since you did it before you have to continue to keep doing it. But almost nothing is a need that you need to do. Almost everything can be put on the shelf for a time so you can process and be with what is going on in your life. Literally. Let me walk you through a little process.
Put everything you do in a day on a piece of paper, and notice that you can release all of them. Every single one of them. You do not need to do anything or any of them. From a place of clarity and a clear mind, look at them, and see which ones you want to put back on your plate. When I say everything, I mean everything in your life. Even the things you feel like, of course, you do because you have to. You could not do anything. So look at it and put the things back on that you truly want to do, and be very mindful of what you put back on.
Then. See that you can choose how you want to spend your time. There’s nothing you have to do.
Here’s why making time to grieve is important. Imagine right now you are carrying around a heavy suitcase. It’s always there, and you are busy surviving every moment, and inside the suitcase, there might be things like anxiety, trauma, terror, inability to sleep, isolation, loneliness, overeating, not eating, anger towards anyone and everyone, health issues, not wanting to live. All these things can live inside the suitcase. And you’re carrying them around 24/7.
When you don’t take the time to grieve, you just keep constantly carrying these things around, thinking that you don’t have the time, so you just gotta keep doing what you're doing, that maybe will time these things will get lighter and easier and maybe someday in the future, you will have more time to take care of yourself.
That’s a huge lie. The only time is now. There is no time in the future. If you’re not making it now, you’re not going to make it in the future. And as I always say, time does nothing. In twenty years, you’ll open that suitcase up and there they all will still be, anxiety, trauma, fear, panic, inability to sleep, health issues, overeating, keeping busy, whatever they are. Or maybe you’re taking medication now to manage them, but they are still a part of your life.
So, what if you made time for your grief? What if you sat down with that suitcase, and began lifting out the things inside of it? Taking care of them. Clearing them. Processing them. You still have to carry the suitcase of grief around for the rest of your life. This is something all of us whose child has died will do, but you can make the suitcase so much lighter. As you clear trauma, all sudden the suitcase is lighter, and you have more energy because you’re not trying to manage triggers all day long. You’re body can finally relax because it’s not alert waiting for the next threat and shoe to drop. Then you clear up your sleep, and you finally get a restful night of sleep for the first time since your child died, and you can’t believe how tired you’ve been because you have only been sleeping 3 hours or less a night. But now, that weight of that exhaustion disappears because you’ve taken the time to process your grief and get your body and mind in a place where they can fall asleep and stay asleep peacefully without medication or stress.
So take these two things. One, where you don’t have time to grieve, and you just keep carrying around the fully loaded suitcase…every single day. Every single moment for the rest of your life. (psst, no wonder you’re so tired), or you take the time to unpack the suitcase, clear up some of the things that you do not need to continue to live with and carry, and your suitcase gets lighter. And the sooner you do this, the sooner your suitcase gets lighter and easier to carry.
So instead of dragging around this heavy suitcase for 20 years and then finally getting so tired you have no choice but to sit down and look at it, you decide to make time for it now, and you sit down with the suitcase now, wherever you are in your grief journey, and start clearing the things in there.
So- when you say you don’t have time to grieve, what I see, are you continuing to walk with the heavy laden suitcase forward into your life.
I get this all the time from moms. My kids need me. My husband needs me to take care of him. My job is demanding and I have to do a lot there.
Aren’t they all better off if you’re carrying a lighter suitcase and not so exhausted from dragging this massive and heavy suitcase around? If you feel like you’re functioning ok, that weight is still there. You try to ignore the weight, it doesn’t just go away.
Say I came up to you and I was like, hey, my computer is so slow. It’s not working. I need a new computer, it’s just not functioning properly. And as you take a look at my computer you see that I have one window up, but then in the background, I have a hundred tabs open, and I have a few different programs running, and you tell me, Megan, your computer will function much better if you shut down all these tabs and all these programs that are running in the background. So you close them all for me, and wala, my computer is functioning just fine.
So in the same way, even if grief or trauma is not completely making you unable to function, but you have things like exhaustion, no time, unable to get out of survival mode, and being constantly busy, it’s still taking up energy in the background, because just because you’re not present to it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
So here’s the thing mama, when you don’t have the time to grieve, and maybe you don’t want to make the time to grieve, but I’m talking to you, who truly wants to make time to grieve but keeps feeling like there’s just never enough time, then this is for you. The only one stopping you is you. Not anything outside of you. It’s not the circumstances surrounding you that are not giving you the time, because the time is yours to do as you wish.
And I hear you say, no it’s not, I just don’t have enough time, I’m saying this as a mom of 7 almost 8 kids, running a business, homeschooling my kids, that one of the biggest stressors is just not having enough time to do all the things I want to do, and take care of myself in the way I want to.
And I keep coming back to this- I have enough time to do the things I want to do. I can make time, and anything that doesn’t make it on the list just isn’t where my priorities are. So my priorities are where I spend my time, and I get to define that in my life, and so I have the time to do the things that I prioritize. For a time, it was making a lot of time to grieve in the way I wanted to. Now, as I’ve taken most of the heavy things out of my suitcase, it’s continuing to care for my mental, emotional, and physical well-being, and making time for that.
Okay, but what are some practical ways as well to make time to grieve?
Well- I shared earlier about imagining you are done with everything, and taking only the things back that truly matter to you.
Then, part of RRT is helping your mind attach meaning and value to the things that are good for you to do. So not just trying to force yourself to do something because you know it’s good for you or because you want to do it, but doing it because it feels good, because you want to, and because you find it supportive for where you want to go, so getting a session for that could be very beneficial.
Another thing you could do is create a time of day that you set aside to do whatever it is that you feel is good for you in processing and moving through grief. So right away for the first 15 minutes of the day, the last 15 minutes of the day, on your way to work, in the shower, whatever it is. Where you set that timer, and you allow yourself to grieve or process in whatever is best for you. And when that timer is up, you put the lid on the box, put it on the shelf, and open again the next day or every few days, or week. This is completely up to you.
The last thing I would say, is sometimes what helps if you want to make more time for something is investing in something that helps you do that. So when I join a program or something, I want to get my money's worth, so I make sure I use it. I have just gone through the training of Rapid Resolution Therapy, and I have shown up live all day long on every call because I invested money into it, and I want to get my full value and benefit from it, even though I didn’t feel like I had the time in the beginning. Somehow I’ve made it work, and I’ve been able to create the time to do it.
Sometimes this energy exchange can put this up higher on the priority list so that you do make the time for what you know you want to do, but it’s been challenging up until now to do it.
As a mom who is part of Grieving Moms Haven told me recently, she's excited about being a part of it because it’s like an accountability of sorts. A space where she will make time for her grief even though she hasn’t wanted to, but she wants to because she knows it’s good for her, and then having this place where she can join calls, she can go through programs, can do meditations and tappings to help guide her through it is incredibly helpful. So, with wherever you are feeling pulled to invest, sometimes that’s a way to shift time and perspective so that you do take the time to care for yourself and your grief in the way that you truly want to.
So I know shared a few different things about time and different ways of thinking about it, maybe you agree, maybe you don’t. Maybe some of it made sense to you, and some of it you think I’m crazy.
But- the bottom line of this is this. Put down the weight of not having enough time to grieve in the way you want to. I know how heavy that is, to feel like you want to do something, take time for something, and that you can’t because you are too busy.
Because you deserve it, your kids deserve to have a mom who is taking time to care for herself and to see how that’s done, to be shown how it’s done. Your family, the people you love are so much better off when you take the time to grieve and care for yourself than when they are getting the dregs of your energy and the exhausted busy run-down mom whos surviving every moment. And frankly, so are you. When you get to be carrying around a lighter suitcase instead of the heavy one weighted down with huge boulders.
You are worth it, my friend, putting this higher up on your priority list.
See you next week.
Have you felt anxiety after your child died?
The racing mind, unable to sleep, waiting for the next bad thing to happen, unable to breathe, panicky kind of anxiety, whole body riddled with anxiety?
Watch my free video on anxiety and grief below!
So that you can think clearly, feel calm in your body, and live your life without the chains of anxiety.
