What happens when the person you're grieving is you

Almost every form of grief involves an element of self-grieving. Here’s what you need to know about mourning the person you used to be.

Grief is a universal part of the human journey. 

We will all lose the people we love. And we also lose the people we used to be. 

A common but rarely acknowledged form of grief is the sense of loss—oftentimes, a very deep and profound loss—that happens when a chapter of our lives comes to an end, and we lose an old version of ourselves along with it. 

As we get older, our younger selves fade away. When a relationship ends, we lose our married or coupled self. During times of career transition, we might lose a professional identity or a more successful version of ourselves. Becoming a parent, we lose our more free and independent self. And in times of sickness or injury, our formerly healthy and vibrant self is gone. 

There may not be a funeral or even a word of acknowledgment from anyone else about what we're going through, but the grief is real. And it's time to name it, and start talking about it, so that we can more smoothly move through the "deaths" of our former selves to fully rebirth into who we’re becoming. 

Self-grieving is a form of what’s known as “disenfranchised grief” (also known as “hidden grief,” which refers to any grief that’s not acknowledged or socially validated. This type of grief can be even harder to navigate because we feel alone in it, and often misunderstood and unsupported. 

And yet, it’s crucial that we make space to grieve. The grieving process is what guides us along the journey of transformation from one self to another. The space we make to grieve becomes the cocoon in which our new self is formed and ultimately emerges. 

Cocoon by Scott Sawyer

Past lives, past selves. 

Like any other kind of grief, grieving yourself can be a deep and disorienting process.

It’s even more confusing when you’re unaware of the fact that you’re grieving. 

Often self-grieving looks like finding yourself in a time of transition, feeling sad, empty or aimless and not knowing why. 

Self-grieving could be the post-exit founder who has no idea who they are without their business. It’s the 30-something with a mortgage and childcare payments with chronic mild depression, who misses the freedom and spontaneous travel of their twenties. It’s the person who went through a few tough years of loss and hardship, who can’t help but wish they could go back to who they were before life got hard.

I recently attended an event for entrepreneurs called "career 2.0," which was all about life after being a founder. Grief was the unexpected theme that emerged in what might otherwise have been a superficial conversation about pivoting or how to become a consultant. The panelists spoke of the profound sense of disorientation and loss they felt in the years after leaving the companies they founded. They had poured themselves into these ventures over many years, and their identities became completely intertwined with their start-ups. Without the business that their lives revolved around, who were they, even? 

Both described a lengthy process of disintegration, sadness, identity crisis, searching and longing, and ultimately, embracing a new chapter of life and a new version of themselves that felt wiser, wholer and more authentic than who they were before. This old self was gone, but it still lived inside of them as an important piece of who they had become. 

I love the way poet Maggie Smith describes this: “We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was… I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.” 

Matryoshka

It’s true: we do carry all these different selves around with us. But I disagree with her on one important point: There is a death of our past selves. While we carry the memory, the imprints, and the consciousness of our old identities with us, they are also gone. 

The reality is that this period of our lives is over. Who you were is no longer who you are. It’s a confrontation with impermanence, and impermanence is what makes life beautiful, but also what makes it sad. We must allow these old selves to die, and grieve their loss, in order to truly embrace the process of rebirth—the next cycle, the next iteration, the self 2.0 or 3.0. 

When we don’t take the time and space to properly grieve, we can easily find ourselves stuck in the past and struggle to fully move on with our lives. We might continue to identify with an old self that we’ve long outgrown and start to feel disconnected from who we really are. Or just as easily, we might find ourselves stuck in the transitional state between one self and another, with a nagging sense of “I don’t know who I am anymore,” unsure of where we want to go next. 

Because when we can’t grieve the past, we can’t fully embrace the future. 

Every loss is a loss of a part of ourselves. 

Grieving a former self tends to go hand-in-hand with other losses. This is something I wish I’d known in the aftermath of losing my dad and my brother. Why did nobody tell me that one of the hardest parts would be the profound loss of my own sense of self? That I’d spend several years trying to put the pieces of my old self back together, only to realize that it didn’t all fit anymore? With two of the closest people in my life now gone, the only way forward was to find myself anew. 

Losing a parent, child, spouse or any other loved one shakes us to our core, and always brings with it the loss of who we were in that particular relationship or the period of our lives that was defined by it. 

As pioneering psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor, author of The Grieving Brain, notes, grief fundamentally disrupts our sense of self. When we lose someone or something we love, we also lose the part of our identity that’s connected to that relationship part of our lives. This forces us to reconfigure an entirely new sense of who we are. 

O’Connor says: 

Grief is not only about the loss of a person. We have grief over the loss of many things—the loss of health, the loss of a job. Our brain might have evolved to understand the loss of a relationship as grief, but it’s always also a loss of a part of ourselves. Even the language we use is helpful here. I describe myself as a daughter—that’s a word that I use about me. When I lose a parent, it is a loss of an aspect of myself. Similarly, the loss of eyesight is the loss of how I function in the world with my eyes.

One of the main functions of grieving is to learn how to live again after these losses. 

Grief is a teacher. 

Grief is a learning process that teaches us how to adapt to life after loss, O’Connor says—we grieve so that we can adapt to a new way of life. 

In some of the first neuroimaging studies of grief, conducted over 20 years ago, O’Connor found that our loved ones are wired into our brain, and learning that they’re gone requires our brain to rewire itself as it crafts a new worldview. 

“I think it can make us feel more normal that our brain is on a learning trajectory,” O’Connor told Scientific American. “And we simply have to accept that things will be difficult for some time while our brain tries to update its understanding of the world.” 

It’s likely that grieving a former self works similarly. It helps us to accept the loss of the old, and teaches us how to be in the world as a different person; as someone we’ve never met or known before. Someone with different strengths and beliefs, an updated worldview, a new way of being. 

The upside? On the other side of our grief are new parts of ourselves waiting to be discovered. A new chapter of our lives. A new version of ourselves with new wisdom, gifts, joys and experiences to share. More of who we are is ready to be discovered. 

We may not know who we are for a while, but we can be sure that a new version of ourselves is simply gestating—and trust in its emergence. We can trust that life goes on, that we go on in new shapes and forms. 

From death comes new life. 

Just as winter is always followed by spring, the journey of grief and loss is always followed by new life. It may take time for the seeds of the new to take root and fully blossom, but we can trust in the basic rhythm of life, death, and rebirth. 

In her book Your Grief, Your Way, grief coach Shelby Forsythia, offers a helpful seven-step process for letting go of your old self and stepping fully into a new stage of life:

1. Name the loss. Clarify what it is you’re grieving by naming it and writing it down. What do you miss most about who you used to be? Your success? Your energy? Your joyfulness? 

2. Avoid black-and-white thinking. Notice when you’re thinking of your former self in idealized terms (“I used to be so creative/beautiful/happy”). Remember that you always had struggles and flaws, too.

3. Create a ritual to honor the loss. Go to a place you used to love and leave an old photo of yourself. Write a letter to your younger self. Get a haircut or a new outfit that symbolizes who you’re becoming. Feel free to get creative here! 

4. Accept the identity of “griever.” You are someone who has gone through loss, and that’s OK. This is now a part of who you are. 

5. Remember not all is lost. Not all of your past self is lost—think about the parts of yourself (a favorite food, a song, an old friendship) that you still carry with you from times past. 

6. Connect with your new self. Even if you’re not yet sure who you’re becoming, you can still start to connect with your future self. Try journaling, meditating or visualizing the future you and inviting them into your life. 

7. Explore your future self. Stepping into a new identity can be a fun, experimental process. You get to decide who you’re becoming! Be playful and compassionate as you try new things and explore new parts of yourself.  

Every single person reading this, at some point in their lives, has gone through a painful process of losing a former self and navigating the landscape of grief to become a new version of themselves and welcome a new era of their lives. 

How has this played out in your life? Who did you leave behind—and who did you become on the other side? Feel free to respond to this email to share your thoughts with me and Maura. We’d love to hear about your journey.