When we think about grief, we often focus on the emotional toll that it places on us - the intense sorrow that throws our thoughts, behaviours and feelings into a tailspin. However, what we appear to have less understanding about are the physical symptoms of grief and the profound impact that grief has on our physical health. The physical pain we experience when we lose someone can often take us by surprise. It can add another layer of suffering onto our existing emotional trauma and can feel very frightening and confusing. In this blog, I’ll explore why we experience physical pain or discomfort during grief. I’ll identify the ways in which grief shows up in our bodies and share some tips on how we can ease these physical symptoms.

Why we experience physical pain during grief

During grief, especially those early stages, when our despair is so raw, our bodies enter into an intense and prolonged stress response, during which our sympathetic nervous system - essentially our threat detec...

 My husband has died. ‘Now what?’ ‘What do I do?,’ ‘What should I expect to feel?,’ As a grief coach, I get asked these questions a lot. They’re questions I asked myself when my husband passed away in 2016. 

In this blog, I won’t be covering how to deal with the practicalities of losing someone such as how to arrange a funeral or pay off a mortgage. Instead, l’ll discuss how grief can impact you as a person. I’ll explore what grief is, how it manifests and how with the right knowledge and approach, you can learn to navigate it more peacefully.

How grief affects us

There are few things in life as painful as the death of a spouse. Overnight, our world shatters into a million pieces and we are suddenly thrust into a life of turmoil, where nothing looks familiar. Our loss affects every corner of our universe. We question how we will survive, or whether we even want to. 

And what makes dealing with this loss even worse, is that we just aren’t prepared for the monumental impact that our ...

I speak to so many women who have lost their partner or husband and hate having to call themselves a widow. It’s a term that instantly reminds them of everything they have lost and one that comes with  expectations. In this blog, I’ll  suggest that the word ‘widow,’ is just that – a word, a label that society has conferred on us but that needn’t define nor limit us. I honestly believe that whilst it may describe what we are it shouldn’t ever define who we are.

Historical perceptions of widows

When we hear the word ‘widow,’ we tend to envisage a sombre elderly lady, dressed head to toe in black, not someone in their 30s, 40s or 50s. It’s an image that’s been handed down to us from the Victorian era when widows used to dress in black as a way of reflecting their inner pain and were also expected to curtail their social engagements and mourn for a significant period of time. Sadly, these societal expectations have endured and continue to shape and define widowhood today.

Unhelpful expe...

Widowhood is unimaginably hard. The heaviness of our grief, especially in that first year, can leave us nothing more than broken shells getting through each day on autopilot. For many of us therefore, getting through our first year of widowhood can feel like a monumental achievement - and something we should rightly be proud of. We might begin to look ahead to the second year of widowhood with less fear and more hope and wonder what it may bring: a greater sense of peace perhaps, a deeper sense of relief and surely…less pain? Sadly however, for many of us, the arrival of this second year can feel like an enormous sucker-punch - leaving us utterly blindsided and confused as we grapple with the reality of our loss.

In this blog, I’ll explore why the second year of widowhood isn’t always easier than the first and identify some ways we can help ourselves through it.

Why does the second year of widowhood feel harder?

#1 The reality of grief sets in

During the first year of grief, the sh...