Grief Doesn't Always Look Like Crying
In this month's opening episode, Jessica introduces April's theme: grief — and challenges the widely-held belief that grief only belongs to death. Drawing on clinical definitions and her own therapeutic lens, she explores how grief shows up across a wide range of losses, why unacknowledged grief doesn't disappear, and what it means to finally name what you're carrying. She also introduces the concept of disenfranchised grief and invites listeners into a simple but powerful reflective practice to close out the episode.
What You'll Hear in This Episode:
- Why grief extends far beyond death and loss of life
- The clinical definition of grief and what counts as a "significant loss"
- Examples of losses that often go unrecognized: identity shifts, relationship changes, unmet expectations, life transitions
- What happens when grief goes unnamed and unprocessed — and how it shows up sideways
- An introduction to disenfranchised grief: what it is and why it matters
- How unacknowledged grief can become prolonged grief
- The power of naming and witnessing as the first act of healing
- A reflective prompt to take with you this week
This Week's Reflective Prompt: What is one thing I'm grieving that I've never called grief?
You don't have to say it out loud. Write it in a journal, a note on your phone, or sit with it quietly. Naming it is the first step.
Coming Up Next Week: Jessica goes deeper into disenfranchised grief — the losses nobody validated — and what happens psychologically when grief goes without witness.
Connect & Stay Connected:
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Transcript
Hi, welcome back to Healing Is My Hobby. I'm Jessica, a licensed clinical social worker, and this is the space where we talk about the real work of healing, not the highlight real version, the actual messy, nonlinear, sometimes uncomfortable
this month, we're going somewhere I think a lot of us need to go. We are talking about grief.
And before you think, okay, this isn't for me, nobody close to me has died. I want you to stay with me for just a minute
Because that's exactly the misconception we're here to challenge. Grief is not just about death. And if you've ever felt a low grade sadness you couldn't trace, a numbness that settled in around something you lost, a quiet ache for a version of your life, your relationship, or yourself that didn't turn out the way you expected, you might be grieving something right now. And you might not even have a word for it yet.
And that's what this whole month is about. So let's get into it.
Let's start with the foundation. What is grief, clinically speaking? Most of us were taught implicitly or explicitly that grief belongs to death, that it's the thing you feel after a funeral, that it follows a specific arc and eventually you get over it. But clinically, grief is defined as the emotional, cognitive,
physical and behavioral response to any significant loss. Any significant loss. That definition is broader than most people realize, and it's the key to understanding why so many of us are carrying something heavy without ever calling it grief. Grief shows up when a relationship ends, even one that needed to end.
It shows up when you lose a job that was part of your identity, when a friendship quietly dissolves, when a diagnosis changes the story you had for your life, when you become a mother and grieve who you were before, when your kids grow up and you grieve the season that's over, when you realize a parent was never going to be who you needed them to be. These are all grief, real, legitimate,
clinically significant grief. Now here's what happens when grief doesn't get named. It doesn't go away. It goes underground. Unprocessed grief tends to show up sideways as irritability, as emotional flatness, as a sense that something is just off and you can't figure out what. It shows up as avoidance, avoidance of conversations of certain people.
of anything that brings you close to the thing you haven't let yourself feel. It can look like anxiety. It can look like disconnection. It can look like working harder than you've ever worked, staying busier than you've ever been, because if you slow down, even for a moment, something might catch up with you. And that something is usually grief. There's also a concept I want to introduce today called disenfranchised grief. And we're going to spend a lot of time on this throughout this month.
Disenfranchised grief is grief that isn't publicly acknowledged. It isn't openly mourned and it doesn't receive social support. It's the grief that gets met with and at least, at least you know it was coming. At least you're still young. At least it wasn't a real relationship.
These responses don't just sting. They teach you to minimize your own pain, to decide it doesn't qualify. And when you spend enough time deciding your grief doesn't qualify, you stop processing it altogether. And the research on this is really clear. Grief that goes unacknowledged tends to complicate. It can become what clinicians call prolonged grief, grief that stays stuck,
that doesn't move through, that keeps people in a state of low grade suffering for years. And the antidote, the thing that actually moves grief is acknowledgement. Naming it, witnessing it, giving it permission to exist. And you know we do that all the time here on Healing Is My Hobby. Like there really is so much power in acknowledgement and naming something. So that's what we're gonna do this month. We're gonna name some things.
And before I let you go today, I want to leave you with something practical. This week, I want you to ask yourself one question. What is one thing I'm grieving that I've never called grief? You don't have to say it out loud. You don't have to share it with anyone. Just let yourself name it in a journal, in a note on your phone, in the quiet of your car.
Because like I've said, naming it is the first act of healing. Next week we're gonna go deeper into disenfranchised grief, the losses that nobody validated, and what happens psychologically when grief goes without witness. And I think it's gonna land for a lot of you. Thank you so much for being here. This work matters, you matter, and I'll see you next week.
If you'd like to read my blog or stay up to date, you can sign up for the newsletter at healingismyhobby.com. You can follow me on Instagram as healingismyhobby. You can follow me on Instagram at healingismyhobby or on YouTube at healingismyhobby. And if you'd like to know more about my clinical practice, you can visit JessicaKolarcoLCSW.com or follow me on Instagram at JessicaKolarcoLCSW. Have a great day.
