S5 Ep3 - Grieving the Loss of the Ideal

Welcome to Episode 3 of Season 5, where we are exploring “little g” grief, a process that helps us honor our everyday disappointments and frustrations. My goal for this season is to help others with managing their expectations and their energy so they have more capacity for living a joyful life. Having unprocessed grief steals our energy and keeps us stuck in denial, and so I’m excited to dive into this season and share tools and resources to help you get unstuck.

On this episode I’m talking about grieving the loss of the ideal - both the internal ideal (our ideal version of ourselves) and the external ideal (ways we wish people and circumstances would be ideal).

As part of the episode, I walk through a recent way that I had to grieve the loss of the ideal and I take you through my grief process. I shared this process in depth in the last episode, and I hope it will be helpful to hear it again with a real world example.

Here is the grief process in writing:

1. Name what you are hoping for. Think about the experience or the thing that you want. What is the view of reality that you wish would happen? What would it mean for you if that were true? What would perfection look like?

2. Name what you are actually experiencing - what is reality? What are some specific ways that you've experienced this reality? What does it mean for this to be your reality?

3. Name what has happened in the gap between what you hope for and what you are experiencing. What is the loss? What are all the ways this loss affects you? Naming these helps you see the real impact so you can honor what you've lost.

4. Name what you are feeling as a result of the loss. This can be difficult if you are used to suppressing and ignoring your feelings. You may need to practice awareness and presence with your feelings. Something that might help you identify your feelings is looking at a feelings wheel. Once you identify what you are feeling, you actually need to spend time feeling the feeling. :) Try to get out of your head, where this is simply an intellectual exercise, and allow yourself to experience the pain and discomfort of difficult emotions.

5. Now, we move to the parts of this process that allow you to reclaim energy and power, which includes creating a statement of acceptance. This will help you let go of the things you can’t control (including other people’s attitudes, beliefs, decisions, and actions) and take power over the things you can control. Write out your statement of acceptance with these four parts:

6. 1. Your hopeful statement - how you wish it would be

   2. Name the actual reality - the way it really is

   3. Express what you are letting go of. especially acknowledging what you can't control)

   4. Give a statement of acceptance, especially acknowledging the reality of what this means for you

7. The final step is to decide how you will live in light of reality. If your statement of acceptance is true, then how will you decide to move forward in power?

Here are links that might be helpful:

Free Download - 7 Ways to Reclaim Energy From Your Weekend

⁠⁠⁠Schedule a free coaching session with Erin⁠⁠⁠

Personal Growth Sucks on⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠ and⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠

Big Rocks Video

Self-Compassion Exercises from Dr. Kristin Neff