How can I move on? The 5 Step Journey of Healing
This post is all about how to move on and find healing in grief.
Disclaimer: I don’t think “moving on” accurately describes how we move through pain. “Moving on” implies leaving something behind, but nothing in life is ever truly left behind.
I never “left behind” being told I might never meet my unborn son. I never “left behind” the horrible day we actually lost him at 6 days old. The pain of those moments has forever changed who I am.
However, I truly believe that my perspective of that pain has helped that change be for the better. This is not a “woe is me” post. I want to show the principles of the healing process in action. I hope this post helps you understand what it really looks like to move on and helps you find some peace on your own journey.
This post is all about how can I move on and find healing in grief.
How can I move on?
Time heals… but sometimes it needs some assistance.
I like the idea of living our lives being like creating a painting. Each experience is a stroke that adds to it. When I was told that we would lose our son, it was like someone took a thick sharpie and scribbled all across the part of the canvas reflecting my family, because I didn’t wasn’t just losing my son. I lost a future.
Our family wasn’t starting with a beautifully chaotic home of sticky fingers. Our daughter would be raised pretty much as an only child until she is five years old. As the oldest in a family with large age gaps, I would experience the very challenges I hoped to avoid, and every future pregnancy would be tainted with fear. Not only would the touch of my son’s strokes missing from the picture, but I had to incorporate this painful black line.
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1. Survive the Pain
At first, I tried to hide this line and force “moving on” by staying busy and filling my life with as many experiences as possible to cover the pain. With any energy I could find, I worked out more consistently than I had since college, started to build a social media audience, and refined my checklists for a “perfect” life. Despite the perfect appearance, these strokes were desperate attempts to give me a sense of control when my world was crumbling, yet, for me, this time had a place. This stage exhaustingly chaotic, but it gave me distance from the experience.
At the time, I was feeling terrified. I didn’t want to be there. It felt like time was just carrying me further from my time with my son. I didn’t want to feel pain. I just wanted to move on to a place where it felt like a life without him was still worth living.
However, God knew better and gave me the strength to give myself time. I needed to get some space from the experience. When I finally collapsed from exhaustion about six months later, I realized that I didn’t want to live in that chaos anymore. I was ready to learn how to find my own way of embracing the existence of that black line, and I started therapy.
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2. Accept this Reality
Every step of accepting that this was my new reality was painful for me, so I tried to figure out what others in my situation had done.
Not surprisingly, I found a lot of people online who reacted to losing a child by outlining their own black line in gold and softening the edges. They made it beautiful by drawing attention to it in a beautiful way as they supported others and shared their story.
There were other people who used the loss to guide a career. One person found inspiration in that dark, thick line for a career in oncology. She added beautiful leaves of meaning, knowledge, and service, turning a dark experience into a fruitful vine that gracefully expanded and touched every part of his life picture.
I knew I needed to give this unexpected line a place in my life, but I couldn’t do that while I was rejecting its existence. There was just one thought that kept showing up: I can’t trust my plans.
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3. Ponder the Parts of You it Revealed
Losing my faith in my plans was nearly as hard as letting go of my dream of the future. When I first put the words “I can’t trust my plans” together, I felt my body physically reflect them. As a recovering control-freak, the idea of plans being fallible made my chest tighten and palms clammy. Just starting a single day without a plan left my brain buzzing, unsure what to do and simultaneously overwhelmed with all the things I “should” do.
Despite those feelings, I felt betrayed by my plans, so I was willing to try living without them. It turns out that I relied so much on my plans that I had no idea how to listen to my gut. This experience opened my eyes to my fatal flaw: I didn’t trust myself. In fact, I wasn’t sure I had ever trusted myself.
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4. Heal the wound behind those flaws
I started doing small things. Some days I learned to listen to my body better as I read and implemented the principles in Intuitive Eating. Other days, I stepped away from my strict workout schedule and took different classes to learn how I enjoyed moving my body. If I randomly wanted to go to the zoo or call a friend, I tried to ignore the impulse to question if now was “the best time” and just left. I tried to flow with the day instead of planning every hour.
I was turning to the internet less often to validate or make decisions for me, and I was less scared of failing. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely still struggle with this and it has been hard for me to let go of the opinions of others and enjoy being the unique being I am. But I am doing it.
As the months passed, I felt something start to soften in me. One day, I spent $5.36 on some discount thread and a medium-looking crochet hook. I didn’t know what I wanted to make or even know how to hold a crochet hook, but it sounded fun! When I pulled them out after my daughter went to bed, I realized what a big deal that was for me. While a past version of me would have stressed about the best size of thread and hooks for the types of projects on my Pinterest board, I had just flowed from curiosity to opportunity to creation. No stress needed!
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5. Show Gratitude for the Growth
In the year since I lost my beautiful baby boy, I have learned to let go of wondering how can I move on. I have been learning how to live in my life instead of in a picture of the future. Though I have never doubted that my son was a gift, I have had to work to see the gift of the opportunity within the black line of his loss.
I am still on this journey, so I honestly still don’t feel grateful most of the time. Yet, despite that, recognizing this change in myself has made it feel like the black line drawn by his loss could one day feel like a gift. It brings me peace to know that this change is one of the ways he will stay a part of me forever.
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I truly believe that our son was given to us not to be a trial, but to be a blessing. A line in one of my favorite lullabies, “You are My Sunshine, ” is, “Please don’t take my sunshine away.” Just because Nathan is gone doesn’t mean that sunshine is gone. Even on my darkest days, I will always have more sunshine in our lives because we had him in it.
Nothing is more pure or filled with more joy than heaven, and nothing felt more pure than our son. He is right where he belongs. I am going to spend the rest of my life doing my best to honor this gift that he gave me and working to be his equal.
Even though his time with us was short, I will forever be thankful that has joined our family.
In case you were wondering…
I’ve had some time to process at this point, but I still have a long way to go. If you want to follow my journey of healing and of discovering my own path to a joyful life of purpose (as well as get a discount code for the cookbook!), then click HERE to get the weekly newsletter! We all could use a little more support, and I would love to help be that for you 🙂.
Life changes when you shift from wondering “how can I move on” to “how can I move forward.”
If you want to learn more about creating peace in a chaotic life, then check out these posts!
– THE ONLY 10 YEAR PLAN TEMPLATE THAT REALLY WORKS
– CREATING YOUR SANCTUARY: 10 WAYS TO NURTURE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR HOME
– 7 QUESTIONS TO START FINDING PURPOSE IN LIFE
