Three common problems faced by people in grief and some solutions
After your spouse dies, grief can feel like it’s swallowing you whole. The loss is so enormous you can’t even find the words to explain it, so you stop trying — and that silence turns into isolation right when you need connection most. Once the shock fades, the fog doesn’t lift. You’re still stuck, still waking up wondering how to function inside a life that no longer makes sense, with no idea what’s actually supposed to help.
Here’s the truth: most of what you think you know about grief is wrong. The misconceptions we absorb from movies and well-meaning strangers build expectations you were never meant to meet — and when your grief doesn’t match them, it adds shame on top of pain that was already unbearable.
In this post, you’ll learn three real, practical ways to stop fighting your loss and survive the waves — all while still holding onto the person you loved.
Fighting the Reality of Your Loss
When you lose a spouse, you don’t just lose a person — you lose an entire future. The vacations you’d planned. The lazy Sunday mornings. The person who was supposed to grow old beside you. And because that loss is so overwhelming, your instinct is to fight it — to refuse to accept a reality this cruel.
Mary lost her husband after a long illness, and she was drowning in the unfairness of it. Rage at a universe that had taken him from her. Fury that her life wasn’t supposed to look like this — she was supposed to still be on bike rides and rafting trips with him, still waking up to the smell of him cooking breakfast, still able to swing by his office just to say hello. She wasn’t supposed to be alone in her 40s. She wasn’t supposed to be buried in financial paperwork with no one to lean on.
She kept showing up to see her friends, kept going through the motions of a social life — but she couldn’t actually feel present in any of it. Underneath everything was this constant, aching hum: this isn’t how it was supposed to be.
After we talked, Mary downloaded The Grief App and started something simple: she began putting photos into the Memory Book, and writing down the stories behind them. Slowly, something shifted. By reliving their happiest memories, by externalizing her grief onto the page instead of carrying it silently, she stopped being consumed by the unfairness of his death — and started remembering the 18 beautiful years they’d actually had together.
After just four months of telling their story, Mary wasn’t drowning in anger anymore. She was finally able to let go of “what should have been,” and start building a life in what actually is.
She’s back to going on adventures with friends. Back to building new relationships. Back to laughing, fully present, because she’s no longer focused on the life she didn’t get — she’s living the one she has.
Telling your story, compiling the photos of the life you shared — this is one of the ways you can begin to face your loss instead of fighting it forever. And while the Memory Book is one of the free tools inside The Grief App, you don’t need the app to do this. A scrapbook, a photo album, even a folder on your phone can do the same work.
Bad Information About Grief Leads to Judgment and Impossible Expectations
Because there is so much misinformation floating around about what grief is actually supposed to look like, we end up judging ourselves against a standard that was never real to begin with. And that judgment — from ourselves, and from everyone watching us grieve “wrong” — turns an already devastating experience into something unbearably heavier.
Sarah lost her husband, and she couldn’t make sense of her own reactions. She barely cried — and that terrified her. Was she broken? Did she not love him enough? She avoided people almost entirely, because being around them meant performing a version of grief she thought she was supposed to display — the right tears, the right sadness, the right timeline. And when she caught herself actually enjoying a work trip, doing something as simple as sightseeing, she tore herself apart over it. She began to question whether she’d ever truly loved her husband at all.
During our call, I connected her with real information — not myths, not movie tropes, but the actual truth about grief and what healthy mourning looks like. And the shift in her was almost immediate.
Once Sarah understood what grief actually was, she could finally set down the crushing weight of judgment and expectation she’d been carrying. With that burden lifted, she was finally able to focus on the real work of mourning — instead of endlessly punishing herself for grieving “incorrectly.” Today, she’s rebuilding relationships and rediscovering what she actually wants her life to look like now.
Without accurate information, you are left condemning yourself for failing at a standard that was never real — and that guilt does nothing except keep you stuck, further from the healing you deserve.
Avoiding Your Emotions Only Delays the Pain — It Never Erases It
Grief hurts. So it makes sense that most people try to run from it. But emotions you refuse to feel don’t disappear — they wait. And they resurface at the worst possible moments, in the worst possible ways.
Rebecca had just lost her son, and the grief felt like it was swallowing her whole life, moment by moment. Like almost everyone in that kind of pain, her first instinct was to fight it — to push it down the second it rose up.
But she still had a job to show up for. Still had a life to keep moving. So we talked through ways she could let herself feel, without letting grief consume every hour of her day. On her drive to work, she’d play her son’s music and let the tears come, fully, without holding back. But the grief waves didn’t stop there — they’d hit her at work too, without warning.
That’s when she started using the Grief Wave Timer. The moment a wave hit, she’d start the timer and give herself permission to feel everything — the full weight of it — for just three minutes. The gentle, encouraging phrases that cycled through gave her something to hold onto in the middle of the storm. And when those three minutes ended, she found she could walk back into her day feeling calmer. Steadier. Grounded again. She knew that whenever the next wave came, she had a tool that actually worked.
Rebecca just passed her son’s one-year anniversary. Because she let her heart and soul actually process the loss instead of burying it, her grief waves are far less frequent now. She still feels him gone — that will never fully disappear — but she’s not drowning in it anymore. And when a wave does still come, she has something to fall back on: three minutes, fully felt, and then she keeps going.
Your heart and soul need real time to sort through a loss this size. Give them that time — don’t fight them for it.
You Are Not Grieving Wrong
Grief is not a test you can fail. It is not a problem to be solved on someone else’s timeline. It is something your heart and soul need real time, and the right tools, to move through — at their own pace, in their own way.
When you stop fighting the waves instead of drowning in them… when you let yourself remember the good alongside the devastating loss… when you replace cultural myths with the truth about what grief actually is — you free yourself. Not from the loss itself. That will always be part of you. But from the added suffering of believing you’re doing this wrong.
You can start these techniques on your own, right now — a scrapbook, a kitchen timer, and real information instead of the misinformation that’s everywhere. The free features inside The Grief App were built to support exactly this. And when you’re ready to go further, the app’s paid features and our Unlocking Grief Intensive are there to give you deeper tools, real knowledge, and the ongoing support you deserve.
Download The Grief App today, and start your journey through grief
What’s your biggest takeaway from this post? I read and reply to every single comment, always.
And if, while reading this, you thought of someone in your life carrying this same weight — please send this to them. It might be exactly what they need today.
When my husband died, there was no grief support available to me. I had to find my way through grief and rebuild my life all on my own. I’m now on a mission to make sure that people have the knowledge, tools and techniques they need to process their grief and rebuild their life.
- Am I Grieving Wrong?
- Unlocking Grief Intensive
- I sold my home to build The Grief App: Here is why
- Why I Cried in the Lunchable Aisle: Understanding Grief Waves
- Grief Isn’t Sadness — It’s Many Things Happening at Once
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