After a death we do a lot of looking backwards. We think about what we should have known or done differently. We imagine a different world, and ideal world, if things had just taken another path. This becomes wound up in our grief - we beat ourselves up for the past based on things we can only know in the present. In this episode we talk through what that looks like, why we do it, and how to avoid getting sucked too far down the blackholes of counterfactual thinking and hindsight bias in grief. 

What we believe about grief often starts from a young age. We get messages from family, friends, community, and the media about what grief is 'supposed' to look like. Those messages become beliefs and those beliefs have a very real impact on the way we judge our grief (and often ourselves!). Today we're talking about the ins and outs - where to we get these ideas about grieving and how to they affect us?

Terms like delayed grief and absent grief get thrown around a lot. Recently, people have been suggesting that distancing may be putting people's grief 'on hold'. In this episode, we talk about whether grief is ever 'on hold', how external circumstances can have a very real impact on grieving, and why delayed grief can sometimes happen. Oh, and we do some musing about our own grief. 

In this episode we ramble and reflect out loud a bit, so don't say we didn't warn you.  Thinking about the ways grief has us doing mental math calculations up, down, and sideways. How old would he be now? She's been gone longer than we were married . . . How many more years until I am the age he was when he died? And on and on. Talking about grief math and the what-ifs and doing some personal processing of our own grieving as we go. 

Though positive psychology may sound like a field that is all about just thinking happy thoughts, nothing could be further from the truth. This well-researched, practical approach to boosting well-being is a WYG when it comes to grief and coping. In this episode we're talking about PERMA and challenging you to some momentum from the school of positive psychology. 

When the world changes, the way we operate in the world has to change. Grief forces us to make new decisions about the things we do, the things we don't do, and how we cope. Today we talk about how so many of those decisions may feel good in the short term, but often don't serve us in the long-run. Avoidance sounds like it is obvious, but sometimes it hides in corners we don't even recognize. 

When a lot of time has passed after a loss, we hear all sorts of questions - is it too late for counseling? Is it too late to reconnect with people I lost touch with? Is it too late to ask for stories and memories? We're pretty strong believers that, in grief, it is never too late. 

There is a lot of discussion right now about the many ways people are experiencing grief - the grief of death related losses, but also many other types of grief that are coming up in the world. Today we're sorting through 7 types of grief we think may be relevant and impacting you right now. 

We received a question recently about talking to children about people who have died, especially those people the child never met. We get questions like this a lot. Is it normal? Is it okay? Will it screw up my kids? The quick answers: yes! yes! no! For the long answers, tune in. 

Seeing as a lot of us are spending more time at home than usual, we asked our readers/listeners for some of the best depictions of grief in movies and television. In this episode, we share your responses and our thoughts. 

We did an "Ask Us Anything" on Instagram and turns out your grief questions were a little too big to answer on Instagram. So today we are answering some of your pressing questions about grief - from widow dating to friends disappearing after a death, we're covering some tough topics in less than 35 minutes. Have a question you would like to see us cover? Email us at whatsyourgrief@gmail.com

Whether you were grieving before the coronavirus crisis or you've just lost a loved one and are navigating through the dark days of early grief, the current crisis is changing the way we grieve. We have heard from people all over the world and we've been touched personally, so it seemed about time to end our long hiatus to offer some observations, thoughts, and hopefully even support for everyone coping with grief right now (which just so happens to be a lot of us).