Category Archives: Grief

Yesterday I went down a rabbit hole.

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It started innocently enough. I’m a founder, and I’m competitive, and I told myself I was doing research: looking at what other practices were building, how they were growing, what they were launching. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being research. I wasn’t learning anymore. I was keeping score. And by the end of it, I didn’t feel inspired. I felt small.

If you’ve ever scrolled through someone’s promotion announcement, their beautiful new office, their book deal, their engagement, their “so grateful for this season” post, and closed the app feeling like you’re somehow losing a race you didn’t sign up for, this one is for you.

Comparison isn’t the problem. The spiral is.

Comparing ourselves to others is wired into us. Back in the 1950s, the psychologist Leon Festinger described what he called social comparison theory: we figure out how we’re doing, in part, by looking at the people around us. It’s how we’ve always oriented ourselves in a group.

So I’m not going to tell you to stop comparing. You won’t, and neither will I. What matters is what happens after the comparison. Research on envy shows it comes in two flavors. One kind motivates us: we see someone ahead and think, “I want that, and I can work toward it.” The other kind deflates us: we see someone ahead and think, “I’ll never get there, and something must be wrong with me.” Same trigger, completely different story.

Yesterday I was living in the second story.

There’s grief in it, too

When I slowed down enough to feel what was underneath, it wasn’t just jealousy. It was grief. Grief that I’m not there yet. Grief for the timeline I imagined for myself, the version of this business I thought I’d have by now.

I think we skip this part. We go straight from “they have it” to “what’s wrong with me,” and we never pause to let ourselves be sad about the gap. But grief deserves a little room. You’re allowed to want something and ache that it hasn’t happened yet. That ache doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you care.

The feeling was younger than I am

Here’s what I noticed when I really sat with it: the “I’m not good enough” spiral didn’t feel like a 40-something founder talking. It felt young. Like a much younger version of me, scanning the room, trying to figure out if she measured up, if she was worthy of being chosen.

That’s often the tell. When a feeling is way bigger than the situation in front of you, it’s usually not about the situation in front of you. Someone else’s success didn’t create that wound. It just pressed on a bruise that was already there.

So I asked myself a simple question: how old do I feel right now? And the answer helped me separate what was happening today from what was being stirred up from a long time ago.

Coming back to my adult self

Getting out of the spiral didn’t come from talking myself into feeling amazing. It came from coming back to the adult version of me. The one who has built something real. The one who knows how hard this work is. The one who can hold that younger part with compassion instead of letting her drive the car.

Sometimes that looks like putting my feet on the floor and taking a breath. Sometimes it’s saying out loud, “I’m an adult, I’m safe, and this is just a feeling.” Sometimes it’s texting a friend who knows me. Nothing fancy. Just a return.

Change the questions you’re asking

When I’m in the spiral, my questions sound like this: Why am I not there yet? What am I doing wrong?

Those questions feel productive, but they’re really just self-criticism wearing a trench coat. They don’t lead anywhere useful.

So I swap them out. Instead I ask: What can I learn from what I’m witnessing? And I remind myself that I have no idea what that person is carrying. I don’t know what they sacrificed, what help they had, what debt they took on, what it cost them, or what they’re struggling with that never makes it to Instagram. I’m comparing my full, messy inside to their curated outside.

And then the most useful question of all: what’s one thing from their playbook I could apply at the scale I’m at right now? Not their scale. Mine.

If you’ve done any therapy, you might recognize this. It’s a core piece of CBT called cognitive restructuring: noticing the automatic thought, questioning whether it’s actually true, and replacing it with something more accurate and more helpful. I realized I’d been doing it without even naming it.

A few shifts that actually help

Treat envy as information. Envy is pointing at something you want. Instead of shaming yourself for feeling it, get curious. What exactly did you want in what you saw? Sometimes the answer surprises you, and sometimes you realize you don’t actually want their life at all, just one piece of it.

Compare yourself to who you were a year ago. That’s the only comparison that tells you anything true about your growth. Pull up an old calendar or an old journal entry and look at how far you’ve come.

Research with intention, not on autopilot. There’s a difference between “I’m going to spend 20 minutes studying how three practices structure their services” and an hour of wandering scrolling. Set the purpose and the timer before you open the tab. When the learning stops, close it.

Find the next step, not the whole staircase. Their success is the result of hundreds of small decisions you’ll never see. You don’t need to catch up to all of them. You need to take your next one.

Let the grief be there. If you’re sad you’re not further along, say so. To yourself, to a friend, to your therapist. Feelings that get named tend to loosen their grip.

Where I landed

By the end of the day, the person whose work sent me spiraling hadn’t changed at all. What changed was the question I was asking. I went from “why not me” to “what can I learn,” and from a scared younger version of me back to the grown woman who’s actually running this thing.

You’re not behind. You’re on your own timeline, carrying your own story, building at your own scale. And the fact that someone else’s success stirs something in you just means you still want big things for your life. That’s not a flaw. That’s a pulse.

Is It Jealousy, or Is It Grief?

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I want to talk about something I hear constantly, and almost never hear a woman say out loud without apologizing for it in the same breath.

You know the moment. Someone posts the ring. The offer letter. The keys. The ultrasound, the one in the group chat where everyone answers within ninety seconds. And before your face can arrange itself into the right expression, your body gets there first. A drop in your stomach. Heat across your chest. That tight little knot at the base of your throat that shows up about a second before tears do.

Then the second wave: what is wrong with me.

I want to slow that second wave down, because you’re about to spend the rest of the night arguing with yourself about whether you’re a good person, and I can tell you from years of sitting with women in exactly this spot that it’s not the argument that helps.

Here’s what I actually think is happening. That knot is usually not jealousy, and it’s almost never a character flaw. Most of the time it’s envy, which is a different emotion with different research behind it, and underneath the envy there is very often grief. Real grief, for a life you didn’t choose or haven’t reached yet, that nobody in your life has ever recognized as a loss. Getting the name right changes everything about what you can do with it. Envy that gets named tends to point somewhere useful. Envy that gets scolded goes underground and comes back later as resentment, usually at someone who didn’t earn it.

Let me correct one word

We use jealousy for everything, so let’s sort it out, because the precision genuinely helps.

Jealousy is about losing something you already have. There are three people in it: you, someone you love, and a rival. It’s the feeling of a door you thought was yours starting to swing.

Envy is about wanting something you don’t have. There are two people in it: you, and the person holding the thing. Researchers have been separating these since Parrott and Smith’s work in the early nineties, and they really are different experiences. Envy comes with longing and a sting of inferiority. Jealousy comes with fear and watching.

So when your friend announces the pregnancy and your throat closes, that’s almost certainly not jealousy. Nobody is taking anything from you. You are standing in front of something you want, and your body just told you that you want it.

Which sounds worse, I know. Jealousy at least comes with a villain. Envy just comes with you, wanting.

Stay with me, because this is where it gets useful.

What’s actually underneath it

This is the part I most want to hand you.

Envy is very often the surface of grief. Not grief for a person. Grief for a version of your life.

There’s a name for this. Kenneth Doka called it disenfranchised grief: loss that the people around you don’t recognize as loss, so nobody helps you carry it. No casserole, no card, no day off. It’s grieving the career you set down. The city you left because it made sense at the time. The relationship you ended for good reasons that you’d end again. The child you didn’t have, or haven’t had yet, or are still deciding about. The years you spent holding a family together while your own life idled in the driveway. The version of you who would have taken the risk, gone to the thing, said it out loud.

And here’s what I want you to notice about that whole list.

Almost none of it is about not being able to.

We were handed a very specific order of operations. School, then the job, then the person, then the house, then the baby, roughly on schedule, and if you did it right it would feel like arriving. A lot of us did it out of order. A lot of us did it and it didn’t feel like arriving. A lot of us are in our late thirties looking at a life we chose on purpose and grieving it anyway, which is a confusing thing to admit at a baby shower.

So sit with the knot honestly and it’s usually one of two things. “I’m not there yet.” Or, “I made a different call, and I’m only now feeling what it cost.”

Neither of those is inadequacy. Both of those are grief.

You made choices. Some were good choices you’d make again tomorrow. And they still cost you something, and the cost gets to be sad. Yes, and. You don’t have to pick which one is the true one.

Why “I should just be happy for them” backfires

Here’s the move most of us make. We feel the knot, we clock it as ugly, and we go straight to performance. We type the message. We say we’re thrilled. And we are, partly, which is exactly why the whole thing is so disorienting.

But when you jump to “I should just be happy for her,” you’re not processing the feeling. You’re supervising it. And a feeling under supervision doesn’t leave. It waits.

Try thinking about your envy the way you’d think about a kid who’s upset about something she can’t explain yet. Sending her out of the room doesn’t settle her down. Sitting with her does.

You can be genuinely glad for your friend and quietly heartbroken for yourself in the same five minutes. That is not hypocrisy. That’s being a whole person with more than one thing going on.

The feeling has a direction, and you get some say in it

Here’s the research that gives me real hope about this one.

People who study envy have found it splits into two very different kinds. One kind moves you up. You see what she has and something in you leans forward: I want that, and I want to know what it would take. The other kind moves her down. You see what she has and something in you starts building a case, against her, or against how she got it, or against women like her.

Same knot in the throat. Two completely different destinations.

What decides the direction is mostly what you do in the first few minutes, and whether you told yourself the truth about what you were feeling. Which is why the naming matters as much as it does. “I’m a jealous person” is a verdict, and verdicts have nowhere to go. “I’m grieving that I’m not there yet” is information, and information can be worked with.

Your body said it first

The knot arrived before the thought did. That’s not a malfunction, that’s just the order these things happen in.

There’s good research on what happens when we put a feeling into words: naming an emotion accurately turns its volume down, which is a strange and generous fact about how we’re built. The catch is that it has to be the right word. “I’m being petty” doesn’t calm anything, because it isn’t true, and some part of you knows it isn’t true.

So next time the knot shows up, try this instead of the scolding.

Put a hand on your chest. Not as a wellness ritual. Just because warmth and pressure on your sternum actually settles a nervous system, and because you’d do it for a friend without thinking about it for a second.

Then ask, with real curiosity: what am I longing for right now?

Not what’s wrong with me. What am I longing for. Those two questions take you to completely different rooms.

Then wait for the honest answer, which is usually smaller and more specific than you’d expect. Sometimes it isn’t the house, it’s being settled. It isn’t the baby, it’s being chosen. It isn’t the promotion, it’s somebody finally noticing how hard you’ve been working with no one watching.

That answer is the beginning of a conversation, not the whole conversation. But it’s a much better place to start than shame.

And it isn’t too late, mostly

I want to be honest with you here, because there’s a whole industry telling women that nothing is ever closed, and that isn’t quite true. You’d know I was managing you if I said it.

Some doors close. Some of them close on things that mattered enormously, and that grief is real. It deserves to be treated as grief and not as a motivation problem to be solved with a planner.

Yes, and. Far less is closed than it feels like at 11pm with a phone in your hand. Career changes at 38 are ordinary. So are first babies, first marriages, second marriages, leaving the marriage, moving countries, going back to school, making new close friends in a new decade of your life. When the story in your head says the window shut, that’s usually grief talking, and grief is not a reliable narrator about the future. It’s an excellent narrator about the past.

The work isn’t to talk yourself out of the feeling. It’s to figure out which part of it is mourning and which part is a nudge, because those two need completely different things from you. The mourning needs a witness. The nudge needs you to actually do something.

What this looks like when it’s moving

Women bring this to therapy more often than you’d think, and they almost never call it grief when they walk in. They call it comparison. They say they’re on their phone too much, or they don’t like who they become around one particular friend, or they had a hard time at a shower in June and they still feel bad about it in September.

What shifts isn’t that you stop noticing what other women have. You’ll keep noticing. We’re comparing creatures and we’re not going to fix that.

What shifts is the recovery time. The knot shows up and you know what it is inside a minute instead of a week. You stop needing her to be secretly unhappy in order for you to feel okay. You can send the congratulations and mean it, and then go feel your own thing on your own time, which is the version of this that actually holds up. And usually something practical starts happening too, because a longing you’ve finally named tends to start asking you for things.

Four questions to sit with

When the knot shows up next, these will do more for you than an hour of scrolling.

What exactly am I longing for here? Get underneath the object to the experience. Not the wedding, the being claimed. Not the title, the being taken seriously.

Is this something I chose against, or something I haven’t reached yet? Those feel identical in the body and they need completely different things from you.

If this was a choice I made, what did I get in exchange? Name it honestly, including the parts you would still choose. Grief and gratitude are roommates.

What’s one small thing that would move me toward this? Small on purpose. One conversation, one question, one email.

If you want help with this

Some of this you can do on your own, with a hand on your chest and an honest question. Some of it needs a witness, especially the grief nobody in your life has ever called grief.

At Marra, the first step is a free 15 minute consultation with our intake team. You tell them what’s going on, and they help figure out which of our therapists is the right fit for it. If nobody here is right for you, we’ll tell you that and point you somewhere better. Sessions are 55 minutes. We’re in River West and we see clients online anywhere in Illinois, and you can meet our therapists before you commit to anything at all.

You don’t need a crisis to deserve this. A knot in your throat you’ve been arguing with for a year is plenty.

If you’re having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. It’s free, confidential, and available 24 hours a day.

Grief Was Never Meant to Be Carried Alone: Why a Support Group Can Change How You Heal

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Woman standing outside in warm sunlight

You went back to work. You answer the emails, you show up to the meetings, you say “I’m doing okay, thanks for asking” and by most outside measures, you are functioning. But there is a moment in grief that almost no one talks about. It usually comes a few months after the loss, when the flowers stop arriving, the texts slow down, and the world quietly expects you to be “doing better.” You are not doing better. You are just doing it more alone, holding it together in public and falling apart in the car, in the shower, at 2 a.m.

If that’s you, here is something we want you to know: grief is not a problem to be solved. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you. Grief is love with nowhere to go, and love that big deserves more than silence.

And if you’re self-aware enough to be reading this, to sense that what you’re carrying is heavier than you’re letting on, that awareness is not weakness. It’s the beginning of healing.

Grief doesn’t follow a schedule

We often imagine grief as a staircase: you move through the stages, you reach the top, you’re done. Real grief doesn’t work that way. It comes in waves. It shows up in the grocery aisle, in a song, in the middle of a workday, on an ordinary Tuesday that happens to be their birthday. And it doesn’t watch the calendar. Six months out, a year out, the loss is still real, because the love is still real. If anything, this stretch is often when grief gets harder, not easier: the support has thinned out, but the absence hasn’t.

The pain of loss is universal. But your grief, the shape of it, the weight of it, the way it moves through your days, is entirely your own. No one can tell you how long it should take or what it should look like. What we can tell you is that you were never meant to carry it by yourself.

When grief gets complicated

For some of us, grief becomes something heavier. When a loss is sudden, traumatic, or layered on top of other losses, grief can turn into a more complex process, one where the waves don’t soften with time, where daily life stays frozen, where guilt or anger or numbness takes up permanent residence. This isn’t weakness. It isn’t grieving “wrong.” It’s a sign that your loss needs more support than time alone can offer.

This is exactly where a dedicated space for grief matters most. Not because your friends and family don’t love you, they do. But the people closest to you are often grieving too, or worried about you, or unsure what to say. So you become the strong one. You comfort them, you soften your pain so it’s easier for others to be around, you keep the career moving because that part of life didn’t pause. That is an exhausting way to grieve, and being capable in every other area of your life doesn’t mean you should have to be capable at this, alone.

Why a space away from friends and family is so healing

A grief support group gives you something rare: a room where you don’t have to perform being okay.

In that space, no one flinches when you say their name. No one changes the subject. No one offers a silver lining you didn’t ask for. You sit with people who understand the 2 a.m. thoughts, the anger that surprises you, the strangeness of crushing a presentation and then crying in the parking garage, the guilt over laughing at something last week, because they’ve had those moments too. Each person’s loss is different, and still, something in the room says: you are not the only one.

Witness is one of the most healing forces we have. Pain that is seen and acknowledged by others begins to move. Pain that stays hidden tends to stay stuck. A support group is, at its heart, a circle of witnesses, people who let your grief exist at full size, without rushing it, fixing it, or looking away.

And unlike a coffee with a well-meaning friend, a group led by a grief therapist is also a place where real processing and real tools take place. You don’t just talk about the pain. You learn how to live alongside it.

Honoring your loved one is part of healing

One of grief’s cruelest myths is that moving forward means leaving your person behind. The opposite is true. Healing doesn’t mean forgetting, it means finding ways to carry them with you.

Honoring your loved one can look like speaking about them freely, telling their stories, saying their name out loud, laughing at the memory that still makes you laugh. It can look like taking care of yourself, eating, sleeping, moving, resting, because your life still matters, and they would want it to. It can look like keeping a ritual: lighting a candle, cooking their recipe, visiting their favorite place. It can look like letting joy back in without guilt, because joy and grief are not opposites. They live side by side in every person who has loved deeply.

A grief group is one of the few places where all of this is not just allowed but encouraged. Where remembering out loud is the point.

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