Episode 196 | The Grief Series
Some grief doesn’t have a funeral. It doesn’t get a casserole or a sympathy card or a week off work. It just lives quietly inside your normal life, in a marriage you’re still in, a child who’s growing up too fast, a belief system you no longer recognize yourself inside of, and nobody ever tells you that you’re allowed to name it.
This episode is for the grief that doesn’t look like grief. The kind that hides inside everyday life because nothing technically died.
A Conversation Born From Deep Work
My guest, Chrissy Powers, has held space for me in some of the most important inner work I’ve ever done, including a ketamine-assisted therapy intensive that cracked open grief I didn’t even know my body was holding. She’s a therapist, the founder of Paradigm Wellness Collective, and someone trained in psychedelic somatic therapy who has spent over sixteen years helping people heal.
I wanted her on this series because I knew she’d go there with me. And she did.
Chrissy named something early in our conversation that reframed the whole episode for me: complicated grief. The grief that isn’t simple because nobody actually died. It’s the grief of waking up and realizing your marriage needs to change. The grief of aging parents who will never be who you needed them to be. The grief of outgrowing relationships, friendships, even your own family’s belief systems.
That’s the grief most of us are carrying and have no language for.
The Grief of a Marriage You’re Still In
We talked about something that doesn’t get spoken about nearly enough: grieving inside a relationship you haven’t left.
I shared my own experience of loving my husband completely, a ten out of ten partner in every way, while he deeply struggled with fatherhood in ways I never expected. I wasn’t grieving the loss of the relationship. I was grieving the gap between what I needed and what he was able to give in that season, and sitting with the real, terrifying question of whether I would have to walk away from my best friend to protect my kids.
Chrissy met that with her own story. Her husband’s struggle with alcohol came to a head around the pandemic, and she had to give him the same kind of ultimatum: get help, or she would protect herself and their children without him. He chose help. He’s been sober for years now. But living inside that uncertainty, not knowing which way it would go, carrying it largely alone because it wasn’t a story she felt she could share, that was its own grief.
Here’s what struck me most: neither of us were grieving the marriage ending. We were grieving while staying. That’s a category of grief we don’t have a script for, the kind that exists in a relationship you’re actively choosing to stay in and fight for.
Chrissy said something that’s stuck with me since: you can be brave and sad at the same time. Telling someone you love, “I love you, and because I love you, we cannot keep going like this,” is one of the hardest, most loving things a person can do. It deserves to be grieved, not just survived.
Outgrowing the People You Love
We also talked about a pattern Chrissy sees constantly in her practice: women doing deep healing work who find themselves outgrowing a partner who isn’t on the same path. Not because the partner is doing anything wrong. Because growth doesn’t always happen at the same pace for two people, and watching someone you love stay in place while you keep moving is its own particular ache.
Chrissy’s read on this broke my heart a little: men so often don’t have language for their own emotions, and the shame that surrounds that keeps them from ever catching up. It’s not always resistance. Sometimes it’s just that nobody ever gave them the tools.
That doesn’t make the grief of carrying someone forward with you any smaller. It just means the grief and the compassion can live in the same place.
Watching Your Children Grow Is Its Own Kind of Loss
If you’ve ever had a photo pop up on your phone of your child at three years old and felt something closer to mourning than nostalgia, you already understand this one.
Chrissy described it perfectly: that younger version of your child is gone. Not metaphorically. You will never hold that exact baby again, never hear that exact voice, never get that exact age back. It’s not dramatic to call that grief. It’s accurate.
We talked about how that grief shows up even when everything is going right. Your kids are healthy. They’re growing the way they’re supposed to. And you can still feel the wave hit you out of nowhere, looking at an old photo, watching them push away from you a little more each year, realizing you are no longer the mother of small children.
You’re allowed to let yourself feel that. Not push past it, not talk yourself out of it because things are objectively fine. Just feel it, let the wave move through, and keep going.
Deconstructing What You Were Taught to Believe
One of the most powerful parts of this conversation was Chrissy’s story of growing up as a pastor’s daughter, and the slow, painful process of deconstructing a belief system that told her she was bad at her core and that women didn’t have a voice in church.
She described the moment it became undeniable: pregnant with her daughter, sitting in a service, listening to a sixteen-year-old girl speak with more spirit and love than she’d heard from any man in that church in ten years. She knew in that moment she couldn’t raise her daughter inside that framework anymore.
That kind of deconstruction, whether it’s religious, relational, or simply the dismantling of an identity you were handed instead of one you chose, comes with real grief. Lost relationships. Family members who see you as having gone astray. A therapist once told Chrissy that deconstruction feels like falling upward: you’ve let go of the floor, but you haven’t landed in the new place yet.
That image has stayed with me. Because so much of grief, the kind that comes from growth rather than loss, feels exactly like that. Suspended. Not lost, but not yet arrived.
How to Actually Move Through It
We didn’t just sit in the hard parts of this conversation. We talked about what actually helps.
Chrissy’s advice: find a guide. A therapist, a friend, anyone who has walked the road before you and can hold steady while you find your footing. Don’t give up if the first therapist isn’t the right fit. Keep looking until you find the person who actually gets it.
And then, trust your body. Not just your thoughts. Chrissy talked about writing poetry as an unexpected outlet during her deconstruction, the kind of intuitive writing that surprises you with what comes out. I talked about my early morning walks, the ones where I imagine I’m walking alongside my own inner child, and how movement, whether it’s a walk, a vibration plate, or even getting a facial, helps process what sitting still never could.
The through line in everything we talked about: your body already holds the answers. Most of us have just gotten so used to scrolling past the question that we’ve forgotten how to sit with it long enough to hear what comes back.
“You can be brave, and you can be sad that this is happening. It takes so much strength to say to a person, I love you, and because I love you, we cannot keep going like this.”
This episode is for anyone carrying grief that doesn’t have an obvious name. The marriage you’re still fighting for. The child who’s growing up faster than you’re ready for. The beliefs you’ve outgrown but haven’t fully replaced yet. You don’t need a death certificate to justify the weight you’re carrying. You just need permission to call it what it is.
Find Chrissy on Instagram at @chrissyjpowers and at chrissypowers.com. Her book, Woman Embodied: The Practice of Coming Home to Yourself, is out October 27th.
This is The Grief Series. Listen now!
xx, Ash
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