Grief As The Process Of Repairing Our Relationship To Reality

Heidi Priebe reframes grief as the process of repairing our relationship to reality, updating inner expectations to match the changed outer world after loss.

Key Takeaways

Grief is a reality-updating process, not merely an emotion to suppress.
Avoiding grief keeps people stuck in outdated expectations and unhealthy situations.
Gentle self-association during grief episodes helps the nervous system recalibrate.
Honoring the past through gratitude while accepting present reality supports healthy recovery.
Unmet needs can be gradually met through other relationships and pursuits.

What the video covers

Grief is primarily a process of repairing our relationship to reality, not just an unpleasant feeling to avoid.
Many people avoid grief by staying in bad relationships or situations long past the point of usefulness.
Grief involves recognizing what is true now while mourning what we wished were true, then readapting to reality.
Nervous system expectation patterns (e.g., texting an ex a joke) keep firing after a rupture, creating a gap between expectation and reality.
Early grief often appears as panic or a sense that something is wrong, typically corresponding to denial or shock phases.
Heidi's example: after a breakup, she woke nightly in panic because her body expected her ex to return to bed after using the bathroom.
Instead of resisting the panic, she gave herself comfort and a calm routine (tea, reading), which gradually updated her expectations.
Grief can be processed through fantasy (staying attached to what could have been) or through acceptance and adaptation.
A ritual of gratitude and a letter that is written but not sent can help honor what was lost while acknowledging it is over.
Needs once met by a former partner can be redistributed to friendships and creative projects, enabling healthy adaptation.

Chapters

Why does the speaker argue grief is not primarily a feeling?

She argues that while grief includes uncomfortable sensations and emotions, its core function is updating our expectations to match reality. Feelings are symptoms of that mismatch between inner expectations and outer circumstances.

What was the speaker's example of grief showing up after a breakup?

She woke up nightly in a panic because her body expected her ex to return to bed after a bathroom trip, as they had for two years. The absence of that expected return triggered alarm until she adjusted her expectations.

How does the speaker suggest people process grief in practice?

She recommends responding to grief episodes with self-comfort rather than resistance, and working through what was lost, such as writing a gratitude letter that is not sent. Over time, needs can be met through friendships and creative projects instead.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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Hey guys, I'm Heidi Pribb. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here. For the past winter on this channel, we've been talking about rupture, self-reovery, and repair. And today, we're going to transition into a new series on change and expansion and

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meaning making. But to kind of bridge these two topics, I want to talk about something that I think it's very natural to end the Rupture and Recovery series on, which is grief. Now a theory I have is that a lot of us are trying to avoid

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grief either consciously or unconsciously because we primarily relate to it as a feeling. So as this kind of very uncomfortable sensation in our nervous systems or in our emotions that we just don't want to have. And so we will hold on to bad relationships

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well past the point where it feels good to be in them. We will hang on to jobs or living situations or whatever it is well past the point where it may have served us to let go of them because we

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are so afraid of that feeling of grief. But what I want to talk about today is how grief is not primarily a feeling.

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Okay, there are absolutely those nervous system sensations and those very challenging emotions that come along with grief. But if we are encountering it directly and cleanly, grief is actually the process of repairing our relationship to reality.

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Okay? So when something goes wrong in our lives, when we have been in a relationship that functions one way for a long time and then something changes, there's now a disconnect between our expectation of reality. So our nervous

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systems that have gotten very attuned to and used to this other person's specific role in our lives and what is actually happening in reality. The grief process is the process of recognizing what is true now mourning what we want to be true. So the

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fantasy version of reality that we might have inside of our heads where none of that ever happened. and then readapting to reality as it is without losing sight of the needs that we once had fulfilled inside of that scenario that has now

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changed. So, if I've recently broken up with someone, I might several times a day have the experience of, "Oh, now it's time to text them because I've developed this template inside of my experience that when I hear a certain

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type of joke that I think this other person would find funny, or when I learn something that this other person might find interesting, what is going to happen based on my past experiences and habits is that I'm going to text this to

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that person and they're going to reply in a way that's going to give me some sort of reward, right? And so those expectation neurons still fire. I still have the impulse or the urge to reach out and share the thing that I would

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normally share. But there's now a rupture between my expectations of reality and what is actually happening in reality. So the argument I'm making in this video is that grief is actually the process of updating our inner world to match the outer world again without

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leaving any significant part of us behind. And so we're going to talk about both why some of us struggle to do that as well as how to do it because some of us have never learned the template and

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so we get really stuck in those negative and uncomfortable feelings for longer than we would like to. So I started thinking about this in a lot more detail when I was going through a period of my life where I had recently gone through a

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breakup with someone who I'd been living with for a couple of years prior. And after that breakup happened, I moved into a new space where I had roommates.

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And something really funny started happening, which is that very often I found myself waking up in the middle of the night in a state of kind of panic.

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And I could not get myself to calm back down and go to sleep. And I couldn't figure out what was happening because there was nothing overt that I could figure out that was causing this. I wasn't having bad dreams that I was

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remembering, but I did have a suspicion that it was probably related to the breakup.

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And so one night when I woke up in that feeling of panic, I decided to just sit up in bed and kind of stay associated to what was happening around me. And I realized that I could hear the sound of

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one of my roommates leaving the bathroom and returning to their own room. And I had this total aha moment, which is that the sound of the bathroom was waking me up. But where the panic was coming from was from the fact that for 2 years

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prior. Very often my exartner had gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. And because I'm a light sleeper, I knew that when they came back into the room and got back into bed, I

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would wake up again if I went to sleep in between. And so I would stay in this kind of half awake state, wait for them to return to the other side of the bed.

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And that was my body's cue to kind of let down and go back to sleep. But now that same expectation was happening in my body even in a halfconscious state but it wasn't completing. So I was waking up in the night hearing the sound

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of the bathroom and the expectation my body was holding around that was that in a minute or two your partner is going to come back and climb into the other side of the bed. And when that didn't happen,

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my body would get increasingly alarmed and panicked because it thought that something was wrong. It had this template, this expectation of the environment that was not getting met. So what I was encountering in that moment was that feeling of grief that so many

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of us work so hard to avoid. Right? This feeling that takes many different forms depending on where we're at in a grieving process. But it often first shows up as a kind of panic or something is wrong. This is often what grief feels

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like in those really early stages that can be characterized as the kind of denial phase of grief or the shock phase. But in each instance, our job is to update our expectations to more closely match reality. And that's what

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we're going to talk about today. That's how we actually use those feelings of grief, as terrible as they feel, to get into better contact with what is true for us now and which possibilities exist for us now on the other side of

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processing that grief. So, in the case of that particular grief experience I was having of waking up in the middle of the night with a kind of panicked feeling online, I told myself, "What if the next time this happens, instead of

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resisting those panicked feelings and going, "Come on, Heidi, grow up. Go back to sleep," I gave myself some form of association and comfort.

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And so the next night when I inevitably woke up at 2 a.m. to the sound of my roommate going to the bathroom in the night, I decided intentionally to sit up, tell myself the way I would tell a

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small child who is upset and disoriented, nothing scary is happening. There is nothing wrong. Your body is just experiencing an expectation that's not getting fulfilled because things have changed and it takes time for us to adapt to change. And so what we're going

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to do right now is we're just going to stay up until our body calms back down.

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And so I gave myself permission to go make a cup of decaffeinated tea, sit in my bed, and read a book for half an hour between about 2 and 2:30 a.m. And after a little while of doing that, I

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naturally got pretty tired and went back to sleep. And I told myself the next day, I can do this for as many nights in a row as I need to. This is an important process. it deserves my time and my

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energy. But what was really interesting was the next night when I woke up at 2 a.m. I had a new template formed for what my options were. And I automatically went, "Oh, right. I'm waking up cuz I'm having that body

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panic. My options are either get up, read a little bit, have a cup of tea, or go back to sleep." And very quickly, my body chose to go back to sleep because I had updated on reality. I had formed and

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stayed associated to a new reality where waking up in the night now means not that I'm waiting for my partner to come back, but that I'm just experiencing a bit of a trigger. And after that second night of waking up at 2 a.m., it never

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happened again in that way. And so this started to kind of take shape in my mind as the how of the grief process. So I think that for a lot of us when it feels like we are stuck in grief, like we just

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cannot find a way to move on from something or to get over something, it's actually often that we are stuck in that feeling of panic that arises when expectation and reality are not aligned.

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And we are refusing to move into the grieving process of accepting that expectation, reality are not aligned.

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And there's one of two ways we can do this. One is that we can stay really really associated to our expectations in the form of fantasy. So instead of accepting I have lost this person to a breakup or whatever it is, every time

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that feeling of longing or of panic that they're gone comes up, instead of finding our inner adult and sitting with our distressed inner child in those moments and gently breaking to them that reality is no longer the same as our

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expectations. Instead, we turn towards our fantasy world where we are either winning that person back or moving on from them in a way that makes them completely irrelevant or kind of ruthlessly pouring over every interaction we ever had with

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them and figuring out where exactly things went wrong and trying to make a plan to fix it so that they come back.

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So, this is what happens when we stay really attached to our expectations and we refuse to even look at reality. Okay?

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If we feel like we are really stuck in grief or in loss, something it's really helpful to check in on is how much time am I spending being actually present and aware of my environment as it exists now

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with this person being gone versus how much time am I spending inside of my own head remembering what it was like to have them here or thinking about how badly I want for them to come back.

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Right? So, we're often stuck in memory and fantasy when we feel like we're stuck in grief. But what we are not stuck in is the actual process of updating our relationship to reality.

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And that's what we need to do if we want to start moving through the process. The second way in which a lot of us resist the grieving process without realizing it is that we try to circumn those terrible feelings of loss and longing

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and aching by shutting down or ignoring the parts of ourselves that want what that person gave us in the first place.

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So, we kind of reason with ourselves. Well, I will just only want what I can get in my environment now. And I will forget about the parts of me that ever wanted what I used to have or what this

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person once gave me. And this tends to make us feel better temporarily. It's what those of us on the avoidance spectrum often tend to default to. But the problem is that we are moving on while leaving real and significant parts

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of ourselves behind. So, we might go, "Well, yeah, I had a whole future planned with that person, and I was really excited about some of the goals that we were working towards together." But actually, now that they're gone,

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what I can fixate on is just enjoying my life in the present, and enjoying time with my friends and all of these other interests and hobbies that maybe I didn't spend as much time on when I was in that relationship. And we can keep

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ourselves busy enough with what's in the present and avoid all of the kind of triggers that might instigate that longing that we don't want to feel. But this naturally disconnects us from a vital part of ourselves. Because while

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it may be very well and true that there's a lot to be excited about in the present, that longing that we would be feeling if we weren't avoiding all of those triggers is telling us something about what we need to stay whole. And so

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when we can sit with it and be with that yearning and that pain and that regret of things going wrong, that allows us to stay connected to the need that existed beneath what that person was giving us.

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And when we go forward in our lives with that need online, even if it's unfulfilled for a while, now we go forward with a conscious space in our lives that eventually can be fulfilled in new ways through the options that

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exist in our environment. So, we're just going to go through what this process looks like. So, we arrive at that moment where those feelings come online to alert us to the fact that what we want or need or are hoping for out of our

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environments is not going to happen. If we want to be kind to ourselves in those moments, what we can do is get really specific and just name what's happening in our systems. I so want to reach out to this person. I so want to feel their

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body coming back into my bed at night and wrapping their arms around me. I so want to be able to call up my family member who's passed and just tell them about my day and ask about theirs.

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There's a part of my psyche that is just reaching out and aching for this person's contribution in the way that they used to show up for me. And in the early stages, this might just feel like plain old-fashioned desperation. But

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something that I find really useful once that grief is getting a little bit less intense is using those moments as opportunities to practice gratitude.

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Even if the person who left our lives was really terrible to us in certain ways and we're glad that they're gone for those reasons, we can still sit with those memories and think in our minds, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank

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you. Thank you for the ways that you came into my life and showed up that were good and nourishing and beautiful.

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I had this big need for comfort and you holding me as I slept every night was such a satisfaction of that need. And now here I am still with that need for comfort. And going forward, I'm going to

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need to find a new way to get it fulfilled. But thank you. Thank you.

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Thank you to the person who once fulfilled it for me for so long. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to the parent who raised me and who gave me this sense of the world is a safer place because I have got your back

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somewhere in the background even if we haven't talked in weeks. And now that that parent may be lost to death, we can go out into the world and find new supportive structures for ourselves going forward. But thank you, thank you,

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thank you to the parents who did that for us when we had them with us. Thank you to the jobs that provided us with stability and with income for as long as they did when those were our primary

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needs. Thank you to the people who helped us grow in new ways. Thank you to the friends who kept us company through the dark seasons of our lives when all of these things go. The role that thanking them plays is not just giving

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ourselves a comforting experience of that loss. It's also that it helps us separate out consciously the need from the fulfillment.

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So if I can get really freaking clear on what it was that a certain friendship that may have ended added to my life and I can thank that friend in my mind for giving me that. Now I also have an

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awareness of what it was that they were giving me. I'm aware of a kind of vacuum that exists in my system which in the future gives me the best possible chance at finding new ways to get that need

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met. So we sit with that ache, with that yearning, with that desire to have someone or something back. And then the next step is that again we find that wise responsible adult in us who is able to sit with that part of us that yearns

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and aches and desperately wants to reach out even in the cases where we know that we shouldn't or it wouldn't be good for us. And we explain to them your pain is so normal. It is so normal and it's good

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that you're feeling it. And here is the reason why we're not going to reach out.

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This is how we relate securely to our own emotions. We marry them with reason.

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Reason really does help contain overwhelming emotional experiences. Right? We know this from developmental psychology. When children can understand why they're experiencing pain or dissatisfaction, they're far less likely to be traumatized by overwhelming emotional experiences. But it's so the

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same for our adult selves. If we can help our disregulated emotional inner children who are doing the exact job that they are meant to do to understand that there is a purpose to the pain that they are feeling. It's going to go a

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really long way in helping us contain and integrate hard experiences. I was once going through the end of a relationship that was so challenging because it was with someone who I loved so much and had connected with so

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deeply, but there were just things we wanted that were too different. And so during a particular week where I was feeling a massive grief wave, I just gave my inner child permission to over the course of 5 to seven days write down

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every single thing I still wanted and still wished I could reach out and say to that person. And then on the last day, I wrote a letter to that child explaining, "Here's why we can't send this. We are not going to send this out

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of loyalty to our future selves who want something different than what we can have with this person." And that actually really helped in allowing that grief wave to crest and turn into something different. We acknowledge the feelings alongside with an understanding

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of why we're not going to act on them. But then the final stage of this process is again recognizing now that we have accepted that our expectation and reality are different and gotten associated to what it is that we were

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wanting or what it is that was getting fulfilled through that prior relationship or situation. We can slowly over time as we reassociate to the reality that we have in front of us find new ways to get those needs met. It's

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not going to happen if we're staying really fixated and stuck on that particular person or that particular situation. So, we have to move through that yearning and that aching and that longing and the coaching of ourselves through it using those wise inner adults

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who understand what has happened to get to the place where we can go, okay, you know what? Maybe this one person met these five needs for me. And I'm not going to meet another person who meets those five needs in the exact same way.

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But I can get some of these needs met through my friendships and some of these needs met through my creative projects.

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And then eventually when I go back into a romantic relationship, I'll be able to take stock of which needs that person's able to meet for me and adjust my life accordingly instead of needing someone to take the exact same shape that that

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other person once took for me, which is often what happens when we try to move too quickly from point A in the grief process to point B. We haven't gone through this experience of kind of dispersing all of the energy and needs

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that were concentrated inside of that one relationship into our present reality. Finding new shapes and forms and rhythms and routines and patterns for getting our needs met in real time and then being at choice about what relationships we develop out of that in

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the future. Because we're no longer expecting point B to look exactly like point A. It requires a lot of change and readdaptation to what's available to us in the reality that we currently exist in first.

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But the idea here is that as we move through that grief process, what we are slowly doing in every moment time and time and time again is repairing that rupture that has existed between our expectations and reality until

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eventually we're no longer doing things like regulating ourselves with fantasies of how someone's going to act or what's going to happen that are completely divorced from reality.

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Right? We've found a way to form new expectations of reality that are aligned with what it can actually offer us, including an awareness of what is not yet fulfilled in our lives. That's going to be a vacuum for a while until we find

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a new way to get those needs met. But what we have given ourselves is the opportunity to be back in a secure connection with reality as it exists.

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This is the end goal of the grief process. It is not just this emotion that we helplessly sit in until it passes. And so the reason I wanted to share all of that is just to make grief feel a little bit less hopeless for

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those of us who are moving through it. It's not just this terrible feeling that we have to thrash and flail around in endlessly. It is a process that our systems are moving through that we can be intentional about and understand what

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it's going to look like to someday get to the other side. All right, I'm going to leave it at that for today, but as always, any questions, anything coming up for you as you've gone through this video, please leave in the comment

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section below. I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other, and I will see you back here again very soon.

Topics:griefbreakup recoveryemotional healingnervous systemacceptanceself-regulationattachmentreality testinggratitude ritualrupture and repair

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