Have you ever encountered a boulder on a hiking trail? The loom-large-block-your-path kind where you had to determine another way around? You can’t see over it, under it, around it. The boulder overwhelms our view of what’s ahead on our life path. Great grief often looks (and feels) like this.

In the podcast episode last week, we discussed how to avoid carrying overstuffed baggage with us into the new year and how grief encompasses an entirely different bag than our possible everyday emotions.

This week, we’re having a conversation about grief trauma with my friend, Ann Golding. We can all experience a variety of life losses like job loss, moves, friendships; any sort of change in life can bring feelings of grief (also small boulders like fear, comparison, anxiety, etc.). My conversation with Ann covers a much deeper and wider understanding of a different kind of grief as she shares her story of traumatic loss.

Traumatic grief holds uniqueness in the spectrum of life grief in the absolute overwhelm that shocking news or loss brings-each person walks such a different path. No cookie-cutter answers exist for how to walk through this particular grief, process it emotionally, physically, and spiritually, and the length of time required to navigate the myriad raw layers of life emotion. In the conversation, Ann offers us such a truth nugget: You never get over it, you just get used to it.

I particularly love the above sentiment because so often hurting people feel wounded by friends, family, and community who communicate expectations for how long grief should last. Many can offer some version of, “Shouldn’t you be over that by now?”

Join me on The Bearing Life® Podcast this week as hear Ann’s story and talk about how to help one another bear the burden of great grief: what we do for each other and how to move these boulders together!