Grief can sneak up on you when you least expect it. When it happens in front of others – such as in your workplace – sometimes you have little choice but to swallow it back and keep moving on, as though it isn’t there.

But it is still there. As Bessel van der Kolk pointed out in his amazing book The Body Keeps the Score, it doesn’t disappear. Feelings buried alive never die.

If you start stuffing grief down in one situation, you start stuffing it down in other situations – even in safer places. And that, my friend, is where the wheels will eventually come off.

You see, your body is happy to support your drama for a long time. But once you hit mid-life, it gets tired. Or, at least that has been my experience.

Here’s what I've learned about grief, which I hope will help you if you’ve been carrying its weight for too long:

1. Stuffing down grief teaches you how to stuff down all kinds of feelings, even the positive ones (like joy). It leaves you feeling numb.
   

2. Fleeing your grief leads to rage, resentment, and self-destructive habits.
   

3. Whether you end up numb or ticked off, you aren’t experiencing your life in the present. You are constantly living in the past.

What do you do about it? Here are some things that have worked for me:

1. Be gentle with yourself. More often than not, the grieving part of you is your inner child. Just as you wouldn’t yell at a child for expressing hurt feelings, don’t scold yourself.
   

2. Remember grieving takes the time it takes. This is true of many things, but especially grief. So often, we want to hurry up a process and get past it, especially when it’s painful. Well-meaning people in your life may also say things like, “It’s been a year” or “It’s really not that big of a deal.” It’s YOUR grief, not theirs. Thank them for their opinion, but follow your own heart on this.
   

3. Get help. My go-to modalities for healing grief are Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). One of my coachescombines the two. These approaches can really help you zero in on the source of grief and begin to heal it more quickly.

Most of all, please know I will hold your grief with you. Just reach out to me if you have something you want to discuss. I’m always willing to listen.