This past week, I’ve been speaking about grief.
Grief for the people we lose. Grief for the versions of ourselves who existed while they were still here.
But there is another kind of loss I see again and again in my work. It rarely gets a eulogy, and it almost never gets a name:
The grief of realising you lost yourself inside a relationship that was meant to be home.
When Nobody Dies, But Something Does
Sometimes the loss is a death.
Sometimes it’s a divorce.
And sometimes it is a slow, quiet separation where no one leaves the room, but something essential in you does.
Then one day, you wake up and notice:
- You don’t know what you want anymore.
- You can’t make even the smallest decision without fear or guilt.
- Pleasing, appeasing and over-giving feel safer than being honest.
- Your body feels like a place you left a long time ago.
From the outside, it might look like “just a breakup” or “just a divorce.”
On the inside, your whole system is mourning an entire life: the shared future, the home, the routines, and the version of you who vanished trying to hold it all together.
A Loss Without a Ritual
For many of the women I work with, this grief is the hardest to name.
There is no funeral. There is no ceremony. There is no casserole left on the doorstep.
There is only a nervous system in shock, trying to understand how love and fear became so tangled that you couldn’t tell them apart.
And so many women carry it in silence, telling themselves they should be stronger, further along, over it by now.
You are not behind. You are grieving.
Where My Work Lives
My work lives in the space where grief for others and grief for yourself overlap.
Through shamanic and generational healing, and by working gently with your nervous system, we begin to:
- Honour the losses that have no language. The ones you were never allowed to mourn.
- See where you began abandoning yourself in order to stay loved, or to stay safe.
- Release what was never yours to carry: family patterns, inherited fear, survival roles passed down like heirlooms no one asked for.
- Call yourself home, slowly, to the person you were before you had to disappear.
A New Conversation
As I close this chapter on loss through death, I’m opening a new conversation:
What happens when the separation isn’t only from another person, but from yourself?
In the coming days, I’ll be sharing more about:
- Losing yourself in relationships
- Divorce and emotional abuse
- How shamanic and generational healing can help you find your way back to you
If This Is Your Story
If something here stirs your own experience, you are welcome.
You don’t need the right words.
You don’t need to be “over it.”
You only need to be honest enough to whisper:
“I think somewhere along the way, I lost myself.”
That sentence is not an ending. It is the first step back.
If you’d like a gentle space to explore what your system has been holding, reach out or book a Discovery Session.
We will move at the pace of your nervous system, not at the pace of anyone’s expectations.
Because the woman you were before you disappeared? She is still here. She has been waiting for you.
