Step 9 of 10 · Heal From Grief & Loss
Returning to Life — Without Leaving Them Behind
Returning to Life — Without Leaving Them Behind
Step 9 · 13 min
🎬 Video lesson coming soon
At some point — and there is no prescribed timeline for this — you will notice something.
A moment of genuine enjoyment. A laugh that surprises you. An interest in something ahead. A desire to plan something, see someone, go somewhere.
And perhaps, alongside that moment, a complicated feeling: guilt for being okay. As if enjoyment betrays the person you've lost.
This lesson is for that moment.
Restoration-orientation in the dual process model: attending to life alongside loss
The guilt of 'moving on' — why enjoyment doesn't betray the person
Small pleasures and their importance in grief: the permission to feel something good
Rebuilding identity after a loss that changed who you are
Stroebe and Schut's Dual Process Model describes the natural oscillation between loss-orientation (the grief, the missing, the processing) and restoration-orientation (attending to the tasks and relationships and interests of ongoing life). Both are necessary. And critically: the movement toward restoration — even early and imperfect restoration — does not betray the person. It is the natural human capacity for life reasserting itself.
The guilt of enjoyment in grief — feeling that positive emotion is disloyal — is one of the most common and most painful aspects of the return to life. It is rooted in a false binary: that grief and enjoyment cannot coexist, that enjoying something means the grief is over or the person forgotten.
The evidence is otherwise. Positive emotion in bereavement — the moments of genuine joy or pleasure alongside grief — is associated with better long-term outcomes, not with denial. George Bonanno's research shows that bereaved people who experience positive emotion (even in the earliest stages) actually show more resilience over time, not less genuine grief.
Rebuilding identity: for losses that were also losses of role or relationship-identity (widowhood, the loss of a parent in a parent-child-defining relationship), the return to life involves also rebuilding a sense of who one is outside of that defining relationship. This is slow, and it is real work.
Find a comfortable position · Read slowly
This practice is gentle and asks only that you look honestly, without pressure.
Is there one small thing — however modest, however brief — that you have enjoyed since the loss? Or that you could imagine enjoying?
It might feel wrong even to write down. Write it anyway.
Maybe it was a meal that tasted good. A conversation that made you laugh despite yourself. A piece of music. A moment outside. Something on your phone that you smiled at and then immediately felt guilty for.
Write what it is.
Then — and this is the practice — allow yourself to have it, without the guilt.
Say, silently or aloud: "I am allowed to enjoy this. It does not mean I love them less. It means I am also still alive."
If nothing comes yet — if enjoyment isn't accessible right now — that's okay. Write "not yet." The question will be relevant in its own time. Come back to it.
The capacity for life to feel worth living again does not betray the person you've lost. It honours them — because they were part of what made life feel worth living, and the ability to feel that again is a form of love continuing.
Living fully is not forgetting. It is the most honest tribute you can pay to a life that mattered — by continuing to live yours with intention and presence.
One final lesson to go. It is about what you carry forward — and the permission to be okay.