Hello! I’m Victoria, your guide through pet loss grief, fellow animal lover, and dog mom to a joy-giving Havanese named Gizmo. As a child-griever who grew up with grief, I have learned how to live alongside grief, albeit with a lot of lessons and what not-to-do’s under my belt. Society has taught grievers for decades that grief is best left swept under the rug.

Also, as an animal lover growing up, I desperately wanted an animal I could keep and call mine for longer than a few months. I wouldn’t get that wish until 2014, when we brought Gizmo into our lives. He has been the greatest gift that keeps on giving. He’s considered elderly now, and I know someday I will be faced with the heartache that brought you to this program.

Check out my newly launched program “Do Pet Loss Differently,” a heartly created program that is dedicated to providing support, comfort, and healing during a difficult time when it’s tough to find support.

“Do Pet Loss Differently” is a self-paced program designed to guide you through the unique and challenging journey of pet loss. This program is crafted to fit seamlessly into your life, allowing you to work through it at your convenience. It’s meticulously structured to keep you on track and focused, ensuring you receive the support and guidance you need. 

Empathy, also according to Merriam-Webster, is defined as the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another in either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

According to the same resource, grief is deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement. However, The Grief Recovery Institute defines grief as the normal and natural reaction to a loss of any kind. It is also anything we wish would be different, better, or more, and the loss of hopes, dreams, and expectations.

The Narcissist in Your Life

Where does narcissism come in, then? If you have relationships with people (who doesn’t?), you may know of a narcissist or have one in your life. And in my experience, it’s grief-causing to understand that the narcissist in your life will always fit the bill for grief-like feelings around the relationship you wish would be different, better or more. Grief also exists in knowing that there is a loss of hopes, dreams, and expectations for the relationship.

I don’t know if a narcissist can change. They will always have a different view of themselves than how others perceive them. How do you get someone to change their perception of themselves? In short, I don’t know that you can. That’s self-awareness, I believe, that has to come from within themselves. Only you have the power to change yourself for the better and work through all of the feelings that arise. Unless, however, you cut them out of your life completely. Even then, the grief-like feelings don’t go away on their own by cutting the person out of your life. There will still be emotional incompleteness between that person and the relationship.

To better understand why you may be experiencing grief while in a relationship with a narcissist, read the following excerpt from this Psychology Today blog post:

Since an empathic response often involves an unconscious assessment of one’s vulnerability to experiencing shame, the narcissist’s inhibition of an empathic response (“unwillingness”) may simply be self-protective. This also points to the affective limitations that accompany narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissists do not consciously feel a lack of empathy or experience an unwillingness to empathize. Instead, in many situations where one might expect them to empathize, their limitations activate a sense of helplessness—an imagined vulnerability— followed by scripted responses to shame, such as shame-fear (fear of loss of face) or shame-rage (protection from some trauma or imagined trauma from the past).

Thus, if you are involved with someone whose behaviors are motivated by shame-avoidance, your task is to protect yourself since they will be consciously or unconsciously unwilling to empathize with you.  Commonly, heartbroken people explain their relationship rupture as due to their former partner’s “lack of empathy,” concluding they had been in love with a narcissist. However, it is possible to respond to our own shame by attacking the other who could not provide what we needed in the first place, given their restricted emotional freedom. Instead, by accepting our disappointment and misdirection, and looking inside ourselves, we can learn because we have the emotional resources and willingness that enable us to do so.

And applying the last sentence to my life is what has given me the emotional freedom I desired that I saw came so naturally to the narcissist in my life. It should come as no surprise that GRM (the grief recovery method) provided me with new tools and knowledge to do just that.

I highly recommend reading the entire article. And, if you suspect someone in your life is a narcissist or not (or are perhaps curious where you fall on the scale), check out this quiz. For funsies, I took it and applied the questions to myself. I scored a 6, which falls into self-sufficiency: a trait that refers to how much you rely on others versus your abilities to meet your needs in life. I feel this is a very accurate result for me. I learned very early on in my life how to be self-sufficient. It’s also a trait that makes it hard for me to ask for help – as a life-long griever and otherwise.

A Solution

Of all of the people in the world, with all of the variety of traits, characteristics, and personalities we encounter in our lifetime, it’s vital to have emotional intelligence and awareness about ourselves. This self-knowledge empowers us to work through whatever emotional disturbance we bump up against that would otherwise have the potential to derail and emotionally block us in our lives.

Grief recovery has given me this emotional freedom, and it can provide it for you as well. After you learn what I have learned, and after you’ve worked through the hardest emotional loss of your life, you will view every other relationship (and person) in your life differently, with clearer goggles of self-awareness and emotional intelligence, as previously mentioned. You will also have the tools and knowledge to see those people and relationships for who and what they are – another griever who hasn’t addressed their emotional disturbances.

P.S. Do you want to work through a narcissist relationship that’s been a source of grief for you? Get in touch here.

Take note of all of the feeling words in the tree of grief. How many you’ve experienced throughout your life?

I imagine you’ve experienced all of them throughout your life.

Recently on social media, I had a request to address the feeling of sadness, which was prompted by the reader referencing the blog post, How to Own Your Feelings, published in May (Mental Health Awareness Month).

I needed some inspiration for this week anyway, so it was perfect timing. If you ever want to learn more about a particular aspect of grief or want me to dig more deeply into a covered topic, please don’t hesitate to share with me! I’m open to all requests!

Why do we feel sadness or any number of feelings shown here in the tree word cloud image?

The root of sadness is, you guessed it, grief.

There is no timeline for grief. Often, when we hear this, we may think about the long-term. However, what about short-term grief as well? You don’t have to be a (nearly) life-long griever like myself to identify yourself as a griever. And, there is ZERO SHAME in identifying yourself as a griever. When your life patterns have changed due to Covid-19, lose a home in a fire or a job (or don’t get hired for the dream job) – there’s grief.

I’ve mentioned this definition (or description) of grief given to us by The Grief Recovery Institute many times. However, I’ll repeat it if you’ve never come across this definition before.

Grief is anything we wish would be different, better, or more. And, it’s also the net result of the loss of hopes, dreams, and expectations.

The words in the image fall under the umbrella of one word – GRIEF. In a nutshell, the root of all of these feelings is grief. And, when we start to look at all these feelings, we can begin to apply new knowledge and tools to process them.

You may think, “But no one died; I’m not a griever.”

You do not have to experience the death of a loved one to experience grief. Go back and re-read that definition again.

You may feel hopeless, depressed, or anxious after being diagnosed with a chronic illness such as diabetes.

You may feel fear, stress, and anxiety about the future if, like many are this weekend, you are graduating from high school or are about to embark on a transition in life.

And, when you add that we are all in a relationship with others, do you think that others may also project their feelings onto us? Do you believe we may struggle to have a relationship where we fully feel seen, heard, and not judged, criticized, or analyzed for our feelings? 

All of this to say, this is why I am so passionate about education about grief. Relationships and lives depend on this education. That may sound dramatic; however, if I were to share some stats with you on child grief as they relate to the A.C.E. Study, you’d be shocked. Or, the stats of addiction, homelessness, or broken homes – you would agree that grief is, and always has been society’s pandemic.

We should all be concerned with grief because it is a social, economic, and health concern.

So, what do we do about this?

1. Acknowledge what we’re feeling to ourselves, so we can tell others the emotional truth.
2. Seek knowledge and tools for processing these feelings in ways that individually resonate.
3. Look at your belief system. What were you taught about these feelings? Did you learn that feeling sad was a bad thing? Or that the only solution to depression is popping a pill? As a child who experienced trauma or loss, did you act out in anger and were applied the label of a “problem child?” We all know if we’re told something enough times, we start to believe it, right?
4. What behaviors are you participating in that are a way to distract yourself from these painful feelings? What behaviors do you want to change to improve your life – emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually?

We all grieve something or someone; therefore, we are all grievers. When we look at each other in this way, we see each other differently. We recognize that, as humans, we do have a lot in common, regardless of the boxes we check on various applications we fill out.

Grief does not discriminate. And, heart to heart, we shouldn’t either.

Thank you for the suggestion, dear reader. At the beginning of this post, I almost wrote on a similar (but different) topic. So, next week come back for the blog post The Mind-Body Connection. I’ll have a personal story to share with you.

Until then, look out with eyes of compassion. We’re all struggling with something.

P.S. I will be receiving training for The Grief Recovery Institute’s new program they’re rolling out online – Helping Children with Loss. It’s a 4-week/session, online GROUP program. I am so excited to get trained and offer this program online. As a grieving child and now a grief specialist, I know the importance of addressing grief in children. This program is PREVENTION. This program is perfect for parents/caretakers of grieving children, Foster programs, School administration, Head Start Programs, Military families, etc. These are a few ways I would love to spread this program. If this is something you feel your children or children in your care need, please get in touch via the Contact tab.

P.P.S. Check out this blog post previously referenced. Scroll down, and you’ll find a FREE Feelings Chart to download – no details required.