Who Am I Now? Grief, Identity Loss, and Nervous System Healing After Suicide Loss

Elisha's Space: You are sitting somewhere ordinary. Maybe the grocery store, maybe the school pickup line, maybe your own kitchen, a place that used to feel like yours. And a stranger speaks to you, uses your name, and for just a second it doesn't register. Who were they talking to? And then you realize That person is talking to you. Except you don't quite know who that is ⁓ anymore. ⁓ If you have someone love to suicide, a parent, a child, a spouse, a best friend, nobody prepared you for this part. The grief support circles talk about the waves of sadness. They talk about the empty chair. They talk about finding your own person's handwriting on a grocery list and having to sit down on the kitchen floor. And all of that is true and all of that is real. But almost nobody talks about what happens to you, to your sense of who you are, to the quiet architecture of identity that was. Brick by brick, without you even realizing, built around this person who is now gone. That is what we're going to discuss today. Welcome to Elisha Space, a sanctuary for healing growth and for the kind of honest conversations that actually change things. I'm Elisha, your host, a counselor, an author, and someone who has sat in the same stuck place as you have. If you've been listening for a while, I see you, and I am so glad that you're back. And if you're new here, Welcome home. Today's episode is practical clinical buttoral. And it's for a very specific listener, the one who has lost someone to suicide and is discovering weeks or months, years later, that the grief has taken ⁓ they didn't expect. Not just the person, themselves. Before we go any further, If you are in crisis right now, I want you to reach out before you do anything else. In the United States, you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, your life matters. And so does your healing. Come back to this episode when you're safe. For everyone still here, stay with me. Let's do it. Here's what I have observed in years of sitting with survivors of suicide loss, the grief itself. As devastating as it is, is something most people expect to carry. They know it will be hard. They know there will be impossible days, unexpected triggers, anniversaries that arrive like physical weight. What they do not expect is the identity fracture. Specifically the experience of waking up one morning. months, sometimes years into their bereavement and realizing that they do not know who they are anymore, not just who they are without this person, but who they actually are. about what I'm describing for a moment. Maybe you are ⁓ a wife, mother, a son, ⁓ a best a caregiver. ⁓ Some part your identity was built quietly In relationship to this person who is now gone, and when they died, in the particular complicated way that suicide loss happens. Something in your sense of self cracked. But here is the layer that makes suicide bereavement different, distinctly different from other grief. It is not only the loss of the person. It is the shame that arrives with it. The questions that live in your body, often in silence, because you are not sure if it is safe to ask them out loud. Did I miss something? Was there something I could have done? Why didn't they tell me? And This is the one I want to stay with today. Am I allowed to still be me? Am I allowed to rebuild? Am I allowed to someday be okay? Or does being okay mean I didn't love them enough? Those are not only emotional questions, they are neurological ones. And today I want to show you what I mean by that. Before we go further, I need to say something. Nothing is wrong with you. The disorientation you feel, the way you move through your life, like you are watching someone else do it, the way you look in the mirror and see a face you don't quite recognize, that is not a sign that you are broken. It is not a sign that your grief is too much or that you are somehow failing at it. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It is trying to protect you from an experience that your mind and body assessed as catastrophic. And in the process, in the shutting down, the hypervigilance, the numbness, the fog. It has temporarily disconnected you from the part of your brain that holds your sense of continuous self. Knowledge isn't just power for trauma survivors, knowledge is safety. So let's build some safety today. Here is what I'm going to walk you through in this episode. First, I want to explain what Actually happens in the brain and body when grief is complicated by shame, what the neuroscience tells us about why identity fractures the way it does and suicide bereavement specifically. Second, I want to give you a framework, a set of clinical and somatic anchors, tools I use in the counseling room, and that you can begin using today. To start the process of reauthoring your identity without betraying your grief. Third, I want to offer a theological reframe because if you have a faith, and especially if this loss has shaken it, I want to speak to that directly, not with platitudes, with the actual neuroscience of what faith can do in the healing process. We will close with a somatic practice and a prayer. This is not a quick fix. There is no quick fix for this kind of loss, but there is a path forward. And today we are going to walk the first few steps of it together. A little context for those of you who are new. I am a licensed counselor. I have worked alongside individuals navigating trauma, grief, anxiety, depression, and faith deconstruction. specifically including survivors of suicide loss not only in the acute phase but in the long arc that comes after I am also the founder of restoring you Christian counseling and I am an author and I want to say this I am not speaking to you from outside the experience of grief. I have carried my own losses I have sat in some of the same stuck places you are sitting in right now when I tell you there is a pathway through I am not saying it from a textbook I am saying it from the other side of the work. If you want to go deeper in clinical setting you can find more information working with me at restoring you Christian Counseling dot com and for resources you can go to elishaspace dot on podium dot com. I'll put those links in the show notes. Okay, let's go. Let's start with the clinical frame. Bereavement is a universal human experience, but not all grief is equal. There is a category that researchers and clinicians call prolonged grief disorder, formerly known as complicated grief, and suicide bereavement is one of the lost experiences most strongly associated with it. What makes it complicated? It is the convergence of factors that are almost always unique to this kind of loss. There is the traumatic nature of the death itself. Often sudden, sometimes violent, almost always unexpected. There is the absence of a goodbye, the lack of a clear narrative, the unanswerable questions, the way the death can feel to those left behind, like a communication. Even when it was not intended that way and layered on all of that, there is shame. I want to speak specifically about shame because I think we chronically underestimate what it does to the body. Shame is not guilt. I want to draw that distinction carefully because it matters clinically. Guilt says I did something wrong. Shame says I am something wrong. When we experience shame, particularly chronic shame, the kind that lives in the body long after. The event that triggered it, the nervous system responds in a very specific way, the vagus nerve. Vagus literally means wandering in Latin, and it wanders from your brainstem all the way down through your heart, your lungs, your gut. The vagus nerve drops into what researchers call the dorsal vagal state, a freeze, a collapse, a shutdown. Are you familiar with that feeling? That place where grief becomes something heavier than sadness, something more than deadness, like you are moving through water, like you have disappeared inside yourself, that is the dorsal vagal freeze response. And in suicide bereavement, shame is often the thing that keeps the nervous system locked there. Because every time you begin to move towards healing, Every time you feel something like okay, shame interrupts. You have no right to feel that way. People are watching. They think it's your fault. And somewhere, maybe you do too. And the nervous system hears that as a threat signal and it drops back into freeze. The cycle, shame, freeze, Identity fragmentation, more shame, is what distinguishes the long arc of suicide bereavement from other grief. It is not a sign of weakness, it is a predictable neurological pattern, and understanding it is the first step to interrupting it. Here is the neuroscience of the identity piece specifically. There is a network in the brain called the default mode network. It activates when you are not focused on a task, when you are reflecting on yourself, thinking about other people, imagining the future. It is essentially the brain's self-referential processing center. It is how you hold a sense of continuous, coherent self across time. Under chronic stress and trauma, the default mode network's connectivity is disrupted, it fragments. And one of the subjective experiences of that fragmentation is exactly what I described in the cold open of this episode. The feeling of looking at yourself and not recognizing what you see. Disassociation, depersonalization, a kind of existential flatness where you move through your life but feel like you are watching someone else do it. When grief is layered with shame. When the nervous system is in prolonged freeze. The default mode network stays fragmented. It cannot reassemble a coherent narrative of who you are when it is operating in survival mode. This is not weakness. This is not faithlessness. This is not a character flaw. This isn't visualization. This is physiology. Your brain is doing what brains do under sustained threat. And the path forward is not to think your way to a new identity. It is first to make the nervous system safe enough to let the brain reassemble one. Stay with me because this is where it starts to get hopeful. The clinical picture is real, but it is not permanent. Up next, three clinical anchors for actually beginning this work. And let's talk about the work. Not the work of grief management. You are already doing that just by staying present to it. I mean the specific work of identity recovery. What it looks like practically and clinically to reauthor a self after suicide bereavement, not to go back to who you were before. Because that person in some ways is gone too, but to move with this loss as part of your story rather than being frozen at the point where it entered. Three anchors, here we go. The first and most critical piece of clinical work and suicide bereavement is this. You must learn to distinguish the grief from the shame, Because they have been living together in your nervous system as though they are the same thing. They are not. Grief is love with nowhere to go. That is not shameful. That is human. Shame is a secondary layer. Absorbed from cultural stigma, from family systems, from faith communities that did not know how to hold this kind of loss, from an internal narrative that takes this shouldn't have happened and twists it into This happened because of me. A question I invite clients into, and I want to invite you into now is this. What story am I telling myself about what this death says about me? Not what it says about your loved one, not about their pain. About you, about who you are, about whether you are allowed to be okay. Write that story down. Get it out of your nervous system and onto a page. Shame lives in the dark and in the unnamed. When you bring it into language, into light, into the presence of a safe person, it begins to lose its neurological grip. Let your nervous system hear that you are not running from it. When identity fractures after suicide loss, it fractures because a central relational anchor been removed. You were her daughter, you were his wife, ⁓ were her friend, and now that anchor is gone, ⁓ and identity that quietly itself around it is floating. ⁓ Identity recovery not mean replacing that anchor, it means widening the foundation In somatic and narrative therapy, we call this identity re-anchoring. Going, looking for the parts of the self that existed before the relationship alongside it and in parallel to it, the things that are still true about you, the values that still hold, the experiences that are still yours. This is not about moving on, it is about moving with. Carrying this loss as part of your story, not the end of it. A practice each morning write one sentence, just one, that is true about you that is not defined by the laws, not despite it, not before it, just true about you now today. It may feel small, it may feel almost dishonest at first, like building a structure while everything is still in rubble. That is okay. You are not trying to convince yourself of something false. you are giving your default mode network raw material to begin rebuilding its connective tissue. And now on to the third anchor. Regulate before you reauthor. And this is the most somatic of the three. You cannot think your way to a new identity when your nervous system is in shutdown. You cannot access the default network self-construction function when the dorsal vagal break is engaged. Before the narrative work, before the writing exercises, before the Theological reflection, the body needs to feel safe enough to begin. Regulation is not a luxury in this process. It is the prerequisite for it. When we engage the vagus nerve through slow extended exhale breathing, through bilateral stimulation, through the hands-on chest prosture, we are sending a direct bottom-up signal to the brainstem. The threat has passed. You are here, you are safe. And from that place, from ventral vagal safety, the default mode network can begin to do its work. We are going to do this practice together in just a few minutes. But first, one more thing I need to say. I want to speak something I hear often from survivors of suicide loss. The timeline of your is not a measurement of how much you loved. Our culture and sometimes our faith communities communicate explicitly or sadly that the length and intensity of grief is proof of love, that healing more quickly ⁓ means caring less. ⁓ Rebuilding your identity means betraying the one you lost. That is not clinically true and it is not theologically true. Grief is not a monument you erect to prove love. Grief is a natural process and healing. The reemergence of self who can inhabit their life again is not a betrayal. It is in the deepest sense a completion. The person you love did not want your life to stop even in their darkest moment. Their pain was about themselves. It was not a verdict of your worth, your love or your right to heal. Receive that, even if you can only hold it loosely today. Let's do the practice. If you are driving or operating machinery right now, please just listen. Do not close your eyes. You can return to this practice as many times as you need when you're able to be still. For everyone else, find a comfortable position if you can, seated or lying down. Uncross your arms and your legs. Let your back be supported. Bring both hands to your chest, right over your heart. One hand on top of the other. Feel the weight of your own hands. Feel the warmth of your own palms against your sternum. This is not symbolic. This is the hands-on-chest posture that activates the cardiac branch of the nevagus nerve. The warmth and the gentle pressure send a bottom-up signal through the nervous system to the brainstem. You are held. You are here. You are safe. Let's breathe. Inhale slowly through your nose. Four counts. Hold gently, one count. And exhale slowly through your mouth. Six full counts longer than the inhale. This is intentional. The extended exhale activates the parasympathetic branch, the rest response. Again, inhale four. Hold Exhale six. One more time, inhale four, hold, exhale six. Good. Let your breath return to its natural rhythm. Keep your hands on your chest if that still feels right Without judgment, just as an observer, I want you to notice is there tension anywhere in your body right now? Tightness in your chest, your jaw, your throat, your gut. You don't need to fix it. You don't need to understand it. You are simply letting your nervous system know you see it. That you are not running from what it lives in your body. Let your nervous system hear that you are not running from it. Now, I want you to bring one word to mind, just one, something that is still true about you. Not a role, not a relationship, a quality, a value, a way of being. Maybe it's faithful. Maybe it's tender. Maybe it's searching. Maybe it's simply present. I am still here. Hold that word gently with the same care you'd hold something fragile and irreplaceable. The word is part of your foundation. It is something that loss did not take. Whenever you're ready, bring your awareness back to the room you're in. Feel the surface beneath you. Take one more full breath. You did good work just now. And I want to speak to your faith now. I want to speak to it carefully because I know that suicide loss shakes faith in ways that can feel unspeakable. There can be theological questions. Where is my loved one now? There can be anger at God. There can be the silence of a faith community that didn't know what to do or said the wrong things. There can be shame that doubles when it gets layered with the belief that this loss somehow reflects spiritual failure. I want to say something directly. Your grief is not shameful, it is holy. The psalmist cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That is the language of a person whose world has been broken apart entirely and it is in scripture. It is honored. It is kept. It was not edited out because it was too dark. your questions do not disqualify you from God. Your answer does not frighten him. Your shattered identity is not hidden from the one who knit together the very nervous systems we are learning to regulate. His peace is not dependent on your circumstances being resolved. It is a regulated nervous system in the presence of a safe God. Let me pray with you. Father, I am grateful you made these bodies that you knit together the very nervous systems that we are learning to regulate, that you did not design us for shutdown and freeze and chronic shame, even though you knew we would walk through losses that would bring us here. I come before you on behalf of everyone listening today who is carrying grief they cannot name, who is standing in a life that used to feel like theirs and wondering who they are now, who has asked the hard questions in the dark, and they heard only silence and stayed away. Be the safe God, be the God who holds the psalmist lament and our own in the same hands. Let your presence be what regulates what nothing else can reach. For the ones who are still in the acute waves, the ones from whom the loss is recent and the body is still in shock. Hold them. For the ones who are years into this grief and carry quiet shame that it is still this heavy, tell them, tell them that it is not too heavy for you. For the ones who are reaching tentatively for a new sense of self, who are afraid that moving forward means moving away. Bless that reaching. It is not betrayal, it is resurrection. You are the God who makes things new, not by erasing what was, but by weaving it into something that can be lived inside of. Be near today in the ordinary places, in the grocery store, in the kitchen, in the mirror. Be recognizable there. Amen. Before I give you your challenge for this week, I want to say something about what you are doing. The act of staying present to grief this complex, of looking at shame directly rather than turning away from it, of remaining curious about who you are becoming rather than collapsing under the question. That is not ordinary. That is extraordinary courage. And it tends to go unrecognized because it doesn't look dramatic from the outside. It looks like putting your hands on your chest and breathing. It looks like writing one sentence in the morning. It looks like showing up to one more day when everything in you wanted to stay in bed. That is the work and it is holy. Here is your challenge. Three practices seven days. One, every morning, before you even look at your phone, before you check anything outside yourself. Hands on your chest, three rounds of four count inhale and six count exhale. That is 90 seconds. 90 seconds offered to your nervous system before the day begins. Two. After the breathing, write one sentence, just one. Something true about you today. It does not have to feel hopeless. It does not have to feel triumphant. I am still here. I am still tender. I am still asking the questions. Any sentence counts, you are giving your default mode network something to hold. Three, when shame shows up this week, and it may, name it out loud, just to yourself. That is shame. That is not truth. You are not arguing with it, you are not trying to defeat it. You are naming it because shame lives in the unnamed. And when you name it, you take back a small piece of your own ground. Seven days, three practices. A few things before I let you go. If this episode has helped you, if it names something that has been living unnamed in your body, share it. Text it to one person you know is carrying this kind of grief. Not everyone will find this on their own, but you can put it in their hands. You can find resources, show notes, and information about working with me directly at elisha space dot on podium dot com and www.restoring you Christian Counseling dot com. If you are ready to do this work in a clinical space, I would be honored to walk alongside you through Restoring You Christian Counseling. And again, if you are in crisis, please reach out, call or text 988. You do not have to be alone in this. Until next time, you are not too much, you are not too far, and you are not alone.