Is your Unprocessed Grief Fueling ROCD?

Hi, everyone, welcome to Awaken into Love, this is the place to be if you're looking for wisdom, support, education, compassion, and to meet an incredible community of people all around the world who experience Relationship OCD and Relationship Anxiety. But this place is specifically for you, if you're wanting to transform and alchemize your suffering as a way to awaken deeper into fulfillment, love, contentment and joy within yourself, your life and your relationship. It is your birthright to heal. It is your birthright to grow. And we are here to support you and to help you. 

Now, if you are using this video in any way as a compulsion, you're feeling a sense of urgency and you're like, I want to watch this video just so I feel some relief. I'm going to invite you to pause and possibly do something else instead, because we're not here to make your ROCD worse or make your anxiety worse. We're here to help you. So if you're feeling like you're using this video as a compulsion, do something else instead and watch this video later when you feel more grounded, when you feel like you're not needing an answer in order to have relief. 

So in the next couple of minutes, I am going to be talking just a little bit about myself, where I've been. I know the last video I recorded was almost about two months ago, and there's just been so much change going on. And this change and just everything that's been happening was really a big inspiration for why I felt called to doing this video today. It's also because I've just been seeing collectively, people really going through what I've been going through. And I really feel like collectively we're always going through stuff together, which is such a big representation that we are never, ever alone. 

So within the last two months, I've been really taking care of my dog Kai throughout his transition of leaving this earth. And he passed away about a month or two months ago. And throughout that process, I was going through grief within myself, change within my identity and letting go of just this kind of life beforehand, of taking care of Kai and being this different person. And throughout this introspection, I realized that a lot of other people were also grieving. But not only that, a lot of people were subconsciously grieving, not realizing they were grieving and actually fueling the ROCD and making themselves feel worse, which is a big reason as to why I want to talk about grief today and why I feel that it's so important to speak about grief. And if you're like, OK, I don't want to watch this video. I haven't lost anyone. I haven't really gone through grief. I'm going to invite you to pause because we all go through grief and a lot of situations we don't realize we're grieving or we don't realize we're going through such difficulty and we mistakenly bypass that as something being wrong with us or it meaning that there's something wrong with our relationship. 

So I'm going to talk all about that today and also to talk about ways and how you can identify if you're grieving and really natural and normal transitions that can happen in different parts of ROCD that really are coming up as grief. So I'm super, super excited to be talking to you all about this today. 

So what is grief? I feel like we're doing a disservice in our society if we just think of grief as losing someone or someone having died and experiencing extremely heavy emotions to their death, the truth is that grief happens all the time. And if you think that it hasn't happened to you or that you haven't experienced it, I'm going to try to prove you wrong. And the reason as to why I'm trying to prove you wrong within the idea of grief is because I want you to see how natural grief is and how it can be tied to ROCD and to projections of thinking that there's something wrong with you and your relationship. If you look up grief on the Internet, it immediately says losing someone or someone passing.

The truth is that grief happens all the time. It happens when we are transitioning. It happens when we are moving. It happens when we are going from one identity. And when I say identity, it's a perception of our self to another. 

Grief happens when we have big expectations or even small expectations and they're not met. Grief happens when we are feeling as though we should be feeling a certain way, but we're not. Grief happens when we feel as though we should be excited about being more committed with our partner, about getting engaged, about getting married, about having a baby, about moving. But instead we feel a lot of emotion that can be associated with grief. 

Now, why is grief so important to address? Why is grief so important to talk about with ROCD? Because the core of ROCD is about not feeling or wanting to feel emotions and feelings that are underneath the obsessive thoughts. What does that mean? One context to grief. If we are going through a big transition like we are moving and there's a bit of excitement within us, but there's also feelings of doubt. There's also feelings of sadness. There's also feelings of grief, and we don't address those feelings or we don't feel those feelings or expose ourselves to them, then in a lot of cases we will feel as though our doubt and our feelings are wrong or that there's something wrong with our relationship. This is also so important to address because many of you are going to and have gone through grief within ROCD. This may show up in different ways. And I'm just going to talk about them right now because this may resonate with you. And it's something that I feel I needed when I was going through ROCD. 

First grief that we can go through and we'll most likely go through with ROCD is grief around the expectations of our partner.

In so many cases, we put our partner on a pedestal or we think of them in some way as needing to be a perfect person and not having any flaws and needing to be absolutely perfect in our mind's eye in order for us to feel better. Now in a lot of situations, our clients and our course members are usually pushing away grief because they don't want to feel the sadness and the loss of expectation around believing that their partner was going to be a perfect person or feeling as though they were going to feel a certain way. It's important to acknowledge these feelings and it's important to acknowledge these emotions because they do get pressed down and they do get pushed away. And we start to feel like our sadness must mean that we're in the wrong relationship when instead it just means that we're moving through one part of ourselves and letting go of these expectations that we thought our partner was going to be perfect and move into actually a more mature, wise version of ourselves, knowing that our partner is not going to be perfect and letting go of these expectations that we had around who our partner or who we should be. This also is tied into believing that our partner can meet every single need and every single one within our own life and within our relationship. It's so important to remember that our partner, even though they're incredible, even though they won't meet our big basic needs, they're not going to meet every single need within our relationship. This is just part of being human and being in a relationship. And the other part of this is sometimes they will meet those needs. Sometimes they will meet those wants, but sometimes they won't. And to believe that our  partner can meet our needs all the time can sometimes bring them grief, can bring up sadness because we're wanting for them to do so. But once we start to grieve and feel those emotions, we can start to transition into a more empowered version of ourselves and give ourselves the needs that we feel our partner cannot meet and allow our partner to move in different places where they'll sometimes meet their needs, our needs or they'll sometimes won't. 

Unfortunately, this is tied back down to our society, constantly programing us different modalities, especially around how a relationship should be and a perfect partner should be, and that if we meet the one, that everything would fall into place and a lot of situations, it's important to actually acknowledge that we might feel sad. We might feel angry that we were taught and told these different expectations about how our partner should be in order for us to come into a more awakened state of understanding love and our partner. 

Another big thing that comes up but a little bit more subconsciously because it's hard for people to see, is that a lot of times we will grieve our partner not being like our parents. So that might seem a little bit weird. Someone talk a little bit more about this, and if you're interested in learning more Harville Hendrix talks, amazing work about how we project what we feel we need onto our partner, believing that they could be our parents. When we are young, our parents are supposed to give us our needs and our wants. And in a lot of cases our parents aren't able to give us those needs. So in our life, we're constantly looking for that person to replace our parents, for that person to be the savior, for the person to give everything that we needed when we were young. In a lot of situations, people start to introspect and look at their trauma and their childhood of what they've gone through when they're going through the journey of ROCD. And for some people, they realize that they've been putting the expectation of wanting their partner to be like that parent, to be that parent that has fulfilled all their needs.

 I'm going to talk a little bit on a personal example, but my dad passed about over ten years ago, and I remember going through that phase of ROCD and constantly feeling like I wanted Joel to be like my dad. I wanted him to replace my dad one, because I didn't get a specific childhood that I wanted from my father, but two because my father had passed. So sometimes we can put these unconscious wants onto our partner. And it's important sometimes to just grieve the fact that our partner isn't going to be our parents. And this goes back into our  partner not being able to be perfect because they're human. But once we come into this acceptance and understanding of this, once we grieve this, once we come into the understanding whether it's anger that comes through or sadness that comes through or things feel unfair, then we can then start to reparent ourselves  and come into a more empowered version of ourselves and start to take care of what needs attention within. 

So going alongside of that, if we have experienced loss and abandonment when we were younger, if there had been a traumatic event where we really lost someone, that we can start to unconsciously project the fear of loss onto our partner. I did this very, very commonly and sometimes still do with Joel because the passing of my dad was so traumatic and so quick. There's still an unconscious part within me that is constantly afraid of losing Joel to death. This is because this mirrors what happened to me when I was younger with my dad. And some cases when we've gone through a feeling of deep loss and abandonment, we might start to project that fear onto our partner, which again comes back into the grief of feeling a sadness of what had happened before and how we start to project the fear of losing our partner onto what had happened. The thing is that the fear of losing my partner and the grief over my dad back in the day was not really felt. I wasn't really acknowledging it. And so instead it started to turn into obsessive thinking, the fear of losing my partner or me actually being abandoned or me pulling away or feeling engulfed, and the lack of being able to feel that and acknowledge that had started to really turn into the fear of losing my partner, which ties back into the grief of my father. So tying that back into how death and loss can actually create obsessive thinking. If you think about it, we've gone through something traumatic and we haven't acknowledged that situation with those feelings or we've just gone through that. It can be such a traumatic experience that can start to turn into obsessive thinking if we're not acknowledging the fear and the sadness underneath. 

So it's true that grief is complex and it can come with an array of many different emotions. And that's such an important part to also bring up as well. It doesn't have to look like sadness and it doesn't have to look like anger or the typical forms of what grief should look like. But the sadness, the loneliness, the feelings of anger for a lot of people with ROCD can feel unacceptable, especially when we don't feel safe in our emotions. So what can happen is that an individual who feels as though these emotions are unacceptable can then start to go into obsessive thinking, feeling as though there's something wrong with them. But what's so important to remember is that we can grieve and we will grieve in so many different times within our life, especially if we are highly sensitive. Again, there's nothing wrong with grief. And in actuality, we'll talk a little bit about this later in order for us to come into more empowered, awakened versions of ourselves; it is important to let go and to grieve parts within yourself and expectations and beliefs in order for us to transform.

A really big one that I've been talking about, which is so evident for everyone, is transitional grief.

Now, transitional grief is when we're moving from one part of our life to another. When we're letting go of an old piece of ourselves and moving into a new piece of ourselves when we let go of expectations and we come into new expectations or new ideas or new beliefs. This is especially evident if it's an external transition. A lot of people don't realize that the external transitions can be hard. I'm going through one soon where I'm actually moving from Colorado back to Pennsylvania to be with my mom for a little bit. And then Joel and I are traveling together. And I've noticed throughout this time that even though this is something exciting and even though there's so much excitement to come with this, there is grief within, there is sadness, there is questioning. If  I'm making the right decision and doubting, it's so important for us to bring in this expectation and understanding that doubting doesn't mean that we're doing something wrong. Feeling sadness and grief over a situation doesn't mean that we're doing something wrong. So transitional grief can really look like I talked about in the beginning, becoming more committed within our relationship, going from singlehood to not letting go of being single, going from being in a relationship to engage, going from engaged to be married, having a baby, moving, changing different jobs, letting go of friends, having new friends, traveling and feeling grief of home. 

So grief can look like so many different things. And so you'll notice that it's really when we sometimes go from one thing to another and sometimes grief won't come up, but sometimes it will. And recognizing that feeling grief, experiencing grief doesn't mean we're doing anything wrong or that there's something wrong with us or our relationship. Difficult thing about transitional grief is that society puts this notion on us that says, OK, well, if we're getting engaged or if we're getting married, if we're having a baby or if we're moving, we should always be excited. And if we're not, then that means that there's something wrong with us. It comes back to this notion constantly that society says we need to constantly be happy, we need to be a certain way when every experience is so unique and different. In one situation, when you're moving, you might not be experiencing much grief, but you might have more grief if you're getting engaged. So everyone is so different. 

Now, what I want to tie it back into is just because it's supposed to be a happy memory or a happy event, it doesn't mean you won't experience feelings that feel opposite from happiness. And it doesn't mean that you're doing anything wrong. This is a really important thing, especially for people who experience or who are highly sensitive because you're going to feel a lot. But being highly sensitive doesn't mean that you're not strong. It just means that you might be more in touch with events in your life and uncertainty might feel a little bit more threatening to you, which is why you seek control. So it's just important to acknowledge the feelings coming up and know that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. 

So another part I want to talk about is around grief with identities.

Now, I know that sometimes the word identity can be a little bit of a trigger for some people. So I'll say grief in terms of beliefs or who we thought we were or expectations. Now, grief in identities is really from going from one person to another. So in different times in my life, when I even changed things politically within my life or had different beliefs, I really held on to this belief that I was this identity. I was this political stance. I was this stance. And when I started to question these stances, I started to actually grieve who I used to be because it was so tied to different expectations that my parents had on me, or I thought that I would get specific love if I had the specific identity. So sometimes we're going from not having ROCD, having ROCD or having ROCD to not. Sometimes we can actually go through an attachment of our identity. And so grief can come within that too. Again, grief doesn't have to look like sadness or anger or loneliness or extreme emotions. It can also look like confusion as we're going through different transitions and letting go of one thing to the next. 

Another part that shows up with ROCD is grief of "time being wasted".

And I want to say, quote unquote, because it's not actually wasted, but for a lot of people ROCD can feel like they're wasting time. They feel like they're not living their life fully, or they might be grieving different things from their childhood where they feel like they didn't have a specific childhood or they just might be really, really sad and upset about the fact they are going through ROCD. And this is so, so, so OK and so expected. Right. We're grieving a part of ourselves that wishes that we didn't have ROCD. You're grieving a part of yourself, the wishes that you could have more connection, fulfillment with your partner and specific moments. So sometimes you will grieve a wasted time and think that it's a mistake if you're feeling that grief or you're longing for that, it's just an expectation and something so expected to go through when we're going through such difficulties, such as ROCD.

So another one that a lot of people don't talk about is grieving over an ex.

So in society, we see so many articles and so many things around grieving an ex. And if that means that we're missing an ex or longing for an ex, that means that we should have been with them. Well, what about this? What about the fact that our ex or people in our lives were really significant to us during those times in our life? What if the people that we cared about, no matter if they weren't necessarily good for us or they were in some way dysfunctional or hurting us? What if it was OK to also grieve for them? What if it's OK to grieve the life that you had? What if it's sometimes necessary to actually grieve the life that you may have had with the person? I sometimes think about my old friends or just different people in my life who now to this day I know would not be good for me. But sometimes I miss different memories with them. Sometimes I feel a sense of sadness that we've grown apart. And so when we equate sadness to meaning as though we're doing something wrong or that we need to go back into a specific person, we're missing the human component. That grief, letting go, feeling different emotions doesn't necessarily equate to anything specific, but just that you're a human being, letting go and moving into a new stage of your life. 

The last one that I want to go into is grieving over wants in your specific relationship.

And those wants this kind of goes back into kind of like these expectations, but also around different type of feelings that you might be feeling like you might feel within your relationship that you want to have like a better sex life. Or you might feel within your relationship that you want to be having sex with someone else or a different type of things that can come up and do come up, especially in monogamous relationships. Sometimes it is important to grieve those, and sometimes you can feel like you want to be with your partner, but also feel attracted to other people. Sometimes you can feel as though you miss your singlehood and just want to go out and do whatever and not be in a committed relationship. One thing doesn't have to equal another, and the reason as to why this one is so hard for so many people with ROCD and anxiety is because it's so gray. 

People with ROCD and anxiety tend to want to have things one way or the other because it brings a sense of certainty and a feeling of control. When in fact so much of relationship work is so gray and it lies in the gray. And sometimes things aren't so black or white. Sometimes it's actually pushing you to become more comfortable with being in the gray. And being in uncertainty and not needing to grasp so hard into believing that you were a certain way or your relationship is a certain way, and allowing truly the beauty and the magnificence and the complexity of relationships to unfold in the greater scheme that is beyond a sense of control and certainty. 

So how can you start working with grief?

The biggest way to start working with grief is first and foremost, just acknowledging that grief is going to show up in your life. And it's part of being human. It's so important for us and for us at Awaken into Love to really constantly show you what it means to be human, to come back into this innateness within ourselves, that truly there's nothing wrong with us at the core of who we are. It's just that so much of our life we've been told that we need to be a certain way to feel guilt, to feel shame for what we're experiencing. And we constantly have society kind of mirroring the shame effect of guilt. But with Awaken into Love, we really strive on and teach empowerment within yourself to become more empowered, to become more in love with yourself and to feel more connected and in love with your partner.

And so the biggest way to start to work on grief is to know that this is just being human. You might experience grief at different times in your life, but grief doesn't have to have a hold on you because in reality, grief is part of life. Were born, reborn. We die, come back. There's so many stages to life. And if we could understand the natural cycle of how life works, that it has its ups and downs, that sometimes we feel as though we're dying. But then we emerge again and we feel as though we're dying and then we emerge again. If we can understand this and we can appreciate it for what it is that we're transforming in these different seasons, but that our feelings want to be acknowledged and that there's nothing wrong with us and there's nothing wrong with who we are, then we can give space for deeper transformation and empowerment within ourselves. 

And this comes back to understanding that grief is part of life, that if you're going through grief over expectations, grief over your partner not being perfect, grief over your parents, not having been able to fulfill your needs and your wants, grief over an ex, grief over transitions. If you are going through this, I know that you are just human, and the more we acknowledge this natural part of being human and life, the more we can transform into awakened versions of ourselves and have more fulfillment within our life and our partnership. So the biggest piece with grief within all of this, it doesn't need to be like this five step of, OK, acknowledge grief in the second you're going to do this. And third, you can do this. The fourth you to do this because we don't need to be doing that. Sometimes it's just understanding that life is going to have its ups and downs and sometimes we're going to experience different emotions when we feel as though we should be happy or we feel as though we should be a certain way, when in fact it's the natural process of just being human. So that is really, truly the biggest way that we can play around and work with grief. It's to acknowledge what's there.

The second thing I want to go over with grief is that difficult emotions can arise with that. Sometimes we might feel lonely, sometimes we might feel sad. Sometimes we might be feeling just a sense of anger for the grief that we are experiencing. And what do these emotions want deep down in its core? It wants love, it wants acceptance, it wants radical compassion. And to be felt from you. Now being felt doesn't mean we're just engulfing ourselves in that, but being felt as part of the exposure work with ROCD and actually part of just being human and being able to alchemize and transform different emotions for us to feel more grounded within ourselves. But truly, at the core of it, our emotions want to be seen. They want to be felt. I'm going to give a personal example. So a couple of days ago, I started to kind of feel irritated and I started to kind of feel uneasy. This happened about five days ago. I remember lying in bed and I just kind of started to feel really overwhelmed within my life. And I started to kind of feel a little bit anxious and go into different scenarios like what if scenarios about my future in regards to moving and all this uncertainty that's coming up, because there's so much uncertainty here right now in my life. And I started to kind of tap in and I was talking to Joel and recognizing, wow, there's a lot of grief around these feelings of being overwhelmed. There's a lot of grief. There's a lot of sadness around moving from Colorado and going to a new state and a new place and not knowing what that's going to look like and not knowing who I'm going to be and letting go of this life that I built in Colorado in the last six years and my friends and all of this type of stuff. And so underneath the overwhelm, underneath anxiety, where emotions were sadness was grief was a feeling of doubt. This can be very, very well translated to having ROCD. When we're in our relationship, when things feel difficult and we're feeling down and we're feeling overwhelmed. We don't have to decide that those feelings mean something or mean that there's something wrong with our relationship or ourselves. We can start to acknowledge that it feels complex. It is complex to go through different transitions. It is complex to go through ROCD. It is complex to be human and to acknowledge that anything that we're feeling is just part of the human experience. Once we start to acknowledge that and once we start to bring understanding to that, then things start to settle, then the water doesn't become so muddy. Then we can see a little bit clearly when we start to feel a little bit more safe within our emotions, which for many people can take time, especially if there's trauma there and we can start to feel more embodied within ourselves and our partnership. 

So for me, I don't want to give you a checklist of what to do with grief X, Y and Z, one, two, three. Because I know for a lot of people with ROCD, you can go into perfectionism with the goal of trying to relieve and remove yourself from grief. 

Here's the truth: grief is going to come in and out of your life, but at the end of the day, it's not there to punish you. It's just part of being human. And take away this for an awakened, empowered idea, in order for you to actually feel the feelings of love, contentment, happiness and joy and feel empowered within your life: it is important for us to go through the darkness and the difficulty and the suffering in order for you to transform. 

Alright, everyone. So that was today's video, all on grief and how grief can show up with ROCD. I hope that this video was helpful for you. And I apologize that I've been gone the last two months. So much has just been happening within my personal life. But if you're wanting a lot of information and you're wanting more help, we post on Instagram all the time, post a couple of times a week, we post on our stories. So please follow us at @withawakenintolove on Instagram because we're posting a bunch of stuff on there and it's been super exciting. If you're new, welcome! You can go to www.awakenintolove.com and download the Free ROCD Checklist at www.awakenintolove.com and if you're ready to start the first dive into finding more freedom from ROCD and anxiety, then you can go back to www.awakenintolove.com, go to courses and click the ROCD Course in community where you'll find people from all over the world just like you who are experiencing ROCD and who are taking the step to do the work within the course to find more freedom and to understand more of what's going on to be able to empower themselves and their relationship.

I love all of you so much and there's so much uncertainty that's coming within the next couple of months. I'm using my tools and I'm breathing into the uncertainty and allowing it to make me feel alive and to help me awaken in the greatest form. I feel as though stepping into this uncertainty is really life testing me to feel more grounded within uncertainty. Here's to being human, everyone.