Grief’s Impact On The Body

Have you noticed an increase in the number of clients dealing with grief? Lately, I have been noticing that more and more people are experiencing loss, not just loss of one person, but the loss of multiple people over a short period of time. Today, I talk about grief’s impact on the body and what we can do to help our clients address dysfunction by honoring their grief.

Dealing With Grief

Grief is a challenging emotion for us to “deal” with because of the intensity and power of it. We haven’t learned how to properly grieve, and we often feel like we have to wait until the time is right to grieve (i.e. when we’re alone, when the kids are asleep, when we have made sure everyone else is okay).

Many of us also don’t know what to do with the big emotions like grief. The majority of people stuff them down or compartmentalize them, and much of the time that stuffing goes somewhere into the body only to show up later.

The truth is there isn’t a right or wrong way to grieve – it is a natural emotion and a part of life that allows us an opportunity to process and honor what has been lost. It is not something to get over by a certain time as grief has no end point. There’s not a finish line that you cross to be complete with your grief, so you never have to deal with it anymore. It can surface at any point in the future no matter how long it has been.

Denying Grief Bursts

After grieving from the loss of my mom, I was surprised at the sudden intensity of my resurfacing grief and how it would just bubble up out of nowhere. When I heard the term grief burst, like a storm burst, I felt that described the experience so appropriately. A grief burst can come up out of seemingly nowhere, anytime, anyplace with zero warning.

When out in our society, it’s rarely embraced when you suddenly burst into tears. The sense is you need to shut it down, stop crying and make everyone around you feel comfortable by denying your true feelings and emotions. When doing this, you are storing your grief inside your body and this can cause heaviness in your body and block your energy flow. Over time the body can’t compensate as easily, and dysfunction often ensues.

Grief’s Impact on the Body

Grief can affect us in so many different ways. From our reaction to grief to our ability to try and deny it. Below is a case study about one of my clients who was presenting with rib pain; however, as we worked to address the pain we discovered that grief was at the root cause of this pain.

Client History

I had a client that came to see me who was experiencing rib pain. She had gone to a chiropractor to get adjusted and that made her pain worse. (Whenever adjustments or any bodywork creates more pain, my immediate thought is it’s not structural and something deeper is going on. The deeper issue may be connected to the organs, blood vessels or nerves or there is trauma or something emotional/energetic being held in the tissues.)

Assessment and Findings

This client had worked with me many times in the past and we had done work with some of the deeper issues in the tissues. She was anxious to get in to see me to see what was really going on with this rib pain. When I listened to her body, her right medial aspect of her shoulder was lifting up towards the upper traps, while the rest of the right shoulder and the sides of her lungs were pulling down. It felt like some of the lobes of lungs were stuck together and she had experienced Covid prior to seeing me.

In our initial session addressing the ribs, we got more mobility in her lungs and shoulders. Even though there was more mobility in her right side, she was still noticing burning in her lungs when she came in for the second session. As we acknowledged the pain and did some deeper work together, the client expressed that she felt like the chest pain was linked to her heart and the loss of her Dad to a sudden heart attack when she was 24. She was concerned about her own heart.

In this second session, I didn’t notice any pulling in her shoulders or neck. The only local listening I found was her liver pulling out laterally and yet it felt connected to heart. As I encouraged her to connect into her heart space, she started talking about being hypervigilant around her kids. She said she was always conscious to leave their conversations on a good note to avoid the sudden loss that she experienced with her dad. She didn’t realize her hypervigilance wasn’t typical.

Letting Grief Guide the Work

The client had already done a lot of work over the years around her dad’s death, both with me and with other therapists. However, what was still present in her heart space during this session, was a limiting belief from her 24 year-old self. Her belief was that “If she fully admits and agrees that her dad died then she’ll lose all connection to him.”

After identifying this limiting belief, the client realized she could not fully embrace the experiences of him in her dreams and her present moments when she sensed him around her because she was unable to fully accept that he had died. As she said the limiting belief, she felt the silliness of it and it shifted to “accepting dad’s death allows greater connection to dad’s spirit.” After this belief shifted, she felt instantly lighter and described it as feeling like she had an exorcism of him from her body. She felt freer in her body and her chest felt lighter. She reported feeling completely different after the session.

Addressing the Whole – Mind, Body and Spirit

I have found that over the many years of working with clients in a holistic capacity, that fear of loss can prevent the mind, body and spirit from thriving. The fear of completely accepting the loss of a loved one can impact a person’s ability to connect with that loved one in other, likely more meaningful, ways. Unprocessed grief sits in the body like a heavy stone and the energy of your body has to move around it if it can. Our attachment to those who have passed, can limit our potential for any other experiences with them in another form or way and can also diminish our own openness to experience life fully.

The processing of grief is individual and different for everyone. How it impacts us and our body will depend on our ability to be with grief, allow its presence and to feel it freely and fully. Grief is just like any other emotion, although more intense than most, it still needs to be felt fully and allowed to move through us no matter when it comes up.

As practitioners, we can support our clients by helping create a safe space and by learning how to effectively dialogue to help shift limiting beliefs that may be creating a stuck-ness in the body. We can help them acknowledge and accept their grief, so it can move through and be the opportunity for love, honoring and healing that it is intended to be.

To learn the skills that can help you dive deeper with your clients such as dialoguing, working with trauma and shifting limiting beliefs, check out the Birth Healing Intensive. This powerful 9-month coaching program is the secret to deep, transformative healing for your clients — and yourself. Registration is now open for 2025!

About the Author: Lynn Schulte is a Pelvic Health Therapist and the founder of the Institute for Birth Healing, a pelvic health continuing education organization that specializes in prenatal and postpartum care. For more information, go to https://instituteforbirthhealing.com