Why You Feel Guilty for Wanting More After Loss

Everything got done today. Work. Dinner. The dishwasher’s running. You’re functioning.

You hit the bed exhausted, and that quiet question arises: “Is this all there is to this life?” You feel the pull toward a different life. You can’t name what it is yet. You just know the life you’re living doesn’t fit the way it used to. Maybe it never did.

And right behind it comes the voice. “I have a good life. Things aren’t terrible. Don’t rock the boat.”

So you fold the wanting back up and put it away. Again.

I know that voice really well. Four months after my daughter Adeline was stillborn, and just weeks after my dad died, I had this overwhelming urge to make a vision board. I’d never created one before. I hung that thing at the foot of my bed and looked at it every night.

And then the voice in my head starts talking:

• What kind of mother dreams about a future after losing her daughter?

• If I build a life I love, am I leaving her behind?

• I have a husband, a home, and people who love me. Why isn’t that enough?

That board hung there for a year before I did anything with it. If you feel that same guilt, here’s what I wish someone had told me sooner.

Wanting more after loss doesn’t make you ungrateful

When I say more, I don’t mean more stuff. I mean wanting to change how you live. How you spend your days. Who you surround yourself with. How you take care of yourself. How you contribute to this world while you’re here.

After we lost my daughter, our therapist recommended not making any big changes for the first year, so I didn’t. I was in deep grief, grateful for what I had, but I could also feel that something big had shifted, and I knew I wanted something different for my life.

Maybe you can feel that too.

A restlessness you can’t explain.

A tightness in your chest when you think about living the next 10 years exactly like the last 10.

“Be grateful for what you have” is something I heard over and over as a kid. It sounds right, but I believe it’s missing a second part. The other half is and listen to what you want. Without that half, gratitude turns into playing small.

Gratitude and longing are not opposites. You can love the people in your life, miss the ones who are gone, appreciate the stability you have, and still feel a pull toward something different.

Where the guilt comes from

The guilty feeling usually isn’t your fault. It comes from 2 places you picked up along the way.

Comparison

Someone always has it worse. That’s the logic, right? Mine sounded like, “Girl, you don’t have it that bad. Other people have it so much worse.” After my loss, I had support and stability that a lot of people don’t have. So who was I to feel this way, let alone want something more?

Brené Brown calls this comparative suffering. In Rising Strong she writes that “even pain and hurt are not immune to being assessed and ranked.” We rank our loss against everyone else’s, decide ours doesn’t count, and then dismiss what we feel.

Maybe you’ve done it after a divorce or a job loss or a friendship that ended. “Well, at least it wasn’t...”

What you feel is real. It’s not more or less than anyone else’s.

It’s yours. And it’s real and valid.

Old messages about wanting

Don’t ask for too much. Take what you’re given. Wanting is greedy.

Many of us picked up messages long before our losses that end up not being helpful after a loss.

• Don’t ask for too much

• Take what you’re given

• Wanting is greedy

I grew up in the South and was taught to focus on being grateful. Dreaming and wanting something big for myself wasn’t really encouraged. So when that feeling showed up so strongly after my loss, I didn’t know what to do with it.

Maybe you heard some of those messages when you were younger. Those messages that reinforce the ideas that:

• Wanting is selfish

• Dreaming big means you're ungrateful

And somewhere along the way, you learn to feel guilty before you even finish the thought.

None of that started with you. None of that is at the core of who you are. They are learned over time.

But they’re loud, and they’re why the wanting something different can feel so wrong when it shows up after a loss.

So the next time the guilt starts talking, ask yourself whose voice it is. Is it yours? Or is it a parent, a teacher, a church, the whole culture you grew up in?

You don’t have to argue with it. Just witness that voice.

Just noticing it can loosen its grip.

You don’t have to wait until the grief is over

For a lot of women, wanting to feel alive again feels like a betrayal. Of the person you lost. Of the marriage, the career, the body or the version of yourself that’s gone. If you laugh at dinner or get excited about something, does that mean you’re forgetting? Leaving the person, or the old self, behind?

It doesn’t.

Here’s the thing: grief doesn’t have an end point. You carry it with you forever.

So if you’re waiting for it to be done before you let yourself feel alive again, you’ll be waiting forever.

One doesn’t cancel out the other. You don’t have to be either completely alive and done grieving or so deep in sorrow that joy isn’t allowed. They might not show up in the same moment. But they can show up in the same day, the same week, the same year. Our lives are more tangled up than that.

Grief researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut describe healthy grieving this way. You move back and forth between facing the loss and rebuilding your life. Not one stage and then the next. A flow between the two, sometimes in the same afternoon.

This is where that inner pull comes in. It can feel like a nuisance. It may ask things of you that you've never felt before.

You may be thinking, “What? You want me to do what right now?”

But please remember that pull; it’s coming from the truest part of you, trying to get your attention.

You don’t have to arrive somewhere before you start listening to it. I made a vision board and didn’t touch it for a year. I wasn’t making changes. I was just getting curious about what was coming up.

And I want to be clear. I’m not saying you should or have to go chase something new while you’re grieving or before you’re ready.

I’m saying you can get curious.

If the pull is there, you’re allowed to explore it now, with your grief right there beside you.

Try this when the guilt shows up

Say both halves out loud. And swap “but” for “and.”

“I’m grateful for my home, and I want more space for myself.”

“I feel guilty about this, and I still want it.”

“But” cancels out whatever came before it. “And” lets both be true.

Then notice what happens in your body as you say it. Maybe your chest loosens. Maybe your throat gets tight. There’s no right answer. You’re just listening.

You can do this in the car, in the shower or lying in bed at night when that voice starts up.

Nothing is wrong with you for wanting something different

You can grieve what you lost and still want an amazing life. You don’t have to. But if that pull is there, you can explore it while you’re still grieving.

If this feels familiar and you want support to explore, book a What Matters Now Session with me and let’s get curious.