I Don't Want My Life to Feel Like This Forever: Numbness After Loss

You get to the end of the day and you're not sure how you got there. The coffee, the work, the emails, the dinner. You're showing up for all of it. You just don't feel like you're in any of it.

I lived that way for years after losing my daughter and my dad. People around me would've said I was doing fine, but I wasn't fine. I was terrified my life would feel like that forever.

In this episode, you'll hear why you feel numb after loss and what your body may be trying to tell you. I share a moment in Lake Tahoe when I realized my life had always felt like an uphill climb. And I walk you through a short practice you can do with a piece of paper and a few deep breaths to feel what in your life still fits and what doesn't.

Get comfy. Press play when you're ready.

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If this episode felt like it was about your life, I made something for you. My free ebook Break Free from Autopilot gives you small, simple ways to start noticing the gap between what you know inside and how you're living on the outside. No big changes required.

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I Don't Want My Life to Feel Like This Forever: Numbness After Loss

Kendra Merrill

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Now, I'd love to hear from you!

When you tried the practice, what landed on your "still fits" side? And what did your body tell you when you read the other list? Remember, share as much detail as possible in your reply.

Many beautiful souls come here for insight and inspiration. Your story may be the one that helps another woman feel seen in her numbness today. Please put your thoughts and ideas directly in the comments. Links to other posts, videos, etc. will be removed.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for adding your voice and experience to this community.

Sending you hugs,
Kendra 💜

• View Transcript

  [00:00:00] 

  The Sleepwalking Feeling

  Kendra Merrill - Truth After Loss: In this episode, we're going to talk about that feeling that many of us get after we experience a loss, that feeling of sleepwalking through life. And so by the end of this episode, you'll have a name for that numbness. You'll understand a little bit more that it's not a flaw. It happens to a lot of us, and it's not something that has to be fixed.

  You'll learn why the life that you're living has stopped fitting you. It's stopped feeling like it's right for you. And I'll give you a [00:01:00] practice that will help you to identify what parts of your life still fit and what parts of your life feel misaligned. I will say before we get into all of this, because this is a, a podcast about loss and grief, I do talk about my experiences of stillbirth and divorce and, um, miscarriages and infertility and all kinds of different experiences that I've gone through, job loss.

  Um, so just know , if any of that's super triggering for you, maybe listen to this at another time on another day, um, when it fits you a little bit better. So we're gonna just start off today with, um, I'm gonna kind of go back in time a little bit because for many years after I lost... So for context, if you don't know, I lost my daughter many years ago and my dad within a six-week period.

  I also had a surgery, my very first surgery, um, in my entire life within that six-week period too. So that was a very intense timeframe in [00:02:00] my life. And for many years after that experience, I felt like I was just going going through the motions. The, the coffee, the work, the emails, the text messages, the dinner, s- try to sleep, and then hit repeat.

  But I didn't feel like I was in my life. I felt like I was sleepwalking through it. I'd get to the m- end of my days and not really know what I did, how I got there, how I got through it. It felt very foggy. And I woke up with this constant weight of another day sitting on my chest and frankly, in my body.

  And most people around me, and tell me in the comments if this feels like it resonates with you, most people around me probably would've said, "She's fine. She's coping well. She's showing up at work. She's getting the groceries. She's making the dinners. She's making it work." The thing is, I looked fine, but I [00:03:00] wasn't fine.

  And here's, here's why

  Because I was really afraid that from this point forward, my life would look and feel this way, that I would always be in this sleepwalking, foggy, um, get to the end of the day and not feel like I was actually a part of my day kind of feeling. I was really scared that it would always be that way.

  And I didn't realize at the time, but the disconnection that I felt in my own life wasn't just about the loss of my daughter and my dad and the surgery and that whole experience. It wasn't just about the loss. It was about something that was stirring deep inside of me, and I'll explain to you what I mean by that.

  It was absolutely about the loss. That was certainly in there. But what I didn't realize was that there was this other piece. I didn't realize it for a really long time. Um, actually not a really long time. . I started to have inklings of it [00:04:00] maybe even four months after this experience, but I didn't really understand what it was, this stirring inside of me

  The Loss

  Kendra Merrill - Truth After Loss: So I'm gonna go back even further now. Let me tell you a little bit about my life before Adeline, before that moment, before my dad died. I had always been guided by what you would consider maybe external motivation. I made decisions based on what other people in my life, what the external environment said that I should do

  All my life I did things like selling my house because a trainer was like, "You should really sell your house and move closer into town." Um, I got a master's degree because a boss said it would open doors. The thing is, it opened doors that I didn't wanna walk through. Those choices weren't necessarily wrong, and there wasn't anything wrong with getting my degree.

  I like my degree. But they weren't mine. They didn't come from the pure [00:05:00] choice of my internal knowing and my internal voice. So I constantly was doing things because others said I should. I created really low-grade exhaustion in my body for a really long time before I lost my daughter, and after that continued.

  But when I lost my daughter and my dad, that moment, like, I don't know, it shook me, like it does for many people. That numbness that I felt after losing them wasn't just about losing them.

  I was also maybe cracking open this idea that the life that I had been living wasn't aligned with my truth. After I lost them, I had, I had zero energy to do anything because someone said I should. There was no external words that people could say or pushing that people could do that would get me to do something that my physical being, um, and spiritual being wouldn't get up and go do.

  [00:06:00] But I also didn't know, didn't know how to live my life from an internally motivated place or direct my life based on what I wanted. And frankly, I didn't even know what I really wanted. I didn't know what brought me joy. I didn't know what made me happy. I didn't really know what I wanted in my life because everything up until that moment had been curated by my external environment

  The house, the car, , the clothes, the makeup, all of it was all built on the expectations that the external world had on me. You can see I don't wear makeup anymore. Um, somewhat because my body doesn't like it, my skin doesn't like it, but also because, good God, we, we as women spend a lot of time and energy, um, putting on makeup, and that's precious hours in my day.

  So I don't do it anymore. That's part of the change that I've been through over the course of the last 10 years

  Lake Tahoe Reckoning

  Kendra Merrill - Truth After Loss: So about four months after losing Adeline and my dad, [00:07:00] my husband and I took a trip to Lake Tahoe. Beautiful place, if you've never been there. It's wonderful. Just to have some cool, crisp air. We live in Texas, and we lost her , and my, and my dad in April and May, so we had all summer with the heat, and we went in September, um, to just get out of town and find some cool air and get on some hiking trails.

  So one of those mornings that we set off to go hike, it was one of the first... It might have been the first hike that we went on. Um, we accidentally started on a big hill up, which is not my forte and certainly isn't my forte after, um, having a baby and losing a baby and losing my dad and having surgery.

  So I struggled. I struggled as we went up this hill, and I was just utterly exhausted. My feet were killing me, which ended up being plantar fasciitis in both of my feet at the same time. But I didn't know that at the time, so I kept going. And I got to the top of that hill, and I found a rock that I could [00:08:00] sit on, and I looked out over the vista, over the lake, and I just sobbed.

  Big, ugly sobs. And yes, that is grief releasing from my body. If you've experienced profound loss, you know that type of crying. The ugly cries, um, the ones where the tears just won't stop coming and the sobs are really deep and really big.

  And that was the first of many of my reckonings between who the world expected me to be and who I actually wanted to be. It was a moment that I realized that my life had always felt like an uphill climb, and I didn't want it to feel that way anymore. I wanted to find more alignment between my truth and my external life, my internal truth and my external life.

  And so I came home, and I created my very first vision board, and I'd never done that [00:09:00] before. I don't know where the kind of spark of inspiration came from. I don't remember that. But I began to think about the type of life that I wanted to live and what mattered most to me and not everyone else.

  Meaning Reconstruction Model

  Kendra Merrill - Truth After Loss: And my story is not unique. Not everybody experiences this, but, um, psychologist Robert Neimeyer created something called a meaning reconstruction model that confirms my experience. The model views grief as a process of rebuilding one's sense of meaning, identity, worldview after some sort of loss. So when someone we love dies or when we lose a job or our world is shattered or what we thought to be true about the world, our view of what we thought to be true about the world, if that feels shattered

  Or if what used to make sense no longer makes sense, or what used to fit no longer [00:10:00] fits That's what this model is talking about. Basically, he says that there are kind of phases that we move through: the loss, the moment, the experience, the disruption of our beliefs, identity, and worldviews, which was what was happening for me on that rock in Lake Tahoe.

  There was a disruption of my beliefs, my identity, and my worldview. There was a reckoning happening in that moment of me understanding that some of the beliefs and identity and worldview that I had carried before that moment of my loss were no longer true anymore. And so I went back again, started to think about creating my vision board, and this is where we get into exploring the questions of why?

  Who am I now? What matters most to me now? What does finding new purpose look like? What does seeking answers look like? And what does examining my beliefs look like? [00:11:00] So this is where, um, you know, Robert Neimeyer talks about rebuilding our meaning in our life because what mattered to us before doesn't matter to us anymore

  I think what we're establishing here is that loss doesn't just take someone or something from you. , Um, if you're willing to allow yourself to feel your grief, it can show you truths about what matters now and what never did maybe, um, or what certainly doesn't anymore.

  And I say this with so much compassion because I know feeling your feelings isn't easy. I actually did a whole podcast about it. Um, I'll put a link to that in the show notes below about how we haven't been taught to feel our feelings, and it's hard to sit in our grief because we haven't been taught to feel difficult emotions

  And when we

  But it's the willingness that you have to [00:12:00] be with your emotions that allows you to take the first step towards healing. And if you're willing to go to the depths of your emotions and your grief, they really can they really can sometimes come with this strange sense of clarity

  Because they give you this gift of being able to look at your life and ask yourself, "Is this the life I want to be living? Is this what I came here to do? Is this what I want my future to look like?" It has a tendency to strip away this preconceived notion we have about what our future's gonna look like.

  And sometimes that clarity isn't necessarily always comfortable for us because , our humanness doesn't like change. Our brains are wired not to change, but to pay attention to what has been before. And [00:13:00] so It can feel really uncomfortable when you start to unearth some of these truths that are a result of your loss.

  And that's why I do what I do. I'm a somatic life coach, and I work very specifically with people who have gone through some sort of experience of loss. It has refield- revealed some truths to them, and they know they wanna make changes, but it's very difficult to make those kinds of changes when we've never learned how to make changes in our life.

  If that sounds like you, I'll put a link to a discovery call below. You can schedule something, and let's chat. But let me go on to the next, um, point here. So if we know that our loss doesn't just, you know, include losing someone, it also maybe, um, includes... So if we already know that loss doesn't necessarily just take someone or something from us, it also may, and not every p- uh, not every person goes through this, but it may open up some

  If we know that loss doesn't just take something or someone from us, but it also reveals some truths. Then we start to look at our lives, and our lives didn't necessarily get the memo

  After, and our lives didn't necessarily get the memo that everything inside of us has been [00:14:00] shaken up, um, but our outside lives, our external experiences are the same. So after my loss, our therapist told us that as much as possible, don't make any big, huge changes in your life for at least one year, and I abide by that.

  I still recommend that to people I talk to. So I went back to the same job, same role, same routine, same version of my life that I had before my loss. Which is basically all the expectations that everybody else had of me. I was showing up, which is why I looked fine. But I went back with a different version of myself emerging as I stood in my old life.

  Sometimes I began at-- And at some point, I began to realize that this old life I had created really didn't fit the new version of me. It was built on a previous version of me who didn't know what she knew now, didn't know the depths of deep grief and loss [00:15:00] and suffering. So I was living inside of a life that didn't fit me anymore, and I could feel that in my bones

  Feeling that mismatch wasn't clearly

  Feeling that mismatch between my internal wisdom and my internal know-knowing and my external world was clearly a choice to pay attention to. Like, I could ignore it. I could keep brushing it off, ignore the, mm, uncomfortableness that I felt inside my body. It wasn't a command to do anything about it. It was just an awareness of the, the disconnect between my life and my insides.

  And so it didn't force me to change my whole life all at once, um, but it did open my eyes to begin to explore what it would mean for me to listen deep to my internal knowing and begin to build an external world that matched my internal knowing. So the meaning, I'm gonna go back to this model real quick, the meaning reconstruction [00:16:00] model that I talked about ear-earlier, earlier, also explains how people gradually reconstruct their understanding of themselves and the world around them

  this isn't something that is about quick fixes. It's not about You know, I, I know sometimes, my husband and I used to talk about this all the time, sometimes you really do wanna sell the house, sell things, and move to another country and live on a beach and just forget it all. I get that. However, I think that's why my therapist said, "Don't do anything for a year," because those feelings are very intense.

  And the best way for you to re-engage with your , next version of yourself, is to do that gradually over time. To explore, to understand what lights you up, to get in touch with and relearn and re- um, connect with that internal self. So if this is resonating with you, here's a very short practice that you [00:17:00] can use to help you find that clarity between what's fitting for you in your life right now and what's not anymore.

  The Practice

  Kendra Merrill - Truth After Loss: So grab a piece of paper, and if you're driving, you know, you can just envision this. But draw a line, uh, down the middle of the page, and on the left-hand side ... Actually, if you're driving, take this for later. Or walking or whatever. Save this for later and do this exercise later because when you draw that line, I want you to actually take a moment to take a deep breath and feel into your body for just a moment

  And on the left-hand side, I want you to write the things that you're still doing or where you're still going or what people you're still surrounding yourself with, what environments that you go into that you know don't feel like they fit anymore. And when you do that, I want you to feel [00:18:00] into how that feels in your body, And then on the other side, you're gonna do the, the same thing but opposite.

  You're gonna feel into what feels like gold right now for you, what feels nourishing, what feels supportive, what feels inspiring if you are in a place where you can feel inspired. What is it that you know now actually matters to you most based on your current circumstances, where you're at in your life, and what you want for the future of your life?

  Then when you're done with that, take a minute. Actually, I'm just gonna scratch my ear for just a second

  Then when you're done with that Take a look at each side on its own and just notice what's happening in your body when you do. Not what you think about these things. Like if, for example, things come up like, "Oh, I couldn't get rid of this person right now," that's okay. Let the thought come and let the thought go.

  What we're doing right now is we're just experiencing what our body feels when we read one list or the other. [00:19:00] So you don't have to do anything with this. You don't have to fix anything. You don't have to actually move people out of your life. You don't have to quit your job. You don't have to do anything with it.

  The idea here is this you're just starting to get to witness the difference between living a life that doesn't feel in alignment and one that does, and what that feels like in your body

  So if you've gotten this far and you're still here, you may be in the thick of grief. And - if you're like me, you may be afraid that life's gonna feel like this from now on. The deep sorrow is real. I know it. The numbness is real. I know it. It's not a determination that your life is gonna be this way forever.

  It is just a signal pointing to a gap. And it is your choice. You can choose to explore that gap or not. You don't have to. And maybe it's not the right time for you right [00:20:00] now. Maybe later is better. But if you're feeling that pull, then now is probably a good time

  There's no right or wrong here. There's just awareness. All we're trying to do in this whole podcast, is just create awareness of how those truths reveal themselves, how they show up, and what we do with them. Just creating awareness. So maybe by now

  So this isn't about pushing harder or bypassing where you are right now. I'm super big about feeling where you feel right now, allowing yourself to feel that. This is about letting you know that if you're here, you're not alone, and that you may be experiencing what psychology calls post-traumatic growth, which doesn't necessarily mean that you ignore the pain.

  Again, you don't ignore the distress or the mental health struggles. If you need to see a therapist, go see a therapist. , Um, post-traumatic growth only shows how adversity can force people to rebuild their worldview, their identity, their [00:21:00] behaviors, their beliefs, their values, leading to deep, meaningful transformation, which is what I work with people on.

  So I understand how it feels. I didn't even tell you all like my, um, that I only told you all about one experience of loss and grief in my life, the one that was most impactful to me, but my surrounding family and environment had multiple losses through the last 10 years. So this has been something I've lived for a very long time, and I want you to know that you can make changes based on the truths that grief has revealed to you, and I'm here to support that.

  So if you're thinking, "I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know what I love to do. I don't know where to take my path for the next portion of my life, the next phase of my life, but I know something has to change because my current life doesn't fit," this is the space for you. If you're looking for, um, just a simple way to break free from that [00:22:00] numbness feeling, that sleepwalking feeling, I do have an e-book that I will link in the show notes below that will support you.

  It's called Breaking Out of Autopilot, and I think that that's gonna be really supportive for you as you just start to kinda, again, notice the disconnection between your internal knowing and what's happening in your external life. So I'll leave that link for you here below.​[00:23:00]