Ep. 76: Christina Rasmussen - Invisible Loss: The Grief That No One Talks About

Dear Life with Christina Rasmussen

This week on the podcast I am speaking with you about something that cannot be seen, cannot be felt directly, and cannot be acknowledged easily by yourself or others. This thing is also something that prevents you from healing and prevents you from what I call Life Reeentry. It can stop you from feeling joy, can contribute to feelings of anxiety, depression, and hopelessness. I call this thing, an invisible loss.

In my life, I’ve gone through big traditional losses, like the loss of my husband and also the loss of my first child. What I’ve learned is, that what makes those things even harder to Reenter from, are the survival mechanisms that we have built inside of us when we were a child and we dealt with something difficult yet invisible. Invisible losses can be experiences like being bullied or rejected, not feeling listened to or heard, when we have found ourselves in situations that were harsh, and left us feeling hurt and uncertain.

“Just because the world doesn't see an experience you had as significant, does not mean that it's not. Overcoming the invisible parts of my life that were hard has been a bigger struggle than the bigger, most tragic, and intense events of my past.” ~ Christina Rasmussen

We likely didn’t really talk about those things. We just dealt with them. We buried them inside of us and we created coping mechanisms to survive them. And as the years go by, we use those coping mechanisms to survive work, our bosses, our peers, some of our friends, some of our family members. And then, of course, to survive the bigger tragedies of our lives. We find ourselves in this place where we yet again have to survive. Survive and endure the covid-19 pandemic and all of the visible and invisible losses, political unrest, the climate crises, and more.

The details of these events and circumstances and how these feel every day are never talked about and they're never shared because complaining about something that is not considered a big deal is often looked upon as a weakness. I want to share with you that I believe this is wrong and that I believe it is just as important to process and grieve the invisible losses as it is the bigger, more traditional losses. Even the more traditional, visible losses become invisible over time. You may have found that 6 months or a year after a death or divorce or major health crises that no one asks you about it anymore. They have moved on and feel as though you should too.

One takeaway from this episode I hope that you’ll consider is that what you may see as the smallest, tiniest moments of struggle in your life are also significant and they deserve to be acknowledged and processed. In doing this, you’ll be able to move through the waiting room and become unstuck in your life. I truly cannot emphasize how important this is. When I started doing my Life Reentry classes in 2010, they were supposed to be for the tragedies of our lives. To overcome and reenter from the bigger events of our lives, yet what I discovered was that what was more difficult to reenter from were these prior invisible dramatic traumatic events that we never talked about. The more seemingly insignificant ones.

If you would like to take a class on this, my next Life Reentry class is starting on October 27th, 2020. You can get all the details and register here.

Things I Mention In This Episode

• Sign up for the Second Firsts Message in a Bottle HERE.
• Book: Second Firsts by Christina Rasmussen
• Book: Where Did You Go? by Christina Rasmussen

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