How Do I Rebuild After Loss? Why You Don’t Have to “Get Over It” to Move Forward
Grief can make reading hard. Want to listen to this article instead? Find its corresponding podcast episode here.
Recently, I received this message from a podcast listener:
“My husband died 18 months ago, and I thought I’d be further along by now. Everyone keeps telling me to move on and rebuild. Sometimes I even put pressure on myself to get my act together and figure out what my life is supposed to be now. But I don’t know how. What does rebuilding even mean? I still feel like my husband is a part of everything I do. We were together for almost 20 years. I can’t just forget him. Does rebuilding mean I have to ‘get over’ him? Because I can’t. And honestly, I don’t want to. How on earth do I move forward when my grief for him feels so heavy?”
Her question expresses so much of the shame, anxiety, and uncertainty my clients and students feel. It’s similar to what I felt too, after my mom’s sudden death in 2013. Simply put, it’s awful living in the aftermath of loss and not knowing how to navigate it.
You might feel like you should be ‘further along’—but you’re not even sure what that means.
You might be looking around at others who’ve faced loss and seeing their happy, healed lives but aren’t aware of how you might make a happy, healed life a reality for yourself—or if that’s even something you want.
You might be getting pressure from friends and family to ‘move on,’ but you’re not interested—especially if it means leaving your person or your loss in the past.
I’ve been where you are, sitting in the wake of a devastating loss and asking—to everyone and no one, “How on earth am I supposed to come back from this?”
It’s a question I get all the time in different forms.
Whether you’re asking:
“How do I rebuild after loss?”
“What does rebuilding actually look like?”
“Is it possible to create a meaningful future without erasing my loss?”
“How can I life a good life after loss?”
… this article will help you find your way.
In it, I’ll offer you a clear definition of rebuilding, share my 5-step GRIEF Method framework with you, and show you how you can build a life you love from the life loss forced you to live—without faking a smile or leaving your loved ones in the past.
The Problem With “Getting Over It”
In Episode 15 of Grief Grower, I compared life after loss to living in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
If you picture your life after loss like a home that was suddenly destroyed, you don’t pretend that the house never stood there. You don’t ignore the pain of everything you lost inside its walls. You don’t forget every memory you made inside of it.
You pause and regroup. You tend to your wounds. You reach out for and receive support. And then, brick-by-brick, you rebuild your life from the foundation up.
“Getting over it” implies that rebuilding your life after loss is as easy as hiking up your pants and stepping over the rubble of your life before as if it never happened—and moving into a shiny, new house down the street.
But life after loss doesn’t work like that. You can’t step over your life before and instantly step into a perfect, unblemished life after. You can’t “leave the past in the past” and “just let it go,” no matter what the people around you say.
Because you still remember the people you’ve lost who’ve died. You still carry their influence with you. And you still own the foundations you built your life before loss upon. Even if those foundations are cracked and worn down by heartbreak, they continue to belong to you. And if you’re like many of my clients, they are some of your most prized possessions.
There’s a Better Way to Move Forward After Loss
Instead of “getting over it” and “moving on,” I propose a new way of doing things.
In my online course and community, Life After Loss Academy I teach a five-step process called the GRIEF Method for rebuilding that honors who and what you’ve lost while also helping you move forward with purpose, peace, and a sense of wholeness.
Inside the community, we take stock of what remains.
We grieve what can no longer be.
We fold in your memories, losses, and loved ones.
We surround you with supportive people and protect you from people who minimize, judge, or dismiss what you’ve been through.
And we help you gradually welcome the return of meaning, hope, and joy—when you’re ready.
In this framework, grief is not an obstacle to overcome or a unpleasant experience to leave “back there.” Instead, grief is a part of the architecture of your life. Not because you’re incapable of “getting over it,” but because everything about your “life after” is built upon the precious foundations of your “life before.” You get to keep your loved ones and your memories and rebuild with them in mind.
Let’s walk through the 5-step GRIEF Method now.
What Is the GRIEF Method?
My 5-step GRIEF Method is a compassionate framework that designed explicitly for the multidimensional, continuous nature of grief. It helps you rebuild life after loss, metaphorically, from the ground up—starting by helping you feel stable in a world where loss has happened and ending with helping you explore things like hope, purpose, and your future life with grief.
It works for all types of losses and is meant to be revisited many times throughout your life as new losses appear, or, as you discover new information about old losses.
Here’s the GRIEF Method step-by-step:
1. GROUND: Create stability in chaos
Grief can make you feel like the walls have crashed in around you.
In this first, foundational module of the course, you’ll learn how to:
Build a sense of emotional and physical safety
Design gentle rituals that regulate your stressed-out nervous system
Recognize what still remains after loss, so you know what ground you’re standing on
This module isn’t about fluffy mindfulness tricks; it’s about anchoring and restabilizing yourself amidst the disorientation of life after loss. It’s a vital first step in rebuilding.
2. RELEASE: Make room for your emotions
Grief is weird. It's messy. And most of us were never taught how to feel our “negative” feelings—such as despair or anger—in healthy, productive, or shame-free ways.
In the Release module, you’ll learn how to:
Identify and express your “big” griefy emotions—like rage, fear, guilt, longing, despair
Mourn the person you used to be before your loss
Grieve the hopes, dreams, and expectations that can no longer be
The goal isn’t to magically “let go” of your emotions so you’re never sad again. The goal is to practice moving through them again and again, so they can be processed instead of staying stuck inside you.
3. INTEGRATE: Weave your losses into your life
Society treats grief as something to “get over” instead of something to grow alongside.
In this module, you’ll learn how to:
Stay connected to your person and honor your loss in meaningful, creative ways
Track your growth (yes, even when it feels like you’re going backwards)
Use compassion, word games, and humor to cope with uncertainty and grief’s constant presence
This step is where grief becomes less of an obstacle and more of a collaborator. And most students inside Life After Loss Academy say this is when they stop seeing themselves as “broken” by loss and start seeing their losses as part of the whole picture of their lives.
4. ESTABLISH: Build relationships that honor your grief
No grieving person is an island, and grief doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Your friends, family members, coworkers, and neighbors all have a significant impact on how you’re able to grieve.
In the Establish module, you’ll learn how to:
Set boundaries with people who minimize or dismiss your grief
Ask for what you need at work, at home, and with friends
Surround yourself with grief-literate people who get what you’re going through
Rebuilding includes receiving support, and this module is all about figuring out how to “do grief” with others.
5. FOSTER: Cultivate a long-term relationship with grief
The most common things my students say they want to experience after loss are peace, purpose, hope, and joy. The ultimate goal of rebuilding then, is something that feels like a “good life” to them—one where their losses and loved ones are remembered, and where they get to feel the full spectrum of emotions again.
In the Foster module, you’ll learn how to:
Reframe grief not as a tormentor, but as a living thing that you’re in a lifetime relationship with
Stop fighting grief and start collaborating with it
Experiment with finding meaning and purpose again
Make space for hope, peace, and joy in a life changed by loss
This set of lessons is the direct response to the question I received from my podcast listener. It’s the part where you define what rebuilding means to you and construct a life that not only includes your losses, but also honors grief’s lasting presence too.
It’s where you get to move forward as a full, complete version of yourself—one that has been impacted by loss and is also carrying loved ones, memories, and compassion into the future.
This is how you rebuild—not by leaving grief in the rubble of your old life, but by allowing it to be part of the new one you’re assembling from what loss left behind.
Closing Thoughts: You Can Rebuild And Honor Your Heart
If you’re anything like my podcast listener—lost or stuck in the aftermath of grief and wondering how to rebuild—this is what I can tell you, from more than 12 years grieving my mom and coaching grieving people since 2016.
Think of it as a letter from my heart to yours:
Rebuilding after loss is clunky, painful, and time-consuming. There will be moments where you plop down on the ground in frustration because you feel like you don’t have enough information or tools to keep going. And you’re right to be frustrated. It’s like building a house when you’ve never worked in construction—and never wanted to. On top of that, you have to live in the house that you’re rebuilding every single day. Your house—aka life as you know it—is the only place you have to live. So you will set up shop in misery as best you can, all the while working very, very hard to make things feel a little less miserable.
There will be parts of your old house—your old life before—that you will grieve. Metaphorical rooms you can no longer revisit and literally dreams that were torn away by loss. You can remember these old versions of yourself—and the hopeful futures you once held. You can even memorialize them in your new home: in a picture frame, a cornerstone brick, or a tile in the kitchen. But they are no longer the foundational bones of your house. There is a heartbreaking permanence in that—and a simultaneous sense of power and agency in how you choose to honor those parts of you going forward.
There will be seasons where nothing feels “done enough,” and you feel exposed to the elements of grief. Maybe you’re missing a roof for a while or trying to rest in a house where wind is whistling through walls that have been framed but not yet filled in. Or maybe you just can’t decide on a new fence yet, so poorly boundaried friends and family keep knocking on your door, insisting you do something about your grief or telling you to “look on the bright side.” This is another frustrating-yet-normal thing and it’s okay to grieve that this is part of your life now too.
There will probably also be a time—or many times—when it feels like your house will never be a place of peace, hope, or joy again. With grief present in every bit of your rebuilding, it’s normal to believe that its volume will crowd out any happy or positive experience. And for a while it may. But gradually, with your intentional focus and attention, things like hope and peace will find their way back to you. They may be hiding in the salt and pepper shakers or tucked away in a random cupboard. In other words, they may not be out in the open like they used to be. But just like you are waiting for their return, they are often waiting for you to find them.
Rebuilding after loss, just like living in a house, is a project that is never truly finished. You will ground yourself into rituals that feel safe to you, learn to release big, hard emotions like anger and despair, fold your losses into your life, establish grief-honoring relationships with people you care about, and eventually form a long-term relationship with grief. But this new home in which you live will constantly be changing shape. Its cast of emotional characters will come and go with the seasons. The rooms you spend your days in will vary. Sometimes you’ll have a blooming garden. Other times, you may need beauty and brightness to be brought to you by others.
What I want to leave you with is that, in every step of your rebuilding, grief—and your loved ones and your memories—come with you. They are an inextricable part of your life’s new foundations. There is no way to separate them from you because they are yours. You don’t have to “get over” a damn thing. You get to stay put and rebuild on top of everything that got you to where you are right now.
Said another way, moving forward is not about forgetting. It’s about remembering with more intention and more gusto and more compassion than ever before.
If you’re looking to rebuild your life after devastating loss, follow along with the GRIEF Method, and meet other people doing the same, join us in Life After Loss Academy. Inside, I’ll teach you the 5-step GRIEF Method roadmap for returning to life after loss and answer your questions during live coaching calls every single week.
Coaching replays are available if you can’t attend live and there is sliding scale pricing available if you’re a marginalized or financially struggling griever. You can learn more and become a student here.
