Episode 86: How to deal with painful evenings
11/20/24
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You are listening to the Life Reconstructed podcast with me, Teresa Amaral Beshwate, grief expert, best-selling author and widow. I’m so glad you’re here because in this and every episode, I shine a light on the widowed way forward.
Hello and welcome to episode 86. In this episode, I share why evenings can be the worst for widowed people, why unhealthy habits can easily happen, and exactly what to do about it.
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If you’re like many widowed people, evenings are the worst.
You might avoid going home.
And once you are home, you probably stay up late, binge watching, scrolling, staying overly busy, overeating, overdrinking, overspending, anything but going to bed.
Why? Because going to bed means you have to face the difficult feelings. The empty bed. The sadness. The reality of it all is incredibly clear at bedtime. It can pack a punch.
So, all the things we do to delay going to bed are really our way of delaying feeling the painful feelings.
Which makes a lot of sense, since we have a hard-wired instinct to avoid pain. Back in the day, after all, pain meant potential danger. So, it’s normal that the primitive part of our brain urges us to avoid pain.
But in attempting to avoid the pain of bedtime, depending on your avoidance strategy of choice, there are consequences: over scrolling and binge-watching are sedentary habits that adversely impact your health. And overeating and over drinking do, too. Overspending impacts your finances and staying overly busy leads to exhaustion.
The more we try to outrun the pain, the more we fear the pain, which means we feel both pain and fear. Which is all the more difficult. It’s a spiral.
Add to that not getting enough sleep, which makes the next day extra challenging.
Now I want to acknowledge that insomnia can be common in life after loss, and this episode doesn’t address that topic. It does address a main reason why we avoid going to bed: because if we’ve been able to dodge the pain during the day, there is no avoiding it at night.
But the truth is that eventually we do have to face the pain. There are two options here. We can face the pain after attempting to avoid it – which means we have the consequences of whatever avoidance strategy.
Or we can simply face the pain.
How to do that?
It’s incredibly helpful to narrate your emotional experience.
For example, tell yourself, “This is the part when evening comes, and I ache for my person.”
“This is the part when the sadness hits hard.”
“Right now, I feel incredibly lonely for him.”
Notice how these uncomfortable emotions feel in your body. Refer to episode 4 for more on how to process difficult feelings – the link is in the show notes.
As you learn to directly feel the pain as it comes, you will:
1. Not have the consequences of any avoidance strategy.
2. Override your brain’s fear of difficult feelings.
3. Reduce the feelings to proper proportions.
4. Increase your confidence in your ability to feel difficult feelings. And…..
5. Possibly get more sleep.
Above all, be gentle with yourself. No one taught you how to step through this life without your person.
Probably no one ever taught you that feeling difficult emotions is a part of the human experience, and especially a part of life after loss. And if that’s true, then certainly no one ever taught you how to feel difficult feelings.
You’re learning that now. Grieving is all about learning.
I promise you that it will not always hurt like this. There was a time that I didn’t believe it, but it is true. It will not always hurt like this.
If this episode was helpful, and you’re listening on Apple or Spotify, please rate and review it. And no matter where you’re listening, please share it with a widowed friend. Remember that I believe in you, and I’m here for you. Take care.
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If you’ve found this podcast helpful, I’ve created something else to help you. It’s my free webinar called Good Grief: holiday preparedness for widowed people. The link is in the show notes.
https://www.thesuddenwidowcoach.com/good-grief-holiday
