grief Kelly Daugherty grief Kelly Daugherty

Who Am I Now? Finding Yourself After Loss

Who Am I Now? Finding Yourself After Loss

One of the most disorienting parts of grief is not just losing someone you love — it is losing the version of yourself that existed alongside them. Your roles change. Your sense of purpose shifts. The questions get bigger and harder to answer. In Episode 6 of the GRIEF Ladies Podcast, Karyn and Kelly close out the G.R.I.E.F. framework with Finding — the F — and what it actually means to search for yourself again after loss.

Why does grief make you question who you are?

So much of our identity is quietly built around the people in our lives. When someone dies, it is not just their presence that disappears — it is the roles you played together, the decisions you made as a unit, the parts of yourself that only existed in relation to them. Many grieving people describe feeling like they are starting over, like their life was one way and then in an instant looked completely different.

Kelly describes Finding as the intersection of three things: making sense of what happened, discovering what benefits — however small — have emerged from the experience, and reconstructing your identity. Who am I now? Where do I want to go? These are not questions with quick answers, and Karyn points out that in early grief, most people do not yet have the capacity to answer them at all. That is normal. Finding tends to come after the acute weight of early grief has had some time to settle.

Meaning-making — including sense-making, benefit-finding, and identity reconstruction — is one of the most well-supported frameworks in contemporary grief research. Studies show that people who are able to find some meaning in their loss over time report lower levels of grief-related distress and greater long-term well-being. (Sources: Park, C.L. — meaning-making model; bereavement and post-traumatic growth literature)

What Karyn and Kelly are clear about: you do not have to force meaning. And you do not have to find it on a timeline. But staying curious about the question — who am I now, and who do I want to be? — is itself a form of progress.

Is it realistic to want to be happy again?

Karyn offers a reframe in this episode that is worth sitting with: happiness is not the goal. Not because happiness does not matter, but because it is fleeting and unreliable even in the best of times. Chasing happiness as a grief benchmark sets people up to feel like they are failing when the feeling does not hold.

What she focuses on instead is peace. Contentment. A sense of things feeling slightly more predictable, slightly more tolerable than yesterday. A client Kelly has carried with her since 2008 said it plainly: "I don't want to be happy. I just want to be neutral." Neutral meaning peaceful. Calm. Grounded. That, she said, felt sustainable in a way that happiness did not.

The episode closes with a story Karyn tells about a man who asked her, "What difference does it make?" — a question that can stop a grief counselor cold if you're not ready for it. Her answer is one of the most honest and useful things in this episode, and it is worth hearing in her own words.

Listen to Karyn answer that question — and hear what she and Kelly believe is possible when you actually do the work: Listen to Episode 6 of the GRIEF Ladies Podcast → LINK: https://youtu.be/qd4XfdkR14o?si=U7Kn_XzInnO8fTVW

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grief Kelly Daugherty grief Kelly Daugherty

Why Does Grief Make You Feel Like You've Lost Yourself?

Why Does Grief Make You Feel Like You've Lost Yourself?

One of the least talked-about effects of grief is what it does to your sense of self. The qualities you relied on — your ability to make decisions, stay organized, show up for people, feel capable — can feel completely out of reach when you are grieving. This is not a personal failing. It is one of grief's most disorienting effects, and in Episode 5 of the GRIEF Ladies Podcast, Karyn and Kelly explain why self-esteem in grief deserves far more attention than it typically gets.

How does grief affect self-esteem?

Grief changes the way you see yourself — sometimes in ways you do not even notice until you are already deep in the cycle. You are not as productive as you used to be. Decisions feel impossible. You feel foggy, unmotivated, unlike yourself. And then you feel bad about feeling that way, which makes it harder to get things done, which makes you feel worse. Karyn describes it as a loop that is very easy to fall into and very hard to climb out of without understanding what is actually happening.

Part of what makes this so destabilizing is how much of our identity is tied to the people in our lives. The person who died may have been the one who told you that you looked good, talked you through hard decisions, or simply believed in you in ways you took for granted. When they die, those things disappear too — and you may not even realize how much of your sense of self was quietly held up by their presence.

Identity disruption — the loss of roles, relationships, and self-perception tied to the deceased — is consistently identified in bereavement research as a core feature of grief, distinct from depression. Rebuilding a coherent sense of self is considered a central task of adaptation after loss. (Sources: Bonanno, G.; identity and meaning-making in bereavement literature)

What can you do when you no longer recognize yourself?

The first step, Karyn and Kelly say, is simply noticing — without judgment. What thoughts are you having about yourself? Where do you feel like you are falling short? What story are you telling yourself about who you are now and what you did or didn't do? Most of the time these thoughts are running on autopilot, and awareness is what makes it possible to interrupt them.

The harder truth is that you do not have to believe everything you think. The story grief tells about you is not the whole truth — but it takes time, and often the right support, to start seeing that clearly.

Karyn and Kelly talk through what this looks like in practice, and what tools can actually help, in the full episode: Listen to Episode 5 of the GRIEF Ladies Podcast → LINK: https://youtu.be/x3BKKoWBPv4?si=6AAFU7TkA0U-RMjN 

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  • Is It Normal to Feel Angry, Guilty, and Resentful When You're Grieving? → LINK: — The first half of this topic: the "ugly" emotions of grief and why they are more normal than you think.

  • Why Do Relationships Feel So Different After Someone Dies? → LINK:  — Episode 4 on navigating the relationships that shift after loss.

  • What Is the G.R.I.E.F. Framework and How Does It Work? → LINK: — An overview of all five pillars and the thinking behind this approach.

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