What it Means to ‘Sit in the Sadness’ of Pet Loss
Today, we unpack a growing catchphrase around grief related to pet loss and how it can protect you from deeper pain while helping you heal.
If you’ve ever scrolled through TikTok or Instagram or binged reality TV, you’ve probably heard it.
“Feel your feelings.”
“Embrace the suck.”
“Sit in the sadness.”
What does that even mean?
Because it feels like social media drivel. Armchair psychology tripe. Like when kids echo phrases without actually knowing the meaning behind their words.
Yet there is something to those statements. Taken seriously, “sitting in the sadness” can even help you move through your pet loss grief to a place where it hurts less and life starts to open back up.
Here are the first steps.
“Good Grief” Takes Practice
Grief shows up in all kinds of different ways. For me, it’s an ache that starts below my eyes. Then my chest begins to clench. My limbs feel limp.
And my whole body aches with exhaustion.
That’s been my physical experience of grief. But it changes…
Sometimes there’s the slow and steady drip of tears that leave staggered wet spots on the floor. Sometimes it all comes out in agonized moans.
More than once, I’ve curled up in a ball on the rug. More than once, I’ve sobbed under tables, no doubt reaching back to some primitive instinct to find shelter in the face of pain.
When Koda, my soul dog, died, I often curled up in his bed to weep.
Usually, though, once I’ve journaled and cried, relief washes over me and gets me through the day until the next time grief pays a visit.
It wasn’t always like this. It’s taken years of practice — and unfortunately, many different types of grief — to get me to a place where I could give my feelings their day in the sun.
I didn’t get there till I’d had a large assortment of therapy and grief coaching sessions.
But I learned that trying to stamp out my grief as if it were fire on clothing wasn’t serving me. I’d previously been master of the stiff upper lip. After all, I wasn’t weak. I didn’t snivel. I couldn’t devolve into a puddle and still keep my life running…
Right?
The Risk of Avoiding Grief Work
Wrong. There’s a problem with unaddressed grief, and it generally always manifests as something worse. More than a catchphrase, there is a psychological reason to address your feelings and “feel the feels.”
It’s because if you don’t do this deep (and hard) work, you risk being pulled into a darker place. It might be something as inoffensive as a stomachache or as terrifying as suicidal thoughts.
It looks different for everyone, but those darker places include depression, anxiety, volatility, or turning to numbing devices like drugs and alcohol and other compulsions.
How to Meet Your Pet Loss Grief Head On
For me, the easiest way to feel my grief over the loss of pets and through other tragedies, is to journal. (I mean actual pen-to-paper journaling, which taps the brain in a different way than typing onto a screen.)
I recommend a body scan as you feel the sadness come on. Then, try writing about what you feel. “I sense a knot in my stomach… I need to lie down… it’s as if tears are stuck behind my eyes… I want to scream.” Write down what you feel and where you feel it in your body.
You don’t even have to use a journal. It could be you just speak the feelings out loud. Or share them with a caring friend.
Key here is that when you observe those feelings, you don’t judge them. Silence the critic that wants to say, “This is stupid. I’m stronger than this. These feelings don’t make sense.”
Grief doesn’t make sense, and grief can’t be judged. It just is.
From there, dig a little deeper. See if you can name the emotions. Maybe the knot in your stomach feels like abandonment. The stuck tears feel like a loss of control. The scream that’s desperate to come out is raw, unfiltered anger.
When you do this, you’re allowing your grief the space to exist. You’re allowing yourself to be vulnerable (which is probably one of the most powerful skills in our human arsenal that most of us don’t know how to tap).
Most importantly, you’re permitting yourself to be human. And it’s these deep, intense human emotions that allowed for the beautiful connection you had with your pet in the first place. Acknowledging the other side of that deep love—the sadness and pain—is a way to honor that initial love.
After all, when it comes to dog loss or cat loss or any kind of pet loss, it wouldn’t hurt so much if you hadn’t loved so intensely.