“Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.” –Dr. Edith Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible
The loss of an unrealized dream sent me spiraling down, down into the darkness. A darkness filled with a despair and hopelessness that I had not known before.
It was safer and more comfortable for me to attribute all my grief to losing a loving mother-in-law suddenly in the beginning of 2023. Her abrupt absence not only in my life but also in my husband’s and daughter’s lives was incredibly hard.
Though the loss opened the portal of grief, there was more I hid. When I was still in a tender place, intangible losses and a health scare came.
The loss that completely broke my heart was when my husband and I made the joint decision to end our dream of trying to have a second child. A shared dream since early on in our relationship and a dream of mine since long before.
Neither of us could have anticipated my unexplained infertility diagnosis and the four-year-long, beautiful, broken, and growth-filled road to parenthood. Throughout the entire journey, I still held onto hope that we would one day have two children.
The visceral, raw grief that came after we made the decision shocked me. When we had first honestly discussed this idea, I felt excited to build our life as a family of three. I deeply knew our family was complete.
But once we made the decision, grief I did not want or know how to feel consumed me. Grief for all that had been lost. For all that wouldn’t come into being in the future. Invisible to the outside world.
At first, my negative, self-critical talk took over, giving me a hard time for what I was going through. Full of self-judgment, regret, anger, and shame. Overcome with grief, I had forgotten I didn’t have to believe that voice and could be kinder to myself.
Mornings were the toughest. Each day, I would wake up with the weight of unshed tears under my eyes. Though I had slept well, my whole body was heavy and weary. My mind felt foggy. I’d forget small things, which wasn’t like me. Seemingly simple tasks took so much energy.
After dropping off my daughter at preschool, I would sit in my living room alone. I had no motivation to do anything. If I didn’t have a work meeting to prepare for or immediate deliverables to complete, I’d distract myself on my phone, numbing. This unhealthy morning cycle would continue for a while.
Once I started working, I would get in a rhythm and focus on the projects in front of me, which I did enjoy.
My body and psyche knew what had happened was significant. It would take time for my rational mind to catch up. I would need to allow myself to have my full experience of grief.
An Expanded View of Grief
Developing an expanded view of grief and processing my experience with a grief therapist began to help.
One of the first concepts I learned is that there are different types of grief. Through Atlas of the Heart, a book by research professor, author, and podcaster Brené Brown, I understood I was dealing with both acute and disenfranchised grief.
Acute grief is the intense grief that occurs during the initial period after a loss. I was not familiar with disenfranchised grief.
Brown writes, “Disenfranchised grief is a less-studied form of grief: grief that ‘is not openly acknowledged or publicly supported through mourning practices or rituals because the experience is not valued or counted [by others] as a loss.’ The grief can also be invisible or hard to see by others.”
My grief not only felt invisible to the outside, but also, I hadn’t valued the end of an unfulfilled dream as a loss at first.
A second concept was to focus on integrating grief into my life. My therapist shared that it’s not about moving on after experiencing a loss; it’s about moving forward, integrating our losses with how we live our lives.
A third concept came from psychologist and Holocaust survivor Dr. Edith Eger’s book The Choice: Embrace the Possible. Though she had been through unimaginable suffering, she gave a message of hope and healing.
She shared, “When we grieve, it’s not just over what happened—we grieve for what didn’t happen… You can’t change what happened; you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now.” We could choose freedom, joy, and love over suffering.
What Helped Me Cope and Rebuild
I began to shift my experience from resistance to instead supporting myself during this period of grief. I started to accept that simply getting through my day was enough. These approaches can be beneficial to anyone experiencing grief, especially if it feels invisible.
1. Support myself and be supported
Once I remembered that I could support myself, my entire grief experience became more manageable. I already had tools to be kind and compassionate to myself. It was a matter of intentionally using them.
I began a practice of noticing and bringing in. Noticing my self-critical voice and, instead of getting caught up in it, bringing in self-compassion and kindness. I would say statements to myself like: It’s okay to feel this way. This is really hard. May I be kind to myself. Sometimes, I visualized wrapping myself in love.
I began to turn toward myself with kindness and love. To be there for myself. To process my experience through writing.
I opened up in close relationships and with my therapist, where I did feel listened to and accepted to share my struggles.
2. Feel my difficult feelings and bring in the light
One day, when I was meditating, I noticed what was happening in my body. I opened to the intense sensations. Before I knew it, I’d gone through a shorter version of Tara Brach’s RAIN practice. This had been a fundamental practice of mine when dealing with infertility, but I likely hadn’t done the full practice in years. The practice remembered me.
This framework means:
- Recognize what is happening.
- Allow the experience to be there just as it is.
- Investigate with interest and care.
- Nurture with self-compassion.
Once the exercise came back to my consciousness, I spent time each morning feeling my painful feelings.
One morning, at the end of the RAIN practice, I intuitively brought in light and love. Another time, I started saying a lovingkindness meditation to myself. I began to incorporate bringing in aspects of positivity after feeling my difficult feelings.
3. Go on awe walks
My grief was the heaviest in the darkness of the winter in Colorado. Toward the beginning of spring, still overcome with grief, I started going on awe walks. Awe walks, a term from Dacher Keltner, are walks where you shift your attention outward. Your task is to encounter something that amazes and transcends. Every day, I looked for new signs of spring at the trail near my house.
I would have missed most of the early signs if I hadn’t been seeking them: flower buds, tiny green leaves forming on branches, the first yellow wildflower blooms that peeked out from behind tangled branches. Then one day, I looked up and saw a canopy of green covering the trees overlooking the trail. Spring had fully arrived.
I discovered that growth starts small; it’s barely noticeable at first. Pay attention to changes happening, to what’s building slowly. It’s the foundation for what wants to come forth. And the bigger message is that winter comes first; only after going through winter is spring possible.
4. Embrace fallow time
Toward the end of the spring, I was getting tired of the heaviness of continued grief. I journaled frantically that I wanted a project. Something new to give my attention to. I longed to experience the energy of summer.
Grief still had more to teach me, though. The next day, my deepest wisdom instead shared with me to embrace “fallow time.” The term is from farming. Allowing the land to lie fallow is a technique where nothing is planted for a period of time. The goal is for the land to rest and regenerate.
Fallow time was asking me to continue to honor the nothingness where dreams once were. To rest in the space before building the next beginning.
I opened to allowing the vastness of where there once was something linger without trying to rush to the next thing.
I discovered that this clearing is where the potential for what’s next would emerge.
5. Reconnect with hope
I had attached so much hope to the outcome of having two children. While hope for a realistic outcome is important and kept me going, I found out its limitations when I let go of the dream.
But hope is so much vaster than that.
One day, I unexpectedly felt the energy of expansive hope. Called transcendent hope, it is broad hopefulness that something good can happen. This form of hope reignited a light deep within me.
Hope to build the beautiful life in front of me that I had once longed for, honoring the dreams, losses and imperfectness.
6. Rebuild possibilities and dream again
Grieving and dreaming felt at odds with each other initially. It turns out, grief would create an opening and space for what wanted to emerge next. Grief was my winter season, my fallow time. It was like planting flower seeds in the fall that won’t bloom until the next spring.
I would first need to accept the past and close this chapter of my life. Then, I could connect with the potential of dreaming again.
The dreams I most wanted to nurture in 2023 were coaching and writing. In the first half of the year, the dreams moved ever so slowly or seemingly not at all.
During this time, I was taking the Playing Big Facilitator’s Training coaching program but had no energy or motivation to start building coaching as I intended.
I also kept trying to write a personal essay about aspects of my infertility journey but felt blocked. I started but kept getting stuck. So instead, I journaled, with writing prompts such as a few things I don’t know how to write about.
Something profoundly shifted within me in September 2023. I became drawn to rebuilding what could be possible in my life.
The personal essay I had attempted to write for months flowed. A story about choosing to focus on personal growth and well-being amid the challenges of burnout and infertility. The final piece would later be published in Tiny Buddha in 2024: How I Found the Good in the Difficult.
As Dr. Egar shared in her book, it was about an experience where I had choice.
September was also the month I started a positive psychology coaching certification program. One reason I selected this coaching program is because positive psychology and mindfulness had been so impactful to me while facing infertility and burnout. Simultaneously, I began offering career, life, and well-being coaching.
I had to go all the way through the intensity of the grief to understand Dr. Egar’s wisdom: “Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.”
I received so many gifts when facing infertility and burnout. Transforming my relationship with myself and my life was the most wondrous. This painful time period was the gateway, on so many levels, for me to connect with a greater sense of meaning and overall well-being. To shift to work that felt more fulfilling. To rediscover my creative self-expression, especially writing, which surprisingly impacted my personal life and work. To uncover a dream to coach others in creating change that matters to them.
My experience in a grief cocoon profoundly changed me. On the other side, I have felt more at home in myself. More at peace with my past challenges. I have sensed wholeness. With a deeper appreciation of integrating it all—the grief, pain, gifts, gratitude, and joy. I am choosing to move forward with renewed hope for fully living my life and honoring my dreams.
About Rachael Gaibel
Rachael Gaibel works as a career, life, and well-being coach who helps others get unstuck and find possibilities so they can create change that matters to them in their life and work. She also works as a leadership development content writer, strategist, and consultant. Outside of work, she is a writer, mother, wife, nature lover, and aspiring creative. Visit her website here. Check out her newsletter here.
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