08/07/2026
The many faces of grief are not owned.
Grief has many forms. I know some would say those of us that have living estranged children are not warranted to call our pain grief.
Maybe.
Maybe we should use loss or simply the word pain.
I know I am grieving, so with the best of Intentions and no ill will meant I must call it what it feels like to me.
Grief.
I resonate deeply with this story.
I am not the same person I was before my love was severed.
Before my expectations lost a future reality.
Before my identity left as his mother.
Now I know my brain has changed and that makes sense.
Nothing is the same for me.
Not the way Interact with my loved ones.
Not the way I see myself
Not the way I plan for my future.
I am just a different soul and now the brain has obvious changes too.
The new brain in me is not bad.
It’s slower and more patient.
It holds a deeper, felt sense of being present with those I care for.
I am unapologetically real.
I realize nothing else matters but that way of living.
From truth.
From honesty.
I hope this research resonates for you as well.
For even though we are grateful that our children are living their lives, their way.
We have no memories to log.
The children we carried in our wombs own children will not bring joy to our hallways nor our hearts.
The silence of those little feet in the hallways can be the loudest thing some nights.
There is light here too.
I am a better soul, human and even maybe brain than I was before the pain.
I am braver, bolder, fearless even.
I have looked my pain square in the eye.
What’s left is courage and what’s to worry about or fear over?
I am thawing.
I am walking clarity and all from my unraveling.
I have lost and found myself along the way.
We hope you feel that way too
~Tami & The Herd Blakely Ranch
🚨 According to Research about our Brain :
This is for the person who has been, underneath everything else, waiting to feel like themselves again.
Who has been enduring the current chapter with the unspoken assumption that healing means eventually returning to the person they were before the loss, before the heartbreak, before the thing that changed everything.
Who has been measuring their recovery by how close they feel to that previous self, and finding themselves falling short in ways that compound the original grief with a secondary grief nobody warned them about.
Grief researchers have a name for this secondary grief. The loss of the self that existed before.
Psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman at the University of Massachusetts studied what she called shattered assumptions following major loss, specifically the fundamental beliefs about the world and about oneself that are disrupted by significant trauma or grief.
Her research found that one of the most universally reported but least publicly discussed aspects of major loss is the permanent alteration of the person’s sense of self, the recognition, often dawning slowly rather than arriving all at once, that the person they were before the loss is genuinely not coming back, because the loss itself is now permanently part of who they are.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s research on the self and its neural foundations supports this finding from a biological perspective.
The brain’s sense of self is not a fixed, static structure stored somewhere and retrieved intact. It is a dynamic, continuously updated construct assembled in real time from the current state of the body, the current emotional landscape, the current memories, and the current ongoing experiences of the person.
A significant loss does not simply leave a gap in this construct. It actively changes the inputs the brain is working with, producing a self that is genuinely and permanently different from the one that existed before.
This is not a reason for despair, though it can initially feel like one.
The research on post traumatic growth, documented extensively by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, found that many people who stopped trying to return to their pre-loss self and instead allowed the changed self to fully emerge reported a depth of self knowledge, clarity of values, and sense of what actually matters that the pre-loss self did not have access to. Not because the loss was good.
But because the person who survived it, who built themselves around it and through it rather than trying to remain unchanged by it, developed a kind of depth and authenticity that was genuinely new.
You are not a damaged version of who you were. You are a different version of who you were.
And that version, with everything it has survived and everything it has learned and everything it now carries and knows that it did not know before, is allowed to be something worth becoming, rather than simply a diminished approximation of someone you are no longer able to be.
