Congratulate Yourself: You're Coping With Grief

Congratulations.

No, really. Congratulations.

You are doing it. You are surviving. You are breathing in, breathing out, and taking one step and then another. Before now, none of that would have felt like an achievement. But that was before you started moving through the dark with a broken heart.

Over time, one truth becomes clear: coping with grief is mostly about the small things. Tiny steps that nudge your sense of wellbeing a little closer to "okay," bit by bit by bit. The hard part is that grief can feel like slow, ongoing work. The good part is that the work comes in doses you can handle, and the odds are you are already doing it. So congratulations. You are coping with grief.

Many of you will want to wave off the praise, because grief has a way of breeding a kind of false modesty. People often feel like they aren't enough, usually because they hold themselves up against who they were before the loss, or against some picture of who they should be. If that is you, stop right now. When you measure yourself against your before-grief self, or against some flawless version of the future you, you risk missing the small wins you rack up every day, and never seeing how far you have actually come.

Far too often, grieving people are hard on themselves for not managing to get over it, pull it together, hold it together, go back to normal, stay strong, be inspiring, grow, or grieve the "right" way. But here is the thing. Some of those goals simply can't be met. There is no getting over it, no going back to normal, no right way to grieve. And the rest? You are almost certainly already doing them, in quiet, small ways, every single day.

So, at the risk of sounding a little corny, here is the ask. Take a moment to congratulate yourself for the steps you have taken through your grief. However bad you feel, however much you think you are struggling, there is at least one thing worth recognizing right now.

Congratulate yourself for getting out of bed today. It doesn't matter what time it was, or how soon you crawled back in. You did it.

Congratulate yourself for getting dressed. So the only clean thing in the closet was an old velour tracksuit from the early 2000s? It still counts.

Congratulate yourself for the schoolwork, the work-work, or the housework you managed. You've given up washing windows? Smudged windows have character.

Congratulate yourself for reaching out for grief support. Even if all you managed was reading one odd little grief article, that is still a first step.

Congratulate yourself for finding ways to grow, even though you would trade every bit of that growth to have your person back.

You get the idea.

Try this as a journaling exercise

Congratulating yourself makes for a lovely journal prompt. Sit with it for a while and simply finish the sentence:

I want to congratulate myself for ___________________________________________

Say it out loud

Give yourself real credit, plainly and without apology. Name one thing you deserve to be congratulated for, or name a few. Then, if you can, offer the same to someone else who is grieving. Recognize the good work another person is doing. It feels good.