Healing Isn't Letting Go. It's Refusing To.

Nick Smith
Jul 18
7 min read

No one prepares you for the grief of being the one who leaves.

We are fed a simple, clean, and utterly false story about endings. That the person who makes the decision holds all the power, and therefore, gets the clean break. That you are the one who walks away, so you must be walking toward a state of immediate peace. You made the choice, the story goes, so you should be happy now. You should be fine.

It is perhaps the most profound and devastating lie we are told about love and loss.

When you have truly loved someone, when your life has been intricately enmeshed with theirs, and you are the one who has to make the cut, the silence that follows is not peace. It is a deafening, high-frequency scream. It is a haunting. The empty space in the bed, the extra coffee cup in the cupboard, the sudden, violent realization that you can’t text them about a funny thing you just saw. It’s a war of a thousand tiny paper cuts, and you are bleeding out in a way no one can see.

You don't just move on as if they never existed. The opposite happens. They become a phantom limb; the feeling of their presence is everywhere, the reality of their absence is a constant, grinding ache.

My mind is a looping film reel of her, and I can't find the stop button.

Is she okay? How did my decision land in her world, a world I am no longer a part of? How is she navigating the wreckage I caused? Will she recover? Will she be okay? I want that for her, more than I can articulate.

I want her to have her freedom, her healing, a life of profound and unburdened beauty. The love doesn't just switch off like a breaker in a box.

It remains, a ghost in the machine of your own heart.

She and I spoke the other day about forgiveness. I carry a definition that it means to make a solemn promise to not cause additional harm. She carries a different one, that it means to let go.

My mentor, Steve Hardison, taught me that two things can be true at once. Her truth and my truth. Both are real. Both are valid. And I am learning to stand in the brutal, beautiful, holy space between those two truths without demanding that one must conquer the other.

To understand what’s really happening, we have to get our language right. Words are tools, and we need the sharpest ones.

The research gives them to us.

Grief is what you feel on the inside, the swirling chaos of sadness, anger, guilt, confusion.

Bereavement is the objective fact of the loss, the state of having been robbed, of having a part of yourself violently torn away.

And mourning is what you do on the outside, the rituals, the talking, the crying, the active process of remembering sorrowfully. You cannot just feel grief; you must also mourn if you are to survive the bereavement.

And none of this is poetry. This is physiology. This is the raw, unsparing data of neuroscience.

For months, for years, you built a shared universe. Every laugh, every argument, every secret, every touch… it all forged literal, physical superhighways in your brain.

Neuroscientists call it myelination, the process of insulating nerve fibers to make a connection faster, more efficient, more automatic. You didn't just fall in love; you paved a four-lane interstate directly to another person’s soul, and your brain’s entire map was redrawn around it. You created profound chemical bonds of oxytocin and vasopressin. You wired your nervous system to be regulated by theirs.

Someone once told me enmeshment is the worst thing for a relationship. I now see a different truth: that enmeshment, that beautiful, messy, intricate wiring of two brains and bodies together, is the entire point of deep love.

The problem isn't the bond. It’s the breaking of it.

When that connection shatters, the brain reels. It is a catastrophic systems failure. It keeps sending traffic down that superhighway, but the bridge is gone. It’s an addict whose drug of choice, the most powerful drug on the planet, the feeling of home in another person, has been ripped away without warning. The withdrawal is a visceral, body-wracking agony. The research is unsparing on this point. The old, neat "five stages of grief" model is a comforting but grossly inaccurate fiction. The reality is a biological state of siege. Your brain sees the loss as a mortal threat and floods your system with stress hormones like cortisol, which can stay elevated for six months or longer. This isn’t a feeling; it’s a chemical reality. It's your body living as if it's being hunted, 24/7. This leads to chronic inflammation, weakening your immune system. Your risk of a heart attack or stroke in the months following the loss is significantly, measurably higher. "Broken heart syndrome" isn't a metaphor; it's a medical diagnosis.

And the "grief brain," that debilitating fog where you can’t concentrate, where you lose your keys, miss appointments, and can’t follow a conversation? It’s not a personal failure. It’s not you being weak or lazy. It’s a real neurological state. Experts estimate your brain is using "99 out of 100" available mental circuits just to process the sheer magnitude of the loss. You’re operating on 1% of your normal cognitive function.

And your body is keeping the score.

So here is the foundational reframe. This is the bedrock I am trying to build on in the middle of my own wreckage. This is the only thing I truly have to offer you.

The profound, biological shattering you feel is not a sign that you made a mistake. It is the receipt. It is the objective, neurological proof of the depth, reality, and significance of the connection you built. The wreckage is the measure of the architecture. The withdrawal isn’t a weakness; it's a testament to the fact that you fused a part of your own operating system with another's. Grief is not a pathology to be cured. It is a sacred, human process to be honored.

You grieve grief by grieving it. There is no other way through.

And then, in the middle of that fire, comes the choice. Benjamin Franklin said change is the only constant. Darwin put a finer point on it: it's not the strongest or the most intelligent that survive. It is the most adaptable to change. Your ability to adapt to this new, unwelcome, and painful reality is the entire game.

So how do we do it? Modern research gives us a map, a better one than the old fairy tales. It’s called the Dual Process Model. It says healthy grieving isn’t just sitting in the pain 24/7. It’s a dynamic oscillation, a dance, between two states: confronting your pain (what they call Loss-Oriented activity, like looking at photos, crying, journaling about the loss) and dealing with the practical challenges of life without them (Restoration-Oriented activity, like doing the laundry, going back to the gym, meeting a friend, tackling new financial realities). The model gives you permission to live your life while you grieve. The dance between the two is the sign of health, not of avoidance.

And this leads to the most powerful and liberating concept of all: Continuing Bonds. The goal isn’t to "let go." It isn’t to forget. It is to find a new, different, and enduring way to maintain a connection with the love that remains. A landmark study found that 73% of people who adapt well to loss do exactly this. They talk to the person they lost. They carry on their legacy. They integrate the love into who they are now. You move forward with them, not away from them. The goal is integration, not closure. You grow your life around the grief, like a tree growing around a rock. The rock remains, a part of your foundation, but it no longer stops your growth.

I think of Erik Thureson, who lost his son. He could have been permanently consumed by the Loss-Orientation. Instead, he chose to engage in Restoration. He chose to serve, to take that impossible energy and direct it, creating new pathways of purpose. That is the dance.

This is the work. And it is done in small, intentional steps. Giants still take small steps; they’re just bigger and more intentional. Some days, those steps are so small they are micro-movements. Getting out of bed. Taking a shower. Answering one email. But they are still movement.

They are intentional.

That word, intention. It’s from the Latin intendere; "to stretch out, to extend toward." It is the perfect description of the work. On your worst days, the "stretching toward" is simply the choice to inhale and exhale one more time. That is the work.

Nobody else can do it for you. Nobody can breathe for you, eat for you, or do your emotional push-ups. No one can go to the gym and give you their muscles. How convenient would it be if they did all the reps and I got the results? But that’s not how life works. We each have to do our own work. To depend on anyone else for our own peace is, as Byron Katie says, to choose to suffer in paradise.

So take the good from what was. Learn from the bad. Use the anger. Anger, in the right titration, is the fire that forges the new path. Too much, and it destroys everything. But just enough is the alchemical heat we need to transform lead into something more precious.

This is my work right now. Today. To honor the love that was by refusing to pathologize the pain that is. To see the grief not as an obstacle to be overcome, but as a sacred testament to be carried. To let it carve me into the man I am supposed to become next.

What would change for you, right now, if you stopped trying to “get over” your grief, and instead asked what it is trying to help you grow into?

Follow my journey as I walk this path.

We teach the tools for this kind of intentional, adaptive work in our program. The link is in my bio. Reach out if it calls you!