I’m a nerd for language. When I hear something I like, I soak it up like a sponge and then share it with my communities where it may have a relevant or meaningful impact. I’ve shared words from other leaders like Confidential Grief (Dr. Lena Salpietro), noble poverty, conscious closure, metaprocessing, and Vicarious Healing (Alejandro Castro Croy). As a writer and published author, I’m also someone who attempts to put language to things I’m working on or working through, such as leadership trauma, Adverse Psychological Events (APEs), financial gatekeeping, and one that resonated with students recently: grief hangover.
In March of this year, the anniversary month of my client’s death by suicide, I took a deep dive into grief and loss books (see that blog here). It opened my eyes to what we do well as a society (minimal), and the things we could do better for the bereaved (vast). But even before that journey, I was attempting to find language for the experience of revisiting something unbelievably painful.
In 2023, when I began writing about my client’s death for a published book, I described to close colleagues and friends that I was putting myself into a “grief hangover” every time I sat down to write. It was the best language I could come up with to describe the feeling, which captured a resurgence of grief and tenderness as I sat down and relived the events before and after her death.
A week ago, the language of ‘grief hangover’ was shared with students to capture the experience of a client goes deep into painful events in therapy after weeks of surface-level processing, but then hesitating the next session due to the sheer magnitude of emotions and activation they felt. It’s exhausting for them and why wouldn’t it be? After all, we are wired to avoid pain and sometimes the therapeutic work has pain associated with it. So what helps us lean into the experience of a grief hangover rather than avoid it?
In 2023, what helped me was the mantra I said to myself repeatedly that “this is going to help more people than it’s going to hurt me.” And here in 2026, it may be that we have to feel the full spectrum of emotions or feel nothing at all. For clients, normalizing the impact of deep processing or trauma work can be validating to their experience. Naming the grief hangover by saying it can feel worse before it gets better may be appropriate. Resourcing our clients to do that deeper work is required. Of course we want to get their consent every step of the way and provide psychoeducation of the therapeutic process. And hesitation after a heavier session shows us a protective part that is attempting to keep them from further pain. It makes sense.
Enter resilience.
One definition of resilience is the capacity to bounce back and move forward after significant stress, failure, trauma or hardship. There of course isn’t an argument for bouncing back from grief because it’s not appropriate nor is it realistic with this simplicity. But what we may consider is the possibility of post-traumatic growth and resilience after loss.
For clients, this may mean taking a strengths-based approach to acknowledge their efforts to embrace change and growth. For them to recognize the usefulness of change in their lives and it outweighing the pain and stuckness they may be experiencing in the present. Encouraging clients to come up with their own mantra or self-talk that empowers them to keep showing up.
Working with clinician survivors, I have witnessed the resilience and am in awe of it. A therapist’s ability to grieve the loss of their client, overcome vicious self-talk, navigate the hits to their confidence and competence, and still find purpose and meaning in the work is inspiring. It’s also a messy road for most of us to get there. Working towards resilience means doing our own grief and loss work, connecting with community, and eventually—if we are lucky—make meaning from the experience. Grief hangovers are part of the process.
So perhaps it’s embracing the language of a grief hangover when we find ourselves tender, depleted, or raw in the experience. There’s an opportunity to resource ourselves so we can bounce back from each hangover itself. Wherever you are on the journey, just know that you aren’t alone in your experiences of grief, grief hangovers, and post-traumatic growth. I hope you can receive the gentle reminder to take it one moment, month, or season at a time.