Grief is a constellation of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Litsa Williams co-founded What’s Your Grief? to assist with the process.
Episode Notes
This month, I’d like to introduce you to Litsa Williams. She’s a Licensed Clinical Social Worker from Baltimore, Maryland, and the co-founder of a website called What’s Your Grief? which you can find at whatsyourgrief.com. She co-founded the site with her friend and fellow counselor from Baltimore, Eleanor Haley. They’ve since built it into a significant online community, along with their grief services coordinator, Mary Manera. Litsa and Eleanor also published a book in 2022 by the name of What’s Your Grief? Lists to Help You Through Any Loss.
Whatsyourgrief.com is now an amazing place if you ever find yourself needing to process grief or to help someone else who is experiencing a loss. I realized while talking with Litsa and while reading her book that grief is super complicated, and it has a lot of layers and dependencies that affect how intense it can be. It’s one of those topics that we tend to put off thinking about until we absolutely have to.
Fortunately for us, the site offers articles, webinars, a newsletter, a podcast, and a thriving community for when we need it. Litsa and the team also offer courses, even professional development courses for caregivers, that have been approved by the American Psychological Association. They point out that What’s Your Grief? isn’t intended to replace professional advice, but that doesn’t discount how valuable the site can be. The next time you want to prepare for a grieving process or if you find yourself in the middle of one, check out What’s Your Grief?
I can’t overstate how major it is to me that Litsa agreed to talk with me. She told me she still serves as a clinician part-time here in Baltimore for the field experience, and that What’s Your Grief? is usually her main focus. As active as she is on the site with writing, recording a podcast, responding to emails and social media comments, and her field work, I wasn’t sure if she would have time to talk with me. I’m really excited that she saw what The Plural of You was about and made time for all of us.
Here’s my conversation with Litsa Williams, Licensed Clinical Social Worker and the co-founder of What’s Your Grief?
Related Links
- Check out What’s Your Grief? at whatsyourgrief.com.
Interview Transcript
Josh: I was in the Ivy Bookshop yesterday on Falls Road here in Baltimore.
Litsa: Yeah, one of my favorite bookshops.
Josh: I was not expecting to see this: your book, What’s Your Grief? [Josh holds up the book.]
Litsa: Yes! I was there recently. I saw it up in their psychology section and was excited about it as well.
Josh: Yeah, but it’s a good thing I picked it up. Because I bought it yesterday, I haven’t had time to read the whole thing, obviously, but I’ve gotten about a third of the way through it.
Litsa: Oh, wow.
Josh: It’s a good reminder for me, and I know this subconsciously, but grief isn’t always about death. It’s just a general response to loss. I think there’s a part in the book where you describe grief as a constellation of thoughts and feelings and emotions, that sort of thing. It encapsulates a lot of different things.
I was realizing, flipping through the book, that it’s such a complicated thing to talk about. There’s a lot of knowledge and a lot of moving parts that you can discuss.
I’m glad I found the book, not only because you wrote it, but like I said, it’s a good reminder of what grief is.
Litsa: Oh yeah. Thank you. I think that was one of our big priorities in writing the book was, we’ve always felt that there was this whole entire community and world of people out there who felt like they weren’t entitled to use the word grief because they were going through something that wasn’t a death. We were working with people in so many different communities who had so much loss. You might go through a divorce or you have children in foster care, or you lose your entire career because of a health issue. I mean, massive things that we go through in our lives.
People would feel like they couldn’t use that word. It was so important to us to help people to say no, from a mental health perspective, grief is our normal and natural response to any significant loss that we go through. When you’re able to use that word, I think it opens you up to a whole new way of thinking about what resources are going to help you, what sorts of coping tools are going to be good for you, and also just to validate the depths and the significance of your experience. Sometimes people feel like, yes, it feels like grief, but I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to call it that.
I think we hear a lot of feedback from people saying it was a relief to hear a grief therapist saying, yes, that is grief. Even if it’s not death, it’s still grief.
Josh: Why focus on grief specifically? What is it about grief that interests you so much?
Litsa: When I got into this work and when I met Eleanor, who I wrote that book with and co-founded What’s Your Grief? the organization with, it was— When we met back in 2009, grief was still something that really, people even in the mental health space, were not talking much about. You could go through a Master’s and PhD program in counseling, social work, psychology, and not take a single class on grief. It was wild. We were fascinated by this.
We met working in hospitals across the state of Maryland with people at the time of a loved one’s traumatic and unexpected death. We had this unique role where we met them at the hospital, and we provided grief support for two years following the death of their family member. In the hospitals, we would find nurses, doctors were so uncomfortable about death and grief. These were folks who are seeing it and working with death every day.
I think we became motivated when we were in that role to start exploring the resources that were out there. We were working with a lot of families at that time who, for various reasons, weren’t always interested in the type of grief support that our organization was able to offer. Traditionally, you heard, go to counseling, go to a support group. That’s a lot of what our organization was doing. There were a lot of people out there who were just like, “I’m not interested in coming in and talking with a bunch of strangers about my grief,” or “I’ve got barriers.” Like, “I don’t have childcare.” “I don’t have time to get over across town to that particular center to go to a group.”
We were looking for, well, what else is out there? What’s available? What grief resources exist in different communities? There was just so little.
I think that inspired us as well, is that we felt like, wow, especially if you don’t want to go to counseling or a support group, there’s not much that you can find. The Internet was a bit of a wasteland when it came to grief at that point. That has changed, thank goodness, in the years since, but there was so little there.
We complained and complained and complained, you know, as, as many organizations start, I think it comes from noticing a gap, complaining for a long time about the gap and then finding, finally deciding to do something about it.
That was why we felt like, we’re working with grievers. We have personal loss that is part of our own lives. You know, my dad died when I was 18. My sister’s partner, who was like a member of our family, he died of an overdose when I was 26.
Josh: Oh, my gosh.
Litsa: Those were both formative to me, understanding just the impact of loss and seeing that there just weren’t more resources available. When I was working in this space and seeing how many people needed resources, it just felt like if I’m going to do something with my life, if I’m going to start a project and organization, this seemed like the most important thing to me to work on grief.
Josh: That all sounds like a very considerate approach, because, like you said, not everyone’s going to feel comfortable going to see a therapist or seeking what might be traditionally recommended to them. We do have the Internet now. That is a positive way to gather resources, like you said.
Litsa: Absolutely. I think one misconception about grief is that you have to talk about it, you know? That goes back to Freud. Freud said in psychology, like, “People have to talk about their feelings in order to process them.” What the research actually shows is, yes, we have to find ways to process our grief, but they’ve also found that people don’t necessarily have to talk to a counselor or a support group. It doesn’t have to be verbal.
Lots of people use creative expression and writing and things that they do on their own and are absolutely able to cope with their loss in that way. We wanted to expand that and help people know that this is legitimate. If you want to explore your grief through learning and writing and creativity and, you know, in your own community support space, you’re not doing it wrong by not exploring those things. This is just another outlet, another way that you might decide to cope with your grief.
Josh: Since then, I think you started the site in 2012. Is that correct?
Litsa: Yes, we started the very end of 2012, going into that holiday season of 2012.
Josh: Okay. Since then, you’ve built a serious community around the website. It’s impressive.
It’s funny. I was talking with my therapist earlier this week, and I mentioned that I would be having a conversation with you, and he said, “Oh, What’s Your Grief? I recommend that site to my patients all the time!”
Litsa: Oh, that’s so nice to hear!
Josh: I admire what you built. You have the Grief Hub, you have different webinars, podcasts, and then, of course, social media. I’m just impressed that you’ve built so much. Obviously, it’s been a long time coming because it’s been, what, twelve years or something like that?
Litsa: Thank you.
Josh: It’s nice to see.
Litsa: Yeah, thank you. It’s a labor of love that has grown over time, and there have been things we’ve started. We always say, throw things at the wall and see what sticks and what are people using and what are they not using. We’ve started different projects and initiatives over the years, and sometimes we’re like, “Oh, this one didn’t stick. Get rid of this and bring in something new.” I think that’s allowed us to hone a space that works for people in all different ways of grieving.
Josh: Do you have a favorite story or two where you felt like the website, or maybe your work outside as a licensed clinical social worker, where that’s made a difference in someone else’s life?
Litsa: That’s such a good question.
I think over the course of my career, there’s been a lot of stories. I think one life example I’ll give is that up until COVID, for six years, Eleanor and I used to run groups in the Fallsway shelter, the homeless shelter under [Interstate] 83—or next to 83. That was a space where there were a lot of people there who had experienced death loss.
Again, there were a lot of people there who just had experienced this series of non-death losses that had brought them to experience homelessness. We’ve always been passionate about non-death loss, as I said with the book.
I think what crystallized it for us because the number of people who we had open groups, and they would come in and say, “I haven’t had anybody die recently, but I feel like I’m grieving. Am I welcome in this space?” People [were] coming and using those groups and getting so much out of it and feeling like, not seen as people sometimes in their day-to-day life, certainly feeling like people had not understood or seen the many losses they had been through to end up where they were. They were trying to both figure out where they’re going to live, figuring out how to get back on their feet, and trying to process and grieve all of these experiences.
I think for us, that was just such an important piece of our work, and it helped give us a new appreciation and insight into how compounded losses become so hard to grieve when we’re just struggling to get our basic needs met. Now I’m always passionate about people who are interested in offering more grief services to those experiencing homelessness. I think that was one.
In the online space, I think probably our work around guilt and regret, I can think of this one woman in particular who took one of our online courses. She sent us this message saying, “I had held so much guilt because the CPR that I did on my family member, basically, it wasn’t successful,” right? They tried to do CPR, and the person still died. This [is a] course where we help people to try to think about guilt and regret and understand where we were at the time.
So often we feel guilt about things where we were doing the absolute best we could with what we had, but the outcome just, it wasn’t what we wanted. It wasn’t what we hoped for. How [do we] start to forgive ourselves for some of those things and show ourselves compassion?
I just remember this message where she said, “This was the first time I was finally able to show myself some compassion and recognize that I was doing the best I could with what I had at the time and to finally feel like maybe I could let go of some of that guilt.” I just remember getting that message and thinking like, “Oh, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
When you put things in the online space, you don’t always know who’s consuming them, who’s reading, who’s listening, who’s taking. That message was a big reinforcement of, like, yeah, we’re doing the right thing, all this work, we’re making this content, and it is affecting people.
Josh: I know that can be— regret can be a common response to loss, at least from my experience. I’m glad you’re able to help that person out. That’s wonderful.
How has being involved with grief education helped you in your own journey?
Litsa: I think it has in so many ways that I never would have guessed has impacted my own journey. I underestimated how much it would help me to process both losses I had already had, but also losses I would face in my own life that came up.
I always say all the time, it doesn’t matter that you’re a grief therapist or how educated you are about grief. When you go through another loss, there’s nothing that prepares you or that changes the pain of devastating losses.
I think that went through Covid. I went through several deaths of friends and family members, all of which were unexpected. I think being connected to so many grievers and such an incredible community, it helped. It has helped me so much to just remember that I am not alone. I mean, so deeply.
Grief feels so isolating, so easy to feel our pain. No one can understand it. It’s so unique, and in so many ways that’s true. No one can ever truly know our loss.
Every day I just look around at the world, and I think everyone’s carrying something huge on their shoulders. So much of it is often some type of loss, whether that’s recent or in their remote past. It’s just part of who we are.
I think [knowing] that has helped me in my own life to just remember that grief is not the enemy. It’s not something that is not supposed to happen in our lives, that it is just one of the many human experiences we have and is so hard, but it’s part of what we do as humans. That connection, I think, has made all the difference in my own life and in the way I see the world.
Josh: It’s a little fortuitous that I reached out to you when I did because I’ve actually had a couple of losses in my own life recently.
Litsa: Oh, I’m so sorry.
Josh: Yeah, my next-door neighbor passed away from leukemia a couple weeks ago, and then— you may know this person. They worked at the Baltimore Furniture Bank. His name was Damien Haussling.
Litsa: Damien! Oh, my gosh. I worked so closely with Damien at Fusion.
Josh: Fusion Partnerships in Baltimore.
Litsa: Yeah. A partner advisory council, reps together on the board. I was heartbroken to see that had happened. I didn’t realize you knew Damien.
Josh: Yeah, actually, I interviewed him in 2021. We weren’t like exactly close, but it’s still like—wow. It’s sad.
Litsa: Absolutely. No, I think those are those losses, I think— when it is those people that are not necessarily close, when it’s the people we’re really, close to, again, I think we know we have permission to grieve. We know that this is something that is going to impact us and we’re going to feel emotionally.
I think sometimes for people, it’s almost more complicated in how they think about their grief when it is someone where we think, well, I didn’t talk to that person every day. It’s not like they were necessarily my good friend or my family member or my neighbor, but they had a significant impact on us or we had a relationship with them where they left an imprint on us in a very real way. That relationship was there.
Of course we grieve those people. We feel the weight of those losses. Sometimes it’s harder to know how to remember them, how to connect. Sometimes if you didn’t have a good friend group with other people who knew the person well, then suddenly you’re looking for people to remember with and share memories and, you know, you don’t always have that. I don’t know if that necessarily is the case for you.
I feel that way a little bit about Damien. I knew other people who worked with him in the community. Since I learned about his death, I haven’t had that piece that can be so comforting for us in many losses where we’re able to get together with other people and remember and talk about what we’re going through. That can be hard, really.
I’m so sorry you had those so close together. It compounds it when we’re processing multiple losses at the same time and trying to make sense of it all.
Josh: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that.
I realize when I ask a question, like I’m about to ask, that there’s no one right answer or there’s no one solution because grief can come in many forms.
Litsa: Mm-hmm.
Josh: Having set that context, how can someone that’s grieving better process what they’re going through?
Litsa: Yeah, this is a good and big question. I think there’s a couple things to consider.
I think one is in terms of thinking about where’s the best space or whatever, the best resources or outlets, sometimes thinking about what your leanings are in general apart from grief. Are you somebody who likes to talk to other people and process your feelings in that way? Does it help you to sit down and be heard by another person or connect with shared experience? If that resonates with you, you’re somebody where a support group or a therapist might be a great fit to be able to reach out for that support.
If you’re someone who goes, oh, no, that’s not me, but I love learning. I’m a little bit more— when I go through any sort of experience, I want to read about it, I want to understand it, I want to deconstruct it. You may be a little bit more of what they call sometimes an “instrumental griever”. Instrumental grievers tend to be a little bit more cognitive in the way that they grieve. Intuitive grievers tend to be a little more emotional in the way that they grieve.
Neither is better than the other, both of them, the outcomes, neither copes better or worse or processes better or worse. It’s just different ways of doing it.
If you realize that you’re a little bit more instrumental, sometimes reading books about grief, listening to podcasts about grief, those sorts of things may be more helpful. Also, instrumental grievers sometimes tend to be a little bit more physical and action-oriented. They might like to do something. They might want to plan a memorial service. They might want to just sometimes do things that don’t even look like grief. They get into building something or creating something, but it’s that they feel good when they’re moving and maybe thinking about the loss in a more meditative way, but they’re not necessarily talking about it. They’re using those outlets.
Thinking about that and knowing that that is a spectrum— It’s not that you’re in one bucket or the other. Some people lean both ways, but that’s a good thing to consider just as a foundation of what type of space might be more helpful for me.
The other piece then I think that’s important to look at is thinking about all those different domains of life and how loss is impacting you. As we talk about in the book and as you mentioned in the beginning, we talk about that people think of grief as an emotional experience. You know, what are all my feelings?
There are so many other things beyond just our feelings that are affected. It is our relationships and our identity. It can be our spirituality. It can be existential, where we start to question what we’re doing in the world, in our own mortality, looking at all of the different areas of your life that have been impacted by the loss and noticing what those impacts are, and thinking about how you may want to get some support with some of them. Process. Write about some of them. Just think about those different ways.
The other piece, I would say is that thinking about that every primary loss often creates this cascade of secondary losses that go with it.
Josh: That’s a good point. Yes.
Litsa: Recognizing all those losses, sometimes people will think like, why am I taking this so hard? Why am I being impacted by a loss that doesn’t feel as big as a loss I went through ten years ago?
Often what they’re underestimating is that one primary loss, it knocked over some other dominoes. When we lose a job, for instance, we often have a huge community of coworkers who were a meaningful part of our day-to-day life. Now maybe you haven’t stayed in touch with them, and you feel that loss of community. It may be that now you’re feeling a loss of your self-confidence, and that self-confidence is impacting you. In that beginning stage of how do I start to process this? [look] at all the secondary losses as well.
You have a full scope of what your processing, why it’s big, and why you need to give yourself the time and the space and the support to deal with it.
Josh: Yeah. Wow, that’s good advice. I appreciate you sharing all of that.
I just watched a video on your YouTube channel about what to say to someone who may be going through a grieving process. I know that’s another question that has a lot of different potential responses. Is there like a short way you can answer that?
Litsa: I think the thing that we try to focus on with people is maybe a little bit more of a philosophical approach to thinking about it, of remembering that you’re there for support and you’re not there to take away their pain.
What I always recommend is just check in with people and ask what they need. When it’s me and it’s one of my friends and they’re going through something, I say, I’m going to check in with you every week. I’m going to keep texting you to check in and see what you need until you tell me, like, stop it. You’re bothering me. I’m going to offer things when they pop into my mind, it might be all wrong. Like just say no if that’s something you don’t want.
If something pops into your mind where you think, like, wow, I just wish somebody would come over here and do my laundry. Please text me and I will come over here and do your laundry just to let people know that we’re here. And yes, you can tell me to go away. I’d always rather have someone tell me to go away and stop checking in than for me to go away and them to feel like I abandoned them or that I ghosted them or that I wasn’t there. I think just navigating a little bit of that.
The biggest thing we hear from people and that the research shows is I just want to know that people aren’t going to be scared off by my pain. I think anything that we can do to acknowledge how devastating what they’ve been through is and to let them know in whatever your own words are, I’m able to be here and be present with your pain. I’m not going to try to find the silver lining, or sugar-coat it, or tell you that you need to just buck up and look on the bright side.
The one never that we will say is, if you feel yourself about to start a sentence with “At least…,” try to catch yourself there. “At least she lived a long life.” “At least she’s not suffering anymore.” All those things might be true. They might say those things to you, the griever, in which case, of course, you can affirm it, but you don’t want to be the person who’s throwing the “at least” into the conversation because it can feel minimizing.
Josh: As we wind down here. I wanted to ask, obviously, you have the website, whatsyourgrief.com. I mentioned before that you have lots of different ways that your community can interact with you. Would you mind going through the list of ways that people can get involved if they want to get involved with the community?
Litsa: Yeah, absolutely. The best way to see the big picture of everything, like you said, is if you go to whatsyourgrief.com and signing up for our email newsletter. That’s where we share new articles, new podcasts, but also what’s coming up, what we’re offering. We do free webinars periodically. We do a lot of different new offerings that come out.
Then we have our social media, which is @whatsyourgrief. The main places that we’re active with that are Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. We are on TikTok and YouTube, but we don’t use those quite often. [Litsa scrunches his face.]
Josh: [laughs] People can’t see your face that you just made, but I like the face you made. Kind of like— [Josh scrunches his face.]
Litsa: [laughs] We’re too old for TikTok, but we are there.
Josh: [laughs]
Litsa: We then have places on the website where you can just do some creative expression that connects with us. We have a Grief Recipes area where if you have recipes that are connected to your grief that you like to make and stories about them that you can submit and share, and we reshare those.
We have Grief Secrets, which is a project where people— It’s inspired by PostSecret, where sometimes people are carrying things with their grief that feel hard to share. You can submit those to us either by a physical postcard or online and read other people’s secrets.
We have a little sub-site that’s called Grief in Six Words, where people can submit their six-word stories about grief. That is something that many people resonate with, even if they don’t feel like they’re writers, just reading other people’s work and submitting.
We have certain things that are low-key ways to connect without having to follow us on social [media] or get the newsletter if you just want to do some of those one off things. And then if you’re looking for something more.
Our Grief Hub is a membership space. It is all sorts of things that we offer in there. There’s a forum to connect with other people. We do webinars. We have a grief cafe twice a month there. That’s like a grief support group. We have befriending grief sessions, creative writing sessions.
We have lots of stuff in our member hub, and that is $19 a month as a membership fee. We never want cost to be a barrier for anything we do, including our courses and things like that. Always just email us if cost is an issue.
Then we have online courses for people who are grieving, but also continuing education for professionals.
Josh: That’s so cool.
Is there anything I haven’t asked that you wanted to talk about?
Litsa: You covered everything.
One more thing I’ll mention just because it didn’t come up, but it’s the thing that I always want people to know. Sometimes people will think like, is it too late? My loss was 15 years ago. Can I still go to grief counseling? Can I still access support? One thing that I think is so important to know is just grief stays with us forever. I don’t want that to sound daunting, because it doesn’t feel the way that it feels in the beginning forever. It evolves.
Josh: I was about to say it evolves. Right.
Litsa: We’re always having new things come up in life that reactivate grief, sometimes from losses that happened many years ago. I said at the beginning, you know, my dad died when I was 18, and there are still times where something hits me like a ton of bricks and knocks me over, and I’m in my own therapy talking about how it’s brought up, something about, you know, the loss of my dad.
I think just knowing that’s completely normal— you’re not grieving wrong. If you’re still dealing with stuff years later, there’s no cutoff for seeking support, whether it’s What’s Your Grief?, another grief counselor, or another support area, please. I always want people to know that, if they’re feeling like this is something that’s important to give some space and time, it doesn’t matter how long it’s been. It’s always important to do that.
Josh: Well, I feel like I could talk to you all day. You’re a rock star in this space. I’m humbled that you made time to talk with me, so thank you so much, Litsa. I appreciate it.
Litsa: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it, and for what you’re doing with the podcast. I think it’s so important.