For the Intellectualizers Who Try to Think Their Way Out of Grief.

Somatic Practices and Expressive Writing Aren’t WooWoo—They’re Neuroscience.

Dear Reader,

If you’re like me, you’ve lived most of your life in your head. You’re a smart, trauma-adapted, high-cognition person who intellectualizes your feelings and is deeply suspicious of anything that sounds mindfulness-adjacent.

For me, when things got overwhelming, I would disappear into books or movies—escape into someone else’s story so I didn’t have to feel my own. Then I’d over-plan my entire life at once, try to “fix” myself by force, burn myself out, and end up even further away from myself than before.

Intellectualizing worked. It helped me survive.

But the cost was high.

I stayed in situations that were hurting me because I could explain the pain away.
I didn’t notice myself getting exhausted, bitter, or numb—because I was used to functioning that way. I ignored my body’s signs until I had all but killed myself.

And when my dog died, I turned to old faithful: intellectualizing.
I tried to analyze my grief.
I tried to make meaning out of it.
I tried to think my way through it.

And it failed me. Because grief cannot be reasoned with. It can only be lived and processed.

If, like me, you have relied on intellectualizing negative emotions, grief is going to hit you differently. You’re used to analyzing emotions, not feeling them. You’re used to solving pain, not experiencing it.

But grief doesn’t play well with those who try to avoid it.

You learned these adaptive skills because your feelings were too overwhelming at the time you learned them. Your brain learned to protect you by shutting sensation down.

But what once protected you now blocks the very thing your body needs. Your nervous system is still trying to complete the process of attachment and loss. Learning to actually feel grief is how you let your mind and body come back into the same reality.

The Physiology of Grief

The nervous system interprets loss as threat to safety. This is because attachment bonds live in the limbic system. When you lose someone that you love, the body still expects them to return.

When Maggie died my brain logically knew she was gone, but my body didn’t. I kept reaching for her in my sleep. I kept making space for her on the couch. My nervous system was still calibrated to her presence.

When the body is out of sync, feeling the loss physiologically while the brain tries to catch up. This mismatch creates nervous system panic.

This is why grief often feels like panic, nausea, shaking, dissociation, and exhaustion.

The hardest part of grief for those of us who intellectualize our pain…You cannot think your way through an experience that is happening in your body. The part of your brain that feels grief has no language. It cannot be reasoned with. The limbic system does not respond to logic, only sensation.

So if you cannot reason your way through grief, you must physiologically regulate and allow your body to metabolize the grief.

What Are Somatic Practices and Why Do They Work?

When the loss first hits, your mind tries to fix it. Mine sure as hell tried. I tried to think my way out of pain, analyze it, blame myself for it, make meaning out of it.
But grief is not happening in your thoughts…It’s happening in your nervous system.

The part of your brain that grieves does not speak language.
It speaks sensation: pressure, shaking, heat, ache, numbness.

Somatic practices are not about calming down or getting rid of the feelings. They are how you teach your body that you are safe enough to feel what is already there.

To metabolize grief, we have to meet the body where it is—not where we think it should be. You have to let your body complete the attachment bond that was interrupted by their death.

So for now, just notice:

Where is grief showing up in your body right this moment? (Chest, throat, stomach, jaw, hands, full body)

Then describe the sensation, not the emotion. Is it tight? buzzing? trembling? heavy? empty? cold?

To intellectualizers like us, feeling grief will always feel unnatural at first. You are not doing it wrong. Your body just hasn’t had practice. The part of you that learned to survive by thinking is still trying to help you. It’s just using an old skill in a new terrain.

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Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing somatic practices, grief-writing prompts, and science-backed nervous system tools inside the paid subscriber space—the exact ones that helped me start living again after Maggie died.

*This space is created for anyone who is grieving a loss, but prompts will be specified for pet loss. *

Inside, we will:
🕯️ build personal rituals of remembrance
✍️ write to keep our loved ones from fading
🧠 learn how grief rewires the body
🤍 process together

If you’re walking through loss and don’t want to do it alone, please come join us.

With love and grief,
Jen, Maggie’s mom