Future Grief? 😢
May 12, 2022
Any creative linguists out there? I’d like a single word for a particular flavor of grief: The feeling of losing an expected future. The feeling when another fantasy bites the dust. Eg: The dream of building a family with a partner that you realize is no longer a match. Even while being grateful for the breakup, you might feel the grief of the imagined future that will no longer happen. It’s slightly different from grieving what you already had. Not anticipation of future loss, but loss of a particular anticipation. The anticipation was serving you and your psyche somehow, so you feel its absence.
I see this feeling in coaching clients fairly regularly, and being able to name it allows us to be intimate with it more fully, which means more allowance, which leads to bring more ease, flow, and vibrancy to being, as well as insight on ways to move forward. Sidenote: Looking through this lens, FOMO (fear of missing out) is a kind of grief!
With love, Jordan
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