I Focused So Much on My Healing That I Forgot to Live

My work is expanding as my life experiences evolve.

What I learned inside pregnancy loss turned out to be true of loss itself, so I'm following the work where it’s been leading me for a while now, under a name it didn't have before: pleasure-based grief integration.

Before I tell you where I'm going though, I need to tell you how I got here because somewhere in all those years of trying to heal, regulate, process, understand, release, integrate and become a better version of myself, I forgot to live.

And whew, that was an inconvenient thing to realize for a woman who had gotten very good at healing.

If you came to me through baby loss, nothing about that part of my work is being erased or retired, but I'll come back to that later because you deserve to hear me speak about that directly. First, I want to talk about what changed.

What's changing

For years, my work lived almost exclusively inside pregnancy loss. That's what I experienced, it's where I trained, the women in this community are who I sat with, and it's where almost every idea I’m now teaching was first tested, questioned and explored.

But eventually I had to admit that the work didn't just belong there.

Your body doesn't check the category your loss falls under before responding to it. It doesn't say, Oh, this was a divorce, proceed with this practice. Death of a parent? Nervous system dysregulation is down that particular path. The body responds to attachment, rupture, shock, meaning, witness, safety, identity, what disappeared, what changed, and what the loss required you to become afterward.

Those things don't always follow the hierarchy we've inherited, where death sits at the top and every other kind of loss waits somewhere underneath waiting for permission to actually count for something.

So my work is expanding to meet women grieving the losses that changed them, including the ones that never received a ceremony, a leave of absence or, sometimes, even an acknowledgment. Underneath that expansion is something I had to learn the hard way about my own grief.

The years of doing it right

I came to grief the way I'd learned to come to almost everything before it: as a chemist.

A background in analytical chemistry and more than fifteen years in healthcare will give you a particular relationship with problems. You read the literature, develop a hypothesis, control what you can control, isolate the variable, run the experiment, examine the results and adjust.

It seemed to be an excellent way to think, and for most of my life, it worked.

So when loss entered the picture, I did what I knew how to do. I studied it.

I read books on grief, trauma, and studied the nervous system. I became a certified trauma-informed loss practitioner, holistic practitioner, Reiki master, breathwork practitioner and herbalist because each discipline seemed to hold another piece of the puzzle. I found practitioners, received the work, learned the work, practiced and lived the work.

Lisssen, when I tell you I was committed to healing, I mean I had credentials for my credentials.

None of it was wasted. Every certification taught me something, every skilled practitioner and mentor who held space for me gave me something I still carry, and every practice helped me understand myself differently.

The problem wasn't that I'd done too much healing. The problem was that, without realizing it, healing had become the organizing principle of my life.

Everything pointed toward getting “better,” and that's surprisingly difficult to recognize from inside your experience because it looks a whole lot like commitment.

But there ain’t no graduation ceremony for healing. There's no little woman with a clipboard waiting at the end saying, Congratulations, girl. You've sufficiently processed your trauma. Here's your certificate. Please proceed to living.

Nothing tells you when you're finished, and I had entered the process with the full force of a woman who doesn't like leaving things incomplete.

So I kept going.

By the fourth year, I could describe what was happening inside my nervous system with a precision that impressed clinicians. I could identify my triggers, track sensations, regulate, process and understand what was happening in my body.

What I couldn't have told you was the last time I'd deeply wanted something. That should've told me everything I needed to know, but it didn't. Not yet.

The noticing

What’s interesting is there wasn't a dramatic breakdown. No rock-bottom moment, no cinematic scene where I suddenly understood the meaning of life. There's a cultural appetite for those stories, but mine wasn't one of them.

Mine was much quieter.

Someone asked me what I'd been enjoying lately. Not what I was working through, what I was healing, what I'd learned or even how I was doing. She simply asked what I'd been enjoying... and I didn't have much of an answer.

That bothered me because I should've been able to answer the question. And because apparently the chemist in me never clocks out, what stayed with me afterward was the accuracy of the question.

It was a good instrument, and babyyyy... it measured something real.

I'd spent years restoring my capacity to function, regulate, understand and sit with what happened. Those were real capacities and I'd genuinely restored them. But in all that time, almost none of my attention had gone toward restoring my capacity to receive, desire, anticipate, enjoy, be surprised or feel good without immediately questioning why.

I'd gotten very good at surviving my life. I wasn't nearly as practiced at actually participating in it.

What grief does to the size of your life

The contraction

Grief contracts and it usually begins in the body. Your chest tightens, your breathing gets shallow, sleep and appetite change, your tolerance for stimulation shifts, and the range of sensation your body is willing to hold narrows toward whatever feels manageable at the moment.

Which isn’t dysfunction. It's protection, and your body is so intelligent.

When something enormous happens, your system reduces the amount of incoming information so it can manage what's already there. The problem is that contraction doesn't always stay in your body. Eventually, it can start influencing your decisions.

You decline invitations, order the same meals, take the familiar route around the city, stop calling certain people, stop starting things and stop imagining too far into the future. It's not because you're consciously deciding to make your life smaller. Novelty, desire and possibility all require some willingness to believe there's a future worth moving toward, and grief can shake that belief.

One reasonable little decision at a time, your life can begin to contract around you.

The wild part is that people may praise you for it. They'll call it strength, grace or resilience. They'll tell you, You're handling this so well.

Meanwhile, you may have quietly constructed your life to ask almost nothing of you because asking for nothing feels safer than wanting something you could lose.

And that's not failure, but it is worth noticing.

Why “healing” didn't undo it

Grief researchers have understood for decades that healthy grieving involves oscillation. We move between being oriented toward the loss and being oriented toward living, and both matter.

Living isn't what happens after grief. Living is part of grieving.

That distinction changed everything for me because when I looked honestly at what I'd been practicing, I realized there wasn't much oscillation in it. Almost every tool I'd learned was aimed at reducing distress inside my existing life.

Regulate this, understand that, process this, and don’t forget to release that.

All of it was useful, but almost none of it asked the question that eventually mattered most: Sis, is your life getting larger? Is it expanding?

That was the variable I hadn't been measuring.

I'd spent years becoming better at existing inside the contraction. Grief made my world smaller, and then, without meaning to, healing kept me that size.

Whew. That one took a minute.

The question everything now rests on

Eventually, a different question emerged:

What if grief isn't something we heal from, but something we integrate through the restoration of our capacity for pleasure?

Before somebody pictures champagne, vacations and a bubble bath with candles burning around it, let me be very clear about what I mean by pleasure.

Pleasure is the capacity to receive.

To receive beauty, sensation, warmth, taste, connection, curiosity, rest, laughter, joy, touch and desire. It's that moment when something feels good and your body is actually able to register it instead of rushing straight past it.

Pleasure, as I use the word, isn't indulgence or excess. It isn't a reward you earn for suffering long enough, and it sure as hell isn't proof that you've finished grieving.

Pleasure is a physiological capacity. It's your body's ability to let something nourishing, interesting, beautiful or satisfying in, and grief often impacts that capacity.

That's why someone can put your favorite meal in front of you, but taste doesn’t hit like it used to. It's why the song no longer moves you, the invitation sounds exhausting, or something can be objectively beautiful and your body responds with a polite little meh.

The world is still offering sensation, but your system simply may not have the capacity to receive much of it yet.

That's where my work changed because pleasure isn't the opposite of grief, it isn't what replaces grief, and it isn't the reward for “completing” it.

Pleasure is one of the ways your body remembers it can still receive.

A body that can receive can begin to expand around what it carries. Your grief doesn't have to disappear for your life to become larger. That's the work.

Why baby loss was never the boundary

Once I understood this, I started recognizing the pattern everywhere.

I saw it in the woman whose marriage ended and who no longer knew who she was outside of it. The woman whose career disappeared and took half her identity with it. The woman navigating estrangement from someone who's still alive. The woman whose body changed, whose friendship ended, the woman grieving the future she thought she'd have, and the one who lost a parent and suddenly became the person everyone else leaned on.

Different losses, different stories, but underneath them I kept seeing the same contraction, the same competence covering up their pain, the same disappearing desire and the same question: Who am I now that this happened?

Often, the losses receiving the least witness were carrying an enormous amount of weight because there was no funeral, ritual or socially sanctioned period of mourning. Sometimes there wasn't even language for what happened.

There was just a woman standing in the middle of her life knowing something ended while everyone around her continued as though nothing had happened.

That's when I understood that pregnancy loss wasn't the boundary of my work.

It was the birthplace of it.

To the women who were here first

If you came to me through baby loss, I'm speaking specifically to you now.

This work exists because of what you trusted me with. Full stop.

Pregnancy loss is where I first learned to listen differently to grief. It's where these ideas began, and it's where I learned what happens when a loss changes not only what you have, but who you understand yourself to be.

Expanding my work doesn't require me to abandon its origin, just as expanding your life doesn't require you to abandon what you lost.

If the word pleasure feels unbearable to you right now, honor that. There's no schedule or assignment you're failing. Your body is communicating its current capacity, and your job isn't to bully it into being somewhere else.

If this work speaks to you, I hope you’ll stay. If it doesn't yet, come back if and when it does. And if what we explored together through the B.R.E.A.T.H.E. Methodology, grief x Rebirth Virtual Summit, LiberationMethod or LiberationGang is complete for you exactly as it is, I honor that too.

This next chapter isn't about dragging everyone with me. It's about following the work where it has honestly led.

When it's more than this

Everything I've described here can be part of an ordinary response to loss, but not every experience should be treated as something you simply need to somatically work through.

Some grief requires clinical care.

If intense grief has persisted beyond a year and significantly affects your ability to work, maintain relationships or care for yourself, it may meet criteria for prolonged grief disorder, a formal and treatable diagnosis.

Similarly, if you're experiencing persistent depression, using substances to cope or sleep, unable to function, or having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact a licensed mental health professional or a crisis service in your area.

Somatic work doesn't replace clinical care. It can sit beautifully beside it, and you should never be confined to one or the other.

One thing to notice today

As this essay comes to a close, I want you to try something.

Name three things your body still says yes to.

Not what you should enjoy, not what you used to enjoy, and especially not what Instagram has informed you counts as self-care this week. What does your body say yes to today?

Maybe it's warm water running over your hands, cool sheets, the hour when the light in your house gets soft, a particular song, a weighted blanket, the first taste of some cold and creamy ice cream, or somebody making you laugh when you were absolutely committed to being irritated.

Some women can name three immediately, many can name one, but some can't name any, and realizing that can feel frightening.

If that's you, I don't want you to interpret that as another thing to fix because it's data. That's all.

Not being able to name your desires isn't proof that something is wrong with you. It's an assessment of where your capacity is today.

Unlike almost everything else in grief, capacity gives us somewhere to begin. You don't have to make grief smaller, and maybe that was never the assignment.

Maybe the invitation is to become capable of holding more life alongside it.

Frequently asked questions

Can you be too focused on healing?

Yes, but the amount of healing work isn't necessarily the problem. The issue is orientation. Healing can become counterproductive when recovery becomes the organizing principle of your identity, schedule, spending and conversations, while placing minimal attention on expanding your actual life. The question isn't simply how much time you're spending processing grief. It's whether any of that work is helping you reconnect with desire, sensation, connection and participation in life.

Is it normal to still feel stuck after years of grief work?

Yes. Most grief support focuses on understanding, processing and reducing distress. Those things can be useful, but understanding your loss and expanding your body's capacity to receive life again aren't the same process. You can become highly skilled at understanding your grief while still feeling contracted in your everyday life.

Does wanting pleasure again mean I've stopped grieving?

No. Grief and pleasure can exist in your body at the same time. The return of desire or pleasure doesn't mean your grief is ending, that you've forgotten what happened or that your love for who or what you lost has diminished. It may simply mean your capacity to receive is expanding.

Start here: P.U.L.S.E.™ is a short, free resource for noticing what your nervous system actually needs.

Next: Pleasure Is Not the Opposite of Grief, where we're getting into why feeling good after loss can feel like betrayal, who taught us that suffering proves love, and why that whole equation deserves another look.



Amber Wood is a Certified Trauma-Informed Loss Practitioner and the creator of the PleasureProtocol™ and LiberationMethod™. She helps women reconnect with their bodies, pleasure, joy and themselves after loss through pleasure-based grief integration.