After Loss: When Everything Feels Fragile and Nothing Feels Safe
This year, you experienced a loss you could never have prepared for. No matter how many times you tried to imagine it, you couldn’t have known how deeply it would change you. Grief has a way of shifting your very sense of self.
Losing a parent reshapes your identity, you feel the weight of generations, the sudden awareness of what has been lost before you and what will be lost after.
Losing a peer feels unnerving: it shakes your foundations when people your age, people you thought you’d grow alongside, are suddenly gone.
Losing someone to illness carries its own kind of ache, stretched out over time, heavy with anticipation and helplessness.
And when loss is sudden, it jolts you into a state of constant alert, as though danger could strike again at any moment.
The circumstances may differ, but grief often leaves behind a common thread: anxiety. The mind begins scanning for threats, playing out worst-case scenarios, bracing for the next blow. Because once you’ve been touched by loss, you carry the knowledge that terrible things can happen… to anyone, on any day, without warning.
The Rewiring Nobody Warns You About
People talk about grief like it's only sadness. The crying, the missing, the empty chair at dinner.
What they don’t mention is the anxiety. The hypervigilance. The way loss can turn you into a security guard for everyone still living.
After someone dies, your threat detection system may fundamentally change. What felt safe before might not feel that way anymore. Your nervous system may learn that loss is possible, probable even. So it can stay on high alert, scanning for danger that might not exist but could.
This isn't a disorder. It's an adaptation. Your brain may be trying to prevent future loss by monitoring everything, controlling whatever it can, struggling to fully relax because relaxation might feel like when the bad thing happened last time.
For parents who've lost someone, the vigilance can double. Every cough might feel like it’s pneumonia.. Every "I'll be home late" could trigger disaster scenarios. You may become the family member who texts "did you make it?" constantly, who needs everyone's location shared, who can't sleep until everyone's accounted for.
Single people may feel it differently but intensely. Without a partner to check in with, anxious thoughts can loop internally. You might become hyper-aware of your own body, every sensation potentially sinister. Living alone can mean worrying that nobody would know if something happened. The apartment may feel both empty and full of imagined dangers.
Living in the Grip of “What If”
You've appointed yourself guardian of everyone you love. Not consciously. But somewhere deep, below logic, you believe that if you worry enough, check enough, control enough, you can prevent another loss.
So you do things like:
Text your sister to confirm she got home. Then text again because what if she answered while driving and that caused an accident?
Research symptoms obsessively. That weird mark on your arm gets seventeen Google searches. Your friend mentions feeling tired and you're secretly scanning for signs of illness they're missing.
Create elaborate mental backup plans. If this person dies, then what? If that happens, how would you manage? Playing out scenarios that haven't happened, might never happen, but feel necessary to rehearse.
Avoid certain activities, places, even conversations that feel too risky. Not because they're actually dangerous but because your risk tolerance evaporated when loss taught you that safety is an illusion.
Life On High Alert
After loss, many people develop what feels like superstitious thinking. If I check three times, they'll be okay. If I worry enough, I'm protecting them. If I never relax, nothing bad will happen.
The exhausting truth: vigilance doesn't prevent loss. It only prevents peace.
But telling yourself to "stop worrying" is like telling yourself to stop breathing. The anxiety isn't chosen. It's your nervous system's attempt at protection, developed from real trauma.
Here's How Therapy Helps You Trust Life Again
Therapy after loss addresses both grief and the anxiety that accompanies it. These aren't separate experiences but intertwined responses to trauma.
Processing the Loss Itself
Before anxiety can ease, the grief needs space. Your therapist helps you move through the pain of the loss, not around it. This means sitting with the sadness, the anger, the guilt, the love that has nowhere to go. It means telling the story of what happened, who you lost, and what it means. Grief processing isn't about "closure"... it's about integrating this loss into your life story.
Normalizing Hypervigilance
Your therapist helps you understand that anxiety after loss is expected, not excessive. Your nervous system is doing what nervous systems do after trauma: trying to prevent recurrence. This isn't a weakness. It's biology.
Gradual Re-exposure to Uncertainty
Together, you practice tolerating not knowing. Starting small. Maybe you don't text to confirm arrival once. You sit with discomfort. Nothing terrible happens. Your nervous system begins to recalibrate.
Distinguishing Possible from Probable
Anxiety after loss can make everything feel equally likely. Therapy helps restore perspective without dismissing real concerns. Yes, bad things happen. No, they're not constantly imminent.
Building Trust Without Guarantees
The hardest truth: you can't prevent all loss. Therapy helps you find ways to love and live knowing this, without being paralyzed by it.
The Body Keeps the Score (Literally)
Grief lives in your body as much as your mind. As Dr. Bessel van der Kolk explores in his groundbreaking book The Body Keeps the Score, trauma reshapes our physical experience of the world. That chest tightness isn't just emotion. It's your nervous system's alarm. The exhaustion isn't just emotional depletion. It's the physical cost of constant vigilance.
You might notice:
Heart racing when phones ring unexpectedly
Stomach dropping when someone says "we need to talk"
Unable to sleep deeply, always partially alert
Startling easily at normal sounds
Physical tension you can't consciously release
These aren't signs you're handling grief wrong. They're signs your body is still protecting you from a threat that already happened.
The Impossible Balance
How do you love people when loving them means possibly losing them? How do you let children play, partners drive, friends live their lives when you know how quickly life can change?
There's no perfect answer. But there are ways to hold both truths: terrible things can happen AND most of the time they don't. Loss is possible AND constant vigilance won't prevent it. You can't protect everyone AND you can still love freely.
The goal isn't to stop caring or become numb to possible loss. It's to find sustainable ways to live with the knowledge that loss exists without letting that knowledge steal what remains.
A Different Kind of Courage
Choosing to trust life again after loss might be the bravest thing you do. Every normal day you don't catastrophize is a victory. Every time you let someone leave without excessive checking is strength. Every moment you enjoy without immediately fearing its end is healing.
This isn't about "moving on" or "getting over it." It's about learning to carry both the grief and the joy, the loss and the love, the knowledge of fragility and the choice to engage anyway.
Some days you'll check too much. Text too often. Worry unnecessarily. That's okay. Healing isn't linear, and anxiety after loss has its own timeline.
The Support You Deserve
If you're struggling with anxiety after loss, you're not alone, and you're not broken. Your nervous system is trying to protect you the only way it knows how.
Our Walking Through Grief therapy group, starting at the end of October, addresses not just the sadness of loss but also the anxiety, fear, and hypervigilance that often accompany it. In this group, you'll find others who understand the exhausting work of trying to prevent future loss through worry.
The group provides a space where these fears can be witnessed without judgment. Where you can admit you check on sleeping loved ones multiple times. Where others understand why you need to know everyone's safe before you can rest.
Together, we explore ways to honour your loss without being controlled by fear of future losses. To love without constantly bracing for impact. To find safety enough in a world where complete safety doesn't exist.
Permission to Feel It All
You're allowed to be anxious after loss. You're allowed to check, worry, and plan for disasters that will probably never come. You're also allowed to slowly, carefully, begin to trust again.
Healing doesn't mean forgetting that loss is possible. It means remembering that life is also possible. Even after loss. Especially after a loss.
Your anxiety makes sense. Your hypervigilance has logic. And when you're ready, there's support to help you find a way to protect what matters without exhausting yourself in the process.
Because loving people will always involve risk. But living in constant fear of loss means missing the life you're so desperately trying to protect.
Ready to find support for the anxiety that came with your grief?