Signs You're Carrying Someone Else's Grief

Not every heaviness you feel started with you

There's a particular kind of sorrow people bring to me that doesn't quite fit their own story. They can't point to the loss that caused it. It doesn't track with anything that's happened in their own life, at least not obviously. It just sits there, familiar and old, as though it's been there longer than they have.

Sometimes that's exactly what's happening. Grief doesn't always stay with the person it began with. When it isn't fully processed, it can pass down a family line or move sideways between people who are close, looking for somewhere it can finally be felt all the way through.

Sometimes the grief we feel is not our own

A few signs this might be what's happening

• The grief feels older than the situations in your own life that would explain it

• You feel a pull toward mourning something you didn't personally lose, sometimes a person or a time before you were born

• A family member has a loss that was never fully grieved, and you notice you feel it more intensely than they seem to

• The sadness has a quality of waiting, as though it's been paused rather than resolved

• You've done real grief work of your own and this particular heaviness didn't move with it

  
  

None of these alone means this is what's going on. Together, especially if they've been true for a long time, they're worth taking seriously.

Why carrying others' grief happens

Grief that isn't given somewhere to go doesn't disappear. It tends to move to whoever in the family or the close circle has the most capacity to feel it, often without either person choosing that or even knowing it's happening. This is especially common across generations where grief wasn't culturally or personally permitted to be expressed fully at the time. The feeling has to go somewhere, and it finds the person most able to hold it.

What a shamanic session addresses

The work here is about identifying where the grief actually originates, separating what's genuinely yours from what you've been carrying for someone else, and giving the original grief a way to finally move, so it no longer needs you to hold it. This often brings real and immediate relief, a lightness in a specific, identifiable place, because the weight was never meant to be permanent in the first place.

If a sadness in you has never quite made sense, it's worth a conversation to find out whose it actually is. You're welcome to reach out. And, in the meantime, get out in nature. Walk. And realise the grief may not be your own.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, a researcher of philosophy of mind and physics, and shamanic practitioner. You can contact her at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit her website at www.magicinharmony.com.