Grief With and Without Alcohol
There are some losses that divide our lives into a "before" and an "after."
The loss of a parent. The end of a marriage. A diagnosis that changes everything. A friendship that fades away. The dreams we thought our lives would hold but somehow never came to be.
Grief isn't reserved only for death. It visits us whenever something meaningful changes or ends, and yet most of us have never been taught what to do when it arrives. We learn how to be productive, how to stay busy, and how to keep moving forward, but very few of us are taught how to sit with sorrow.
For many women, alcohol quietly becomes part of that equation. It offers temporary relief from the ache, a brief escape from the heaviness of missing someone or something we love. A glass of wine can feel like a way to soften the sharp edges of grief or to make an unbearable season a little more manageable.
But grief has a way of waiting for us.
The tears we postpone, the memories we avoid, and the emotions we push down do not disappear simply because we numb them. They remain patiently beneath the surface, waiting to be acknowledged and felt. Alcohol may delay our experience of grief, but it cannot do the grieving for us.
At some point, our hearts still ask to be heard.
When We Numb Our Pain, We Also Numb Our Healing
One of the hardest truths about grief is that healing requires us to feel. Not all at once and not without support, but little by little, our hearts need space to process what has happened.
At The Zero Proof Life, we often say that emotions are energy in motion. They are meant to move through us, not remain trapped inside us. When we suppress them, avoid them, or continually numb them, they often reappear in other ways—through anxiety, irritability, exhaustion, or a persistent sense that we're carrying something heavy we can't quite name.
Grief especially wants to move.
It may move through tears that seem to come out of nowhere. It may move through conversations with a trusted friend, long walks in nature, quiet moments of prayer, or pages filled in a journal. None of these experiences are particularly comfortable, but they are deeply human. They are often where healing begins.
The truth is that grieving without alcohol can feel harder at first because we are no longer buffering our emotions. We feel the loss more clearly. The ache is more present. The tears may come more easily.
And yet, there is also a gift in this kind of presence.
We begin to fully honor what—or who—we have lost.
The Courage to Stay Present
Our culture tends to make grief uncomfortable. People often want us to "move on," "stay strong," or find a silver lining as quickly as possible. There seems to be an unspoken expectation that grief should have a timeline, that after a certain number of weeks or months we should somehow be finished with it.
But love doesn't work that way.
We do not simply get over losing someone or something that mattered deeply to us. Instead, we slowly learn how to carry the loss and the love together.
There is a particular kind of bravery in allowing yourself to stay present with grief. It means resisting the urge to rush through it or tidy it up. It means being willing to witness your own heart and tell the truth about what hurts.
Over time, many people discover something surprising: grief and gratitude can exist together. Sorrow and joy can sit side by side. Missing someone deeply does not prevent us from laughing again or noticing beauty in the world around us.
In fact, grief often changes us in ways we never expected.
How Sorrow Enlarges the Soul
Author Jerry Sittser writes in A Grace Disguised that sorrow has the capacity to enlarge the soul. At first, that idea can feel almost impossible to accept. No one would choose grief. No one would ask for suffering.
And yet, many people who have walked through profound loss eventually discover that grief has softened something within them.
They become more compassionate.
More present.
More appreciative of ordinary moments.
More aware of how precious and fragile life truly is.
The pain itself isn't the gift. The loss is never something we would have wanted. But the willingness to walk honestly through our grief can deepen us. It can expand our capacity for love, empathy, and gratitude.
The same heart that has been broken open by loss often becomes more capable of holding joy.
Learning to Walk Through the Darkness
One of the hardest lessons of grief is that there are no shortcuts. The way through it is through it.
Healing doesn't come from avoiding the darkness. It comes from gently walking into it, one step at a time, trusting that we won't stay there forever.
This doesn't mean we need to grieve perfectly. There is no right way to mourn and no timeline for healing. Some days we feel strong. Other days a song, a smell, or a memory can bring us to tears.
This, too, is part of being human.
The invitation is not to fix our grief or make it disappear. The invitation is to tend to it with compassion. To make space for our sorrow while also remaining open to moments of beauty, connection, and even joy.
Because grief is not evidence that you're broken.
It's evidence that you loved.
And love, even when it costs us deeply, is always worth feeling.
This blog accompanies Episode 33 of The Zero Proof Life Podcast: Grief With and Without Alcohol, where Coach Brandi Babb shares her personal experience with loss and the profound differences between grieving while drinking and grieving with presence and sobriety.
Additional Resource:
A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss by Jerry Sittser
If you're walking through grief today, may you remember this: You do not need to rush your healing, and you do not need to carry your sorrow alone. Healing happens gently, often slowly, and sometimes in ways we could never have imagined.