Self-Care After Suicide Loss: Caring for Yourself When Everything Hurts

In the days after we lost our son John to suicide, I stopped eating.

Not dramatically. Nobody noticed right away. I would open the refrigerator, look at what was inside, and close it again. There was food. I had no idea what to do with it. Grief does that. It takes something as automatic as feeding yourself and turns it into a decision you have no capacity to make.

Self-care after suicide loss is not about bubble baths or morning routines. It is about keeping yourself moving forward during a time when even the basics have become hard. It is about recognizing that your body, your mind, and your spirit are all carrying something enormous right now, and that none of them can keep carrying it if you give them nothing in return.

I have been a suicide loss survivor since April 10, 2009, when our son John died at seventeen. For more than fifteen years, my wife Teri and I have co-facilitated our suicide loss support group and I have sat across from hundreds of survivors in their first weeks and months. What I see frequently is people who are pouring everything they have into getting through the day and nothing into keeping themselves standing.

This post is for you if you are in that place. It is also for you if you are further along in the journey and realize you have been running on empty for longer than you thought.

If you are in crisis right now, please call or text 988. Support is available around the clock. Reaching out may be the most important act of self-care you can do today.
This post will be here when you are ready.

Why Self-Care Feels Impossible After Suicide Loss

Before anything else, let me be clear about something. The phrase “self-care” has been so thoroughly attached to wellness culture that it can feel almost offensive in grief. You are not looking for a morning routine. You are trying to get through a Tuesday morning.

So let’s be honest about what is actually happening.

When someone we cared for dies suddenly and traumatically, the body floods with stress hormones. Cortisol and adrenaline surge. The heart rate climbs. The immune system is suppressed. The prefrontal cortex, which handles decision-making and memory, is working under a measurable load. These are documented physical changes that happen to a body under sustained traumatic stress.

You are not lazy. You are not weak. You are running a system that has been pushed to its limits, and your body is not responding the way it used to.

That is the starting point. Not judgment. Just the honest reality of where you are.

The research on traumatic bereavement is clear on this: suicide loss survivors are at elevated risk for depression, prolonged grief disorder, and PTSD-level symptoms. The Alliance of Hope for Suicide Loss Survivors notes that the traumatic, sudden, and often stigmatized nature of suicide loss creates a grief experience that is uniquely demanding on every system in the body and mind.

Physical Self-Care: The Floor, Not the Ceiling

The body is often where the grief shows up first, and where it is often neglected.

If you have not read the post on the physical symptoms of grief after suicide loss, it goes deeper into what is actually happening in your body right now. Briefly: exhaustion that does not lift with rest, chest pain that is real and physiologically grounded, insomnia that fragments your sleep or shuts it down entirely, grief brain fog that makes reading a paragraph feel like lifting something heavy. These are not signs of weakness. They are what a body looks like under sustained grief stress.

Here are some self care things you can do for yourself:

• Food. it doesn’t have to be a perfectly balanced meal. Something. Half a banana. A piece of toast. The soup someone left at your door. The body needs fuel to manage the stress response happening inside it. When cortisol runs high for long periods, appetite suppression is common, and the body’s ability to regulate mood and emotion depends partly on what it has to work with. You do not have to want food. You just have to put something in. Your body needs fuel.
• Water. Dehydration amplifies every symptom that grief already produces: fatigue, headaches, cognitive fog, digestive disruption. This sounds almost too simple. It is also something many survivors genuinely forget to do in the early weeks. A glass of water is a small act of care, and small acts of care add up.
• Rest. Canceling plans is not failure. Lying on the couch without doing anything productive is not failure. Early grief is physically exhausting, and pushing through that exhaustion does not speed healing. Rest that is not quite sleep still counts as rest.
• Sleep, even when it is broken. The insomnia that follows a suicide loss is real and has a physiological explanation, and there is a full post on sleep after suicide loss that goes deeper into what is happening and what helps. The short version for right now: protect whatever sleep you can get. A consistent bedtime, even an imperfect one. Limiting screens in the hour before bed. These are small signals to a nervous system that is running on high alert, and they matter even when the sleep they produce is fragmented.
• Gentle movement, if your body allows. You don’t need a weight training regimen. Start simple. A walk around the block. Some stretching. The goal is to give the nervous system a chance to discharge some of the accumulated tension that grief stores in the body. On the days when you cannot do even that, you cannot, and that is all right.
• A word about numbing. Many survivors reach for something to dull the pain in the early weeks. Alcohol is the most common. The pain is unbearable and anything that turns the volume down even slightly can feel like a lifeline. What I want to say gently is this:
  
  substances that numb the grief do not move it. They pause it.
  
  And when the numbing wears off, the grief is still there, often heavier. If alcohol or other substances have become the primary way you are getting through, that is worth bringing to your doctor or therapist. You deserve support that actually helps.
• See your doctor. This is import to mention: grief can change how your body responds to medications you are already taking. Chest pain and severe fatigue warrant ruling out cardiac causes regardless of your age or health history. Your physician needs a current baseline. The sentence that helps is this: “I lost someone I cared for deeply to suicide. I know my body is under extraordinary stress right now. I want to make sure anything I am experiencing gets evaluated in that context.” Call this week, not in six months. Things will not have settled by then.
• Some survivors find that talk therapy reaches the emotional grief but not the physical residue it leaves behind. If that is your experience, it is not a failure of therapy. It is a signal that the body may need its own form of attention. Approaches worth knowing about when you are ready: Somatic Experiencing, developed by Dr. Peter Levine specifically for trauma stored in the body, and EMDR, which is widely used with traumatic loss and familiar to many survivors who are already in therapy.

Emotional Self-Care: Giving the Heart Room to Grieve

Emotional self-care after suicide loss does not mean managing your grief or keeping it contained. It means creating enough space for the grief to move without it becoming the only thing in the room.

That is a delicate balance. I am not sure I found it well in the first year. I found it better in the second.

Grief after suicide loss is not a single emotion. It is a storm of them, sometimes in the same hour: rage, guilt, love, relief, confusion, shame, tenderness. All of it is part of the experience. Understanding anger after suicide loss, for instance, is one of the emotions many survivors feel but few give themselves permission to discuss with others.

Talk to someone who understands. The people in your life who have not lost someone to suicide do not fully understand what you are carrying. That is not a criticism of them. It is just true. They love you. They cannot reach this part of what you are going through.

• Peer support, sitting with other people who have been where you are, is different from any other kind of support available. In fifteen years of facilitating support group meetings at SOS Madison, I have watched people walk in convinced that nobody could possibly understand their specific grief and leave two hours later knowing that they had finally been understood. Finding your people, other survivors who get it without explanation, is one of the most powerful acts of emotional care available. If you are not ready yet, there is no pressure. The door stays open.
• The AFSP’s Healing Conversations program connects survivors with trained peer volunteers who have also lost someone to suicide.
• The Alliance of Hope’s online support community is available around the clock for survivors who are not yet ready for in-person group.
• Name the grief waves when they come. A grief wave is a physical event as much as an emotional one. Many survivors describe it as arriving in the body before the mind registers it: a tightening in the chest, a sudden shortness of breath, the surge that comes before the tears. Grief ambushes happen in ordinary places at ordinary moments. When one arrives, see if you can name it: “This is a wave. It will move through.” You cannot stop the wave. You can sometimes ride it differently.
• Watch the pull toward isolation. There is a difference between protecting your energy and disappearing entirely. Many survivors in early grief stop answering texts, cancel everything, and quietly withdraw. That pull is understandable. Being around others takes energy you do not have, and managing someone else’s discomfort with the death can make staying home feel like the only option. But isolation tends to compound the grief rather than give it room to settle. Reaching back toward even one person, one conversation, one small point of contact, is a form of self-care worth attempting when you can.
• It is all right to limit contact with people who deplete you. Some people in your life will ask questions you cannot answer, say things that hurt without meaning to, or expect you to be further along than you are. Managing all of that takes energy you do not have to spare. You are allowed to say “I cannot talk about this right now.” The post on the people who show up after suicide loss addresses the full range of what support looks like and how to navigate the ones who do not quite land right.
• Journal, if it helps you. Not everyone is a writer, and that is fine. But for survivors who find words useful, writing can give the grief somewhere to go outside of the body. It does not have to be coherent. It does not have to make sense.
• Be patient with yourself about the timeline. Three months is not a long time. Six months is not a long time. The people around you may have returned to their routines and stopped checking in. Everyone assumes you are doing better. You may not be doing better, and that is not abnormal. It is how grief works, and there is a full post on the second year after suicide loss for when that particular surprise arrives.

Seeking Professional Support: When Peer Care Is Not Enough

Self-care and professional care are not the same thing, and I want to be very clear. It is not one or the other. They are complementary to each other.

If what you are experiencing has moved from grief into something that feels like it has taken over your nervous system entirely, that is a signal worth taking seriously. Trauma after suicide loss covers what that looks like and why it matters.

Finding a therapist who genuinely understands traumatic grief is harder than it should be. Not every clinician is equipped for suicide bereavement, and the wrong fit can leave a survivor feeling more alone than before they walked in. The post on finding a grief counselor after suicide loss breaks down what to look for and what to ask. The companion post on what makes a therapist actually helpful after a suicide loss goes deeper into evaluating fit before committing.

If you are having thoughts of suicide yourself, please reach out now. Call or text 988. That number connects you to support around the clock. Suicide loss survivors carry an elevated risk of suicidal ideation, and reaching out when that is happening is not weakness. It is the one of the most important forms of self-care available to you.

Spiritual Self-Care: What This Is and What It Is Not

I want to handle this section carefully, because I know the people reading this are in very different places spiritually.

Some of you came to this loss with a faith that feels, right now, like it is holding you. Some of you have had that faith shaken to the ground by this death. Some of you did not have a religious faith before and are not looking for one now.

I am not here to tell you what to believe. I am a Catholic, and my faith has been part of how I have moved through this. But faith is personal, and what matters here is not any specific church doctrine. It is the question of what feeds your spirit right now.

For some people, that is prayer. For some it is silence. For some it is sitting in nature, which has its own kind of sanctuary. For some it is music, or reading, or ritual, or returning to a practice that brought comfort before the loss. For some it is none of those things, and that is honest too.

What I have seen in seventeen years of sitting with survivors is that the people who find some form of spiritual grounding, whatever it looks like for them, tend to find small moments of peace that become something to hold onto. That is not about solving grief through faith. It is about having somewhere to put the weight, even briefly, outside of yourself.

For some survivors, one of the most exhausting spiritual questions is also the most quietly held: what happened to them? Where are they now? If you are carrying that question, the post on whether people who die by suicide go to heaven is one I wrote as a Catholic father who has sat with that question for seventeen years. It does not pretend to settle what cannot be settled. But it may give you something to hold on to.

If faith has become a source of pain rather than comfort since the loss, the post on what Good Friday taught me about faith after suicide loss speaks to that tension directly and without resolution that feels forced.

If spiritual healing is genuinely part of where you are, The Hard-Fought Hallelujah explores what that path looks like after a loss this hard.

The Guilt of Feeling Okay

Many survivors feel guilty about self-care itself. Not just reluctant to do it. Genuinely guilty. If I slept through the night, does that mean I did not love them enough? If I laughed at something today, am I already forgetting? If I ate a real meal and felt, for a moment, like a person again, does that mean the grief is shrinking before it should?

It does not.

It is not a signal that you are healing too fast or caring too little. It is what survival looks like. A moment of rest, a moment of laughter, a moment of ordinary life does not erase the loss. It does not even push it back. The grief will be there when the moment passes. It always is. What those moments do is give you enough of yourself to keep going.

You are allowed to take care of yourself. You are allowed to need things. You are allowed to still be alive, with all that being alive requires.

If You Are Someone Who Wants to Help

If you found this post not because you are the one grieving but because someone you care about is, this section is for you.

The people around a survivor often want to help but do not know how. The instinct is to offer something big: a conversation, a heart-to-heart, a chance to process. But in the earliest weeks, many survivors do not have the capacity for any of that. What they often need most is for the basics to be handled so they do not have to handle them.

• Bring food. Not “let me know if you need anything.” Bring food. Drop it at the door if they are not up for company. A specific offer made without requiring them to respond is one of the most useful things you can do.
• Drive them to the doctor appointment they keep putting off. Sit in the waiting room. Ask if they want company or quiet, and let them choose.
• Send a text that does not require a reply. “Thinking of you today. No need to respond.” That kind of contact reaches through the silence without demanding anything back.
• Show up for the small logistics: groceries, errands, picking up the kids. These are the things that accumulate into overwhelm when someone is barely holding on.
• Most of all, do not disappear after the first two weeks because you assume they are doing better. They are probably not. The numbness is starting to lift right around the time people stop checking in. Keep showing up in small, low-pressure ways, and you will be giving them something real.

Self-Care After Suicide Loss Is Not a Distraction From Grief

Taking care of yourself is not moving on. It is not forgetting. It is not failing to honor the person you lost.

It is how you survive long enough for grief to do its work.

John has been gone for seventeen years now. There were years when I cared for myself poorly and years when I cared for myself better, and the difference was visible in every part of my life. The grief did not go anywhere in the years I neglected it. It just accumulated. The body keeps the score, as the research tells us, and mine did too.

What I know now, and what I would go back and tell myself in those first weeks if I could, is this:

Take one small step today.

Just one.

Let that be enough.

Nobody can do this part for you. The people who love you can bring food and sit with you and check in long after everyone else has stopped. But the decision to take even the smallest step toward caring for yourself has to come from you. That is not a burden. It is the one thing that is entirely yours. A glass of water. A text returned. A phone call made.

Self-care is where it starts. Small acts of care open, slowly, into something that begins to feel like hope. And hope, tended carefully and without pressure, becomes a path forward. Not a path away from the person you lost. You do not leave them behind by healing. You carry them differently. The weight does not disappear, but it changes shape over time, and what feels right now like a pressure that will crush you becomes something you can hold. Something that is part of you rather than something happening to you. That is what the other side of this looks like. It is reachable. The first steps are small, and they begin with taking care of yourself.

And when you are ready for more support, finding your way to a suicide loss support group might be one of the most healing things you can do. Not because it fixes anything. Because you will finally be in a room where you do not have to explain yourself.

Posts You May Also Like

• Healing Journey Checklist for Survivors of Suicide Loss – A practical, step-by-step resource for survivors who want to take an honest look at where they are and what small moves toward healing might look like.
• Finding a Grief Counselor After Suicide Loss: A Practical Guide – If the idea of talking to a professional feels overwhelming, this post breaks down exactly what to look for and how to find someone who actually understands suicide loss.
• Suicide Loss and Therapy: How to Know If a Clinician Will Help – Not every therapist is equipped for suicide bereavement, and this post helps you figure out what questions to ask before you commit to working with someone.
• Something You Get Through: Finding Hope After Suicide Loss – A reminder that healing is not a destination you arrive at but something that happens gradually, one small act of self-care at a time.
• The Physical Symptoms of Grief After Suicide Loss – What is actually happening in your body after a traumatic loss, and why the exhaustion, chest pain, and fog are not signs that something has gone wrong with you.
• Insomnia After Suicide Loss – A dedicated look at why sleep breaks down after suicide loss, what the nervous system is doing, and what survivors have found that helps.
• Finding Your People: The Healing Power of Suicide Loss Support Groups – Why peer support with other suicide loss survivors is different from any other kind of support, and how to find a group.
• Roadblocks to Healing After a Suicide Loss – What gets in the way of caring for yourself after loss, and how to recognize and move through those obstacles.
• Sexual Intimacy After Suicide Loss: When the Connection Changes – Covers a specific and rarely discussed dimension of physical wellbeing after loss: what grief and trauma do to sexual function, and how to address it as part of caring for yourself.

PRINTABLE GUIDE PDF

A two-page PDF guide has been generated for survivors to print, save, or share.