331. Grief and the Secondary Loss of Friendships
The Widowed Mom Podcast
Krista St-Germain
4.9 • 695 Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2025
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you’re surprised by how some friendships have changed after losing your spouse, you’re not alone.
When we lose our person, we often don't expect to also lose connections with friends who we thought would always be there. And many widows experience this unexpected secondary loss - the shifting or disappearing of friendships they thought would remain steady through their grief journey.
Understanding the dynamics of friendship changes during grief can help us process these losses and make room for new connections that align with who we're becoming. Listen in this week as I explore why these friendship changes happen and, more importantly, how to navigate them with grace and self-compassion.
Get full show notes, transcript, and more information here: https://www.coachingwithkrista.com/331
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Widowed Mom Podcast, episode 331, grief and the secondary loss of friendships. |
| 0:10.3 | Welcome to the Widowed Mom podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward |
| 0:23.2 | to. Here's your host, Master Certified Life Coach, Grief Expert, Widow, and Mom, Krista |
| 0:30.5 | St. Germain. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. It's a beautiful September afternoon here. Beautiful, beautiful. It's been raining so much. The fact that the sun is out and there are no clouds and it is mild. Feels amazing to me. If I could record this podcast episode from my porch, my back deck, I absolutely would. One of the things I love about that back deck, |
| 0:55.1 | though, is that there's water behind it. So it probably wouldn't be very good for podcast recording. |
| 0:59.8 | There's several fountains in a pond behind my house, and I love it back there, but maybe not |
| 1:04.3 | the best for podcast recording. Anyway, it's a lovely day. Hopefully next week, I will get the yard |
| 1:10.1 | cleaned up. I think I mentioned it that |
| 1:12.1 | had sewer problems. They found them during the inspection, so thankfully I didn't have to pay for them, |
| 1:17.6 | the repair, but I didn't realize how invasive the repair would be. And they dug this, gosh, |
| 1:23.3 | like 14 foot trench in my front yard. It was wild. So now I have to have the yard redone. So hopefully |
| 1:28.6 | that will happen next week. After all, it's going to rain again. And then it'll clear up. And then we'll |
| 1:33.2 | get the yard done. I have a master's retreat this weekend for my master's. Mom goes on master's |
| 1:37.9 | members. We do that once every six months. It's online. It's amazing. I created a new, brand new retreat for this time. Sometimes I |
| 1:46.7 | create new ones. Sometimes I use ones that I've loved in the past. This is a brand new one. So I'll |
| 1:52.3 | do that all this weekend. That'll be fun. Enough about me. Let's talk about something that catches |
| 1:58.2 | widows by surprise a lot, which is the loss of friendships after becoming a |
| 2:03.8 | widow. It's a grief experience that sometimes it doesn't get talked about very much, and so then when |
| 2:08.3 | it happens, we're not really prepared for it. It can be kind of confusing and unexpected and pretty |
| 2:14.4 | painful. So I think it's pretty true that most of us expected that grief would |
| 2:20.2 | hurt and that when our person died, there would be a lot of grief associated with that. |
| 2:25.6 | But sometimes what we didn't expect and what I want to talk about in this episode is we didn't |
... |
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