Grief is the bridge

Loving reality over illusion: A Series

This is part two of a series on learning to love reality over illusion. Click here if you would like to read part one.

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One of the most confusing parts of letting go of illusion is how devastating it can feel.

Even when we know something isn’t sustainable. Even when we can see that the story we were living inside was costing us. Even when letting go is, on some level, a relief, the collapse can still feel unbearable. This is often the moment people assume they’re doing something wrong. That they’ve regressed. That they’ve lost progress or destabilized themselves unnecessarily.

But what if the devastation isn’t a sign of failure? What if it’s the sign that something essential is finally being metabolized?

Most of us associate grief with the loss of something tangible -a person, a relationship, a life chapter that clearly existed. But some of the deepest grief we carry is for things that were never fully real, yet were very real inside us.

We grieve imagined futures. The version of ourselves we were becoming in someone else’s presence. The sense of aliveness, orientation, and meaning that illusion quietly provided us.

The reality is that illusion tends to dissolve only when the nervous system feels safe enough to metabolize loss. Because letting go of illusion doesn’t just take away a fantasy, it takes away a regulating structure. One that helped us make sense of our pain, our longing, and our hope. And when that structure dissolves, the nervous system is left without the scaffolding it once relied on.

This is where grief enters, not as a problem to be solved, but as the bridge that allows us to leave illusion without abandoning ourselves.

Why did we come to rely on illusion so tightly in the first place? Well, illusion didn’t form because we were naïve or crazy. When safety, consistency, or emotional attunement were missing from our lives early on, the nervous system learned to bridge the gap internally. It learned to extract meaning from small signals, to orient toward possibility, and to organize around hope.

This isn’t pathology, but adaptation. The alternative would have been to only experience a state of hopelessness, despair, or to shut down completely. For many of us, illusion became a way to regulate. The anticipation, the imagining, the story about what might be provided a sense of aliveness and coherence that wasn’t reliably available elsewhere. In moments of uncertainty or relational ambiguity, illusion helped the nervous system stay activated rather than collapsed, oriented rather than lost.

From this lens, it makes sense why illusion can feel so compelling. It doesn’t just offer fantasy, it offers regulation. Limerence, in particular, often functions as a powerful nervous system state. Dopamine and anticipation create energy. Focus narrows. Longing gives direction. In the absence of stability, intensity can begin to feel like safety.

The problem isn’t necessarily that illusion is false. It’s that it eventually asks the nervous system to run on borrowed fuel. Over time, the body begins to sense the mismatch. The uncertainty becomes harder to hold. The intermittent signals no longer regulate in the same way. What once felt energizing starts to feel destabilizing.

This is often the moment illusion collapses, not because we decide to let go, but because the nervous system can no longer sustain the effort it takes to keep the story alive. And when illusion falls away, it doesn’t leave neutrality in its wake. It leaves a void.

The body loses a familiar organizing principle. The anticipation that once structured days and thoughts is gone. The imagined future that once softened loneliness disappears. What remains is raw sensation: sadness, emptiness, longing without direction.

This is where grief enters the picture.

Grief is the nervous system’s way of updating its internal model of reality. It’s how the body releases what it was preparing for, what it had invested in, what it believed was coming. Without grief, illusion doesn’t truly dissolve, it just gets replaced. With another person. Another story. Another source of intensity. But when grief is allowed, something quieter begins to happen.

The nervous system slowly learns that it can survive without the illusion that once kept it organized. That presence is possible without anticipation. That reality, while less intoxicating at first, is more stable over time.

Therefore, grief is not the enemy of healing. It is the process that actually makes reality inhabitable again.

If you find yourself in the place where illusion has faded but reality hasn’t yet come alive, there is nothing wrong with you. This in-between state is not a failure of healing. It’s the nervous system learning how to exist without the scaffolding it once relied on. It’s the body releasing an orientation toward what might have been, before it can fully turn toward what is.

Grief rarely arrives with clarity or relief. More often, it arrives as heaviness. As slowness. As a quiet ache that doesn’t seem to move anywhere. This doesn’t mean you’re stuck. It means something inside you is reorganizing. Reality, at first, can feel flat compared to illusion. Less charged. Less animated. But this doesn’t mean it’s empty. It means your system is recalibrating, learning to source vitality from presence rather than anticipation.

There is no way to rush this process without bypassing it. Grief has its own timing. What helps is not force, but companionship -learning how to stay with yourself as sensation, emotion, and meaning slowly realign. Over time, as grief is allowed to move through, reality begins to feel less threatening. More spacious. More responsive. Not because it suddenly becomes easy, but because you become more able to meet it.

Illusion dissolves when it’s no longer needed for survival. Grief is how the nervous system learns that it’s safe to come back.

In the next piece, I want to explore one of the biggest unconscious myths that I find cuts us off from engaging with reality, and stuck creating stories in our mind. Then, I will move onto exploring what it looks like to stay in reality once illusion has loosened its grip, and how we slowly build meaning, aliveness, and connection without abandoning ourselves in the process. Hit subscribe below if you’d like to follow along.

P.s.

If you want a gentle place to begin, try this: notice where grief lives in your body, place a hand somewhere supportive, and stay with the sensation for one or two slow breaths. You’re not trying to fix anything, just letting your system know it’s safe enough to feel, a little at a time.