Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - You’re Allowed to Love Again After Loss

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

What happens when your heart begins to open again after loss… but guilt rushes in before desire even has a chance? For so many people, the idea of loving again after losing a spouse or partner doesn’t feel freeing. It feels disloyal. Confusing. Even wrong. In this session, I respond to a listener who is navigating that tender space between grief and possibility. She isn’t questioning her love for what she had. She’s questioning whether moving forward means leaving it behind. And what unfolds is a deeper conversation about something many people carry quietly after loss:How do you stay connected to someone you’ve lost… while still allowing yourself to keep living? Because healing doesn’t ask you to choose between honoring the past and opening to the future. But it can feel that way. In this episode, we explore: Why feeling ready for connection doesn’t mean you’re “done grieving” The subtle emotional shift that allows you to love again without replacing what came before Why guilt often shows up right at the moment your heart begins to reopen How fear of judgment, from others or yourself, can quietly block the connection you actually need What it really means to “choose life” after loss in a way that feels grounded and true How to tell if you’re moving toward love from wholeness or from fear of being alone Why learning to be with yourself is often what makes healthy love possible again If you’ve ever found yourself wondering, Is it too soon? or Does this mean I’m letting go?… this conversation will meet you right there. Because loving again after loss isn’t about replacing what you had. It’s about expanding your capacity to carry love forward… without abandoning yourself in the process. For deeper support through loss, healing, and rebuilding life after grief, make sure to get Dr Berman’s new book, Crying Out Loud: A Path Through Grief into a Life Reimagined, her web course  Good Grief: Healing From Loss With Love and he grief podcast, Crying Out Loud (wherever you like to listen) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, and for more than 30 years, I've worked with individuals and couples to help them build deeper, healthier relationships with one another and with themselves. Welcome to Language of Love Sessions. This is where I work one-on-one with you, my listeners, in real time. These sessions are intimate, personal, and grounded in what's actually happening in your life and relationships. Let's get started and get fluent in the language of love. All right, it's time for Language of Love sessions.

This is one of my favorite things, answering your calls, questions, whatever's on your mind. You can reach out, you can email me a question or even work with me live on the air. I know a lot of you love to email me. Dawn emailed me at languageoflovepod at gmail.com, by the way. Dawn says, Dr. Laura, I lost my spouse and part of me wants companionship again, but I feel guilty even thinking about dating. It feels like a betrayal, like I'm erasing them. I'm also afraid of judgment from my family.

How do you hold love for someone? someone you lost while allowing yourself to love again? What does healthy moving forward actually look like? Wow, what a good question, Dawn. The truth is there's no one way that this looks. There's so many factors involved. I don't know what happened with your spouse, but for instance, if they had a very long and painful and protracted illness and you had a very long time to say goodbye. And you also even maybe feel a little more freedom, which is totally normal. I know a lot of people feel guilty about that, but it's totally normal. You can grieve and feel freedom at the same time. But the point is, is that if you had a really long time to say

goodbye and you feel really at peace about it, also your own personality and how many traumas you have in your past. I mean, there's so many different variables, but you could be very ready much sooner to date than someone who perhaps lost their partner in a really sudden and traumatic way and have to kind of go through the process of reconciling that they're even gone, right? Where someone who's gone through a long protracted illness will still have to reconcile that, but they've had a lot of time to get used to the idea. So depending where you are on the process and how you've moved with the healing and your own history of trauma and loss and what's come up for you. Everyone is so different about when they're ready to date again. But it sounds to me

like there's a big part of you that is ready, right? And as you say, you want companionship again. And think about it like I think about this the same way that I think about children. I noticed that a lot of first time moms, they have their first child and even dads, whoever, they have their first child and love them with everything they have. And then they're getting ready to have a second child. And they have this fear that they're somehow betraying their first child. And that what if I don't love this baby as much as I love the other one? Or what if it takes away from the first one? And then you very quickly realize that the heart isn't divided. It just expands bigger and bigger and bigger to hold more and more and more love. You're not dividing

love. You're expanding the amount of love you have to give. And it's the same thing after loss when you are ready to find love again. You are not replacing your partner. You are not erasing them. You are not taking the love you had for them and now shifting it over to someone else. They are always going to hold that place in your heart. And that love will always be there for them. And your heart expands to allow new love in as well. You are not erasing them by loving again. And in fact, I find that 99% of the people that I speak to, unless they have like major emotional issues or other things going on will very clearly say toward the end of their life.

And at this point, I've talked to a lot of people that are getting close to the end of their life that they want their partner to be happy, that they want their partner to live and to love and to live a full life. They don't want their partner to be suffering and lonely for the rest of their lives because they've now crossed over.

so you are not betraying your partner by loving again you are just expanding your life and choosing life which in my opinion is what every griever has to do anyone who's lost one of the decisions we have to make pretty consciously is to choose to live and I don't mean not kill yourself although obviously that's part of it too I mean choosing life choosing to be here in this body and be in the miracle of life, which also means love. And as far as your family goes, I think certainly kids can have an issue with this, even grown kids. I certainly struggled when my dad got into a new relationship after my mom died. It wasn't easy, but just want to really with your kids, I'm not saying you have to take it super slow when you find love, but in terms of

bringing this person into your life, telling your kids about it or your family about it, that I would take really slowly. First of all, I would make sure that whoever you are dating is really a keeper before you introduce them. And then I would do it very slowly. And I would do it in a way that really supports their parent, right? And their relationship with parents. So you're saying to them, no one is ever going to replace your mom or dad. That's not what's happening. I'm never going to want to replace them in my own heart. They still are fully in my heart. We're still going to celebrate them, talk about them, have their pictures up, all of that. And anyone you bring into your life has to understand that.

Most of us have no idea how to move through loss. There's no roadmap to follow when you're trying to navigate grief. And I realized this when I lost my son three years ago. As a therapist who understood grief, a whole new level of pain opened up to me when I lost my 16-year-old son. And since then, I have been building resources that have allowed me to navigate through loss, not only in a healthy way, but in a way that has transformed me for the better. We can move through the most terrible loss with grace. And that's why I have created the course, Good Grief, Healing from Loss with Love.

You can find it on my website, drlauraberman.com, right there on the homepage, page, as well as free resources letting you know how to support others who are going through loss. None of us has to do this alone. And I would also say that if you want a good relationship with your children, grown or otherwise, you want to make sure that whoever you bring into your life, just like if they were little, it's the same thing when they're adults. You want to make sure that that person gels with the rest of the family. Unless your kids are being total jerks, you want to make sure that whoever you bring in can hang with them, right? I mean, that was the situation with my dad. He ended up

having a relationship with this woman who was quite horrible, even to him to an extent, but certainly to the rest of us. And it made it really hard. So trying to find someone who not only does for you, but who can fit into your world, I think is an important piece of the puzzle. No matter what age your kids are, certainly, especially if they're young and dependent, but even if they're older. So I would say that as well. And you can hold love for someone you lost while allowing yourself love again. I think what makes it healthy, so to speak, is just staying really conscious and making sure really sure that you aren't rushing into it out of fear of being alone and this is true whether we've lost a partner or not I think for all of us when you're single and

looking for love and wanting to call love in when you're doing it from a place of fear of loneliness scarcity I can't be alone that's a very different energy than look I'm comfortable in myself and in my life and I would really love to have a companion and a partner to share my life with and I will be okay if I don't and I really would like it, right? That's the energy you want to come at this with because when you do, then you're a frequency match for a much higher caliber person and relationship. If you're coming at it from a place of desperation and fear, you are going to attract in some pretty toxic situations. That's what I see time and time again. So just make sure that when you say that you're ready for love again, that it's coming from that place of

wholeness, right? And sometimes that means really doing a little grief healing first, if that's needed. Maybe you've already done that and you really are feeling ready, but I just mentioned that in case you haven't and it hasn't been very long and you're just feeling scared to be alone. One of the best things all of us can do for our love lives, ironically, is get really comfortable being alone. Not because we want to be or will be, but because then we're always in choice and love. If you are afraid to be alone, then you're never really in choice and love because you're always fighting against that fear and living in the fear. So you're not necessarily going to advocate for your needs in the way you want to stand up for yourself in the way you want.

You're going to be trying to avoid being left because you can't stand the idea of being alone. Once you know that you're OK alone, that doesn't mean you want to be alone or that you will be alone, but it makes you much more able to call in healthy love and sustain the kind of love that allows you to get your needs fully met. So I hope that gives you some guidance, Dawn. Good luck to let us know how it goes and we are cheering you on. And you can reach out to anytime if you have a question or something you want me to talk about or attend to. I am here for you no matter what it is at languageoflovepod at gmail.com. See you next time. Crazy for your love

Wrote me a prescription But there is no cure for a crush All I wanna do, I wanna do is take you home with me