On Healing Through Grief
Arguably, the most avoided emotion
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What if the sadness you feel is not exclusively sadness?
What if the depression you feel has a lot more depth and complexity of life experiences wrapped up in it that simply calling it “depression” does absolutely no justice in covering all the emotions tied up in it?
What if the loneliness you feel is far more than just loneliness?
What if the sadness, loneliness, and depression you feel is actually… grief?
We commonly associate grief with the loss of a loved one — commonly a family member or friend. Perhaps even the loss of a pet.
But grief is significantly more complicated than that.
We don’t only grieve the death of loved ones.
As humans, we also grieve things like:
Things that we’ve hoped and longed for and didn’t get
Lost dreams and aspirations
Significant life changes, such as moves, job changes/losses, etc.
Essentially, we can grieve literally anything that has involved change or not getting what we hoped for.
Some people grieve the fact that their high school experience wasn’t as supportive and enjoyable that they hoped it would be.
Some people grieve the fact that they didn’t have the relationship with their mom or dad that they wished they did.
Some people grieve the fact that they don’t have emotionally supportive relationships with their siblings.
Some people grieve the fact that they had to leave a school and friends they were comfortable with in elementary school because their family had to move.
In my work as a therapist, I will also say that it is not uncommon for people to grieve once they have made significant progress in therapy.
For instance, an older person may make progress in reducing their anxiety via therapy and then later find themselves in grief over the “lost years” that they experienced due to their anxiety that prevented them from doing things they wanted to do. Another person who once struggled with social anxiety may now feel grief over lost relationships that they could’ve had in their younger years. They may now wish they had more years and regret not going to therapy earlier in life.
Grief is a part of life. It’s a part of being human.
In fact, I might even go so far as to say that our grief is what makes us human, because grief is the recognition that we do not have total control over our lives. We don’t always get what we yearn for in life. We don’t get to live forever. The world we live in never stays the same. Literally nothing in our mortal world is fixed.
From the moment we are born we are constantly evolving, growing, and changing. When we were babies our parents had to learn how to accept the fact that our appearance might change from one morning to the next. For some parents, I’ve heard that this is when they began to fully realize how our lives are filled with constant change and evolution.
We don’t talk about grief a whole lot in our American culture. In fact, it tends to be both devalued and avoided. Someone dies and we’re expected to go back to work right away. There’s not a whole lot of time spent around talking and processing our emotions about the person we lost.
One could easily argue that that’s merely a reflection of our economic system. However, I can’t help but wonder if the issue runs deeper than that. After all, humans created this economic system, which was based on our culture at the time when that the system was created. A culture is merely a reflection of our collective psychological state.
Culture is constantly evolving — just like we are. It is not fixed. It changes and evolves as we evolve, like language, architecture, art and music. Our culture changes and evolves our as we ourselves change and evolve. Sometimes it’s for the better, and sometimes it’s for the worse.
So, why do we, as a culture, not value grief?
In my work as a therapist, I will say that grief is the the most avoided emotion (anger being a close second).
Grief is often avoided because the reality that emerges from it is very painful to face. By acknowledging and accepting grief rather than avoiding it, we are also acknowledging and accepting our own immortality. We are acknowledging and accepting the fact that we will not live forever. We are acknowledging and accepting the fact that we might not be able to experience all of what we want and yearn for in life.
By acknowledging our grief, we are also acknowledging and accepting the fact that we are never 100% in control of our lives and the world around us. We are not immortal. We are mortal and we will all die someday in the same way that all living things die.
Grief can put us into a bit of an existential crisis. And in a modern world that is extremely focused on being secular, that existential crisis can be really hard.
However, not acknowledging and accepting these realities is a significant detriment. It shows up as avoidance of our reality. It shows up as dismissal and invalidation our experiences and the experiences of others rather than compassion and understanding. It perpetuates further disconnection from one another rather than connection, which, as human beings, is what we seek and yearn for because we literally need one another for survival.
So we need grief.
We desperately need to feel, acknowledge and accept our grief and start looking at it with curiosity and compassion. Because without it, we are completely dismissing a huge, huge component of what makes us human. And until each of us starts to do that, our culture and world will continue to be a reflection of our avoidance.
Even though facing grief is so incredibly scary, it is, ultimately, very healing.
Grief gives us the opportunity to slow down and discover what truly matters in life. It gives us the opportunity to re-evaluate how we’re living, check in with our values, and what we are putting our time and energy into.
Grief has the opportunity to teach us how to make the most out of our lives, so when our own end comes, we can smile from a place of knowing that we focused on living from a place of what matters most.