Where Grief Flows, Growth Follows
Grief is an experience every single one of us will have in our lives, and we will have it more than once. It is inevitable that we will be separated from those we love through death, distance, or endings. It is inevitable that the things that bring us pleasure or joy will change. Even our own bodies and capacities will shift and decline eventually. This is not something that anyone really enjoys hearing or contemplating. In fact, entire industries are dedicated to working against this tide and truth. But truly, it doesn’t matter how much we exercise, optimize, plan, or pray. There is an end to all things no matter what they are, and that ending evokes grief.
Grief is so powerful. It upends everything. It disrupts routines, plans, and our sense of safety and confidence in the world. It can drown us and consume us so that we are just curled up gasping in a corner or lying flat on a couch, unable to function. Grief can drive us into all our worst habits of distraction... the endless scrolling, the mindless eating, substance abuse, compulsive working, and other projects... this list is not exhaustive. It’s just exhausting. It’s so peculiar that a species who has evolved the sort of consciousness we have struggles so much with this fundamental aspect of our nature. I think many of us have occasionally longed to be a dog or a cat in a good home—taken care of, happy, and blissfully unaware that it’s all going to end someday, one way or another.
So, in the absence of becoming a well-tended domestic pet, what can we do? I think that we need to consider how faith has a role in our managing of grief. The faith I’m talking about could be an actual religious faith that includes divine purpose. But here I’m talking about a broader notion of faith, one that is about the process grief offers.
When a client is speaking to me about something that is heavy with grief*, I am often quietly asking myself, “Is this grief moving or is it stuck?” A new grief is always raw and painful. People can be on fire with it or frozen and numb, but these are just two sides of the same experience. Life is being upended without consent of the parties, and it hurts. What happens in the days and months and years after an acute or evolving loss is more crucial and requires more skill as a therapist to discern and engage. A grief that is “stuck” can be extremely painful or totally disavowed. It can be the only topic of conversation week after week or even year after year, or it can never arise at all as an explicit topic. The job of the therapist is to hear it and feel it and realize it’s going nowhere. Grief that goes nowhere is a problem for the suffering person. A stuck grief means so much is on pause. The psyche is subtly trying not to let anything change, even though it has changed profoundly. Nothing new is being let in and so nothing new can arise.
What is missing here, I think, is faith. The particular kind of faith I’m talking about is a faith in the process of change. We are always changing, always dying and regenerating. Every time we breathe, eat, blow our nose, or brush our hair, our atoms and molecules shift. When we resist that truth and deny the follow-up consequences of it (things like divorce, moving, getting laid off, losing friends, partners, and our eventual death), we are trying to cling to a dissolving life raft. We have to learn to swim in the river. Grief can feel like it will kill you, but it is actually our response to grief that can kill us, not the grief itself.
If we have a faith that letting grief exist and move will release the fire or melt the frozen heart, we can begin to see what it offers. There is so much to learn and understand about our nature when we allow grief to just be a presence and a process that we neither cling to nor push away.
One of the things therapy can help with is an experience of being present to grief in its fullness without turning away or trying to fix it or telling you not to cry. You shouldn’t have to perform “fine.” Or, you may very much want to perform fine, and a good therapist doesn’t let you do that forever. A good therapist will allow you the opportunity to understand that you are of a nature to change. When that change is held in loving awareness, you can have faith to feel, be, and heal.
Student therapists are available right now, supervised by me, to help you unstick your grief. Maybe it’s time to let the river flow? Reach out to us today.
*this is often the death of someone important but it could be related to any sort of ending