The One Thing No One Ever Says About Grieving

Another way to say that you’re grieving is that a part of you is stuck in a moment in time.  

Sometimes the cause of the stuckness isn’t the grief itself, but the fact that you don’t even recognize that you’ve lost something and that you need to grieve. You’re confused. You’d work to heal what’s wrong if you knew what was wrong to begin with.

Grief is a word that’s used interchangeably with bereavement, but grief isn’t exclusively about the physical death of a person.

Grief doesn't fit in a box, either.  Some forms of grief take years to work through, other types take a few solid months, some take a single moment of deep acknowledgement.

Everyone grieves differently and for different reasons, but one thing remains constant in the process. It's the one thing no one has ever said about grieving:

“I did it right on time.”

Grieving is marked by a lag, a delay, a freezing, “Wait. What just happened?”

Grieving is also not a linear process. One moment you feel you’ve fully moved past something, the next moment it’s right back in front of your face.

Grief demands to be felt. Even if you’re able to somehow avoid it all day long, grief comes back to you in your sleep.  It’s laying right atop your heart as you wake up.

Grief doesn’t say, “I’ve been here long enough, I think it’s time for me to leave.”

No.  

Grief crowds the heart, gnaws at your energy, and chronically imposes upon your peace.  

But grief isn't some evil force that's only there to cause pain; grief is escorting up an even deeper feeling - a truth about your life, what you value, and what you need. Perhaps how much you wanted something? How deeply you care about someone? How far you've come from where you were? 

As Mark Nepo so beautifully puts it, "The pain was necessary to know the truth, but we don't have to keep the pain alive to keep the truth alive."

Still, grief isn’t necessarily a depression.  People can be grieving and heartbroken about something and not even know it.

Here are some examples of events that cause grieving:

A break up

The selling of your childhood home

What you always wanted but never got

A person who died

A person who’s still alive but is electively absent in your life

The loss of a dream

Divorce

Infertility

Loving someone who’s self-destructive

The loss of a pet

The end of a friendship

Job loss or the end of a career

Abortion

Perhaps surprisingly, “positive’ events can also stir grief. For example, getting married may rouse a sense of loss for your single, more autonomous self – as well as all the future romantic connections that may now be closed off to you. Having a child can spur grief for a thousand little and big things, like sleeping in on the weekends, greater financial freedom, and a life in which you weren’t managing the awesome responsibility that being a parent entails. Your child’s high school graduation can spur grief over their childhood ending and their adulthood beginning…the list is endless.

The typical route for grieving begins with denial, and that’s actually a good thing.  

Ultimately, your defense mechanisms are there to protect you. Denial kicks in when it would otherwise be too overwhelming to feel everything you experienced at once. Ideally, denial fades away piece by piece, and you feel what you went through piece by piece – as you’re ready to. Ideally. 

More typically, you swallow your grief.  

It comes up in small spurts when you’re not paying attention, then you numb yourself to it somehow, then it jumps up more forcefully, then you numb yourself more heavily.

That's the path of staying stuck in grief. The path loops. People lose themselves on that path.

Is there a better path?

The answer is yes. But you don’t have to walk on it unless you choose to.

It must be said that some losses are so exquisitely painful, in a way that no one else could ever fully understand, that no one would fault you for staying in the loop.

If you do choose to get out of the disorienting, dizzying loop of grief, here are 4 ways to begin:

1.  UNDERSTAND - That your heart is broken, even if it’s not visible to others.  

Keep in mind that there’s no ‘right way’ to grieve and that grieving is not a linear process.

Just because its been 6 months, 4 years, 15 years, whatever – none of that means anything to your grief. The clock starts when you begin to recognize your grief. In other words, when you genuinely begin to address what happened (or perhaps what never happened).

2. RECOGNIZE - Before you can grieve, you have to recognize that you need to grieve.  

Something happened, or didn’t happen, that burdened you.  

When you’re burdened, something is given to you and taken away from you at the same time.  

What do you feel was taken from you? What do you feel you’re burdened with? The answers to those questions help you recognize what you need to grieve.

3. TOUCH - You have to touch the loss, as well as all the anger, sadness, bitterness, resilience, compassion and any other feelings you encountered during your loss.  

You're in touch with your grief when you make space for the feelings your loss brought into your life. You stop resisting feelings that you judge as “bad.”  

It may seem counter-intuitive to go back to the feelings that you want so desperately to let go of, but there's simply no way to move through grief without making contact with it, without touching it, without feeling it.  

You have to pick it up, hold it, feel the weight of it in your hands, on your heart and within your life. You have to give yourself permission to feel the loss.

Grief demands to be felt with an insistence that needs no sleep. You either allow yourself to encounter your feelings or you remain encased in a shell of yourself under a misguided sense of self-protection. 

4.  MOVE - The feeling of grief can linger for so long that you almost befriend the grief.  

Grief can become oddly soothing in its familiarity and its predictability. Not allowing grief to dictate your life means letting go of the familiarity and moving towards something less predictable and less familiar, which is scary.  

Still, if you want to genuinely address your grief, you have to continue to move through the peripheral, familiar parts of your grief and go right into the epicenter of your grief.  

As the classic hero's journey goes, you have to get inside the belly of the whale. There, and only there, you’ll find the door to the unpredictable pieces of life that are patiently waiting for your attention alongside your grief.

So....

Understand that your heart is broken.

Recognize why it’s broken.

Touch the grief.

Move towards the epicenter of your grief. You can’t go around it, you have to go through it.

Please remember, the grief you're experiencing is yours, and you can carry it with you for as long as you like.

Do we ever fully ‘get over’ our grief? I don’t know. Definitely not with some losses. Let go only when you feel ready-enough, and if you never feel ready, that’s okay. If you do feel ready to move through grief, recruit professional support here or here. Don't forget about post traumatic growth, and if you're open to it, let other peoples' experiences help you steer your own.     

Navigating through grief is unpredictable, dangerous terrain.  You don’t have to do it alone.

Katherine Morgan Schafler is an NYC-based psychotherapist, author, and speaker. For more of her work: get her book, follow her on Instagram, subscribe to her newsletter, or visit her site.