PART 1: THE NECESSITY OF GRIEF
By Crystal King
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger’s lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us.
(Joseph Campbell)
Grief is one cave many of us are afraid to go into. It is the unknown abyss we aren’t sure we will find our way out of. We don’t see grief as the most direct path to opportunity and adventure, though it actually is. It is the path to the most alive version of ourselves that can exist. It is time to get curious about our grief, for the neglect of grief work doesn’t just mean that we miss out on becoming fully alive; neglecting this cave means we carve a path of destruction for ourselves and others. So come with me on a journey, be a curious explorer of your grief, unlock your hidden pain, and find clarity, creativity, compassion, connection, and calm within THAT cave, the very cave you have forbidden yourself from entering.
WHAT IS GRIEF AND GRIEF WORK
Grief, like any emotion, is part of being human. It is the anguish felt when we lose someone or something that we dearly care for. It is the misery of loneliness. It is the intense ache of a dream unfulfilled. It is the stomach churning, nauseating impact of rejection. It is the iron heaviness in our chest when we find out our world has just been altered. It is felt in every cell of our body. It often sits underneath the anger we use to disguise our heart wrenching sorrow. We are all grieving in some capacity or another. Grief is the mental, emotional, and physical expression of the felt sense of suffering in our body.
Author and psychiatrist, Scott Peck, wisely illuminates the following truth: “Mental health is the dedication to reality at all costs.” To grieve is to break through the alternate reality that we create in our head to avoid the suffering we are experiencing. To grieve is to lift our head out of the sand and look our pain in the face, acknowledging the toll it took and is taking. To grieve is to live in reality.
Gabor Mate (an addictions expert and physician with a background in childhood development and trauma) asserts that, “Grief is the antidote to trauma.” This is because trauma is an experience that overwhelms the nervous system, and grieving allows for that trauma to be metabolized, so it does not get stuck in the body. If grief is expressing the trauma that already sits in the body, no wonder it can look intense and messy. Incidentally, addictions, mental illness, neuroses, can all be activated and formed when we are not able to express our grief and be seen in our suffering.
“Grief work” is the work we do to express our soul’s suffering. Grief work involves actively engaging with and feeling the suffering which is already inside of us. Suffering unexpressed is suffering that can come out as illness, addiction, destruction, and rage. Grief work gives authentic, healthy expression to the suffering inside so that the illness can dissipate, addiction can lose its momentum, and the rage can calm. Grieving itself is not the suffering; instead, grieving is the active, mental, emotional, and physical acknowledgment of that suffering. Grieving is the gift we can use to keep healthy, so the body does not have to grow sick from the pain trapped up inside. It moves the emotional energy of our pain through our bodies.
Everyone has a different experience of grief. For some, grief may come from the absence of love, the aching desire to receive love. For others, grief can come from love that is blocked from expressing itself:
“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
(William Spence)
One of the most notorious moments in the Marvel TV series, WandaVision, materializes during a conversation between Wanda and Vision about her grief and his brilliant attempt at understanding it:
Wanda: It's just like this wave washing over me again and again. It knocks me down and when I try to stand up, it just comes for me again. And I can't... It's gonna drown me.
Vision: No. No, Wanda.
Wanda: How do you know?
Vision: Because it can't be all sorrow, can it? I've always been alone so I don't feel the lack. It's all I've ever known. I've never experienced loss because I've never had a loved one to lose. What is grief, if not love persevering?
That last line, “What is grief, if not love persevering?” had audiences looking at grief as a key ingredient of love rather than something to avoid.
WHY WE AVOID GRIEF WORK
“Will I ever come out?”
“What if I get stuck there?”
“The energy and time it takes to grieve is too great a toll to pay."
“It has never been safe for me to feel my sorrow. The consequences were too great.”
“I don’t have any sadness; I just have anger.”
These are valid statements I have heard from clients. There is a great resistance to grieving because of these beliefs that live in the murky waters of our subconscious. Grief calls us to sit in discomfort and feel the pain that is alive inside our body. Naturally we want avoid it.
For many of us, grieving is neither safe nor advisable in the here and now. When we were injured as children, emotionally or physically, we instinctively knew whether or not it was safe to process the grief in our body. If tears or sadness when in pain and despair were shunned or we were neglected, we had to learn other ways to manage. Our survival instincts kicked in so that is what we did, we survived. But that part of us that needed to grieve was exiled, forever waiting for the safety needed to be fully processed. Regrettably, once the template is set up that grief work is not safe, we carry that template with us and continue to exile the grieving parts of ourselves well into adulthood.
If we are not in a safe space, it is not time to start the grieving process. We cannot be in survival mode and simultaneously be grieving. This is because grief taps into our tender selves and prepares us for wholeness and connection again, but survival mode is a heavily guarded fortress that keeps us protected from feeling our full pain. We live numb. We get comfortable with the anesthetic of “survival mode,” not recognizing how to step out of it into grief. Survival mode is necessary at times, but we were not meant to live there. Unfortunately, when the habits we form to survive, stay with us and tell us that it is never safe to unlock the pain, we get stuck. The grieving cave appears too dark, and not knowing the cost it will exact from us, we keep away. We don’t want to go near our grief with a ten foot pole. We see it as a useless waste of time rather than forward movement.
WHY DO WE NEED TO GRIEVE?
YES, there is a cost to grieving. Yes, it will take much time and a ton of our energy.
YET, there is also a cost to avoiding our grief. A greater one. A “black hole” sized cost. It may not come right away, but it will come. And the price it will exact is far greater than the more immediate cost of grief. The price of avoidance is always the deeper, darker hole.
When we talk about fears surrounding grief, a common fear we have is that once we start grieving, the tears will consume us. We will drown in the river of grief and not know how to get out. We believe that if we keep it locked up, we will remain untouched by it. Unfortunately grief, sorrow, anguish, does not work that way. It will remain in the body, like a reservoir being held by a dam. Until that dam breaks, the reservoir of pain sits. For a while, it may seem like we can get away with this, but when pain sits with nowhere to go, it will find any outlet it can. Outlets like anger, rage, blame, and criticism are some of the most common channels that grief funnels itself into. When we meet an incredibly angry person, we have met someone with an incredible amount of buried grief.
Letting the pain out may be scarier than the holding it in, but, to hold it in, is to maximize its impact and ensure infection. When the body holds a bullet, a surgery must be performed to take out the bullet. The damage it will do in the long run is much more severe than the surgery to get it out and let it heal.
Still,……..why must we grieve?
Because the impact of our loss is already inside us, locked up, and grieving = the movement needed to unlock the toxic energy of frozen trauma.
Because grieving opens our access to the most alive, authentic version of ourselves.
Because we cannot syphon off our grief and expect to have a full range of expression with other emotions.
Because “Grief is the cost of love.” It is the price we pay to care in this world. If we want to care, we must be willing to grieve.
Because grieving is a vulnerable and genuine expression of who we are, which means that it will inherently allow for deeper connections to form with others.
Because the cost of stifling our grief is all forms of disconnection in our relationships.
We desperately need to grieve our losses; actually, grieving is the most purposeful work we can do with our suffering. In his book, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss, Jerry Sittser explains a deep truth he recognized while grieving the loss of his mother, his wife, and his daughter after a devastating car accident.
“Choosing to withdraw from people and to protect the self diminishes the soul; choosing to love even more deeply than before ensures that we will suffer again, for the choice to love requires the courage to grieve.”
This man suffered the loss of three deaths in one day, and over the years, he fought the battle of what he calls, “the second loss.” The “the second loss” is the loss of the soul. Without actively grieving, our soul becomes filled with self-pity, bitterness, revenge and hate. If we do not allow the pain of the initial loss to transform us through grieving, we risk darkening our soul. Grieving allows for transcendence. Sittser continues,
"Freedom did not come from denying the past, but from looking at it squarely, taking ownership of it, and allowing myself to be transformed by it.... if I want transformation, I must let go of my regrets over what could have been and pursue what can be.....We exacerbate our sufferings when we allow one loss to lead to another... through avoidance and escape"
He is adamant that avoidance, in all its forms, will not bring us the transformation we need; instead, avoidance is the surer path to diminishment. Our losses, pain, and regrets do not have to diminish our soul, but our response to them surely can.
Ultimately, my own experience has taught me that grieving softens a prickly heart. A hardened heart is one that cannot experience growth, joy, and deep connection, yet a grieving heart is one that remains open and available for transformation. To invite lament into our hearts is to invite redemption.
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