Fully embracing life means we (humans) experience trauma

Experiencing trauma is inevitable, simply because we are complex humans. It is also inevitable (living on a planet of 7.8 billion people) that we experience inter-relational strife, which most definitely can be felt as (drama and) trauma. Many also house inter-generational (also called historical) trauma. Consider that our political history (past and current) has been peppered with horrific deeds done, and you might agree that we all house historical trauma.

Life’s challenges - experienced one-at-a-time, over days, months, years, and generations, added-up - can easily overwhelm the nervous system. Unattended, cumulative trauma can affect our ability to sleep, concentrate, or create. Stored trauma becomes aches and pains, illness and disease, the lack of connection and zest-for-life.

Grieving allows for the expression (release) of trauma

To grieve is to be authentic to your reactions to living a life fully embraced. Grieving helps dissipate what is held in the body. Grieving is a means to open one’s heart to compassion.

Normalizing Grief

For cultures that have not, it is (beyond) time to normalize grief (like, here in the US of A).  We (like, United States Americans) need to grieve out loud, together - for the sake of our (nation’s and individual) health and wellbeing. 

Grief Exists

To normalize grief, we need to first validate that there is grief. It is normal to experience an array of emotions when there is a loss - and we call that array of emotions ‘grief’. As we experience this array of emotions (called ‘grief’), we say we are ‘grieving’. Take a moment to let this sink in - that grief exists. It’s a simple concept, yet (maybe because it is so simple) grief is often ignored. You may want to say this out loud: grief exists. Say it now. Grief exists. Say it throughout the day.

We are all Grieving

Next, we need to validate that we are all grieving. We all experience losses - large and small, one-off and cumulative, individual and communal - wanting to be acknowledged (to be grieved).

Every day, there are moments when we lose a degree of love, hope, faith, or trust - in ourselves, another, nature, Source. ‘Soul cuts’ manifest as insecurity, a sense of unworthiness, a lack of connection - loss of Self.

There is also a unique, cumulative, embodied loss within generations who have been dealing with trauma - such as Indigenous people (including Native Americans and First Nations Peoples) and People of Color (dealing with racism). These historical trauma ‘soul wounds’ underscore who we (as individuals, a nation, and a world) are. This particular concept can be difficult to fully grasp or accept. The book My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem is a helpful tool (for white people as well as people of color) toward understanding and healing racialized trauma. I highly recommend this book.

There are so many reasons to grieve.

Once, after my daughter died, a group of women were supporting me during a grief wave. The underlying message was: this is the worst loss - the most significant grief. One of the women in the group - a mom of a son diagnosed with Downs Syndrome - enlightened us that there are other reasons (than death) for deep grieving. She shared that, though she loves her son as he is, she grieves a loss every time he doesn’t hit a milestone that his peers are able to accomplish. There is a sense of loss experienced during developmental milestones even when people do hit them - a sense of losing one’s prior self-identity.

People experience the loss of a dream; the loss of a lifestyle; the loss of connection; the loss of health; the loss of youth.

And then there’s death. Eventually, we each experience the loss of someone significant to us. It is a loss that suddenly changes the trajectory of our life and creates a ‘before and after’ touchstone.

Grieving is ongoing

Grieving will last much longer than an allotted amount of days off from work. Grieving, in fact, is a lifetime job. To be a more compassionate society, we need to first acknowledge grief as a baseline fact of life. I envision a healthy society in which we allow time and space for grief to rise and fall, throughout each day. Let’s start now. When would you like to allot time to grieve? Where will you do this? How will you do this? What tools or rituals will you use?

understanding grief

Everyone’s grief process is different. And, even for one person, with every loss, grief is different. Often, when there are cumulative losses, grief becomes more complex.  One loss brings up another, and the experience of grief is not only multiplied, it’s alchemized into a grief that is different than the grief of the two individual losses. Some losses create ‘complicated grief’, due to complicated circumstances. Other losses, though they do not feel simple, are called just that.

When loss creates ‘simple grief’, grief can feel like the undertow of the ocean. In real life, when you get caught in the undertow, it’s best if you don’t fight it. When grieving, let yourself be taken down.  Underneath, there’s a deep place - different from what we’re used to when on or above the surface. It’s sacred territory. In real life (when taken down by the undertow), as is true with grief, eventually, you’ll pop back up, and will be washed to shore. When you get to shore, you may be scraped and bruised, but you will have survived. Grieving is a testament to resilience.

I also like the analogy of ‘grief waves’. During a grief wave, there can be a feeling of impending doom or angst, that lasts for seconds or minutes or weeks or months. It’s coming from somewhere unknown, from behind, and then crests and crashes over you like a wave. You’re suddenly crying and realize that all that build up was part of a grief wave. Initially, right after a death, grief waves can be fast and furious.  Years later, they tend to come and go with a lot less frequency and ferocity.

Grief can also be understood as a weather pattern, like rain. Rain falls, puddles form, liquid evaporates, moisture gathers to form clouds, clouds move and rain down in another spot, and the cycle continues. Sometimes, the rain is soft, sometimes it’s a tsunami. Thoughts and emotions may include feeling numb, disbelief, being sad, angry, guilty, relieved, even accepting of this new reality – and more. These thoughts and emotions take turns rising into and falling out of focus, coming up to the surface and retreating, around again and again, like a weather pattern, like rain.

And then there are breaks where – the sun is shining, and you aren’t thinking about the loss - you’re just living. The pattern of grief will continue for your whole life. Like the weather, it won’t go away. Unlike the weather, the pattern of grief will change through the years, and most often, become calmer for longer periods of time.

Grief can never be stagnant.  You can’t get stuck in one stage of grief.  People often say that: If I cry, I’ll never stop. You may cry long and hard. You may cry often. You may cry every morning and/or every night. But you will not get stuck in being sad and crying.  There will be other feelings that come in and out of your day.

At the beginning of grief, there tends to be one or two feelings that dominate the rest. Then other feelings are added in. All of the stages of grief circle around, popping in and out of focus, often overlapping and layering. There’s no “getting over grief”; there’s just more integration of all the aspects of grief with life.

People often have ideas of what “should” happen during the grief process. Elizabeth Kubler Ross wrote of the stages of grief, and lots of people interpreted her findings to mean that grief is linear. It is not. Grief is not a linear process with an end-point. There’s a way of thinking, that if you accept the death, you’ve mastered denial; if you cry, you’ll be done being sad; that you move through the stages of grief one-at-a-time, until you get to acceptance – the end of the grieving process.  But grief isn’t like that. It’s… circular, maybe even spiral-like. 

how to grieve

It may seem presumptuous to say there is a particular way to grieve, since everyone grieves differently. There are foundational concepts, though, that help normalize and support grief. When you try the following points and they work, add what works to your grieving toolbox.

• Be gentle with yourself and with each other. Grief is the most heart-centered, significant, authentic work we’ll ever do. Embed a kind voice into your psyche, reminding you to “Be gentle with yourself”, that “You’re grieving”. 

• Allow thoughts and emotions to rise and fall as they will, for as long as they do. It’s all real. It’s all acceptable.  You are OK as you are. Feel your emotion, and then, when it’s moved on, let it go. Allow this process of feeling and letting go to happen over and over, as the various emotions of grief rise and fall. Allowing others to grieve means being present, listening, and accepting whatever comes up as part of a larger, ongoing process.

• Trust the grief process - knowing that grief never ends; it just changes. Find your unique way of understanding and explaining what’s going on for you.

• Be curious about the grieving process. Become an observer and student. Grief is a sacred teacher. Be curious about why others act as they do. Everyone has their story. Everyone is grieving something. When you observe something you don’t understand, dig deeper and ask: “What is going on behind the scenes? What is the grief story here?”

• Talk openly and naturally about the person who used to be here. Use their name. Be real. They were a part of this person’s life, and still are.

• State the obvious, like: “Grieving is insanely hard work” and “my heart hurts”.  Stating feelings helps keep us honest, and doing so can move the difficult emotion to a less intense setting. 

• Check for unhealthy thinking patterns and reframe your mantras to aid you toward healthy thinking. If you’re telling yourself “I can’t do this” or “I don’t want to do this, because it’s too painful”, or “I don’t want to be here” or “I’d rather be with the deceased than alive without them”, over and over, you’re building a case toward self-destructive behavior or suicide. Suicide is permanent. The rawness of a grief wave is temporary. Destructive behavior causes more problems that will eventually need attention. At some point you will feel more ease, and even joy and peace.  You don’t need another problem to deal with that holds you down when you’re finally ready to fly. Reframe “I don’t want to be here” to “This is hard. I want things to change”. Eventually, things will change.

• Keep healthy boundaries. I like to think of supporting the bereaved as holding a container, safe and strong enough for them to climb in and grieve fully, knowing they’ll be able to go in and out of that container as needed – as grief waves crash over them and then recede.  If you’re holding space for another to grieve, feel their emotion, and then let it go. If you find yourself climbing into the container of grief, let it be your own grief you’re climbing into, not theirs.  (My experience of being a supportive container is that the bereaved feel more freedom to grieve, knowing we will both come out of this grief wave feeling healthy). 

• Seek support from people you trust to be a safe container - who will hold space for you while you grieve. Know that you are not alone.  Seek out others who you can relate with. It’s important not to be alone.  During the first weeks after a significant loss, try not to be alone longer than the time you’d spend in a bath. Seek a support group with others who’ve experienced a similar loss.  Even in this time of social distancing, you can find visual support online as with Zoom, or on the phone with Face Time.  Try ‘turning up’ internal voices of supportive friends. Or, turn up the internal voice of the deceased, if it feels supportive. Imagine these supportive voices talking to you.  Imagine them sitting with you, listening, while you grieve. If you’re at all psychic, you can hear or see or sense the deceased when they’re with you.  If you can, accept spiritual ‘contact’ as support.

• Adopt a ‘Both/And’ view of your thoughts and feelings. The pain of grief can be excruciatingly raw. It may all feel unbearable, and it’s easy to focus solely on the pain. There are two sides to grief, though. Grief waves are tumultuous and they subside. Between the waves, there are breaths of pure presence and being fully conscious. Your life is now different and you don’t know what it will be like. You may feel frightened and curious.  The heart is broken and because it’s broken open, love is freely flowing. Grief is painful and it’s a blessing. We miss the person who has died and, often, we feel closer to them now than we did in life. Grief brings us to a depth we don’t otherwise visit; it is sacred ground. Grief is both horrible and beautiful.

Creating avenues for Grief

What has supported your grieving process? How are you normalizing grief? What would you like to add to this conversation?