Another facet of our aversion to grief is fear. Hundreds of times in my practice as a therapist, I have heard how fearful people are of dropping into the well of grief. The most frequent comment is “If I go there, I’ll never return.” What I found myself saying one day was rather surprising. “If you don’t go there, you’ll never return.” It seems that our wholesale abandonment of this core emotion has cost us dearly, pressed us toward the surface of our lives. We live superficial lives and feel the gnawing ache of something missing. If we are to return to the richly textured life of soul and to
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