It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

by Megan Devine LPC

Saying something like “He wouldn’t want you to be sad” or “At least you had her for as long as you did” might seem like a comfort. The problem is, there’s an implied second half of the sentence in all those familiar lines. That second half of the sentence unintentionally dismisses or diminishes your pain; it erases what is true now in favor of some alternate experience. That ghost-sentence tells you it’s not OK to feel how you feel.

If you cringe or feel angry when friends and family try to comfort you, it’s because you hear the second half of that sentence, even when they don’t say it out loud. The implication is always there, speaking louder in its own silence: stop feeling how you feel.

Words of comfort that try to erase pain are not a comfort. When you try to take someone’s pain away from them, you don’t make it better. You just tell them it’s not OK to talk about their pain.

To feel truly comforted by someone, you need to feel heard in your pain. You need the reality of your loss reflected back to you—not diminished, not diluted. It seems counterintuitive, but true comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away.

How many times have you heard “Everything happens for a reason” inside your loss? Those same people would be the first to refute that statement if something horrendous happened to them. We use words on one another we would never accept for ourselves.

Things like “Everything happens for a reason” and “You’ll become a stronger/kinder/more compassionate person because of this” bring out rage in grieving people. Nothing makes a person angrier than when they know they’re being insulted, but they can’t figure out how.

It’s not just erasing your current pain that makes words of comfort land so badly. There’s a hidden subcontext in those statements about becoming better, kinder, and more compassionate because of your loss, that often-used phrase about knowing what’s “truly im...

The unspoken second half of the sentence in this case says you needed this somehow. It says that you weren’t aware of what was important in life before this happened. It says that you weren’t kind, compassio...

As though loss and hardship were the only ways to grow as a human being. As though pain were the only doorway to a better, deeper life, the only way to be truly compassionate and kind.

Statements like this say you were not good enough before. You somehow needed this. It’s implied, and certainly the speaker would deny it if you pointed it out. But those ghost words are there. And they matter.

Learning happens in a million different ways. Grief and loss are one path to depth and connection, but they are not the only path. In an essay on post-traumatic growth, a veterans’ therapist states that people who look back and see their devastating loss or injury as a growth experience are those who felt most dissatisfied or disconnected in their personal lives before the event. They are not grateful for what happened, but they see the arc of their own development in the shadow of their loss. But for those whose lives were full and deep before their loss? The researcher admits that these participants didn’t experience big surges in growth because there were no big surges to make. There’s no comfort in “becoming a better person” when you were already happy with the person you were.

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing loss to become who they are “meant” to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen.

Things happen, and we absorb and adapt. We respond to what we experience, and that is neither good nor bad. It simply is. The path fo...

When you choose to find meaning or growth inside your loss, that’s an act of personal sovereignty and self-knowledge. When someone else ascribes growth or meaning to your loss, it diminishes your power, gives subtle shaming or judgment to who you were before, and tells you that you needed this somehow. No wonder it feels so bad. Words of comfort that imply you needed this, that you needed whatever has happened to rip open your world, can never be of comfort. They’re lies. And lies never feel good.

is. Grief is not a problem to be solved; it’s an experience to be carried.

Your personal experience is affected, intimately, by the wider cultural sweep of grief illiteracy. Seeing that illiteracy laid out can help normalize a wholly abnormal time.

What is taught is a hugely outdated system of stages that was never meant to prescribe the correct ways to grieve. What is taught to the medical professions trickles down to the general population.

I also heard seemingly wonderful things—that I was strong and smart and beautiful, that I would find someone new right away. That I would turn this loss around and make it into a gift, that I should think of all the people I could help. That if I would stop being so sad, I’d feel his love around me (but only if I stopped being so sad). Anything to get me out of my pain and sadness and back into a more acceptable way of being.

Judgment, criticism, and dismissive comments are the norm in deep grief, not the exception. Sure, most people have “good intentions,” but the difference between their intentions and the actual impact of their words is vast.

Our cultural ideas are so deeply embedded that it can be hard to describe how it feels to be on the receiving end of what passes for grief support. We’ll get into this more deeply in part 3, but it’s important to state here that most people simply stop saying how misunderstood they feel in their grief because it seems no one wants to hear it. We stop saying “this hurts” because no one listens.

We think “happy” is the equivalent of “healthy.” As though happiness were the baseline, the norm to which all things settle, when we’re living as we should.

Still. Yes. Five days, five weeks, five years. One of the best things someone said to me in the months after Matt died was that, with a loss of this magnitude, “just happened” could mean eight days ago as easily as it meant eighty years. When I speak to someone within the first two years of their loss, I always tell them, “This just happened. It was just a minute ago. Of course it still hurts.” Their relief is palpable.

We have it so deeply engrained in us that any kind of hardship shouldn’t last more than a couple of months, at most. Anything more than that is considered malingering. As though the loss of someone you love were just a temporary inconvenience, something minor, and surely not something to stay upset over. Our medical model calls grief that lasts longer than six months a “disorder.” Descriptions of so-called complicated grief—grief requiring psychological intervention—include still longing for the person who has died, feelings of injustice, and a pervasive sense that the world can never go back to what it was (and other forms of so-called hopelessness).

Many grieving people find themselves educating their therapists about the realities of grief.

taught the five stages of grief model proposed by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying, published in 1969. Even if the five stages are not explicitly mentioned, they underlie so much of what counselors and doctors think of as the “healthy” way to grieve. No wonder so many grieving people have given up on getting professional support: the stages don’t fit.

The griever is expected to move through a series of clearly delineated stages: denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, eventually arriving at “acceptance,” at which time their “grief work” is complete.

In her later years, Kübler-Ross wrote that she regretted writing the stages the way that she did, that people mistook them as being both linear and universal. The stages of grief were not meant to tell anyone what to feel and when exactly they should feel it. They were not meant to dictate whether you are doing your grief “correctly” or not. Her stages, whether applied to the dying or those left living, were meant to normalize and validate what someone might experience in the swirl of insanity that is loss and death and grief. They were meant to give comfort, not create a cage.

Despite what many “experts” believe, there are no stages of grief. Despite what the wider population believes, there are no stages of grief.

“According to some clinical diagnostic criteria, I am suffering from moderate to severe depression, and my anxiety levels are high. My therapist suggests antidepressants and some online cognitive behavioral therapy. I leave feeling worse than when I went in. I’m not just grieving anymore. I’m now mentally ill. Someone in some central NHS office has created a downloadable test that tells me so. It must be true: I am failing grief. I try not to let it get to me, but I wonder again if I should be over this by now. I have passed the six-month milestone after all.

Things always work out for the best. Part of our strange cultural relationship with grief comes from a seemingly innocent source: entertainment. All of our cultural stories are stories of transformation. They’re stories of redemption. Books, movies, documentaries, children’s stories, even the tales we tell ourselves—they all end on a positive note. We demand a happy ending. If there isn’t one, well, that’s the hero’s fault. Nobody wants to read a book where the main character is still in pain at the end.

Social scientist Brené Brown argues that we live in “a Gilded Age of Failure,” where we fetishize recovery stories for their redemptive ending, glossing over the darkness and struggle that precedes it.1 We’ve got a cultural narrative that says bad things happen in order to help you grow, and no matter how bleak it seems, the end result is always worth the struggle. You’ll get there, if only you believe. That happy ending is going to be glorious.

There’s a gag order on telling the truth, in real life and in our fictional accounts. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there are things that can’t be fixed. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there is some pain that never gets redeemed. Some things we learn to live with, and that’s not the same as everything working out in the end. No matter how many rainbows and butterflies you stick into the narrative, some stories just don’t work out.

If we’re going to change things, if we’re going to create new, valid, realistic, and useful storylines to live into, we have to start by refusing the happy ending. Or maybe, by redefining what a happy ending is. A happy ending inside grief like yours cannot be a simple “everything worked out for the best.” That ending isn’t even possible.

When Matt died, I went looking for stories of people who had lived this kind of loss. I went looking for stories of people living in pain so huge it obliterated everything else. I needed those stories. An example to live into. What I found were stories of how to get out of pain. How to fix it. How to transform grief as soon as possible. I read over and over that there was something wrong with me for being so upset. It wasn’t just the books that told me that. The people in my life, close friends, the wider community, and the therapists—they all wanted me to be OK. They needed me to be OK because pain like mine, like yours, is incredibly hard to witness. Our stories are very hard to hear.

It wasn’t their fault. Not really. They didn’t know how to listen. But this is what happens when we only tell stories of how pain can be redeemed: we’re left with no stories that tell us how to live in it. We have no stories of how to bear witness. We don’t talk about pain that can’t be fixed. We’re not allowed to talk about it.

Collectively, we carry an immense backlog of grief that has never been heard, simply because we have no story that helps us hear it.

Being brave is about waking to face each day when you would rather just stop waking up. Being brave is staying present to your own heart when that heart is shattered into a million different pieces and can never be made right. Being brave is standing at the edge of the abyss that just opened in someone’s life and not turning away from it, not covering your discomfort with a pithy “think positive” emoticon. Being brave is letting pain unfurl and take up all the space it needs. Being brave is telling that story. It’s terrifying. And it’s beautiful. Those are the stories we need.

There’s such a pervasive weirdness in our culture around grief and death. We judge, and we blame, dissect, and minimize. People look for the flaws in what someone did to get to this place: She didn’t exercise enough. Didn’t take enough vitamins. Took too many. He shouldn’t have been walking on that side of the road. They shouldn’t have gone to that country if it has a history of monsoons. She shouldn’t have gone out to that club, knowing how dangerous it is these days. If he’s that upset, he must not have been very stable before this happened. I bet they had unresolved childhood issues—see what unhealed issues do to you?

I have a theory (as yet scientifically unproven) that the more random or out-of-order the loss, the more judgment and correction the grieving person hears. It’s like we just can’t reconcile the fact that someone could be alive and well at breakfast and dead by lunch.

It’s terrifying to think that someone who seemingly did everything right could still die. It’s terrifying to look at a person torn apart by their grief, knowing that could be us someday.

Brené Brown’s research states that blame is a way to discharge pain and discomfort.

Evidence of someone else’s nightmare is proof that we could be next. That’s seriously uncomfortable evidence. We have to do some fancy footwork (or rather, fancy brain-work) to minimize our discomfort and maintain our sense of safety.

When someone comes to you in your pain and says, “I can’t even imagine,” the truth is: they can imagine. Their brains automatically began to imagine. As mammals, neurobiologically, we’re connected to one another. Empathy is actually a limbic system connection with the other person’s pain (or their joy). Being...

Blaming someone for their pain—whether that’s grief or some kind of interpersonal violence—is our go-to mechanism. How quick we are to demonize rather than empathize. How quick we are to move into debate, rather than hang out in the actual pain of the situation. At the root of our fears around grief, and in our approaches to grief and loss, is a fear of connection. A fear of acknowledging—really feeling—our relatedness. What happens to one person can happen to anyone. We see ourselves reflected in another person’s pain, and we don’t like to see ourselves there.

This idea that some overarching force of the universe decides who lives and who dies creates, as Cheryl Strayed writes, “a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned.”2

Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are asking (why would god do this?) creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not god exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason.3

This belief in a god who can be swayed by human petition is incredibly tricky territory. It’s plagued people throughout human history. We can’t reconcile our ideas of a loving god—in any tradition—with the horrors that happen on a personal or global scale. What we’ve created in the face of that cognitive dissonance is the idea that there is a force you can please or displease, through your actions or your petition. It gives us some sense of power and control over what seems to be a random universe full of injustice.

Faith is not meant as a means to change the outcome of anything.

This vending-machine god who doles out reward and punishment based on our changing ideas of what it means to be “blessed” is a disservice to those who lean on faith in times of hardship.

While organized religions have historically trafficked in this model of the one-false-move universe, modern culture has tacked on a New Age, mindfulness-esque yoga-speak around difficulty, death, and grief as well: You create your own reality.