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

by Megan Devine LPC

“Over three years now since you left and I am still tired of having people ask, “How are you?” Do they really think I will tell the truth? I am tired of hearing how it was all planned before you were born and how you and I agreed to your death for my soul’s learning and for yours. No one here wants to acknowledge that there might just be chaos and that some things happen because they can, like cars running people over, like bullets ripping through a skull or tearing open a heart, like blood clots filling lungs so you can’t get air, or cancer consuming what is left of the body. A pre-mapped-out lifetime doesn’t make the death of someone you actually love any less devastating. I am tired of hearing there is a reason for your death, for my heartbreak, and that when we get to the other side it will all make sense. It will never make sense, even when my heart stops hurting so much. I miss you. I wish you had never died. DRU WEST, Writing Your Grief student, on the death of her daughter, Julia

Author and researcher Barbara Ehrenreich calls this the “tyranny of positive thinking.” Her experience with the machinery of positive thinking (and a forced “happy outlook”) came first from living with cancer, with exhortations to see her diagnosis as a gift, and to banish “negative” emotions in order to triumph over her illness:

The first thing I discovered is that not everyone seems to view this disease with horror or dread. Instead, the only appropriate attitude is upbeat. This requires the denial of understandable feelings of anger and fear, all of which must be buried under a cosmetic layer of cheer. . . . Without question there is a problem when positive thinking “fails” and the cancer spreads or eludes treatment. Then the patient can only blame herself: she is not being positive enough; possibly it was her negative attitude that brought on the disease in the first place. . . . [There is] an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate. . . . In fact, there is no kind of problem or obstacle for which positive thinking or a positive attitude has not been proposed as a cure.4

Facing poverty and other financial distress, many were told that layoffs and home loss were gifts, and that to be truly successful, one needed to simply believe in oneself and exude a positive attitude. Any external obstacle could be overcome if you believed hard enough. As a way of deflecting responsibility away from the actual corporations that created the collapse, enforced positivity was a brilliant strategy: “What could be a better way of quelling dissent than to tell people who are suffering that it’s all their attitude,”

What better way to silence pain than to blame those who feel it?

This kind of victim blaming and the glorification of suffering is not new; we just have much prettier language to talk about it now.

Somehow, we are meant to both accept suffering as a gift that we needed in order to become better people and refuse to let loss shove us out of our normal, happy, rosy, optimistic demeanor. Painful emotional states aren’t meant to last—they’re short-term pit stops on the way to a brighter and better (or at least more “normal”) you. Suffering makes you grow. It’s all part of that cultural storyline that glorifies transformation, while staunchly avoiding the reality of pain in the world.

No matter how much our culture insists on it, spiritual and meditative practices are not meant to erase pain. That’s a symptom of our pain-avoidant culture, and not an accurate portrayal of the practices themselves. It’s a misuse of so many beautiful teachings to force them into roles they were never meant to play.

So much of what we now call spiritual bypass is the age-old split between the head and the heart—trying to surpass being human by becoming more intellectual. We do this because being human hurts. It hurts because we love. Because we are connected to those around us, and it’s painful when they die. It hurts when we lose what we love. Being a spiritually minded person makes you more open to pain and suffering and hardship—which are all parts of love.

We may claim it as higher thinking, but it’s our survival instinct brain stem running the show. What we need is our limbic system: our capacity to see ourselves in the other, and respond with love.

Whatever faith or practice you claim, it shouldn’t force you to rise above your pain, or deny it somehow. If anything, practice often makes you feel more intensely, not less. When you are broken, the correct response is to be broken. It’s a form of spiritual hubris to pretend otherwise.

Spiritual bypassing—the use of spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs—is so pervasive that it goes largely unnoticed. The spiritual ideals of any tradition, whether Christian commandments or Buddhist precepts, can provide easy justification for practitioners to duck uncomfortable feelings in favor of more seemingly enlightened activity. When split off from fundamental psychological needs, such actions often do much more harm than good.

Please know that you are not failing to be a “spiritual” or “emotionally intelligent” person because you are so upset. The fact that you’re upset makes perfect sense, and your desire to bear witness to your own pain is a sign of your emotional depth and skill. Empathy—feeling with yourself, feeling with others—is the real hallmark of development.

about the Four Noble Truths—that my suffering is all in the mind, and that I needed to let go of my attachment. Those were the cruelest words I ever could hear. He kept saying “it’s all in the mind, it’s all in the mind.” And when I rocked back and forth through my tearstained pain and asked him, “But what about the heart?” he had no answers for me.

But here’s the thing: I spend all day listening to the pain grieving people carry on top of their actual grief. I hear, over and over again, how painful it is to be judged, dismissed, and misunderstood.

The cult of positivity we have does everyone a disservice.

It leads us to believe we’re more in charge of the world than we are, and holds us responsible for every ...

We don’t lie to ourselves well. Unaddressed and unacknowledged pain doesn’t go away. It attempts to be heard in any way it can, often manifesting in substance addiction, anxiety and depression, and social isolation. Unheard pain helps perpetuate cycles of abuse by trapping victims in a pattern of living out or displacing their trauma onto others.

Our cultural avoidance—and denigration—of our very human losses and pain creates so many problems, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say we have an epidemic of unspoken grief.

Pain has to be welcomed and understood, given actual true space at the table; otherwise we cannot do the work we do, whether that is the personal work of showing up and staying alive, or the wider global work of making the world safe, equitable, and beautiful for all beings. We have to be able to say what’s true without fear of being seen as weak, damaged, or somehow failing the cultural storyline. We need to make it just as normal to talk about our pain as it is to talk about our joy.

The real path here, the real way forward, is not in denying that irredeemable pain exists, but by acknowledging that it does.

The tricky thing is, true survival never exists in a world where we have to lie about our own hearts, or pretend we’re more in control than we are. It just makes us desperately more anxious and more rabid in our attempts to make everything work out in the end.

The most efficient and effective way to be “safe” in this world is to stop denying that hard and impossible things happen. Telling the truth allows us to connect, to fully enter the experience of another and feel with them.

The real cutting edge of growth and development is in hurting with each other. It’s in companionship, not correction. Acknowledgment—being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one’s own life—is the only real medicine of grief.

We’ve got this idea that there are only two options in grief: you’re either going to be stuck in your pain, doomed to spend the rest of your life rocking in a corner in your basement wearing sackcloth, or you’re going to triumph over grief, be transformed, and come back even better than you were before. Just two options. On, off. Eternally broken or completely healed.

It doesn’t seem to matter that nothing else in life is like that. Somehow, when it comes to grief, the entire breadth of human experience goes out the window.

There isn’t much written on the early parts of grief, that close-to-impact zone where nothing really helps. We’re so terrified of intense grief, and the feelings of helplessness it engenders, most resources don’t speak to it at all.

Continuing to show up, continuing to look for support inside your pain, when all the world tries to tell you it’s a problem, is an act of fierce self-love and tenacity. Grief is not a sign that you’re unwell or unevolved. It’s a sign that love has been part of your life, and that you want love to continue, even here. You are here now, and here sucks.

The only way I know to start talking about the reality of grief is to begin with annihilation: there is a quiet, a stillness, that pervades everything in early grief. Loss stuns us into a place beyond any language. No matter how carefully I craft my words, I cannot reach where this lives in you. Language is a cover for that annihilated stillness, and a poor one at that.

LITTLE LAND MINES How many times have people encouraged you to take your mind off this for a while, or they’ve avoided speaking your person’s name so they don’t “remind” you of what you’ve lost? As if you could forget, even for a moment.

When you get to the “emergency contact” part of a form, and realize you can no longer put down the name of the person who has held that spot for years.

It comes up often enough as a stressor that one task of everyday life needs to be addressed on its own: the grocery store. In early grief, a “simple” trip to the grocery store is anything but simple—you could run in to any number of people who want to know, “How are you really?”

Both my mother and my mother-in-law wanted me to be excited about, and involved in, their projects to memorialize Matt’s life, an excitement I did not have in me at that time. Every time they went on about this tree or that garden, and how I needed to be involved, or choose, or attend, I had to fight back the words: “I don’t want a stupid tree. I want him back!” “I don’t care what kind of flowers you put there; it’s your garden, not his.” And, oh, the number of times I had to bite my tongue and use my grown-up words when some distant family member insisted on a hyperreligious memorial that would have made even Matt lose his temper. In the end, of course, no one could truly win: no matter what got planted or who gathered in his name, my love was still dead. He was still not coming back.

In my own experience, and in the stories I’ve heard, it seems that however someone behaved pre-death, they will be more of that in the aftermath of death. The people who tend to be calm and rational remain calm and rational. Those who try to include varying viewpoints, coming to an argument with compassion and patience, tend to do more of the same. And those who argue, blame, and generally act with poor skills . . . do that.

Grief changes your friendships. For many, many people, it ends them.

THE ONE THING PEOPLE REALLY DON’T LIKE TO TALK ABOUT: RAGE

What we don’t listen to (or refuse to listen to) doesn’t go away—it just finds other ways to speak. Shushed anger joins a backlog of disallowed emotion, popping up in health issues, interpersonal challenges, and mental torment. Those negative images we have of rage actually come from anger that isn’t allowed to exist: repression creates pressure, which creates toxic behaviors set atop what used to be a healthy response to injustice.

Anger, allowed expression, is simply energy.

It’s a response. Allowed expression, it becomes a fierce protective love—for yourself, for the one you’ve lost, and in some cases, gives you the energy to face what is yours to face. Shown respect and given room, anger tells a story of love and connect...

All of this is to say that your anger surrounding your loss is we...

In his book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes that the body needs to express itself when exposed to stimuli. It has to. It needs to. When the body and mind experience pain, we have a biological need to express it. Pain that is not allowed to be spoken or expressed turns in on itself, and creates more problems.

For our purposes here, it’s useful to separate pain and suffering. Pain is pure and needs support rather than solutions, but suffering is different. Suffering can be fixed, or at least significantly reduced. To differentiate the two, we need to define some terms.

When we say that the Buddha taught, “All life is suffering, and the way to escape suffering is to embrace impermanence,” he wasn’t saying, “Please pretend you see no suffering; please pretend you aren’t in pain.” He wasn’t saying, “If you’d just let go of your attachments, nothing would hurt.” He saw suffering. He saw pain. He wanted to find a way to stay present and respond. To respond without flinching. Without turning away from the abyss of pain present in the world.

His response—in my mind anyway—was love. Love with open hands, with an open heart, knowing that what is given to you will die. It will change. Love anyway. You will witness incredible pain in this life. Love anyway. Find a way to live here, beside that knowledge. Include that knowledge. Love through that. Be willing to not turn away from the pain of this world—pain in yourself or in others.

Suffering and pain are not the same thing. And that distinction is the beginning of true healing and support inside your grief.

As we’ve said, pain is a healthy, normal response when someone you love is torn from your life. It hurts, but that doesn’t make pain wrong. Suffering comes when we feel dismissed or unsupported in our pain, and when we thrash around inside our pain, questioning our choices, our “normalcy,” our actions and reactions. Suffering comes with being told to not feel what you feel.

Suffering comes when we rehash the events that led up to this death or this loss, punishing ourselves for not preventing it, not knowing more, not doing more. Suffering brings with it anxiety, and fear, and isolation. If we want to make this better for you, your suffering is where we need to look for change.

Grief is as individual as love.

If you take a recent experience of feeling completely overwhelmed in your grief, can you look back over the week before it happened and see signs that the load was getting too heavy? Where were the additional stressors, the things that eroded your capacity to find rest or stability? What were some smaller eruptions that happened leading up to the larger one?

Gathering data also helps you make micro-comparisons of better and worse: Are there times you feel more stable, more grounded, more able to breathe inside your loss? Does anything—a person, a place, an activity—add to your energy bank account? Are there activities or interactions that make this feel just a little softer or gentler? What’s going on before and during those times? Conversely, are there activities or environments that absolutely make things worse? What elements contribute to making things suck even more than they already do?