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

by Megan Devine

The way we deal with grief in our culture is broken.

I’d been a psychotherapist in private practice for nearly a decade.

it wasn’t just loss that we shared. Every one of us had felt judged, shamed, and corrected in our grief.

help ended up hurting. Platitudes and advice, even when said with good intentions, came across as dismissive, reducing such great pain to greeting card one-liners.

the physical aspects of grief (memory loss, cognitive changes, anxiety)

What we all share in common—the real reason for this book—is a desire to love better. To love ourselves in the midst of great pain, and to love one another when the pain of this life grows too large for one person to hold.

Here’s what I most want you to know: this really is as bad as you think.

Platitudes and cheerleading solve nothing. In fact, this kind of support only makes you feel like no one in the world understands.

Telling the truth about grief is the only way forward: your loss is exactly

as bad as you think it is. And people, try as they might, really are responding to your loss as poorly as you think they are. You aren’t crazy. Something crazy has happened, and you’re responding as any sane person would.

There is nothing wrong with grief. It’s a natural extension of love. It’s a

healthy and sane response to loss. That grief feels bad doesn’t make it bad; that you feel crazy doesn’t mean you are crazy.

There are losses that rearrange the world. Deaths that change the way you see everything, grief that tears everything down. Pain that transports you to an entirely different universe, even while everyone else thinks nothing has really changed.

There is not a reason for everything. Not every loss can be transformed into something useful. Things happen that do not have a silver lining.

in one way or another, loving each other means losing each other.

This book is not about fixing you, or fixing your grief.

This book is about how you live inside your loss.

It’s OK That You’re Not OK is divided into four parts: the reality of loss, what to do with your grief, friends and family, and the way forward.

What I would have given to see my reality reflected back to me. Grief support is kind of like the emperor’s new clothes of the relational world—those in pain know that what passes for support is truly nothing at all, while well-intentioned

intentioned support people continue to spout off empty encouragement and worn-out platitudes, knowing in their hearts that those words don’t help at all. We all know this, and yet no one says anything.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.

it’s important to validate how crazy other people’s responses to your loss can make you feel. Wondering if other people are nuts or you’re just being “too sensitive” adds an additional level of stress.

Intense grief is an impossibility: there is no “making it better.” Words of intended comfort just grate.

grief is not a problem to be solved. It isn’t “wrong,” and it can’t be “fixed.” It isn’t an illness to be cured.

We need to talk about the hierarchy of grief. You hear it all the time—no grief is worse than any other. I don’t think that’s one bit true. There is a hierarchy of grief.

Death of a grandparent is not the same as the death of a child. Losing your job is not the same as losing a limb.

Here’s the thing: every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say t...

When someone tries to alleviate your pain by sharing their own story of suffering, know that they are attempting to connect and relate. And know that there is a reason it feels

so crappy: they aren’t actually connecting. They’re unintentionally turning the focus away from you and onto their own stories of pain. Your reality is erased, which is exactly the opposite of what they’d hoped to do.

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.

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.

On the contrary: life is call-and-response. 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 forward is integration, not betterment.

Life-changing events do not just slip quietly away, nor are they atonements for past wrongs. They change us.

When you choose to find meaning or growth inside your loss, that’s an act of personal sovereignty and self-knowledge.

As a therapist, I often find myself apologizing for my profession.

No matter their theoretical orientation to therapy, or their intent to help, clinicians are often the least skilled people in the room. Many grieving people find themselves educating their therapists about the realities of grief.

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.

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 pain and heartbreak we endure. It sets up a one-false-move world, in which we must be careful not to upset the gods, or karma, or our bodies with our thoughts and intentions.

If you can’t tell your story to another human, find another way: journal, paint, make your grief into a graphic novel with a very dark storyline. Or go out to the woods and tell the trees. It is an immense relief to be able to tell your story without someone trying to fix it. The trees will not ask, “How are you really?” and the wind doesn’t care if you cry.

Being allowed to tend to your grief, without feeling like you need to fix it or clean it up, makes grief, itself, easier. Reducing suffering while honoring and supporting pain is the core of this book and the focus of this chapter.

If we boiled down everything in this book about how to survive intense grief, it would come down to this: show yourself kindness.

There’s a deep cultural presumption that creating something out of grief somehow makes it all even out in the end: That your deepest call is to transform your grief into a work of art that touches others. That when you do that, when you turn to creative expression in the depths of pain, you are, in fact, healing your grief. Creativity is a way to transform pain.

The results of your creativity, if they’re good enough, can help others transform their pain. It all works out. At the very least, art and writing will make you feel better, and you can get to “acceptance” of this loss faster. That presumption does such a disservice, both to the creative practice and to you.

Recent studies show that engaging in as little as ten to fifteen minutes of creative writing can help reduce overall levels of cortisol, the “stress hormone,” in the body. While the studies say other things about emotional regulation, increasing optimism, and decreasing hostility, I think the safest corollary is that writing, in its effect on stress in the body, can help your physical organism survive this loss. As I said in chapter 9 on grief and the mind, tending your body makes grief, itself, easier to bear.

Any creative practice, including writing, can help reduce your suffering by allowing you to tell your own story.

That hole torn in the universe will not just close back up so that you can go back to normal. No matter what happens next in your life, it will never be adequate compensation. The life you lost can’t come back. That loss can’t be regained.

Recovery in grief is a process of moving with what was, what might have been, and what still remains.

KINSHIP AND RECOGNITION

Finding others who live inside this territory of grief validates the nightmare of what you already know: there are things that can never “get better.” That may seem like the opposite of helping, but for those experiencing such deep loss, having others recognize the depths of your pain is lifesaving. When someone can look at you and truly see, really recognize, the devastation at the core of your life, it changes something. It helps. It may be the only thing that does.