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

by Megan Devine LPC

None of what I knew applied to loss of that magnitude.

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

each one of us felt alone, misunderstood, judged, and dismissed. It’s not that the people around us meant to be cruel; they just didn’t know how to be truly helpful.

Our culture sees grief as a kind of malady: a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible.

we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like.

our culture simply hasn’t taught us how to come to grief with the skills needed to be truly helpful.

rehumanize grief.

You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

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;

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.

Our hearts get broken in ways that can’t be fixed.

we can begin to talk about living with grief, living inside the love that remains.

validate the crazy dissonance between your reality and the reality others foist on you.

That difference between what the outside world believes and what you know to be true can be one of the hardest aspects of grief.

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

Little by little, pain and love will find ways to coexist.

We assume that if something is uncomfortable, it means something is wrong. People conclude that grief is “bad” because it hurts.

condolence cards feel offensive because, at their root, they’re trying to fix pain. They skip over the true reality of the situation: this hurts.

Comparing one grief with another almost always backfires. One experience of loss does not translate into another. Grief is as individual as love.

You feel “mugged” by other people’s grief stories because something has been taken away from you: the central importance of your current reality.

We all deserve to be heard in our grief, no matter what that grief may be. At the same time, we can’t assign equal weight to all losses and successfully support someone in pain.

That ghost-sentence tells you it’s not OK to feel how you feel.

At least you had her for as long as you did (so stop feeling so bad).

they’re actually dismissing and minimizing the extent of your grief. They aren’t seeing your reality for what it is.

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.

Nothing makes a person angrier than when they know they’re being insulted, but they can’t figure out how.

The unspoken second half of the sentence in this case says you needed this somehow.

Statements like this say you were not good enough before. You somehow needed this.

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing loss to become who they are “meant” to

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

Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.

Reexamine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul. WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass

What is taught is a hugely outdated system of stages that was never meant to prescribe the correct ways to grieve.

The thing is, people think the whole point of grief is to get out of it as quickly as possible. As if grief were some strange thing, some bizarre, and incorrect, response to someone (or something) you love being torn from your life. Grief gets a narrow window to be expressed. After that, you are expected to return to normal, carrying with you the gifts you’ve learned from the experience. You’re supposed to become wiser, more compassionate, and truly understand what’s important. Staying sad means you’re not doing it right.

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.

Grief is routinely dismissed, judged, medicated, and minimized by those in the “helping” professions.

Kübler-Ross wrote that she regretted writing the stages the way that she did, that people mistook them as being both linear and universal.

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.

Grief is as individual as love: every life, every path, is unique.

Despite what the wider population believes, there are no stages of grief.

the solution-oriented messages behind most of what people say and think about grief, but the roots of our anti-grief culture run deep.

Grieving people are met with impatience precisely because they are failing the cultural storyline of overcoming adversity.

Brené Brown’s research states that blame is a way to discharge pain and discomfort. Intense grief is a reminder that our lives here are tenuous at best.

We have to do some fancy footwork (or rather, fancy brain-work) to minimize our discomfort and maintain our sense of safety.