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

by Megan Devine

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. This book offers the skills needed to make that kind of love a reality.

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.

Platitudes and cheerleading solve nothing. In fact, this kind of support only makes you feel like no one in the world understands. This isn’t a paper cut. It’s not a crisis of confidence. You didn’t need this thing to happen in order to know what’s important, to find your calling, or even to understand that you are, in fact, deeply loved. 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. WHAT’S

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. Grief is part of love. Love for life, love for self, love for others. What you are living, painful as it is, is love. And love is really hard. Excruciating at times. If you’re

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.

The reality of grief is different from what others see or guess from the outside. Platitudes and pat explanations will not work here. 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. We have to start telling the truth about this kind of pain. About grief, about love, about loss. Because the truth is, in one way or another, loving each other means losing each other. Being alive in such a fleeting, tenuous world is hard. Our hearts get broken in ways that can’t be fixed. There is pain that becomes an immovable part of our lives. We need to know how to endure that, how to care for ourselves inside that, how to care for one another. We need to know how to live here, where life as we know it can change, forever, at any time. We need to start talking about that reality of life, which is also the reality of love.

That all grief is valid does not mean that all grief is the same.

worse—simply not the same. We need to be careful that we don’t exclude anyone’s grief. 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. Making no distinction between levels of grief does not support the griever. It’s also true that after a certain point, comparisons become useless. Is it worse to lose a child or to lose a partner? Sudden death or long illness? Suicide or murder? Babies die. Children get cancer. Lovers drown. Earthquakes open the seemingly solid ground, and thousands of people disappear. Bombs go off in random places. The seemingly ordered universe is split open into a big yawning chasm, and no reality makes sense anymore. Distinctions between losses like these do not matter, and they are not helpful. What we need to remember—as a working practice—is to honor all griefs. Honor all losses, small and not small. Life changing and moment changing. And then, not to compare them. That all people experience pain is not medicine for anything.

Friends and family want you to feel better. They want to take away your pain. What they don’t understand is that in trying to take your pain away, they’re actually dismissing and minimizing the extent of your grief. They aren’t seeing your reality for what it is. They don’t see you. 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.

you’ve learned how quickly life can change. 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, compassionate, or aware enough in your life before this happened. That you needed this experience in order to develop or grow, that you needed this lesson in order to step into your “true path” in life.

becoming a better person. 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.

it’s important to know that most things offered as “support” in our culture are really designed to solve problems or to get you out of pain. If it feels wrong to you, it is. Grief is not a problem to be solved; it’s an experience to be carried. The work here is to find—and receive—support and comfort that helps you live with your reality. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.

But you can’t force an order on pain. You can’t make grief tidy or predictable. Grief is as individual as love: every life, every path, is unique. There is no pattern, and no linear progression. Despite what many “experts” believe, there are no stages of grief.

To do grief well depends solely on individual experience. It means listening to your own reality. It means acknowledging pain and love and loss. It means allowing the truth of these things the space to exist without any artificial tethers or stages or requirements.

Collectively, we carry an immense backlog of grief that has never been heard, simply because we have no story that helps us hear it. We need to tell new stories. We need new stories that tell the truth about pain, about love, about life. We need new stories of bravery in the face of what cannot be fixed. We need to do this for each other; we need to do this with each other because pain happens. Grief happens.

In telling better stories, we weave a culture that knows how to bear witness, to simply show up and be present to that which can never be transformed. In telling better stories, we learn to be better companions, to ourselves, and to each other.

Pain is not always redeemed, in the end or otherwise. Being brave—being a hero—is not about overcoming what hurts or turning it into a gift. 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.

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. 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 close to someone else’s pain makes us feel pain. Our brains know we’re connected. Seeing someone in pain touches off a reaction in us, and that reaction makes us very uncomfortable. Faced with this visceral knowledge that we, too, could be in a similar situation, we shut down our empathy centers. We deny our connection. We shift into judgment and blame. It’s an emotionally protective instinct.

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. The roots of any tradition call us to love and companion one another inside whatever life brings. 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. Such a narrow definition of faith is also a disservice to the beautiful traditions we do have: belief in something larger than us helps us survive. It comes up alongside us to help us live what is ours to live but doesn’t tell us who is right, who is wrong, who is saved, and who should suffer.

You can see this show up in pop-psychology and New Age renditions of Eastern philosophy, with a slightly different bent: If you’re suffering, it’s because you aren’t in right alignment with your true self. If you were more in touch with your “core,” you would have seen this coming. Illness or difficulty is a sign that you were harboring some kind of negativity or resentment—it just showed up in physical form because it was hiding in your thoughts.

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.

Spiritual practices in any tradition, including mindfulness in its many forms, are meant to help you live what is yours to live, not make you rise above it. These tools are meant to help you feel companioned inside your grief. They’re meant to give you a tiny bit of breathing room inside what is wholly unbearable. That’s not at all the same thing as making your pain go away. Rather than help us rise above being human, teachings in any true tradition help us become more human: more connected, not less attached. 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.

The way to get through the pain of being human is not to deny it, but to experience it. To let it exist. To let it be, without stopping it up or holding it back, or in our newer, more modern forms of resistance, by claiming it isn’t “evolved” to be in pain. That’s garbage. It’s elitist. By the same token, you don’t “allow” pain so that you can go back to a normative baseline of happiness. You allow pain because it’s real. Because it is easier to allow than to resist. Because being with what is is kinder, softer, gentler, and easier to bear—even when it rips you apart. Because bearing witness to pain, without shutting it down or denying it, is enlightenment. Your emotional resilience and intelligence has to be quite secure to be able to hold your gaze on the reality of loss.

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. ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters 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.

On a personal level, repressing pain and hardship creates an internally unsustainable condition, wherein we must medicate and manage our true sadness and grief in order to maintain an outer semblance of “happiness.” 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 foundational inability to tolerate pain, hardship, and horror also keeps us paralyzed in the face of global heartbreak. The amount of pain in the world is staggering, and we work hard not to see it. Our rampant avoidance of feeling-with-each-other requires us to distance ourselves from environmental devastation, from human suffering, from child abuse and sex trafficking, from global wars, from hate crimes of all kinds. When we do see suffering, we throw ourselves into outrage, rather than collapse into grief. Activist and author Joanna Macy speaks of the unrecognized, and unwelcome, pain in the hearts of most activists. It’s as if we are afraid the full force of our sadness would render us mute, powerless, and unable to go on. That unacknowledged pain results in burnout, disconnection, and a distinct lack of empathy for others who hold seemingly opposing views. Our cultural avoidance—and denigration—of our very hum...

When we’re afraid of loss, we cling to a system of right and wrong, of well and unwell, to safeguard our connections to those we love. We think barricading ourselves against pain and suffering will help us survive. Our deeply embedded aversion to pain and hardship—to acknowledging pain and hardship—keeps us from what we most want: safety. Safety in the form of love, connection, and kinship. We defend ourselves against losing it, but in doing so, we keep ourselves from living it. 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. Real safety is in entering each other’s pain, recognizing ourselves inside it. As one of my oldest teachers used to say, poignancy is kinship. It’s evidence of connection. That we hurt for each other shows our relatedness. Our limbic systems, our hearts, and our bodies are made for this; we long for that connection. That you see your own potential for grief and loss in someone else’s grief? That’s beautiful. Poignancy is kinship.

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.

What I’m proposing is a third path. A middle way. Not on, not off. A way to tend to pain and grief by bearing witness. By neither turning away, nor by rushing redemption, but by standing there, right there, inside the obliterated universe. By somehow making a home there. By showing that you can make a life of your own choosing, without having to pick one thing over another: leave your love behind but be “OK,” or retain your connections and be “stuck.” Finding that middle ground is the real work of grief—my work, and yours. Each of us, each one of us, has to find our way into that middle ground. A place that doesn’t ask us to deny our grief and doesn’t doom us forever. A place that honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant, and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door. DAVID WHYTE, Consolations

We can’t wage war on the “problem” of grief without waging war on each other’s hearts. We need to let what is true be true. We need to find ways to share in the shattering experience of loss—in our own lives and in the larger world. Shoving through what hurts will never get any of us what we most want—to feel heard, companioned, and seen for who we are, where we are. What we need, moving forward, is to replace that mastery approach to grief with a mystery orientation to love: all the parts of love, especially the difficult ones.

Bowing to the mystery of grief and love is such a different response than fixing it. Coming to your own broken heart with a sense of respect and reverence honors your reality. It gives you space to be exactly as you are, without needing to clean it up or rush through it. Something in you can relax. The unbearable becomes just that much easier to survive.

We can never change the reality of pain. But we can reduce so much suffering when we allow each other to speak what is true, without putting a gag order on our hearts. We can stop hiding from ourselves, and hiding from each other, in some misguided attempt to be “safe.” We can stop hiding what it is to be human. We can craft a world where you can say, “This hurts,” and have those words simply received, without judgment or defense. We can clean out the backlog of pain that keeps us trapped in shallow relationships and cycles of disconnection. We can stop making the other “other,” and instead protect and support each other as family. It won’t be a world with less grief. But it will be a world with so much more beauty. Self-compassion is approaching ourselves, our inner experience with spaciousness, with the quality of allowing which has a quality of gentleness. Instead of our usual tendency to want to get over something, to fix it, to make it go away, the path of compassion is totally different. Compassion allows. ROBERT GONZALES, Reflections on Living Compassion

You are here now, and here sucks.

of. When someone you love dies, you don’t just lose them in the present or in the past. You lose the future you should have had, and might have had, with them. They are missing from all the life that was to be.

Please know that if the outside world feels too harsh or too saturated with all things grief, you aren’t being “too sensitive.” The world is full of things connected to your grief. If there is anything that gives you even a moment’s relief or respite, move toward that. It makes no difference what it is. Finding a break in grief is nearly impossible, but those occasional breaks are necessary. A day (or more) inside a blanket fort of your own choosing is healthy.

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 connection and longing for what is lost. There is nothing wrong with that. All of this is to say that your anger surrounding your loss is welcome. It’s healthy. It’s not something to rush through so you can be more “evolved” or acceptable to the people around you. Find ways to give your sense of injustice and anger a voice. When you can say you’re angry, without someone trying to clean it up or rush you through it, it doesn’t have to twist back in on itself.

The way to live inside of grief is not by removing pain, but by doing what we can to reduce suffering. Knowing the difference between pain and suffering can help you understand what things can be changed and what things simply need your love and attention.

“This is the recurring theme: Quick! She’s in pain! Let’s talk her out of it. Let’s tell her things will be better someday. Let’s remind her to be grateful for what she had. Let’s tell her how smart and funny and kind she is. And let’s be sure, because we know it’s weighing her down, to reassure her that someone other than the man she loves will eventually be beside her, snoring softly, waking up to kiss her good morning, rolling back over to have five more minutes while she gets up to walk the dog so he can sleep. Great. Bring it on. Thanks so much for your kind words. You’ve really relieved my suffering, with all this trying to talk me out of it. The people I love, the ones I will go to again and again, are the ones who do not in any way try to “solve” this for me, or fix it, or fix me. They do not make any attempt to cheer me up, or shame me into feeling thankful that I had as much love as I did, and so should be happy with that. They do not tell me things will be better “later,” and that I have so much to live for. They do not remind me I am part of the cycle of life. As though that matters, all that pandering, condescending crap. Excerpted from “Ask, Don’t Tell: How to Help Someone in Grief” on refugeingrief.com

Unacknowledged and unheard pain doesn’t go away. One of the reasons our culture is so messed up around grief is that we’ve tried to erase pain before it’s had its say. We’ve got an emotional backlog sitting in our hearts. You can’t heal someone’s pain by trying to take it away from them. You can’t gloss over pain as though it were in the way of some “better” life. That grief is painful doesn’t make it wrong. Pain is a normal and healthy response to loss. The way to survive grief is by allowing pain to exist, not in trying to cover it up or rush through it. Rather than erase pain, we might tend to it as though it were healthy and normal, in need of our kind, compassionate, simple honesty and care. We might, instead, companion ourselves inside pain. Only in tending to it can we bear what is unbearable.

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. The Buddha saw pain. He asked: “What can I do to not lose my mind and my heart, here? How can I keep both eyes and heart open without being consumed by this? How can I keep my gaze steady on that which cannot be fixed?” 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 comes with being told to not feel what you feel. Suffering comes with being told there is something wrong with what you

Your grief is not a test of love; it’s an experiment in love. There’s a huge difference between the two. Experimental faith, experimental relationship with yourself, with this life, with grief, with pain, with love, with suffering—it’s all an experiment. It’s not a test. You can’t fail. You haven’t failed.

If you think of your stability, your capacity to be present to this grief, as a bank account, every interaction is a withdrawal. Every stressor is a withdrawal. Recognizing the signs that your account is getting low is one big way of preventing—and soothing—both meltdowns and grief overwhelm.

Be sure to note what things gave you even the tiniest bit more peace of being or calm. Especially in very early grief, nothing is going to feel amazing. The weight of immoveable pain is simply too much. However, there might be moments where you feel steadier, less anxious, or are able to be gentler with yourself. Remember that we’re aiming to reduce suffering and find ways to tend to pain. If you find anything that feels less bad (in early grief) or, eventually, even a little bit good (whenever that happens), pay attention to that. Gathering

Evidence of suffering: poor sleep, no appetite, excessive appetite, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, self-judgment, emotional reactivity (reactivity is different from grief or pain), short temper, sense of guilt disproportionate to actual responsibility, inability to breathe through intense emotion or to compartmentalize intensity enough to care for yourself, feeling victimized by your own pain or by the responses of others, a sense that your pain is too large to be contained or survived. Evidence of relative calm: emotional evenness, self-kindness, sense of being held or companioned inside your pain, validation, feeling somewhat rested, eating enough for your body’s needs, feeling an acceptance of your emotional state (no matter what that state is), ability to respond to others’ poor behavior with clear redirection or correction, taking things less personally, ability to compartmentalize intense emotion or remove yourself from a situation in order to tend to that emotion, sense of connection to self, others, and those you’ve lost.

And in a way, that’s true. The answer to pain is simply to feel it. Some traditions speak of practicing compassion in the face of pain, rather than trying to fix it. As I understand the Buddhist teaching, the fourth form of compassion in the Brahma Viharas, or the four immeasurables, describes an approach to the kinds of pain that cannot be fixed: upekkha, or equanimity. Upekkha is the practice of staying emotionally open and bearing witness to the pain while dwelling in equanimity around one’s limited ability to effect change. This form of compassion—for self, for others—is about remaining calm enough to feel everything, to remain calm while feeling everything, knowing that it can’t be changed.

Equanimity (upekkha) is said to be the hardest form of compassion to teach, and the hardest to practice. It’s not, as is commonly understood, equanimity in the way of being unaffected by what’s happened, but more a quality of clear, calm attention in the face of immoveable truth. When something cannot be changed, the “enlightened” response is to pay attention. To feel it. To turn toward it and say, “I see you.”

That’s the big secret of grief: the answer to the pain is in the pain. Or, as e. e. cummings wrote, healing of the wound is to be sought in the blood of the wound itself. It seems too intangible to be of use, but by allowing your pain to exist, you change it somehow. There’s power in witnessing your own pain. The challenge is to stay present in your heart, to your heart, to your own deep self, even, and especially, when that self is broken. Pain wants to be heard. It deserves to be heard. Denying or minimizing the reality of pain makes ...

My friend and colleague Mirabai Starr, author of Caravan of No Despair, writes in a blog post on her website: As we breathed into the truth of what had happened in our lives, safe in the protective community we built together, we began to discover that the unbearable became bearable, that by whispering “yes” instead of screaming “no,” an ineffable grace began to fill the space of our shattered hearts. . . . Try it. If you’ve tried it before, try it again. Find the smoldering ache of loss inside of you and soften into it. Allow yourself to gently and lovingly explore exactly what it feels like to hurt in this way. With compassion for yourself, disarm your wounded heart and breathe quietly inside the wreckage. No need for fancy formulas or prescribed affirmations. No goal. Just be. Right here. Inside the fire of grief. One breath in front of the other.1

Mirabai encourages us to seek out the “smoldering ache of loss,” but facing that pain head-on, coming to it gently, truly feeling the intensity of weight and shape can feel daunting. Even the idea of softening into the pain can be scary. What will you find there? If you soften into it, will you ever find your way back out?