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
...more
