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

by Megan Devine

Though I’d been skilled in deep emotional work, Matt’s death revealed an entirely different world. None of what I knew applied to loss of that magnitude.

We shared stories of being encouraged to “get over it,” put the past behind us, and stop talking about those we had lost.

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

It’s not that the people around us meant to be cruel; they just didn’t know how to be truly helpful.

We turned to other grieving people because they were the only ones who knew what grief was really like.

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 As a result, we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like.

Even our clinicians are trained to see grief as a disorder rather than a natural response to

Our cultural and professional ideas about what grief should look like keep us from caring for ourselves inside grief, and they keep us from being able to support those we love. Even worse, those outdated ideas add unnecessary suffering on top of natural, normal pain.

learned the difference between solving pain and tending to pain.

This book provides a path to rethink our relationship with grief. It encourages readers to see their grief as a natural response to death and loss, rather than an aberrant condition needing transformation.

When we change our conversations around grief, we make things better for everyone.

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

In order to survive, to find that life that feels authentic and true to you, we have to start with telling the truth. This really is as bad as you think. Everything really is as wrong, and as bizarre, as you know it to be. When we start there, we can begin to talk about living with grief, living inside the love that remains.

When we shift the focus from fixing your pain to simply tending to it, a whole world of support opens up.

And that’s the truth about grief: loss gets integrated, not overcome.

We share stories of loss to communicate that we understand where you are: “Hey, look. I’ve walked this road. I understand how you feel.” Shared loss stories are an attempt to make you feel less alone inside your grief. They don’t usually land that way,

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

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

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.

If it were true that intense loss is the only way to make a person more compassionate, only self-absorbed, disconnected, shallow people would experience grief. That would make logical sense. That it doesn’t? Well, it proves my point.

The path forward is integration, not betterment.

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.

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.

Clinical counseling training programs devote very little time to the subject, even though most clients will come to us with immense grief.

Medicalizing—and pathologizing—a healthy, normal, sane response to loss is ridiculous, and it does no one any good.

Her stages, whether applied to the dying or those left living, 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.

Despite what the wider population believes, 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.

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

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.

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.

What happens to one person can happen to anyone. We see ourselves reflected in another person’s pain, and we don’t like to see ourselves there.

What starts as limbic system-based connection reverts to a brain stem survival instinct, an us-or-them response, that puts those in pain on the wrong side of the line, and us, always on the right.

We distance ourselves from pain rather than feel annihilated by it.

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.

Spiritual

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.

Rising up into our intellectual spheres, trotting out spiritual aphorisms, is just one more way we try to safeguard against feeling. It’s one more way we try to protect our attachments by denying we have them.

What we need is our limbic system: our capacity to see ourselves in the other, and respond with love.

Your emotional resilience and intelligence has to be quite secure to be able to hold your gaze on the reality of loss.

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

Real safety is in entering each other’s pain, recognizing ourselves inside it.

When we recognize pain and grief as a healthy response to loss, we can respond with skill and grace, rather than blame and bypass. We can respond by loving one another, no matter what happens.

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.

Just two options. On, off. Eternally broken or completely healed.

I can’t tie things up in a pretty bow and say, “Everything’s going to be OK, and you’re going to be even better than before,” because I don’t believe that and it’s not true.

different.” I can’t leave you, or anyone, down in that basement rocking in the corner. That’s not appropriate either.

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.