Making Friends with Your Feelings: The Grief Edition

Hello to September and hello to our FPA friends. This month I wanted to share with you something I’ve noticed in my 7 years practicing therapy that I find a bit strange.

My patients’ concerns seem to come in waves of certain themes. What I mean is, I experience these clusters when a lot of people come in saying the same things to me in a marked period of time. I’ll have a few weeks where it seems like all of my patients, or a huge proportion of my patients, are dealing with the same thing. It’s always very specific. I don’t know how to explain the phenomenon.

There are a few problems that I talk with almost everyone I treat about. I imagine that because we’re all humans navigating a wild world we’ll all experience flavors of the same dishes. We all know what it’s like to be sad, we all know what it’s like to be stressed, but every once in awhile I’ll have a few weeks when I hear over and over about a specific pain point. The theme of my work lately has been grief. Specifically, lately the theme of grief has centered around a parent processing the death of a child.

I cannot imagine the pain of burying my own child. Death is, of course, a part of life. But it is against the flow of nature for parents to outlive their children. I try to help my patients navigate the heavy, dark waves of death and loss. Often people are trying to make sense of their loss, trying to find meaning in tragedy and purpose to suffering.

How can we make sense of experiences that seem senseless?

How can we regain a sense of normalcy after the world feels like it’s been turned upside down? 

Grieving people sometimes feel frozen, like time has stopped for them, but they watch the world continue turning around them. Everyone else is moving on and moving forward, and they’re stuck. The heaviness of grief feels like it could swallow a person up. Consume them and suffocate them and end them.

I ask my grieving patients, and especially my grieving parents, "How can you befriend your grief?"

The death of a child is a transformative experience. You will not be the same after. The ‘normal’ that you settled into before the loss no longer exists. You are different now. Life is different now, and there is no going back. Grief has become a permanent passenger in your heart. As much as you might want to evict grief, you can’t. Knowing you can’t choose to not feel, what would it be like to choose to befriend grief?

Befriending grief looks like an acknowledgement of the reality of your loss, and an honoring of how deep the pain goes. It looks like seeking support, from friends or family or a professional or a grief group. It looks like releasing the grief as it washes over you, allowing it to move through you and out of you. This could be in a process of journaling or talking or making art or physical movement.

It looks like inviting your grief to send you whatever message it has for you. If you can tolerate pausing for a moment to listen, your grief might tell you something. It might remind you how deep and close of a relationship you had with your child. It might sharpen your memory of connected moments. It might offer you a reminder of how resilient you are, that you choose to keep going and keep living despite the constant ache. Grief might tell you to be more present in your day to day, reminding you that more time is not promised. It might clarify what is important to you in your life, magnifying the ways in which you are or aren’t living aligned with your values.

Your grief may be an important messenger, that you can’t hear because your instinct is to shut it out. What if you could make friends with your grief, offer it a place at your heart’s table, and allow it a voice to remind you of what is so dear to you that losing it changes you fundamentally?

Rae Holliday, LMFT