How Our Grief Opens Us Up to Life

I’m reading a book, called The Wild Edge of Sorrow, by Francis Weller. He talks about how, in Western Culture, we have become so separated from tools and processes that help us to fully express and metabolise our grief. Many traditional cultures still hold regular, even weekly, grief rituals, where the whole community come together to purge and move through their accumulated emotions.

But in our society, we largely shun and suppress our grief. So often we hide our pain from the world and feel shame for even feeling such heavy emotion. But when we don’t express these emotions they get stuck in our body and create blocks in our system, stopping the free flow of energy.

It’s now widely accepted that the lingering residue of unprocessed shame, grief and trauma remains in the body and can lead to depression, persistent pain and even death. What is often diagnosed as depression is actually low-level, chronic grief, shame and despair.

When we avoid feeling and fully expressing our pain, we resign ourselves to a life lived in this dimmed existence. And we don’t even realise that we’re doing it.

So, Weller talks about the Five Gates of Grief, as he calls them. Five different flavours of grief that we all might endure during the course our lives. The first is the sorrow of losing someone or something we love. This is the obvious one. The people, relationships, pets, our health, even roles or parts of our identity.

The second is, the places in us that have not known love. This is our past hurts, traumas, the sources of shame we keep inside of us. We hold grief for the parts of ourselves that we don’t believe to be good enough.

The third is, the sorrows of the world. Our pain when we witness the suffering of others and become deeply aware of the destruction of nature and our environment.

Fourth is, what we expected and did not receive. We can grieve for our alternate life paths that we hoped for, but never made it.

The final one is ancestral grief. We pass down our unprocessed traumas and patterns from generation to generation, unconsciously treating our children the way our parents treated us, until someone is able to confront and release these wounds.

The Sorrow of Losing Someone or Something We Love

So, I’m going to break each of these down a little bit more. The sorrow of losing someone or something we love. This is probably the big one for most of us. The rupture of any of those deep emotional bonds are probably the most painful experiences most of us will face.

I had a conversation with a woman recently who was still grieving the loss of her husband, 4 years ago. And she said something to me that I’ve been thinking about since, which was that she was afraid to fully feel and express her grief, because she felt that it still connected her to him. She believed that, once she lets it all out, she will move on and it will be as if they had never been together.

The author, Jamie Anderson, said:

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

So, I completely get that; why she would want to hold onto her grief. And it’s not apparent to me if it’s better to push to process our grief or simply sit with it for as long as we can bare.

Never waste a good depression, right? My own recent grief hung around for the best part of 2 years and continued to teach me right up to the end of that. I wanted to be free from the pain, but I also did not want to let go.

In times of grief, it seems we are drawn to silence and solitude, so that we can feel and process our pain, so that we have the space and perspective to begin to define a new world for ourselves. Our broken hearts open us up and help us see through the veil that separates us from the rest of existence.

Through grief, we start to see beyond what we believed to be the concrete reality of our individual lives and come face to face with the sheer power and magnitude of this immense universe we’re part of. As Leonard Cohen said,

“The crack is where the light gets in.”

Our suffering is a gateway to more meaning and wisdom, and understanding of the full human experience. It is our greatest teacher, but at some point we need to make the decision to return from the underworld and rejoin the flow of life. Grief and shame trap so much energy within the body, literally sapping the life out of us.

But when we have tools, rituals, intentional spaces where we can fully express and move through our grief, the catharsis of letting it all out is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. The freedom, the energy and lightness on the other side is like you’d never known what a human body was meant to feel like. Expressing our grief in its fullness is what brings us back to living.

This is a passage from a book called “ Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times”, it’s by Katherine May, who expresses it far more eloquently than I can.

“You’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out.

This may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, one passed down carefully through generations: that of looking at other people’s misfortunes and feeling certain that they brought them upon themselves in a way that you never would.

This isn’t just an unkind attitude. It does us harm, because it keeps us from learning that disasters do indeed happen and how we can adapt when they do. It stops us from reaching out to those who are suffering.

And when our own disaster comes, it forces us into a humiliated retreat, as we try to hunt down mistakes that we never made in the first place or wrongheaded attitudes that we never held.

Either that, or we become certain that there must be someone out there we can blame. Watching winter and really listening to its messages, we learn that effect is often disproportionate to cause; that tiny mistakes can lead to huge disasters; that life is often bloody unfair, but it carries on happening with or without our consent.

We learn to look more kindly on other people’s crises, because they are so often portents of our own future.”

Now, I love this passage because it sums up so much of what I’ve experienced. When I was down in the depths, I tore myself apart trying to figure out what I did wrong, only to realise I’d simply been looking in the wrong direction. I then blamed people around me, and the whole world for a while, because I couldn’t bear the weight of the pain on my own.

I was so ashamed of myself for not being stronger, but since I’ve started to share my journey I’ve been blown away by the number of people who have reached out with similar stories, and I’ve come to understand how much of what happens to us is beyond our control.

We couldn’t have done anything differently because we didn’t know better, and we so often hurt each other, completely inadvertently, because of our unconscious protection mechanisms, caused by our own pain.

If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you. It really is the saddest thing to realise how much we’ve hurt people who loved us while trying to protect ourselves from old wounds.

What We Expected and Did Not Receive

This is really powerful to explore, and a huge part of why many of us find it hard to take action and move forward in our lives.

As we grow older, we need to continually shed our skin as we move from the realm of the infinite possibility of youth — from the desire to taste and experience everything we can — to making a decision to commit to one path guided by our values and what we stand for. What’s in our heart. For any of us who had a difficult childhood, who feel like we lacked a strong sense of who we are, this can be particularly challenging.

But we do need to grieve for the lives we will never live. Let go of the dreams we won’t realise, the relationships that didn’t live up to what we needed. Whether it was our own fault, or out of our control, there is nothing to be gained from holding onto these regrets. Expressing our grief for the things we wish were different is how we can finally let go, and look with fresh eyes at the possibilities we still have, to move forward from the present moment.

I had a surprising experience of this kind of grief a few months back. I was at a sweat lodge, which is a bit like a ritualised sauna, where they use the pain and discomfort of extreme heat to access and metabolise stuck emotion within the body.

They use a big fire to heat rocks until they are glowing, when they are brought into the lodge and have water poured over them to distribute the heat as steam. In this tradition, the fire is referred to as the grandfather, and the rocks, being of the earth, as the grandmother.

About half way through the ceremony, people were sharing stories about their own grandparents, when I suddenly got hit with this confronting realisation about my own lack of that relationship.

I only really properly knew one of my grandmothers, who died when I was 8. I had met my other grandmother, but never knew my grandfathers. And it had never really crossed my mind, what I had missed out on by not having those relationships in my life.

I see friends who still have really beautiful relationships with their grandparents, and I can see the uniqueness of that relationship, and the opportunity to learn in a way that can be challenging with our parents. There’s that little bit more space to breathe and flow.

So yeah, I grieved, for those relationships I’ll never have. The wisdom I’ve missed out on. A big part of the experience of being human that I can never know.

We need to grieve for the life we thought we’d lead, for everything we thought would be different, so that we can return to the reality of the present and focus on how we can make the best of what we still have in front of us.

The Sorrows of the World

I recently read a great article on trauma by Richard G. Tedeschi. He defined trauma as “a disruption of our core belief systems”. The article focused on the collective trauma we’ve all experienced as a result of the pandemic.

We thought we were safe from these kinds of infections, that we were protected in our modern society, and now we have to come to terms with the fact that we are vulnerable after all.

There is undoubtedly a lot of suffering out there in the world, but in our culture we’ve done a great job of insulating ourselves from fully experiencing most of it.

We’re far less at risk from the temperature changes and rising sea levels of global warming. We’ve not known war on our shores in our lifetime. We’re so removed from our food production so as to not see the brutality of factory farming.

So it’s rare for us to come face to face with a traumatic event of this scale. Covid came out of nowhere and ruptured our illusion of safety.

The knock on effects of which included the isolation and deaths of our loved ones, unemployment and lost businesses, serious damage to the schooling and socialisation of our children, rising anxiety and loneliness, and the decimation of our economy.

This can only have had a significant emotional toll over a sustained period of time. And I don’t believe we’ve fully seen the fallout yet. As a society, and as individuals, we still need to process and grieve this traumatic experience we’ve been through.

I’ve spoken to so many people recently who are going through relationship issues, or are depressed or feeling disconnected from themselves, with no immediate, obvious reasons as to why. This collective trauma we’re still suffering is just far enough removed from us to not be in our immediate attention.

We’re carrying all this pain, but are blaming it on our partners, our jobs, our families, because they are nearest in the firing line when our minds are looking around, trying to find a cause for this low level anxiety and depression and grief we’re feeling.

Collectively, we still need to grieve and process this disruption of our core belief systems, so we can regain perspective and figure out how to move forward. So many people I speak to are questioning their lives, their commitments and responsibilities right now.

We can feel that things are not right and need to change, but we’re finding it hard to move forward because we’ve not yet finished processing the damage.

Ancestral Grief

I had an experience recently where I became acutely aware of this collective wound that we’re all carrying, that’s been passed down throughout the whole of human history.

And this is what the story of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the fall of man, is really about. Biting the forbidden fruit and getting banished from paradise — it’s allegorical, a metaphor, for the moment in evolution when humans became self-conscious.

When the switch got flipped and we went from acting on animal instinct — by our innate nature — to suddenly feeling like we need to control our environment to be safe. We no longer could just ‘be’.

This is identical to our experience of separation from the mother — the transition from the warmth and peace, the absolute security of the womb, to the moment when we stand alone out in the world.

Collectively, we all inherently feel this separation already, but if our parents or ancestors experienced additional trauma from their caregivers, it’s highly likely we’ll feel it even more so. Most of us struggle with some degree of not feeling good enough, believing that we should be behaving differently in some ambiguous way or other.

All the pain and suffering, and evil of the world is a result of this wound. Fear of abandonment, of not being able to trust, or surrender to the knowledge that we will be held and cared for unconditionally. This trauma has been passed down from that moment of self-consciousness, and compounded with each generation throughout the whole of human history.

All of the mental chatter, the need to control, to prove ourselves worthy, to have power over others, is all an attempt to feel safe and secure. Like, underpinning every argument with your partner is a bid from each of you to feel loved and supported unconditionally. To be held and accepted with your grief and shame and trauma.

And when we feel safe enough to express these emotions fully, they dissolve. It’s not our job to fix each other’s pain, we simply need to witness — to create the safety for it to be felt and expressed, without further shaming.

Unexpressed grief and shame creates all sorts of psychological distortions in us. It traps emotion in our body, leading to chronic pain, depression and even death. Shame creates a bind in our psyche which completely inhibits us from performing actions we know to be good — like expressing our feelings to our loved ones.

And when we are so disgusted or ashamed of ourselves, it can be too much for our psyche to bear, which can cause us to project onto those around us and punish them for what we can’t accept in ourselves.

I’ve had a number of people contact me this past week who are suffering from situations like these. Loved ones who are unable to open up emotionally, or who have ended a relationship and punished their partner for their own unexpressed grief.

This is the hardest emotional landscape we’ll ever have to deal with. It becomes near impossible to heal these ruptures unless we have tools and practices in place in advance, before things get emotional.

Hurt People Hurt People

My last point is to say that, people act unpredictably and hurtfully when they are going through grief and shame. These are the most overwhelming emotions, and often our psyches are not resilient enough to withstand the force.

It’s heartbreaking how often we can end up projecting onto, and punishing each other, because we cannot bear the weight of our own suffering. If this has happened to you, I want you to know that the people who hurt you quite possibly didn’t have the capacity to act any differently.

Some people have more pain than they might ever be able to recover from, and sadly they can offload it onto people who didn’t deserve it. It’s not ok that they hurt you. But the pain was more than they could take and they couldn’t bear the weight of their burden.

It’s one of the saddest things in the world, how grief can tear apart other relationships in collateral damage. And why it’s so important that we make an effort to normalise tools and spaces to share and process our pain.

The more we can understand and accept that people could not have acted differently to us, even if they wanted to, the more we will learn grace and compassion, and free ourselves to move on, without holding onto anger and resentment.

“Stand in awe of what people have to carry, rather than judgment of how they carry it”. — Father Greg Boyle

Resources

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface here and maybe I’ll come back and do a full post on each of these individually at some point. But I wanted to get across that there’s likely a lot more difficult and unprocessed emotion in our lives than we consciously realise.

I used to be that guy who was completely cut off from my emotions, hadn’t cried in 15 years and thought that was something to be proud of. When I finally tapped into them, the floodgates opened and for a long time I felt like they were out of control. Which also created more shame in me, for not being able to control them.

But I had suppressed things all my life so it’s to be expected that there’s gonna be a lot come up when you finally open that box. But once you make some progress clearing out the cobwebs and learn some techniques so that you can move emotions through you properly, you’ll also become far less likely to fall to pieces.

Emotions will still rise up and flow through you, but without bumping into any residual pockets of old, unprocessed junk that can build into a torrent.

Emotions are part of being human. We all have them and they serve a purpose — they are how we actually understand and relate to each other authentically. When we suppress them, we are also denying that honest and open connection to those around us.

The emotions themselves are not the issue. The problems arise when we feel shame for feeling those emotions. And largely that happens because we feel weak or not good enough in that moment. But we also get to choose what we do with that feeling.

Either we can continue to hide our real selves from the people around us and hope we don’t get ‘found out’, or we can use those moments as insight into the places we still need to heal and grow. And it takes work to cultivate and organise our relationships to feel safe enough to work through this stuff.

It’s not easy and it really needs some effort to lay the groundwork in times that are not emotionally loaded so that you can effectively navigate situations when they arise. There’s also lots we can be doing to work through and express our stuck emotion individually, so our partners don’t always have to bear the brunt of it.

I mentioned at the start, how traditional cultures continue to practice rituals to work through their grief and emotion. There are already people who do this work in our society, and I’m happy to see them becoming more mainstream. It’s an area of work I’m moving into, but for now, I’ll link to some of the spaces and resources I know of below.

Grief Rituals: Love and Loss: https://www.loveandloss.co.uk/loss/gr…

Grief Tending: https://grieftending.org/events/

Breathwork for Emotional Release: https://www.instagram.com/josh_ffw

Further reading:
The Body Keeps the Score: https://amzn.to/3j66Fvb Waking the Tiger: https://amzn.to/3wx2wDw

When the Body Says No: https://amzn.to/3Hac1NP

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your perspective and if there’s anything else you’d like me to talk about then let me know in the comments too.

Originally published at https://www.jamesgarside.co.uk on January 26, 2023.