No one meant to teach you unhelpful things about dealing with grief. Your parents and caregivers taught you what they knew. Unless they’d done a bunch of spiritual development work, that was likely what they were taught by their own parents.
Society also does a good job of impressing beliefs upon us. It’s so good at it that it often takes deliberate effort to find out what your own beliefs really are.
Grief myth #1: Don’t feel bad
One of the myths, or unhelpful things, you were probably taught about grief is to not feel bad when a loss occurs.
This is a totally common, and seemingly normal, reaction people have when you tell them something bad has happened in your life.
Imagine a child, your own if you have one, coming home from school feeling sad about something that happened during the school day. The friend that usually sits with them at lunch was at home, sick, so they ate lunch alone.
“Don’t feel bad, honey,” you say. “Your friend will get better soon and eat lunch with you again.”
Raise your hand if you’ve done this. I have. I’ve totally done this as a parent. Multiple times.
I want my kid to feel happy. I don’t want them sad. I know their friend will get better and they’ll eat lunch together again, probably the next day, and the whole thing will be forgotten about.
I want to alleviate my child’s suffering.
But I’ve totally invalidated my child’s feelings. I’ve dismissed them.
And I’ve taught them that the reaction society expects them to have, if they want to be accepted, is to either dismiss their own feelings or not show them if they are deemed negative in nature.
Great.
With repeated teaching of this myth, we internalize it and believe it. (And then accidentally teach it to our own children.)
We feel bad – that’s good
We also don’t stop feeling bad. Feeling bad, sad, mad, upset, disappointed, etc., when something unpleasant happens in our life is a natural and normal reaction. We are human. We’re supposed to have emotions. Not all of them are going to be sweetness and light all the time. They’re not supposed to be.
Feeling bad when a loss occurs is good – in the sense that you’re reacting in a completely normal way.
Intellectualizing grief doesn’t help
While my example above isn’t a grieving event – the child’s friend gets better and goes back to school – consider how people often react to something that is a permanent loss.
Say it was the child’s pet cat, Hobbes. The cat was old. She had cancer. She was in pain. So the mom (yep, that’s me in this case), calls the vet to come out and “put the cat to sleep.”
Intellectually, the family knows that being euthanized is the best thing for Hobbes, the cat. She’s days or weeks away from dying a painful death. Plus she’s pooping everywhere and who wants to clean that off the carpets? No one wants to see their cherished pet suffer.
But we don’t grieve in our heads. We grieve in our hearts.
So telling the child, “Don’t feel bad, Hobbes isn’t in pain anymore,” isn’t really helpful. Nor is, “Don’t feel bad, Hobbes had a long life. She was 19 which is really old for a cat.”
Helpful responses to grief
What is helpful?
Be honest – especially with your own feelings. Emotional honesty brings healing.
Give the grieving people around you permission to feel what they feel. They can feel bad. You can feel bad. It’s OK.
Acknowledge the emotional hardness of the situation. You don’t need to compare losses, or minimize their loss or your own by doing so.
Learn to be with emotional discomfort without trying to change it or fix it. Mindfulness meditation practice is super helpful for learning this and becoming able to make room for all your emotions.
Grief is the normal and natural response to loss. Grief is hard. That’s OK.
Rev. Joanna Bartlett is a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist® certified by the Grief Recovery Institute® and offers one-on-one and group sessions using the Grief Recovery Method® to help you move through grief and live life again.
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