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Key insights from
Its OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief
and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand
By
Megan Devine
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What you'll learn
Megan Devine is a psychotherapist, author, and grief
counselor who works at the intersection of psychology, emotional literacy,
and anthropology. Ever since her husband died, she has reflected deeply
upon the nature of grief and loss. She has created an online platform for
the sake of navigating grief and helping others live out their losses in
community. Her organization gives workshops, runs a podcast, and shares the
wisdom she has gained with regard to grief, trauma, and healthy
communication. In Its OK, Devine’s first book, she navigates the
problematic methods of grief management in our culture, the relationships
we have with those who just want to support us, and how we ourselves can
live through our grief and seek a good life.
Read on for key insights from Its OK That You're Not OK.
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1. Grief is not a
problem to be solved, but a burden to be carried.
After suffering the loss of her husband, Devine began
navigating conversations with others who tried to cheer her up and out of
her grief. But in her pain, even the nicest of sentiments and the clearest
advice sounded wrong. There was a disconnect between her and others, and
all of the platitudes and encouraging words given to her unfortunately felt
hollow and were sometimes frustrating.
Why was this the case? Clearly those around her meant to
help, not hurt. Moreover, some of what they were saying was accurate: She
was loved, she was supported. Yet, the disconnect remained. What separates
a sufferer, someone newly grief-stricken, from their support system and
those who care for them? Why does helping sometimes hurt or ring hollow?
The revelation came when Devine tried to resume reading a
book titled There Is a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. It,
like the words of others, felt wrong, uncomfortable to read. Sometime
later, the title leapt out at her. In her mind, grief had been a problem.
But this conception of grief was actually the problem. Grief has no
solution, because it is not a puzzle. It is a process. It isn’t a
pathology, an illness to be cured.
This revelation led Devine to understand grief and loss in a
whole new paradigm. Our culture treats grief as a puzzle demanding a
solution. The right phrase, a good meal, a helpful hug, some combination of
these must be the answer. As we try to support someone in their time of
grief, we desire so firmly to remove their pain and give them happiness
that we ignore the reality of their suffering and the substance of their
grief. There is no combination to unlock someone’s suffering and usher them
back into a state of normalcy. Grief simply is. It is something to be
borne, not ignored. Grief reshapes our reality, and how we support those we
love means entering into their suffering, helping them bear it, and helping
them map out their newly altered landscape.
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2. Our culture has
a positivity problem, which renders all negative emotions illegitimate.
Rather than accept and acknowledge grief, our culture tries
to gloss over it and all other “unpleasant” feelings. Instead, we rely on a
pattern of positivity platitudes to handle the times in our life that just
don’t make sense. If our culture treats grief as a problem and normalcy as
the end goal after grief, then positivity is the solution to our
grief-problem.
As aforementioned, people often appeal to grievers with
platitudes, token phrases, and encouraging remarks that seem hollow and
disjointed from the griever. As it turns out, these platitudes, such as
“Everything happens for a reason,” “They wouldn’t want you to be sad,”
“Look at what you can learn through this!” are not universal antidotes.
Grief is not a lock that has a certain set of sayings that act as keys.
This positivity problem operates not only on the
interpersonal level, but it actually has warped our religious institutions
which normally provide wisdom for navigating grief. All of the major
religious traditions have resources for living through grief and pain, not
providing a cure for them. Yet so often the spiritual resources available
to us are co-opted by our cultural framework of grief erasure. From West to
East, Christianity to Buddhism to New Age spirituality, spiritual resources
are forced to play the role of platitude placebos. In Christianity, one may
hear, “It’s all a part of God’s plan.” In Buddhism, one may hear,
“Suffering is all in the mind.” Even in the non-institutional New Age
movements, one may hear, “Your intention manifests your reality.”
All of these are meant to ground us in our reality, no
matter how painful. Yet these statements are strong-armed by a new
intention that seeks to manage grief like a disease. Ultimately, these
aphorisms disentangle the head from the heart, seeking to give otherwise
valid reasons that utterly displace our present feelings.
Though there are many good intentions behind this push for
positivity, oftentimes it covers up our own fear of suffering and pain. The
discomfort we feel in the face of someone grieving before us intensifies
this desire to sweep sorrow under the rug and forget for the sake of normalcy.
To this we must remember that we are to connect with each other, see the
truth of a griever’s experience, and feel with them. Poignancy is kinship.
Real support comes through genuine empathy, which enters into the griever’s
reality without seeking to abolish it.
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3. In times of
grief, pain must be felt, but suffering is to be reduced.
Though it is important to push back on our culture’s grief
suppression tactics, this does not mean we must sit in our grief and do
nothing. We must make the distinction between pain and suffering, which
both appear in grief, and seek to remove only our suffering.
Pain is inevitable, but this does not mean it is unnatural.
Though pain hurts, it is not wrong to feel it. What we need when we are in
pain is support, and when that support is not present, then there is
suffering. Suffering emerges when we are dismissed, blocked up by others,
or when we dismiss our own present situation by imagining what once was or
might have been. Suffering acts like a cork, damming up the natural flow of
our emotions in grief. It stifles and seals off our feelings, labeling them
as unacceptable. This reflex in our mind, whether it comes externally or
internally, ends up multiplying our pains by letting the pressure build and
the burden increase.
Instead of having a horrible burden that we must and can
bear, suffering crushes us under a swollen weight that is not necessary or
good. Rather than letting this pressure build within us or be placed from
without, we can take action by observation. We must notice where our fault
lines are, where the burden begins to become utterly unbearable, where we
begin to shut down.
Take note of the things that upset you on a given day.
Analyze the cause and determine whether that stressor must remain in your
daily life, if it need not be there at all, or if it should be there, but
not right now. In this way, we come to understand that our grief is a
process, an exploration through unfamiliar terrain requiring
experimentation. Noticing our present capacities and what makes our burden
worse will inevitably highlight things that lighten our burden and give us
stability. Even if these moments are tiny or brief, finding the things that
calm us or help us carry on are essential to keeping our balance as we
manage the flow of our feelings.
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4. Grief is not
just an emotional experience, but affects us fully.
Though grief is primarily something that affects us
emotionally, it does not make sense to somehow view our emotions as
separate from our other mental faculties and our physical ones. All of the
categories of human experience are interconnected, and thus, understanding
what grief does to our bodies, which interrupts our mental faculties, is
important.
When grief first comes upon us, we have to recognize that
the change in our life is not just to the feeling that the outer world is
different, but that we ourselves are different as well. It is like we have
entered a cocoon in our grief. We are not the caterpillar we were when we
went in, nor are we the butterfly which comes forth. We are between our old
existence and our new one.
It is common in times of grief to experience illness
symptoms, though the two are by no means necessarily connected. Our bodies
rebel in times of grief, because they have to hold together our
experiences, whether strictly physical or emotional. From sleep changes to
weight loss or gain, such things come with the tide of grief, and this is a
part of the process. Though these changes should be monitored for long-term
health concerns, understanding that they are connected to grief is
significant for treating oneself appropriately during this process.
Moreover, the effects grief can have on cognition, memory,
and mental energy are nothing to be ashamed of. Though these are scary,
they are a part of the reality of loss. The change in our mental capacities
in times of grief reflects that we are trying to survive in severe
hardship. Treating ourselves with kindness in these moments means not
comparing the person we once were to the person we currently are.
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5. Grief may be
lessened as time goes on without going away entirely.
Our emotional experiences are not discrete mechanisms. We
can not turn our grief off for good after a sufficient mourning period.
Though we can work to ease our suffering and process our grief, this does not
change the fact that grief is something that happens to us. Moreover, it
likely will continue to happen to us, though in softer and less steep ways.
On the back side of the first period of grief, what often
rushes in on grievers is a softer sense of loss. As we begin to look more
normal to those around us, as days begin to be mundane and time begins to
tick regularly, it is tempting to assume grief is over. Yet it is not, and
that feelings of grief endure, though less intense than they first were, is
by no means unnatural.
This attests to the fact that our individual grief, and the
losses which our grief reflects, are unique, irreplaceable. Just because
someone begins to live and love and proceed through their life after loss,
this loss is not negated. Having a child after losing one is not a
replacement. Having a marriage after a spouse dies does not replace the
lost love. Our culture will tell us that eventually time heals all things,
and we will simply move on. But this is inaccurate, because it denies the
change we undergo because of these experiences. Just because we heal does
not mean we have no scars. What matters is healing these scars such that
they do not feel like open wounds.
What we come to learn as we ease from our immediate grief
into our ongoing sense of loss is that our love and pain are connected now
because of the loss we have faced. Though our love is far from the same
thing as our pain, it remains true that our love for those lost will be
interwoven with all our experiences of them, even the sorrowful ones. Our
pain may even recede totally, but the loss that created that pain will
remain, and be woven into the life we live thereafter, as well as the man
or woman we become.
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6. When those we
love are in grief, we must be helpers, not fixers.
For those who are not grieving but are in a relationship
with a griever, it is natural to assume our culture’s “fix-it” mentality.
Coming to learn that grief is not a problem but a burden is hard enough.
Continually fighting the impulse to fix grievers with platitudes and
dissonant condolences is even harder. So those who support grievers must
learn to be helpers, not fixers.
External support, not internal remedy, is all that is
available to those surrounding a loved one in grief. Like the cast for a broken
bone, helpers do not actually mend the arm, but are simply present to help
make it easier for the person grieving to process their brokenness.
Acknowledgement is the most valuable resource communities have to support
those who are heavily burdened.
When the impulse to fix grief and remove pain arises, we
must take an extra moment to stop and recognize that what matters more than
half-hearted platitudes is our presence with one another in times of grief
and sorrow. Coupled with our presence comes an attentiveness to truly
listen to the pain of loss.
Too often we are wrapped up in confident assertions about
“the way things really are,” which often entails telling the griever “the
way they ought to feel.” When tragedy strikes, however, we are to be
learners and listeners rather than teachers or adjudicators. People who are
processing grief have a whole host of feelings and reflections on those
feelings. The weight of what they have to say is sometimes too much to
carry alone, and so we must be patient enough to help them ease the
pressure by sharing their words, not our own.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Its OK
That You're Not OK here. And since we get a commission on
every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.
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