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Anxiety and forgotten grief

“Don’t forget, the heaviest rain comes out of the darkest clouds.”

Rumi

I recently made a connection between unresolved grief and fears of the future.  I’m using the term “grief” here broadly.

When we are fearing the passing of time, getting older, and moving into the future away from the past, it could be that some time in the past hasn’t lived up to our expectations, and so we’re anticipating more of the same in the future.  When we don’t feel peace with the way things have gone, our imagination (which bases future predictions on past experience) naturally envisions more times ahead that may also be less fulfilling than desired and therefore,  regrettable.

Or, it could be that a really great time is coming to an end, and we are feeling some anticipatory grief (“what’s ahead could never live up to this”).  I experienced this when I studied abroad in college.  It was such a rich year full of rewarding growth and life-changing experiences, that I did not expect my next couple of years to be even half as rewarding.   Even before I’d returned, I had lost something — the closer I got to my flight home, the more days of my study abroad year had expired, had died, never to be recovered.  That is a real loss, and I wish someone had pointed it out that way to me.  I would have understood what I was feeling a lot better.  I think that I felt some “reverse culture shock” that gradually decreased, for a few years, lasting until I traveled to a different country again, which didn’t live up to my original international experience.  I was trying to recreate what I had lost, because I hadn’t yet let go of the experience that I’d had.  I had unfinished grief.  

In a past job, I met some college students with similar fears when graduation approached.  Probably the most common outlooks were excitement for moving on to something positive, or relief to be finished with a stressful, or just worn out, phase of life.  But sometimes a student had had a really great time in college and had a lot of fear about moving on afterward, because they weren’t sure what afterward was going to look like.  Sometimes finishing college meant moving back in with family for a while.  Often, such students had rougher childhoods and teenage years, so they viewed university as the exception to an otherwise adversity-laden life.  Naturally, their minds feared what might come next.  They wondered if post-college life would be a continuation of a virtuous spiral, or a relapse back into the status quo they knew before.

There’s a good reason we don’t want to grieve.  Grief hurts like hell.  But whether it comes quickly or gradually, there are no shortcuts for the flow of pain.  

It sounds good and simple at face value: “I just need to grieve.  Great, I added it to the to-do list… how do I start?”

It’s as if we think we can complete the grief task in our heads alone, not feeling the loss in our bodies and hearts.  But our hearts is mainly where the bond we have to the person/place/experience.

Two sides to grief

“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”

Rumi

Some say that, for grief to flow, we need to get quiet and still and mourn, preferably fasting and someplace cold and monochrome.  Imagine a stereotypical dark funeral, with minimal talking and eye contact, slow walking, and somber music.

Others talk about simply moving on, not looking back, quickly filling up the void, not allowing sadness to ruin future planning.  Imagine a “life-celebration” when someone dies, with loud cheerful music, colorful clothing, talking, drinks, and dancing.

Personally, I think these two images represent the far two sides of a spectrum.  And that it’s okay to visit those extremes, and everything in between.  It’s also okay to be somewhere in the middle.  But I think that oscillating along this continuum could be helpful, not staying in either place for too long.

So, grief has two basic components:

  1. Noticing when we feel nostalgia, longing, and sadness, and not reacting to it with fear or shame, but instead opening and allowing ourselves to feel it.
  2. Opening ourselves to new experiences, allowing ourselves to create new connections and images of the future.

These two approaches are both useful, and I don’t think they need to be followed in sequence, although with heavy grief, often the first one tends to precede the second.

There is a saying that we need to empty our cup first before we can fill it.  A useful metaphor, but I think in human affairs we are never fully empty, and we can both empty and fill the cup at the same time.  Rather than liquid in the cup, it’s like there are components or pieces that we can gradually sift through and sort out.  I’m not sure it’d be either possible or advisable to try to completely detach from past connections before we form new ones.  

On the other hand, if we don’t take the time to let go of the past, we risk having our cup remain full of memory that isn’t useful or supportive of new experience, and this can result in feeling less alive, stuck, or clogged up.  

These two polarized outcomes are related to the less effective emotional strategies of becoming our emotions or repressing our emotions.  The middle way of doing neither, and instead processing our emotions, has elements of both.

These two steps enhance each other.  Feeling the pain of the loss empties us out, and eventually we feel ready to fill the emptiness with something new.  And, trying new things puts the past a little farther back into the rearview mirror, giving us the strength and confidence to look back less frequently.  

At a neurological level, new experiences create new cells and connections in our brains, and lead to pruning and cleanup of old ones.  But that neurological cleanup also requires grief emotions such as sadness and longing.  I believe that this is why sadness tends to arise after a loss, until it is felt.  Our psyche’s are wise and know that we must “feel it to heal it.”

“Forgetting” to grieve

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”

Rumi

I wanted to write this post because it seems that sometimes people “forget” to grieve.  It doesn’t seem possible at first, after all, is this even an option?  Doesn’t grief just happen on it’s own?  Is going through it actually an option?  If it were, wouldn’t we all be wise to decline it?

I’d say yes and no to these questions.  On the one hand, forgotten grief will stay with us.  It won’t leave us completely alone.  On the other hand, some of us can get really good at suppressing it, at keeping busy, at thinking our way out of it and around it.  I think even in these cases, grief still happens, but it can take years, when it need not take so long.  

Imagine a tire, that can either slow leak over days, or immediately blow out.  With grief, perhaps neither is ideal.  But grief can slow leak over years or even decades, causing us to continually get flats until we patch up the heart.  Only we don’t make the connection between our subtle malaise or anxiety, and instead “fill up” by distracting ourselves with some addictive, emotional analgesic.  This could be anything from alcohol to love/sex to work to extreme sports (the sky is the limit).  

The fundamental problem is an automatic tendency to turn away from pain when it arises.  This is an almost ubiquitous reflex for most people, and ranges along a continuum from mild to severe aversion.  It is actually our minds getting in the way of a natural process.  It’s a bit like having a physical injury that we don’t let heal because we’re too busy using that part of the body.  Whether emotional or physical, injuries require some period of rest and stillness to heal.  We don’t have to be totally inert while we heal, but the injured part of us at least needs to be allowed to rest, in order for the natural healing processes to occur.  

With grief, these natural processes are essentially emotions that spontaneously rise up when we least expect it.  That is the good news.  We don’t have to actually do anything, we just have to stay open, and practice relaxing the reflexive impulse to clench and tense the body and then get up and do something, or get lost in fantasy, when relaxing doesn’t immediately work.

Shouldn’t I be feeling more?

“My heart, sit only with those who know and understand you.”

Rumi

Sometimes people feel confused, or even guilty, when they expect to feel grief but don’t, such as on a special date (e.g. a death anniversary or important holiday).  This is the other form of counterproductivity.  Our analytical minds are judging our hearts, whose job it is to grieve.  This is like judging our bodies for healing a cut too fast, or when a strained muscle doesn’t hurt.  It’s silly.  It’s the body’s job to produce pain or not produce pain.  The analytical mind doesn’t know what it’s talking about.  That doesn’t mean it is bad.  It’s trying to be helpful.  And it’s normal for it to make predictions about when we will hurt and when we won’t.  But it’s important (and helpful) to recognize that these are just guesses. 

When we judge the presence of grief pain we are hindering our cup emptying.  When we judge the absence of pain we are hindering our cup from filling up with the new.  All we have to do is let go of our attachment to what we are going to feel, and when.

Since so many of us err towards staying busy to avoid pain, I think it’s important to consciously take regular breaks to simply stop everything and turn inward, and just see what is there.  

I thought I was past this

“Be patient where you sit in the dark. The dawn is coming.”

Rumi

The other side of the “I should be feeling more” coin is, “I should be feeling less.”  I think it’s totally possible to oscillate between the two.  Again, this is just our analytical mind getting out of it’s lane and running amok in the heart realm.  It is similar to when our minds sometimes get confused or critical about a mysterious waning of physical energy, or feeling more hurt by a situation than we think we “should” feel.

Our bodies, souls, and environments are too complex for our conscious mind to predict what we are going to feel, and when we’ll feel it.

Now, I’m talking about feelings, not mental stories.  Sometimes we can get stuck in what many people call feelings, but which are actually negative and painful narratives in our minds (which create feelings as a byproduct).

How can you tell the difference?  Feelings happen in the body.  If you put all your attention into your body and feel relief, then you were most likely thinking a lot.  If you can remember what the thoughts you were just having were, you can ask yourself if you were letting go of something, or  perpetuating something.  Thinking tends to happen when we feel, but often we’ll then judge or resist the thoughts and feelings.  We’ll be in a hurry to feel better, which makes us feel worse.  Any thought about the feelings being unwelcome or inappropriate is the narrative that creates a new wound (there is something wrong with me for having my experience), which takes away attention and energy that could be used to heal the old wound (whatever it is we lost or never had).

If this sounds familiar to you, I’d try a few things.

  1. Notice the thoughts
  2. Move your attention to your body (focus on the physical sensations) and keep it there as much as possible
  3. Notice any judgments that something is wrong, and let them go
  4. Repeat

I think of the grief as an energy that needs to be released, or a wound that needs to heal.  And our attention is the balm.  We can take breaks from healing it, but if we forget about it, it will continue to remind us to finish the process.

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