Now what? moving on when things change

Most often, I’ve written about grief as it relates to the death of a loved one. But grief isn’t only related to death and dying. In fact, it’s one of the most pervasive and universal experiences we share as human beings. It’s a part of the life cycle: relationships and jobs and the stages of childhood all come to an end. Life is full of changes that feel like losses and those losses have to be grieved.

As I’ve said before, I’m a real hit at cocktail parties when I tell people that I specialize in grief and loss. For most people, my work sounds deeply sad. And it can be! As I’m fond of saying, hard feelings are hard. But looked at another way—I live to reframe things, it’s the only part of CBT that I’m truly confident in—it’s a gift to honor our grief when something ends. We can experience our grief without wallowing; we can honor endings without big rituals. We can choose to acknowledge that endings are hard without staying stuck in the hard part.

So how do we do that? There are tons of sort of pop psychology buzz words people throw around, memes on social media meant to inspire, about “closure” and “closing the chapter” and “rising from the ashes.” Those are all lovely sentiments and I don’t disagree with them. But I think we lose the nuance of the grieving process when we put it into that kind of phraseology. Closure, for instance, isn’t a thing. Our lives are not actually laid out in neat chapters that resolve after X number of pages. We never leave behind the people we were, even if we make dramatic changes or dramatic changes happen to us. Instead, we add layers and learn lessons and yes, move forward. In short, like any kind of grief, the only way out is through.