Stuck in grief

Grief never ends.

I don’t mean that grieving is a hopeless, forever state of being, though it can certainly feel that way. I only mean that there is no magic solution to fix it. There is no timeline to follow; there is no guidebook. You can experience your grief in any way that feels natural to you. The only caveat is, you cannot fast forward or go under or over or around it. You have to experience the hard feelings of grief and loss.

Hard feelings are… hard! And so many people enter therapy hoping for answers, to solve the issue they are presenting: I have a feeling, it is hard to have it, please can we make it go away? But grief doesn’t go away. It continues even when we think we have “solved” it. The task is to learn how to live with it instead of trying to outrun it.

And you can live with it, even when it feels suffocating. Over time, grief softens. It feels less like a dark hole you can’t climb out of and more like a shadow: always with you but less obtrusively. You can be released from the idea that you have to solve your grief, or outgrow it, or close the door on it. You don’t have to do that to be helped.

Then what can help? Most importantly is to acknowledge our losses: ritualize and memorialize and speak the names of the people we have lost aloud. And then, in our acknowledgement, we can also reach out to others. We can ask for help—from our friends, our family, our religious faith. We can go to therapy and allow someone else to carry the burden of grief for just a little while. We do not have to experience any of our feelings alone, even if they feel isolating. Grief is a universal experience. It never ends and it can’t be solved. But it can be shared. And sometimes, just sharing our burdens can go a great way towards relief.