How do you know you’re grieving? Here’s a little check-in
After my dad died, I thought I was grieving. Actively. Consciously. Even dutifully.
I tried to honor my feelings, to be with them, as difficult and wide-ranging as they were, while trying to process the loss of my dad alongside the loss of the relationship we’d never have. Ours had always been a complicated, often strained and bruising, connection. Ripe with love. Rife with the heartache of disappointment, longing and regret. Grieving him was a deep dive into the layers of all we had, and hadn’t been, to each other.
And I was doing the work. Or so I thought. Until I found myself sitting in my car on a summer day, staring into the eyes of the man I’d loved for six years — the man who’d been an accidental but willing pallbearer at my dad’s funeral — choking out the words “I can’t do this anymore.”
He was, I’d always been certain, the love of my life. The big magic. The story spun from a thousand giddy dreams, even with our struggles that snared us in intermittent sorrow. Those I hoped we’d overcome…until I knew we couldn’t.
That day, meeting his wounded eyes as he stood on the sidewalk, I knew I needed more space to grieve than our recurrent battle was allowing me. I also knew the only thing that would keep me tethered to him was doing something drastically different from what we had done before.
I found myself a therapist, enlisting her services to help me decide whether I wanted to stay in our relationship, to explore the terms and changes that would make me comfortable with such a decision.
At least that’s what I thought I was there to work on in those early weeks of sitting, confused and heart sore, on her couch. The subject of losing my dad was inevitably a part of those sessions, almost as a periphery event, until my grief horned in, determined and raw. Suddenly, processing that loss became the reason I was there. And that was what I devoted a year of therapy to, working out the tangles of the ways my dad and I had loved and failed each other, denied each other our truth and the willingness to salvage something more than our fraught and dented history.
I did eventually say goodbye to my partner over the course of that year. Yet it seemed I had been walking toward that choice even before I sat in my therapist’s office. Still I remember the emotions spiraling through me the day I refused to keep entertaining the painfully familiar. At the time, they felt ragingly disproportionate to the challenge he and I were facing.
But that unbearable, cacophonous weight was exactly what I needed to begin the true work of grieving my dad.
It is not uncommon, therapists and counselors often note, for people to seek them out with one presenting issue only to discover that untended or unresolved grief is at the heart of their struggles.
Yet in a culture that shies away from honest expressions of grief and wants to rush us through our experiences of deep loss with a platitudinous Band-Aid fix, we may not even be aware that our grief is clamoring for our attention and care.
If you’ve suffered a significant loss or undergone a major change in your life but are trying to live within the framework where you previously functioned, you may wish to check in with yourself.
Are you allowing yourself time and space to feel your feelings? What would that actually look like for you?
Are you able to sit with your sadness and any other difficult emotions that may come up or are you more likely to choose distraction or denial when your attention turns to your loss?
Are you fixating on the challenges, real or imagined, in other areas of your life or creating problems where there were none rather than letting in your sorrow and befriending your grief?
Do you find yourself rehashing, often obsessively, the events leading up to a change in your circumstances? Are you repeatedly focused on what happened and why?
Do you often overreact to circumstances that you may have handled with greater equanimity before your loss? Does your emotional response feel out of proportion to the experience at hand?
Are you working overly long hours, sleeping all day or not enough, overeating or skipping meals, or otherwise engaging in unhealthy or risky behaviors?
Do you feel numb, lethargic, unmotivated? Have you shut out the world around you?
Do you find yourself pushing others away or clinging to certain people, becoming overly dependent on them?
Are you overly irritable and prone to angry outbursts?
We all respond differently to grief. But the key part is to respond — in a way that honors our true feelings and experience, that makes room to process and move through the layers. That allows us to tune into our bodies and all they’re holding.
For some, therapy — especially somatic and other body-oriented therapies — is the path to healing. Others may turn to mindfulness practices like yoga, meditation and breathwork. Some seek out energy workers, acupuncturists, shamans and other healers. The community of grief circles and grief groups are where many find comfort and support. As a grief coach, I companion individuals through a process of self-reflection, tool sharing and guided support. And while some combination of all of these and more may be effective, sometimes we need only to allow ourselves the time to sit with, to move with, to write through our grief … until we emerge, through our own compassionate presence and tending, into the space of healing.
It’s through such active engagement that we ultimately learn to trust in grief as a natural human response to change. That we become willing to open our hearts to its vitalizing journey of release and self-discovery.