The Paradox of Intentional Grief – Why we must practice it, and how to implement it in our lives.

Originally published October 2018.

Do you consistently make it a practice to take time to intentionally grieve the loss that happens in your life, both the significant and minor? If you find yourself living in America, the answer is probably not. Grief is an extremely important and necessary space to embody and walk through in all of our lives, but in our world of constant stimulation and smartphones and working too much and rushing to take the kids to soccer practice, grief is something that I see being pushed out of Western culture as something that must be valued, affirmed, and paid attention to. At some point along the way, the innate human phychological and emotional need to lament the people and things we lose in our lives has become a lost practice. Americans are really bad at recongizing, naming, and claiming things that must be grieved, and that is really scary to me, for it is most likely that we are always grieving something, and if that grief is repressed, it will manifest and be projected on to other things in our lives without us even recognizing it. When it is normalized for grief to automatically be quieted, the result is a mass people walking around with pain they’re not looking at, without any tools to navigate or uncover it in order to let go and move forward.

I want to advocate for a new normal. We must lean how to intentionally grieve, or our grief is going to eat us up from the inside out. 

Intentionally practice grief? Yep. And no, I am not just saying this because of my melancholy Enneagram Four-ness.

The grief is happening whether we look at it or not, so we might as well hold space for it and give it room to move through us.

Western society reinforces the message that grief is something you experience only when someone dies, and even then it is something that must be kept inside of us, processed alone, and kept tidy and neat, as if expressing our grief externally is a burden that none of the people around us are interested in bearing with us. This is so incredibly backwards. Grief is not only more expansive than the grief of death, but it is also something that should not be hidden from our communities. Grief should be a time when we press in and push into the space of being held up by our community, not isolating ourselves from them.

Although grief is of course sometimes processing deep loss, such as a death of a loved one, betrayal, abuse, or trauma, it is not only limited to the more significant things we think of when asked to think of grief. Grief can be much more subtle and easy to miss, because friends,

Any change is a form of loss,

and loss must be grieved.

I heard this said on a podcast a couple years ago, and for those of you who know me more personally, I’m sure you have heard me say it at some point in one of our conversations, or ten of them, because it has become one of my “Emily-ism’s,” one of my go-to mantras, one of my core values that I deeply believe in and say all of the time. Change is happening constantly in all of our lives, and therefore there are frequent microscopic losses and microscopic griefs to pay attention to. So much has changed in my own life over the past three years, and therefore there has been a lot of loss, and furthermore there has been a lot that I have needed to grieve.

Through processing my own grief, I have learned that grief is so much more expansive and deep and multi-faceted than being reduced to something we do only when someone close to us dies. There are new kinds of grief that I have become aware of and learned to pay attention to that I would like to talk through. Also, I must say, I am not trying to make a scientific claim, and I do not have peer-reviewed articles to give you. This is fully from me being present in my own experience and trying to put languange to it.

In addition to grieving death and significant loss, there is the practice of:

Grieving the good.

Grieving the ideal that you deserve that for whatever reason will never be.

Grieving the could-have-been.

Grieving macroscopic pain of a society or culture, spurred by a natural disaster like Florence, or systemic oppression like the history of race in our country, or this week, the normalized culture of sexual assault brought up in the Kavanaugh trial that leaves us all triggered and filled with rage, and the list goes on.

I have recently become part of a group that meets once a week on Sunday nights to intentionally do life together and practice radical vulnerability and authentic community. We have been taking turns leading every week, bringing a topic or conversation to talk through together, and after a few events bringing up some grief in my life this week, it had me thinking about how important intentional grieving has been for me, and I wanted to share that with my community, which if you are reading this, you are part of that community too.

I talked through the different types of grief, and after it I gave everyone a piece of paper and asked if we could take some time to check in and sit in our grief together communally and physically write out and name the things we were grieving in this season, because naming it in words and holding your grief with open hands is the first step in being able to intentionally grieve.

And I want to ask, would you have the courage to do the same?

Would you grab a piece of paper, put on some instrumental music, go for a walk, find some space, and take time to write down and name the things in your life that you are currently grieving? Not for me, though I do genuinely and deeply care for your heart and your healing,

but would you do it for you?

The first kind of grief I would ask you to name is the kind most of us think of when asked about grief. The deep loss, the most painful. This grief is normally the most intense, the sometimes multi-year grief that we carry with us for a long time, and sometimes forever. What is one hard, sad thing that you are grieving in this season? Have you lost someone close to you? A parent? A sibling? A grandparent? A best friend? Has a significant relationship in your life ended in betrayal that you havent quite let go of? Have you had to let go of a part of your foundational identity that doesn’t work anymore, such as a change in spiritual belief or feeling abandoned and betrayed by God being different than the worldview you were handed growing up? Have you experienced physical or emotional trauma that leaves you crippled with deep pain? Have you lost a job? Been separated from your family?

What deep change or loss are you grieving? 

I also want to name the fact that thinking about this level of grief can be extremely hard and triggering, so make sure you practice self-care, and if you are feeling triggered or feel that this is too much right now, maybe wait and do this near or around someone who can check in with you if it would lead to feelings of being unsafe, whether that be a close friend, family member, or therapist.

Next, grieving the good. I asked everyone to write down one good thing that they have had to leave within the past year or two. This is a kind of grief that is more associated with change than loss, because most of the time the “good thing” did not end badly or in pain, but the dynamic of the good thing might have had to change because of a change in circumstance. That change is loss, and that loss must be grieved. That might be leaving a town and friendships you love to move for a new job, leaving a job you love because you got a promotion, a transition into our out of being a student, moving out of a home, the end of a life-changing trip… Are you grieving something good that is no longer in this season? Grief of the good is a grief that often happens in the midst of celebration in the excitement of change, which can make it one of the hardest kinds to notice and pay attention to.

For example, I recently realized that I have felt especially annoyed and unnecessarily frustrated with the two new boys I have been nannying in Durham, which has been confusing because my transition into a new job has been great for the most part. Why in the world do I feel myself pushing back against this when it seems to be going well?  I have felt this for my entire first month, and it was only this week that I was able to put a finger on the fact that it had nothing to do with the boys I am nannying. I have been grieving the loss of the good. I had extremely tight-knit relationships and got along so well with my nine kiddos at Crossnore, and my relationships with them were all so rich and deep, and I have been projecting my grief of missing my Crossnore kids onto the fact that the boys I am nannying are not the same. I still have those relationships with my kids at Crossnore. I still love them, and they still love me (as far as I can tell), but our relationship had to change becuase our circumstances changed, and that is significant and therefore must be grieved. It gave me so much more freedom to give myself grace and be more present with the sweet boys I am nannying now, because I was able to see the wall of grief I had been projecting out that was preventing me from building a close relationship with them.

What good thing are you grieving in this season? 

Third, grieving the ideal that you feel you deserve that for whatever reason will never be. This one is like grief squared. It is the grief beyond the grief. I first started thinking about the necessity to grief the ideal that will never be when I was walking a friend through processing a childhood relationship with an abusive father with mental illness. There is the obvious grief of the pain and trauma of abuse, especially an abusive parent that is mentally unwell. But then it hit me in the chest like a freight train one day during one of our talks.

Oh. It sounds like you not only have to grieve your dad being unwell, but you also have to grieve the happy, supportive, loving, safe, mentally stable father that you deserve but will never be able to have. 

And it hit home. Mmm. So hard, but so real and raw and important.

We don’t think about the grief beyond the grief, the grief of the ideal we deserve. It is weird to think about grieving something you have never experienced, but the reality is that we do long for the perfect ideal in the midst of our reality, and we must take time to hold space for the fact that it will never be. This could be a similar situation of having to grieve the healthy mom or dad that you will never have. Or maybe a family that wasn’t so broken and dysfunctional, with parents that stayed together instead of getting divorced when you were so young and didn’t understand. This could be grieving the healthy body that you feel you deserve but has been plagued with an autoimmune disease your whole life. This could be grieving the loss of a limb and the fully functional limb you will never get back. What is the ideal you must grieve, which you feel you deserve but will never have? 

Then, there is the grief of the could-have-been. This could be grieving the could-have-been of what it would have been like to work the dream job you applied for and felt so confident you were going to get but ended up getting turned down, like a close friend of mine has been working through recently. This could be grieving your idea of what could have been if that relationship you thought would last forever actually worked out instead of suddenly ending. This could be grieving what could have been if your dad didn’t get cancer. Or if your boyfriend didn’t become abusive. Or if you would have gotten that part, that promotion, accepted to that school, or maybe what would have happened if you stayed, or left.

Do you identify with one of these, or is there something else that you must grieve which “could have been?”

The final kind of grief I will touch on is macroscopic systemic or societal grief. This grief does not always have something to do with your own individual experience, but it is a grief we still feel all the same. Sometimes this is the grief of the loss that happens in a natural disaster. I think many of us felt that recently with the loss that hit the east coast with Hurricane Florence that affected hundreds of thousands of people. Even if we are not fully in the midst of it and experiencing the loss directly in our own lives, we can still be triggered with grief by our investment and common empathy knowing what people might be going through. More intensely though, macroscopic grief can be grief of things like systemic racial oppression that defines our country’s history, or the brutality of war, or the normalized culture of sexual assault that has shown its ugly face through the media surrounding the Kavanaugh trial. Macroscopic grief can be grieving with families separated at the border, grieving the exploitation of labor and bodies for capitalist gain, grieving the slow death of our planet and the systemic apathy that seems like nothing will ever change.

*I will preface with the statement that my intention is not to bring about political debate*, but I defnitely was feeling super weighed down with macroscopic grief surrounding sexual assault and trauma this week triggered by the constant Kavanaugh/Dr. Ford media, as I think so many of us have been. Being someone that has my own experience with the effects of sexual trauma, in my own life and in the lives of many people close to me who have experienced sexual harassment, assault, or abuse, I knew how triggering this past week was for the millions of people, people of all genders in our country, as well as anywhere around the world exposed to the media who have experienced sexual trauma. Millions of people were reminded this week of what was most likely one of the hardest days if not the hardest day of their lives, and being in a trauma-informed community for a while, I was overwhelmed with the idea of millions of people feeling triggered and upset this week, with their deepest wounds re-opened, especially the idea that so many of those people felt alone with no one to talk through their grief with because they had never come forward, and probably wondered if they ever would now, not knowing if they would be believed. I have been filled with rage because of the fact that somehow America has not found a way to get on the same page about the fact that every human should have a right to their own body.

EVERY HUMAN. SHOULD HAVE A RIGHT TO THEIR OWN BODY. 

YET THE HISTORY OF AMERICA HAS TOLD THE STORY OVER AND OVER AGAIN THAT THERE ARE SOME HUMANS THAT HAVE A RIGHT TO THEIR OWN BODY, AND THERE ARE SOME HUMANS THAT DO NOT.

This started with the genocide, explotation of labor, and rape of women of indiginous tribes of North America as white men waved a banner of belief that Native peoples did not have a right to their own body.

Then the story continued to be told with slavery and racial oppression where white men waved the banner of belief that African Americans don’t have a right to their own bodies either, and actually that white men had a right to OWN someone else’s body.

And STILL the story continues in 2018 with a normalized culture of sexual assault that waves the banner that there are still some humans who do not have the right to their own bodies, that there are some people (males as the majority) that are allowed to take others’ bodies and do whatever they want to them and not be held accountable for the sexual assault of another body, another HUMAN.

HOW, IN ALL OF OUR “ENLIGHTENMENT” AND ADVANCEMENT AS A SOCIETY, CAN WE STILL NOT GET ON THE SAME PAGE AND AGREE THAT PEOPLE, ALL PEOPLE, SHOULD HAVE A RIGHT TO THEIR OWN BODIES, ALWAYS. IN EVERY SCENARIO. REGARDLESS OF GENDER, RACE, OR STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, REGARDLESS OF HOW LONG AGO IT HAPPENED, OR HOW MUCH ALCOHOL WAS INVOLVED.

I just can’t see how this is not a universal human moral agreement.

That it is WRONG to assert dominance and ownership over another human.

This is something that crosses party lines.

This is not political. This is human.

When you make it political you take the humanity out of it. There are MILLIONS of people hurting this week, sitting in their trauma, and the response is to be so wrapped up in denial that there is a deeper systemic issue going on, that the answer is that “it must be a conspiracy?”

I’m over it. And I want to check out. Throw the towel in.

But that is not the answer. I have to be here, present, in my country, in the ugliness of the effects of white supremacy, and somehow find something to hold on to in order to remain sane while being fully in it instead of looking away because it hurts too much.

Coming back to America has been so overwhelmingly hard, and this is just one example of the rage and frustration I feel.

So yes, I am angry, and I have been macroscopically grieving this week.

For those of you feeling triggered and angry, for those of you reminded of your own sexual trauma this week, I am with you, and for you.

I believe you. And I am grieving with you.

.       .       .

What macroscopic systemic or societal grief do you feel in this season?

.       .       .

I understand this is heavy, and in a culture of needing to be okay and happy all the time, it has become unnatural to want to look at grief.

But we must.

The kinds of grief I have named are not the only categories of grief that exist. I literally made them up. But they are groups of the most common types of grief I have seen, in my own life and in the lives of those I have been around the table with all these years.

And let me reinforce that there is no thing too small or silly to grieve.

And there is no right answer to grief. The things we grieve are constantly shifting and changing, and sometimes can be really hard to find unless we take time to sit and put words to them.

The last component of intentional grief is that I think it should not be done fully alone and in private. I know how important it has been in my life and in my community for the people closest to me to know what things I am grieving in different seasons. This is not so we can constantly talk about them, but because knowing that people are standing in solidarity with you in your grief is so important, to feel held up when you are at your weakest.

If you feel comfortable, would you confide in someone that can support you in your grief, so that someone knows? There is power in being seen, in being known, and there is power in knowing that someone is standing with you, in the silence where there are no words.

As always, if you have questions of comments, feel free to leave them in the feed below, or you can email questions/comments to emdobberstein@gmail.com.

Thank you for hearing me out,

and for being courageous and showing up.

May you find the gift even amidst the grief.

Grace and peace, my friends.

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Cheers to the journey, and may your Spirit always reside in a state of wonder.