Good grief is distinct from the negative patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior we exhibit when old wounds are in play.
- Absent grief – is when we suppress our grief so that we don’t feel it.
- Delayed grief – is when we’ve got too much happening to cope so we allow ourselves to grieve later.
- Prolonged grief – is when we become unable to move through to the other side of grief because we lack closure.
- Stuck grief – is when we stay in one of the stages for years because we don’t work on the issues that arise.
Healthy grieving is when, in the midst of the pain of the loss, we feel our feelings, express them with others, and we learn to value life. We actually heal through grieving.
Unique. Your grief is as unique as your fingerprint. Some people never are in anger, or denial. Some people never find acceptance.
Grief is always about change, specifically, the changes we experience in life that we didn’t want. How do we adjust to the changes in our life? Death is the biggest change, obviously, but people grieve breakups, divorce, being fired, moving to a new area, illnesses. Life involves lots of change, much of it is positive, but the unwanted changes feel like losses to us, and so we grieve.
The universal question seems to be, “How do I get out of this grief?” The only way is through. You must allow yourself to feel your feelings and be where you are. You don’t heal what you won’t feel. If you resist grief, you prolong it. If you reject what you feel because it doesn’t makes sense to you, or you simply don’t want to feel the way you do, you prolong it.
Comparison is no benefit. It never really pays to compare your losses to others losses. Just learn to be okay with not being okay and feel your feelings.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross is the one who identified denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance as the stages of Grief. She said that she had very few friends after she had her stroke because they couldn’t handle her anger. “People love my stages, they just don’t want me to be in one.”
At least one witness. We need people, or at least one person, to bear witness to our loss. I heard a story about a village where when any member of the village experienced deep loss, each person would change at least one thing about their house or yard so that when the grieving person re-entered the world the next day, they would see that the whole village was bearing witness that life would not go on as before.
Old wounds are often touched by the intensity of grief. This gives us an opportunity to heal from them as well! I like to say, “It came up to come out.” Grief often becomes a trigger for the old wounds of the past. By old wounds, I don’t mean old losses. I mean the wounds. Loss is a part of life, and grief is normal, but as we become damaged and our hearts take on painful lessons we were never meant to take on, that’s the wounding I’m talking about. The negative patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior that surround an unhealed heart — that’s the unhealed wound.
A reflection of a lost connection — a similar dynamic that takes us back — is what gets triggered. Triggered grief is often a reflection of a lost connection. The current grief is resonating with a deeper wound. We grieve people we love, or like, or dislike or even hate. We don’t grieve people we’re indifferent to.
- We grieve what happened; what went wrong. The abusive dad, for example.
- We grieve what didn’t happen. The loving dad, for example. Not just the harm done, but the loss of the hope for what we wanted to get out of life.
What did you get out of life? Most of us have a wide margin between what we wanted to get out of life and what we got. But if you survey a room of people, just listen to the amount of painful stuff life gave each and every person. Suffering is universal! So even though we may feel like we’re being singled out, we aren’t! Even though we may be asking, “Why me?” It’s actually a wonder that more of the hard stuff doesn’t happen to us each more often. We could be asking “Why not me?”
Pain is inevitable, but unhealed wounds are optional. Unhealed wounds come because we turn the loss into a story that uses facts to tell lies. These distorted narratives say things like, “I’m unlovable,” “I’m a failure,” “My best days are behind me,” “I’m a burden,” “everyone leaves me eventually,” “If I put myself out there, rejection is inevitable,” “life’s not worth the trouble.” These are all, of course, entirely untrue beliefs that, when followed back to their point of origin, you’ll find an unhealed wound that’s still in pain, unresolved, not finished grieving, and not yet healed.
If someone came along and kicked your friend while they were down, told them it was all their fault, that they really are an unlovable burden and a failure, all the things I just finished saying, you’d probably become angry and protective really quickly and jump in the middle and say, “Stop it! What are you doing!? These are wicked lies! How dare you speak to them like that! That’s the worst thing you could do! They need gentleness and tenderness and care and support right now! Not your cruel lies!” But the odd thing is that’s often how we allow the voices in our own head to treat us in the midst of grief. Many of us treat ourselves terribly during grief.
What we learn. During grief we learn the value of life and the fragility of life, but the main lesson we’re learning as we enter the pain of loss is how to live well. To open ourselves to the pain is actually about opening ourselves again, not just of the thing or person we lost, but to life itself. To open ourselves to grieve what didn’t happen, the loss of the hope, actually opens us to experience hope again. Lament opens us to joy again. Joy and sorrow are not mutually exclusive. The heart that hides from one hides from both.
Avoiding God to avoid ourselves. Because worship, at least authentic worship, is at its heart rooted in a basic affirmation that it’s good to exist in God’s world, we cannot authentically encounter God without our hearts — which means to face God I must in that same movement encounter me. Which is why many of us hide from God when we are actually hiding from our own pain. Something about authentic worship means being as we are, unveiled, unhidden before the Lord. I wonder if that’s not why so many people resist church when they’re in a holding pattern of unhealth. Perhaps they don’t want to worship in public because subconsciously, without even realizing what they’re avoiding, they don’t want to be truly seen by others or God or even themself. Sometimes we avoid God as a subset of simply avoiding ourselves.
The facts vs the Truth. Demons use facts to tell lies that keep us bound, steal our identity, hope, and purpose, and kill what God created as good. Jesus uses fictions to tell the truth that makes us free, tells us who we are, reveals our hope, our purpose, and brings to life all that Abba always intended. Facts can deceive but the truth that makes us free isn’t a proposition, it’s a Person. We can come to actually recognize the voice on the line and no longer be fooled into following a thief.
Matthew 11:29-3029 Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”
John 8:31 “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
John 10:3-5 The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. 5 A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.”