What Is Grief?

Written by HealthyPlace.com Staff Writer

An examination of grief. What grief is and why we try to keep grief at bay, avoiding emotional pain and the impact of doing that.

"Grief is; the impotent rage of being born into a Universe of change."
--- Charles Garfield

Everyone has grief. It's an inescapable reality of human existence.

We are not abnormal or weak because we experience grief. We are merely touching the depths of the human experience, the chasm between what we wanted . . . and what is.

From the first moment that we don't get exactly what we want from the world, we experience grief. It may come as early as the moment we leave the womb. Or it may come in the womb.

As infants we react with tears, sometimes in fear, sometimes in pain, sometimes in rage. As we get older we learn to control our reactions. We become adept at concealing the tears, pain, and anger, from ourselves and from others. But they are always there, lurking just beneath the surface. And whenever we are faced with a cataclysmic loss in our lives, the accumulated grief of our entire lifetime rises to the surface.

At moments of profound loss, our defenses crumble. We no longer have the strength to stuff our feelings down. Sometimes just seeing another's tears is sufficient to trigger our own.

Many of us react to grief by distracting ourselves. Or we seek to gain economic, political, and social power to have the illusion of being able to control our internal and external environments. For many of us, when other distractions don't work, we numb ourselves with alcohol or drugs.

Our grief can be our undoing. It can turn us off to ourselves-to our lives and to our world.

Or... it can be the sword that tears our heart open, that allows us to be vulnerable, that takes away our illusion of control, our self-imposed distance from our capacity to love and surrender.

If we can meet our grief with courage and awareness, it can be the key that unlocks our hearts and forces us into a profound new experience of life and love.

In that sense, grief can be our friend . . . a fierce teacher, but a welcome wake-up call. It is the one thing that can jar us out of our propensity to sleepwalk through life and through relationships.

The Complexity of Grief

And what is "grief other than the agonizing space of disharmony, disequilibria, and discomfort between what we want from life and what we ultimately get? It is the vast reservoir of our accumulated past losses. It is the awareness of the inevitable losses to come. It is the sea of human disappointment.

It is the recognition that, ultimately, we have no control.

From our very first encounter with grief, our life has been a process of learning to cope with, to integrate, or to avoid the discomfort and disappointments we inevitably experience in life.

Many of us think of grief as the emotional pain surrounding the physical death of someone we love. But grief is much more complex, much more fundamental to our lives and the way we choose to live them.

At the very foundation of our society is the drive to avoid that which is unpleasant -- to negate the aspects of life that would bring us disappointment. Instead of being taught how to deal with the inevitable disappointments and losses in our lives, we have been taught to ignore and deny them. We've been taught to "put on a happy face," "keep a stiff upper lip," and to "talk about something more pleasant." We want to "feel better fast." Many little boys have been taught not to cry because it's "unmanly." And many little girls have been taught that their emotions are irrational . . . an inconvenient by-product of unbalanced female hormones.

Our entire culture is built on maximizing pleasure through the systematic avoidance of grief. We worship youth, beauty, strength, energy, vitality, health, prosperity, and power. We have confined illness, aging, and death to hospitals, nursing homes, funeral homes, and cemeteries. We treat these places like ghettos where distasteful things are happening and where most people in our society would rather not go unless they have to.

We spend billions of dollars each year on cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, hair transplants, hair dyes, liposuction, girdles, breast implants, breast reductions, genital enhancement, toupees, and wigs-all in an effort to change the ways in which our bodies don't measure up to the cultural model of "beauty." We don't want to look old, wrinkled, paunchy, or bald. The cultural model is so pervasive that we have evolved diseases like anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Their victims, mostly young women, would rather die of starvation than live with one ounce of fat on their bodies.