What's with grieving?

There can be a number of reasons why a person can’t grieve well. Many people are emotionally repressed and they can’t break through that repression. A feeling that should be poignant – tragic or sweet – remains dull, stifled, dissociated. Another reason for poor grieving is that the expression of dear feelings – what the griever wants to feel – is sabotaged because those feelings are chemically tied to negative (even angry or hateful) feelings that are more hidden and that the person would rather not feel. The negative taboo feelings hold them all under water.

Another reason for aborted grieving is guilt – valid or false guilt. One middle-aged woman was able to pour out a lot of grief pain, love, need when she could acknowledge and express her mother’s abusiveness. What kept her from successfully grieving was her sense of guilt for having taken her mother out of the old family home so she could caretake her better. It didn’t work: Her mother never got over losing her house, being removed to a bedroom, being disliked by her daughter’s husband.

One more preventive of grieving that I’ve never seen described anywhere may be called “temporal resonant grieving.” When my mini schnauzer died in 2002, I was living alone in a state (Colorado) I had moved to to get away from a sad relationship. Alone after midnight with my euthanized pet, I knew – knew to the depths of body and time – that I would never get over her death. What I felt was Loss itself, all my critical and unfair losses through time, feeling lost in the present day, the state of never-had from my beginning. The loss of childhood, the loss of love then, the loss of youth. Simply because I can’t be the only “resonant” person, I believe that our deepest truths may return with a present death. We are holistic in mindbody and time.

With this being true, we would have to grieve everything sad and wrong, from beginning to now, at any given death or abandonment. To do that, we’d need to be very in touch with our unity in our time: certainly not something most therapy clients will experience until they’ve been talked to for a little while.

Then they may be able to move on.