It’s one of the unavoidable and universal human experiences and certainly, if you do trauma work, you’re going to encounter it. Yet, for as common as grief is, the way we talk about it often paints a rather unhelpful picture. We speak of it as though it were a neat, sequential process; arranged in stages. Although I am partial to some illustrations such as this comical take on the stages of grief, having an inaccurate view of what grief is can keep us from engaging with it well, whether it’s for ourselves or someone else.
What grief is
I seldom tell this to clients early in the work but at some point, when someone is ready to hear it, it can be quite validating and freeing. You see while grief is not pleasant at all, it isn’t unhealthy. In fact, grief is the healthiest response we can have to a loss that really mattered. The size of the loss = the size of the grief.
Life in the already/not-yet means struggle. Christ has come and in the person and work of Jesus: living the perfect life and imputing it to us while taking upon himself the full weight and consequence of our sin, we have been perfectly reconciled to God. One day He will return to make all things new. He will wipe away every tear and make every sad thing untrue. We live in between those realities, and here in that messy in-between, there is loss. With that loss, there is grief. It’s the healthiest possible response to a loss that matters and it hurts.
With this view, I’d like to offer for the rest of this article that grief actually isn’t something to be gotten rid of. It certainly isn’t something that we want to last forever and no one wants to be in it; but what we believe about what something is has a big impact on what we believe ought to be done about it. If grief is the healthy response to a loss that mattered, then
You don’t fix it
I often hear it in our language, someone will speak about wanting to “get over” “get through” or “get past” their grief; I wish that was the way it worked. Grief isn’t something that we experience, like the flu, and then when we’re done experiencing it, simply move on. I’ve heard it said that what we do instead is move forward with grief. I would add that we re-encounter ourselves and potentially grow though I’ll expand on that thought later.
Why it’s so uncomfortable to be with someone else’s grief
Our western culture spends an awful lot of time, energy, and money avoiding not only suffering but even having a basic awareness of suffering in our world. Think of the efforts we’ll put into making ourselves appear youthful so as to mask the reality of age. Consider how much time we spend distracting ourselves and not being in the present. How long can you stand in line before pulling out your phone? Often when we do engage with suffering in the world today (at least on social media), it’s with outrage. Outrage is an empowered emotion, as is anger in general. It isn’t fragile and helpless in the face of evil. It feels safe.
So, in a culture as avoidant of suffering as our own, the suffering of those close to us can be a disquieting thing. It can serve as an uncomfortable reminder of the thing we wish to not be aware of. What’s more, when I encounter your suffering, it reminds me that I am not immune from sharing your fate. When financial ruin happens, health fails, marriages fall apart, and there’s a hurting human there before me: the fragility of it all becomes tangible.
So what do we do? We rush to “fix it”. We offer quick silver lining. In Christian circles, this very often takes the form of a Bible verse. All of us have experienced someone trying to “silver-lining” or “fix” our hurt and we know how helpful it isn’t. So why do we sometimes find ourselves doing it also? I’d offer two things: the first is that our culture tends to hold a view of emotions as being something to be “fixed”. In the church, we can be especially guilty of this, often speaking about unpleasant emotions like anxiety, anger, or sadness, as things to be gotten rid of with a Bible verse (tell me you’ve never read Psalm 109 without telling me…). The second is that we are able to be with someone’s pain and discomfort to the degree that we’re able to be with our own.
Why it’s so uncomfortable to be with our own
Being with pain and discomfort isn’t something that comes naturally to those of us immersed in American culture (or western culture more broadly). Certainly, the idea of being with pain and discomfort well isn’t something you’re likely to hear about from your local TikTok guru or from the pulpit next Sunday. Our language about our inner world often revolves around “fixing” our emotions. We live carefully curated lives aimed at living in denial of suffering and other existential givens like death. Our church cultures very often portray worship and closeness to God as being distinctly marked by pleasant emotions and the distinct absence of suffering. We handle other people’s suffering and grief poorly because, at least in part, we don’t know how to engage well with our own. We aren’t really taught by and large how to be with grief or suffering well. It isn’t a problem to be fixed, but I can’t live here forever so…?
So what do you do with grief?
Slow Down
This feels counterintuitive to really everything in us. Surely, we should try to figure out how to “move on” as quickly as possible. The way forward with grief though, begins with being able to just be with it. In terms of both the literal pace of our lives and our overall approach to the process, grief requires that we slow down.
Create Space
The other thing we need to do is create lots of space. We need to do that in the more literal sense: taking things off our “to-do” list so that we have the time and space to grieve. We also need to do it in a more holistic life-focus sense, re-prioritizing and giving ourselves permission to set aside some good things to attend to the necessary. Grief needs time and space. Be compassionate and kind towards yourself in the process.
Re-encountering Ourselves
Biblical counselor Brad Hambrick once said that “the big question of grief is ‘who am I now‘”. I would say that just as any trauma work at some point involves working with grief, all grief work involves re-encountering ourselves. There are questions of identity and meaning to be worked through. I once heard a pastor encourage husbands to be students of their wives. I can’t espouse enough the relational benefit to having curiosity, openness, and learning in a healthy relationship. Perhaps grief is a good time to become students of ourselves.
Grieving with God
All of this needs to be held within a framework of understanding that we are not on our own when we grieve. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, grief is the healthiest response to a loss that mattered in a world where ever, suffering, and death are realities. In John 11:35, the shortest verse in the Bible we read that “Jesus wept”. This is significant for several reasons but certainly one of the most important being: it means that we have a God who gets us. He has entered into our suffering and understands it experientially.
Consider all the emotional content of the Psalms, how much of our raw and universal human experience is laid as it is before God. It isn’t cleaned up or carried away to be dealt with privately. When we grieve, we can know that God is empathic, kind, and compassionate toward us.