Suffering: The Series Part 4~ The Problem(s) with Grief and Loss

So here we are at part 4 of the series on suffering, and, although I had planned on publishing articles on one or two other subjects on the matter prior to this one, I can't help but reflect (currently sitting in my therapy office) on grief and loss and the way it has made its way into my conversations with the clients I see, whether that was the reason they came to see me or not.

Before I dive into my mind space about this, let me share an insight first. When I say the words "grief" and "loss" what I am referring to is not just the result of the death of a loved one, or the feeling of having lost someone either suddenly or to more natural causes. I am referring to an entire spectrum of losses and shades of grief, to include loss of love, loss of friendship, loss of financial security, and so on. And the grief I am referring to is simply any amount of emotional response as a result of that loss, indicating any level of sadness related to it.

To be more concise, my point here is a person does not need to have lost a loved one to experience loss, nor do they need to have lost someone to death in order to have their response categorized as grief.

An example. I've spoken to people who have had lost loved ones either to murder or suicide and counseled them on the ways their grief has affected their lives and mental health in general. I have also spoken to people who have had to downsize from a full residential home to an apartment due to financial hardship from COVID, as well as those who who have lost the jobs they have had for 30 years because of the pandemic--and I have also counseled them on how grief has affected them as a whole.

So long as there is something lost, grief will be present and is an appropriate response.

Another prevailing issue that has arisen in conversation with clients and acquaintances alike is the fact that, in general, people in society struggle greatly to manage, navigate and respond to their own grief because as a whole society struggles to do so with the grief of others. (In a future article, we'll go deeper into the typical ways people respond to grief an loss that are ultimately not as helpful as they have been taught to believe.)

(For this next bit of conversation, I tip my hat to It's OK That You're Not Ok by Megan Devine. It is an excellent book, and an insightful look into the problem of how we have been taught to respond to grief and loss, and how much damage that has done.)

Referring to previous articles, the idea of pain in general has become more topical, not just in therapy sessions but elsewhere in the "outside world" as well. And it's no surprise, anyone who's been awake and alert the past 5 years or so would be able to attest to the emotional turmoil that has seemingly increased due to the economy, politics and the number of domestic shootings we've had to hear about at an alarmingly frequent rate.

And yet, I still see people who have suffered much and still feel as though their environment is supportive of the level of grief they are experiencing. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard, "I know I shouldn't still be hung up on this, but I can't seem to move on from it," I'd probably be able to retire 20 years ahead of time.

Which brings us to the first problem in grief and loss, which is this: For some reason, there is an expectation that one must "get over" loss at an inhumanly rapid pace, otherwise they are considered "hung up on" or "wallowing in" their grief.

About once a week I consider locating the person who decided this and set this expectation into motion as a societal norm and write them a strongly worded letter. And perhaps it wasn't one person, but a society of people long ago before mental health was considered to have been important. That sound more likely. Still, what I hope is the takeaway is that grief, no matter what for, has absolutely NO timeline. A person who has had a falling out with a close friend may take as long to process through that as someone who has just lost a spouse of 30 years, and that bears no reflection on how "well" or "appropriately" that person is responding to their particular suffering.

In fact, what it really reflects upon is the depth of feeling and connection that person felt between themselves and their lost friend, loved one, etc.

This segways to problem number two: As implied up to this point, people in general have a mentality about suffering that is almost completely backwards from what it should be.

Put it this way. If a person who has injured their leg for some reason came to a hospital and mentioned that "It's been a week or so and it's still hurting just as much as it was a week or so ago!" the response to this would not be, "Hey, it's been a week, maybe you should not wallow in it so much and just let go of the pain and move on!"

Why not? Because, for lack of better terms, only a monster would tell someone their possibly broken or even just fractured leg that has been hurting longer than a week is a matter of them wallowing, or getting hung up on their pain. This is because even those only basically familiar with medicine and anatomy know that pain means something has happened that requires attention, time and care to heal--not ignorance and overt machismo.

And yet, here we are, in a society where emotional pain is seen as a problem of someone's ability to cope with life as it happens to everyone, not that a person is responding as they should to life happening as it happens to everyone.

If someone has lost the love of their life I would hope that it takes them a while to get through it!

Which brings us to the third and final problem to be discussed in this article: Society at large views suffering as the problem, not the way it is regarded. Referring back to the first article, the way people think about pain, loss, hardship and so on over the last century has changed, at the very least in terms of how often those words are being used. At the end of the article, I surmised that those words have been used more in recent years due to the rise in support in mental health in general. Another possibility, considering the prevalence of war and related events in the years prior, is that suffering was anticipated or at least accepted as a part of the times.

In other words, people knew that where there is war there is suffering, so avoiding it was pointless. It wasn't received with excitement, but it was received as a reasonable consequence. And certainly, with the recent rise in mental health awareness and the increase of people seeking therapy for their suffering, there isn't anything negative to say about the rise in conversation about it, it makes a lot sense.

However, as I mentioned, there is a an extra weight placed on those who come to see me, namely that of the assumption that their experience of suffering qualifies them as someone who is broken, or attention seeking, or to some degree a burden to the rest of society which struggles to adequately lighten the burden that individual already carries as a result of being a human being in the midst of suffering.

So, in summary, the problem with suffering is largely the way that we have been taught to think about it. There hasn't been one person who has sat in my office processing a grief, a loss, or an emotional injury of any kind which I would consider broken, attention seeking, or in any way incorrect about their own suffering. In fact, I consider those individuals the most attentive to life around them, as they have noticed the disorder that occurs as a matter of life and seek to make it right.

In the next article, we'll cover the "Suffering Rulebook" in society and how to change it (or do away with it...) to improve the suffering of every human.