Grief. We need to actually start talking about it.
Emotions, themselves, are not the problem.
It’s our resistance to moving through and feeling them fully.
I had the most incredible conversation with Courtney Passfield and Fiona Daley on their podcast, Your Daley Pass.
Courtney unexpectedly lost her father-in-law a few weeks before we recorded this episode ago. The intensity and complexity of her grief — and her willingness to process this together — allowed us to share in this beautiful space of exploration wherein we could look at the complexities of grief and emotion — anger, resentment, fear, pain, longing, etc — and make space for it.
We talked about grief as it pertains to death but also explored the impact of grief in other zones and areas of loss. And whew — it was intensely therapeutic and raw for all of us. One of the most significant spaces of curiosity was around emotional processing and the fears of getting stuck in grief (or a subset of it).
“What evidence do you have that you will get stuck there?”
This question became the theme for so much of our discussion. See, when it comes to pain and anger, we have internalized a belief that if we allow ourselves to truly feel it, it will consume us. Like The Nothing in The Neverending Story, we will be consumed by darkness.
But what evidence do you have?
Most of us spend our lives trying to condition ourselves out of feelings that we see as inconvenient, scary, or shameful.
We don’t want to be seen as weak, selfish, dramatic, less than…the list goes on…so we hide any feeling that lies in or is adjacent to those camps.
We fear getting lost in pain and having no way out — or if we can find it, losing our sense of self and standing in the process.
But what evidence do you have?
If emotions were stagnant, we would find a way to be calm, excited, or happy all of the time. We would figure out a way to get stuck in the “more favorable” options. But when have you ever been able to do that? No matter how wonderful something is or was, did the happiness last indefinitely?
No. That’s not because you weren’t happy — or didn’t work hard enough at being or staying happy. It’s because emotions don’t work that way.
Emotions are like waves in the ocean.
They come and go and when one is past, another one arrives. They are here, experienced and gone. Just like that.
And inherently, they are all neutral and natural. There are no bad or good emotions — WE MADE IT THAT WAY.
We made it so that certain emotions are bad or dramatic or weak.
We created a world where we try to logic our way through life rather than experience it as we are meant to. But they are not good or bad. They just are. And if we could let go of our desire to try and control everything with logic and shame then we could allow the possibility that we cannot control our emotions — and DON’T HAVE TO — but instead, can just be present in and curious about them, trusting that they will always change and move through us.
To dive deeper into this and truly explore the intensity and complexity of grief, take the hour and listen to this absolutely beautiful and raw episode I was HONORED to be a part of.