There's No Magic Pill for Grief

What if eternity lay before you, brimming with love, friends, and laughter? Yet still, one day, in all your radiance, bubbling over with giddy excitement, you tripped, fell, and got hurt--really hurt. Would you give up on all of your dreams? Would you hate yourself? Would you forget life's magic and promise? Or would you shrug it off, look ahead, and exclaim that it's "just a flesh wound"?
~ Notes from the Universe

This is the kind of thing that gives personal growth a bad name.

It's a much-lamented truth of our current media environment that sound bites rule, and complexity needs to get over its complexity and be simple. Ambiguity is unwelcome. If it doesn't boil down, it must not be very valuable or important.

Clearly, I disagree.

We are complex. We are ambiguous. And if we were able to shrug off our griefs and declare them to be "just flesh wounds," we would have.

It's wishful, magical thinking, that we can just wave a magic wand, or say a magic word, and poof. We're healed. Once in a long while, this may work. But 99.99% of the time, it's just not that simple.

Unresolved grief underlies so many psychological challenges. It's the dirty little secret of our culture. To get through grief means to go through it, but slowing down, taking time, being less than shiny for a while isn't tolerated well--not by us individually, and not by the societal programming we're steeped in.

Individually, well... grief hurts! It hurts deeply. It strips us down to a raw core and shackles us with the fact of our vulnerability, and then we're just there, in that state, in pain, minutes feeling like days, desperate for escape. Who would choose that? So we become accomplished psychological contortionists, wiggling out of any tight spot where grief may corner us. We hear its footsteps, and we find an excuse to be elsewhere. We're master avoiders.

Societally, we value productivity--being effective, efficient, keeping up. It's hard to break pace even to get over a cold or flu, and in fact, most people don't--they just manage their symptoms with pills and go to work anyway.

The quote above is the psychological equivalent of taking a pill. And it's a welcome pill, a pill people are overjoyed to swallow. Great news! There's an easy answer! Some part of us knows better, but we push it aside. Why would we go through grief when we don't have to?

Yeah, OK, we don't have to, but there's a cost.

Unresolved grief comes out in passive aggressive behavior. In control addiction. In alcohol and drug abuse. In anger and rage. It comes out in neurotic parenting, and unhealthy marriage dynamics, and irresponsible spending. It comes out, one way or another. It comes out.

If you don't relate to this, if you've never had any intimacy issues or avoided people or situations that may cause you to feel some emotion, and you never behave defensively or passive aggressively, congratulations. You've either faced, embraced and suffered through your grief (kudos), or you've never experienced loss, be it a loved one or a dream or a dearly held belief about yourself. Either way, you're not normal.

There's no right or wrong here. If you decide to face your grief, you decide when and with whom (unless it's chosen for you with a new episode). If you'd prefer to live with the psychological side effects and inexplicable relationship problems that come with unresolved grief, that is absolutely your privilege. I mean that.

But don't tell yourself you can "shrug it off" if you can't. If you could have, you would have.