Grief and Loss: Learning to Live With What We Carry

Written by: Shaelyn McCabe, MFTC

Loss is a universal human experience and the natural response to loss is feeling grief. While we often associate grief with death, loss can be experienced in countless ways throughout our lives. The loss of a relationship, the loss of time, the loss that comes with change, the loss of parts of ourselves, collective loss within our communities, intergenerational loss, or even the quiet loss of connection in a fast-paced world.

Buddhists refer to this reality as impermanence. Everything we love we will eventually lose.

I think many of us have been taught to view grief as a temporary period of mourning, an experience we endure and eventually move beyond. But grief does not really work that way. Loss continues to shape how we move through life, how we connect with others, and how we fully engage with ourselves.

Why So Many of Us Fear Grief

In my work as a therapist, I often see how disconnected we are from grief and emotional pain. We live in a culture that struggles to make space for loss. Grief is often pathologized, rushed, or treated as something that needs to be fixed. We are expected to grieve quietly, quickly, and privately before returning to productivity and normalcy.

Our society tends to value ascent. Progress. Achievement. Solutions. Improvement. We become anxious around descent, uncertainty, and emotional pain. When we experience sadness, exhaustion, grief, or emotional overwhelm, many of us interpret those experiences as signs that something is wrong with us.

I think about the stories we consume in movies, books, and media. So often the hero survives through self-sufficiency. The hero rises above the pain. The hero remains in control. Vulnerability is rarely honored.

Many of us have also learned early in life that certain emotions were unsafe or unwelcome. Fear and sadness are often the first emotions children learn to hide and associate with shame.

Imagine being 12 years old and experiencing your first betrayal by a friend or heartbreak from a crush. You come home carrying that sadness and hurt and maybe no one knows how to respond to it. Maybe your pain is minimized. Maybe you are told you are overreacting. Maybe no one acknowledges your feelings at all. Without someone to help hold that experience with compassion, grief can begin to feel overwhelming and frightening. Overtime, many of us learn to exile grief somewhere deep inside ourselves.

The Ways We Learn to Avoid Emotional Pain

But emotions do not disappear simply because we suppress them. What we avoid often resurfaces in other ways. I see it come into my therapy room masked as anxiety, depression, anger, addiction, isolation, numbness, and feelings of worthlessness and disconnection. So much of what we call “coping” is actually an attempt to not feel our emotions. I call this maladaptive coping. This can show up in many ways:

• Intellectualizing- stuck in analysis to avoid actually feeling

• Minimizing- Downplaying feelings to avoid discomfort or vulnerability

• Distracting- Keeping ourselves busy so we don’t have time to feel

• Numbing- Using substances, food, or sleep to dull pain

• Humor/Sarcasm- Using these as a shield against pain

• Defensiveness/Blaming- Shifting blame, denying, or justifying instead of acknowledging emotions

• Isolation- We push others away when they offer support

These patterns usually develop for good reason. They helped us survive emotionally at some point of our lives. But when these automatic responses become our primary way of relating to pain, they can also keep us disconnected from ourselves and others.

Slowing Down Enough to Feel

One of the hardest parts of grief is that it asks us to slow down enough to actually feel what is there. That takes a lot of courage and endurance.

Most of us are afraid of our grief. We fear being consumed by it. We fear becoming a burden to others. We fear being judged for our vulnerability or rejected for the intensity of our emotions. So we push people away, isolate ourselves, stay busy, or try to maintain control. At the same time, we also fear being alone with our suffering.

In therapy, I often witness how healing begins when someone finally experiences a safe emotional container for their grief. Sometimes therapy becomes the first place where emotions are fully witnessed without shame or dismissal. Sometimes that container is found in friendship, family, faith, or community. What matters is finding spaces where grief can exist without needing to be hidden.

Awareness becomes an important part of this process. Many of us are trying to cope with symptoms without understanding what is underneath them. When we slow down enough to notice what we are actually carrying, we can begin responding to ourselves differently. Beneath anxiety or anger there may be grief, fear, loneliness, shame, or hurt that has never been acknowledged.

Building the Capacity to Stay Present

This requires building the capacity to stay present with our emotional experiences. In therapy we often talk about self-regulation, but I think of it as strengthening our emotional muscles. Learning how to tolerate and move through emotions rather than immediately escaping them. Learning how to remain connected to ourselves when difficult feelings arise.

This often begins in very simple ways. Some ideas you can try are:

• Writing

• Drawing

• Praying

• Meditation

• Movement

• Dancing

• Sitting quietly outside

Anything that allows us to slow down enough to notice what is happening internally rather than constantly distracting from it.

We are not trying to control because our emotional experience is not something we can control. Our emotions show up in our body and we have no say in the matter. What we can control is how we decide to respond to our emotions. We can build awareness and presence, slowing down long enough to notice a thought, sensation, or emotion emerging, which creates space for choice. We are no longer reacting entirely from old survival patterns.

Grief Needs to Be Witnessed

Another essential part of grief is allowing it to be witnessed.

Human beings have always needed communal ways of grieving. This can look like:

• Rituals

• Storytelling

• Collective mourning

• Talking circles

• Time in nature

Any practice that allows grief to move somewhere instead of remaining trapped in the body, unattended to. Grief needs expression. Some people:

• Write letters

• Bury something symbolic

• Speak their grief aloud

• Cry with others

• Or sit quietly beside someone who understands

The beauty of grief is that it expands our capacity for connection. Through the experience of loss, we often deepen our understanding of ourselves and others. We also open ourselves up to experience the full range of emotions. You can’t selectively numb emotion, so if you avoid “difficult” emotions, you are also limiting your capacity to experience “easy” emotions like joy, hope, or peace. Can we hold both grief and gratitude? Can we hold loss and joy at the same time?

Grief, Connection, and Self-Compassion

Many of us struggle to offer compassion to ourselves. We reserve kindness for other people while believing our own pain is too much, too messy, or unworthy of care. Shame cuts us off from self-compassion and convinces us to reject the parts of ourselves that are hurting.

When we begin approaching ourselves with curiosity instead of judgement, we become more capable of listening to the signals our body and emotions are sending rather than immediately trying to silence them.

Avoiding pain does not allow us to fully live. Avoidance keeps us at the surface of our lives and relationships. It limits our ability to experience connection, joy, intimacy, and belonging.

Grief is painful because connection matters. To grieve is to reveal how deeply we have loved and cared for others.

Loss will always be part of being human. The question becomes whether we carry it alone and in silence, or whether we allow ourselves to be supported, witnessed, and changed by it overtime.

If you are struggling to understand, process, or hold space for your grief, I am here to accompany you and help you build the capacity to live with grief. You are not alone.

Life Reimagined Therapy Group offers therapy in Arvada, CO. We also serve the surrounding communities including Wheat Ridge, Westminster, Golden, Lakewood, and the greater Denver area, as well as telehealth therapy throughout Colorado. Schedule a free consultation to learn more!

Resources:

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Griefby Francis Weller