Mourning
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
-Sigmund Freud
When I first began trying to get in touch with my emotions, I would ask myself a simple but powerful question, “How do I feel?” At first my answer was, “I don’t know.” I had spent so much of my life avoiding my feelings and my inner world that this seemingly simple question was surprisingly difficult for me to answer. Over time I became more connected with myself and more knowledgeable about what was going on inside me. As I became increasingly able to accurately identify my emotions, saying “I feel ____” opened up my inner world to me. I could describe and connect to my emotions on a deeper level. I could identify if I felt happy, sad, grateful, lonely, scared, nervous, eager, guilty, hopeful, regretful, and much more. The truth is, I still haven’t entirely mastered this and I’m not sure anyone ever does. I’ve gotten infinitely better, but sometimes I neglect to take the time and make the effort to figure out what I am feeling (and to understand that I can feel multiple emotions at the same time, including those that appear contradictory).
Quite frequently I would find that I felt sad without knowing why. As my journey continued, I discovered what I referred to as my “inner pool of sadness.” I had no idea how long it had been there, but I suspected it had been a very long time. Not knowing its origin annoyed me at first, but later I made peace with realizing that accessing the emotion is more important than explaining it. I learned that it’s okay to feel an emotion without knowing why.
I learned that many refer to what I called my “pool of sadness” as “unexpressed grief.” A trusted friend helped me understand that, “Grief is loss that is stuck beneath denial.” The key to relieving ourselves of our unexpressed grief is mourning it. This was initially a confusing and frustrating concept to me. Nobody ever taught me how to mourn. I didn’t know how to mourn when loved ones died or when a relationship ended. Now, how was I supposed to mourn these losses and sadnesses when I didn’t even know what they were?
Slowly I learned that mourning had already begun as soon as I began to acknowledge my feelings. Letting myself feel, share, and express my feelings was the first step. I had to acknowledge how I felt. Acknowledge my losses as my awareness towards them gradually grew. Then I could give myself empathy. I could acknowledge the truth of my own feelings and experiences. I could also seek out others capable of empathizing. Perhaps most critically, I could avoid doing the things I had previously done to avoid my unexpressed grief. I could head towards (rather than away from) my pain, sadness and discomfort. I could also do activities that I felt honored my losses. Like honoring my lost childhood by being playful. Or, honoring my lost authenticity by being my true self as much as possible. I could find subtle but satisfying ways to let my authentic self appear in my work, my life, my conversations, and my relationships. In time, I could let myself be joyous and do things I enjoy.
Often so much of life is about survival. It makes sense that we’re wired first and foremost to survive. If we don’t keep ourselves alive, nothing else matters. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs states that we naturally seek to get our needs met in a bottom-up priority order:
Only with the more fundamental needs being met, can we build upward. First, we seek to fulfill our physiological needs (like food, water, air, and shelter). Only when that is satisfied can we turn our attention to safety, and so on, with each priority necessary as a building block for the next. This way we progress through love/belonging to esteem, and finally, if all the other needs are met, we arrive at self-actualization.
The problem lies in the fact that so many of us have been forced to focus on our physiological and safety needs just to survive, so we never have the luxury of getting around to the other priorities. Often, even when our physiological and safety needs are being met, we are so use to seeking to merely survive, we do not even realize we have the base necessary to progress to satisfying our higher needs. This is of course learned in childhood and reinforced throughout our lives. Even if we do have our basic needs met, we may be afraid to address our needs for love, belonging, and esteem.
Avoidance, dissociation, and numbing may be less scary than actually trying to get our needs met. Grieving is sad and difficult. It involves unearthing difficult buried memories and feelings, and it involves feeling them. Nevertheless, this remains the only way to heal. I would like to suggest that you deserve that. Furthermore, you don’t just deserve to survive; you deserve to thrive. You don’t deserve an okay life or just a safe life; you deserve even more, a great life.
I want you to mourn your losses, not so that you can move from sadness to neutrality, but so you can move beyond a neutral state to a truly great place. I don’t expect this to happen perfectly or all of the time. Life will always have its ups and downs, but your ups can be higher and more frequent if you come to believe on the deepest levels that you deserve more than just mere survival. You deserve to feel your emotions, the positive and the negative ones. You deserve to mourn your losses. And you deserve to thrive.
Ask Yourself:
Do I suspect I might have unexpressed grief? Why or why not?
What does “mourning” mean to me?
On a deep-level, what kind of life do I believe I deserve? Could that prediction be self-fulfilling?
Next Letter: Getting Out of Your Head