"All connections are infused with dreams of what is possible in the future. Thus, when we lose something or someone important to us, we aren’t just grieving the loss, we are grieving the shattered dream.”
~ Bill Crawford
As a psychologist and someone who has experienced loss firsthand (both of my parents died of cancer within about six months of each other when I was 21), I have come to understand that the natural, normal, healthy reaction to loss is grief. Unfortunately, our western culture doesn’t seem to see this way. Possibly, because of this lack of vision, or because grieving can be so intensely emotional, we try to avoid it and/or describe the feelings associated with the experience of grieving in rather pejorative terms. For example, we call it “breaking down, falling to pieces, losing it, becoming a basket case,” etc., and thus we find it hard to move through this process when we experience a loss.
I know that this was my experience when I lost my parents. Being a male raised in the piney woods of North East Texas, I thought that the way to deal with grief was to resist feeling anything, and so, when faced with the loss of my parents (and given that I was an only child in my family), I shut down and tried to feel nothing. Unfortunately, not only was I successful in this resistance, I received a lot of support for this position. People would come up to me and congratulate me for “doing so well” and “being so strong.” Little did they know that I had shut down altogether, and was just going through the motions.
Finally, after years of denial, I entered a master’s program in psychology that had the wisdom to insist that the students deal with their issues before they were let loose on the public. This requirement turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it allowed me to get in touch with these long-repressed emotions in a safe place with people that I trusted. As a result, I finally began open up and allow myself to feel the emotions that had been buried for so long, and a very strange thing happened.
For the first time in my life, it felt really, really good to feel really, really bad.
