Reclaiming Grief: Learning to Stay with What Hurts

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about grief. I’ve been particularly struck by the way we tend to rush it. We live in a culture that values productivity and forward movement, and grief doesn’t always cooperate with that pace. We want to feel better. We want to understand what happened. We want to know when we will be “through” it. But grief doesn’t always work that way.

In his writing on grief, Chuck DeGroat reflects on the pressure we can feel to hurry through sorrow rather than allowing ourselves to actually experience it. His words have reminded me that grief has its own pace, and that sometimes what we need most is simply enough space to notice what is there.

Grief is a natural response to loss. And loss can take many forms.

Sometimes we grieve a person or relationship we have lost. Sometimes we grieve a future we imagined that never came to be. We may grieve the childhood we needed but didn’t have, the kind of family relationship we longed for, or a part of ourselves that we learned to hide. There are also losses that are harder to name, such as changes in our sense of home, belonging, identity, or hope.

Pauline Boss has written about this as ambiguous loss: losses that may not have a clear ending or resolution. Kenneth Doka has also explored disenfranchised grief, the grief we experience when a loss isn’t fully recognized or supported by the people around us.

Sometimes grief is difficult to recognize because we have become so accustomed to functioning around it. We can look fine on the outside while carrying something very different underneath. We may have learned to stay busy, explain things to ourselves, or put our attention elsewhere when something hurts. These responses can be understandable ways of coping, especially when we haven’t had much room to experience or express what we feel.

There can be something healing about simply telling the truth:

I really wanted that.

I miss what we had.

I wish things had been different.

This mattered to me.

Grief doesn’t always move in a straight line, either. There can be days when a loss feels very close, followed by days when we laugh, work, connect with people, and feel almost like ourselves again. Then something small like a song, a photograph, or a familiar place, can bring the grief back.

This doesn’t necessarily mean we are going backward. Grief and living can exist alongside one another.

In my own life, and in the therapy room, I’m learning that grief doesn’t need to be forced or dramatized. Often, it simply needs permission to be acknowledged and felt. It can exist alongside joy, connection, and ordinary life.

Perhaps grief is one of the ways we stay connected to what has mattered to us. It reminds us that love makes us vulnerable to loss, but also that our capacity to feel deeply is not something we need to get rid of. Making space for grief isn’t about dwelling in sorrow. It’s about becoming more able to live honestly with the whole of our experience.

Further Reading

Chuck DeGroat, Why Grief Can’t Be Rushed
Pauline Boss, Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss
Kenneth J. Doka, Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow
Robert A. Neimeyer, Meaning Reconstruction & the Experience of Loss