By Jeanne Denney
If you are bereaved, or grieving any loss, you probably feel funny wearing your sadness in public, or talking about it to friends for more than a month or two. Increasingly it isn’t seen as a welcome or even healthy process. Recently, at the end of a 5 week course on death education, I was asked by participants whether it was appropriate to cry at a funeral. I had to check twice to see if they were serious, “ Wait…A FUNERAL?!?!?” I asked “Has grief phobia really gotten that bad?”
Helping people stay “up” and “not bringing others down” are apparently social mandates. Grieving people often isolate, as if they are carrying the ebola virus, yellow fever and bird flu all at once. When they do go into public places or socially engage, it is common for them to rehearse inauthentic behaviors to meet perceived requirements for cheerfulness, resilience, and optimism, something like putting on a face mask. Surely this is burdensome.
The phenomenon of grief phobia is not new and is clearly unfortunate for grievers, but I am writing about the other side of the problem: the loss for others who have no contact with grief. I am suggesting that the bereaved are a rare medicine rather than an infectious disease.
One way I know that shared grief is a medicine is because I facilitate therapy groups with ordinary people. Practicing body psychotherapy, it is clear that unacknowledged sadness works its way into the body and psyche. What has not openly been acknowledged or shared becomes “somaticized” (held in the tissues of the body). Healing processes most often require that we acknowledge, feel, and release emotions we have held in the body but have not fully accepted and experienced.
In The Other Side of Sadness, grief researcher and psychologist Dr. George Bonanno of Columbia University writes that sadness is one of the important emotions evolved to help us through grief and loss. His studies show that people in states of sadness have an inward focus which allows them to be more aware, alert, and in possession of greater wisdom than people who avoid it. Likely it is a door we walk through to gain real life and genuine joy.
If tears and active sadness are good for us, how do we find and release them? Watching people struggle sometimes for years to feel buried sadness, I know it isn’t so simple. That is why grievers are especially good medicine. Group dynamics routinely demonstrate the power of one person’s heartfelt sharing of grief on others. There are only a few responses we can have in the presence of another’s expressed pain: we can freeze or feel our own human sorrow. In a healthy group, one person’s tears beget others because truly felt grief really is contagious.
I was fascinated to read the accounts of Malidoma Somé, an African Studies scholar and shaman, who writes about the way grief is handled in the Dagara tribe. Drumming, dancing, music, and grieving goes on for days during which everyone is allowed space to explore their losses as well as their relationship with the world of spirit. I have to wonder how many things would change if we had similar rites in our own culture.
It is hard for grievers to deal with our culture’s denial of loss and death. But in truth, we are all impoverished by this isolation and denial. The benefits of grieving in a collective are not just to the griever, they are to the community. Through them we find a portal through which we can enter the reality of our own primal losses, finding wisdom, truth, healing, and precious inwardness. Grieving in a collective is strangely memorable and bonds the community deeply. We are united and humbled by loss. It is a doorway that can lead to more true joy and connection. And, it seems, we need each other to pass through it.
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If you connected with this post, join us for SoULL’s online workshop Making Space for Grief led by Andrea Pollak and Ami Isett November 14th from 11:00 AM 2:00 PM. We will create space to acknowledge sorrow.
Header photo by Bastien Ruhland
