Tag: loss

Layers of discontent

All the things that happen to us produce an emotional response. Thankfully, emotions move through us if they are allowed to be expressed.  If emotions cannot be expressed they are stored in the psyche. The long term implications of these simple and obvious facts are critical to human stability.

To elaborate, if we lose someone we love then we become sad, if we are allowed to mourn, then the sadness eventually passes. If someone hurts us, we become angry, and if we are allowed to protest against the violation (hopefully appropriately and in a way that our protest is heard and respected) then the anger dissipates. The exact type and intensity of emotional response to given events will vary depending on different personalities and their psychological history, but emotional responses cannot be avoided.

If (for whatever reason) the normal function of emotional response and subsequent expression is inhibited, unprocessed emotions will lay themselves down in the psychic bedrock in layers upon layers upon layers, all filled with potential energy. And one day, when it gets hot enough, they will blow through a crack into consciousness. This eruption almost always wreaks havoc and is usually a great surprise to everyone.

So, it follows that we should think twice before we tell ourselves and others (especially our children) that we must “get over it”; that things are “not so bad”; that we must “stop crying”; that we must put “a lid on it”; that we should stop “throwing a tantrum”. We need to stop preventing emotional expression either through unspoken disapproval, or explicit prohibition. Little meltdowns every now and then are preferable to a major eruption that destroys everything in its path. And interestingly, the more we are allowed to have our true emotions and are supported through their expression early on, the better we become at managing them constructively later in life.

Thoughts on managing loss

Arctic selection 022We suffer loss everyday. We lose our youth, our health, inexorably and we lose the people and things that we become attached to. Conceivably, this is an unbearable part of being human, and in many instances, losses are indeed experienced as unbearable. However, surprisingly, we also recover from losses, even remarkably painful ones. I have been thinking about the things that help us recover from loss.

It seems that we as humans have an inherent capacity to grieve – in other words we have inbuilt mechanisms which help us metabolise the experience of loss. Elizabeth Kubler Ross did important work in this area and her books are well worth reading if one is struggling with loss. We have emotions that help move us through difficult experiences, if we are allowed to feel them and ideally express them. Sadness (and maybe first, anger) helps us to accept the eventual separation from the people and things that we are attached to. The experience and expression of grief allows us to come to terms with the loss. However, many of us have lost our capacity to grieve, or we never developed it in the first place.  Grief is messy, and in world that insists on the shiny one-sidedness of perfection as the ultimate goal, we increasingly shy away from the useful chaos and misery of grief. We have fewer and fewer rituals that evoke our deepest meaning-making capacities, and so we are losing touch with our archetypal predisposition to heal.

Another idea is that loss is never the final act of the drama. As an insightful friend recently commented, anything that had life once, eventually supports new life. In that way, we live forever. This idea is possibly not comforting in itself, but it does embed each of us firmly in the cycle of life, and this may deliver a sense of belonging that, although abstract, softens our felt isolation from a creative source.

Finally, loss keeps us humble. It forces us to re-evaluate our relationships, our lives, our choices. It reminds us of what we do value, and sometimes encourages us to newly appreciate people and things around us that had apparently lost their lustre. With the full experience of loss, we wash the dust from our eyes and our hearts, and we discover that, remarkably, they still work.