I work with families who have experienced the death of an infant or a child, or a homicide or a suicide. These are really traumatic experiences. For instance, the death of a child is known across cultures as being one of life’s greatest sufferings.
Yet I think in general, we as a society don’t know how to cope with others’ suffering, and even our own suffering. We often try to circumvent it. We use whatever we can to distract ourselves from being able to tolerate our own painful, human emotions.
In the wake of devastating flooding in Texas, here are a few tips that I’ve found help others work through their own sorrow, grief and emotional pain with more skill and grace:
More space, more acceptance
We tend to be uncomfortable with people who cry. We tend to give people a limited time period in which to be sad, even when they’ve experienced the loss of a beloved.
They’re allowed from this time to this time to be sad. And then the sadness should end. What we don’t allow people to do is to feel what they feel for as long as they need to feel it, in whatever way they need to feel it.
In my work with families whose children have died or are dying, many have trouble not sleeping or eating. Some have extraordinary perceptual experiences — they might be hearing phantom voices or phantom kicking if the family had a baby who died.
These symptoms are all normal responses to an abnormal event. Their emotional, biological, behavioral and social reactions are actually congruent with the unnaturalness of the tragedy.
Resisting the pain can make it worse
Part of the human experience is experiencing the full range of human potential — both harder emotional experiences and lighter emotional experiences.
It’s the resistance to a particular emotional experience that adds energy that makes it heavier. It’s kind of like surfing.
I used to be a surfer. When you first learn to surf, you are taught that if you get sucked in by a riptide, you have to relax into it.
If you don’t relax into it, you risk your life. Because you can’t struggle against it; it will take you under, and you will drown.
So you relax into it, and you go with it — and it carries you; the riptide will carry you a mile down the shore and spit you out, and you will swim to a different shore.
But you’ve made it. And it’s a little like that with our own grief. Suppressing it merely elongates it and intensifies it. Because grief will then disguise itself as something else — substance use, promiscuity, or food disorders.
Experiencing the heavy emotions
Grief is part of the human experience. We are going to grieve. The more we try to self-protect, the more we put ourselves into the fear-stress cycle.
Sir Henry Maudsley said, “Sorrow which doesn’t find vent in tears, will soon make other organs weep.”
I had a woman come to me 16 years after the death of her baby. And she had been on psychotropic medications for 13 of those 16 years. She had hidden her pain for so long — she had unnamed it, masked it, and suppressed it for so long — that it stole from her ability to feel joy.
When we limit our ability to tolerate the heavy emotions — when we don’t allow ourselves the full range of our expression — what we do, in a sense, is limit our capacity to experience the lighter emotions in life. We also restrict our ability to feel joy — unbelievable, transcendent joy and meaning in life. So our lives become very small in order to manage this constricted emotional state.
I experienced the death of a daughter in 1994 and went into my own “dark night of the soul,” as 16th century St. John of the Cross once called it. I was unprepared. I was 29 years old and she died for unknown reasons.
I lost a lot of weight — I weighed about 89 pounds, and almost died myself. But I told some well-intentioned mental health professionals offering ways to feel less, “her life was worth every tear I shed. You’re not taking that away from me.”
Sometimes, we just need to cry. Sometimes, we just need to be with it. Even though it hurts.
Oftentimes, people will tell me they had a crying marathon. And I’ll say, “How did it feel?” And they’ll say, “Awful, awful, awful ... and amazingly healing.”
It’s a paradox that something can both hurt and be good for us.
Hurting together
I conducted a research study with a Hutterite colony in South Dakota — a closed society a little like the Amish community. They don’t have radio or television or contact with the outside world. And I sat down with these people who don’t even have a word for depression.
The closest thing they have to it is Anfechtung — an intense depressive state. But rather than treat it only like a disease, what the community does is they surround the person with love and affection.
They take over their work duties. Their friends and neighbors come and visit them daily. They bring them meals. They sit with them, and talk with them. And it’s that community response that helps the person to emerge from whatever dark night of the soul that they’re going through.
And then at some point, they can do it for someone else. And that, to me, is sanity. That is what we should all look like. Our society should aspire to rally around people who are suffering and say, “How can we be with you?”
Healing together
While that kind of approach has worked in other cultures and at earlier times, it’s easy to wonder why things are different today. Who has time for that now? It’s easy to think that the way of life we observed in the Hutterite colony, for example — that sense of community — is quaint and a nice idea conceptually, but something that can’t be recreated in the real world.
But the truth is that we can recreate it in the real world. We have technology that allows us to create it in the real world. We have neighborhoods that allow us to create it. We have faith-based communities. We also have animals who can provide us with incredible solace and connection.
We can create it and start relying on those little, tiny changes between people that make the difference.
Unfortunately, we treat grief as if it’s a pathological state. And the truth is, we need to surround people with community and create a safety net for them.
When we do that, at some point, they are able to tolerate their heavy emotions. Then they can reach out to another person, and provide a safety net for that person.
At some point, they take those emotional states of heaviness and transform them, and integrate that grief into their life — and then reach out to another person.
That’s healing; that’s the magic right there. When we’re able to take the painful states of our own grief, see the suffering of others and turn our hearts outward, our range of compassion for others just broadens and broadens and broadens — and we see the world in a totally different way.
‘Beautiful people don’t just happen’
The late psychologist Rollo May once said, “One does not become fully human, painlessly.” By allowing ourselves to experience the heavier emotions, we not only learn to tolerate them, but we also learn to grow and transcend our place in the world.
Yes, being with grief — being with our own suffering, and being with the suffering of others — is a hard thing. And yet, if we don’t learn to be with grief, then we miss the beauty that often coexists with grief, when people are ready.
Renowned grief expert Elisabeth Kubler-Ross used to say the people who have experienced loss, the people who have experienced trauma, the people who have experienced suffering, those are the most beautiful people in the world. She says beautiful people don’t just happen.
Joanne Cacciatore is a research professor at Arizona State University and founder of the MISS Foundation, an international nonprofit that helps families whose children have died or are dying.