Inertia is something I mention all the time and I think it’s a big enough topic for us to visit over two meetings. It’s something I want to make you aware of and remind you of so that if you experience it in any of its manifestations, at any time along the way, you might recognize it for what it is and be able to do something about it if you choose to. If you’ve heard this before, it is still a large and important enough concept that you might want to revisit and reevaluate it in your grief and healing journeys at almost any time along the way.

Inertia is something that can, and often does, manifest in all parts of our grief journeys. It can be very clear and obvious or it can be more subtle and hard to recognize or even to realize is happening. It may also be hard to understand that many of the things we are feeling or experiencing in our grieving might be a form of inertia that our grief imposes on us and is actually something that our grief is doing to us but that is an often unrecognized part of our grief and grieving even while we experience it. 

Some types of inertia can sometimes look so much like ordinary procrastination that we may find it hard to realize that it is a part of our grief and grieving and that it can be much more important to recognize it for what it really is and that it is something we might well want to seriously address when it appears.

Definitions:

Inertia: “An object at rest tends to remain at rest! An object in motion tends to remain in motion…” Inertia is a tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged.

In the context of grief, inertia is a term I use to talk mostlyabout a number of different types of grief fatigue, of finding it difficult to gather the physical or mental energy to do things or change things throughout our grief journeys. It can also manifest as a type of “fight or flight “response to the pain our grief often contains

I’ve come to see that we might experience as many as four basic ways that inertia appears in our grieving. They are not absolutes, so they can all interact with one another and sometimes they can all occur at the same time. We may, however, find that we predominantly gravitate to or experience one of them more than the others.

In the early days, weeks and months of our grief especially, the weight of our grief can be so heavy that we can be physically immobilized by it and we can find ourselves without much energy, just sitting and staring and/or crying and/or remembering or even just not thinking much at all. At those times, most of the ambition and energy to move or even to think or feel anything other than our grief and thoughts about our loved ones and our lives together often seems unavailable to us.

Some version and level of this appears to be common in most people’s early grief. It’s ok to experience those things if you do and it may even be unavoidable and necessary early on. It is also helpful if you can learn to recognize them as something your grief is doing to you when they happen, especially when they first begin to appear.

With time, however, as our grief journeys progress and our grief begins to be more manageable, when we are ready, we may want to begin to make an effort to find ways to recognize, work on and overcome the more obvious types of inertia that our grief makes us feel. Further along, as our grief and healing journeys go forward, we can begin to recognize and address inertia in not just our actions but also in our thoughts and emotions as well.

Physical inertia:

In our early grief, the heavy, physical type of inertia may express itself in simple things like not wanting to get up off the couch or out of our favorite chair, or not getting dressed or on some days, not even getting out of bed. Sometimes, spending a day or a few days binge-watching something on TV can be a type of physical inertia as well. 

Later on in our journeys however, that physical inertia can manifest in many other, more complex ways; when we keep putting off getting something cleaned or fixed around the house, or not changing the oil in our car, or when we don’t want to cook dinner or when we don’t cook at all: essentially, when it seems to be too hard to do simple tasks we used to be able to easily do. And when we keep not doing them! And when we find ways to excuse ourselves for all those things we aren’t doing as well!

Mental inertia:

Inertia can also manifest not just as a physical lethargy, but in thoughts like I can’t or I won’t or it’s too hard stopping us from doing or changing physical, mental or emotional things that we might want or need to do.

Some thoughts that might come into our minds that we may not even realize are part of the mental/emotional inertia trying to keep us immobile, often strongly connected to physical things are: it’s too hard, it takes too long, I’m too tired, I don’t want to, I’m grieving and I don’t have to, I’m having a bad day and I don’t want to, I don’t like this, I hate my life, it doesn’t matter if I don’t, there’s no point in it or to it anymore, I don’t care, and others as well.

Throughout our grief journeys, inertia in our minds and emotions may keep telling us that we can’t or shouldn’t do stuff or that we can’t or won’t or shouldn’t move forward and in our grieving we tend to believe it.

If we can begin to deny that, perhaps by creating an intent to overcome it in some way, we can ultimately find ourselves able to do or become pretty much everything we want or need to. Once, no matter how we feel, we learn to stop listening to the I can’t or I won’t and learn tosubstitute I can and I will, it can help us as we move forward towards healing.      

Recognizing, changing and overcoming these thoughts and feelings and then getting up and doing the task we are avoiding is not easy and it’s actually easier to not work on it, to not accept that it’s there and to let ourselves remain static and just drift along in whatever patterns we establish. But it’s a critical task I believe we should try to take on as soon as we can recognize where inertia is active in our lives. At some point, we need to escape the trap of: I can’t turning into I won’t and I don’t!

“Active Inertia”:

While many, if not most of us, experience inertia as the lack of motion and the difficulty of getting started and getting out and doing things, there seem to be others who actually do the opposite, they get in motion and often get very active and may even get “hyper-active”. Since inertia is also defined as “an object in motion tends to remain in motion”, if we start on that path, you can see how we might continue that way until eventually, it can become a “habit of grief” and for some, almost a way of life. 

For some people its just their nature to be doing things. They have probably always done things throughout the day. I think there is a fine line however, between a healthy level of doing lots of things and the avoidance that may be a part of a constant engagement that is what I’m calling “active inertia”.

There may be an element of “if I keep busy, I don’t have to sit home and think about my grief or be hurting or sad” energy here. That energy can drive or lead some people like a “fight or flight” reaction to try to fill every possible waking moment with activity, involvement, and sometimes even frantic movement from one thing to another. Then, they might fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day or lay in bed looping thoughts about what has to be done tomorrow. And then maybe they get up, often still tired, and do it again the next day! 

This seems to be so much like the “hiding from my grief” idea that we talked about in a previous meeting, that I wonder if “hiding from ones grief” isn’t actually a kind of “active inertia” that drives some of us in the first place. 

As we look (often unconsciously) for ways to handle our grief and grieving, instead of being immobilized by it, maybe getting very busy keeps some of us from sitting and thinking and dealing with our grief and the intense pain we may be going through so effectively that we embrace it. Maybe we also think that if we stop being active, we won’t be able to start again or if we let down our guard and stop being active and busy, that our grief will come pouring into our lives and that the pain and sadness will overwhelm us. 

But just like the rest of inertia, this too can eventually get in the way of our healing. First of all, we are in some ways ignoring or not dealing with our grief by avoiding it. Secondly, we may become physically and mentally exhausted by the activities we pursue. It is also possible that the elements of our grief that we don’t deal with while we are being very busy are not really gone and so may also return sometime down the road despite our activities.

As we’ve talked about before, in some ways, at times, our grief may need to overwhelm us so that by acknowledging and experiencing our grief, we can find ways to move through it to healing and wellness. It probably won’t go away if we ignore it, it may just be sitting, waiting for us to acknowledge it, behind the screen of our activity.

Emotional Inertia:

Early on in our grief, we may find that we become more emotional, we may cry easily or more easily. We may cry at things we never used to be emotionally effected by before. We may also find that we resist our emotions and especially we may resist emotional connections with others. 

We may often strongly resist emotions that center on others of the same gender as our loved ones, perhaps out of faithfulness to them and their memory. We may find that we resist involvement with others out of guilt. If we let our emotions warm towards others, we may feel that we are somehow betraying our love and our loved ones. 

Resistance to emotions or avoidance of emotional connections are very much a common part of grief. But after awhile, I believe that they are also a possible place where inertia may manifest in our grief journeys. This is more likely to occur later in our journeys when we begin to interact with others in social situations. 

Emotional inertia can affect whether we choose to or how we go about forming friendships and new relationships of almost any type if we choose to do so. It may be something that keeps us from wanting to get close to or commit to others. It may be a factor in any involvement with others that might involve our emotions and the potentially frightening possibility of us experiencing another loss in our lives at almost any level of intensity.

If, over time, we find that we tend to keep ourselves away from relationships with other people or that we keep our emotions locked in the past and don’t allow ourselves to become involved or attached to others because we feel we are still grieving or we feel we should still be grieving or we feel guilty or we don’t want to get hurt by a future loss or we fear the possibility that a connection to another person may lead to our becoming a caregiver again, these may all be thoughts that come from what I’m calling emotional inertia. They all may be ok to think and feel for a while but over time, as with most things we talk about, if they persist, they can also hold us back if we cling to them too strongly and for too long.

Saying never can often be a resistance to or a lack of belief in change. Most things I’ve said never would or could happen in my grief have since come to pass or over time, the possibility of them happening has opened up and I have come to see things differently.

At some point, as our social connections grow and time passes, we may want to let our emotions be more free in their expressions or we may want to reevaluate how we feel about these things even if we still find a certain amount of resistance remains to allowing ourselves to grow close to others.

Overcoming the inertia: 

Inertia is not usually a constant. As it is with much of what happens in grief, inertia can come and go, be stronger or not so strong at any time along the way. As we mentioned at the last meeting, it may be like the waves of grief, sometimes we can be active and effective when the inertia is not holding us so strongly and at other times, we can become immobilized or at least, frustratingly, not be able to find the energy we had the day before when the inertia is now weighing us down…

The one constant in the physical and mental types of inertia does seem to be, at least at some level when it is happening, that the inertia within our grief can hold us relatively still or unchanging as we grieve. Even in the active type of inertia, it too can actually hold us back from growing and changing even as we move rapidly though our lives.

Inertia can be like glue holding us in place, it can be an element of our grieving that keeps us from growing and healing. Once we start to release that glue, to break the bonds inertia puts on us, we can begin to heal more easily, more smoothly and perhaps more quickly.

The sooner we begin to actively oppose the inertia in whatever form it occurs and learn to overcome it, the sooner we will begin to find the energy and the will to pursue moving forward in all aspects of our lives. Learning to let go of the inertia is a major part of our healing journeys, of building strength, confidence and the desire to heal and to be able to fully live again.

It might be good to consider the possibility that inertia is manifesting in your life if any of this sounds familiar to you and to remember, in all the types of inertia, it may very well be something that your grief is doing to you. It may be another part of your grieving and it might be something you might want to consider working on and thinking about in those terms and be something to work to change if you want to.

Overcoming inertia of any type rarely or only slowly happens on its own, we usually have to work at it to get to see significant change… More next meeting about how we might work on recognizing and overcoming inertia!

Questions:

• Are you struggling to find not just the energy but the ambition to do things?

• Do you feel something like either type of inertia in your life

• Do you feel like you might be somehow stuck along your journey, like you are on some kind of long plateau, and could it be caused by inertia of some type that you might need to recognize and work through?

• What types of inertia do you experience?

• What specific thoughts do you have that keep you from doing things?

• What do you do when you feel and think these things?