For many of us, our grief and grieving is relatively new. Our grief and healing journeys mostly start with the devastation we feel when our loved ones pass from this world, however that happens. From the moment we are left without them in our lives, we begin our grief journeys and they play out in different ways for each of us. 

For many of us, we go through so many changes and levels of confusion and we often feel very lost and alone. We can often be unsure of what is happening to us and of what the feelings we experience even mean.

Often in our grief and grieving, a major component of what we experience, especially at the beginning, is pain and sadness. The pain and the sadness can be overwhelming at times and it can be one of the most difficult things we ever go through. Our reaction to that pain can often be a determining factor in how our grief journeys play out and the things we try to do to either surrender to the pain within our grief or to avoid that pain as our grieving progresses.

Once it begins to dawn on us that our grief isn’t going to stop or go away quickly, we have some choices to make as to how we are going to go forward within our grief and grieving. Once we realize that healing lies on the the other side of grief and that at some point we may have to grieve to find that healing, we may want to think about how we are going to let our grieving unfold and maybe take some active control and make some intentional choices about it going forward.

Here are some ideas, questions and observations of what we may do to deal with the pain we feel in our grief and grieving. They are ideas about how we might try to escape feeling and experiencing the pain or how we might accept the pain and learn that it may be a healthy part of our grieving. I’ve also included some definitions and then some ideas to think about that might help you to choose a path to follow through your grief as you begin to move forward towards healing and wellness.

Definitions:

Resistance: The attempt to prevent something by action or argument. The opposition or hostility to, the refusal of or the struggle against and the unwillingness to accept something or become something.

Courage: The ability to do something that frightens one. Strength in the face of pain or grief.

Surrender: To yield to the power or domination of another. 

The idea of surrender can hold negative connotations and also the implicationthat surrender is the same as giving up.But in the context of grief, surrender can take on another, quite different meaning. 

Surrendering to your grief means allowing yourself to experience what you experience in your grieving without judgment, to allow your emotions to be felt and to learn to accept, as you can, the changes that are happening in your life. It also means facing and experiencing the realities, difficulties and pain of your grief journey as and when they happen to you as gracefully as you can.

Surrender, in this sense, also means not fighting against or resisting your grief or your need to grieve. It suggests that at times, sitting home alone and experiencing the pain of your grief is not necessarily a bad thing, especially in the early parts of your journey. It also suggests that perhaps the type of pain we experience in our grieving is not something we always have to control, avoid or run away from. 

We can also learn to take breaks from our grief, we can do things to leave our grief behind for a while so we can catch our breaths but in the end, most of us will find healing by experiencing our grief and learning from it as we go. 

In this way, surrender can become a positive process by which each person can find their own unique way through their grief when they are ready to do so.

And, it’s always good to remember that grief is something we are experiencing and that is happening to us and not who we are. I think it’s important to accept that at some level and in our own unique ways, we all need to grieve and we all need to grieve for as long as we need to grieve!

Three very general ways we might choose to deal with and respond to the pain and sadness and other emotions within our grief and grieving: 

We don’t have to choose just one or another of these possibilities, they are not absolutes. It’s always possible that we may find ourselves doing more than one of them, or even doing all of them at various times, depending on the circumstances. There are times and situations when they can all be appropriate choices. 

We may also find that we want to make different choices about how we address our grief at different times and during different parts of our journeys. It’s always ok to change to a different way of addressing your grief and grieving at any point along the way. As you learn and grow, you may find that different ways of grieving may become more effective ways for you to find healing as you move forward. 

It’s always your choice how you navigate your grief and grieving. These ideas are here to give you a model that might help you recognize some possibilities and help you to choose or change your path when you are ready to do so. It’s building an awareness of what and why we are doing things and choosing to predominantly use them with intent that is important.

Hiding our Grief, Hiding or Diverting Ourselves from our Grief or Facing and Surrendering to our Grief:

1. We can choose (or think we need to choose) to be strong and stoic and try to hide our grief and our feelings of grief and not express them outwardly or deal with them internally. We can try to control or avoid them by hiding them, by keeping them to and maybe from ourself, locked away inside. 

We might also lock our grief away because we feel that we have to be strong for others and not let them see our grief or grieving. These choices are, in many ways, based on older models of grieving from an earlier time when showing or acknowledging any emotion was frowned upon and mostly unacceptable. But, consider that if we don’t show or acknowledge our grief, not showing it may also affect others because if they don’t see us grieve, they may think that we are not grieving or that we don’t care or that we’re ok when we’re really not. 

2. Secondly, we can choose to hide from and/or divert ourselves from our grief and get busy in perhaps multiple ways to keep ourselves from being alone with our grief. We can try to put off the feelings and pain our grief causes us by doing lots of other things because we hurt so badly, especially when we are alone. This might well be a subconscious, emotional fight or flight reaction to the pain we feel as we grieve.

As part of that, we may get so busy avoiding our grief and grieving that it makes us avoid other things that we need to do or should be doing in our lives. Also, because we are so busy trying to avoid our grief, we may come to think that those grief feelings have gone away after awhile…

Here too, if we don’t show or acknowledge our grief because we are hiding from it and not expressing it, our not showing it may cause others think that we are not grieving at all or that we’re ok when we’re not and perhaps when they are not ok either.

3. The third choice is to face our grief and surrender to itas and when it comes over us. We can choose to experience and embrace all that our grief brings us, including the pain and loneliness. We can perhaps learn to experience and embrace being alone with our grief at times, no matter how it makes us feel. We can come to understand that grief is a part of life and love and perhaps we are here to experience it all and learn all that it has to teach us as part of our journey through life and through grief. 

A question that occurs to me here is; are we culturally afraid of pain? Have we been taught that pain, especially emotional pain, is always and inherently bad and that we always need to avoid it?

It can be a very courageous thing to do to allow ourselves to grieve… It takes courage to face, surrender to and embrace our grief instead of resisting it, avoiding it or hiding from it…

Thoughts about Avoidance:

When we do any type of conscious or unconscious avoidance, in this case resisting or hiding or diverting ourselves from our grief, my experience and that of others I’ve talked to, is that the feelings or things we are avoiding don’t really go away. What usually happens is that the feelings and emotions become hidden inside us and because we are not dealing with them, they remain unresolved. They can remain inside us even if we don’t think so, since we haven’t learned all the things we need to learn from or about them.

Those hidden feelings may, unfortunately, get even more intense tucked away inside us while we are busy avoiding them, until they find a way to come back to the surface sometime later down the road. Sometimes they explode as anger, sometimes they just build up and return to the surface with even more overwhelming pain and grief then before. Sometimes we may find the world turning less bright and the diversions becoming less effective and we may not even be aware of what or why that is happening. 

I guess it’s possible that sometimes, although I’ve not yet encountered it, our hidden feelings of grief or grieving may really just fade away over time as well.

So, this meeting’s main question is: 

How do we want to set the stage for the next part of our lives? Should we avoid our grief, should we struggle and resist it, or should we try not to fight it, try not to resist or divert ourselves from our grieving. Should we or can we mostly face it, embrace it, surrender to it, sit down and visit with it and go with the flow of it no matter how badly it hurts or how little we like it and see where it takes us and what it has to teach us?

Two images from an old Oceanography Instructor:

1.If you are washed out to sea in a riptide, a seaward moving current that goes away from shore, it is usually way stronger than you are. If you fight it, you will eventually tire and run out of energy and by fighting the strength of the current, sometimes people don’t have enough energy to make it back to shore. 

But, if you let the current take you, don’t fight it, surrender to it and let it carry you with it’s energy and take you out towards the sea (even though that doesn’t seem to be where you want to go), eventually, the current will run out of energy. Once it does, you can use the strength and energy you didn’t use fighting it to swim to the edge of the current and then turn and swim back to shore.

2. When I first moved to Florida, I thought that if I lived on the coast, I would want to have the strongest reinforced concrete pilings I could find to build a house on so it would survive the winds and waves of a hurricane if it occurred. I was surprised when I went to the coast that many of the homes built at the back of the beach had been and still were being built not on concrete pilings but on wood posts, much like telephone poles, that were driven deeply into the sand.

When I started trying to find out why, because it didn’t make sense to me to use a less strong material, I found out that because concrete is not only strong but also rigid and inflexible, in the wind, it was actually often too resistant. Concrete isn’t going to bend much at all, it will just rigidly stand there and eventually break and collapse because it couldn’t be flexible. 

Wood pilings, however, are like palm trees, they flex and bend in the wind and while a house built on them may sway and shift, except under the most extreme conditions, the pilings don’t usually fracture or shatter, they just tend to be flexible and bend under the force of the wind and waves.

Another image to consider:

3. In electrical systems, resistance reduces the flow of electricity and uses up energy. Resistance to the flow of electricity in the wiring of a computer, for example, generates heat as the energy moves through the hardware of the computer and that degrades the amount of usable energy that is available for the computer to do it’s work. Since it is a loss of energy along the way, the more resistance there is, the less energy there is that’s available to run the system.

What do these images tell you about how you might be able to move through other natural systems like grief and grieving?

A final thought about surrender: 

I believe that much of my own growth towards wellness was due to the early choices I made to surrender to my grief and face it head on, to experience all of it, to allow the pain of it to knock me to my knees at times but to learn to remain flexible within it. I had to learn, slowly, to get back up and stand after each time it knocked me down. I had to learn to find the strength and courage to brace myself and be ready for the next wave to break instead of running for the “back of the beach” each time I felt the pain of the next wave rising, even when I wanted to. 

From that surrender, I was able to build a strength within myself that allowed me to move forward, to move through my grief with less resistance rather than repeatedly crashing into the wall of my grieving, and to eventually find healing and wellness in my life. 

Rather than squandering my strength fighting and struggling against it or diverting myself from it again and again each time it became painful, I believe that facing it allowed me to move through it more easily and smoothly and maybe, in the long run, more quickly (although not necessarily less painfully at times). I was able to move with more energy available to work on healing because I wasn’t resisting it. Each time I got back up, it gave me an affirmation and a strength to know I could get back up and continue to live and grow and work to build the next part of my life.

If we choose to fight against our grief early in our journeys, we can easily develop habits and patterns in our life that divert us from our need to grieve. We can find ourselves doing or not doing things that take us down a path of reaction to and avoidance of the pain and loneliness in our grief. That path, unfortunately, may not lead us to healing but only to a (temporary) diversion from our need to grieve. 

When you are ready or able to take some control, how will you choose to grieve? Will you choose to struggle against, hide or resist your grief in some way or will you try to learn to find a way to surrender to it?

Questions:

• Are you resisting your grief? How do you think that effects how you grieve and how you might move towards healing and wellness?

• *** Can you think of other places or situations where surrender is a positive force that you might use as a model for applying it to your grieving?

• What coping skills, social skills and life skills do you think you need to learn or re-learn to move forward and surrender to your grief as opposed to resisting it?
• If you have not yet reached a point of choice, based on who you are, would it be better for you to be rigid and inflexible (struggling against, resisting, and/or denying your grief) and possibly fracture under the stress, or would it be better for you to be more malleable and bend under the force that is applied to you by your grief (surrendering to your grief)? Would it better for you to struggle or surrender?

• *** Where are you now? Are you hiding your grief, struggling to control it, hiding from it or facing, accepting and surrendering to it. Or are you doing some of each?

• If you are struggling, what does your avoidance look like?

• If you are surrendering to it, what do you think helped you the most to choose that path?

• *** Why have you chosen the path that you have? Did it just happen or did something “push” you towards the direction you are following?

• How are you coping with your grief and figuring out how to navigate your grief and healing journeys?

• Do you think that the pain of your grief needs to be avoided at all costs or can the pain be part of the healing?