The Importance of Grieving for the World
The collective well of grief
One unexpected perk of being a therapist is access to real-time data about what we’re collectively feeling on a deep level. Every therapist I meet agrees that our clients tend to be going through similar moods and feelings, sometimes in eerie ways. Once, 4 of my clients (and a friend of mine) had childhood pets die over the course of a week. This happened to occur during the week of a notable astronomical event. I tried not to read into that too much, for fear of having to concede that astrology may be onto something.
Perhaps more interesting than the timing of trends in thoughts and feelings is what lies in the hearts of the folks I work with. In short: most of us are suffering in similar ways for similar reasons. I have joked to clients that being a therapist is inherently very validating, because I no longer entertain the illusion that what I struggle with is unique. I have come to see my suffering, which I once felt ashamed of, as shared by many (perhaps most) members of my generation. That alone has been quite liberating to know.
With most clients, there comes a time where we discuss an unmanageable sense of overwhelm about the sorry state of the world. For some clients, this subject is colored by dark humor and ironic detachment. For others, this subject holds a profound sense of gravity. What I have seen, though, is that almost everyone bears the burden of knowing that the world, animalkind, and humankind, are in bad shape. What I have not seen is a clear, effective way of dealing with this knowledge. For most of us, the answer is some measure of ignoring, distraction, or dissociation from the grief, either intentional or unconscious.
The lost practice of grief
Our culture is especially bad at dealing with grief. This is apparent in how we make so little space for mourning. On average, workers are allowed five days of bereavement leave (often less), which means they are expected to return to normal life and work less than a week after a spouse, parent, or child has passed. Having gone through lesser losses in my life, it seems astonishingly out of touch to expect productivity from someone who is grieving a tremendous loss. It’s a bit like asking an athlete to return to practice while they are still seriously injured.
Most of us are not prepared for the process of grieving until we are thrown into grief, and even then, we may not be allowed to grieve fully. Until I became a therapist and familiarized myself with grief work, I was unaware of the many world traditions that existed to help us through grief. Our productivity-focused culture is in the minority; most human cultures have had rich, long-held rituals and practices to allow the process of grief to unfold, for individuals, families, and communities. As recently as the Victorian era, widows were expected to formally be in mourning for two years and a day after their husbands died.
In a culture so immature in its understanding of grief, what hope is there for folks who are actively and chronically grieving the endless river of losses fed by exploitative economies, ecosystems that are raped and uprooted, entire animal species that are tortured or eradicated, and human communities that are destroyed by injustice and devastated by trauma? How can the sensitive among us hold this grief amidst our already difficult lives?
Transforming through grief
It would be arrogant and premature of me to answer the question of how we should respond to the multifaceted horrors that humans, animals, and the earth face. I will say, though, that we can start by contacting the grief we are dissociated from. As I have learned from myself and clients, most of us turn from the horrors of the world because it is too overwhelming to face them. I do not judge this, nor do I advocate for diving into the collective well of grief with no guardrails (and certainly not all on our own). But without contacting this grief, how can we be expected to respond? How do we attend to something that we cut ourselves off from?
What our culture does not know about grieving is that it is vital to our growth and development. To go through deep grief is to be changed, to be matured in a way that no other process can achieve. It is to shed the common illusions of youth, which allows us to finally relate to life from deep and profound sensitivity. It makes us sensitive and responsive to the world’s suffering.
In past ages, when we were not so capable of dissociating from daily life thanks to endless distractions, cultures valued people who went through this process of deep maturation; we celebrated elders because of this. Now, besides a few pop culture archetypes of old, wise characters, we have almost no awareness of what gifts come from being touched, moved, and transformed by grief and deep contact with life.
When clients come to me full of sorrow and anxiety about the state of the world, they usually have no sense of what to do with those feelings. More often than not, they search for ways to avoid the feelings, to extract them as if they are malignant growths needing surgical removal. What I struggle to tell them is that these feelings just might be exactly what they need in order to deepen their contact with life and respond to the world’s (and their own) suffering. To continue dissociating from these feelings is to fall into the trap that our culture has fallen into as a whole: ignoring, shutting down, and turning away. Is it any surprise that we usually do not respond to widespread injustice and suffering, given how phobic we are of the very feelings that call us into action?
My prescription is simple: allow the feelings of grief for the world to be felt. Allow them to sink into you like rainwater sinks into dry earth. Allow yourself to weep on behalf of all that has been lost. These feelings are not the artifacts of depression, or cognitive distortions, or maladaptive beliefs. They are essential, important indicators that you are alive, you care, and you are a part of the world. If you feel that this process is too overwhelming, seek comfort and guidance from those who have been through it. It is yet another symptom of our culture’s woundedness that we suffer these things alone.
If we turn towards the suffering of the world, grieve all that has been lost to ignorance and injustice, and allow ourselves to be changed by grief, we may finally wake up to what needs to be done.
