Why Grief Matters
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. This month we are highlighting counseling topics and how they intersect with our life and faith. Let’s explore one of the most important emotional experiences God gives us to process our pain and transform our lives—grief. So, why does grief matter?
Grief is a natural response to pain or loss. It’s a complex set of emotions that includes sadness, anger, regret, guilt, confusion, and fear. However, grief and mourning are different. Grief is what we think and feel inside after a loss while mourning is the expression of our thoughts and feelings on the outside. Many of us mourn after a death or a loss but we don’t acknowledge our grief. And if we don’t allow ourselves to grieve, our unresolved pain can turn into chronic issues like severe depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.
Grief can take on many forms—it can result from a death or losing your job or your home, getting a devastating health diagnosis, or an unmet dream that goes unfulfilled. We assume our life would turn out differently, and feelings of frustration, sadness, and grief take over. Author Nicholas Wolterstorff, who lost his son in a tragic climbing accident, says this: “Grief is a special kind of suffering. It’s intensely wanting what you know cannot be.”
What does grief feel like? Grief is like riding an emotional wave. These emotional tides can swallow us up by their intensity. But waves come and go, and they eventually recede. Riding an emotional wave is a practice of surfing your own intense emotions. If we practice accepting the emotions that arise without fighting or suppressing them, we can experience more freedom and control over our feelings. We allow the pain to come to the surface because it is real.
Many of us worry that if we let ourselves feel grief, we may never get out of it. Or, that grief will change us—we’ll become more depressed, angry, or cynical. Grief can also be confusing, sometimes we feel fine, other times we want to crawl in a hole. C.S. Lewis famously said after losing his wife, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Our fear of what will happen when we grieve can lead us to suppress these important feelings.
Some of us resist grief because we feel misunderstood in it. Grief can be seen as an aberration from normal, happy life. Many of us (and our American culture) think of grief as an illness to be cured, and we feel pressure to get out of it as quickly as possible. But the question for us shouldn’t be, “How long will this take?” but instead, “How deeply did you love?”
There is no psychological finish line to grief and everyone’s grief is different—like a fingerprint. We will respond differently to our losses because of our own personality traits, environmental triggers, circumstances surrounding the loss, support system, emotional maturity, and faith. For instance, there is nothing wrong with you if the sight of a toothbrush brings tears to your eyes! We must learn to inhabit what hurts because grief is a signal that love has been a part of our lives.
Grief is inevitable for each of us. And your grief will keep trying to get your attention until you give it the attention it deserves. One writer said, “Grief waits on welcome not time.” When we grieve, it doesn’t shrink us or make us less of who we are, but it expands our soul more to the world around us: we grow in how we communicate, make decisions, and live more presently with ourselves. Grievers will take inventory of life, reconsider priorities, deepen connections, and determine directions for what is most important. Author David Kessler writes, “Grief is not just something we go through, but it is something we grow through.”
Growing through grief doesn’t happen alone. We have a savior who knows those experiences well: “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). Jesus says to us that we are blessed if we mourn and promises we will be comforted. We don’t have to be perfect in our grief though. Pastor Tim Keller says, “God is very patient with us when we are desperate. Pour out your soul to him.” After all, we are promised that “those who go forth weeping, bearing their seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves” (Psalm 126:6). Our grief is never the end of the story.
The Barnabas Center exists to help Christ the King members, and our Houston community explore, understand, and heal from loss and learn how to grieve. And we offer Grieving with Hope, a counseling support group for losses related to death, suicide, and chronic illness. Please reach out to us to connect with a counselor or visit our website to learn more about counseling support groups. We would love to connect you with a counselor or others to support you in your season of grief.
And stay tuned during the month of May for more counseling resources and encouragement for Mental Health Awareness Month!
Grief is a natural response to pain or loss. It’s a complex set of emotions that includes sadness, anger, regret, guilt, confusion, and fear. However, grief and mourning are different. Grief is what we think and feel inside after a loss while mourning is the expression of our thoughts and feelings on the outside. Many of us mourn after a death or a loss but we don’t acknowledge our grief. And if we don’t allow ourselves to grieve, our unresolved pain can turn into chronic issues like severe depression, anxiety, and substance abuse.
Grief can take on many forms—it can result from a death or losing your job or your home, getting a devastating health diagnosis, or an unmet dream that goes unfulfilled. We assume our life would turn out differently, and feelings of frustration, sadness, and grief take over. Author Nicholas Wolterstorff, who lost his son in a tragic climbing accident, says this: “Grief is a special kind of suffering. It’s intensely wanting what you know cannot be.”
What does grief feel like? Grief is like riding an emotional wave. These emotional tides can swallow us up by their intensity. But waves come and go, and they eventually recede. Riding an emotional wave is a practice of surfing your own intense emotions. If we practice accepting the emotions that arise without fighting or suppressing them, we can experience more freedom and control over our feelings. We allow the pain to come to the surface because it is real.
Many of us worry that if we let ourselves feel grief, we may never get out of it. Or, that grief will change us—we’ll become more depressed, angry, or cynical. Grief can also be confusing, sometimes we feel fine, other times we want to crawl in a hole. C.S. Lewis famously said after losing his wife, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” Our fear of what will happen when we grieve can lead us to suppress these important feelings.
Some of us resist grief because we feel misunderstood in it. Grief can be seen as an aberration from normal, happy life. Many of us (and our American culture) think of grief as an illness to be cured, and we feel pressure to get out of it as quickly as possible. But the question for us shouldn’t be, “How long will this take?” but instead, “How deeply did you love?”
There is no psychological finish line to grief and everyone’s grief is different—like a fingerprint. We will respond differently to our losses because of our own personality traits, environmental triggers, circumstances surrounding the loss, support system, emotional maturity, and faith. For instance, there is nothing wrong with you if the sight of a toothbrush brings tears to your eyes! We must learn to inhabit what hurts because grief is a signal that love has been a part of our lives.
Grief is inevitable for each of us. And your grief will keep trying to get your attention until you give it the attention it deserves. One writer said, “Grief waits on welcome not time.” When we grieve, it doesn’t shrink us or make us less of who we are, but it expands our soul more to the world around us: we grow in how we communicate, make decisions, and live more presently with ourselves. Grievers will take inventory of life, reconsider priorities, deepen connections, and determine directions for what is most important. Author David Kessler writes, “Grief is not just something we go through, but it is something we grow through.”
Growing through grief doesn’t happen alone. We have a savior who knows those experiences well: “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). Jesus says to us that we are blessed if we mourn and promises we will be comforted. We don’t have to be perfect in our grief though. Pastor Tim Keller says, “God is very patient with us when we are desperate. Pour out your soul to him.” After all, we are promised that “those who go forth weeping, bearing their seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves” (Psalm 126:6). Our grief is never the end of the story.
The Barnabas Center exists to help Christ the King members, and our Houston community explore, understand, and heal from loss and learn how to grieve. And we offer Grieving with Hope, a counseling support group for losses related to death, suicide, and chronic illness. Please reach out to us to connect with a counselor or visit our website to learn more about counseling support groups. We would love to connect you with a counselor or others to support you in your season of grief.
And stay tuned during the month of May for more counseling resources and encouragement for Mental Health Awareness Month!
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