Learning to Sit With the Emotions of Grief

Sometimes life feels relentless with the things it throws at us, and grief and emotional turmoil can feel never-ending. We might lose someone with whom we had a complicated relationship, and we are left with complex emotions and without closure.

We might experience job loss, the end of a significant relationship, or have to change our living situations all at the same time. Life can feel like a tumultuous ocean, and we are just trying to stay afloat in a raft that is slowly breaking apart.

All grief is valid, and all of it is complex. It takes time to process the emotions that grief brings and find a way of moving forward. Before we can even think of the road ahead, though, we must learn to sit with our emotions. When we learn to accept our emotions and process our pain, we make our life rafts stronger against the waves of life.

Pandora’s Box

In a story from Greek mythology, a woman named Pandora was responsible for unleashing all evil, suffering, and hardship into the world. She never intended to do so. She was merely curious. Given a jar (later mistranslated to “box”), she was instructed to give it as a gift to a human whom the gods wanted to punish.

Inside the jar were all manner of bad things, but also in it, right at the bottom, was hope and the ability to overcome all of the evil within. When she was alone, she peered inside it, and unwittingly allowed all suffering, troubles, and grief to escape. She shut it without realizing that hope was still inside.

This tale is a picture of how hard it can be to find hope in suffering, and of how difficult it is to deal with our complex emotions. Today, a “Pandora’s Box” is a situation full of troubles and pain that can’t be stopped once we begin dealing with it.

Many of us have spent years and even decades shutting our emotions and feelings into a similar kind of box. It is usually only in grief that we venture to open this box. Just as with Pandora, suffering comes pouring out, threatening to overwhelm us.

Warning Lights

Emotions need to be felt, not ignored or shoved down. Emotions can feel deeply uncomfortable and unpleasant, but they are almost always helpful if you learn to pay attention to them. Many of us have been taught that we shouldn’t trust our emotions because they will lead us astray.

This is like advising someone to ignore every light that appears on the dashboard of a car, because they are only a distraction. People can’t help but feel an emotional response when something happens in their lives, and emotions always convey important information.

For example, a person might start feeling unexpectedly angry as they think of a loved one who recently passed away. That person might feel as if they are disrespecting the memory of their loved one by feeling angry, especially if they had a good relationship with them. They might not even know where the anger came from and may not want to find out. They shove the feeling away out of sight before anyone else sees.

Feelings don’t disappear when we shove them down. They tend to stick around in our body, in the form of aches, pains, physical sensations, or a compromised immune system. Most of us tend to go deep into our thoughts as we process grief, trauma, or hardships.

We might feel better for a moment when we talk about our experiences with someone, because talking about it feels like we are processing the trauma or grief, but it’s not long before we are stuffing more emotions back into the box. It’s only a matter of time before we break down, and all because we were taught to ignore the emotional warning signs.

Learning to Sit with Grief’s Emotions

It takes a healthy dose of bravery, patience, and endurance to begin processing our emotions, especially when they are attached to grief. Over the years, we might have developed unhelpful reactions that actively get in the way of sitting with our emotions. For example, we might change the subject each time a triggering topic comes up in conversation or make plans with friends to distract ourselves and avoid our feelings.

There are hundreds of ways that we learn to avoid our emotions, and all of them feel more natural than sitting with our feelings.

What happens inside our bodies when we begin to feel something we usually avoid? Have you ever taken notice of the sensations you feel when broached with difficult feelings? It begins as a rising panic that starts somewhere in the stomach.

You might find yourself short of breath and sweating slightly, or you might experience chills down your spine and goosebumps on your arms. This is a fear response with your nervous system responding to your emotions as if they were a deadly threat.

The first step in sitting with your emotions is to retrain your nervous system so that it stops responding to your emotions as a threat. When you feel triggered in a situation or when your emotions are slowly surfacing, do not do what you normally do. Instead, sit, become still, and allow the emotions to surface.

This might feel foreign and terrifying, but it only takes a few minutes for your body to realize you are not in peril. When your nervous system realizes there is no true threat present, it will stop sending chemicals to protect you, and you will slowly acclimatize to feeling your feelings. Deep breathing can help in this case.

The next steps in the process take a lot of time, patience, and someone else to help you process. You must learn to name your feelings and identify where in your body you experience them. Let the emotions exist without judging them, or feeling guilt, shame, or frustration in yourself for feeling them. Over time, you will learn that emotions come and go like ocean waves. They are not who you are; they are merely visitors in your home who pass on important information.

Grief is not an emotion. It does not come and go like emotions do. Grief is a new home where you must make yourself comfortable. It is easier to live with grief and to process trauma when you have learned to sit with your emotions and pay attention to them. In time, they will help your grief, even if you can’t imagine how that could happen.

Sorrowful yet Always Rejoicing

The New Testament apostles frequently wrote to churches they had established and encouraged them to “rejoice” in sufferings and hardships. They went through various life-threatening trials, from snake bites to shipwrecks, and ultimately death after long prison stays. We can never know how their words of encouragement were received, but two things are certain: nothing lasts forever, and hardships are opportunities to learn and grow.

We develop coping mechanisms when life pummels us. Some of these coping tactics are helpful, some are harmless, and some make things worse. The most harmful coping methods are the ones that cause us to forget our troubles or numb our pain. Some things are truly overwhelming.

It is instinctive to avoid pain, but we can’t run away from hardships or grief forever. There must come a time when we face our emotions and process all of the things that have happened to us.

You are not weak for having tried to avoid your pain, nor are you a failure for coping poorly with it. You are human, and you are still alive, despite all you have been through. There is a journey ahead of you, and it is one you can only undertake one day at a time. Nothing lasts forever, and even grief transforms into a travel companion for the road ahead.

If you would like to unpack your pain and grief, a counselor can help. When you are ready, contact our offices, and we can help you with an appointment for therapy. The road to healing is a long one, but it is better when you don’t go it alone. Contact us today, and we can find someone to walk with you.