TRANSCRIPT
I’ve been asked quite a few times in the comments section of this YouTube channel, “How can I grieve?” I do all the things that I think should help me grieve, and I’m not able to access those feelings. I’m not able to grieve. And so, I’d like to talk about what I would say to someone, some general person who reached out to me and asked me, “I can’t grieve. I’m stuck in some way. How might I grieve?”
And I’d like to share my ideas. The first thing I would ask is, have you created a sense of safety in your life? Because often, grieving can be pretty damn overwhelming. It can actually resemble trauma for people who haven’t created that sense of safety in their life. And to really be able to grieve and to grieve effectively, it can’t overwhelm you. If a person really is going to be overwhelmed by their grieving, then they probably shouldn’t grieve.
So, I think a lot of people, if they haven’t grieved yet, at some unconscious level, they’re not consciously aware of it, but unconsciously they’re aware: I’m not ready to do it. I’m not ready to blow the circuits of my mind. I’m not ready to destroy my life. And I think sometimes there are people—yes, I’ve seen people who have grieved before they’re ready. Sometimes, “Oh, if I take ayahuasca, it can make me grieve,” or “I’ve taken some deep drug that makes me blow up my feelings and they all come out, and it’s been so great.” And then afterwards, their life crashes and burns. I’ve seen this with people.
And other times too, they’ve done a lot. If they’ve gone to a program where they’re talking about their feelings for days and days and weeks, maybe some sort of inpatient program that holds them, that gives them a sense of safety and comfort, and they feel their feelings, and then they grieve. And then when they get out of the program and they go back to their regular life, their regular life doesn’t hold them enough, and then they become overwhelmed. And they can literally have a breakdown over it, go insane even. It can be absolutely terrible for their lives.
So, I think a lot of people, if they’re not grieving yet, it means they’re not ready. So, a big part of becoming ready to grieve, being able to grieve, is to prove to your own unconscious that you can handle it. And so, how would one prove it to one’s own unconscious? I’m thinking, hmm, I would ask someone. These are just general questions that I might ask anybody who asked me the question, “Why can’t I grieve? What’s wrong with me?” or “What might I do?”
How stable is your living situation? Is your living situation stable enough to hold you if you really become full of this deep emotion that grieving inherently is? How much money do you have saved up? Do you really have enough of a nest egg, enough of a comfort to hold you if, let’s say, you’re not able to work for a week, or two weeks, or a month? A lot of people don’t have any money at all saved up. And I think, oh, maybe unconsciously they know that if they grieve and they’re not able to work for a week, or two weeks, or a month, or two months—because sometimes that does happen with grieving—that it’s not going to absolutely ruin their life. So maybe it’s, you know, there’s a way to prepare to save more money.
Also, what kind of friendships do you have? Do you have friendships, people that you can talk about it with? I hate to say, but even maybe a psychotherapist—a good psychotherapist—that would be able to handle the deep emotion, to be able to share what you’re going through. But I think really deep down, more friendship. But even deeper than that, regardless of the nature of the relationship—therapy, friendship, whatever it is—do you have some sort of deep emotional connection with another person who can see you, who can hear you, who can respect you, who can especially maybe have some perspective over what you are going through?
Because sometimes when people grieve, I think especially early on, it can be a little confusing. And it can be really nice to be able to talk about it with someone who says, “Oh my God, you’re grieving! What you’re going through is healthy.” Because I’ve seen people who start to grieve and they have no one around them who has any perspective. Sometimes people say, “There’s something wrong with you. You’re sick. You’re depressed. You need to go on an antidepressant.” Now therapists even say that they’re terrified of grieving.
I think a lot of people in the world—friends, therapists, lots of psychiatrists for sure—haven’t done their own grieving. And so when other people grieve, it triggers them. And so sometimes people maybe who want to grieve don’t have other people in their life who would be supportive of them. Or sometimes—this is sometimes the saddest thing—I have met quite a few people who say, “I’ve done a lot. I feel like I should be grieving, but I’m not grieving. What’s going on?” And then I hear that they’re actually living with their parents, or the closest people in their life to them are their parents.
And sometimes the very things that they need to be grieving are in relationship to the failures of their parents from long ago. And yet often, it’s not at all safe for them to be grieving the things that their parents did to them when their primary emotional support still comes from their parents. Sometimes it can really backfire terribly on them. Sometimes their parents will reject them much more terribly, or heaven forbid, part of their grief process—which is very normal and healthy—is to feel all that ancient historical rage and anger over what happened. And sometimes it’s very unhealthy if their closest people in their life are the people who actually caused them the problems that led them to have this anger and rage and things like that. It’s not safe. It can make their life worse. So unconsciously they’re saying, “Ah,” they’re saying to their self, “Oh self, don’t grieve. It’s not a good idea.”
So that’s another thing I would ask people: How much distance have you taken from your family of origin? If your family of origin are the—often true—the primary people whose failures, whose losses, whose inadequacies, whose traumas that they cause you are the things that you need to grieve, often when people are close to their family, it’s like a little button inside of them that says, “No, can’t grieve yet. Can’t grieve yet. You don’t have enough distance.” I’ve seen that for a lot of people.
Sometimes the more distance that they take, the more—not just random distance where they get rid of their family, but they have no new healthy life to hold them—but distance where they’re in a new supportive life, a new life that has roots in the ground, friendships, work, a place to live, a healthy support system, things like that—a new individuated life. This unconsciously sends the message to a person, “You are now ready to grieve the losses of where you came from, of the failures of your early childhood.” So that’s a big one.
Another one I would ask people is, are you journaling? I know journaling isn’t for everyone, but I also think that there are lots of different ways to journal. I talked about it in another video. Even speaking into voice memo on a person’s phone can be a form of journaling. Basically writing down or speaking or in some way putting out one’s feelings, one’s thoughts, so you can self-reflect on them, developing a stronger self-reflective relationship with yourself, exploring your history. Maybe even writing down the history of your life, writing down everything that you remember about your childhood, writing down everything that you remember about the traumas that you experienced.
A lot of times just getting it out on paper, or even getting it onto a voice memo, getting it out of oneself, listening to it later, reading what one has written, listening to what one has recorded—not for anyone else to hear, just completely in an uncensored way for a private self-reflective relationship, for a relationship with one’s own self intended for you as your own audience—this can be transformative. This can be a big part of opening up the mess, clearing away the cloud, clearing away the dirt to see what’s down there, what’s inside of myself. This can really open up the door to one’s deeper feelings.
Very helpful in leading one toward grieving, also leading one toward making healthier life decisions. Another question I would ask is, to what degree do you, if I’m going to use the word, have unresolved addictions? What are you still addicted to in your life?
I think everybody, myself included, has certain addictions. I think often our world looks at addictions in pretty narrow ways. Are you using illicit drugs, or are you addicted to alcohol, specifically to certain substances that are deemed addictive substances? And yes, those can very easily be addictions, but there’s lots of other kinds of addictions.
So I think it’s really important for people, if they want to grieve, to look at what their addictions are. Because when people have addictions, it’s harder to grieve. In fact, addictions often serve that very purpose unconsciously. An addiction is a pad against grieving. It’s a sort of wall that makes it easier for a person to not feel those deeper feelings. And often there’s a good reason for it. Those deeper feelings are incredibly painful. Addictions are a way to avoid pain, a way to feel comfort and pleasure without actually going through the process of healing. It’s like bypassing the process of healing.
So what are some of these addictions if they’re not just drugs and alcohol? Well, people can be addicted to relationships. Romance is a big one. A lot of people are very addicted to their romance, meaning it’s not a real healthy nurturing of the soul and the self. It’s just a comfort. It’s a distraction against feeling one’s feelings.
People can be addicted to the sex, specifically within the romance, or sex outside of the romance. I see there’s a sex addiction—people going out and having lots of sex, or sometimes not even a lot of it, but just, well, diverting their unresolved feelings, diverting their self-reflective relationship, acting out their unresolved feelings into sexuality, even into maybe non-interactive sexuality, such as things like pornography, as a way to buffer against one’s deeper painful feelings.
But what other addictions? I think a lot of people, they use their own children that way. They have children for that very purpose—a distraction, a way not to feel your feelings, a way not to move forward in your life, a way to get some less powerful being to love you and nurture you so that you don’t necessarily have to do it for yourself. Or more so, to feel historically on a deeper level how unloved and unnurtured you were.
I think a lot of times when people really come to the realization of how unloved and how unnurtured they were, it opens the door to that terrible, terrible sense of loss. And when people block that sense of loss, they block the realization of how unloved they were by having external people try to make up for it, like by having a child or having an unhealthy romantic relationship, or even a romantic obsession about someone. It might love me and allow someone to keep their deeper feelings at bay and not to grieve.
So that’s the basic idea that I have in terms of looking at one’s own addictions and feeling how to resolve a person’s addictions. Now, I know a lot of people, oh, they have one addiction and then they replace it with another addiction. Even sometimes psychiatric drugs can be a kind of addiction in the more general sense. People can be using them to not feel their deeper feelings. Oh, I’m feeling depression. I was feeling more empty and blank, then I started to feel really terrible and depressed, and my therapist, my psychiatrist suggested I go on these psychiatric drugs. And often those drugs block the grieving. They block the deeper feelings. Sometimes that is their inherent purpose, and sometimes for many people that can be very comforting, especially if the grieving is coming up in a way that’s just so absolutely overwhelming because they maybe haven’t built the stability of their life to handle it.
But to become healthier, a person has to feel those feelings. And so many times I’ve heard people say when I was on various psychiatric drugs—lots of different types of drugs, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, antipsychotics, even anti-anxiety drugs—they couldn’t access the feelings that allowed them to connect with their grief, and they felt stuck from it.
Now, that’s not to say, oh, just stop taking your psychiatric drugs, because that can be an absolutely horrible and life-shattering experience. I know a lot of people who have gotten off their psychiatric drugs in a healthier way. A lot of times it’s very, very slowly. I’ve seen some people who get off their psychiatric drugs too fast and absolutely ruin their lives, even ruin their bodies as the result of it. So I’d say if you’re going to get off psychiatric drugs and you’re on them because you want to find out what’s underneath in terms of your feelings, to figure out how to do that in a healthy, careful, often very, very, very slow way.
But my basic ideas, if at all possible, avoid getting on them in the first place. That’s a general idea that I think can be very healthy.
Now, another way that people can help themselves access deeper grief—and in fact, I think this is going to be the final way that I’d like to talk about—is to find ways to reflect on this question in one’s own life, to think about it, to meditate on this question. Because ultimately, I believe these deeper answers are within us. And I think if we can create a quiet place in our life, a quiet self-reflective way, I think this is even beyond journaling or anything like this. Even through meditation or just by, well, I came up with the term once upon a time, 10, 15 years ago, the term inner dialoguing. And I would do it with myself, just ask myself when I’m in a quiet place where there’s nobody around, in silence, in my bedroom perhaps, or even out in nature somewhere where nobody’s around, just ask myself a question and see what bubbles up.
And that’s, that would be my answer—to stop and just really ask oneself, what is blocking me from grieving? And to try to listen, to listen to that still, quiet voice in oneself that says what the answer is. And I think often if we’re really, really quiet and we really develop our listening skills, listen to our deeper self, we can find that answer within us all on our own.