Grief and loss: Are we allowed to feel sad?

        In last few decades, we seem to live in a society that is intolerant of almost all emotions except happiness. So much so that people nowadays often go to enormous lengths to cover and avoid feeling anything else. If you lose a job, it is expected that you get up the following morning, apply for the next one and move on. If someone dies, grieving process is to be done privately, away from the public eye and certainly not for too long. If your relationship ends, you are expected to get over it and get back into dating game as soon as possible. Everyone is swiping, applying and moving on without a moment to spare for reflection and emotion.

         We are so uncomfortable with (and around) emotions like sadness, grief and loss that we run, deny, and generally take very little notice of any of it until it hits us in the face with vengeance. You see, this is the point where I see most of my clients and I often wonder: in our society, has anyone ever taught us how to process grief, loss or sadness or have these three things became almost dirty words? Just the other day, a client was telling me that he felt embarrassed for still feeling sad and not ‘getting over the death’ of his father, three months after his death. He said: after an initial few weeks, people expect you to move on, get on with your life, accept party invitations and continue like nothing happened. He couldn’t and thought that there is something wrong with him. People said things like: he was old after all, he had a good life, it was his time. Other people didn’t know what to say, so often they said nothing or avoided him all together. The Internet is full of one liners and inspirational quotes that no longer work. So often, for a while, life stops making sense for those who were left behind.   

Many cultures have proscribed steps through a grieving process. Admittedly, some of those steps might look silly and outdated to us, but nevertheless they have the purpose of holding space for a person to make sense while allowing them to process emotions. For instance, in not so recent past, in most Mediterranean cultures the burial lasted three days, with the whole community of people visiting one’s home: sitting together, crying, praying, eating and talking. It was expected for a widow to grieve a loss of her spouse for a year and it was not unusual that people would wear black for the rest of their lives and never marry again. It was respectful and honourable thing to acknowledge the importance and the space this person held in your life for a year. Although, a year may seem like a long time and wearing full black attire too much to ask from the family outside the funeral these days, what we have now is another extreme.

          When it comes to sadness and grief , it is no longer expected from us to mourn the loss in our lives but instead we are to press ourselves into a happy, functional mould that has been offered. As a result, not many of us in that situation are doing fine. But seriously: What happened to us? How did we get to this point? Why do we numb ourselves or expect to get over things quickly, and why there no longer seems to be a place for things to unfold organically, in their own time. My question to you is: What’s the rush? When and why did we start to consider sadness and grief as a weakness?