Societies That Shame Grief Are Dangerous

Families That Shame Grief Are Outgrowths of Society

I’m walking in chilly rain with weight on my back while thinking about grief. Sometimes I like when things match. Almost enough to overcome not loving each individual thing.

Really, I don’t mind the rain, weight, or grief individually. All are needed. All make me stronger. I like challenges. Another thing I get from my parents. I get SO much incredible good from my parents—good I would be denied if I couldn’t face the associated grief.

I didn’t make a practice of facing my grief every Wednesday and writing about it because I thought it would be wildly popular or successful.

I am well aware that I live in a society that shames and punishes public expressions of grief. I’m not doing it to win friends or get likes and shares. I get the opposite. I know it is often hard to like what I write. I try not to take my lack of popularity as an indication I can’t write, though my brain does sometimes go there.

No, I don’t write about grief to win friends and praise. I do it because my parents raised me to be addicted to challenge. Just like they were.

Challenge does not have to mean hardship, though often it does. My parents took on financial hardship as a means of challenging themselves. And I needed to do it myself to really understand that.

I started out in financial hardship and couldn’t fathom why anyone would choose it for themselves and their children.

I had to get myself out of financial hardship to be in a position of electing to put myself into financial hardship. To truly understand my parents.

So I did exactly that.

And now I understand!!! Really understanding my parents from the inside out does give me so much empathy. To truly grieve my parents, I have needed to feel their grief. Grief that was always present but rarely expressed.

My parents experienced A LOT of grief they didn’t process, instead passing it onto me. I’m trying not to do the same to my kids. By feeling my grief instead of burying it. Where it can emerge somatically as cancer and cardiomyopathy. I’m trying to be physically healthier than either of my parents—by feeling my feelings. Including grief.

Even though it isn’t popular. I care more about my health than my popularity. This took decades to achieve. And can still be a work in progress.

The body keeps the score and mine gets loud when she’s being ignored. My vagus nerve starts scolding me with shooting back pain anytime I stray too long from yoga or remain horizontal for too many hours in a row. Migraines also let me know something in my life needs to change.

My parents’ unprocessed grief killed them both prematurely and didn’t make their relationship especially nurturing, in my opinion. And they did pass it right onto me. Which has meant my grief work is double. (AS IF my grandparents processed their grief.) The trouble with grieving in a family that didn’t allow it is you get saddled with not only your own grief to process, but grief for generations before you. It takes a hearty soul to break chains of intergenerational trauma. Why so few do it.

My parents were cycle breakers, too! Just not in the processing of personal grief department.

They processed HUGE grief at the societal level, which is why they couldn’t also face it at home. Political activists are the grievers of the world. Doing the highly unpopular work of calling out things that are grievous.

My parents did this for all of my early childhood and years before it. They were spent. AND they were punished by most everyone in their lives for calling out injustice. Despite being raised to call out injustice. It was deeply painful and hard. They suffered so much.

Which I understand so much better now, too, having experienced it myself.

My parents taught me how to feel grief at the societal level—which is why it hasn’t been a stretch. When you are the first in your family to face the grief of society—it’s a heavy lift. Deeply grateful my parents did that part themselves, teaching me how to do that part myself. And really, my grandparents faced grief at the societal level, too. All part of why they couldn’t also do it personally.

It is all connected. To face our personal grief we must face societal grief and vice versa. My parents struggled with one but led the way on the other. The more I feel, process, and release their grief, the more I can open to all of the other amazing things about them.

Grief work is worth it.

If you weren’t taught how to grieve in your personal life or in larger society, it can be hard to learn. I’m here to help if you want to face grief in a safe container with trauma-informed care and support. I’ve been studying how to do this myself and with others for the past 30 years. Paid subscribers receive access to my monthly grief circle on the third Wednesday of each month.

I also caution us all against too much grief at a time. While I am grateful to be able to feel both societal grief and my own personal grief, it can seriously threaten to overwhelm. Again helping me understand how my parents shut off their focus on personal grief to pay attention to societal grief.

Grief is hard and a great many of us were taught to avoid it at all costs. That expressing it is vulnerability, a burden to others, dangerous, shameful, makes people not like us, makes people push us away. At the personal and societal levels.

I hope to be a change agent at both the personal and societal levels, helping encourage others to feel, process, and release their grief by doing so myself.

There is a lot of grief both personal and societal. My own experience together with decades of research and study tells me we don’t benefit from refusing to face grief. We pay a steep price. And so do those around us.

We need to feel grief. But we should grieve with the support of others, not in isolation where we’ve been shunned by people unwilling or incapable of facing their own grief.

Which is a systemic failure of society mirrored at the family level. Politics is personal. Societies that can’t grieve create populations incapable of grieving. Leading to abuse and war.

Everything is connected and an incapacity to grieve starts from the top down and infects us all. Communities that can’t grieve get trapped in unprocessed grief they then pass onto their children. And the children of others.

I feel like I’m writing a bit in circles, apologies. I find this happens when everything feels connected in my mind. So often, everything feels connected in my mind. Explaining succinctly how to those outside my mind is the challenge.

Thank you, dear readers. I know grief is not everyone’s favorite subject. It makes me even more grateful to those who choose to read my words on it. I am continually amazed to have new people sign up to receive my words every week. On grief?!

TL;DR

I’m not sure I even wrote about any specific grief today. Just the top-down impact of living in societies that shame and shun grief and how many of us grew up with parents who struggled to face grief at the societal or personal level or both. Leaving us with extra grief to process. Which can threaten overwhelm if we’re not careful. Also, grief is better felt in community.

Grieving is like walking in chilly rain with weight. You don’t necessarily love it while you’re in it, but it makes you stronger, you survive it, and you feel relief after.

Writes the girl who made it home to cats and quilts and cups of tea and does indeed feel relief having faced some grief even if it was in looping abstract ways that are perhaps only connected in my mind.

Those who dissuade you from feeling grief leave out this key part: It leads to gratitude.