How to Understand Grief |An Alternative Take ...

Grief can feel like a toxic best friend

It lurks beside you sitting there mocking you, or sidling up to you when you’re not prepared and screaming in your face that you're sinking…

There are many types of grief, yet the most common one that we talk about is when we lose someone to the other side.

The other types of grief tend to be accompanied by sentiments such as get over it, you’ll live, or just plain outright ignoring the fact that you’re falling, because you should have gotten over it by now.

If you’re part of my beautiful awakening tribe you know ‘get over it’ is a swearword. You know that when the wound is still raw so many people don’t understand why you haven’t healed.

So few people understand the proclivity of true grief, after all if you have never felt it how do you even attempt to have an opinion about it. Grief is a feeling emotion that completely takes over the whole of life. It pours into you when you wake up, and ruffles your feathers as you make breakfast, you feel as if you’re less than everyone else.

Many people mask grief with recreational pursuits that are not of the highest value, such as drinking, drugs, self medicating, over exerting themselves to the point of complete exhaustion. The method, the solution is a panacea, that dulls the pain. It stops the person feeling the grief, reconciling with the new life, or even acknowledging that a change has occurred.

The problem with grief that is bereft of a passing of a soul is that the person, situation, house, people you worked with, life that you had to leave is still there in some ways. It is still kicking and breathing nearby. When that grief hits the wall, Mondays turn into Friday’s within the blink of the eye, and you wish everyone could see the pain you are going through.

Yet their concern has passed by because they think it’s time to act as if it never happened.

Many years ago I left my ex … I had believed previously that 'till death do us part' was forever.

Seriously, it seemed toxic to me that I had decided that the relationship was a crock of **** and that I had to walk away. I don’t do sticking at something because the collective tells me it’s for the best. Or that it’s a long held belief of our people, that when we marry, we stay married. To my mind the collective has a load of conditioned thinking that truly does not marry up with my experience. See what I did there? I threw the word marry in on a whim.

Words and meanings are interesting and what we believe in all truth is actually just a social construct.

Shake all your common root beliefs off you right now and ask yourself is there anything that you are holding yourself away from doing because you believe that is goes against the grain of the world view that you’ve been taught.

Right now more than ever, this question is a biggy, we are living in excruciatingly confusing times where emergency legislation is incarcerating us in our own minds. Think about it, whatever you’re following right now, someone else is thinking the reverse.

Who is right…?? You’re both right… Now understand that comment and remain fashionable.

This thinking, this odd over arching I know everything complex is why the overwhelming, painful story of grief tends to be unsupported by others and mostly dealt with by individuals alone, with no true support.

This is a shame because grief is a toxin that pollutes the system, humans herded into this feeling tend to be astounded by the level of pain that appears during the releasement of whatever is causing the grief.

In my own example it took a divorce, years for him to leave and another myriad of years to let go of everything that was holding me in a story that was pulling me apart. Even tougher was the fact that no mother ** could hear me screaming. Everyone wanted it to be neat and tidy and beyond pain. They did not want to hear that I was upset, or that I thought he’d behaved like a shit (they liked him you see) all they wanted was for me to shut the hell up and just get on with life, so that they too could get back to whatever the hell they were doing, before I fell into a mess, that I brought on myself.

I soon got wise to the fact that everyone else had no idea what I was going through and if they did have an idea, they didn’t care, it was my story, my mess, my grief and that was that. It was also right, to be honest. I learnt a lot about me from grief.

Grief sat in the corner snarking at me ‘look at your life, what a mess, can you see how old you are, bit of a failure really think of all the life experiences you’ve missed!!!’ I looked back at grief and said, ‘I am proud of what I have done, glad you disapprove, sitting there moping away, this is not how I am going to be.’

Of course grief won, we have to go through it, to get out the other side and really live life. I am out of that cycle, but it comes back sometimes, little pockets of it prodding me, waving a light in my face, asking me if I am happy, did I make the right choice?

That’s the thing with grief it believes it can hold you in it’s vice like grip, steely, cold and pulling you down into the gutter. When actually what it really is, (shush, I am not sure it knows this) is the healer, the time stealer that slowly gently shows you that you will live another day. You will be stronger because you made tough choices, choices that you committed to and really believed in because grief showed you that you’re the tough one. You’re the smart one, that would'nt let life smack you down.

In my circumstance, there was judgement, people didn’t have to say anything it was there dripping off them, their opinion slowly attempting to strangle my exodus from what to my mind, felt like purgatory. Yep, when I was with my ex I lived in a gilded cage. My life was beautiful, yet there was something about it that just didn’t make sense and I knew that I was unhappy.

So many people want to avoid the grief, which means that they stay in awful, painful, dire situations because belief tells them to. I gotta stay for the kids, I gotta stay because she’ll never make it on her own, he’s a danger to himself, if I leave what does that make me? Yet in the words of my current bf’s friend, ‘this person is not good for you, it’s their sh*t, let them deal with it.’

You see the truth is that we are not responsible for others. Not even your sweetheart the love of your life, no they, we, you and I, we’re all responsible for ourselves. I know that we are currently living in a time where this sentiment could be questioned. However to understand collectively, community, togetherness etc, is to first understand the self. If you do not understand the self, how do you justify asking other people to do things for you, to protect you, when you show those same people that you are only out for yourself.

When people are in the grief cycle often others, show them this same selfishness, this need for them to get over it, to do what they are expected to do. We do not live to do what others want us to do. We live to share, to grow and to work together in a cohesive way. Cohesion is never about you doing as I do, to make me feel better about myself.

When I was trapped in that whole grief cycle, I lived alone for years. I isolated myself from society (we all know what this feels like now) and I stopped going out. I sold the house last year and I fell straight into the debacle of the current time. For me it was just more of the same and I felt cheated. Therefore my grief was like an angry child wanting to throw a tantrum.

Some of us right now are in this grief cycle, some of us are anxious, feel vilified, and unheard. We are locked in a world that we do not understand, a world that keeps testing us, just as grief does.

Why is it grief?

It is grief because we hanker for what could have been, we wonder if this terrible situation had never occurred, what life would really look like now. Many of us want to fall back into the arms of what felt like safety. Yet the truth is, as with my separation and then eventual cutting away of my past, it needed to happen so that I could see that there is another way.

Yes, I know that it can be painful. The grief banging around in your head when you wake up in the morning. The thoughts of what other people think of your choices and decision being a fear striking up a conversation with your egoic side. I know you want it to go back to normal…

So here I offer you a thought. Of course I did not, and do not want to go back to my old life, the one where I had no choices, where I lived in constant fear of the next terrifying episode befalling me. It would make no sense for me to go back there, for it was where my life was pretending that I had freedom, it was pretending that I had joy, it was pretending that I had rights.

When the truth is I did not have any of those things. I had lies, fear, limited information and no real life. Why would any of us want that? We wouldn’t right? Now, this is why recognising when you are going through a grief cycle is imperative for you to heal whatever is happening for you.

It is not about judgement, it is not about looking at what other people are doing, or telling other people what to do. It is about recognising that when you want to walk away from something, or live through something that is warded by grief, that ulitmately you make the choices how you deal with it. Grief is tough enough as it is without people believing that they know how you ought to think, behave or react.

None of us has the right to attempt to direct other people’s grief. This story is a tough one and we are all sitting in the midst of it. Even with my run up grief story, I still find her sitting next to me attempting to pontificate about the loss of a year or more and the constant grief that we are all feeling.

To go back to the earlier part of the article, we all require support, we all require love and understanding and we all deserve to be honoured for who we are. Even if our decisions go against the grain, as mine I did when I left my ex.

Even now there is a still a part of me that wishes that I married the right guy, so that my life could stay where it was. Growth though, comes from the b/s, it comes from watching your world fall apart around you. While realising at the same time, that you can still be the best you ever.

Rather than giving into fear and anger consciousness that has you believing that how it is for you in the world is how it needs to be for everyone in the world.

It doesn’t matter what we do, we are always going to have opposing views and forces in our lives. The problem is never the opposition, it’s how humanity treats opposition. If you’re spitting in the face of a choice that is different from your own, you have not grown up enough to understand that when there is choice, there is also grief and when people are suffering grief, they are also going through their own pain story.

As with everything I ever write about all the views that we have, the way that we behave, all comes right back to how much love we are giving ourselves. Are you stepping into your loving self to such a degree, that you can send love out to the world - rather than need?

Essentially this helps us to heal grief, it helps us to understand that whatever has been or will be, we have got our own back. Tough stuff helps us to get this right...