Apologizing to Ourselves: Transforming Grief into Wisdom
How to acknowledge and reframe our suffering.
The bricks to
which we cling,
build the prison
in which we suffer.
“It was awful,” my friend said.
His neighbor, about our same age, experienced sudden heart failure over the weekend.
Paramedics were quick to the neighbor’s home, but after repeated attempts, they were unable to save his life.
While my friend stood in the background, the new widow told her five children what happened, followed by everyone’s grief-stricken responses—a core emotion they will likely shoulder for a very long time.
Passing Along Our Grief
“I wondered if your girls would have reacted similarly if you’d died by suicide,” he admitted to me. The fact is, burdening my children with more grief was the single thread preventing my self-imposed death on many occasions.
Not just grief for the myriad treasures stolen by my decades-long depression—including time with my loved ones, memories with my girls, and a 22-year marriage. But also the transgenerational grief (aka intergenerational trauma) I’ve carried with me since exiting the womb.
The truth is that we all experience grief’s rawness at some point, and it’s a useful tool for navigating new rules governing our lives following swift changes. However, …
Embodied Emotion: Clinging to Grief
While grief’s lessons are indispensable, they’re also expensive—a toll frequently paid by our bodily health.
When the psychological impacts the physical, this phenomenon is called embodied emotion. For example, common physical effects of grief include:
worsened depression
sleep changes
increased aggressiveness/irritability
body aches/headaches
chest tightness/heart issues
shortness of breath
lethargy
weakened immune system
Even though it doesn’t feel good and is toxic to ideal health, we can become addicted to prolonged unresolved grief since memories of the person we miss can trigger brain areas associated with reward processing and pleasure.
Thus, the first step toward healing our grief is acknowledging that it’s a hot coal to which we’re clinging.
Mindfully Identifying Our Embodied Grief
Upon identifying when we're clinging to our embodied grief, we can pinpoint where by mindfully scanning our body in just a few minutes:
1. Establish
Settle into a comfortable position, relax your eyes, and inhale deeply a few times through your nose, with balanced exhalations out through your mouth.
2. Observe
Next, pay close attention to the sensations at the top of your head, such as tightness, temperature, itchiness, etc.
3. Accept
Maintain curious awareness of these sensations. Acknowledge any emotions they engender, and then breathe while they pass.
When you recognize grief specifically, instead of running away, identify it. Call it by its name. Smile, welcome it, place your hand on the area, and say, “Ahhhh, hello. There you are.”
4. Repeat
Gradually move down your body, repeating the process on your neck, shoulders, back, chest, abdomen, and so forth, until you reach your toes.
5. Return
Once again, become fully aware of your surroundings by inhaling and exhaling deeply a few more times.
After mindfully acknowledging the physical vault(s) where our grief rests, we can work toward unlocking its doors and freeing ourselves from its shackles.
Healthily Releasing Our Embodied Grief
[Please note: The episode Being with Painful Feelings from The Way Out Is In podcast inspired some of this section. I highly recommend it as a resource for healing.]
The goal is not to eradicate our grief. That’s impossible.
Instead, we want to step back, provide the appropriate space for our grief, fully experience it, and reframe it.
Like a little child that needs our attention, we must cradle it with compassionate understanding, breathe with it, and bathe it in mindfulness to help us recognize that—while it is a part of us and has been a guiding force in our lives—we are more than our grief.
This changes our relationship with it. We allow grief’s cumulative lessons to become a root insight that helps us better understand and guide our future, but we can cease identifying with the story that keeps us stuck.
Consequently, we permit ourselves to let go of how things “might have” been.
Once we recognize that we possess the ingredients to look toward the future and create a new chapter, we can reflect on our old story while remaining free from its emotional entrapments.
By harnessing this higher perspective, a path forward appears.
In this way, we’re not so much releasing our grief as we are reframing it, allowing its past tragedies to generate future happiness.
From Root to Fruit: Your License to Move on From Grief
May we acknowledge grief’s ugliness while bowing to its raw, life-changing beauty.
However, we cannot allow grief’s fruit to rot on the tree or risk becoming imprisoned in its emotions.
To maintain its wisdom, we must mindfully recognize that we are more than our grief (or any emotion, for that matter), and that we can step back and wrap our arms around it.
Will embracing our grief feel good? Maybe not at first, but when gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves, the only way out is—mindfully—through.
Freedom lies on the other side.
I’m curious: Have you been able to reframe your grief? What lessons has it taught you?