Understanding Grief: A Personal Journey of Loss, Pain, and self discovery
Grief is something that we will all experience. Working with people who are navigating the grieving process is something that I feel called to as a counselor, both from my experience professionally and personally. Counseling someone experiencing grief is about offering support and empathy to a person as they move through this challenging but completely normal part of life. I feel moved and honored to sit with someone who is willing to share their grief with me. Grief can be confusing, elusive, and often shrouded in silence. It’s something many of us tend to keep private, tucked away in the quiet corners of our hearts. And yet, it’s also something so universal, something we all inevitably experience. To me, grief can be a way to access our deepest selves, a shared human experience that connects us all.
Grief is a topic that feels deeply personal for me, both in recent years with the death of my father but also as a thread that has been woven through my entire life. In the late winter of 2021, I underwent a profound transformation and exploration into the darkest parts of myself. Death visited me, leaving an indelible mark on my life through the death of my father. It was a time of immense pain and crippling despair, but also a period of unexpected beauty. I’m grateful for that time, messy and painful as it was, because it broke down the emotional defenses I had carefully and subconsciously constructed. For the first time, the wounded, vulnerable, beautiful core of my being was laid bare. I was forced to feel my feelings fully, without the numbing distractions or the option to run away. It didn’t feel like a choice, but it did take courage—courage to face the pain, to be swallowed by it and to emerge forever changed.
During this time, I became fascinated with understanding grief. I read books, watched movies, listened to podcasts. But I was left feeling like I didn’t fully relate. Often, these narratives focus on a kind of grief that felt wholly different than mine—the pain of losing someone deeply loved, the haunting beauty of memories, and the longing for just one more day together. But what about those of us who have lost someone we have a more complicated relationship with, where memories are more tinged with pain and sadness than beauty and longing? I wanted to understand my grief more fully, to talk to people who could relate. It couldn’t just be me that was feeling this way. As I dove deeper, I began to see that my grief was about more than my father’s death, it went back all the way through my life and my relationship with him, and with the archetypes of father and family.
My relationship with my dad was challenging – a swirl of mental health issues and attachment wounding. Our relationship continued to deteriorate as I became an adult and started to set boundaries, eventually leading to estrangement. This was not an easy decision but felt necessary for me to do my own healing. When I got the call that my dad had died, it was both a deep wound and a relief. A burden I had been carrying for years, an unsolved issue that was always weighing on me, but I had no power over. An incessant injury that refused to heal. When he as gone, I was able to feel compassion for him and the pain he must have been experiencing. To see that we were in a web of generational trauma that was tying us both up. As I moved through my grief, which at times felt unbearable, waking up with my heart pounding in my chest, brought to my knees with the pain of imagining his suffering, grieving for the little girl inside of me that never got the love she deserved, I came to understand my grief more fully. Prolonged grief and intergenerational trauma became familiar terms in my vocabulary.
Grief, I’ve learned, is not a one-size-fits-all experience. It’s messy, complicated, and deeply personal. My grief doesn’t fit neatly into any cultural narratives I was familiar with, but it’s real, nonetheless. It’s a grief for the father I never had, for the childhood I lost, and for the wounds that still ache. But it’s also a grief that has brought me to a place of deeper understanding, compassion, and healing. In sharing my story, I hope to validate the experiences of those who, like me, grapple with grief connected to complicated relationships. I’m not sure anyone’s grief fits neatly into a box. We all have our unique stories and relationships. No one’s grief is better or easier or more “normal” than another. When I first experienced my grief, I was scared to share it with others, scared people would not understand or judge me or feel pity for me (side note: can we please stop saying, “I can’t even imagine?” I’m not sure why this became a generic response to tragedy, but to me, it feels so isolating, like your experience is so different than others, they can’t even imagine how that might feel. I offer this substitute: “That sounds so painful. If you would like to share, I’m open to hearing more about your experience.”) But I was often surprised with how much empathy people would share, how if I took the first step in opening up, I was often met with softness, understanding and reciprocated vulnerability. In sharing my grief, I felt more understood than ever before in my life. If you find yourself alone in your grief, I invite you to find a safe person to share your experience. It can be a partner, family member, friend or mental health professional. I think this is a crucial part of processing grief. It may not fix it or make the pain disappear, but you can feel the embrace of someone holding space for you and being there to support you through the process. And maybe one day, you’ll look around and realize you have a little more space around your grief, more space to move, to breathe, to play, to love, and to live a full and more embodied life.
