Jill’s 29-year-old son died of a drug overdose late last year and was found in a porta-potty in Los Angeles. Distraught and running her fingers over her tired eyes, she related how a sheriff had come to her house to tell her what had happened.

“It’s about your son,” he began. “Don’t tell me my son is dead!” Jill screamed. “Do not do it!”

Through tears, Jill told me how she would have broken everything in her house and started running as fast as she could if the sheriff hadn’t been there. That is the impact of the grievance.

I imagine some of the grieving faces in our Grief Program, some gaunt, some with thin lips or puffy eyes: people right in the middle of the heartbreak, loneliness, and confusion known as grievances. John just couldn’t keep filling it. Karen felt like her bread was eating her alive. Tina had run out of tears.

Some in that room had long-term relationships with pain. Unresolved experiences of loss of trust from childhood can keep us in a state of “I have to accept the pain as a permanent condition.”

Pain can become so familiar that it is like a member of the family. We build an identity around our pain. We have a relationship with her. We build walls around our pain, walls that keep pain in but exclude joy, happiness, and other people. We become our stories.

Many of us have suffered so much loss that we no longer remember why we suffered. Loss upon loss upon loss, all rolled up like a ball of wool. Along comes another loss, and it’s one more spin around a huge ball of pain. Over time, we can start to feel separated or numb. Life does not touch us in the deepest places of our hearts.

Some may wake up one day and find that they have shut down the feelings completely. Others call someone like me and say, “I can’t get over my husband leaving me” or “My life stopped when she died.”

We become confused not knowing what to do with the unresolved pain. It sounds so overwhelming.

Some of the reasons we grieve badly are that we want to make a good front for others, be strong for children or friends. Some think that tears are evidence of weak faith, so they go through the motions and try to act collected. Others try to think of themselves to feel better.

The result? Getting stuck in fear, isolation, anger, and despair. Experiencing nightmares, hallucinations, and eating disorders. Add a healthy dose of guilt, and you have a recipe for depression. However, as author Sam Keen wrote: “Those who refuse to cry are trapped in melancholy.”

Fourteen years ago my two sons were killed in a terrible car accident. Jeremy was 4 years old and Amelia was 18 months old. A car crashed into us on a dimly lit highway in the middle of nowhere. In an instant I found that no matter what I knew, who I knew, or how much money I made, I was ill-prepared and utterly devastated.

Like so many others who drown in injury, I did not lack the courage to recover; I just didn’t know where to turn. I did what everyone wanted me to do: try to get over it. Acting like everything is fine and putting on that “I’m fine” face.

Many of us have filled in pain over the years. Maybe it’s a sad movie or listening to a friend’s battle with cancer, and we slowly feel a lump rise in our throats. Our feelings rise to the surface and stay there. Many of us repress those feelings. “Come on, sweetheart, hold still!”

Many still suffer from unresolved or repressed negative emotions that they thought they had dealt with. Some are lost in the religious experience. Some delve into the problems of others or turn to alcohol or drugs for false comfort. Some try to put the pain behind them by working until they collapse in bed.

They all offer only temporary relief. Like a rubber band, it always snaps back. We can continue to suppress the feelings, push them away, or medicate until the losses become more and more of a burden to carry. Then we wonder why life is not the happy and joy-filled experience we have always imagined.

We often talk about the pain of loss. Sometimes it is no longer pain at all; it is detachment. The people they hurt can be scrutinized, turned off, and disconnected. Forty-year-old Chris, for example, refused to deal with his complaint, “even though I have a freight train full, I know it.”

Chris described how a police officer had ticketed her that day for driving 85 miles per hour. The officer had warned her that she could die at that speed. “I told her I didn’t care. I’m so detached, why would I care if she died?”

I asked Chris about her children and her husband. “Oh, they’d be fine. The kids are older and could take care of themselves. Plus, they have their grandparents. My husband? She’s getting married again in three weeks!” he said half jokingly.

People who suffer from accumulated wounds shut down their feelings because they don’t want to be hurt anymore. “If this is the way life is played, then I don’t want to play it.” They have given up on intimacy and have stopped taking risks in relationships. As Tina Turner sings, “Who needs a heart when a heart can break?”

Regret often permeates unresolved grievances. When Jeremy died my first thought was a broken promise to let him burn off energy running across the moors of England. I regretted it and longed for another chance, just five more minutes with him. But those minutes never came.

Others wish, “If only things had worked out differently” or “If only I had been there on time.” All the dashed dreams, hopes and expectations. As a result, we can feel defective for having normal, natural reactions to loss.

However, grieving people are not broken and do not need to be mended. They need to be heard in an atmosphere of safety, respect and dignity, without evaluation or advice, which is just criticism in disguise anyway.

Today I am happy to say that I am emotionally complete with the death of my two beloved children. It’s not that I’m somehow “over it”; that event is still a long way from me. But I have learned to incorporate that loss and my enduring love for them into my life. She needed to enjoy the fond memories of Jeremy and Amelia. I needed to remember them not just for the way they died, but especially for the way they lived.

The step-by-step method of the Grief Program helps people caught in confusion and loneliness to get over the loss by completing the incomplete emotional relationship. It provides the right skills that we were never taught. By saying goodbye to conflict, pain, and isolation, we can cherish fond memories of our loved ones forever.

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