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Key points
- Covid has emancipated our culture to recognize the dark side of the human experience.
- Ancient and most contemporary religious traditions embrace pain and joy as essential to life’s journey.
- We must embrace intense, unremitting grief as reflecting a recognizable, however unusual, response to human life.
Finally, this culture acknowledges grief and loss. Grief is seemingly everywhere. This weekend an article in the New York Times featuring two exceptional Marlin baseball players was titled “Teammates Bond in Grief and Baseball.”
A week before, the opinion page of the Times carried a lengthy article by Perri Klass titled “We will all mourn, and we will all be mourned.”
The Covid pandemic has undoubtedly liberated our culture to include grieving as part of our human, collective experience. Americans have been reluctant to talk together about loss and sadness. Do these darker emotions make us feel like emotional failures?
Casual interactions in the United States often end with the imperative to “Have a nice day,” which Europeans find objectionable. We compulsively emphasize happiness and pleasure rather than depth and scope.
When Freudian psychoanalysis was imported to this country, its darker vision of inevitable aggression and destructiveness was softened by an emphasis on the power of good parenting and early security. In many popular forums, grief is identified as a source of growth and personal enhancement.
What have we been frightened of? Ancient and certainly most contemporary religious traditions embrace pain as well as joy as essential to life’s journey. If our cultural experience expands to include the inevitability of pain as non-avoidable and non-negotiable, we can offer each other deeper connection and support.
I think we have to rethink our psychotherapeutic perspectives. Therapists most commonly see grief as time-limited and as needing a “process.” Now we are dealing with a new DSM category, ‘Prolonged Grief Disorder.' There may be a subset of stricken individuals who cannot return to their lives. Still, the categorization of “prolonged” strikes me as typical of our response to tragedy, which is to edit and medicalize it.
As therapists, it is much more important for us to embrace intense, unremitting grief as reflecting a recognizable, however unusual, response to human life, which features both remarkably joyful as well as ravaging experiences.
Perhaps if we gave more room to darkness as a culture, individuals who grieve would always feel they have enough space and time for their mourning and would feel strengthened by collective recognition. It is feeling like an outlier to the human condition, which causes us the greatest pain.
