Megan Devine is a psychotherapist, author, and grief counselor who works at the intersection of psychology, emotional literacy, and anthropology. Ever since her husband died, she has reflected deeply upon the nature of grief and loss. She has created an online platform for the sake of navigating grief and helping others live out their losses in community. Her organization gives workshops, runs a podcast, and shares the wisdom she has gained with regard to grief, trauma, and healthy communication. In Its OK, Devine’s first book, she navigates the problematic methods of grief management in our culture, the relationships we have with those who just want to support us, and how we ourselves can live through our grief and seek a good life.

After suffering the loss of her husband, Devine began navigating conversations with others who tried to cheer her up and out of her grief. But in her pain, even the nicest of sentiments and the clearest advice sounded wrong. There was a disconnect between her and others, and all of the platitudes and encouraging words given to her unfortunately felt hollow and were sometimes frustrating.

Why was this the case? Clearly those around her meant to help, not hurt. Moreover, some of what they were saying was accurate: She was loved, she was supported. Yet, the disconnect remained. What separates a sufferer, someone newly grief-stricken, from their support system and those who care for them? Why does helping sometimes hurt or ring hollow?

The revelation came when Devine tried to resume reading a book titled There Is a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. It, like the words of others, felt wrong, uncomfortable to read. Sometime later, the title leapt out at her. In her mind, grief had been a problem. But this conception of grief was actually the problem. Grief has no solution, because it is not a puzzle. It is a process. It isn’t a pathology, an illness to be cured.

This revelation led Devine to understand grief and loss in a whole new paradigm. Our culture treats grief as a puzzle demanding a solution. The right phrase, a good meal, a helpful hug, some combination of these must be the answer. As we try to support someone in their time of grief, we desire so firmly to remove their pain and give them happiness that we ignore the reality of their suffering and the substance of their grief. There is no combination to unlock someone’s suffering and usher them back into a state of normalcy. Grief simply is. It is something to be borne, not ignored. Grief reshapes our reality, and how we support those we love means entering into their suffering, helping them bear it, and helping them map out their newly altered landscape.

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Rather than accept and acknowledge grief, our culture tries to gloss over it and all other “unpleasant” feelings. Instead, we rely on a pattern of positivity platitudes to handle the times in our life that just don’t make sense. If our culture treats grief as a problem and normalcy as the end goal after grief, then positivity is the solution to our grief-problem.

As aforementioned, people often appeal to grievers with platitudes, token phrases, and encouraging remarks that seem hollow and disjointed from the griever. As it turns out, these platitudes, such as “Everything happens for a reason,” “They wouldn’t want you to be sad,” “Look at what you can learn through this!” are not universal antidotes. Grief is not a lock that has a certain set of sayings that act as keys.

This positivity problem operates not only on the interpersonal level, but it actually has warped our religious institutions which normally provide wisdom for navigating grief. All of the major religious traditions have resources for living through grief and pain, not providing a cure for them. Yet so often the spiritual resources available to us are co-opted by our cultural framework of grief erasure. From West to East, Christianity to Buddhism to New Age spirituality, spiritual resources are forced to play the role of platitude placebos. In Christianity, one may hear, “It’s all a part of God’s plan.” In Buddhism, one may hear, “Suffering is all in the mind.” Even in the non-institutional New Age movements, one may hear, “Your intention manifests your reality.”

All of these are meant to ground us in our reality, no matter how painful. Yet these statements are strong-armed by a new intention that seeks to manage grief like a disease. Ultimately, these aphorisms disentangle the head from the heart, seeking to give otherwise valid reasons that utterly displace our present feelings.

Though there are many good intentions behind this push for positivity, oftentimes it covers up our own fear of suffering and pain. The discomfort we feel in the face of someone grieving before us intensifies this desire to sweep sorrow under the rug and forget for the sake of normalcy. To this we must remember that we are to connect with each other, see the truth of a griever’s experience, and feel with them. Poignancy is kinship. Real support comes through genuine empathy, which enters into the griever’s reality without seeking to abolish it.

Though it is important to push back on our culture’s grief suppression tactics, this does not mean we must sit in our grief and do nothing. We must make the distinction between pain and suffering, which both appear in grief, and seek to remove only our suffering.

Pain is inevitable, but this does not mean it is unnatural. Though pain hurts, it is not wrong to feel it. What we need when we are in pain is support, and when that support is not present, then there is suffering. Suffering emerges when we are dismissed, blocked up by others, or when we dismiss our own present situation by imagining what once was or might have been. Suffering acts like a cork, damming up the natural flow of our emotions in grief. It stifles and seals off our feelings, labeling them as unacceptable. This reflex in our mind, whether it comes externally or internally, ends up multiplying our pains by letting the pressure build and the burden increase.

Instead of having a horrible burden that we must and can bear, suffering crushes us under a swollen weight that is not necessary or good. Rather than letting this pressure build within us or be placed from without, we can take action by observation. We must notice where our fault lines are, where the burden begins to become utterly unbearable, where we begin to shut down.

Take note of the things that upset you on a given day. Analyze the cause and determine whether that stressor must remain in your daily life, if it need not be there at all, or if it should be there, but not right now. In this way, we come to understand that our grief is a process, an exploration through unfamiliar terrain requiring experimentation. Noticing our present capacities and what makes our burden worse will inevitably highlight things that lighten our burden and give us stability. Even if these moments are tiny or brief, finding the things that calm us or help us carry on are essential to keeping our balance as we manage the flow of our feelings.

Though grief is primarily something that affects us emotionally, it does not make sense to somehow view our emotions as separate from our other mental faculties and our physical ones. All of the categories of human experience are interconnected, and thus, understanding what grief does to our bodies, which interrupts our mental faculties, is important.

When grief first comes upon us, we have to recognize that the change in our life is not just to the feeling that the outer world is different, but that we ourselves are different as well. It is like we have entered a cocoon in our grief. We are not the caterpillar we were when we went in, nor are we the butterfly which comes forth. We are between our old existence and our new one.

It is common in times of grief to experience illness symptoms, though the two are by no means necessarily connected. Our bodies rebel in times of grief, because they have to hold together our experiences, whether strictly physical or emotional. From sleep changes to weight loss or gain, such things come with the tide of grief, and this is a part of the process. Though these changes should be monitored for long-term health concerns, understanding that they are connected to grief is significant for treating oneself appropriately during this process.

Moreover, the effects grief can have on cognition, memory, and mental energy are nothing to be ashamed of. Though these are scary, they are a part of the reality of loss. The change in our mental capacities in times of grief reflects that we are trying to survive in severe hardship. Treating ourselves with kindness in these moments means not comparing the person we once were to the person we currently are.

Our emotional experiences are not discrete mechanisms. We can not turn our grief off for good after a sufficient mourning period. Though we can work to ease our suffering and process our grief, this does not change the fact that grief is something that happens to us. Moreover, it likely will continue to happen to us, though in softer and less steep ways.

On the back side of the first period of grief, what often rushes in on grievers is a softer sense of loss. As we begin to look more normal to those around us, as days begin to be mundane and time begins to tick regularly, it is tempting to assume grief is over. Yet it is not, and that feelings of grief endure, though less intense than they first were, is by no means unnatural.

This attests to the fact that our individual grief, and the losses which our grief reflects, are unique, irreplaceable. Just because someone begins to live and love and proceed through their life after loss, this loss is not negated. Having a child after losing one is not a replacement. Having a marriage after a spouse dies does not replace the lost love. Our culture will tell us that eventually time heals all things, and we will simply move on. But this is inaccurate, because it denies the change we undergo because of these experiences. Just because we heal does not mean we have no scars. What matters is healing these scars such that they do not feel like open wounds.

What we come to learn as we ease from our immediate grief into our ongoing sense of loss is that our love and pain are connected now because of the loss we have faced. Though our love is far from the same thing as our pain, it remains true that our love for those lost will be interwoven with all our experiences of them, even the sorrowful ones. Our pain may even recede totally, but the loss that created that pain will remain, and be woven into the life we live thereafter, as well as the man or woman we become.

For those who are not grieving but are in a relationship with a griever, it is natural to assume our culture’s “fix-it” mentality. Coming to learn that grief is not a problem but a burden is hard enough. Continually fighting the impulse to fix grievers with platitudes and dissonant condolences is even harder. So those who support grievers must learn to be helpers, not fixers.

External support, not internal remedy, is all that is available to those surrounding a loved one in grief. Like the cast for a broken bone, helpers do not actually mend the arm, but are simply present to help make it easier for the person grieving to process their brokenness. Acknowledgement is the most valuable resource communities have to support those who are heavily burdened.

When the impulse to fix grief and remove pain arises, we must take an extra moment to stop and recognize that what matters more than half-hearted platitudes is our presence with one another in times of grief and sorrow. Coupled with our presence comes an attentiveness to truly listen to the pain of loss.

Too often we are wrapped up in confident assertions about “the way things really are,” which often entails telling the griever “the way they ought to feel.” When tragedy strikes, however, we are to be learners and listeners rather than teachers or adjudicators. People who are processing grief have a whole host of feelings and reflections on those feelings. The weight of what they have to say is sometimes too much to carry alone, and so we must be patient enough to help them ease the pressure by sharing their words, not our own.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Its OK That You're Not OK here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.