Five on a Friday: Learning how to actually, practically, handle grief

Photo by Greg Shield on Unsplash

Hey there, Soothers, and happy Friday. Happy… meh. I wrote this today in my online Slack community, you are all welcome to join that too if you like, nearly 450 HSPs!:

Well Soothers, here we are, Friday, the end of an incredibly tough week in America, to say the very least. I don’t know about you but my body is still feeling it. It’s almost like I came down with Shock Flu. I’m incredible sore and achy, can’t eat much, still fatigued, no concentration. I wish I had magical words of comfort, a wand to take this all away. All I know is community of like-hearted people will be more important than ever, and I’m so glad we have this amazing group on our corner. Please take care of your body and mind however you can, not as denial and escapism, but to prepare to help for the long road ahead. I’m focusing on eating protein (when I have appetite), not numbing out on caffeine, staying with my sunrise and light practices, and sleeping as much as I need.

I feel the same way about this Substack community. I’m grateful for every person who reads, clicks, hits the “heart” button, shares a post or pays to subscribe.

One of the features I wanted to introduce to my paid community was “Five on a Friday” — the idea is a thoughtful link roundup to take you into the weekend, with a theme or an aim each time.

I was thinking on the theme this time as I was walking this morning. Favorite skincare products?! Maybe my favorite five workouts. Or five great books I’ve read?

Nope, I’m me, I’m a Scorpio moon, with a bleeding heart, and so the first theme for Five on a Friday will be this:

Grief.

I feel culturally we are epically bad at handling, processing, facing, feeling grief. As sensitive souls, the pain of truly feeling it can simply overwhelm our tender hearts, when we don’t have the rooting and grounding to hold it; and of course, we are never taught to face it, hold it, feel it, let it flow through. We just don’t have the skills, and many of us have in fact been shamed for grieving and feeling, and are petrified as adults to allow that process back into our awareness.

But the reality is that grief, amazingly, will not kill us. In fact, it’s a deep and healing catharsis that can clear our energy and our fields once we let it up and out.

Sensitive souls get quite good at burying grief, holding it back, for years, decades, a lifetime, until cracks in the dam of our heart begin to show: outbursts; depression; illness; even heart issues. Unprocessed grief shows up in all of these ways.

I was thinking too, about the role that unprocessed grief plays in the emotion we might be struggling with most as a country right now: anger.

I was thinking about this because as I was waiting this morning at the busy traffic roundabout near my house, trying to block my eyes from the bright morning sun that was causing a glare and not really letting me see if anybody was letting me in, I became aware of an older man in a white SUV. I think he had been trying to let me in for a second or two, but I couldn’t see because of the glares on both of our windshields. Then I realized he had started… screaming at me. Gesturing furiously. I could practically sense beads of sweat on his face. He had been trying to do a nice act; I hadn’t been able to realize it; he shot straight to fury.

Years ago, this would have sent me into a triggered spiral where I would have met his anger with my own rising tide, flipping him off or racing ahead, road-rage-ing my way through the next part of the day, fuming, exhausted.

Today, I waved, slipped into the flow of traffic, and wondered how much grief he might be holding.

Because what I see as the core emotion at the root of most of our anger, is a desire to further suppress and avoid grief.

As Bernard Golden writes in “Is Anger Masking Your Grief?” [Psychology Today], “For many individuals, anger can serve as a powerful distraction from grief. Anger is an energizing emotion that directs our attention outward to a situation or person we perceive as triggering our anger. And by redirecting our attention, we can protect ourselves from the intense pain of grief.”

Grief can arise from any kind of loss—death, ending of a relationship, unfulfilled dreams, changes in life circumstances, and, of course, political terror and despair. Anger, then, does its best to serve a defense against the vulnerability of feeling sad, helpless, or betrayed by the loss.

Grief is the tender, exposed, bleeding heart, the sobbing child; anger is the righteous protector, the child’s BFF, who comes in, guns a-blazing, to protect the softness of that grief, to hold it back, to stem it as much as it can, to say, “Nobody will see you like this.”

Anger often acts in this way as a barrier to feeling grief because it feels more active or in control. Many of us find anger easier to access than sadness, which feels too vulnerable. This “protective” anger can be our way of pushing away feelings that feel too overwhelming to handle.

I feel so much of the anger that’s driving our political choices is at least in part, motivated by an inability to process grief.

In fact, I believe that the re-election of Trump is in at least part motivated by the the unfelt, the unprocessed, the unacknowledged grief of all of the losses we experienced during COVID.

And so, just maybe, one way in which we can help move forward more towards the world we want to build, is to learn, first and foremost, ourselves, to healthily feel grief. And then, once it is something we ourselves are comfortable doing, we can model and hold space for and teach others, too.

Behind the paywall are five links that have to do with teaching ourselves how to better process grief.

May I say, your first instinct in response to this election may be to move straight into mobilized action, and there is nothing wrong with that, that is righteous and just. But I also counsel you to reflect, might racing straight to action be a way for you to avoid grief? Do not bypass the grief, it is okay to take this weekend, a few days or whatever time to feel that first, and THEN move into action, because it will be from a much more grounded and clear space. This is not spiritual bypassing; it is a necessary part of what comes next.

Before I go to the paywall, here’s a bit of my past writing that might help:

• My 5 favorite tools for processing anger (because if we can process and move the anger, we may then be better able to access the grief)

• 10 ways to clear resentment (because for sensitive women, the mix of anger and grief often shows up instead as irritation and deep resentment, so we can work at it from that angle, too)

• The part of ourselves who deeply needs us to express our grief is our inner child. Here’s a mini Instagram guide I put together on how to start that work.

• An IG reel I created with 4 ways to process grief

Below, in the Five for Friday, are…

1. My favorite journaling exercise for releasing grief

2. An interview on hope to cope with election grief

3. My fave EFT tapping video for grief

4. My favorite recipes to cook when I’m feeling like I need comfort (one involved, one made from pre-made, easy to assemble, stuff)

5. A Tarot spread for your grief

Plus a few other goodies and links…

Oh, and before we head down below, don’t forget - there are still spaces left for my New Year’s Eve retreat, full of Tarot, magic, community, delicious food. Might be the grounding and loving in-person presence we could all use before inauguration, ha ha ha sob…