Gillian, a fifty-eight-year-old businesswoman shows up on my screen wearing a pristine dress-suit. On the outside she is immaculate, manicured and perfectly presentable, but inside she reports experiencing a profound sense of meaninglessness. Blasé is the word she uses. She feels emotionally listless, unconnected with her family and work. She can’t quite pinpoint what the problem is. All she knows is that the difficulties began a few years after her mother died. I ask her how long ago the death had occurred. “Ten years,” she replies.
After a short dialogue, it becomes clear that Gillian habitually avoids painful situations. She rose quickly in her vocation to assume a role where she was always the one with power, thus minimizing her experience of conflict and discord. She prefers easy acquaintances over deep friendships, and in her marriage, arguments are forbidden. However, after her mother’s death, her body seethed with painful feelings that made her extremely uncomfortable. Unable to tolerate the intense broken-hearted pain of losing her mom, she turned inward stuffing the grief somewhere out-of-reach and soon began feeling sick-at-heart.
We avoid and sedate the pain of sorrow because grief presents us with a real problem; it often feels physically and emotionally terrible. Even minor losses can tow us through periods of heart-wrenching loneliness and joy-deadening sadness. Many decide it is better to avoid than to collide.
The avoidance of ‘negative’ feelings is endemic in our feel-good society. We have sidelined our dark emotional depths in favour of positivity, striving for happiness and the illusory mirage of a pain-free life. Death, despair, grief, fear, rage, chaos, and vulnerability do not receive the hero’s welcome on the Main streets of modern life. We are more inclined to suppress these feelings states or to trump them with massive doses of distraction.
There are plenty of folks like Gillian who sidestep their grief. After a death, they sail along for a time on the good ship bereavement, until cracks begin appearing in the superstructure. These people can be plagued by unspecified health concerns, chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and a host of other simmering emotional problems. Some of us treat our pain about as lovingly as snakes. We consider them poisonous and unwelcome.
We are wiser to feel our hurts. To embrace them. Behind each pain is a tenderness that can make us shrink away, but tenderness isn’t frightful, it asks only for our tenderness in return. Gillian’s grief was asking her to open up to her pain. By learning this basic task, a skill she should have been taught as a child, Gillian gained access to the tenderness and intimacy of heartbreak that was essential to her becoming an emotionally healthy adult. In place of her blasé depression, Gillian experienced a living, energized grief; uncomfortable, uncharacteristic, and full of a sweet, soft, and precious love.
It’s better to have a broken heart than to be sick-at-heart. When we learn to embrace our heart-pangs, we grow so much. We heal so deeply. We take into our lives the fullness of being human, not just the joy of existence, but the sorrow and loss as well. We become whole-hearted people.