TOO MUCH & TOO LITTLE GRIEF

You’re four months out from the death and you haven’t really started crying yet. Each morning it’s getting the kids off to school, then the nosedive into work or gym or whatever keeps you moving forward. Go go go. There’s a gnawing frantic feeling behind it all, but you use that as fuel to keep the jets burning hot. There are little pauses in your day, and in those gaps you are aware of a heaviness in your chest, of something dark and anxious rising from below, so you kick on the afterburners and head back into the fray.

Or

You can barely get yourself out of bed. You move through your life as if you’re dragging a diesel engine behind you. Things that used to energize your soul are meaningless. Nothing gets through the lead walls that surround you. You can’t fully feel people, or yourself. The death you experienced recently is muted—you know it happened but you can’t seem to get your heart to speak about it. You can’t seem to touch the poignancy or the love in the background. There is nothing but weight and a sense of gasping for air, of going under and down down down. The question swirls fearfully in your mind: will this terrible foggy numbness ever go away?

During grief we can feel TOO MUCH emotion and become overwhelmed and panicked or TOO LITTLE and wind up frozen and chronically numb. Both of these responses are avoidant patterns that keep us separated out from our grief.

When we talk of too much grief, we’re indicating an experience that overwhelms our emotions and sends us up into the stratosphere of anxiety and busyness. Our minds become electrical storms of confusion, chaotic with thoughts and buzzing with negative voices. We become megaplanners and hyper-functional. Too much grief can function quite well at times, as long as the pain is kept hidden behind the to-do list and we are running off our feet with work. In the moments of pause between the madness, our bodies too go into anxious overload—we can shake with hicupping sobs, arms trembling, abdomen gripped, shoulders tight as high-wires. Fearing this state, we charge back into work. Too much has at its core a hot white panic, a mania that keeps us rushing and dashing, trying to keep ahead of whatever pain we fear is on our tail. It wraps us in frantic desperate thoughts that hijack our heads, taking us into the vale of lonely fearful trepidation—the land of the ugly What-ifs.

When we talk of too little grief, we’re indicating an experience that overburdens our capacity to feel, integrate or metabolize the full compliment of our pain. The too little experience is the great white-out of the soul: a somnolent, dissociated state which partitions our pain from our awareness. We are sleepy and slow, cut-off from our feelings and heavy-limbed. Too little grief speaks of drowning, of being buried under, of being pressed beneath a mountain of sadness until we are so thin we cannot recognize ourselves as human. Too little grief means that our feelings are locked away in an vault inside our hearts. Too little can function in a pinch, as long as the well of pain is capped with a heavy unmovable stone—-as long as nothing tips the balance of our super-fragile emotional house of cards. Too little lives a hidden life, wears a false-front and ensures that the deep pools of emotion remain far out of the reach of others and ourselves.

Some people find themselves bouncing back and forth like a ping pong ball between too much and too little grief. It’s an exhausting scenario, but one you may be familiar with; periods of manic overwhelm followed by the inevitable crash of heavy blank-eyed deadness. It’s a high-speed roller coaster which ultimately leaves us weary and wasted.

Experiencing too much and too little is normal, but both states are unsustainable for long periods. Too much distracts the mind with high-anxiety and too little deadens the heart’s deep sorrow. Finding the middle ground demands that we slow down a little, and dare to look inside at what is hurting us. We think that we're stuck in too much or trapped in too little, but more often, we are not willing to consider the alternative. We just use the avoidance mechanism that keeps us out of harms way. The long term impacts of chronic avoidance are troubling. We can become severely depressed or suffer unending panic attacks. Our moods can become unstable, flip-flopping between irrational rage and disinterested passivity. Avoidance tends to like to increase its circle of triggers. We start by avoiding certain places that remind us of the deceased, then the people that inhabit those places, then the thoughts we have about the deceased, then the feelings we feel until all the contents of our soul and world become problematic. The result of such global avoidance is isolation at home, in bed, in front of the TV or asleep. The only safe place is unconsciousness or the empty emotional calories of American Idol.

Somewhere inside of you, between the panic and the pain-killing, there is a field of feelings, wild and profound, that longs to be experienced—that longs to fill you with your own life, with your own loss. It's not an easy place to be, it can hurt like hell, but it has a grace and a natural flow. A just rightness to it. And although it may feel at times like more than enough, it will no longer be too much or too little. It'll be just kinda sorta right.