What Grief Needs

I want to talk about emotions in a public space. 

My goal is to normalize the discussions of emotions in the workplace, because, we have emotions, it’s part of the human experience, and in order to become the best version of ourselves at work (or anywhere), integrating emotions will be necessary.  While I will talk about me and my experiences, this is about you and your experiences.  Use what I’m sharing as an opportunity to look within to see where you might want to grow, stretch or ask for support.   

First, let’s set some ground rules.  

1.  I plan to share from my perspective only. While I do consider the professional experiences that I’ve had with others as anecdotal data, I think it’s best that I speak from my experience only - which requires us to acknowledge that it is my lived experience, and it may not be yours. If it doesn’t fit with your experience, that’s OK, move along.

2.  I am not posting for advice or feedback. I am sharing my experience, and the emotions that I have encountered as a result for integration purposes, this is not the time to tell me what I should do or how I should or shouldn’t feel.

3.  I will be mindful about sharing stories that involve others, especially if I don’t have permission. If I don’t, I will probably change the circumstances and names to protect anonymity.

I want to talk about grief.  Even saying the word makes me cry. It lives in me and I don’t want it to. I literally want to grab the phone and call for an exorcist to pull it out of my body.

Grief is not an emotion that I handle well. Honestly, I would like to believe that I have the power to remove grief from my personal experience. It’s that hard of an emotion for me.  I thought I was successful at going through a lot in life and also becoming very resilient which requires me to acknowledge that I am still learning about the errs of my ways. Let’s face it. I compartmentalize grief and don’t deal with it. 

My life story involves a lot of loss and it started early which probably explains why grief is challenging for me. My goal is to not dissect all of that necessarily, but I think what will be helpful is understanding that I thought I had control over grief, which therefore meant I didn’t have to deal with it. (Well, if you followed my journey or any of my work, you’re probably laughing because you’ve heard me say something similar about vulnerability and shame.) Either way, I want to talk about grief, and I want to talk about it in the context of work and how my personal life ties into that.

I’m a good steward of leadership and continuous improvement. I don’t believe we can be any of those without understanding emotions, and how they impact you. And grief is deeply wrapped around those things. I had zero clue about the emotion of grief in the context of my work until I heard it put in this way:  I’ve learned there are 3 properties of grief. Loss, longing and feeling lost.

Most of us understand loss well.  It’s where our head goes when we think of grief because we primarily only think of grief and grieving when someone has died.

But what if I suggested, that when we lose anything or whenever there’s a change in a process or how we used to do things, that the accompanying emotion is grief?

So, that newfound understanding and connection to grief kind of blew me up a bit. My career has been rooted in a love for complex problem-solving and continuous improvement which by default means that I am in the grief business.  So, to say that I am obsessed with grief is incredibly far from the truth, but it actually is a really powerful connection to why I am where I am in my current state of affairs.

This past year I spent a significant amount of time doing some very intense, healing, work and trauma reprocessing.  Not only has my body kept score of the healing that I have not done but my heart is broken.  And has been for a long time.  While the context of my trauma and healing is for another post, what matters is that grief and my old wounds are inextricably connected. 

When COVID locked our worlds down, I assumed all would be back to normal operations in 2 months.  (Oh, and I also have a huge action bias.)  When it wasn’t, I had to get my head wrapped around what work would look like, what life would look like.  Just like all of us.  Day after day, my mental health worsened but I was still grinding away.  While I was watching the loss of life and the ways of our world change drastically, I was not watching what was happening to me. 

Grief was starting to take hold but I had limited words or awareness to describe what I was feeling.  I would not have called it grief because NO ONE DIED in my life!  The best I could do was say I was overwhelmed and exhausted but also very busy with work.  But, what I could do was describe my behaviors.  And if I’m honest, what I was doing, makes a lot of sense.  I started to button it up and lock it down. Because that’s what I do when I am experiencing extreme stress.  It’s how I protect myself.

Here were some of the behaviors that started to become a routine in 2020 and beyond:

·       Excessive busy-ness/overscheduling

·       Couch duty/TV binging

·       Social media numbing

·       Limited cooking/cleaning

·       Sitting in quiet for long periods of time

·       Defensive behavior, avoidance of people

·       Pretending that things were ok when people asked

·       Resentment of others for random things

·       Excessive naps at random times, sometimes right after a meeting

·       Exhaustion and apathy

·       Overwhelmed from feelings of burnout

Some of these behaviors would be labeled as depression.  Which is legitimate and it’s one of the stages of grief processing.  But what is important to recognize over the last couple of years is that I am not alone in this, which I’ve come to learn is a critical component of my recovery.  It’s also a critical component to self-compassion.  It’s a critical component for all of us as we heal.   

Even more important is that I finally had some clarity on what was happening and what I needed to do.  I needed to feel it.  I’m still feeling it.  I’m grieving the loss of a childhood I didn’t have.  The loss of family members who I worked incessantly to have as my family.  The loss of my father who I wasn’t “allowed” to grieve. The loss of long-term friendships and working relationships.  The loss of clients and colleagues.  I’m not really sure I fully grieved my divorce in 2019 because we went straight into managing the uncertainty of COVID.

The grief has compiled and while I am hopeful that I could just work through each chunk and place it back on a shelf, I’ve learned it doesn’t work that way.  I learned I never really gave myself permission to feel, let alone permission to heal.  I also learned something really powerful.  Grief needs to be witnessed.  When it’s not, it turns into a sharp edge that seems to gnash and slice its way through life and relationships.  When my grief isn’t witnessed, I turn inward.  And grief is a really stressful situation and when it is present, my old wounds surface.

So, not only have I been locking it down and turning inward, it’s what I do when I am under extreme stress because it’s what I did when I was a child.  I relied on myself to pull through because when I trusted someone to take care of me, that trust was often betrayed or weaponized.  But I also recognized that I need people and support to work through stress and grief.  And, I also realized, that who I was relying on to help me navigate all of this stress (which I didn’t realize was grief) was not always helpful.  I was literally looking for milk inside a hardware store and I needed to get the hell out of the hardware store.* I needed to lean on people who understood grief and who could help me work through it.  So I did.   

When it comes to grief and if you’re finding you’re in the same boat as me, just know you’re not alone and that grief is a really important emotion for us.  There’s no timeline for it nor should you be over it quickly.  We just learn to live with it.  There has been a lot of change and loss for everyone over the last few years – grief is present without a doubt.  Especially at work.  But we need to talk about it and acknowledge its existence and importance.  Grief needs to be witnessed, and how that happens might be:  

·       Thank you for sharing that with me.

·       Tell me more.

·       I’m here to listen to you.

·       How can I support you right now? 

Grief doesn’t want to be fixed.  Grief doesn’t want to be judged.  Grief doesn’t want to be minimized or skipped over.  Grief doesn’t want silver linings or positive comments like “at least you get to go to the desert to work on your grief.”  There is no response you can give me to make it better. When that happens, now the focus is on you and I can see that my grief is now a problem for you.  It’s not your problem.  I need you to see my humanity and just sit with me in it.  It’s ok, in fact ideal, to say nothing.  Really, that’s a way to witness grief. 

When it’s all said and done, the goal isn’t to get rid of grief.  It’s to feel it.  Big grief is a result of a big loss – it’s big love.  I probably am just missing people, organizations, co-workers, processes, connections and more.  And before I can ever “move on” or “get over it” I first have to acknowledge that it was real and that what I am missing had a special meaning for me.  This is what it means to be human.  Which is who I want to be. 

*My journey through grief has not been without help and I’ve spent several weeks with David Kessler who is a grief expert.  Most of the new insight I have gained has been from his work on grief and his incredible support.  www.davidkessler.com