How to Feel the Pain of Your Grief
- Written by Morgan
Why Do We Feel Pain?
Biologically, pain is a good thing. It keeps us safe. The pain of a burned hand keeps us from forgetting oven mitts ever again. Pain in the body signals us that something is wrong, allowing us to seek treatment, thus protecting ourselves from further damage and destruction. But once we have felt that pain, our body warns us to escape a situation so that we don’t have to feel it again. Emotional pain is similar. It signals to us that we are in a toxic relationship or that something in our lives needs to change.
But our bodies know that there is such a thing as too much pain. When someone has an extreme physical injury, the body goes into shock. This allows them to not feel the severity of the pain. Other times, people pass out from too much pain. Their brain shuts down to avoid processing what is happening.
We do that with emotional pain, too. Even though pain is technically a good thing, we avoid it at all costs, especially emotional pain. No one wants to feel heartbreak or loss or sadness. And so, we find ways to mask it using alcohol, sex, shopping, gambling, productivity, exercise, etc. We ignore it until we can’t anymore. In his book I Am Restored, Lecrae says, “We can face our past willingly, or our lives will force us to face it.” The same is true of pain. We cannot escape it forever.
Numbing the Pain of Grief
When my parents first died, I thought I was dealing with my grief. Everyone tells you there’s no handbook, so I thought that moving to Nashville a week after my dad died and sharing my mom’s story at a fundraising gala in front of 1000 people a few months after her death meant I was healing. I didn’t realize that I was using those things as a cover. Really, I was pushing down any real feelings of grief by going to bars and getting drunk. At the bar, I wasn’t the girl with dead parents. I was just a girl.
Luckily, I had an incredible church community in my life who not only saw through this facade but also walked with me through it. I remember sitting with my pastor one night, saying, “I’m dead inside.” He said, “You’ve experienced such devastating loss that you’ve turned off your ability to feel. You’re not dead inside. Just apathetic.”
Apathy is a dark place to be. When we convince ourselves that we don’t have to feel pain, we also numb our ability to feel things like happiness and excitement. Everything becomes one shade of gray, a completely monochrome life. When that happens, we can’t move forward or backward. We just become stuck.
How to Feel Your Pain
To heal, we have to feel the pain. An easy sentence to write but an incredibly hard one to live. Real healing requires work. It takes effort to feel pain. It’s easy to disconnect and suffer alone. What’s difficult is picking up the phone for the third day in a row and saying, “I’m still not okay.”
But, if you’re like me, the question you’re asking yourself right now is how do I “feel my pain?”
Recognize it - Have you ever stubbed your toe, and for a few seconds, you can’t even form words because it hurts so bad? Those few seconds are you taking time to pause and recognize that you are in pain. We get those same signals when we experience mental pain, too: emotions. Our emotions give us signals about what is going on in our minds. Are you irritable at work? You might be in pain. Are you constantly exhausted? You might be in pain. Take time to recognize what’s going on around you, how you’re reacting, and how it’s making you feel.
Get it Out - It’s not natural to take the hardest things we go through and put them to words, especially when we want to forget they’re even happening. But we can’t keep our feelings inside. Not only is it not healthy, but feelings tend to come out in one way or another anyway. Write about how you’re feeling or talk to someone about it. Doing this can give you perspective on your own situation and help you process your grief.
Let Others In - I don’t know if I could have survived the past two years alone. There were times when I couldn’t remember how to make a grocery list or didn’t know if I could stand one more minute of being alive because the grief I was experiencing was too much. There were a few people I let into the deepest parts of my pain, and they are the reason I was able to keep moving forward. They fed me, cried with me, laughed with me, pushed me, and supported me through every part of the journey. You have to find someone who can walk through the journey with you so that you don’t give up halfway through.
Don’t Be Afraid of It - When we’re afraid, we do one of three things: fight, flight, or freeze. If we fight, we are trying to get rid of the pain without working through it. When we flee (flight), we refuse to acknowledge the pain. And when we freeze, we can’t move forward because we can’t process anything. Instead, we have to be still and realize that the pain is there regardless of how we interact with it. The more we avoid it, the worse it gets. There’s a reason that this step is last. To do this, you have to acknowledge your pain, put your pain out in the open where you can really see it, and have a team of people behind you.
Real Healing
Those four steps are as “tangible” as I can make my grieving process. All I’ve wanted for the last year and a half was for someone to tell me “here are the steps you should take.” I’m great at following directions, not so great at wandering around trying to find my way around without a map. Without an instruction manual, we only have one choice: rely on Jesus.
We see Jesus heal multiple times throughout the gospels, but we tend to only think of those stories in terms of their physical healing. Imagine, for a moment, the woman in Mark 5 who had been bleeding for twelve years. In her culture, bleeding was a sign of uncleanliness, and uncleanliness meant one should be separated from society and from God. Can you imagine what twelve years of isolation felt like for her? To put it in perspective, how has your one year of COVID-19 been?
So when Jesus heals her and frees her from her suffering, he doesn’t just heal her body. He heals the brokenness of her self-worth. He heals the shame she has carried around for years.
In Luke 7, Jesus sees a widow walking to bury her only son. He brings her son back from the dead not because of her son, but because “his heart went out to her” (Luke 7:13). Jesus sees a woman who has lost her husband and now her son, and he recognizes the pain she feels. He knows how the loneliness will stay with her. And God sees in her the pain of losing His only Son.
We are the mother in that story. God sees our pain and wants to take it away, but He can only do that if we let Him. The first step to letting God heal us is accepting the pain and letting ourselves feel it.