Why I Write

Most of what I read from widows and widowers and about widows and widowers seems rooted in the deficits of this experience.  That is, the focus is on what we have lost rather than on what remains for us to use in the building of a new life.  Over and over, I have been reminded how hard this all is.  I have gotten plaintive and sympathetic notes telling me how difficult it must all be at this point in my life.  Repeatedly I have been reminded of what I don’t have, who I don’t have, how much I have lost.  What strikes me is that I know all of this quite well.  I don’t need reminders of the deficits in my life.  Those losses, gaps and deficiencies are there all the time, staring me in the face, slapping me on the cheek.  The reminders don’t help me very much at all.

These reminders come from what I see as the “orthodoxy of grieving.”  Expressing bad feelings, acknowledging them, letting them happen—these processes seem to be regarded as ends in themselves rather than as possible tools for healing.  I think this whole framework is rooted in a semi-Freudian theoretical framework that believes we must express all this deep darkness in order to get on with this.  In this framework, the psychological task seems to be a sort of repeated psychological vomiting with no other purpose in sight.  That strikes me as perverse.

Think of how many times you’ve been told that you must express your anger in order to be healthy.  Suppressing such feelings will damage your heart, elevate your blood pressure, and give you hemorrhoids (I made up that last part).  In fact, psychological experiments have demonstrated that expressing anger without purpose—simply to “get it out”—makes things worse for us rather than better.  If we engage in constructive expressions of anger that actually resolve the feelings in positive ways, then we can benefit.  Simply to be angry without purpose or structure makes no one feel better and usually makes everyone feel worse.

As I noted earlier, I have experienced the orthodoxy of grieving as a roadblock to healing rather than a resource.  Is the “goal” of grieving processes to simply feel bad for a period of time or to begin to feel better?  I would think that the latter is the preferable goal.  If there are ways to move that process forward, I would imagine that we might all be in favor of such things.  However, that has not been my experience—especially with professionals who are committed by training and experience to the orthodoxy of grieving.  Other widows and widowers who have moved forward with some speed in their healing report similar experiences.  We feel judged and criticized for feeling too good too soon.  What a surreal experience that is!

I have sought to live out of my strengths in this time of hurting and healing.  People have different strengths, so my experience cannot be descriptive or normative for anyone else.  Everyone, however, has strengths as well as weaknesses.  I believe that effective bereavement therapy would take into account those strengths and then tailor approaches to personal grieving based on those strengths rather than on a standard model of grieving, a one size fits all sort of approach.  That one size fits all approach has only hurt me and done nothing to help.

On the other hand, the insights of positive psychology--especially the psychology of hope--have focused on strengths for moving forward.  These insights match much more closely to the words of the New Testament on hope than anything I have found in the Culture of Bereavement Orthodoxy.  After all, we who follow Jesus are not those who "grieve without hope."