Surrendering to Your Grief to Grow
Initially, many of the people I support through their grief journey have a desire to find strength through their grief. They feel so vulnerable and so distraught that they label themselves as “weak” or “a wreck.” They look for tools and techniques to help them maintain stability, groundedness, and have something to believe that they are “good” regardless of how painful their grief feels.
For some, this approach is a way of avoiding or resisting the painful feelings caused by grief. For some, finding strength is a distraction or a way of denying what their grief feels like. However, if one were to continue to avoid, resist, or distract themselves from the painful feelings associated with grief, they are going to have to keep doing it- over and over again- because grief just doesn’t go away.
Grief is something that needs to be healed. It’s healed by expressing the feelings associated with it. It’s expressed by talking to someone, crying, journaling, moving the body, doing artwork, as well as in many other ways, shapes, or forms.
Recently, I’ve been reading a book called “The Surrender Experiment” written by Michael Singer. In the book, Michael describes a point in his life when he decided to put faith into saying yes to what life was putting in front of him. Michael had put himself through a Surrender experiment. Stated more clearly, he writes:
Surrender — what an amazingly powerful word. It often engenders the thought of weakness and cowardice. In my case, it required all the strength I had to be brave enough to follow the invisible into the unknown. And that is exactly what I was doing. It’s not that surrender gave me clarity about where I was going — I had no idea where it would lead me. But surrender did give me clarity in one essential area: my personal preferences of like and dislike were not going to guide my life. By surrendering the hold those powerful forces had on me, I was allowing my life to be guided by a much more powerful force, life itself.
By that stage of my growth, I could see that the practice of surrender was actually done in two, very distinct steps: first, you let go of the personal reactions of like and dislike that form inside your mind and heart; and second, with the resultant sense of clarity, you simply look to see what is being asked of you by the situation unfolding in front of you. What would you be doing if you weren’t being influenced by the reactions of like or dislike? Following that deeper guidance will take your life in a very different direction from where your preferences would have led you. That is the clearest I can explain my surrender experiment, and it became the foundation of both my spiritual and worldly life.
[From the Surrender Experiment (p. 64–65)]
After reading this part of The Surrender Experiment, I put a lot of thought into what it would feel like to surrender to your own grief. After all, when something hurts so bad, it seems like one has to surrender to it in order to get through it. For example, I am a client of a Bodyworker who does what he calls “Neurophysical restructural bodywork”. What that means for me is he takes my soft tissues (muscles, ligaments, tendons, and fascia) and reshapes them and molds them into a new me. He’s the artist and I’m his canvas. He uses metal tools and hooks them into my body (without puncturing the skin) and moves stuff around- breaking up adhesions, scar tissue, and/or bunched up fascia.
It’s an understatement to claim that this hurts. It’s excruciating! Throughout this process, he guides me through taking deep breaths. However, I feel my body tense up and “fight” his work. I don’t do this consciously (I don’t try to fight it). But the point is that it’s so painful, there’s something automatic inside me that just resists, fights, and puts me on the defensive.
However, I get to a point in our sessions where I just surrender. I take a deep breath, sigh and soften my tension. I sometimes tear up. But my body just lets go and somehow, the pain lessens.
The surrendering is a permission for me to let go. It’s also a way for me to lessen the burden. I connect with my higher power, asking for help. I pretty much ‘say’ “please help me. I can’t do this alone,” without speaking a word.
And this is what I mean by someone surrendering to their grief. Asking for help from something greater than you to somehow, soften the resistance, the fight, or avoidant tension to let go and let the emotion run through its course. It may be the scariest and/or saddest thing you will ever experience but it’s only going to be for a brief moment. The pain and/or fear shall pass.
Grieving can exhaust many people. Part of all the energy invested is by fighting the painful feelings. What would it be like to stop the fighting? What would it be like to allow the emotions to run their course?
It wouldn’t mean giving up. And that’s important to realize because many people think that surrendering is giving up. To surrender may mean to give up for something as grandiose as war but it’s quite the opposite for grief.
Sometimes grief is a wake up call- letting us know that we’re less in control of life events than we previously thought. If you keep fighting grief, you sometimes find yourself in denial, pretending everything is fine, or putting too much on your plate to keep busy and/or distracted.
For someone who does surrender to grief, it could mean letting go of the resistance. It would also mean eliminating the distractions. And it could have the potential to mean trusting that there is a flow to life and grief needs to run its course.
Surrendering to grief isn’t easy. To help explain further, I want to share a story with you about George. George isn’t his real name but I do want to honor his privacy.
George is an old school and more traditional man- in the sense of being stoic and expressing little verbal communication when spoken to. George was not a person at all interested in surrendering to his grief. However, George was in a lot of emotional pain and it didn’t take long for him to recognize that he was heart broken, lonely, and didn’t have a sense of direction after his spouse passed away.
George and I would meet and he would talk- but mostly in response to my listening and asking questions from a place of compassion and empathy. George first started talking about the characteristics and personality traits of his wife. He was more open to sharing his favorite memories than talking about his feelings.
The sharing of his memories brought up a lot of sadness- mostly from missing his wife. Early on in our grief support work, George would cut off his sad feelings, saying “Well anyway” and quickly bring up something about sports to criticize so that he could get back in control of his feelings.
I knew George wasn’t allowing himself to feel his emotions and if he continued to follow this pattern, he was going to get stuck in his grief. After some time together and noticing the pattern repeat itself consistently, I asked George if he was up for playing a game.
With a surprised and interested look on his face, George said “sure”. We began to play a word association game- like a fill in the blank sentence completion. Some of the first statements were “right now I feel ____, one thing I’ve realized since this loss is ____,” and “a hard thing I encountered recently was ____.”
George caught on to where the game was leading and pretty much stopped me in mid sentence with words that I can’t remember but the energy was something that felt like complete resistance. I took a deep breath and with a calm voice, asked “George, you’re a fighter aren’t you?” With that stoic look he had mastered for many years of his life, George shrugged and said “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I knew George wasn’t going to work through his grief without some confrontation. I asked him for some time where I would speak and he would listen. George agreed and I explained my observations about his resistance. I provided examples and spoke slowly so that I would carefully choose my words to better articulate my experience.
At one point George’s eyebrows raised and I pretty much stopped mid sentence to ask more about what happened. This was the first time I saw a full facial expression change from him. He told me he heard me talk about surrender and it baffled him because he’s never surrendered to anything in his life. I went on to explain that surrendering to grief can be a good thing because it helps the emotions move through a person. I also explained that surrendering to grief isn’t giving up or showing weakness. Rather, it’s an act of strength for someone to open themselves up to allowing grief emotions to run their course.
That conversation was a turning point for George’s grief support work. George became more open to his sad feelings and did his best to let go of any resistance or defensiveness when either showed up.
Healthy grieving is feeling the emotional pain associated with loss. Healthy grieving can include noticing what’s hurting, acknowledging it for what it is (and not letting it feed a narrative or limiting belief in your mind) and accepting the deeper pain as something real right now. This process may create an authentic expression for all the feelings involved.
So what would it feel like to surrender to your grief? Would it feel lonely, devastating, or horrible? If so, know that those feelings don’t last forever. They do transform into other forms of more comfortable feeling states. They may transform into wisdom, a new self-identity, and a purpose to help others.
The possibility of surrendering could be very meaningful. It could make healing that much more possible. And the healing is what helps your grief become less painful.
Reid Peterson is the Creator of the Grief Refuge app. Grief Refuge is a daily companion to help support people on the grief journey. Download for free on iOS or Android to get daily support.
