Grief and Anger

I think it’s helpful to realize that those who are in grief, are expressing their truth. For someone on the outside, it may feel tempting to pull someone out of their grieving process, but grief can actually be a welcoming destination because it doesn’t kick anything or anybody out. We don’t have to be divided here.

That being said, I think it’s important to identify when you find yourself lashing out. You can circle back and say, “Hey, I’m sorry. I wasn’t angry at you, I’m really reacting to my dad’s death.” Whatever it is, the communication is really key here, but it is not surprising that you’re angry at this time. It’s fine if you have no patience. These are really, really difficult times.

And I guess my last thought here is to say that the goal here isn’t to feel good. I mean this is another sort of frenzy and a social construct in our society. It’s all about feeling good. Now the idea here is to build out our capacity to feel anything, even everything.

Let’s not make an enemy of hard feelings. It’s not like if we conquer grief, then we don’t have to deal with those pesky thoughts.

The idea is to welcome grief, so we have a larger capacity to handle hard feelings. Hard, easy, comfortable — those are some of our adjectives. Those feelings just exist.

There doesn’t need to be a hierarchy to them.