Allowing Space for Grief

When was the last time you really let yourself grieve? Was it last week? Last year? Too long ago to remember? What shape did your grief take? What did it feel like to acknowledge the pain of loss? 

Whether it’s the personal loss of a beloved person or other animal, or the larger-scale loss felt as we experience the polycrisis of climate change, pandemics, and genocide, the grief that we experience and carry with us as individuals and communities often goes unacknowledged and unprocessed. It can seem easier to look away, to avoid intense emotions, and to pretend like everything is fine even when it feels like a black hole has opened somewhere inside of you.

There are famously five stages of grief, as outlined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the 1960s, but these stages don’t necessarily refect all experiences of grief and real-life grief doesn’t always follow a linear path. Grief is messy. Grief is unpredictable.

On top of everything, grief can be a very isolating experience, the pain of loss amplified by the feeling that you’re the only person feeling this intensity and this emptiness. And while it's true that your grief is as unique as you, loss is universal. 

The pain of loss and the discomfort of grief get even further amplified by struggling against feelings and emotions. By trying to avoid the experience of grief, we are seeking to avoid discomfort—and while that’s not always a bad thing, avoidance can cause more suffering in the long term.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) provides strategies to support experiential acceptance of thoughts and emotions like grief. Acceptance of grief means allowing yourself to feel it, even when it’s painful. By letting go of the struggle to avoid grief, you can make room to name it, experience it, and ultimately allow it to follow the course it will without struggling against it. Steps to take in cultivating experiential acceptance include: 

1. Acknowledge the grief you’re feeling by journaling about it or talking with a friend you trust. Explore where grief shows up in your body with a body scan meditation. Reflect on what you’re mourning and how it impacts you. Consider what grieving has looked like in your life, your family, and your culture. Name your grief.

2. Allow feelings of grief to come—and in turn, to go. Grief may wash over you like a wave with some warning or it might show up out of the blue. You might feel grief about something recent or ongoing, or you may experience grief about something from the distant past. Regardless, try to sit with your grief and allow it to happen. Breathing exercises or the 5-4-3-2-1 technique and similar grounding exercises can help you stay with the grief even when it feels overwhelming. Allowing grief to co-exist with your other emotions and experiences can look like opening up to make space for it, softening yourself to allow the grief in, breathing into the grief like you would breathe into other painful or uncomfortable experiences, or making peace with it being something that you would rather avoid but are willing to sit with instead.

3. Accommodate & Appreciate your grief as something vital in your life. Reflect on the associative memories you have with it. How does the loss you’re feeling now resemble or remind you of other things that you’ve experienced? Consider what lessons you can learn from how others have learned to appreciate their grief. 

Poets can be great guides for developing an appreciation of grief, offering wisdom and community through work that explores the darkest depths of grief as well as the brightest joys of existence. Here are just two poems that do this well, but there are countless others: 

• “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” by Ross Gay 

• “Love Letter from the Afterlife” by Andrea Gibson

As you experience grief and work to accept it, don’t go it alone. Whether you seek support from a trusted friend, loving family member, or one of our trained therapists at Divergent Path Wellness, navigating experiential acceptance around grief is a journey best taken in community with others.

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Sarah Lawson

Clinical social work intern

Student therapist at Divergent Path Wellness

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