Grief

Finding Meaning In Grief

By  | 

Something to keep in mind when you are helping people who are grieving or are faced with grief yourself is that the experience becomes bearable if you can find a way to surround it with meaning. When you are grieving you are suffering, and when you see a reason for this suffering you can persevere in spite of the pain.

The existentialist Viktor Frankl championed meaning as a psychological cure for a host of maladies and for him grief was no exception. He told a story about a person who came to see him because his wife had recently passed away. This man was gripped by intense loss and didn’t feel like he could go on. Frankl asked him, “Do you think your wife would be in a similar state if you had been the one to die first?” When he assented, Frankl went on, “Then you see that you are saving her this experience of suffering by taking it on yourself.” With that the man stood up, shook Frankl’s hand, and went out into the world with a new sense of purpose to sustain him. Suddenly each moment became a dedication and an act of love for the person he had loved the most.

I try to keep the idea of finding meaning in the foreground when I’m working with people who are grieving and have seen it work wonders many times. It’s not that the painful feelings go away, it’s just that they become a badge of pride. A recent example occurred with a guy I met who was really torn up about a dog who had just died. He runs a shelter where he cares for and places dogs who have been mistreated and who have often suffered terrible abuses at the hands of their former caretakers. This dog had suffered greatly, and in fact her situation seemed bleak. The guy doubted whether he should take her on because her chances of survival, based on his experiences, didn’t seem very good. But something about her drew him in, and they forged a close bond over the next few days. She seemed to be getting better. Then everything suddenly took a turn for the worse, she started vomiting uncontrollably, and died.

This guy was confronted with a lot of powerful emotions. Guilt and doubt about what he could have done differently to save her. Anger at the people who had tortured her. Powerlessness to change the situation. And just pure grief at having taken the risk to open himself up and forge a close emotional bond, only to have that bond severed.

I told him there were two things to consider, which I separated from one another in the conversation so that he could have time to process. It’s important to let people talk out how they are feeling because when we can name our emotions some of their power over us diminishes. The first thing I told him to keep in mind was that if she could have suddenly, magically increased her cognitive power to the level of a human, she surely would have made the choice on her own to hitch her wagon to his star, knowing that there was no guarantee of survival but that he was a trustworthy, loving person with a lot of expertise in such matters who wanted the best for her. She would have taken the risk of going with him, especially since there weren’t a lot of other options.

The second thing was that while their time together was short, the bond they formed was very real and gave her a chance before she died to experience what a loving relationship between a dog and a human can be like. He gave her that, and they both benefited. Who are we to say, amongst the infinite cosmos, that an experience of short duration is worth less than one of long duration, or even that there is a difference when compared against billions of years? Actually some of the most important moments of our lives are short lived, but this doesn’t diminish their worth.

These ideas were effective and provided some relief because they helped instill the situation with meaning. The sense of futility and powerlessness are diminished when we can see a purpose surrounding what happened, and feelings of pride and love take their rightful place alongside the sadness and longing, helping people open back up to the world in spite of their loss.

Related posts:

  1. Grief As A Symbol For Love Of all the ways we have tried to help grievers bear up under the weight of loss there is one idea that has consistently been the most effective. This idea doesn’t change anything about the grief experience as such except for perception, so we suppose it could be categorized as cognitive behavioral. Though nothing about […]...
  2. Why Grief Is Scary When faced with a situation that elicits grief the concrete loss is obviously scary to confront. No one wants to admit that something or someone they love has slipped through their fingers forever. But there’s a deeper reason grief is scary, and this is that all of the unfinished business from previous losses comes bubbling […]...
  3. Grief Is Supposed To Hurt When confronted by the loss of something or someone we’ve grown accustomed to we’ll experience painful feelings of grief unless the situation was highly aversive to us, in which case we might feel relieved or even ebullient. But especially in the case of relationships it’s usually a mixed bag. Even if we feel mostly positive […]...
  4. Grief Is The Price You Pay For Caring We’ve written that when it comes to losing a loved one, the expression ‘little love little grief, big love big grief’ helps people wrap positive meaning around the boundless emotional pain and suffering they’re experiencing. That pain and suffering is a testament to their loved one, a proof that this person was special and important […]...
  5. Depression Versus Grief Depression and grief are both total responses to a given life situation. To use a poker analogy, we could say that whether you’re depressed or you’re grieving you’re all in. And the two syndromes have many symptoms that overlap, symptoms like despair, hopelessness, guilt, diminished interest in activities that used to seem pleasurable, inability to […]...
  6. Helping People Move Through Grief Grief is triggered by the irrevocable loss of something important to us. The mistake many of us make when helping people move through grief is to try to downplay that importance, to basically say “It’s not so bad,” while focusing in on the positives of the newly changed life situation instead. It’s a well-intentioned strategy, […]...
  7. Grief And Growth Grief means you have lost something or someone dear to you. You desperately want that something or someone back although you know it’s impossible, so you desperately want what you see as the next best thing, which is to be rid of your painful thoughts and feelings around your loss. Approaching grief in this way […]...
  8. Narrative Therapy For Grief Grief is the multifaceted response to a change in a customary pattern of living. Thoughts and emotions are usually all over the map and there is also usually a great deal of ambivalence. The ephemeral, hard to pin down nature of grief makes narrative therapy, with its emphasis on externalizing conversations, ideally suited to help […]...
  9. Acceptance Most people are familiar with the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. From our existential point of view the paradigm could be whittled down to the duality of non-acceptance and acceptance. Grief is a kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Denial, anger, bargaining, and depression are only a small […]...
  10. Finding Meaning In Old Age In our Western culture where meaning and self-worth are measured by the dual yardsticks of productivity and youth, elderly people who have recently retired face existential crises of enormous intensity. They suddenly feel like their lives have no meaning, that they’ve become unnecessary as people now that they’re apparently unnecessary in the eyes of the […]...
  11. Finding Happiness Through Meaning “It is characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’ Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in […]...
  12. Meaning I’ve been reading a lot of Albert Camus lately and came upon a passage that mirrors an idea Viktor Frankl presented in one of his books. When two of the great existentialists independently come to similar conclusions your ears perk up and you take note. They both lived in Europe during World War II, Frankl […]...
  13. Depression And Discovering Meaning If you’re depressed your depression has already taken a lot from you. It’s probably taken away your interest or pleasure in daily activities that used to seem interesting or pleasurable. It’s probably taken away your happiness. It’s probably taken away your hope. It’s probably taken away your sense of self-worth. It’s probably taken away your […]...
  14. Meaning From On High The common belief is that it can’t be meaningful unless it’s given from on high, as a commandment or sanction from a godlike presence. But this sort of relationship to the metaphysical is a projection of relationships to authority figures in the real world,  relationships of dependence relied upon to guide thoughts and actions. In […]...
  15. Attaching Meaning To Words All of us in a similar verbal community might use a more or less similar constellation of words but we attach wildly different personal meanings to these words. Each of us is coming from our own subjective set of beliefs and perceptions, yet we take this subjective set of beliefs and perceptions to reflect objective […]...
  16. Grief And Despair When confronted with the loss of an important human relationship the enemy is not grief but rather despair. Grieving is healthy and productive. Above all grief is natural. As much as we want to avoid those painful thoughts and feelings grief is the adaptive response to loss. Those who have the courage to confront their […]...
  17. Boundless Grief If your love for someone is boundless then it shouldn’t be surprising that when you lose them your grief will be boundless. We could say that grief is the price you pay for love. Little love little grief, big love big grief. Acquaintances, public figures, and other people you know pass away all the time, […]...
  18. Finding Yourself Finding yourself in adulthood would be easy, almost effortless, if you’d always been encouraged to be yourself in childhood. Some get lucky in that regard but most don’t. Not because their parents are particularly malicious or controlling but because, in trying to be good parents and passing on the norms and values that will help […]...
  19. Positive Side of Grief Quiet contemplation on a still evening lake. Sheets of rain pounding the earth. Deafening claps of thunder. Flashes of lighting above the treetops. The star speckled sky. The sound of the ocean. A cool breeze in a summer field. When I think of grief I often think of nature. This is because the nature of […]...
  20. No Clean Slates With Grief It’s easy to fall under the spell of closure when working through grief, under the idea that with the proper  insight and enough time life will go back to normal. Goodbyes will be said, the gestalt will be completed, and everything will revert to the way it used to be. There are a lot of […]...
Related Items