Fear, Control, & The Grief That Sets Us Free

Here’s something I’ve had to confront again and again in my life:
Life is uncertain.
It is not in our control.
Suffering is a part of it.

Control has been my favorite method of protection. And yet— it never works. Or at least, lasts.

It’s actually only made me more anxious.

—

I am a therapist who specializes in trauma and fear.

Every day I sit with clients in the ways their nervous systems try to protect themselves. How their psyche’s cling to illusions of control. Just like mine.

And it’s made me really think:

What are we so afraid of?
What are we so desperately trying to avoid?

Here’s what I’ve come to:

When we peel back control, we find fear.
When we peel back fear, we find grief.

Our bodies, our relationships, our careers, our health, our emotions, our livelihood…
all carry uncertainty, change, and loss.
Life is not in our control.
An an employer can let you go.
A family member can let you down.
A partner can leave.
A friend can be upset with you.
An injury can change your lifestyle.
A pregnancy can end.
A child can get sick.
A storm can rip up an entire community.
War exists.
And a loved one can die— even if they weren’t supposed to yet.

Or— none of these things can directly or explicitly happen to you and you can still wake up one day and look at your life and feel that it just didn’t work out the way you had hoped. There’s something missing.

If you’re like me, reading this may make your stomach drop, your muscles tighten, your face contort, or your mind scramble trying to resist these inevitable truths.
If so, stay with me. We’re going to move through this together. And I want to talk about how:

We’re going to learn how to grieve, rather than protect.

I’m reading one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read that is supporting my writing on this topic. In this book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, author Francis Weller writes:

“No one escapes suffering in this life. None of us is exempt from loss, pain, illness, and death. How is it that we have so little understanding of these essential experiences? How is that we have attempted to keep grief separated from our lives and only begrudgingly acknowledge its presence in obvious and sequestered times, such as a funeral?”

To be human is to know loss in many forms.
Grief, then, is an essential experience of being human.

The extent to which we can feel grief and embrace loss is the extent to which we can live full, deep, and rich lives. Welcoming all parts of the human experience is the ultimate challenge, but it’s also the secret to being fully alive.

Grief is all around us, happening in ordinary moments and earth shattering ones. But we don’t know how to embrace grief. We fear and resist it and cling to control instead.

Control is the opposite of grief.

Control is seductive. It tells us that if we do everything “right,” we can keep ourselves safe from pain. Everything will be good.

Control shows up as perfectionism, people-pleasing, micromanaging, health obsessions, rigid routines, anxious checking, limiting risks, compulsive planning and preparing, decision paralysis, emotional repression, conflict avoidance, addiction, constant productivity, over- intellectualization, or simply put, resitance of reality.

Every one of these is a nervous system strategy that says, If I can control enough, maybe I won’t have to feel the ache.

But this is not living.
This is not being human.
This is an illusion of safety that only guarantees a smaller life.

As much as we want to convince ourselves otherwise, control won’t set us free. The grief we so desperately try to avoid will.

Only through embracing grief do we get the opportunity to experience that safety doesn’t come from ensuring suffering doesn’t happen. Quite the opposite actually:

safety comes from our ability to feel and experience suffering.

I know, that doesn’t quite sound appealing.

That’s why grief requires courage—
the courage to face your world as it is and not turn away, not burrow into a hole of modern anesthesia (booze, sex, netflix, productivity, etc), and not collapse into despair and denial.

The most essential skill to grieving is developing our ability to stay present in our adult bodies when loss happens.

Embracing grief sets us free because when we stop fighting grief, we stop fighting life.
And when we stop fighting life, we begin to actually live it.

Most of us were never taught how to grieve.

To grieve is to stay in relationship with what has been lost—to say, “This mattered.”
It’s to allow ourselves to be reshaped by what we’ve lost without losing ourselves (which is the challenge). This is to say, grief is important. So how do we do it?

Well, grieving much less something we “do”, and more something we tend. We don’t resolve grief, we attune to it and take care of it. Through ritual, through connection, and through courage. It’s true, we might not ever move on, but we must learn to move with.

The first step of tending to grief is mustering the courage to stay with what hurts instead of numbing or fixing it. This is how we remember, how we process, and how we heal.

The second step of tending to grief is finding and leaning into connection and community. Grief is not meant to be experienced alone. Grief must be witnessed and held by community. For as long as humans have existed, communities have come together to honor grief and to hold the mourning. In our modern world, we have lost this. This is why it’s imperative to join a support group, engage in body work, receive hugs every day, lean into your communities, share meals. Touch and storytelling is vital.

And lastly, we tend to grief through ritual (which is also something that has been lost in our modern world). Ceremonies like funerals, vigils, closing the bones, or ones you make up are an essential way of taking care of grief- giving it a place to go, a place to be witnessed, to be held. Rituals as simple as lighting a candle, writing a letter, returning to a special song, hanging an ornament, are all daily practices of tending to grief.

—

I’m on a quest to stop fearing grief. And to start practicing grieving every day.

I know this is how I’ll live the fullest, most abundant life. And isn’t that the irony? The whole abundance coming from loss thing. We fear grief, we cling to control to try to taper the pain, and we live smaller lives because of it.

So instead of control, my invitation today is to cultivate courage and connection instead.

I know that I can handle anything life throws my way as long as I’ve got connection and courage.
And I know you can too.