What Is It That I Am Feeling?

By Erica Sonnabend

Wow.  What a year it’s been.  

I feel like that statement is one we're all hearing now that we've marked a full year since a global pandemic came crashing into our lives, but it really is fitting.  

I certainly do not say these words lightly - quite the opposite, actually. The deep emotions behind that statement and what they represent are what strikes me the most when I hear that statement. There has never been a time in most of our lives that the whole world has experienced loss from the very same root cause.  

As the weeks of uncertainty turned into months, I witnessed a shift in the collective conversation in our society that gave me hope.  Initially, we were talking about the world shutting down, frightening case numbers, and lack of toilet paper, but then something else happened.  While we were still talking about those drastic changes in our daily lives, we also started talking about how those changes made us feel.  

Our conversations became a mix of both intellectual facts and the corresponding emotions that accompany them. Words such as mindfulness, awareness, wellbeing, compassion, and connection started popping up during nightly news reports, on social media, and in zoom calls all over the world.  We as humans were speaking our emotional truth like never before.  That truth was filled with all sorts of feelings - fear, sadness, longing, relief, gratitude, isolation, anger, desperation, love, etc.  People started discussing problems with sleeping, eating, working, feeling stuck, being disoriented, and connecting to joy as a result of the pandemic.   

Guess what all of those feelings are?  Yup...GRIEF.  Our usually “grief avoidant” society was experiencing loss in so many unprecedented ways that many of us started talking about our losses and our feelings instead of relying on the social norm of not really expressing our challenging emotions.  As someone who has discovered the many benefits of dealing with all of my emotions (those most often viewed as either positive or negative), this is such a welcome change.

By July of last year, I had many people (including news media) reaching out to my grief support practice to ask what grief actually is and how someone can tell if they are experiencing it.  To answer that question, I offered the definition of grief that completely changed my perspective on loss. 

"Grief is the conflicting feelings caused by the change in or the end of a familiar pattern of behavior."    - John W. James 

Why is this definition so important?

Personally, I walked around thinking something emotionally was wrong with me after experiencing the death of my father, the end of my marriage, changes in my health, and challenges in my career. I believed that once my dad had been gone for a year, I was supposed to magically feel better, but I did not.  I struggled to cling to what others told me about “being better off” when my marriage ended.  And let us not forget that “everything happens for a reason” platitude. Those sentiments were offered out of love for me which I appreciate; however, I was still stuck and stuffing my feelings down.

The problem was that outside of the death losses I had experienced, I didn’t consider that the other changes in my life were also losses. Consequently, the conflicting feelings I experienced didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t understand why I continued to feel the way I did so I kept those feelings hidden.  I believed that loss was about death and that feelings of grief were reserved solely for that reason. 

Grief is certainly about death, but it is also about so much more.  It's about any change in your life that has deep emotional value to you. Only you can determine what those loss events in your life are and how you will integrate those losses into your future life. It is important that we realize that feelings of grief are not just limited to the date (or the year after) your loss occurred.  Loss and change can cause ripple effects throughout our lives in various ways.  Expressing the varied emotions that come up is absolutely essential.

As we moved through this past year, many of us came to realize that the definition of grief we'd been relating to for so long was too narrow.  So much that was familiar to us came to an abrupt end and the changes are too many to count. Recognizing that feelings of grief and loss are not limited to specific changes helps us to expand our conversations.  The figurative stop signs we used to encounter are replaced with open hearts and listening ears which leads us down a path toward healing.

There is much work ahead for us as we continue to battle this pandemic into year two. We will need to rely on each other and keep pushing to eradicate this public health crisis that has taken far too much.  The losses are many which means the need to connect to our emotional truth is greater than ever.  Let’s continue to shift our conversations about every aspect of our loss experiences by speaking our truth about how we feel when a “familiar pattern of behavior” changes or ends.  

Wow.  What a year indeed. 

Be well, friends.

When Grief Resurfaces in Uncertain Times

By Erica Sonnabend

Like so many of you, I have been thrust almost instantly into a new way of living, working, and communicating with my family and friends.  Although I’ve always considered myself to be a very adaptable and flexible person, changing nearly everything all at once due to the pandemic has made me question that.

Within a matter of days, all of my normal routines ceased to exist and my days of welcoming visitors to my home and gathering with loved ones stopped.  My world seemed to shrink and I was left feeling fearful, uneasy, disconnected, and vulnerable in ways that I never had before.  I was weepy, quick to snap at others, manically keeping busy with home projects and not sleeping well.  In my mind, I determined this was expected behavior given all that our world and our communities were going through.  I just needed to ride it out.

Not only was I experiencing the loss of my sense of normalcy and safety, my heart was hurting for those around me who had died, were sick, or had lost their jobs or businesses.  I wasn’t feeling all of this on the “usual” level that I would expect to feel about such terribly sad things, these feelings were ENORMOUS.

What I later came to realize is that through all of the news reports, zoom calls, sanitizing, and home quarantining, an uninvited guest had shown up.  There it was…GRIEF…amplifying my emotions and my actions. Grief for my new losses during quarantine and resurfaced grief from previous loss events.  

Grief is normal and natural, but it doesn’t always look and feel the way you think it will.  It’s sneaky. It disguises itself as many things – exhaustion, irritability, excessive behaviors, keeping super busy, forgetfulness, and many more.  With a little stepping back, I have realized that our various losses and our history with grief will show up unannounced and affect our current lives if left unresolved.

Around week five of my ten week quarantine, I discovered the root of my intense feelings. This happened when I opened my kitchen cabinet to start making lunch for my two school-aged children.  Yes, you read that correctly.  I connected to my grief when I opened my kitchen cabinet. Looking at the well stocked canned goods brought me back to a time in my life that I hadn’t thought of in decades.  

When I was in middle school, my father moved about two and a half hours away from me.  That distance felt like I was on another planet. It was a long, monotonous bus ride and then a thirty minute car ride away from the beauty and comforts of my home on Cape Cod.  At home, I was surrounded by extended family and connected to close friends in an awesome neighborhood.  While visiting my dad, who I adored, I was sleeping in a space that wasn’t mine and spent most Saturdays at his house alone because he’d have to work. He lived in a second floor apartment in what used to be a single family home.  It was always very clean, but it had a makeshift kitchen with bookshelves used as a pantry…filled with canned goods.  I had so many questions about why my parents divorced, but I couldn’t get them to come out of my mouth.  I felt an incredible loss of normalcy, routine, companionship, and familiarity.  Among other things, I was anxious and bored on those Saturdays and I missed my friends.  

As I stood in my kitchen, decades later in the midst of a pandemic, staring at the aluminum cans in my cabinet, my grief from long ago became obvious to me. Just like that. After weeks of pacing in circles to pass the time, full of anxiety about the unknown, grief had resurfaced. This time of great change and uncertainty connected me to the losses I experienced when I was about the same age as my one of my kids that I was making lunch for.  Coincidence?  I don’t believe so.

When I allowed my heart to go back to that time, a whole range of unexpressed emotions came to light. These were thoughts and feelings that I had back then plus some new ones from my adult perspective. Those buried feelings and undelivered communications were my unresolved grief. This discovery showed me exactly how unexpressed grief can evolve and resurface in different ways in our lives – especially during a pandemic.

It’s important to remember that loss is not solely connected to the death of someone we care about.

Loss occurs in all kinds of situations.  You can feel it when relationships end, when changes in health or financial stability occur, or when any event that brings physical or emotional impact happens.  Loss can be tangible (people or things) or intangible (sense of safety, relationships with money, loss of health).  After finding my own unresolved grief hiding in my kitchen cabinet, I knew I had some work to do to free myself from the pain of my past losses.  Taking action through grief work and participating in my own emotional healing has led me to better understand my current losses.  What a difference that has made in my daily life!

As you continue on your own path, weathering the ups and downs of losses in your life, I encourage you to pause and allow yourself to truly connect to the changes you’re experiencing.  Let your emotions come up and out.  Be mindful of what unresolved grief looks and feels like in your heart.  And always show love and compassion to yourself when grief resurfaces during these very uncertain times. 

Take care, friends.