Grief is NO journey

People are quick to tell us that grief is a journey but if you are experiencing grief, you will find that over the subsequent months (and then years) as you try to walk this journey, you will realise that considering your feelings as a journey, you are actually making and form of normality harder to achieve. It will feel like you are running a race with no finish line. Like you are holding a map where every road just leads back to the place you started from.

Some people believe that they can ‘man up’, pack their bags, push through the hard part and finally arrive at an end goal where grief ceases, and they finally get to go home and heal. This is an unlikely scenario.

Looking at grief this way can put pressure on people to “get over it”, to “finish the journey on time”, and if it’s been a number of years and you’re not there yet, some people will start to feel like they have failed. However, anyone who has truly grieved knows that there is no that there is no finish line, because the love doesn’t just end and the feeling of missing someone doesn’t just disappear.

Grief isn’t a linear process where you can tick off stages. Experience tells us that one day you could feel like you’re walking in the sunshine but the very next day you feel like you’re right back in the middle of the storm. When you’re stuck in the journey metaphor, moments like that can make you feel like you’re stuck like you’re going backwards.

This is like a voice in your heads says “well I should be farther along by now”, “I thought I was warmer”, “what’s wrong with me?” and then we start to become our own grief police, judging ourselves for not grieving the right way.

You therefore need to consider a different, better fitting and more useful analogy to consider when working with grief. It is actually more helpful to look at grief as a new language that we have to learn. This is because the goal of a language isn’t to finish, it’s to become fluent in scenario you now find yourself in.

You should know that there is no correct way to grieve. Grief isn’t a trip to be finished but like a language to be learned.

Think about learning a new language. It isn’t about reaching a destination, it’s about slowly, maybe awkwardly but at least persistently becoming fluid. It’s a process of integration not completion, so the goal then doesn’t become “to finish a journey”, but the goal is to become fluent. This fluency doesn’t mean that all your grief is gone, or that we still don’t have this feeling of sadness. It just means that the language has become part of you and this shift in perspective can be liberating because it removes the crushing pressure of a timeline. There’s no test to pass, there’s no date that you have to be healed by. You can just give yourself permission to be a beginner and your progress becomes a positive experience constantly building on your previous experiences and understanding.