Our Subconscious Grieves

I had an "Aha" moment last night while reading about Anniversary Stories in John Savage's book, Listening and Caring Skills. I was reviewing it in preparation for helping teach Lifeline Chaplaincy's Creating a Healing Community workshop.

Savage writes about the fact that we often display emotional, mental, and physical symptoms of grief as we approach an anniversary of a loss, even when we have not consciously thought about the anniversary. He gave personal examples of a time when both he and his wife were irritable and grumpy, and once they talked about it, realized that it was the anniversaries of both of their mother's deaths, even though they occurred almost 20 years before.

This is further validated by brain research which indicates that the brain, when not focused on some present activity, stays very busy trying to make sense of the past and working on the future.

The reason this brought an "Aha" to me is that for several weeks I have been a little down, both emotionally and physically. While I'm conscious that today is the fourth anniversary of Mom's death, I hadn't tied my symptoms to grieving. Perhaps an even bigger "Aha" came when thinking about Dad's behavior and symptoms over the past month or so in this light. He is grieving Mom's death as well as the illness of his wife Carol, which has interrupted their lives in significant ways. He, as we all do, keeps trying to figure out how to feel better by trying to find physical remedies -- prescriptions, exercise, foods, etc.

He's just following the same rule we all seem to follow, "I'm not feeling well, so there must be a physical solution." Yet we all know that our emotions drive how we feel, even physically. But most of the time when we're not feeling well, we first think about physical causes. Part of that is probably a defense against the pain of bringing the emotions to the conscious level, and part of it is cultural -- being seen as overly emotional is a sign of weakness. Yet it's amazing how healing it is when we recognize the grief and allow the emotions to become conscious.

Learning how to grieve consciously seems to be a lost art in our culture. But the more life experience we have, the more we have to grieve. And the more important it is for our physical and emotional wellness that we learn to grieve well.