Why You Must Fully Feel Your Grief

It’s so easy to distract yourself, but you shouldn’t.

Image credit: Canva

Living is about finding balance even when terrifying things happen. We live, we love, and we lose people. Loss is awful. Grief feels like drowning. Love is real and it will leave you open to the possibility of heartache. If you open yourself up, life becomes beautiful but it also makes us vulnerable. To love is to be capable of great loss.

We lose people, and it hurts. We lose things in life all the time. But to lose someone you deeply love is a feeling of the greatest sadness. It feels like an overpowering ache in our souls.

That heartache makes us want to burst. We can’t look at it for too long because it will hurt us like looking into the sun directly. Yet, it’s with us everywhere lurking in our shadows. It’s waiting to be felt and released.

When I lost someone special to me, a friend actually told me that I need to keep busy. They said I shouldn’t stop and think about the trauma I’d endured. This just can’t be good advice.

I think the more we run away from it or distract ourselves, the worse it will be for us later. We have to just sit with it. It’s insanely uncomfortable, but we must do it. It’s the brave thing to do.

If we don’t do it, the discomfort and emotional explosion will arise at times when it is least convenient. It might even ruin parts of our lives if we don’t process grief in a way that is healthy for us. It will come back to haunt us later and get into our thoughts so we make impulsive decisions we wouldn’t have made if we were healed and clear-headed.

We simply can’t look away. We must let it exist and feel it as long as we possibly can.

I certainly don’t have all the answers. But I know this grief stuff comes in waves. And I know that no two people grieve in the same way. So, do what feels right to you — as long as you’re not denying some emotion that wants to surface and you’re not resisting the focus of your mind on things that need to be processed.

It’s a bumpy road, I know. But that’s the point of being human. We have to heal to really understand the power we have in all things.