You Can Trust Your Grief: A Therapist's Approach To Grieving

Grief can feel frightening, overwhelming, or like something is wrong with you. But what if grief isn’t something to fix? In this talk, licensed therapist Lilian Childress offers a different way to understand grieving—drawing from Internal Family Systems, the work of John Tarrant, and years of clinical experience supporting people after the death of loved ones. Rather than something to overcome or manage away, grief can be understood as a sacred territory of the inner world. When we learn how to enter this territory with trust, grief begins to reveal its own wisdom, direction—even nourishment. In this talk, you’ll learn why your grieving is not something you are doing "wrong," how to approach grief without trying to fix or suppress it, how to begin exploring your inner world safely, and why grief can be a meaningful journey rather than something to escape. Your grief is unique. But you are not lost in it.

Transcript

You can trust your grief. It knows what it's doing. Now that may sound nuts. Grief can be scary and we're usually told that it needs to be fixed, It's a problem, Something to get through. It's scary to other people. But grief is not something that's wrong with you. There's nothing to work on. In other talks, I've described the psyche as your inner world and parts within you that are distinct but that are all integrated in the wholeness of the self. I think sometimes there can be a part or parts of us that hold grief from past experiences. But I don't think of grief as a wounded part itself. And I'm talking now about the death of a loved one. And that is an utterly unique and sacred experience. Even though there are other kinds of grief and other kinds of deaths, What I'm talking about is not comparable. It's its own thing. And what I really want to emphasize is that your grief isn't something wrong and you're not grieving in the wrong way. If grief isn't a part, I see it more along the lines that John Tarrant describes in The Light Inside the Dark as a territory of the inner world, The territory of night. And grieving is the journey through that territory and the tasks that we have there and the parts of yourself to find along that journey. Grief may not be a part, But spending time in its territory will bring you to your most wounded parts, What might be called your deepest exiles. I can't tell you about your grief, But I can offer you a sort of map of the territory to help you navigate it. A sense of the territory to reassure you that you're in the right place at the right time. When there is a death, That death propels us down into a moment of utter helplessness. That's what begins our journey into the territory of grief. I think of this grieving as similar to what a shaman does, Moving back and forth between the spirit world and the physical world. You are not in just one world. You are an inhabitant of both worlds and your task is to trust when grief calls you down into its territory that is not your normal waking world. To hear that call and follow it and allow it fully and then trust the process that happens there. And then you return to the sunlit world when it calls to you, The world of practicalities and the body's needs and relationships and work. It's a back and forth movement, Not governed by your will. When you are in the territory of night, I'll call it when you are grieving, The people around you can be alarmed by it. They look into your eyes and see vastness reflected back to them. They sense that you're not fully of this world and you're not. You know something about life now, Something primal. You are with this and in it and you cannot change it. You can't direct it. It is larger than you and so you surrender to it. You trust it. And at first, When you're in this territory, It can feel like you're in a cloud forest at dusk. You can't even see five inches in front of your face. You have no sense of time. And you simply endure moment by moment. Grief is not a problem to fix. It is not something you need to work on or overcome or manage away. It is a territory to be in. And responding to that call from grief is a sacred task. And what is that call like? How does it come? I think it's different for each of us. Sometimes a smell, A quality of the light, The way somebody moves, A word you read, A song, Anything. And then suddenly you're descending into the territory of night. Physically, You're still in this world, Right? But you're in the other place. And there's nothing to do about it but allow. Surrender. Not like surrendering your personal power to another person or institution, But surrender to soul and the logic of soul that is not a logic of mind. When you're in this territory, You can continue to do the daily things of your life. Talk to people, Answer the phone, Manage the stuff, Check your email. But you're not fully here. And that's okay. You can feel really isolated, Even like you don't belong anymore with people, Like you're an other. And that's okay too. The reflection of that night territory in your eyes, That ineffable vastness, It really can spook people. And they can want to make it go away and make themselves feel more comfortable by making you feel better. Especially if you're in the part of the territory that is the thickest night. Imagine a part of the grief territory that is utter and complete stillness. You don't even have a story of you anymore. You have no capacity to pay attention to anything. It's like you're in darkness with no stars and no energy to move. As Tarrant describes it, Any act of will is just not possible. It's beyond you. But what is it like to be in that and understand it for what it is? If you're in it and you don't understand that you are in a specific territory with inherent and profound meaning, It can be terrifying. I'm not describing depression. Depression is not grief. The grieving journey that has been stopped, Stilted, Overmanaged, Distracted away from, Numbed, That over time can develop into depression. But what I'm talking about is when someone you love dies and you are pitched into this other territory. And while you're in it, You're in it. There's nowhere else you're supposed to be in that moment. And when you're not in it, When you come back out into the sunlit world, You're in that world. It's okay to let yourself be exactly where you are. When you are in the dark, If you are no longer afraid that it will annihilate you, I mean, It already has and yet here you are, If you're no longer afraid that you'll get trapped here, If you name it, You greet it, It can actually begin to nourish you. That dark territory that I'm calling grief can give you things that don't have words. Another part of the map I want to at least gesture toward, That it can be helpful to know and really, The tools I'm offering here are tools of understanding and allowing. That's it, Understanding and allowing. These are not tools to make it better, To make you feel better. You don't need to feel better. When you journey into the grief territory, You are exactly where you need to be. So one other thing on that map that the grief journey can lead you to is the cave of exiles and that's just an image that comes to me. You'll find that for you, It's its own thing in your inner world. This is that deepest place in you where your wounds, Your most wounded parts that have been rejected by your ego, Your manager, This is where they live, Exiled away, Waiting to be seen by you, Waiting to be discovered, Remembered. Oh, They long to be seen by you. I had a client once who called them her cholera children, Ugly, In the basement, Dressed in rags, Despised, Starving, Ill. That image she had of the parts that she had to reject in order to get love and be safe in the world, To succeed or function, You name why, They had to be rejected. The cholera children could not be welcomed up into the kitchen of her inner world, Her house, They had to stay in the basement. But when you feel most in the dark and you say okay to that, To being lost in this territory of night where there are moments of sheer agony, When your old familiar sense of self and purpose has been stripped away and you let it, When you say okay to not knowing who you even are anymore or what to do now, That's when you often come across the cave of exiles and you discover a hugeness in you, An incredible generosity and capacity to feel for those rejected parts of you, To take their hands and hold them and really see them and lead them out of the cave, Help them. In the outer world, What that encounter in the cave of exiles looks like is clinically decompensation to friends falling apart. All your quirks and symptoms and shit has just come right up. This death has made this person grieve and everyone recognizes that he or she or they are grieving and oh my gosh, They're having all these symptoms coming up that we thought they'd fixed, They're worse. It looks like an exacerbation of obsessive, Compulsive, Impulsive, Addictive, Anxious, Depressive, All kinds of behaviors and symptoms. But in the language of the inner world, It's the discovery of your cave of exiles. And when you do acknowledge them, For example, Suddenly in the depth of your pain, You remember a feeling you had as a child that was so painful or scary and then later, A specific memory keeps popping into your head. You're having nightmares or suddenly that shame that's been way down inside you, Managed very well by addiction, Has burst up into your conscious felt experience and the addiction can no longer protect you from it. That's that moment when you look at the ashamed part, Usually just a child with compassion. Oh, You've been inside me all this time holding that wound all by yourself. No one came for you. And that's the healing process of inner work that I've been talking about that I think is innate in you, Native to you. You don't have to reach for it. You don't have to learn special skills. It's right there. I bet I'm describing things that actually you already know. So that's a lot to say about what I think grief is and again, With the understanding that your grief is irreplaceable. I can only gesture toward that territory in a general way. But know that you are in a place that has its own deep and soulful logic and that place can hold you and even offer you keys to healing some of your deepest wounds that had been there all along.