Working With Our Emotions – Grief and Sorrow
Disclaimer: The tips and thoughts in this blog are shared from my personal experience. If your emotions are affecting your ability to function in daily life, please ask for professional help – hospitals and the NHS (UK) offer therapy, counselling and other mental health services. Check with your health provider.
“We live in a culture where people
need us to move through our grief
for their own comfort and
grief does not have a timeline”
Brene Brown
Being human means, that feeling grief and sorrow during our lives is unavoidable. Grief and sorrow are the natural emotions we experience when we lose that which we love. With cancer and any major illness, feelings of loss and sorrow, are inevitable. It may be that you mourn for your old pre-cancer way of life, for your work, for the way your body was before you became ill. For me I felt sorrow about the loss of all I’d pushed away in my past, the people and the opportunities, the times I felt that I hadn’t lived or loved fully. I was sad about the times when I’d felt rejected, and when I’d done the rejecting. And I grieved for the happier times in my old pre-cancer and pre-pandemic life.
In Western society perhaps we are expected to be ‘happy, happy, happy’ most of the time, driven and ‘successful’ and there’s no real room for sorrow, grief or loss. Sometimes we avoid those who are sad or grieving, almost as if we’re afraid we won’t be able to handle our own grief if we witness someone else’s. Look at the way being ‘happy’ all the time is instilled in us from a very young age. Children are told, ‘Don’t cry’, or young boys, ‘Boys don’t cry’, ‘Chin up’, ‘Pull yourself together’, ‘Put on a brave face’ are words that are constantly thrown at us. No wonder then the open expression of sorrow and grief becomes embarrassing, feelings to be kept behind closed doors.
But shared sorrow and grief can be incredibly cathartic and healing. Weeping is healthy and releasing. It’s when we stuff those painful emotions down – all energies and forms of expression – that things start to go wrong.
So, it is only natural, when faced with the possibility of one’s own dying or the dying of a loved one, that we will feel raw and wild feelings of sorrow and grief. Cancer does not wait for us to skirt around our feelings and hope that somehow it will all just go away. Cancer chucks us into the very centre of the whirlpool of life and ourselves. I found myself spontaneously and instantly forced into dealing with all these feelings whether I wanted to or not. There were many creative ways that I remembered and new ways that I learnt, to channel and express my feelings of grief and sorrow and to honour and celebrate them.
Remember we are aiming to work with our feelings not against them. We are allowing grief and sorrow to flow through us.
Expressing grief and sorrow creatively
“Embrace your grief for there your soul will grow” Carl Jung
I believe that feeling grief and going through the grieving process is what reminds us of our humanity and of our ability to feel love and therefore loss deeply.
In many cultures and throughout history, grief is celebrated through rituals and in art and music. I believe it would be a step towards greater health and good in society, if we could learn to honour our grief and sorrow and find ways to celebrate these feelings, rather than judge and suppress them. The Fado singers of Portugal sing sorrowful songs about the struggles of life. In the Ancient Greek tragedies, sorrow and grief were seen as a ritual of catharsis and clearing for both performers and audience.
Numerous poets have written about sadness and longing. Sorrow and grief are expressed throughout most forms of art. How often have we found ourselves listening to a sad song or watching a weepie, as a way of releasing grief or knowing that we are not alone in our feelings? These universal feelings, are a part of the fabric of who we are as human beings.
It is entirely our choice whether we wish to celebrate grief and sorrow publicly or privately. We might want to share our grief publicly or with a therapist or we might want to experience our grief privately or only with those closest to us. We might not wish to celebrate but instead rage against our grief and that’s perfectly good too.
For quite some time after my surgery and ending of my treatments, I’d been feeling numb and not able to really cry. So, it’s not about forcing ourselves to express emotions like sorrow and grief. When you and your body are ready to express these emotions, then it will happen naturally.
I personally find freestyle dance, writing songs, listening to songs or a piece of moving music, being in nature, talking to someone who is understanding, watching an empathic film where I can relate to the characters’ pain, will help to release deep feelings of grief. Being an actor has helped me enormously to access some of these ‘taboo’ feelings because as performers, we’re required to get under the skin of our characters, no matter how emotionally full or lacking or confused or mixed up the character is. In fact, as actors, it’s necessary to celebrate the ‘taboo’ emotions to allow them to be held up to the light and to give our audience and society the permission to acknowledge these feelings.
Now I’m writing about my feelings around having cancer in a book and in these blogs, with the hope that sharing how I feel (the awkward emotions as well as the comfortable ones), will allow you to feel you’re not alone whatever way you’re feeling.
I have also reconnected with, released, and resolved feelings of stuck grief in therapy, so that they were not trapped in my body.
You will have your own ways of reconnecting with feelings that may feel frozen. Perhaps you can get in touch with these feelings through gardening, yoga, dance, therapy groups with people going through similar situations or journaling. When the grief and sorrow are ready to be expressed through tears, then they will let themselves be known to you.
I hope you’re beginning to see where we’re going with this train of thought – that we’re not forcing, or repressing, or judging any of our thoughts and feelings – we’re instead lovingly working with them and giving ourselves permission to let them flow naturally, when our feelings are ready to do that. Rather than pulling up a flower that’s not growing to our timetable or expectations, instead we give it some water and sunlight and good soil, and the flower will find its way naturally towards the sun in its own time.
