Processing Grief: An Overview from a Christian Counselor

Grief is a fundamental part of our lives and affects us in ways that can rock us to our core. We tend to view grief as a reaction to death or loss of relationships. However, grief is far more pervasive than that and affects every major and even minor change in our lives. Yes, we grieve the deaths of friends and family, people we know or look up to, our pets, and the loss of relationships.

We also grieve our health, changes in our status, jobs or opportunities that are lost, careers, moving from places we know, failures, mistakes, our dreams, promises that aren’t upheld, betrayals, trauma, our life before the trauma, our life when we were successful, or if we have never been successful.

We can grieve our present and our past if it doesn’t align with our dreams, values, or beliefs. If we find ourselves in a state of life that we never thought we would be, we will grieve what we thought would happen in relation to what happened.

The point is that grief impacts our lives in so many ways that we don’t normally realize. It also affects us more than we give it credit. We grieve because we love, hope, and dream. While grief is painful, it is a necessary transition to someone or something that is no longer present in our lives and only in our memories.

Everyone grieves differently

Grief is one of the things that no one does the same way. We all grieve differently, at our own pace, in our own way. Don’t expect someone else to grieve the same way you do. The only right way to grieve is to allow yourself to go through it in your own way and time. Do not bury or avoid your grief, as this will lead to many complications that will be discussed momentarily.

People are quick to give advice in grief. As a society, we feel pressure to say the perfect thing that will help the person who is grieving. Part of why we feel we need to say the perfect thing and give advice is that grief fundamentally makes us uncomfortable. It is painful and something we want to shove under the rug as soon as we can.

If we say the right thing, the person will feel better, and we don’t have to deal with the awkward moment or their pain, let alone a reminder of our own grief that we have been avoiding. The actual perfect thing to say to someone who is grieving is to say nothing at all. Just listen. Let them know that you love them, care about their pain, support them, and are there to be a listening ear if they want to talk or a silent companion if they don’t.

One of the best things anyone can do to start processing and working through their grief is to talk about it. Getting things out instead of holding them in. Journaling is also a great way to process your grief.

Don’t avoid your grief

As previously mentioned, don’t bury or avoid your grief. It will not make it just go away. Grief will make you face it at some point in your life. When we bury or avoid our grief, we are allowing it to fester and stew in our lives. The more we run from it, the bigger and more impactful it gets, until eventually the dam breaks. If we avoid it long enough, it will start affecting our lives in ways that we don’t realize and never thought it would.

It will also cause us to avoid new relationships and old ones, blame ourselves and others, stop caring, allow hate to enter our lives, as well as struggle with depression, anger, and anxiety, even leading to suicidal thoughts, attempts, and completion.

Avoiding grief doesn’t make it go away; it makes it worse and here to stay, and we become stuck and unable to move on. We avoid it by keeping busy, throwing ourselves into work, resulting in exhaustion and illness, turning to addictions or things that bring us unhealthy pleasures, avoiding talking about it, leading to its persistence, and making ourselves sick. Dying of broken heart syndrome is an actual occurrence.

Grief and Forgetting

A common misconception is that if we allow ourselves to grieve, we will forget. That is a myth and a lie. You will never forget, and allowing yourself to grieve is not dishonoring whom or whatever you have lost; it is honoring them.

It allows you to move to a place of healing where the intense pain is replaced by increased love, the ability to remember the happy times, not becoming emotionally dysregulated when you think about them, and honoring your loss in a way that allows them to live through your memories and actions.

You can come to a healthy place of acceptance, realizing you can’t change the loss, no matter how much you deny it, avoid it, or spin in your head overanalyzing all the ins and outs of it, as well as blaming those who are blameless, including yourself and those around it.

Please stop telling yourself and others that death is “God’s plan.” It is not. This has caused so much trauma to those whose loss is traumatic and unimaginable, like the death of a child or the death of a parent with young children. God’s plan for us was the Garden of Eden, where life was in abundance without pain, suffering, sin, or death.

However, He gave us free will to choose for ourselves. Adam and Eve chose to deliberately disobey God by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eve listened to the serpent who enticed, manipulated, and lied to her. Adam and Eve’s deliberate disobedience of God opened the world up to sin, pain, suffering, torment, death, and grief. The death of the innocent was never God’s plan (Genesis 3:6-12).

In our grief, we often blame ourselves and others in a way to control the uncontrollable. Yet it doesn’t change the outcome of the loss but ensures increased shame, guilt, suffering, pain, and misery. Acceptance does not mean that the loss is okay, right, just, or fair. It means that you will no longer be fighting with reality, trying to change something that is already set in stone or unchangeable.

It doesn’t change anything but ensures that you will continue to suffer, stay stuck, and be unable to find any relief by avoiding your healing. It keeps us stuck and unable to live our lives to the fullest. Instead, we wallow in it.

Jesus and Grief

Even “Jesus wept” (John 11:35 NIV). Jesus is fully God and fully man. He wept at the grave of Lazarus, whom he loved. He knew He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, yet He took time to grieve because He knows grieving is fundamentally important. He felt the pain of loss from His own love, as well as the pain of Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha.

While I am not a theologian, I am positive He was also grieving the death and destruction that sin brought into the world. He knew He was about to conquer sin and the grave by dying on the cross. Yet He also knew that his death would not stop the pain and suffering of this world from sin, but it would allow us the ability to join Him in Heaven, where pain, death, and grief have no place.

Jesus humbled Himself to be born in poverty in a manger, so that He could experience firsthand the effects of sin on this world. He did that for you and me because He loves us so much.

One of my favorite quotes since childhood is, “I asked Jesus, ‘How much do You love me?’ He said, ‘This much.’ Then He stretched out his arms and died” (Unknown). He knows your pain and grief not only as our omnipotent God but also intimately from the pain, suffering, and grief He experienced when He walked on earth.

Even if you can’t put your grief into words, Jesus knows. Romans 8:26-27 (NIV) says, “In the same way the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us through wordless groans [groaning too deep for words]. And He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.”

To intercede means to stand in the gap. To bridge the barrier when we ourselves cannot put our pain into words. Jesus knows.

You are not alone

My friend, you are not alone in your grief. While you grieve, uniquely Jesus knows even better than you what you’re experiencing. Allow yourself to feel the emotions you need to feel as they come, without judgment. We tend to judge our emotions because we believe we should be experiencing them in different ways through our biases.

However, your emotions are valid and what you need to feel in that moment. If you let them come naturally without fighting or judgment, they will pass naturally and allow your brain to process what it needs to. The more we fight or judge our emotions, the more complicated they become. It is not only okay to cry, but also healthy. It allows your brain to process its emotions and biochemically bring about healing change.

The only right way to grieve is to allow yourself to go through it and face it head-on. This will bring with it the ability to process, heal, and find purpose again, living alongside the memories of who or whatever you have lost. It will allow you to focus on the happy moments, both present and past. It will allow you to honor your loss by living your life in a healthy, positive manner. Even “Jesus wept” (John 11:35 NIV).