Holiday Grief- what is it? How does it differ from other grief? What is grief anyway?

These are but a few questions you might want to explore as we move ever deeper into the holidays, the season of celebration, gift-giving/receiving, parties and gatherings of various sizes and diversities.

Grief is not a feeling; it is a heavy and complex emotion (energy-in-motion) containing every imaginable feeling in the human psyche. When someone experiences the loss of a loved one, a spouse, a child, a parent (not just from death but from any tragedy), grief emotes powerfully to pull you down to where you can safely begin to feel yourself without that which you've lost.

Grief provides a safe haven, a kind of hospice where you can tend your wounds, grow new skin, encourage the scabs to form and thicken, so that you rise back up into the world as a new person.

However, many people choose to ignore this gift of Grief and rather than actively grieve, they passively carry their grief inside, sometimes for the rest of their lives, accumulating more and more grief. Numbed out to their own feelings, they push forward as if nothing has happened to them, as if they have not been irrevocably changed; they choose to live a lie. Their bodies then have to adjust to the deadness it is forced to carry inside; eventually that becomes disease. On the outside, it shows up in depressed feelings, temper tirades, road rage, jealousy, guilt, shame, and projections onto others.

It is amazing how forceful people can become in their attempts to hide their grief from their own conscious awareness. They even convince themselves that if they close their eyes to it, so will everyone else. Not true. It is in the air we breathe. We breathe each others' air. We exchange each others' realities and each others' fantasies. Surely you've heard it said, "Magic is in the air;" or "Death is in the air." That is true. So too is: "Grief is in the air."

Depending upon how well you know yourself, how well you own your own feelings, grieve your losses, and ground yourself in your own center, that will determine the real choices you actually have in filtering the air you breathe. In these days when toxicity is killing everything that lives and breathes and drinks water, we need filters to maintain good health. The same is true for our psyches. This filtering begins by asking ourselves the questions we've not dared to ask, maybe have not dared to even imagine.

During the holidays and on the anniversaries of a tragic event, Grief usually offers us another opportunity to grieve losses not fully grieved for the purpose of healing. If you can feel the feelings rising up inside you, you can choose whether and how you will receive this unexpected and precious gift- the opportunity to create new life.

2005 Mary Richardson