THE CULTURE OF POSITIVITY
Now that you’ve created and embraced your own unique story of grief, it’s important to talk about the state of things for the bereaved in our society and in culture more generally. I want you to know that you haven’t been imagining things — it is very hard for grieving people out there.
For a series of articles in Slate magazine, Meghan O’Rourke and psychologist Leeat Granek surveyed eight thousand bereaved people, focusing on the emotional challenges of those who mourn:
The most surprising aspect of the results is how basic the expressed needs were, and yet how profoundly unmet many of these needs went. Asked what would have helped them with their grief, the survey-takers talked again and again about acknowledgment of their grief. They wanted recognition of their loss and its uniqueness; they wanted help with practical matters; they wanted active emotional support. What they didn’t want was to be offered false comfort in the form of empty platitudes.1
There is a very good chance that you have felt unsupported in your grief, at least at some level. You may have been bombarded by often hurtful and meaningless clichés from well-intentioned people. Or maybe you felt abandoned by those who are uncomfortable in the presence of human suffering. Fred Rogers also spoke to this sad reality: “People have said ‘Don’t cry’ to other people for years and years, and all it has ever meant is ‘I’m too uncomfortable when you show your feelings: Don’t cry.’ I’d rather have them say, ‘Go ahead and cry. I’m here to be with you.’”2
See if you can relate to the words of C. S. Lewis, the great writer and theologian who lost his wife to cancer and wrote about his mourning in the classic book A Grief Observed:
An odd by-product of my loss is that I’m aware of being an embarrassment to everyone I meet. At work, at the club, in the street, I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll “say something about it” or not . . . I like best the well brought-up young men, almost boys, who walk up to me as if I were a dentist, turn very red, get it over, and then edge away to the bar as quickly as they decently can. Perhaps the bereaved ought to be isolated in a special settlement like lepers.3
How did suffering become shameful? I believe a main culprit is our “culture of positivity.” Psychologist Stephen L. Salter defined this culture as “the widespread social practice of eliminating any attitude and utterance that doesn’t have an uplifting effect on one’s mood and those around them.” He continued:
The pressure to think positive pervades our everyday language and practices. It’s the reflexive response, “Put on a happy face,” if we are not smiling. “Think cheerful thoughts and good things will happen.” We feel pressure to display a pleasant countenance even if it is insincere. And we often feel guilty if we’re not quite able to don that cloak. The underlying belief, it seems, is that hurt and discontent can be done away with simply by acting as though it isn’t there.4
Author Barbara Ehrenreich also skewered the positivity culture in Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America:
I do not write this in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment of any kind, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness and, better yet, joy . . . But we cannot levitate ourselves into that blessed condition by wishing it. We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles, both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from our mass delusion that is positive thinking.5
Ehrenreich, who ran afoul of the positivity movement when she openly expressed her anger as a breast cancer patient, called the culture an “an obligation imposed on all American adults . . . To the positive thinker emotions remain suspect and one’s inner life must be subject to relentless monitoring.”6 Ehrenreich traced the movement to the mid-1800s, when positive thinking was promoted as a healing technique. A century later, Norman Vincent Peale became a cultural icon, and his book The Power of Positive Thinking was another gospel of good living.
The sunny theology of television preacher and author Joel Osteen is one more contemporary example. Osteen inspired an Internet firestorm when, in a recent book, he criticized parents who continued to mourn years after the death of their young son:
Fifteen years after the fact, Phil and Judy continued to languish in self-pity and self-induced isolation. Why? Because they don’t want to get well . . . They like the attention too much . . . You must get beyond it. Unless you let go of the old, God will not bring the new. It is natural to feel sorrow and to grieve, but you shouldn’t still be grieving five or ten years later.7
Grief expert Joanne Cacciatore responded to Osteen:
Allowing mourners to be in their pain, without trying to make them change how they feel (often to make yourself and said others feel better), would actually be a more compassionate and Christ-like response. Why? Because trying to force a grieving person to feel better is like telling a double amputee to get up and run before she is ready: it’s insensitive, lacks circumspection, and certainly doesn’t even remotely resemble compassion.8
As Ehrenreich concluded, the positive thinking movement encourages intense self-scrutiny of a person’s thoughts and judges them against the rubric of optimism and happiness. Negative thoughts are to be avoided, purged, and certainly not spoken of. The result is to drive crucial parts of our humanity — our true feelings and emotional pain — underground. Happiness, hope, and optimism became positives. Sadness, anger, loneliness, depression, and fear became negatives; they signify weakness or, worse, mental illness.
According to psychotherapist Francis Weller:
This “psychological moralism” places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems. Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulnerability into the underworld, where they fester and mutate into contorted expressions of themselves, often coated in a mantle of shame.9
I believe that the positivity movement also has had much to do with our grief- and death-phobic culture. It’s exceedingly difficult to put a universally positive spin on death and what grief requires of us, which is openness to our sadness, pain, and confusion. The culture of positivity and resolution theories like the stages of grief seem to go hand in hand. According to them, the quicker you can achieve closure/resolution/acceptance, the quicker you can return to the pre-loss state of sunniness.
The culture of positivity is also reflected in how our funeral practices have changed over the past generation. One aspect is the tendency to put more and more distance between the bereaved and the actual body of the deceased, with more cremation and closed caskets. At the same time, there has been greater and greater emphasis on looking at the bright side. This is not necessarily a good thing. As Thomas Long and Thomas Lynch pointed out in The Good Funeral: Death, Grief, and the Community of Care, the idea of “dealing with death by dealing with the dead” had “worked for humans for forty or fifty thousand years all over the planet, across every culture.” But more recently, how we deal with death, at least in Western cultures, has changed dramatically. As they explain, “[T]he most recent generation of North Americans . . . , for the past forty or fifty years, have begun to avoid and outsource and ignore their obligation to deal with the dead . . . And a failure to deal authentically with death may have something to do with an inability to deal authentically with life.10
According to Long and Lynch,
Funerals have become increasingly joyful, more like celebrations of life than solemn observances of death, and nothing is more disruptive to these upbeat ceremonies than the morbid presence of a dead body. Dead bodies are not emotionally buoyant, and they place a drag on the light banter, jokes, laugher and storytelling prized in a contemporary service of memory.11
“Bright-siding” is a common issue among my clients. One of them was Nick, whose wife urged him to see me. She was worried about his lack of emotion after his brother, Thomas, was killed in a traffic accident.
“I get where she’s coming from,” Nick told me. “My brother was my best friend, and I can’t imagine life without him. But I don’t want people to feel sorry for me. I’m a positive person, and I’m not going to let this drag me down. Thomas wouldn’t have wanted that.”
Here is how Nick spoke of his loss:
“It was a horrible accident, but at least he didn’t have to suffer.”
“Losing my brother is hard, but it is not like losing a child.”
“I really missed Thomas today, but my faith tells me he is in a better place.”
In our second session, I suggested there might be a connection between his characteristic positivity and an inability to feel his loss.
“Nothing you’ve said is not true,” I said. “Your brother didn’t suffer. The loss of a child is different. I’m sure your faith is a comfort. But you also can’t deny this: losing your brother is just really hard.”
I asked Nick to slowly repeat the three sentences I listed above but to stop before the word but. I encouraged him to feel the feelings brought up by the first part of those sentences. He was extremely reluctant but finally did as I suggested. Then he began to weep.
“Your grief is about how much you love your brother,” I told him. “There is nothing negative in that.”
From an early age, we learn the dos and don’ts of feelings in our culture. Some degree of socialization is clearly necessary for society to function. Imagine a world in which we all blurt out every thought and express every feeling. But we take this socialization to an extreme by labeling some feelings as “negative.”
Many years ago, I witnessed the power of this socialization firsthand. After the tragic death of a local kindergarten child, I was asked to consult with the principal, teachers, and parents of the other children. I helped them come up with this plan: We would leave the deceased student’s desk as it had been. Young classmates were invited to bring toys and tokens to place on the desk. Most did. The children also were invited to talk about their missing friend. When I checked in with the teacher, she was amazed by how openly, authentically, and without fear or shame her students expressed their loss. The children were quick to recall their classmate’s favorite toy or something funny that happened to him on the playground or the games they played at his last birthday party. There was an innocent beauty in how they expressed their grief.
The very next spring, the same school suffered another terrible tragedy — the sudden death of a second grader. When I was asked to return, I encouraged the community to replicate what we had done after the earlier death. This time, the grieving children responded much differently. Most would not speak of their dead classmate and avoided the student’s desk. Absenteeism was up, as were requests to see the school nurse. What a difference just two years of socialization had made.
To once again quote Fred Rogers: “There’s no ‘should’ or ‘should not’ when it comes to having feelings. They’re part of who we are and their origins are beyond our control. When we can believe that, we may find it easier to make constructive choices about what to do with those feelings.”12
As a therapist, I was trained that actions are negotiable but feelings are not. The kindergarten students could still spontaneously express what they felt. Even though the second graders had the same feelings and stories about their loss as the younger children had and even though they had the encouragement to express those feelings, they had already learned to internalize, which was right on schedule in terms of socialization. No wonder all the trips to the nurse with sore tummies.
In the fall of 1996, I was privileged to witness another example of pure, unsocialized grief. It was my good fortune to become acquainted with Henri Nouwen, the Dutch Catholic priest, writer, and theologian. Henri had spent the last decade of his life as pastor at L’Arche Daybreak, a residential facility in Ontario, Canada, for profoundly mentally challenged adults. While there, he provided pastoral care for this amazing community of residents and helpers.
That fall, some friends and I had planned to meet Henri for a short retreat at L’Arche. But then we learned of his death from a heart attack a few weeks before we were to leave for Canada. We decided to proceed with the visit to L’Arche to mourn Henri in the place that had meant so much to him. However, I was not at all prepared for the environment of grieving that I found there.
In the middle of a meal, a resident would yell, “Henri’s dead! Remember to pray for Henri.” In the midst of Mass, another resident would shout again, “Henri’s dead,” which would precipitate loud wailing among the others. The adult residents of L’Arche were like those kindergarten students — transparent and unashamed. They could not not express their loss. I have to admit that it was initially unnerving. But I came to appreciate the beauty and power of what I experienced there. What a different, kinder, emotionally healthier world it would be if we could be more like those kindergarten students and the residents of L’Arche.
Instead, the bereaved are more typically treated like C.S. Lewis’s lepers. As O’Rourke and Granek wrote in Slate:
Acknowledgement, love, a receptive ear, help with the cooking, company — these were the basic supports that mourning rituals once provided; even if we’ve never experienced a loss ourselves, we know from literature and history that people require them. Yet as American culture has become divorced from death and dying, we no longer know how to address the most rudimentary aspects of another’s loss — what to say, when to say it, how to say it. Disconcerted by discomfort, friends or colleagues are all too likely to disappear or turn the conversation to small talk in the aftermath of a loss, not knowing what to say. Our survey-takers reported wanting to grieve communally and yearning to find ways to relate to those around them.13