The River of Buried Grief

I (jkz) have been in a room with seven hundred men of all ages, every one in tears over his lost relationship with his father. Before they walked into the room and spent time talking and listening together, most were barely aware that they carried such grief, and hardly any would have shared it with other men.

I have been in groups of hundreds of health professionals where, during intensive training in mindfulness, immense personal sadness from childhood poured out of person after person, men and women. At these retreats, we let such emotional expressions of grief and the stories that contain them occur and go on for some time without any reaction or comment other than our full and silent attention. People have a hard time realizing that making space for deep and unpleasant emotions is as much a part of mindfulness as following the breath.

A veritable river of grief seems to flow through us. Its subterranean course is not always in evidence, so we may have no idea it is there. But this river of grief is never as far from us or as foreign to us as we might think when we see it coursing through the heart of someone else. Seen or unseen, it can color an entire life journey, including our character, choice of profession, and how we parent.

I am convinced that this river runs through us all, carrying deep, perhaps archetypal feelings we rarely come in contact with or even know exist. When we are out of touch with our own grief, it can feel more than a little awkward and strange when someone else gets in touch with theirs. It is easy to feel embarrassed for them, or aloof and a little judgmental, like, “Why are they making such a big deal about something like that?” “It happened so long ago.” “Haven’t they dealt with that already in therapy?” “I’m certainly beyond that.”

We are all to some degree defended against the deepest feelings we carry. If we weren’t, we would no longer be carrying them in quite the same way. The real work of mindfulness is making room for whatever is happening while it is happening, with openness, equanimity, empathy, and compassion. It means being patient with ourselves and with others and not jumping to move on prematurely to something else because of our discomfort.

In those rare moments when we do connect with our own grief, when it’s our feelings that surface in this moment, for whatever reason, the situation is all of a sudden very different. Then the whole world is in pain, our whole universe colored by a sorrow that we feel extends far beyond the personal.

Perhaps we wouldn’t be carrying quite so much buried grief as adults had we been parented with greater kindness and thoughtfulness when we were children. We cannot say with any certainty. It is different for each one of us. Each of us has our unique constellation of painful past experiences and our reactions to them, some buried, some unearthed.

It takes years of inner and outer work on oneself to heal from losses of one kind or another, and from a lack of recognition and honoring and of being cared for in childhood. Often it takes years to even become aware of our deepest feelings about our experiences and how we were treated. It is not always that one’s parents were abusive, or alcoholic, or grossly neglectful. Much of the hurt for many of us came about while our parents were trying to do the best they could with what they had and within the framework of their world and worldview. They were formed by their own experiences, both positive and negative and by what their parents passed down to them, just as we are. Each family has its own unique combinations of love, shame, guilt, blame, withholding, and neediness. These emotions are most harmful when coupled with unconsciousness.

A woman told me that when her mother died—at a time when she was still a young girl with a number of younger siblings—her father refused to allow any further mention of her mother in the household. It was as if, once buried, she never existed. All the children were forced into this emotional closet. The father thought it would be better, less traumatic, to just move on and not dwell on the past. On the contrary, it did enormous harm to the family.

So we see that it is ignorance (in the Buddhist sense of ignoring how things actually are) that so often lies at the root of our suffering. This kind of ignorance can lead to parents not knowing their own children. This ignorance can coexist within a family in which there are many positive accomplishments and a surface appearance of harmony and love. The one does not preclude the other.

Unconscious grief casts a shadow that extends out and down in our psyche. It moves in the dark inner recesses of our memory. It has a life of its own underground, even when the surface seems bright. Indeed, sometimes the brighter the surface, the longer and darker the emotional shadows.

Robert Bly, in The Little Book on the Human Shadow, describes the dynamics of our buried emotions using the image of an invisible bag we acquire early in life. As we grow, in our attempts to be seen and accepted by those we love, we progressively stuff into this bag all those parts of ourselves that we are made to feel aren’t lovable. This can go on for an entire lifetime, living something of a lie to keep up appearances or to fit in.

It may have started out at home with our parents, when we were infants and young children, and were given messages about what pleased them and what didn’t, what was “acceptable” in terms of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and what wasn’t. But it continues in school among one’s peers and teachers, and out in the world. Over time our bag gets longer and longer and heavier and heavier as we stuff more and more of ourselves into it: our anger, our impulsiveness, our spontaneity, our softness, our strength, even our intelligence, in our sometimes desperate efforts to be likable or accepted or well thought of, or to fit a certain framework we believe we are called upon to reflect—the stoic, the martyr, the wise one. It is truly dark in the bag, because we are unwilling to let in any light and see what’s going on in a large part of our own psyche.

If we pretend we don’t have this bag over our shoulder, and we therefore refuse to open it from time to time for thirty or forty years, except to stuff more things in, those shadows we have stuffed inside—which are valid and important, if unaccepted, parts of ourselves—fester and grow toxic from lack of acknowledgment and expression. They can linger there and influence our life trajectory in momentous ways we may not know but only see on occasion in dreams, or when the fabric of our life seems to fray or suddenly disintegrate. What we don’t want to look at in the inner world is often visible on our face in the outer world. The inner reflects the outer, and the outer the inner. To come to harmony requires marrying inner and outer, bringing them together again, in the light of awareness and acceptance.

Perhaps it is time to educate ourselves to this burden we carry once and for all and to consciously make ongoing, moment-to-moment efforts to accept all aspects of our being, to listen to and speak with our shadow and our subterranean river of buried grief, and hold them, as best we can, with unconditional acceptance and kindness. This is tantamount to parenting ourselves on the way to what we might call true adulthood.

If we can “parent” ourselves in this way, maybe—just maybe—we will have a clearer view of our children and will be able to see and accept them in ways that will occasion less lopping off of parts of themselves in their heartbreaking attempts to be accepted by us and by the larger world.

Ring the bells that can still ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

LEONARD COHEN, “ANTHEM”