Resilience: A New Grief Myth That Can Hurt You

This is incredibly wise, tender, true, and soothing to any heart that has experienced loss — which means all of us. There are many faces to the unhealthy aspects of our culture. And this article and its heartfelt and soulful wisdom is among the antidotes. 🙏💜— Molly

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Frank Ostaseski, author of The Five Invitations (https://fiveinvitations.com/the-book/), also writes:

"We have individual and cultural habits around managing grief. We are generally afraid and impatient. Often, our own unexplored fear of grief can lead us to hurrying others along the path of healing. 

"We need to allow for the spectrum of expressions of grief….from the numbness and absence of expression to the wildest and out of control displays. These expressions of grief are rarely allowed in many conventional bereavement support groups.

"This article is worth reading."

The antidote to despair is not to be found in the brave attempt to cheer ourselves up with happy abstracts, but in paying profound and courageous attention to the body and the breath. … To see and experience despair fully in our body is to begin to see it as a necessary, seasonal visitation and the first step in letting it have its own life, neither holding it nor moving it on before its time. — David Whyte,Consolations

By Candyce Ossefort-Russell

I had a hard time sleeping last week. I jolted awake with my heart pounding two or three times every night. Lying with eyes wide open in the dark, images of resilience tapped into a deep, old trauma.

Resilience was setting off trauma? Isn’t that weird?

Let me explain.

Last week I read Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant.

Two years ago, Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, lost her 47-year-old husband to sudden death, and became a widowed mother to her two young children. Her experience led her to write about “kicking the shit out of Option B” when Option A (e.g., the dead husband) isn’t available. Grant is an organizational psychologist who applies to grief his cognitive behavioral strategies for changing the way one thinks during hard times — strategies he uses to help businesses rebound after financial setbacks.

Sandberg and Grant’s message for making it through grief centers on the concept of resilience, which they define as “the strength and speed of our response to adversity.” The goal of the strategies they offer is to help people bounce back to normal as quickly as possible.      

Different Paths Through Grief

Sandberg is clearly a loving mother who wants more than anything to make sure her kids survive their tragedy intact and happy.

I identify wholeheartedly: When I was suddenly widowed at the age of 30 and my son was an 11-month-old nursing infant, the only reason I got out of bed in the morning was to keep my son alive and to try to make some semblance of a normal life for him.

But clearly, even though Sheryl Sandberg and I share an almost panicky desire to assure an ultimate post-death wellbeing for our children, we have very different philosophies about how parents need to deal with their own grief in order to help children thrive in the face of loss.  

Sandberg is a living example of getting back to normal quickly. She’s a high achiever who applies her high-achieving nature to grief. Adam Grant’s tips for “overcoming” sadness and guilt, and for plunging into a full-out plan for finding joy resonated with her, and she applies those strategies with fervor.

In fact, 22.5 weeks into her widowhood, she decided to stop journaling because she consciously chose to try to “move on from this phase of my mourning.” She said, “I am pushing myself to move onward and upward — and part of that is to stop writing this journal.”

Then, fewer than two years after her husband’s death, she somehow found the energy to not only parent her children alone and be back at work, but also to write a book, pose for publicity photos in which she looks radiant, and go on book tour doing interviews all over the country.

Twenty-five years ago, I responded to my widowhood differently. I had a different kind of support and a different personality.

Within a culture that wanted me to hurry up and return to “normal,” I was fortunate enough to have family and a fearless therapist who instead encouraged me to feel whatever I needed to feel for as long as I needed to feel it, and to allow happiness to make its slow and natural way back into my life over time.

Please continue this essay here: https://medium.com/the-mission/resilience-a-new-grief-myth-that-can-hurt-you-40af29639e62?fbclid=IwAR19AAISimz41KqadDDafx8z3Nc7vsAe_hXWQg_f0WvLN9D1tufS86eIalw