I learned an important lesson one week when I had a cookie at 2pm on Monday, a cookie at 2pm on Tuesday, and, at 2pm on Wednesday, experienced an overwhelming physical urge for a cookie. Like I was being pushed into it.
This was both highly interesting and incredibly unsurprising. Our minds and bodies are usually just trying to oblige us, based on patterns of behavior or of attention-paying. It's just like TikTok showing us lots of squirrel videos because that's what we've previously clicked on. The mind functions as an algorithm, surfacing whatever has sparked interest. And it even thoughtfully factors in your scheduling patterns.
So it wasn't my body dragging me along, trying to satisfy its base yearnings. My body is not my oppressor, but more like an eager poodle taught to expect a walk every morning. I trained it that way, and can just as easily train it some other way. This is a whole other way to think about habits—a far more helpful framing than the standard talk of discipline and self-denial.
It's the same with suffering and grieving.
If the memory of your dear deceased parakeet Henry keeps popping up, it's not your mind dragging you through a painful process of grieving. It's that you've devoted lots of recent attention to Henry, so the "algorithm" (so to speak) keeps offering heart-wrenching trips through the The Sad Tale of Henry, and if you keep opting in, soon every icon on your mental screen will be some slant or other on that theme.
Henry isn't calling to you from your imagination any more than the cookies are. You've established a pattern of focusing attention, so your mind keeps offering more of same. Just like TikTok offering squirrel videos.
There's one big problem. We are convinced, as a society, that we need to think about bad stuff a lot, because if we gloss over it, the very worst thing might happen:
REPRESSION. We obsess over loss and tragedy because we've been told it's a long, arduous process. It has filtered down from the mountaintops of psychotherapy that we must "accept" before we can move on.
Here's where we screw this up (tremendously): "Accept" doesn't mean "approve". We have developed a societal habit of waiting for a feeling of approval, which will never arrive, because Henry was a hell of a parakeet, so we'll naturally always be sad. How have we managed to convince ourselves that we must
approve of misfortune? Talk about being set up for failure!
Humans don't require optimal conditions and unblemished delight for proper functioning. In fact, we're built for loss. Not to approve of it, but to accept it and move on. The hazards of repression arise when we neurotically deny loss, death, failure, etc. We might hover in foggy denial, or seal off the thought. In such instances, we need to take time to really think things through. That's the "acceptance" threshold, and it's a low bar!
Over-grieving invites perils more daunting than dreaded repression. What's worse, after all, than getting caught in a vicious circle of obsessive misery?
If you know what happened, and clearly acknowledge what happened, and some sort of emotional response has landed, then you've accepted. You are free to move on...unless you’re attached to sad stories (probably to
ballast your happiness).
There is no shortage of sad stories to grab at. Me, I'll never play with the NY Knicks, and the only reason I'm not weeping as I type that is because I've opted out of marination in the lament. I haven't made my life revolve around it, becoming That Guy With The Dashed Basketball Dreams. Oh, and don't get me started on the woman in the green crushed velvet dress with whom I exchanged soulful glances in 1992 but was too shy to follow up with. Having opted out of freezing attention on sad tales, they don't often pop up on my mental dashboard.
Not repression. Having accepted, I declined perpetual marination.
Modern grievers keep endlessly running the scenario ("My beloved parakeet has been forever silenced!"), hoping to reach an approval point where it no longer makes them sad. But that's not how it works. You're just training the algorithm. And as you train, so shall you reap.
Notes:
1. We grieve very differently than people in previous centuries. It's partially because they were tougher. But I think it's also because this terrible misunderstanding of "acceptance" went viral in the mid 20th century after the rise of psychotherapy, which scared us about "repression" to the point where we make ourselves miserable waiting for an impossible level of approval that was never the benchmark (i.e. loss never comes to feel terrific...and that's okay).
2. Contemporary psychotherapists seem to share the misapprehension, and urge an overzealous and unrealistic notion of "acceptance". They've lost the thread.
3. This comes at a moment when we are more entitled than ever. We feel we deserve an unblemished world experience, and are like princesses increasingly vexed by smaller and smaller mattress peas. The terror of "repression", which drives compulsive over-marination re: shortfall, is a particularly toxic addition to our psychic landscape.
4. More on how "Your Body's Just Trying to Accommodate You"
See also
Grief Survival Kit