Note: This will be the first of likely many blogs about dealing with the physical sensations of grief. This initial blog is an overview.
It’s a kind of tiredness that’s experienced in body, mind, and soul. The weight of it presses onto your shoulders. Your body aches. Your heart aches. And it feels like it may never get better. That’s the experience of grief, and it’s one that frankly, we don’t talk about often enough.
There are many reasons right now to be grieving, and you may be experiencing grief on a level that rivals the world stage or on one that’s sincerely personal. Grief also doesn’t come alone. It brings along friends, worry, fear, and also hope and love. I want to talk about grief today in terms of what we feel in the body.
Psychology has words for grief disorders. They speak of complicated grief or prolonged grief. And for psychology, these are listed as grief that meets certain criteria, but isn’t designed to deal with or even put a label on the grief we may feel on a day to day basis. The communities I work closely with, those who are neurodivergent and/or chronically ill-disabled, often deal with a lot of grief, where the able-bodied, neurotypical community thinks of grief only in terms of death, and even then it’s manageable, something you can deal with. Even then, grief can produce physical symptoms.
The physical sensations of grief differ for everyone, but they might include a tight chest, muscle aches and pains, shoulder or back pain, or even feeling as if you are weighed down, moving through sludge. There’s a catch in the throat, not to mention the physical sensation of wanting to cry or releasing those tears, whether in a soft, quiet gentle rain of sorrow or a hiccuping, sobbing torrent.
Our society teaches us to shove down those sensations, to “get over them”, when the truth is depending on the situation, it can take a long time, several weeks, months, or even years, to fully integrate grief into our being. No one “gets over” grief. We can, however, learn to walk with it, to hold it in our bodies and hearts, and eventually treat it like a companion, or even an occasional visitor, rather than something that takes over our lives and consumes us.
One of the first ways of learning to live with grief, and perhaps even move through grief so that it is no longer larger than us, is to understand how it feels in the body. An example, if I may, from my own life. As I type this, my shoulders ache like a heavy yoke is on them and there are sharp, stabbing pains in them. I’m tired. I want to go lay down. I probably will once I finish writing this blog. I know what I’m experiencing is grief, and a lot of different layers of it, too.
Why is this knowledge important? Because when I recognize grief in my body I can take steps to move it through my body or just sit with it. I can say “what do I need in this moment?” and have the answer help. This is why it’s so important to know about grief in the body, and why I’ll be talking about it more.
