I am curious about the relationship between American cinema’s obsession with sex and violence, and unexpressed collective grief. I have personally noticed, in myself and in people I have worked with, that unimaginable grief – grief too big to bear – sometimes comes out sideways in indiscriminate, loveless hypersexuality or rageful violence. If this happens for us as individuals, perhaps it also happens for us collectively?
Ironically, it was a movie that gave me the idea. “Manchester by the Sea” is a deeply moving story about grief. In the movie, we see what tragedy does as it strikes, how it ravages a family, how everyone responds differently, and how some suffer in ways they come to feel shame about, when in fact these suffering people are simply dancing the choreography of grief.
In the ones affected by immense loss we see all sorts of tell-tale signs on the surface: self hatred, isolating tendencies, inability to focus or controlling hyper-focus, and perhaps even self-destructive behaviors like indiscriminate sexual promiscuity or an anger hair trigger that explodes into violence. But below the surface, what we don’t necessarily see, is shame.
In his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, psychotherapist Francis Weller offers us wisdom about the many shades and hues of grief. In the book he speaks about the relationship between grief and shame:
There is another entrance into grief … in the places often untouched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives. We often hate these parts of ourselves, hold them in contempt, and refuse to allow them the light of day. …
These neglected pieces of soul live in utter despair. What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something we feel is outside the circle of worth. That is our predicament – we chronically sense the presence of sorrow, but we are unable to truly grieve, because we feel that this piece of who we are is unworthy of grief.
Weller explains that none of us are born with shame, rather that shame comes on over time as a response to the cumulative effects of neglect and violation:
We can endure a certain number of times when the connection is broken between us and the people we love and need. We can endure a certain volume of disappointments and criticism. But at some point, with enough repetition, the internal stories associated with those events reach their saturation point, and the fictions crystallize into things that feel like truths.
Herein begins the slow, insidious process of carving up the self to fit into the world ... We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality and so forth are the cause of our unacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion, even if it is provisional. We become convinced that these pieces of who we are, on some basic level, are not good enough – that they are, in fact, shameful – and we banish them to the farther shore of awareness in hopes of never hearing from them again. They become our outcast brothers and sisters.
In my work with clients, I am observing that many, if not all of us are working with some amount of grief. (How can we not? We live in a world experiencing staggering loss on the daily.) We each have different responses to this collective grief.
When grief arises, Francis Weller offers some insights about the healing process:
In order to loosen shame’s grip on our lives, we need to make three moves. The first is from feeling worthless to feeling ourselves as wounded. The second emerges from the first and is a shift from seeing ourselves through the lens of contempt to one of a budding compassion. And the third is moving from silence to sharing. As long as we see our suffering as evidence of worthlessness, we will not move toward our wounds with anything but judgment.
That third move we must make, from silence to sharing, is important, but be mindful to share these vulnerable truths only with people you fully trust. As Goethe said, ‘Tell a wise person, or else keep silent’.
In the times ahead, it will be vital for us to be able to move from silence to sharing. When our circumstances don’t allow for sharing with others in the human community, we can turn to the natural world. We can share with the community of the natural world through our breath, our body, and our wordless voice.
Compassion is the condition that allows us to see beauty in our chaotic dance with grief. Without compassion stirring, bringing grace to our wild movements, the dance becomes a nightmarish cage fight with our shadow selves.
Please share this with anyone you know who might benefit from hearing this right now.