Each week for my drop-in Pain Group, I choose a topic that’s sociological in nature for the group to discuss. I give a brief overview of the literature on the topic (I promise it’s not too academic), and then I pose some questions for reflection and discussion. Last week, I chose grief as our topic.
Grief is its own form of pain—it’s one of pain’s many manifestations. I’m frequently asked whether I focus on physical or emotional pain in my work. I typically smile and say, yes. Both. They travel together. They are processed in similar regions of the brain. What works to improve one will often work for the other. But I’m not a grief counselor. What I really do is work with my clients’ physical pain–which means also working with things that are not strictly physical pain, but that impact the experience of it. So grief and pain have many overlaps, and grief can amplify pain. I wanted to mine those overlaps in the group discussion. Grief corresponds with pain in part because those of us who live with persistent painful conditions must grapple with grieving parts of themselves.
But what’s sociological about grief? In the Pain Group we cover the social layer of pain (the cultural, relational, structural parts of what it means to live with persistent pain in this modern moment). What, then, does grief have to do with any of that?
As a specific topic, grief is about as sociological as pain itself is. How we handle loss, who gets space to grieve, and what even counts as grief are all questions whose answers are collectively produced. We were taught to grieve, or not grieve, and someone at some point showed us what it meant to experience loss and be with others who have lost.
Often the lessons that we learn about what’s appropriate in grief have strong ties to what we believe about what’s normal and okay to feel about physical pain.
In his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, psychotherapist Francis Weller talks about grief not as a problem that needs to be fixed but as a skill to learn. He refers to grief as a communal act. I feel very similarly about the experience of physical pain.
I have long believed that most of what I learned about the human experience of pain was taught to me via grief. I had the unfortunate opportunity to learn to grieve young, after the loss of my father shortly after I left for college. Those early days of grief were some of the most painful moments of my entire life. The avalanches of sorrow that hit me out of nowhere, years later, set me up to understand that pain, and grief, know nothing of timelines. Those moments paved the path for me to think and feel deeply about the nature of suffering.
