Your grief from a grieving experience is similar no matter what the cause is. I learned this first hand. Pain and sadness can overwhelm your heart for different causes, yet completely unrelated events incite the same painful internal feelings. I hope my story encourages you to have compassion for yourself and others if a loss triggers what appears to be unwarranted pain in you when the triggering event was small, you thought.
Local news stations report tragic situations every day; A house burns down and leaves a family in pain; a son dies in war; a car accident leaves someone paralyzed for life. Pain is really a part of life, not a surprisingly strange experience. It affects each of us at some point. Every time something or someone to whom we are attached is taken away, every time we have a disappointment or lose a loved one, we feel pain. Complaint and loss go hand in hand.
I have learned from my own personal experience the nuances of feelings of pain that cannot be obtained from a book or lecture alone.
An adversity does not have to be tremendously tragic in the eyes of others to create immense pain. Your emotional response depends on the situation in your life at the moment. If you’ve had a tragic loss that hasn’t healed yet, it doesn’t take much to feel pain again. The more you suffer from unhealed pain, the easier it will be to return to the raw state of your suffering when a new tragedy strikes.
My heart was very tender after my wife died in a car accident the day after we were married, and I went through immense pain as a wife. About two years later I had a puppy named Apollo. He was a little German Shepherd and I was deeply attached to him. He lived on a busy street near Eugene, Oregon. One Sunday afternoon a friend came by and I went out. Apollo walked out the door when my friend peeked out and the puppy started following the friend. He walked down the road, was run over and killed. Needless to say, I went through the pain of losing pets.
I was devastated. I was grieving for a dog, but the pain in my midsection was similar to what it had felt when Nancy was killed. I cried for the loss of Apollo. In my mind it seemed ridiculous. What I learned in subsequent reflection and healing was that my grief for the puppy was igniting the latent grief I still had from the death of my girlfriend.
Our feelings of pain depend on who we are at this moment. What other pain and sadness still needs some work to heal? What subtle memories of the past flare up again? These are signs that there may be residual grief, unhealed, complicating our current pain, regardless of the cause.
I hope this idea gives you a chance to be compassionate to yourself when the smallest thing can trigger feelings of extreme sadness. When someone at work or a friend tells you, “Just get over it,” you know enough to back off and not just suppress your feelings. I also hope it inspires you to speed up your healing process.
It is important to abate the grievance. If you don’t, the following situation will accumulate greater pain on the load you already carry. In my book, At Least We Were Married, which tells the story of my young wife’s death and my pain at losing her, I go into more detail about how I overcame my suffering and grief pain, which is more than I can in this space little. What I can tell you is that it IS POSSIBLE to heal your pain.