What I Have Learned From Being a Grief Therapist

—and Why America Needs to Grieve Right Now

Grief—experienced once—is achingly familiar in its return:

a cold rush,
a sudden narrowing of the room.

Disbelief settling like fog.

Pain spreading slowly:
heavy in the chest,
twisting low in the belly,
dull and vibrating beneath the skin.

Then more quickly:

Breath becomes shallow.
Time loses its edges.

Pain hums everywhere at once:
behind the eyes,
under the ribs,
deep in the places without language.

Sound feels too loud.
Light feels wrong.

The instinct to howl—
to let the sound rip through bone and air—

is countered by a whirlpool of
stillness,
longing for disappearance,
for the mercy of not feeling for a while.

The feeling is terrifying, disorienting, and exhausting.
No one instinctively welcomes grief.

But what if we did?

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Gifts of Grief

We aren’t very good at grief as a culture.

We avoid it, rush it, suppress it—whatever it takes not to feel it. And as a result, we get stuck in it. I regularly meet clients who live day to day with overwhelming, raw emotion just under the surface of their lives. So much energy goes into containing what has never been allowed to move that there is little bandwidth left for joy, creativity, or connection.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Grief, when it is allowed, brings gifts. It is not only something to survive; it is something that can transform us.

Over and over again, in my work as a grief therapist and in my own life, I’ve seen grief act as a portal—into authenticity, accountability, and awakening. Grief reminds us of our humanness and asks us to recommit to a bigger, truer vision of what that means.

These are the things America desperately needs right now.

I meet with clients regularly who want help coping, grounding, and otherwise managing their emotions in regards to the current political stage. I’m happy to do that. But there is another truth.

We need to grieve, because we need its gifts.

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Grief and Authenticity

American life in the 2020s is busy. Most of us live lives fueled by overwhelm and medicated with distractions. We need the intensity of our emotional responses to tell us what matters most to us.

Much of what we are grieving right now—whether we name it or not—has to do with losses we never expected to have to face:
a sense of safety,
shared reality,
moral clarity,
trust in systems,
or the belief that life would continue more or less as it had before.

Current events are inviting us to weigh assumptions and alliances, to rethink and clarify core values.

I cannot speak to the lived experience of everyone in America. For myself and many of the clients I serve, privilege has in the past provided insulation from the harshness experienced by others in our communities. Grief interrupts that illusion. It asks us to see painful truths, and to be honest about where they settle—in our hearts and our guts.

I also speak with clients who experience the current political environment as deep validation for the sense of disenfranchisement and lack of safety they had been told for years was in their imaginations. Grief feels like a call to trust themselves in ways they were conditioned not to.

For all of us, grief poses deep questions:

Where do we draw internal lines?
Where are the circles we draw, and who is inside them?

Increasingly, it is difficult to engage fully with ourselves if we are not also finding ways to engage with community.

I have seen a growing number of social media posts from people engaging politically in new ways—changing alliances, clarifying positions. National polling data seems to validate this observation.

We need this.

We need to feel deeply enough to define our values—and to act based on them.

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Grief and Accountability

Grief invites reflection.

When we slow down enough to feel, we begin to see more clearly—what we are responsible for, what we are not, and what needs to change.

Sometimes grief brings guilt. When that guilt is justified, it can guide repair. When it is not, it can be released. Either way, grief creates the conditions for discernment rather than defensiveness.

We need to be willing to ask:

How did this happen?
How did the collective lifestyle we are living allow this to happen?

Instead of answering these questions with reflexive finger-pointing, grief slows us down. It refocuses the inquiry:

What can I do?

I didn’t personally cause this mess. Neither did you. But we are part of the collective that created it. We need to be present enough—as a nation of individuals—to find responsibility and take action.

Accountability can take many forms.

I have witnessed beautiful variations in my own community—people using suffering as an impetus to create benefit events, donate to food banks, foster animals. These are gestures of humanity, love, and connection that came from feeling too deeply to remain passive.

Even more difficult—and more important—is accepting the call to challenge our assumptions, beliefs, and habits.

There is no single answer to this crisis, unless that answer is to shift the underlying dynamic that feeds it. Our national dialogue has become a competition to silence and dismiss the stories and perspectives of others.

Grief invites us to listen with an intent to understand—to hear each other with openness and humility.

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Grief and Awakening

At its deepest level, grief is an awakening.

It brings us into the present moment—into our bodies, our emotions, our values. It asks us not to numb what we feel, not to discharge it impulsively, but to sit with it, listen to it, and understand what it is asking of us.

When we know and tend our own wounds, we are less easily manipulated through them. When we bypass grief, those unexamined wounds are activated again and again—fueling reactivity, judgment, and fear.

Judgment invites defensiveness.
Presence invites dialogue.

Grief teaches us something radical: that self-interest and the good of the whole are not in opposition. They are the same thing. My well-being cannot be separated indefinitely from yours. None of us are free from the systems we participate in.

To grieve is not to collapse.
It is to wake up.

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The Cost of Avoiding Grief

When grief is not allowed, it doesn’t disappear—it hardens.

It turns into numbness, ignorance, apathy, or rage. It fuels divisiveness and a failure to truly listen to voices outside our own echo chambers. We focus on deconstruction and criticism without the capacity to imagine what might be built in their place.

Leaving—emotionally, relationally, or civically—begins to look like the only answer.

Underlying all of this is a powerful illusion:
that I am separate.
That my well-being can be indefinitely isolated from the well-being of the community I belong to.
That what happens to them will never reach me.

Grief dismantles that illusion.

It reveals a web of interconnection so vast and intimate that the only way to live well is to act with love, compassion, wisdom, and care.

Whether we like it or not, we exist as a shared community—locally, nationally, globally.

We are all America.

Every one of us is part of what has been created—whether we agree with it or not.

Grief does not ask us to drown in despair.
It asks us to become more human: more honest, more responsible, more awake.

If we can allow ourselves to grieve—fully, courageously, together—we may yet discover that the very thing we’ve been avoiding holds the wisdom we need to move forward.