The Intention of Grief

I’m puzzled and fascinated by the form and place that unresolved grief takes in our lives. Grief has a life of its own. If you don’t make space to know it and feel it, it has an uncanny ability to find you.  Grief has to be expressed and understood, and if it isn’t it will hold onto you until you know it and surrender to what it has to say.

For example, I was startled and shocked to witness intense shaming and criticism from my niece’s coach at her last soccer game. He’s always had a tendency toward the negative as compared with the other coach, but he was emphasizing the negative uniquely on Saturday. The intensity of his criticism toward my niece and others was hard to communicate without being there, however, I hope that it is clear that I am not talking about benign coaching feedback to players. He actually yelled at my niece after she shot on goal “Good shot, next time pass the ball!” which was absurd because it was her and the goalie with no one else in sight to pass it to. My niece picked up on his tone as well and was in tears after the game. She said that the coach was yelling at her all game and we agreed that we would intervene and find a resolution or find another team for her.

This example of unresolved grief is classical in its presentation in the sense that grief adheres to us in hidden ways. When the coach was confronted with his misbehavior he was genuinely shocked by the feedback. It was as if he was considering for the first time the possibility that he may have been negative and harmful to the girls.

In his defense, I do believe that he didn’t “know” how he was impacting the team. But we have to allow Freud into the conversation at this time in the sense of saying that he was unconsciously acting-out a central experience in his upbringing (either familial or sport-related from his childhood) that had been dissociated from his consciousness awareness.  In other words, when grief isn’t felt and known by us and honored as a natural process of being human, our conscious memory may forget the original hurt, but our unconsciousness will not allow us to forget. We “remember” by acting out those original hurts in the form of our adult relationships and in a sense we recreate the very pain that we have suppressed from consciousness to begin with.

Freud termed the phenomenon the “repetition compulsion” in order to describe the way in which he noticed that his patients repeated complaints in relationship after relationship, at work, school and home, repetitively until they understood the way in which they were manifesting a central pain in their childhood in the style or shape of relationships that they formed as adults.

I’ll guarantee you that if we had this coach in therapy what would be revealed is a very painful experience with a hypercritical coach, father, etc. that he has not fully felt, accepted and allowed himself to grieve. If and when he makes that happen, his “blindness” to his abrasive style will disappear as if magically transformed from something he doesn’t “know” to something that he feels and mourns over, and therefore he refuses to repeat with other children.

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