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I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief
C.S. Lewis
Humans are story-telling animals, and there is a tendency to make up a story – to expect that there is a story – around every emotion.
But emotions are a summary of your organic body’s status, and are not necessarily related to external situations or even to any recognisable past event. Instead they can be your animal body’s story, with an animal organic meaning that knows nothing of cognitive-level stories, and may not make any sense to your rational mind. So fear, terror, apprehension, anxiety, helplessness, powerlessness, grief, persecution, foreboding or a sense of impending doom may relate to something real I the external world, happening now – in which case the cause may be quite obvious.
However, a useful question to always ask (when you remember) is "to what extent is this emotion proportional to this situation?"
If there is any sense of disproportion in which the feeling seems smaller than the actual thing itself, then either you are simply maintaining some calmness in the storm, or you are slightly dissociated (or both). Slight numbness in a real immediate situation is normal. The body-mind demands response in the form of action - rather than introspection. It is only afterwards and in genuine safety that we can have the luxury of unpicking the details, and the mild dissociative adaptation naturally (ideally) de-adapts by itself.
If the feeling seems to be bigger than the actual situation warrants, then again we have three clear options – (i) one being to check that maybe there is something else that your conscious mind has not yet picked up on or is not immediately aware of. The two remaining options are either (ii) this is a memory of a fearful event that you may or may not know about, or (iii) your body is going through some kind of physiological emergency (and the emotion is a biological existential fear). If there are also physical symptoms – sweating, palpitations, shaking, nausea – then either the remembered emotion is big (more like terror than fear), or something is happening with your metabolism.
When everything is over, one of the emotions that follows may be Grief.
In this gathering-back-together, grief almost always arises when the body recognises that its is safe but something - innocence, part of the body, part of the self, part of the family, a favourite toy - has been lost. If allowed to take its biological course, the grief does not last long at all – because it is an emotion of re-integration of everything that remains.
Grief also arises because the body has a strong feeling of loss because "it/we could have been like this all the time" – a feeling/state closely connected to the "gathering back together what remains". A feeling of re-connecting to what was disconnected-from. Which results in mild grief when we are extremely happy or awe-struck or become aware of some deep connection that we were previously oblivious to. This grief-of-reconnection itself may be overwhelming. So re- connection (from fragmented parts back to being loosely and adaptively coupled) is not a trivial thing, and has to be marinated in for some time before it can become a normalised state.
Consequently, in restorative work and healing of trauma – there is almost always grief. It is particularly important to recognise that biological grief usually needs no particular story to be told, often arises without an obvious narrative of its own, and – provided that it is not locked in by being attributed to a story – goes almost as quickly as it came, because it has completed its biological task.
Of course, as humans we are rather more than biology, and so to that can be added a bigger theme: "Grief is Love with nowhere to go" (from Rob Avis, on LinkedIn). I would put it slightly differently - Love has to be re-organised so that it has somewhere to go, and grief is the beginning of of that process of re-organisation,
In these days of the world slowly dying [1], grief is everywhere. We started with CS Lewis stating that Grief lay below anger, but often anger lies below grief. Here we have identified the inherent polarity of the body-mind - whatever falls uncontrollably inwards (grief) must eventually have to turn back outwards if one is to live meaningfully and responsively in the world. And whatever falls uncontrollably outwards in anger or terror will eventually have to turn back inwards to find some greater self-awareness. The opposite is always present, and what usually prevents it is a lack of acceptance of (or overwhelm in) the more superficial and immediately obvious emotion. Therefore the practices of Arriving, Love, Gratitude & Appreciation and the ability to work with "Gesture-Response" are fundamental skills for making the most of the Body-Mind - but also for this Age.
References & Notes