Your pain from an experience of wrong is similar no matter what the cause. I learned this first hand. Pain and sadness can overwhelm your heart from different causes, and yet completely unrelated events incite the same painful inner feelings. I hope my brief story encourages you to have compassion for yourself and others if a loss triggers what seems like unwarranted grief in you when the triggering event was small, he thought.
Local news stations report tragic situations every day; A house burns down and leaves a family in aggravation; a son dies in the war; a car accident leaves someone paralyzed for life. Grief is truly a part of life, not a surprisingly strange experience. It affects each of us at some point. Every time something or someone we are attached to is taken away, every time we have a disappointment or lose a loved one, we feel grievance. Complaints and Losses go together.
I have learned from my own personal experience the nuances of hurt feelings that cannot be elicited from a book or a lecture alone.
An adversity does not have to be grossly tragic in the eyes of others to create immense pain. Your emotional response depends on your life situation at the moment. If you’ve had a tragic loss that hasn’t healed yet, it doesn’t take much to make you feel grieved again. The more grievances you bear that have not been healed, the easier it will be to return to the raw state of your suffering when a new tragedy occurs.
My heart was very tender after my wife was killed in a head-on car accident the day after we got married, and I went through immense marital grief. About two years later I had a puppy named Apollo. He was a little German shepherd and I became very fond of him. He lived on a busy street near Eugene, Oregon. One Sunday afternoon a friend passed by and I was out. Apollo slipped out the door as my friend peeked out and the pup started following the friend. He went out on the road, they ran over him and killed him. Needless to say, I went through a pet loss complaint.
I was devastated. He was crying to a dog, but the pain in my midsection was similar to what I had felt when Nancy was killed. I wept for the loss of Apollo. In my mind it seemed ridiculous. What I learned in subsequent reflection and healing was that my grievance for the puppy was igniting the latent grievance I still had for my girlfriend’s death.
Our feelings of injury depend on who we are in this moment. What other grievance and pain still needs a little work to heal? What subtle memories of the past spring up again? These are signs that there may be residual, unhealed grievances compounding our current pain, regardless of the cause.
I hope this idea gives you the opportunity to be compassionate with 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 hide your feelings. I also hope it inspires you to speed up your healing process.
Reducing grievance is important. If you don’t, the next situation will pile great pain on top of the burden you already carry. In my book, At Least We Were Married, which tells the story of my young girlfriend’s death and my grief at losing her, I go into more detail about how I overcame my grief and grief, which is more than I can in this space. short. What I can tell you is that it IS POSSIBLE to heal your grievance.
