What we do not Mourn, We try to Fix

There is something very human about wanting to make things better.

When something hurts, we often look for what needs to change. We want the other person to understand. We want our child to stop doing what frightens us. We want the relationship to become different. We want injustice to end. We want the world to be safer, kinder, more reasonable.

Working to create change matters. But I’m interested in something more subtle:

**What if our attempts to change what is outside of us are sometimes also attempts to escape what is happening inside us? **

It is easy to experience our pain as evidence that something outside us must be different before we can be okay.

If only they would speak to me differently. If only my child would behave differently. If only my friend understood. If only the people in power would change their policies. Then, perhaps, I could finally feel at peace.

But what we experience is not simply a result of what is happening outside of us in this moment. Our history, our nervous system state, our expectations, our beliefs and the meaning we make of what is happening all shape our experience.

Reality enters us through an interpretive and embodied process. Something happens. It means something to me. I have an experience of it. I respond to that experience.

This matters because the intensity of our emotional or somatic response does not tell us how true our interpretation is, or how severe the situation is. If we are not careful, it is easy to mistake our experience of reality for reality itself.

So there is a question worth asking:

To what extent is my wish to change this situation motivated by a wish to escape some pain I am feeling or anticipating?

When we do not want the painful experience, we may become preoccupied with fixing the thing we believe is causing it. If we make relief dependent on the outside world becoming different, we can become trapped in an endless struggle with reality. And from a desperate place, our actions may recreate the pain we are trying to avoid, or pass it on to others despite our best intentions.

Mourning what is

Grief and mourning do not sound heroic at first. They can sound like resignation or passivity, particularly when we are faced with something that we believe should be different. We are used to the idea that when something is wrong, we should do something about it. And if we can see something we could do that we believe would make a positive difference, it can seem almost self-evident that we should do it. But this is precisely where I think it is worth slowing down and becoming curious about our own motivation.

What if the wish to act is partly a wish to escape what we are experiencing? What if the perceived benefit of changing the situation is so great that we are no longer in a position to really examine whether the action we are considering is wise, or whether there might be something else we have not yet seen? We can become convinced that our action is necessary because we have not yet faced what it would mean to simply be with what is. In this way our proposed action can become almost unfalsifiable: because we believe so strongly in the relief or good that it will bring, it becomes very difficult to question it.

This is where I think grief and mourning offer something important. Grief asks us to stay with what is true even when we desperately wish it were otherwise. It allows us to feel the loss without immediately turning that loss into a problem that someone or something must solve. If reality cannot immediately be made different, and we stop fighting the fact that it is as it is, we encounter the discrepancy between what is and what we wished were true. That discrepancy is loss. And when we allow ourselves to feel the loss rather than immediately solving it, we mourn.

This is not about deciding that nothing should change. It is about becoming willing to feel what is here before deciding what to do about it. There may be something that needs to happen, but we do not have to decide what that is while we are still trying to get away from our own experience. When we can allow ourselves to mourn what is, something in us can settle enough to see more clearly. And perhaps when action is genuinely needed, it will become clear without requiring us to force ourselves towards it.

What we find when we stop fighting

When we allow ourselves to feel what we have been trying not to feel, other things often begin to emerge. Meanings we have carried without examining them. Old hurts, longings and fears. Experiences that have been waiting to be felt. We can begin to separate our emotional response from the events in the moment, and to notice: what belongs to what is happening now and what has been carried into the present from somewhere else. The intensity of the situation may decrease—not because anything has been resolved, but because we have stopped fighting our own experience. We may also begin to notice how much pain we create by pushing away what we feel. We reinforce the messages we may already have received: that we are too much, too sensitive, too irrational, too… And the pushing away itself can become part of the injury: another way of not being met with the warmth and care we needed. Becoming aware of this invites mourning for how we haven’t been met and for how difficult it was to find a way on our own. But we did it.

And now we can begin to break the pattern—not by finally growing up and leaving those childish emotions behind, but by turning towards ourselves with curiosity and gentle care. This is not always an easy thing to do. What we may encounter is the painful recognition that there are things we cannot make different: someone may never understand us, a relationship may never become what we hoped it would be, the past cannot be changed, and the world may not give us what we needed.

Through mourning, we can begin to relinquish the fantasy that if we just find the right action, we can finally make reality give us what we needed. There is powerlessness in this. Impotence. And that can feel heavy, because what we have often needed is not to be told to accept our powerlessness, but to have company in it—to have someone believe our experience and recognise that what we long for is okay and makes sense.

Perhaps this is where mourning needs relationship. We can begin by taking our own experience seriously, becoming soft to it, and seeking the company that helps us do the same. Paradoxically, acknowledging and mourning where we are powerless can free us to recognise where our power actually is. We no longer have to use our power to make the world give us what we needed. We can become more available to what is actually possible.

What grief teaches us

When we allow grief and mourning to come, they can help us hold what was painful. Grief is the experience of our heart stretching to hold more of what is true. And if we didn’t love, we wouldn’t grieve. Grief is evidence of the depth of our care, and we can let our heart be touched by that. None of this feels easy at the time. It can feel heart-breaking and excruciating, but it leaves us more whole and softer to a world that has now become our teacher for the depth of our own love.

And something else becomes possible. We may still act, but our relationship to action has changed. We are no longer trying to act our way out of an experience we cannot bear. We can look at what is happening with less desperation and more freedom, and perhaps ask a different question: not “What can I do to make this stop?” but “What, if anything, is mine to do here?”

Our pain is not a transparent measure of what is happening outside us. The intensity of what we feel cannot tell us, by itself, what action is right. When we have mourned what we cannot change, we become more able to see what we can. And when there is something that needs to be done, perhaps we can trust that clarity will find us, rather than manufacture urgency.

We are enabled to act from something else: the lived experience of what being met with love and care feels like. Through mourning we can find the nuanced position of: Not giving up on the world, but no longer needing to fight the world in order to be at peace within ourselves.