How to Accompany Ourselves and Others in Grief || By Catherine Dockery, MA, Conscious Aging Facilitator
Feeling grief was impossible for me most of my life. I grew up in the middle of a very large family, My mom had absolutely no capacity to hold her own grief nor to recognize or welcome mine. I learned really quickly to be strong, to be independent and not too needy. In order to do this, I had to turn away from vulnerability, including the recognition of my delicate sadness and sense of aloneness in the world. Since my early adult years, I’ve been on a mission to find the depth and meaning of this lack of ability to feel my own sense of loss.
My five-year-old self woke up to the stark reality that I was expected to take charge of my own growing up. It’s taken decades for me to recognize the lasting impact of that time on my nervous system. In addition, it was the impact of future traumas and aloneness that stacked up to create a well of grief and sense of aloneness. I had to wall it off inside of myself in order to function. I had no idea that I would continue to be impacted until I could return someday to heal it.
It’s taken me decades to feel and trust in the safety that I’ve needed, to find the intimacy between grief and aliveness. I have found it through warmth and care and the resonance from others. I am now deeply grateful for the gift of grief.
Welcoming grief has made it possible to breathe more deeply, to touch into joy and play, and find connection with people that matter most, including my very precious self.
Just what is grief?
According to Sarah Peyton, a neuroscience educator, grief is an emotional state of the nervous system that’s activated when we bump up against loss, death or abandonment. We often describe it as sadness or sorrow.
What does it mean to be accompanied in our grief? Sarah has a whole program guiding participants through warm accompaniment. She describes accompaniment as, “Being with another person or ourselves. Being present with our feelings, such as sorrow or any other emotional state we might be in, without trying to fix us. Just being present without trying to reassure us or to distract us from our pain.”
Just to be present in accompaniment often has a quality of warm acceptance and resonance. Sarah describes resonance as being in living connection with another through relationality that is reflected in our voice tone and in our body language. It’s our ability to have a sense of seeing the other person. Resonance allows us to be understood, to be seen, to be known, and to be accepted.
We begin by naming the types of losses we’ve experienced, such as the death of a loved one. Or, there might be some event or interaction from the past that remains unsettled. There might be accidents or illness, violence or unknown causes of death.
There may be the death of a beloved pet. I wanted to name that because often there are some of us who found accompaniment only through our pets, through the animals that have been in our lives. So the death of a beloved pet leaves a very distinct mark on our spirits and souls. Maybe you have some sense of loss around your health, around relationships, friendships, family, perhaps through divorce or breakups or estrangements, maybe the loss of dreams that you’ve had, the loss of innocence, of careers, or jobs, the loss of a sense of place or home. Any of these losses can leave a mark on us, can be something we don’t know how to grieve. There is also the loss of faith, the loss of youth, the loss of hope. So just having your eyes glance through this list and wondering what is here for you to revisit in order to fully heal.
You might think about creating a grief practice that will help you capture the losses that are still lingering within you. But I first wanted to just talk a little bit about the neuroscience of language. Matthew Lieberman is a neuroscientist in social cognition. He researched how the brain can be calmed after it gets triggered or activated with feelings of fight, flight or freeze. He looked at what it takes to calm the brain to bring us out of these survival modes.
Lieberman found that when a person’s experience is named the brain begins to calm down. He tested people in MRI machines and showed slides of facial expressions. When the area of the brain holding emotions was lit up, he tried different methods of calming. The one that was the most effective was simply naming the experience or the feeling.
At least every four seconds we are scanning our environments and asking ourselves, “Is there any danger in our world? Are we safe? Do I matter? We’re asking so that the brain can react quickly and keep us safe. If we find ‘no’ to be the answer, if I am not safe, if I feel that I’m not safe, or that I don’t matter, the brain is so quick and smart it sends all the energy into the fight/flight response and we lose the functions of the rest of the brain. We’re just there for fight, flight, freeze to keep us safe, but we lose the capacity to contextualize the environment – noises or smells or things that we see, voice tones – and we lose our executive functioning as we’re in this triggered state until the brain can again calm gradually over time.
So I think to myself, what if my younger self’s experience had been named by a significant adult? If someone had said to my little 5-year-old, “Of course you are in shock, of course you stopped breathing when your siblings didn’t make room for your voice. Are you overcome by terror and horror and grief?” Each day that your siblings ignored your needs, what if I was encouraged to feel the grief in my own body, to be seen for how painful it is for a little one to not be heard or feel they matter to the ones whom they are deeply attached? What if my experience had been named? I might not have felt the need to move away from myself in order to survive within my family.
It’s not too late. I can now say to my inner 5-year-old self, “Are you feeling hopeless that you will ever be heard among all these siblings?” I can begin to wonder about what this is like to have our experience named in really simple ways. If a friend comes with an upset, we can begin to help with that calming by the naming of their grief or sorrow. We might say, ‘Of course you’re devastated by this loss or it makes so much sense that you could barely breathe.’ Do you need someone to understand what it’s like to live in your body and then your brain?
So making feelings guesses or repeating what someone has said sometimes that sounds kind of awkward but there’s something incredibly validating to know that the other person has heard you deeply. First, think about a loss or death and name the feelings that come up, especially noticing what’s happening in your body sensations as you focus on loss. You can also do this when a friend or family member reveals their feelings of loss.
References and Further Reading
Celeste Kersey, An Exploration of Death and Loss through the Circuit of Panic/Grief, Sarah Peyton’s 2024 Resonance Summit, https://sarahpeyton.com/2024-resonance-summit-epilogue/
About the author: Rev. Catherine Dockery, MA, is a People House minister and a trained facilitator in conscious aging, nonviolent communication and resonant healing of trauma. She has an MA in Public Administration and BA in Communications both from the University of Colorado at Denver. Catherine started The Center for Conscious Aging in 2015 where she conducts workshops, personal coaching and support groups for older adults helping them to understand their developmental changes and transform their lives. She has 10 years of experience in individual and group facilitation and presents on aging topics throughout Colorado. To learn more about Catherine’s services please visit www.centerforconsciousaging.org or email [email protected]
