Some Thoughts on Loss and Ease

“It’s been immensely liberating to realize so much of joy is made worse by trying to make joy stay. And so much of suffering is made worse by trying to make suffering go away. When you’re just comfortable allowing whatever sensations are there to be there, allowing the paths whatever their paths, that is healing.”

Max Ritvo

Lately, I’ve been working with grief with a client. Or should I say I’ve been trying to hold the client through an experience I know so well that every time I want to say “I know how that feels,” the only correct answer is, “It doesn’t matter who gets you and who doesn’t? This sucks.” The client has been telling me that therapy is not quite helpful to them as they are not able to go back and be functional, find the motivation to do things that they once could. But they come back every week, irrespective because they do like talking about the kind of stuff we’ve been talking about.

At one point, I started doubting myself. Am I not a good enough therapist? Why am I not able to help this client achieve their functionality back? How did I just miss upon their goals? Have I been too focused on what I think the client will benefit from? Practice and experience tell me that the answer to all these questions is yes, no and maybe. At the heart of therapeutic work, there is a back and forth navigation amongst what the client wants to achieve from the space, patterns I think the client will benefit from looking at, empathizing with them, intervening when they fall back to maladaptive coping patterns and helping them reframe what this space is actually capable to provide.

I am coming to realize it is so important to cut yourself some slack while trying to help the client and communicating back to the client that they would have to do the same. We are not trying to find the solution to a mathematical equation. We will not arrive at a solution. I certainly share the frustration with my client when they wish all this healing was easy, quick and less taxing. But at the same time, I think it is pertinent to their well-being for healing to look messy, chaotic, slow and non-linear. It is the only way they can truly experiment and explore themselves.

As per my understanding, as adults, we have way too many external responsibilities, worries and stressful events to be able to find time and energy to even look within. Moreover, we put pressure on ourselves to be able to arrive at the “good part” as soon as possible. I am guilty of expecting myself to move on from painful experiences through social comparison. There was way too much unconscious pressure to get through the difficult times because the people around me were able to do so. I certainly missed upon the fact that in addition to having completely unique experiences, I did not share similar emotions with them and I certainly do not subscribe to the hustle culture that expects to rest “productively”. Time and again, I have forgotten my own principles and theories of life. I think that is the cruelest thing we can do to ourselves. Hasten our process of healing to meet other people’s timelines and forget our own vision of life, to accommodate the world at large.

And so, there is no one answer other than actually slowly rewiring everything. When dealing with loss, we are grieving what it could have been, missing what is was and mourning everything that life is not. If we come to therapy expecting this will solve me, we are labeling ourselves as a problem. We have problems, we are not the problem ourselves. I wish things were easier for all of us, I really do. Simultaneously, I wish there is space to experience the hard ones and letting them stay with us, just as we would have invited the more pleasurable and fun stuff.