But what if we are grieving about something not so "acceptable" or something considered not worth grieving about? What if a son has died of AIDS or a sister has taken her own life? What if we have experienced an abortion or miscarriage? What if we have lost our job, our spouse has been unfaithful, or our child has chosen a lifestyle we consider immoral? What if we are dealing with emerging memories of childhood sexual abuse? What if we are grieving about physical or mental abuse? About money?

If we include our "little griefs" along with our "large griefs" we can say that grief is as natural to every person as breathing. It is inevitable! You cannot live without experiencing it in a thousand different ways. Such a seemingly inconsequential thing as your husband's phoning at the last minute, just before guests are arriving for dinner, to say that he has to work late throws you into a mild form of grief. Or perhaps the boss under whom you have worked happily for ten years is suddenly transferred, and the new man is pompous and overbearing. This is a form of grief. How you handle these "little griefs" will in some measure tell you how you will probably handle the larger griefs when they come. Another form of grief might come if you work for a large corporation and you have moved three times in the last four years. Your family has settled into the last place that you have moved and your children at first found it difficult to make friends and then did and finally everyone is settled in and your company tells you that you have to relocate again. The mother says that they have never before felt such a sense of belonging as they have in their present town. They had hoped that they could stay there for a long time. This is a form of grief since they will be leaving again and having to uproot the family again.

Think of the problem of divorce. Certainly divorce is a situation which creates grief in the hearts of those who have now lost someone who once was dear to them. It is almost like a living death to see the one whom you continue to love turning his back on you, figuratively slapping you in the face.

Think of grief in relation to a man in is forties who is laid off indefinitely because of a business recession. Then there is the person who has worked diligently to gain advancement in his job, who has worked overtime and weekends to demonstrate his ability to fill a particular position. After several years that job is finally open, and he is sure he will be chosen. But the boss remembers he has a nephew who needs a job, and the nephew takes over. Is this a cause for grief? Of course it is!

In situations such as these, grief bears a certain stigma ~ it is associated with something considered to be disgraceful or dishonorable. The person who has suffered a loss of this kind may feel abandoned and cut off from comfort, and may think it would be unwise or impossible to ask others for support. If you are carrying some sorrow that you feel you need to hide from the world, the following steps may help you to overcome your burden.

Recognize the risk of not grieving. When we are reluctant to share our grief with others for fear that they will condemn or reject us, we are experiencing what some experts now call disenfranchised grief. This happens when the cause of our sorrow is something that we feel guilty about or think others disapprove of. "In Living Through Personal Loss," Ann Kaiser Stearns labels this "unspeakable grief."

When we are not free to express our grief, however, we run the risk of our wound becoming "infected." Keeping the pain to ourselves inhibits our ability to work through our suffering, delays healing, and needlessly increases our pain. To our burden of sorrow, we add the burden of isolation and loneliness.

Identifying barriers to grieving. Sometimes we feel unable to express our grief because of unrealistically high demands that we place upon ourselves. We may be living by a double standard; we might have compassion for others who grew up in abusive and dysfunctional families, for example, but are convinced that our own experience is too shameful to talk about. We may be surrounded by people who are excessively rigid and intolerant. Such people see life in black and white with no shades of gray. They categorize actions as absolutely right or wrong with no consideration of the circumstances.

We may equate sadness with weakness, having learned that tears are "sissy" and that strength of character means not being too "emotional." Men, especially, have this damaging myth imposed upon them.

Some people may avoid us or deny our grief because it threatens to awaken unresolved issues within themselves. Someone who has not faced issues stemming from his or her own abusive childhood, for example, will hardly be in a position to help you grieve the painful memories of your alcoholic parent.

The deepest truth I have discovered is that if one accepts the loss, if one gives up clinging to what is irretrievably gone, then the nothing which is left is not barren but enormously fruitful. Everything that one has lost comes flooding back again out of the darkness, and one's relation to it is new ~ free and unclinging. But the richness of the nothing contains far more; it is the all-possible, it is the spring of freedom.

Find a safe person. We need to identify as soon as possible to at least one "safe" person with whom we can share our grief. A safe person is someone with a capacity for empathy, compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance.

In sorrow we begin slowly to let the anger and the self-pity go. We begin to think that we can know happiness again ~ it is a happiness with shadows, but it has found a way to affirm those shadows.

The following criteria for safe people may be helpful ~ almost invariably they have suffered significant loss and worked through grief. Their personal value systems are balanced and flexible, not rigid and condemning. And they have a level of emotional and spiritual maturity that enables them to be tolerant and open instead of judgmental and defensive.

Watch out for well-intentioned cliches. Bereaved individuals need to stay alert for well-meaning but misguided people who may try to impose some kind of premature solution upon their grief. Almost certainly, friends will subject us to well-worn reassurances and cliches; "It's all for the best," "Time heals all wounds," "Good will come out of it." These are half-truths at best. Or people may try to set the time frame in which we are supposed to finish our grief journey; "It's time for you to put this behind you and get on with your life." But grieving is a highly individual process, and no one has the right to impose a schedule on our inner pilgrimages.

Remember that feelings are not the enemy. Feelings are in themselves neither good nor bad ~ they just are. Telling someone, "You shouldn't feel that way!" is misguided and harmful. Our feelings serve as a kind of smoke alarm or early warning system for our emotional and spiritual condition. When we suppress or ignore this warning system, we obstruct our inner growth.

It is one of the grace-filled mysteries of the human spirit that when we acknowledge our grief and suffering, we gain new energy for growth and healing. In the healing process, we do not seek to erase the past, but to integrate it into our unique story. We no longer feel shame about the things that have happened but learn to offer our pain for transformation into new life.

Some faith traditions have called this process redemption. Contemporary language sometimes calls it recovery. It means that not only is healing possible, but that we can even become "weller than well" ~ stronger and richer for having courageously moved through grief.

Recognize that feeling precedes forgiving. Almost all grief, especially stigmatized grief, involves the issue of forgiveness. "Forgive and forget" may be the most common of all the religious sayings to which grieving people are subjected. Forgetting our life story is neither healthy, necessary, not possible, and forgiving is often misunderstood. Genuine forgiveness is never possible until we have worked through our anger over what happened. Anger at God can be particularly troublesome. This is especially a problem if someone convinces us that we have no right to ask, "Why me?" since, after all, others are suffering worse. "Why me?" is a natural, honest reaction in our struggle to understand the ways of a loving God in light of our suffering. We need to let the question come forth and to seek spiritual guidance, if necessary, in order to work through our anger.

Similarly, we need to get in touch with our anger toward those who may have wronged us before we can forgive them. Forgiveness does not mean that we have to like what happened, ignore reality, suppress our hurt feelings, or convince ourselves it didn't matter. More than anything, forgiveness involves a decision not to retaliate and to allow God to be the judge of the mysterious depths of human behavior.

Suffering is experienced as a threat to what I am. It threatens to diminish and in the end to destroy my personal identity ~ so when the suffering first comes, ignorant of our dormant potential, we feel simply that we cannot bear it ~ yet when, by miracle, we accept the suffering, receive it, take it on board, then we find that this limited self is an illusion, that we are infinitely more than we ever imagined ~ thus does the destructive power of suffering become creative and what is death-dealing become life-giving.

Take heart ~ as we find comfort in healing attitudes and relationships, our passage through the dark valley of hidden grief can become a pilgrimage to new life. We can emerge with a depth and strength we did not know was there until we opened ourselves to the healing journey.

Find a support group where you can truly be yourself. In this kind of group, you can drop your mask, lay aside your fear of rejection, and accept your imperfections. A nurturing support group helps us to grieve when others might look down on us or even condemn us for "bringing it on ourselves." Compassionate people do not discount our sorrow, no matter what its cause. With them, we are able to share the whole range of our joys, sorrows, triumphs, and defeats in the common bond of our human brokenness and immeasurable potential.

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