What grief asks

There is a version of my work where I stay moving. Back to back sessions, a full calendar, the rhythm of holding space so constant that it becomes its own kind of anesthesia. I know how to do this. Most of us do. We learned it early in training, in the culture of care, in the particular way helping professions teach you to be present for everyone except yourself.

When I am busy enough, I can stay at a distance from grief. Not intentionally. Not as a choice I make consciously. It just happens the way water finds its level. There is always something more urgent. Always another person whose sorrow has a better claim on the hour than my own.

I used to think this was just the nature of the work. Now I think it is one of its central occupational hazards.

Here is what I know from the times I have let myself stay close:

Something alchemical happens.

I become more human. Not more skilled, not more knowledgeable, not more equipped with the right intervention at the right moment. Just more human. And when I am more human, something in the therapy room loosens. Clients feel it before I can name it. The work becomes more fluid. Less effortful. Less like technique and more like contact.

I don't fully understand why this is. But I know it in a reliable and predictable way now.

Grief does something to the practitioner that no training can replicate. It returns you to yourself. To the part of you that knows, from the inside, what it is to carry something heavy. To lose something. To not be okay and have to keep showing up anyway.

That knowledge is not incidental to this work. It is the work.

Our care work bring us the full weight of being human. The losses that have names and the ones that don't. The grief that looks like anger, like numbness, like eating disorders, like not being able to get out of bed in the morning. They bring it to us because they need somewhere to put it.

What are we bringing to that room?

I don't think we need to arrive having processed everything. Plus, we don't ever get "done" with our own grief.

What I mean is that there's a difference between a practitioner who is in relationship with their own grief, who knows its terrain, who is willing to be in it and one who has found a way to stay moving so they never have to find out what it contains.

Clients feel that difference too. Even when they can't name it.

I keep coming back to Francis Weller's framing: grief is a solitary journey we cannot do alone.

That's true for our clients. I think it's equally true for us.

The question I'm sitting with lately: what would it look like for helping professionals to have a real container for their own grief? Not a supervision hour where loss gets reframed as countertransference. Not a vacation that's really just recovery from over-functioning. Something actually tended.

What does grief ask of you in your work? I'd love to hear what this brings up.

With care, Hilary