grief Archives – Page 2 of 2 – Marty Cooper, PhD, MFT

April 20, 2020August 12, 2024 by Marty L. Cooper, PhD, MFT

May 2020 – Depression and Ungrieved Futility

Last month, I was interviewed on the Sidewalk Talk podcast by my friend and colleague, Traci Ruble. Sidewalk Talk is a project to bring empathic listening to the streets, literally: volunteers set up chairs on sidewalks all over the world, and fellow humans get to sit down for a bit, and just be heard without judgment or trying to be fixed. It’s a brilliant and heartful idea, and Traci has added this podcast to help support the hundreds of volunteers with different interviewees offering different perspectives on how to understand the project, and stay inspired.

So below are a few notes about the interview, and the link to the audio recording. Enjoy.

The Stalling of Grief: What we are saying when we say, “I can’t believe!”

I think that virtually everyone I’ve worked with (myself included) at some point (or perhaps chronically) finds themselves saying, “I can’t believe they did that!” It could be specific: “I can’t believe my mother criticizes me about my partner!” Or general: “I can’t believe that people drive like such idiots!” Or very broad indeed: “I can’t believe that God allows suffering to happen!”

Grief: From Pain to Poignancy

Most of us are not very good at grieving. We deny loss, we judge emotions, we fear getting lost or stuck, or “wallowing,” or we fear judgment or unsupportiveness from others. Maybe it’s the legacy of eons of human history in which we were so exposed to disease, social chaos, natural disasters, psychological trauma, capricious death, that we had to learn and teach our young an emotional stoicism to just survive. Maybe it’s our American culture of individualism, hyper-masculine, capitalism, gladiatorial social relations. Regardless, if we look in, and around, most of us will find a good measure of ambivalence about grief. Yet, without learning the terrain and skill of grieving, we’re left profoundly exposed to the vagaries of this life and all its losses. It behooves us to be better grievers.