Mourning and Mental Health

“If we don't know how to mourn and rebuild, we are incentivized to keep the storms of our lives raging indefinitely.” -Heidi Priebe

Mourning plays such a big role in therapy, and it so rarely gets talked about as the sign of growth that it often is.

It’s so important because it means something is being let go; defenses are changing and something is moving that wasn’t allowed to before. This can only happen when we feel like we are capable of tolerating this movement and the feelings it produces. This means we have grown.

When we refuse to mourn what we’ve lost, it takes up emotional space inside us and drains our vitality as energy is siphoned off into maintaining our defenses of denial and avoidance. And of course we do this, because some losses are too overwhelming to face in real time; that’s why they get compartmentalized in the first place.

We are also often not taught how to mourn (vs wallow or ruminate), so the overwhelming feeling associated with the loss can persist indefinitely, because it feels like we don’t have the tools to face it. Locked in a stalemate. Therapy can be helpful here because it allows the person to contact the losses, but not alone and overwhelmed, as they likely were the first time they experienced them.

The healing that comes post-mourning can be profound, because we’ve created emotional room for new experience. And the energy that was formerly being drained by denial and avoidance can now be returned to the person and channeled into living, hopefulness, and genuine relationships.

So mourning is not only a signal that you’re backsliding into lower states of mental health.It’s often a cue that something essential is changing for you, and that change is making space for a part of you to be liberated and allowed to rejoin you here in your present and future experience.