What If We Don’t Heal from Grief?

For the past year I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “healing” in the grief space, and even in the mental health space at large. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in the realms of personal growth, self-help, and wellness.

To be honest? I don’t love it.

The definition of healing is “the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again.” It can also mean “to correct or put right” or to “alleviate distress.” 

Healing is not necessarily inaccurate (“alleviating distress” makes sense to me), but especially when we’re talking about grief, I think it misses the mark. 

“Healing” – taken directly from the medical model – implies that something is wrong or broken that needs to be fixed. “Healing” implies that we can be returned to a former state of wellness.

Thinking about grief as a healing process can (very subtly) set us up to either believe that we will be returned to a pre-loss version of ourselves or to believe that one day we will reach that “healthy” point at which our grief is tidy, like a scab over a wound. It also implies that grief is something to be fixed, treated, and managed rather than an experience to be lived.

Instead of thinking about healing from grief, I like to think about integrating grief.

Integrating grief means that we slowly, over time, learn to understand that our loss is – and will always be – part of us. It means that we make space for our grief. It means that we honor our loss and our past while also making room for joy, fulfillment, and meaning in the present.

Through an integration lens, our grief isn’t healed. It just is.  It is a part of us, though it is not all of us. We don’t ask it to change (which healing implies), but rather we adapt alongside our grief, learning how to build our lives around, beside, and through our experience of loss.

What does integration mean to you? What language feels most resonant for you when it comes to living with loss?

As always, take gentle care of yourself.