Why Do I Feel So Sad and Can't Move On? A Therapist's View on Grief.

There's a moment early in The Last of Us where a father carries his dying daughter through a burning, collapsing world, refusing, right up until the last possible second, to accept what has already happened. This sets the terms for everything that follows, because the man who emerges from that night doesn't get better. He gets sealed. Twenty years pass, and Joel Miller is a competent, capable, closed door of a person. Someone who has organised his entire adult life around never again being in a position to lose something that mattered.

I think about that opening a great deal when I sit with clients who tell me, often with some embarrassment, confusion or pain, that they don't really cry, or don't really let people in. Sometimes they can't remember the last time they let themselves feel that they wanted something so bad because of the fear of losing it that comes with this. In a culture of therapy and growth as ideals, not having a way of explaining how scared we feel about wanting or needing can feel like a subtle, internal sense of falling apart. They usually think this is a personality trait. It rarely is. More often it's a door that got closed at a specific moment, for a specific reason, and simply never got reopened.

Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott had a strange, but useful idea about states like this. He suggests that when someone is haunted by the fear of some future collapse — the sense that if they let themselves feel too much, want too much, need too much, they'll come apart. What they're usually afraid of isn't really a future event at all. It's a past one. Something did happen, at a point early enough (or overwhelming enough) that there wasn't yet a self organised enough to have the experience of it happening. It couldn't be felt, so it couldn't be remembered, so it sits there undated, unfiled, still technically in the future as far as the psyche is concerned because it never got to properly become the past. The dread isn't anticipation. It's a memory with nowhere to go, still waiting to be had for the first time. 

Joel is not a man guarding against future loss, so much as a man who never got to finish losing the thing he'd already lost, and who is going to spend the rest of his life organising himself around not finding that out.

Loss is not the exception to a life. It is the material of one.

We tend to talk about loss as though it's an event that interrupts an otherwise continuous life, a death, a breakup, a diagnosis, something that happens to us and then, eventually, is over. But loss isn't really an interruption. It's closer to the medium we're working in the whole time. Every attachment we form is, from the moment it begins, on a clock. Every version of ourselves we grow out of is a small death nobody sends flowers for. Every stage of a child's life, every year of a marriage, every home we leave these end continuously, all the time, whether or not something dramatic marks the ending. Growing up is itself a long series of losses: the loss of being fully taken care of, the loss of the parent who could fix everything, the loss of the fantasy that if we just become good enough, safe enough, careful enough, we'll finally be exempt from more of it.

Most of us are not taught this. We're taught that loss is what happens when something goes wrong, and that the healthy response is to recover and to get back, as fast as possible, to the baseline we were at before. But there is no getting back. There is only what we do with what's left.

The two things we're actually grieving

When something or someone is taken from us, we're usually grieving two different things at once, and it helps clients enormously to be able to tell them apart:

1. There's the loss of what we had, the real relationship, the real years, the real closeness, gone now and never coming back exactly as it was. 

2. There's the loss of what we never had, the version of the relationship, the parent, the childhood, the marriage that we needed and were owed and didn't get, and which no one, ever, will now supply. 

The first is sad. The second is closer to devastating, because it asks us to stop hoping. As long as we're still quietly waiting for someone; a parent, an ex, a version of ourselves to finally come through, we haven't yet admitted how total the absence is. Admitting it is what allows grief to actually resolve, rather than circling forever as a low hum of unmet want. 

Let me repeat. Admitting is what allows grief to move through us. It’s here in our bodies, hurt has already found a way into our lives, our work is to admit this before we create further suffering from it.

Ellie, in The Last of Us, learns this the hard way, over and over, with every person she loses. Joel resists learning it at all, and his resistance is eventually devastating. When he's finally given the chance to lose her too, in service of something that might have justified all the earlier loss, he can't do it. He chooses her, not the world, and he lies to her about it. It isn't a villain's choice. It's what an ungrieved loss, twenty years deep, will do to a person's decision-making when their grief is finally given an undeniable exposure. He isn't protecting Ellie so much as refusing, one more time, to survive another door closing. That's not a flaw unique to Joel. It's what many of us do, in smaller ways, when grief has never been allowed to finish its work. We start making decisions from the wound rather than from the present moment.

Disillusionment as a form of freedom

There's a strange gift hidden inside full grief, and it's worth naming plainly to clients who are terrified of going near it: once you've let yourself fully know that something is gone, not softened, not silver-lined, just genuinely and permanently gone, there's very little left to fear. The dread beforehand is almost always worse than the grief itself, because dread is grief's imagination working overtime, while grief itself, once entered, is simply sad. Sadness has an end. Dread doesn't.

This is why disillusionment, properly grieved, doesn't leave a person more cynical. It leaves them liberated. The illusions we carry about what we still might get, from a parent who was never going to change or a past that was never going to be different, cost us more than the original loss did. They keep us in a kind of low-grade negotiation with reality that never resolves, because reality isn't negotiating. The moment we stop bargaining is the moment the energy that was tied up in the bargaining becomes available again. For the actual, current, still-possible relationships in front of us.

What we're left holding

None of this makes loss smaller. If anything, it makes it more central. Not a wrong turn in an otherwise smooth life, but the very thing being metabolised, over and over, by everyone we sit across from. What changes is what we do with it: whether it stays as an ache that quietly runs the show, dictating who we let close and how much, or whether it gets to be known, felt, and eventually put down.

Being fearless in the face of loss by accepting the pull of grief is profound work. Work that can transform the availability we have as people to joy and pleasure in our relationships, be that to the more than human world, meaning or the depth of eye contact with the people that we love.