Global Grief

Many see the current global situation as frightening and want to return to the past.  Others look to the future with anxiety and foreboding. The general public in our country and all over the world is experiencing and in many cases is paralyzed by these thoughts and feelings: anger, fear, anxiety, isolation, loneliness, vulnerability, an existential crisis of meaning.  Anger manifests in the form of war, increased racism and hate crimes, and the reliance on drugs and alcohol to ease the pain.

I believe that the turmoil that we all are witnessing and experiencing in the world is a grieving process. These thoughts and feelings are a manifestations of grief, and have been building and building to this present day. This is not hopeless, although at times, it may feel hopeless.

The origins of this grief are in our recent collective memories: the loss of manufacturing jobs, the demise of the small family farm, continuing racism against all minorities, wars, climate change, the opioid epidemic. Many losses go back even farther to the beginnings of our country including the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, the subjugation of women.

Current articles describe the pain of widespread grief, but do not necessarily address grief’s transformational power. Grief is our natural human response to loss. It is painful, sometimes horrible and traumatizing. Yet it helps us to recognize and identify our loss, experience the pain of our loss, incorporate the loss into our lives, and then move forward into the future – changed.

We, as a world, seem to be stuck in the pain of grief. People in positions of power exploit our pain to hold on to their power, by “channeling” our anger and fear for their own purposes, or by denying or minimizing our losses and grief. It is time for us to recognize our global grief and move through it individually and collectively – changed and renewed.
Please see my article about this. https://medium.com/@julievpotter.dc/global-grief-2c2736ce464b
I will post ideas from my article here, but also hope that you will read my article in its entirety.