My meditation teacher called it “crooked grief.”
I loved that image, as I wondered, “what in the world could that mean?” She explained, and I pondered.

Crooked grief slips out the side door of your body in the form of anxiety, fear, distractibility, irritability, and annoyance. We see it in our tone turning toxic with judgment and blame. We notice it in the breathy, speedy pace of long “to do” lists begging for our undivided, immediate attention. It haunts us as we engage in compulsive “overdoing.” Like a hawk on high alert, we find ourselves in crooked grief, sweeping down, flying upward, bypassing what we truly need.

There is no blame in crooked grief. It appears as a reminder that grief is there, wanting to be held, felt. Grief becomes crooked when it goes unacknowledged. It longs for a place to be seen and heard, a protected space in which to live.

Crooked grief is a place holder; that little tugging we feel lurking just outside our heart. It calls to us when we can’t “find time” to honor the presence of grief.

That is all it asks of us.

And yet, people enter therapy with the idea that they can fix their problems, or at the very least, make them go away. They have an entrenched notion that if only they try hard enough, or find the right therapist with the “perfect” instructions on what to do differently, all their problems will conveniently disappear forever.

I like to think of “problems” as doorways to growth. The word problem connotes bad, wrong, needing fixing, something which elicits shame and blame. Everyone has problems. No one is immune to them. So to acknowledge a problem with openness is a different way to think about the things that get in our way. Problems are there to help us see ourselves more clearly; they help us reach out to touch the edge of clarity.

In therapy, we don’t sit down to solve a problem, but rather, we engage in a relationship that allows us to see that the “problem” exists because at one point it helped us adapt or exist in the best way we could. As the therapy couple walks through this together, the problem begins to unstick itself, dissipate, and afford us the space to try out new ways of being.