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My Experience with Rumination About Grief

Makayla Arcuragi, LPC
Clinician

We hear this word all the time, but how many of us know how to describe it? What is rumination? This is defined as, “the habit of obsessively, repetitively, and passively dwelling on negative feelings, past mistakes, or worries, often without finding solutions.” Rumination exists when we are unable to accept what has happened. I view this process as reliving a painful memory and finding all the ways you would have changed it. “I wish I said this. I wish I could have done that sooner. I can’t believe I didn’t see all the signs. Maybe that thing I said at dinner was weird and everybody felt it.” are all examples of rumination. When rumination is present, acceptance is nowhere to be found.

I used to think that acceptance always meant I would feel indifferent. However, it doesn’t always play out that way. For example, I am able to think about a bad breakup that happened years ago and feel indifferent. I feel sad for my old self, but I am no longer hurt at the idea of being separated from this person. I am indifferent. On the other hand, I lost both of my grandfathers within months of each other. This will never be a situation that I feel indifferent towards. In fact, as I type this, I feel a lump in my throat and my eyes have gone teary. There is an ache in my chest. However, I am not angry about the situation. I no longer bargain for ways to change it. I accept it for what it is, a deeply painful situation that I had no control over.

Acceptance can mean indifference, but it doesn’t require it. When I was 17 and this happened, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and I would often feel angry. I would replay the last conversations I had with them. I hated all the times I took their presence for granted. I judged myself for every phone call, missed photo opportunity, and even the child version of me that didn’t spend enough time with them. I was ruminating. I wasn’t able to accept that my last conversation with them felt meaningless. And the truth is, it’s because reality is painful. We ruminate in hopes that we will one day see the situation differently and be able to justify all our missed opportunities.

I have found that in order not to ruminate, I had to view this as a process of living in the past. Acceptance was in front of me, but I couldn’t reach it if I continued to look behind me. This may make sense in writing, but if somebody gave me this advice a few years ago, I would have replied, “That’s it? Oh gee, if only I had thought of something like that I could have fired my therapist years ago!” The reality is, the advice looks pretty in writing, but the execution is excruciating.

During the time that I was grieving the deaths of my grandfathers, I would replay all the ways in which I felt I was unkind, careless, or not attentive enough. I remember finding a picture of me at the beach with my grandparents. I was in a lounge chair reading a book and they were standing behind me. The picture looked like a happy memory. But the happiness drained out of me as soon as I remembered the part of me that felt annoyed by the interruption of my book. My mind flooded with thoughts that went a little something like this, “They took you on this trip and you decided to read instead of spending time with them? You had no idea this was the last trip you would have with him. You should have spent less time alone and more time hanging out with them. I bet he was sad when you didn’t seem interested. Did I even thank him directly for the vacation? Did I hurt his feelings without knowing?” I felt that I had to find all the things I did wrong in the past so that I could do better in the future. I was determined to never waste a precious moment around a loved one ever again. I learned over time that this is not sustainable. And I see now that this wasn’t something I was doing for their benefit. It was an act that was driven out of fear and guilt. Because when a loved one passes, we are faced with the reality of our decisions. It’s never about if the thing we did was truly terrible. It’s about the story our mind creates.

Your mind can come up with all kinds of stories about how things happened. In the end, how you choose to narrate matters. The stories my mind told me were painful. I wanted to run from them and find all evidence that proved them to be wrong. I liked when people said, “they loved you and they knew you loved them” or “your grandfather told me so much about you”. I liked it when people gave me permission to let go of my guilt. But if I’m honest, this was only temporary. Although I wanted it to be true, I didn’t have certainty and I couldn’t convince myself. This would lead me back to the path of rumination I knew like the back of my hand at this point.

Reaching acceptance meant letting my thoughts exist without trying to change them. Accepting past decisions related to my grandfathers wasn’t going to happen by digging deep enough until I found a happy answer. I wasn’t going to just wake up and tell myself the same silver lining and it finally stick. For me, it was the very opposite. I realized that the purpose my rumination served was to take away a bad feeling. For example, thinking that I didn’t spend enough time with them while they were here brought on feelings of guilt. It left a hollow ache in my chest. It made me question my values. I associated guilt with the idea that I had been a bad person. I hated this feeling so much that I would try to remove it by telling myself, “Yeah, I was annoyed when they interrupted my book for a picture. But I also remember getting ice cream with them. And he seemed really happy on the trip. So maybe I shouldn’t feel so guilty?” The back and forth of “I was horrible” and “but maybe you weren’t” was exhausting.

Now comes the part that sounds simple but was very painful to experience. Acceptance. The truth is, I stopped telling myself the silver lining story that I could never convince myself to believe. I stopped trying to take away the guilt. I know this may sound counterintuitive. But when therapists say, “it’s okay to feel how you feel”, this doesn’t just apply to sadness, grief, or hurt. For a long time, I believed guilt was bad. This was only something you experienced when you truly messed up. I now know that isn’t true. I now define guilt as something I experience when I feel I have messed up. This doesn’t make it objectively true. It also doesn’t mean it isn’t true. This meant that I had to say to myself, “I feel guilty about some things related to how I spent the time I had with my grandfathers. Maybe I never got to say all the things I wanted to. Maybe there were things I did that made them feel upset or angry at me. Thinking about this makes me feel sad and horrible. I hate the sensations it evokes. But it is okay. An emotion feeling bad does not indicate it is bad to feel. I am allowed to feel guilty for some parts of the way I approached my relationships with my grandfathers.”

Thinking this way brought a lot of tears at first. I wasn’t even convinced that it would work. I just knew what the research showed, and I had to trust it. Guilt is an emotion I am still working to get comfortable with. Guilt for me has never meant that I was doing bad things, but that I constantly perceived everything I did as bad. And despite my efforts to convince myself otherwise, it wasn’t going away. My friend invites me to a party and I can’t go. GUILTY. Dad calls and I can’t answer the phone. GUILTY. My partner asks if I want to go for a walk and I say, “no thanks”. GUILTY. I overshared at the dinner you invited me to. GUILTY and I should probably let you know that I know how weird it was just in case. The things I am doing are not anything I would ever be tried in court for. Logically, I know they are nothing to be worried about. But logic didn’t seem to keep my mind from spiraling.

If you stuck around until the end, the simple answer is that you cannot control how you feel. Do yourself a favor and STOP trying. You can control how you respond to your feelings. Writing this blog has brought up a lot of different feelings. To this day, I still feel some guilt related to my relationships with my grandfathers. I don’t stand by all the past decisions I made. And I don’t feel that I have to. Grief got easier with time, but it’s something I will always carry. There are days that the guilt creeps in, and I know I just have to outlast it. I no longer need to prove it to be wrong. But there are also a lot of happy memories that bring happy feelings. I don’t think my grandfathers would want me to replay decisions 17-year-old me made. But I do think they would both have their fair share of stories about me being their least favorite person that day. For that, I’m grateful. Because where pain exists, there also are signs of a deep connection. That throughout all of the feelings of guilt and anger, I never truly doubted their love for me. My guilt now serves as a reminder to myself that I am caring. I may not like the way it feels, but it is safe to feel. And I choose to see it as a way to move forward and let go.

Leaving you with a statement I wrote after a painful experience. I have this in my notes app, and I often refer to it when I’m struggling with allowing myself to feel. It goes, “Although the tears can be overwhelming and far too frequent, it reminds me that I can feel. It reminds me that I am alive. It reminds me that this cold world hasn’t completely turned me numb.”