Three Important Things I Forgot About Grieving
Plus a really helpful visual from Sheryl Sandberg’s Option B
You’re sitting in a room. Your arm is in a bucket of water. You have to sit there with your arm in the bucket for five hours.
Oh, and plot twist, the room is freezing.
How much pain are you in?
“In one experiment, people were asked to put their arm in a bucket of water and guess how painful it would be to sit in a freezing room for five hours. When the bucket was filled with ice water, they predicted that sitting in the room would be 14 percent more painful than when the bucket was filled with warm water. But when people made their predictions just ten minutes after removing their arm from the ice water, they made the same estimates as the warm water group. Once the icy water was behind them, even for just minutes, they couldn’t quite fathom what it felt like to be cold.” (Sandberg & Grant 2017, pp. 50)
Simply, people miscalculate the pain and impact of grief unless they are also grieving.
As an Intuitive Grief Guide I’d like to say I have a heightened level of empathy for grieving people — that when they hurt, I hurt. (And to some extent, I do.) But experiencing my own…
