We Do Not Need to Optimize for Grief
Both inside and outside of sessions, I have noticed a striking feature of the culture we are swimming in, namely, the pressure to optimize our lives. We strive to prepare the optimal meal plan with the right amount of protein, to eat 30 different plants a week for optimal gut health, to lift a certain amount of weight three times a week, to perfect breadmaking, design our homes for ideal rest and rejuvenation, monitor our step counts, caloric intake, REM sleep, deep sleep, heart rate, and so on. We are encouraged to optimize our relationships, parenting, productivity, and even leisure. There seems to be less room to simply be human without also trying to become a better person.
Interestingly, this pressure follows us into therapy. We set goals around becoming the best version of ourselves, healing the trauma we’ve been carrying for years, or becoming a better mother, son, sister, father, friend, colleague, lover or partner. Therapy itself can become another means of optimization, with mental health imagined as an improved state toward which we should continually be striving. There is always another pattern to recognize, another trigger to manage, another response to regulate, another part of ourselves to heal. When therapy begins to reproduce the same demand for continual improvement that shapes so much of the rest of our lives, perhaps our assumptions about what therapy is for need to be examined more carefully.
We live in an age where being human is too often pathologized. Therapeutic language can give us useful ways of understanding ourselves, but it can also encourage us to interpret distress as evidence that something within us needs to be fixed. Pain becomes suspicious, and so too does grief, as though suffering after a loss indicates that we have not yet found the right way to respond. But grief hurts because something that mattered to us is gone. That pain makes perfect sense in relation to that loss. If we could optimize ourselves out of grief, what exactly would we be optimizing ourselves into?
Grief is an especially interesting case because there is no obvious optimal outcome. When something significant is lost, we are forced to reckon with how little control we have over what happens to us and with the finitude of the lives we build together. We can also find ourselves painfully aware of the distance that remains between our inner lives, even in our closest relationships. Rainer Maria Rilke described love as consisting of “two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.” This image feels significant here. Someone else may understand a great deal about what I have lost, yet the border between us remains. My grief is, in an important sense, mine alone.
And yet grief also draws us toward one another. No one else can carry this grief for me, but another person can walk beside me while I bear its weight. They can witness my sadness even if I cannot turn it productive, insightful, or interesting. They can hear the same story again. They can allow an experience to remain unresolved without immediately reaching for a strategy. Sometimes this is what therapy offers, and sometimes we find it in our relationships with others. We can greet grief in one another and acknowledge that it is here.
This is part of why I am uneasy with the language of ‘processing’ grief, which often sounds like there is a task to complete. Even the metaphor of ‘moving through’ grief carries an implied destination, which can suggest that progress means gradually putting more distance between ourselves and our grief until we have successfully left it behind. And with that comes the question of whether we are getting there in the best way possible. How can I grieve the hardest, the healthiest, better than those who came before me? How do I know when I have done enough work? Optimization gives us both an endpoint and a standard against which progress can be measured. Neither applies particularly well to grief. Feeling better may happen over time, but feeling better cannot be the measure of whether we have grieved well.
Allowing for grief may seem passive, but I do not think it is. Anyone who has tried meditation and concluded, ‘I can’t meditate; my mind keeps wandering,’ has encountered the difficulty of allowing. Our minds wander. We notice and return. They wander again, and we return again. That repeated return is the practice. Allowing grief can require something similar. We distract ourselves, and then return. We wonder whether we should be further along by now, and then return again. Allowing an experience means actively letting it be without constantly demanding that it become something else.
This does not mean that we should become consumed by grief, or that there is nothing we can do when our responses to loss compound our suffering or pull us away from other parts of our lives. Therapy can help us recognize these responses and find ways to live alongside what has happened. But helping someone remain in contact with an experience is different from treating the experience itself as evidence that something has gone wrong or that we are somehow not enough as we are.
There may be growth after loss, but grief does not need to produce it. The expectation that we should emerge wiser or more resilient can turn our suffering into yet another opportunity for self-improvement. Instead, we can return to the experience as it is without demanding that it produce something of value in return. We do not need to optimize for grief.
Books to Explore
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929/1984). Vintage Books.
Matthew Ratcliffe, Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience (2022). MIT Press.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973). Free Press.
Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (2015). North Atlantic Books.
