All My Sides and Roles

BY KEN BARRINGER

What is the counterbalance to what we are feeling in this moment, and can we experience paradoxical feelings simultaneously? Huh?

People sometimes include in the description of their grief process the word “bittersweet”. The person they are grieving may have been ill for quite some time and now they have died. The survivors are feeling sadness from missing their person and relief that they are no longer in pain. Bittersweet is a generally accepted term and one we use liberally. Recently, a client described her experience as “joyful sadness”. This term doesn’t have the same cache’ as bittersweet but does it mean the same thing? Bittersweet is more like a sensory or tasting experience whereas joyful sadness feels more emotional. Is bittersweet more digestible (pun intended)? Do we struggle with emotional expression that much? It got me thinking of other paradoxical or counter-intuitive words and phrases that may help describe what is truly happening. For instance, we can’t be “brave” unless we know what “fear” is. We can’t recognize when things are easy if we don’t know what difficult is. We can’t live stressless unless we stress-less. We can’t get what we want, until we know what we want. It’s important to recognize we can, and do, have many sides.

Even though we are multi-faceted we often sees ourselves as singular. We have more sides than a steak house menu. How can I be brave if I’m also fearful? The concern here is if we don’t recognize all our sides the result is we disenfranchise ourselves. We may not be recognizing the loss, muti-faceted relationship, or ourselves as grievers. We embrace all our sides in death when obituaries, or eulogies reference someone as, “he was a son, brother, father, husband, and friend. She was…”.  Why don’t we recognize all our sides and roles when we are still living? We may be robbing ourselves of accurately writing our own history and experience.

Many poems and songs have contained references to pleasure and pain. We like catchy phrases like “comedy is tragedy over time”. Someone once described their anger as “blissful” because the anger was valid and justified after years of being gas lighted by her partner. We do understand that wherever our truth lies there is another perspective of that truth. Being open to all truths can help us gain wisdom. This outlook is what we need to heal. Perhaps an important intersection of paradoxical feelings is that ultimately, we are tasked to be comfortable with the discomfort of processing our grief.