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Why we fight what we feel after loss

Neal Tricarico · · 10 min read

After loss, Neal Tricarico learned that the instinct to push pain away is a kind of emotional bypassing that keeps grief stuck. Feeling the sadness instead of fighting it, through small rituals and honest moments, is what lets connection and healing back in.

A snowy ridge at first light under a vast still horizon, on emotional honesty after loss - The Endurant Way

We fight our feelings because, in the moment, feeling them feels like drowning, and shutting down feels like swimming. The problem is that the feelings do not leave when you push them away. They wait, and the distance you build to avoid them becomes the same distance that keeps other people out.

TL;DR

After loss, almost everything in us wants to shut the hardest feelings down. That reflex is normal, even smart in the short term, but it becomes a trap. Pushing pain away does not make it smaller; it buries it, and the wall you build against grief is the same wall that keeps love and connection out. The way forward is not to feel everything at once or to bypass the pain with forced positivity. It is emotional honesty, practiced in small doses, through rituals and honest moments, until the door to belonging reopens.

Key Takeaways

  • We resist grief because feeling it feels like drowning, so shutting down briefly feels like the safer choice.
  • Avoidance does not remove pain; it buries it, and the distance that protects you also keeps other people out.
  • Emotional honesty, not forced positivity or bypassing, is what reopens the door to connection after loss.
  • Small rituals and honest, steady practices let you feel big emotions without being overwhelmed by them.
  • Post-traumatic growth is built through deliberate processing of loss, not through skipping past the painful parts.

Why do we emotionally shut down after loss?

We shut down because the full weight of grief is too much to feel all at once, and our nervous system knows it. In the first days and weeks, numbness is not a failure. It is a kind of emergency brake that keeps you from being swept away while the loss is still too new to hold. I felt it myself. After my son Anthony died by suicide, there were stretches where I did not feel much of anything, and part of me was grateful for the flatness. It let me keep standing.

The trouble is that what starts as a necessary brake can harden into a way of living. Grief researchers describe mourning not as a straight line from pain to relief, but as an ongoing back and forth between confronting the loss and rebuilding a life around it American Psychological Association: Grief. Both movements are necessary. When we only ever do the rebuilding and skip the confronting, we are not processing grief. We are managing it, and there is a cost to that.

The cost shows up in the body and in relationships. The stress of holding down strong emotion does not stay quiet; research on stress and health has long documented that unprocessed, suppressed emotion keeps the body in a state of ongoing arousal American Psychological Association: Stress effects on the body. I could not have named it then, but I was carrying grief in my shoulders, my jaw, my sleep, all while telling everyone I was fine.

What is emotional bypassing and why does it fail?

Emotional bypassing is what happens when we try to jump over the hard feeling and land directly on the better one. It sounds like "at least he is at peace now," or "everything happens for a reason," or "I need to stay strong for the kids." Every one of those sentences can be true, and every one of them can also be a way of not feeling the grief underneath them.

Bypassing fails for a simple reason: the feeling does not go away just because you walked around it. It stays, and it finds other exits. It shows up as irritability, as withdrawal, as a vague heaviness you cannot name, as drinking or scrolling or working yourself numb. The clinical language for this is avoidance, and the National Institute of Mental Health is direct that recovery after trauma begins with acknowledging what has been lost, not with minimizing it Coping With Traumatic Events - NIMH. Acknowledging is the work, not a detour around the work.

I spent a long time trying to be the strong one, the one who had it together, the one who could carry everyone else. It was not dishonest in the way people mean. It was dishonest in the way that matters: I was building a version of myself that did not feel pain, and the people who loved me could not reach the real one.

What is the difference between vulnerability, authenticity, and honesty?

People use these words interchangeably, but they are not the same, and the difference matters when you are grieving. Vulnerability is letting someone see the soft, undefended place. Authenticity is being the same person on the inside and the outside. Honesty is the smaller, more attainable thing: telling the truth about what you are actually feeling, even when you cannot dress it up.

I learned that I did not have to be vulnerable with everyone, and I did not have to be whole. I just had to stop lying about being fine. A friend would ask how I was doing, and instead of "fine," I would say "today I am angry and I do not know why." That is not vulnerability. It is not even especially brave. It is honesty, and honesty was the door.

The research on post-traumatic growth points the same way. Growth after loss is not the product of skipping the painful parts; it grows out of deliberately working with them PTGI: What is post-traumatic growth?. One study of bereaved people found that deliberate processing of the loss, not intrusive rumination you cannot control, is what predicts growth Taku et al., 2008: Distress and post-traumatic growth coexist. Honesty is the first deliberate move. It is how you turn a feeling you are drowning in into a feeling you are sitting with.

How do rituals and nature help you feel safely?

Rituals give feeling a shape. When grief is formless, it is easy to be overwhelmed by it, because there is no container and no beginning or end. A ritual is a container. It can be as small as lighting a candle at the same time each evening, walking the same loop, writing three lines, or sitting quietly with a cup of coffee and speaking Anthony's name out loud. What matters is not the size. What matters is that it is regular and it is yours.

Nature does something similar. A vast, still horizon or a ridge at dawn does not ask you to feel less. It just holds the feeling with you, without comment. I found that my hardest feelings became bearable when I stopped trying to feel them in my head and started feeling them with the ground under my feet. This is not a metaphor I am stretching; it is a practice. The post-traumatic growth work done at places like the Boulder Crest retreats is built on exactly this, giving people a real container for the hardest material Posttraumatic Growth Resource Center.

The rituals do not make the grief smaller. They make it something you can visit instead of something that ambushes you. That is the difference between being flooded and being able to feel. You are not trying to feel everything at once. You are giving the feeling a door it can use to come and go.

How do you hold big emotions without being overwhelmed?

You stop trying to hold them all at once. The idea that you have to feel the entire loss in a single sitting is the thing that makes people drown. You are not required to hold the whole ocean. You are only asked to hold the wave that is in front of you, for as long as it is here, and then let it pass.

The practical version is small and unglamorous. Name the feeling out loud, even just to yourself. "This is sadness." "This is anger." Putting a word on it moves it from something that is happening to you to something you are looking at. Then notice where it lives in your body, and breathe there for a minute. Then let it be bigger than it was for a beat before you move on. Do that a little each day and the feeling stops being a flood and becomes a current you know how to swim in.

This is not bypassing. It is the opposite of bypassing. It is feeling, in doses you can survive, until the body learns it will not actually be destroyed by honest grief. That is the same steady, step-by-step motion I have written about when I described finding a way forward after losing a child to suicide, and it is the ground truth underneath post-traumatic growth not being closure. Before any of that motion can start, though, you have to stop pretending the hard feeling is not there, which is what I was learning when I first wrote about grieving the purpose I lost before anything new could arrive. The work is not to get past the feelings. The work is to stay with them honestly enough that they stop running your life.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it bad to push feelings down?

Pushing feelings down is not a moral failing; it is a reflex, and in the first shock of loss it can even protect you. The problem is only when pushing down becomes the permanent strategy, because unprocessed grief does not disappear, it festers and finds other exits. Acknowledging the feeling, in doses you can bear, is what moves you through it American Psychological Association: Grief.

How do you reopen after shutting down?

Start small and start honest. Say one true sentence about how you feel to one safe person, or even to a journal. Introduce a tiny ritual that gives the feeling a shape. You do not reopen by forcing yourself to feel everything at once; you reopen by removing one brick from the wall at a time, and the brick is always honesty.

What helps you feel without drowning?

The container is what keeps you from drowning: a ritual, a walk, a journal, a trusted person who will sit with you without trying to fix it. Feel the feeling in small doses rather than all at once, and remind yourself that feeling is not the same as being destroyed by it.

Sources cited in this analysis?

If you are grieving the loss of someone you love, you do not have to carry it alone. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention offers loss-survivor resources at afsp.org. If you or someone you love is thinking about suicide, help is available 24 hours a day - call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.