Greater Good · 15 hours ago

Are You Making This Common Mistake with Grief?

In a therapy-literate culture, even compassion can miss its mark - not through cruelty, but through the habit of reaching for meaning before simply staying present. Grief counselor and educator Naomi Sanderovsky identifies a subtle way well-meaning people wound those who are hurting: by interpreting their pain rather than accompanying it, leaving the griever feeling "not seen, but studied; not comforted, but diagnosed." Drawing on years of leading grief retreats, she describes watching sorrow ease again and again "not when someone explained it, but when someone stayed with it." The rocks at her retreat's forest fountain - painted with the names of the lost, their colors slowly fading into the wood - offer a quiet image of what healing actually looks like: not understanding arrived at, but presence sustained over time. What Sanderovsky ultimately offers is less a set of techniques than a reorientation toward what grief most needs, which turns out to be something far simpler, and far harder, than insight.