For a Man Who Specializes in Grief and sorrow, Psychotherapist Francis Weller Certainly Seems joyful. When I Arrived at His Cabin in Forestville, California, He Emerged with a Smile and Embraced me. His wife, Judith, Headed Off to Garden While Fran

But shame keeps most people from sharing at all. My clients in therapy often tell me they don’t want to burden others with their problems. I’ll ask how it would make them feel if a friend called and said, “I’m having a really hard time today. I just need to talk with someone.” Usually they say they would feel honored by the friend’s trust, but they can’t imagine the reverse: that maybe a friend would feel honored if they trusted the friend. In healthy cultures one person’s wound is an opportunity for another to bring medicine. But if you are silent about your suffering, then your friends stay spiritually unemployed.

In Navajo culture, for example, illness and loss are seen as communal concerns, not as the responsibility of the individual. Healing is a matter of restoring hózhó— beauty/harmony in the community. The San people of the Kalahari say, “When one of us is ill, all of us are ill.” They do an all-night healing ritual for the entire community four times a month.

That girl in your class initiated a call and response. She put out this call, “I am in pain,” and the rest of you responded.

McKee: Do you see any significant differences in the way men and women experience grief?

Weller: Some. I’ll have to make generalizations, but I’ve observed trends.

The men of our fathers’ generation were probably some of the loneliest who ever walked the planet. This is part of the bitter legacy of rugged individualism. As men in this culture, we are given one archetype to follow — the solitary hero — and we never know when to set it down. So we have men who are old enough to be elders but are still acting with this youthful, foolish bravado. We don’t get beyond a certain preoccupation with the self and step across that threshold — as the old traditions encouraged us to do during initiation ceremonies — into a much broader role of caring about the children and the village. If most men’s primary concern in their fifties or sixties is their own rank or status, we’re in serious trouble.

By contrast, women have a little more freedom to escape that oppressive silence, particularly among other women. But one of the primary questions that come up for women in my practice is: Do I matter? What a great loss. Women are immensely valuable to community, yet many have been reduced to doubting their status.

McKee: You call grief an act of protest against living “numb and small.” What do you mean by that?

Weller: A lot of us associate grief with a state of deadness or numbness, but that’s not grief at all. Grief is wild; it’s a feral energy. So when people really open up to grief, the last thing they are doing is operating in a polite or socialized manner. It is an eruptive state. What we require, once again, is sufficient time to express the full measure of the grief we are carrying.

One of the most important things we can do right now in this culture is to grieve, because it is a protest against the collective agreement to turn our backs on what is happening. Just look at the headlines: earthquakes caused by fracking; multiple communities in distress following the killing of African American men by police; more and more economic inequality; carbon-dioxide levels going over four hundred parts per million. It is easy to shut down. What we need are people who are willing to feel this and to respond. As James Hillman said, “Outrage is a sure sign of a soul awake.”

The beauty of working with grief is that you quickly realize it is not solely your grief. I may have personal stories of sorrow — we all do — but I am also weeping for what is happening to the forests. And watching the California countryside wither in this drought breaks my heart. If I’m willing to register the losses of the world around me, I can become an advocate for the earth.

I remember driving through Northern California and coming across a clear-cut. The shock of that just hit me. Some psychologists would say that’s projection: I’m reacting to my own wounds, my own internal clear-cut. But what if the world is speaking through us, and one of our spiritual obligations is to be open to the cries of the earth?

Racial and economic justice still eludes us. The wealthiest among us are buying elections. Climate scientists suggest that humanity may face near-term extinction. What was once solid and reliable is becoming shaky and unpredictable. The cumulative weight of all of this is staggering. We experienced similar anxiety during the Cold War, but the difference now is that a wider range of threats are contributing to our fears. And no matter what circumstances we face, we must do our own inner work and our communal work, just to be able to show up to address the crisis.

The anima mundi — the soul of the world — is trying to speak. It’s telling us that its capacity to mend itself is at risk. And we are a part of the anima mundi, intimately tangled in this net of events. We think we’re somehow separate from nature because we live in cities, drive cars, and look at computer screens all day, but we’re still entangled in the earth. Michael Sendivogius, a fifteenth-century alchemist, said, “The greater part of the soul lies outside the body.” My soul is entwined with those Douglas firs and the redwoods and the sorrel and the raccoon and the fox.

McKee: What do you think about taking antidepressants or antianxiety medications to deal with grief and suffering?

Weller: There’s a place for them. Depression is a serious illness. Sometimes, if we’ve been carrying an emotional pain lodged in the body for too long, it begins to alter our physiology, and we lose the ability to respond. Antidepressants and antianxiety medications don’t resolve the problem, but they can make it possible for us to work on it. And hopefully the need for medication is temporary.

But another thing I tell my clients is that I have no interest in improving their lives. What I want is to deepen their capacity to listen to what their symptoms are asking of them. Whether it’s a cut to the skin or a wound to the soul, it will worsen through neglect. Hillman said that depression is a symptom of a culture that is addicted to speed and action and doing. In depression the psyche says, “I’m not moving another step forward. I’m stopping right here until you pay attention to me.”

McKee: I once went to a psychotherapist who noticed during our sessions that I had the tendency to catch myself whenever I started to talk about something emotional. My reflex was to keep my composure.

Weller: That reflex comes from not being seen in formative moments of pain and sorrow. When there’s no one there to say, “I see the pain you’re in,” some piece of us breaks off. We disassociate ourselves from that piece, and it remains silent until we have an experience that resonates with it. Then it can take over, possess us in a sense. Suddenly you are a five-year-old boy trying to catch his tears and tighten his belly and not show that he is scared or sad or hurt.

It doesn’t matter what age you are chronologically. Even as a fifty-nine-year-old man, I can turn back into a five-year-old boy very quickly.

In my work I try to transfer the grief from the child’s hands to the adult’s hands. If that younger self inside you is the only one who responds to grief, then you end up doing what I call “recycling grief,” because that younger self doesn’t have the capacity to handle it.

The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give.

McKee: Where does your interest in grief come from?

Weller: I often say that I never volunteered for this position; I got drafted through personal losses. The first was when my father had a massive stroke when I was fifteen, and he lost the ability to speak. It was the end of my youth. I don’t think he and I had ever had a real conversation, and now we never would. He died when I was twenty-three. For years after that, I might start to cry at odd moments, even though I hadn’t been thinking about him at all. I called these “Dad attacks,” and I had no defense against them.

The other loss was of my sense of self. For much of my adult life I have felt disconnected, worthless, not a real participant in life. I was performing the role of Francis, the dutiful son, husband, and father. Whatever was expected of me, that’s who I tried to be. My only concern was approval. Did I do it right? Did I meet your expectations? I couldn’t say what I needed. I had to please everyone else, because if I failed, the punishment was banishment — or so it felt to me. I couldn’t stand to be alone, but I didn’t want anyone to get too close either: Would they like me? Would they pull away? I remember a friend of mine saying, “You never look me in the eye.” It was true. I was too ashamed. I couldn’t risk the possibility that she would see how awful I felt inside. I was trying to slip through life without getting caught. My tombstone was going to read, SAFE AT LAST!

Finally, out of desperation, I asked my friends to help me break free from the prison I was living in. They put me through an intense ritual that woke me up. I had to express all the grief that I had been repressing. I cried every day for months. It was an intense time, but since then I’ve been truly inhabiting this life that I have been given.

My failure to experience my life for so long became a source of tremendous sadness for me: to have missed four decades of an already short existence. I remember sitting on the couch with my wife, sobbing, and saying, “I just got here, and it’s almost time to go!”

To fully inhabit this life, I first had to grieve all that I had lost. If we cannot cross that threshold of grief, we live separate from our most vital self. When I finally broke through, I was able to allow my wife and friends to be there for me, and I wept for a long time. It was like a slow baptism.

As a therapist I began to see grief at the heart of almost every problem people brought into my office. No matter what had happened in my clients’ lives, it could be traced to a loss: of their childhood, of a relationship, of a parent, of their health, of a marriage, of a child. I knew how to address such losses through therapy, but it wasn’t until I started learning about ritual that I found the architecture, the choreography, that allows grief to be fully expressed. We need to have a safe encounter with what’s most vulnerable in us. We don’t get that in our day-to-day life. There are certain things that can happen only within the container of ritual, where the neglected, repressed parts of us are invited to speak.

I remember a friend of mine saying, “You never look me in the eye.” It was true. I was too ashamed. I couldn’t risk the possibility that she would see how awful I felt inside. I was trying to slip through life without getting caught. My tombstone was going to read, “SAFE AT LAST!”

McKee: How has the quality of your relationships changed since your breakthrough?

Weller: Every few months I get together with three good friends for a meal, and we share poetry. There are no “we won’t go there” subjects. In the past I wouldn’t let anyone see me in a vulnerable position. Now I’m willing to let myself be seen no matter what is in my heart.

A little while ago I got an e-mail saying that a man I knew had just shot himself. I came out to the living room, where my wife said, “You look stricken.” I was, absolutely. Over the next few days I heard about four more suicides. At around the same time, my uncle died, my cat died, and the editor of my book, whom I loved, died. I was swimming in this sea of death. Before, I might have tried to handle it myself and not let anyone know, but instead I told my friends about it. I found the courage to reach out in the face of loss.

Grief is not an abstraction. You can’t think your way through it. You have to have a physical encounter with it. It’s a bodily experience. We need to feel the tightness in our chest or belly before we can engage with it meaningfully. The loss may have happened many years ago, but these hurts haven’t noticed that a single day has passed. And when I can really access the grief, I’m almost back in that moment, with just a hairbreadth of separation from it. But that small distance is essential. Jung said that we cannot heal what we cannot separate ourselves from. If I’m still caught up in the loss, the part of me that initially experienced it will be the first to respond. But if I can get a little distance from it, then I am with this experience, not in it.

We have to be in the correct relationship with sorrow. If we drown in it, nothing happens. If we get too detached, nothing happens. We need the right amount of attention and separation to turn our grief into something vital and life-serving.

McKee: What about when we can’t name the source of our pain? Can we still be “with” it?

Weller: The origins of grief can be obscure, and sometimes they are unnecessary to discover. But even if I can’t fully name the source of the sadness, I can still have a sensation in my body. I can hold that with mercy and not go in with a magnifying glass to see what it’s about. The source might reveal itself, but it’s more important that I give the sorrow the attention it has been wanting.

McKee: I lived in South Africa for five years, and I noticed, especially in rural areas there, that the question “How are you?” often elicited a long, in-depth response, because people weren’t worried about giving “too much information.”

Weller: Mythologist Michael Meade says there are three layers of experience. The first is the social layer: “Hey, how’s it going?” “Fine, how about you?” The second layer is difficult emotions such as grief, anger, rage, envy, violence. The third layer is deep soul contact, true intimacy. Meade says that you can’t go from layer one to layer three without going through layer two, and we avoid layer two at all costs. We stay on the surface, where we talk about the weather and who’s doing what on Capitol Hill. We need a way, as a community, to get through layer two. Otherwise, when there’s a tragedy, how are we going to deal with it? If we don’t chew on these subjects, they chew on us.

McKee: You’ve said that grief can be handed down through generations. How does that happen?

Weller: Most of us in this country can trace our ancestry to a village setting: languages, foods, traditions, and a particular geography where our ancestors may have lived for thousands of years. They knew that terrain mythically and spiritually, and suddenly there was this upheaval, and they were jettisoned across the ocean to another continent.

In my family my parents spoke German, but they didn’t teach the language to their children. Why? Was it some kind of shame attached to two world wars? I’m not sure, but their native tongue had a secrecy to it. They spoke the old language when they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about. I could often tell that their conversation was heated, and my inability to understand their words left me feeling excluded from my parents’ concerns and, by extension, my heritage.

So there was a rupture in the family line: we lost something. I certainly lost the ritual processes that had sustained my ancestors’ culture.

The second part of ancestral grief for white people in the U.S. has to do with what many of our European ancestors did when they got here. They decimated an indigenous population through war and disease. They brought slavery to this continent. We have not reconciled with the indigenous people of this country or the people we brought here from Africa. That grief is still there in our collective psyche. We’ve barely touched it. Some other countries with similar histories are beginning to deal with such griefs. The Canadian government recently apologized to its indigenous people, though now it’s backtracking. Australia has done some symbolic work with the aboriginal people. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was significant. But the ancestral grief is thick in the U.S.

The third piece of ancestral grief is the pain that is passed on generationally. I see this a lot in my practice. Someone will be carrying a shame that began in some prior generation: a pregnancy from a rape, for instance. When that child born of rape grows up and has children, the pain can be passed on. I recently listened to a psychologist by the name of Joy DeGruy talk about her research on how the generational effects of slavery show up in the lives of African Americans. This unresolved grief casts a long shadow.

I worked with a woman who was struggling with her body and sexuality. She regarded her body with contempt and couldn’t tolerate intimate contact with her husband. One day I told her I didn’t think this grief was hers. I thought it belonged to the generations that had come before her, and now it was showing up in her body, asking for healing. She let this sink in, then remembered the ways her mother and grandmother had neglected and rejected their bodies. She could feel this trauma that had come to her from them. So she crafted a ritual that included writing out all the lies she’d been taught on a large rock, which she then dropped into the ocean. She was able to start shedding the old story and reclaiming the intimate part of her life.

We’re not going to figure it all out: grief doesn’t need to be solved; it needs to be tended. Whether it comes from our ancestors, or from what we didn’t get from those closest to us, or from the parts of ourselves we shut off, or from the destruction of the natural world, our job is to mourn that loss so that we can become people who respond to the world rather than just survive day to day. If I try to figure it all out on my own, I’m just back in survival mode. Malidoma told me there is a word in his village: yielbongura. It means “the things that knowledge cannot eat.” You cannot figure out grief. Knowledge cannot help you metabolize it.

McKee: You have written that there are some sorrows — especially societal ones like climate change, slavery, and the Holocaust — that can’t be worked through; they must be “lived with.”

Weller: This is an idea that came to me from two writers, Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman, who tell us that there is redemptive grieving, in which we are changed by the time spent in sorrow; and there is nonredemptive mourning, for the losses that communities should never forget but keep in memory through an anniversary or a ritual or a monument, like the memorials to the Rwandan genocide or the Holocaust or the Vietnam veterans. These great losses cannot be made right. They remind us that we need to live differently, so that we do not do this again.

McKee: How do other cultures integrate grief and loss into their communities more effectively?

Weller: The Irish still observe the traditional wake, where they lay out the body of the deceased in the home and alternately celebrate the person and mourn his or her passing with toasts, poems, songs, and keening. The body is never left alone during the vigil, which lasts two or three days. Then it is moved to the church for burial.

The Mexican Day of the Dead, which you mentioned earlier, is a three-thousand-year-old tradition that comes from the Aztecs. It is a way of annually honoring the ancestors and keeping the dead present in our lives.

We do have practices in our culture that help us grieve. When my father died, our house was filled with neighbors bringing food and condolences. There was a sense that we weren’t alone with his death, that the community was there with us. It meant a lot. Friendship is perhaps the most essential tool we have in times of loss.

Poetry and music can play a significant role in grief. I think poets are more in touch with sorrow because they pay better attention to the psyche. Blues music is an American tradition that can help us find our way through suffering. And the choral music in churches: the requiems, the songs of lamentation — these were all designed to assist us in dealing with grief. We rarely hear them anymore.

It’s up to us to devise our own rituals. What we’re grieving as a culture is unique, and so our rituals need to be specific to our times. I feel that ritual rises from the earth. If we slow down and listen to the land we are on, we will know what we need to do. I don’t want simply to copy another tradition, to appropriate it. I respect traditional cultures, but I can’t just take their forms. They’re not mine. They weren’t shaped by my people, on this continent, at this time. I’ve done some of these emerging rituals with Malidoma, and after one he told me, “That makes perfect sense for your people, but you’d never see that in my village!” Our rituals must speak to the particular ways we’ve been shaped, or misshaped, by our culture.

One of the values of ritual is that it has the capacity to derange us, to shake us out of the old forms. We need that derangement, because the current arrangement isn’t working.

McKee: What about weddings, graduations, church services? Aren’t those rituals?

Weller: We have ceremonies, yes, but we come out of those pretty much the same as we went in. You’re supposed to emerge from a ritual wondering what the hell just happened. Ritual connects us to spirit and soul. It can shift us out of our usual state of mind. Ceremony works to maintain and renew social bonds. We need both, but we rarely have access to rituals that are potent enough to break us open.

McKee: You write of being in “constant conversation with grief.” That sounds exhausting!

Weller: [Laughs.] What I mean is that grief is always by my side. There will be an exchange on any given day between me and this melancholy brother of mine. I might hear a sad story on the radio, or I might be driving and see roadkill on the shoulder. I want to be sensitive to the losses around me. To drop out of the conversation would mean to isolate myself, and I’m not willing to do that anymore. At times it is tiring to be open to grief, but, on the other hand, I’ve never known more joy than I do now. I remember saying to a woman in Burkina Faso, “You have so much joy.” And she replied, “That’s because I cry a lot.”

McKee: You call bringing grief and death out of the shadow our “sacred duty.” Why “sacred”?

Weller: I mean it’s our moral obligation to stay engaged. A heart that does not somehow deal with grief turns hard and becomes unresponsive to the joys and sorrows of the world. Then our communities become cold; our children go unprotected; our environment can be pillaged for the good of the few. Only if we learn to grieve can we keep our hearts responsive and do the difficult work of restoring and repairing the world.