Reflections on Grief and Dialectical Thinking
One after the other, in my feed this morning, I saw two posts that felt so utterly true to me. And I knew, reading them, that there were probably many folks in the world right now that would see them as contradictory. As mutually exclusive.
The first was referencing the newly announced Taylor Swift album, and exploring the importance of leaving space to experience joy, even with all the chaos and pain in the world today. The second was a reel of an author describing the heartbreak of seeing people carry on with work and life, as if the world wasn’t falling apart underneath our feet.
For me, right now, the work of “holding both” feels more important than it ever has before.
“Holding both” is language I use a lot as a therapist. I first came across the concept in a DBT skills group I attended during undergrad and grad school. The concept of a dialectic (the D in DBT, which is an acronym for Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) is basically this: sometimes two things that feel opposite or contradictory can both be true at the same time. In the context of DBT, this is often discussed in the context of holding both acceptance and change. Accepting that things are the way they are, AND that change is necessary. Accepting that we are absolutely trying hard enough, AND that we need to change something in order to heal.
There is no reason too small to cry.
There is no reason too small to scream.
Pain is pain, child. I will not qualify it for you.
I love you. I will do everything I can
to not make that hard for you to understand.
Some people love you and hurt you,
and you will learn that dialectic when you are older
but right now it is not a lesson you need to understand.
Scream, child. I love you.
–excerpt from “This one is for the youngest one I know–you do not owe them your silence.”
The world is a complex place, and many of us–myself included–often try to lean on logic to understand these complexities. Sometimes logic is helpful, but in my experience, it often leaves me at dead ends. If I follow the logic down this one path, it leads me to truth A. If I follow it down this other path, it leads to truth B. But A and B are opposites, contradictory. So now what?
What I have found, both in my work as a client in therapy, and during my time as a therapist, is that we need to leave space for contradictory truths.
Today, one of the major dialectics I see causing frustration, fear, hurt, and conflict in the people around me, is a dialectic between grief and joy. The messages I received growing up taught me that grief and joy exist at opposite ends of a spectrum. After all, aren’t they just sadness and happiness with the volume turned up?
But also, in my childhood, I learned that happiness and sadness were not necessarily antithetical. When I was a child, I remember reading the book “because of winn-dixie.” One of the pieces of that book that I still remember to this day, is the symbol of the Litmus Lozenge. These candies were described in the novel as tasting both “sweet and sad,” or, “melancholy” as one character says (am I the only child of the nineties who first learned the word “melancholy” from this particular book?).
Fearsong.
The little one in me is wide-eyed and wanting:
What made your lips quirk like that?
Did I do something wrong?
Are you gonna leave? (please not again).
Listen, there, did you hear it?
That one sings like the caged bird.
Melts, like a litmus lozenge, mouth wet with
syrup and sorrow. Cold and calling.
You were born to solve a problem.
But I kept telling you that you were one.
Melancholy is, itself, a word that speaks to holding both. The things we think are opposites, are not necessarily opposites. Love can exist alongside hate. Fury alongside gratitude. Grief alongside love.
After all, how many times have you heard someone discuss grief, and bring up that first time they laugh, or smile, after the loss of a loved one, and it feels so utterly wrong to feel that joy, when they are surrounded by all that pain? That conflict doesn’t mean that the grief is gone. Rather, that first joy, and the feeling of wrongness inherent in it, is a near-universal part of experiencing grief.
Grief.
I need you to understand.
One day there will be no words.
One day, a smile will slip from my lips,
and I will catch it in my palms, floating
in the pool of settling water there,
and I will not know what to do with it.
Today, when I saw those posts side-by-side, I felt pulled to write about this feeling of dialectics, and the need to hold both grief and joy.
Because yes, when we are piled high with pain and grief, and we see another human (or ourselves) feeling lightness or joy, the cognitive dissonance can be overwhelming. That experience is, so often, absolutely devastating. It can feel like a betrayal.
And also, we cannot force ourselves to sit, mired in grief, and turn away from the lightness and joy when it comes to us. In this moment when there is so much violence and hurt, I truly believe that one of the most important things we can do is remain defiantly connected to our humanity. And part of staying connected to our humanity amidst tragedy is allowing joy to exist when it arrives.
I do want to clarify that I am not suggesting we should force ourselves to feel joy when it is unwarranted. Forced positivity (often called “toxic positivity”) is not something that reaffirms our humanity. In fact, I believe that forcing ourselves to feel only the good is similarly injurious as forcing ourselves to hide from joy, and only allowing ourselves to feel pain and sadness and fear. Reaffirming our humanity means acknowledging and accepting that we feel how we feel for a reason. And it means allowing those feelings to exist (and to coexist).
I do not know my own pain.
No one ever introduced us.
I was always running away from her,
but I can’t anymore.
We stand. [estranged] sisters.
All wide eyes and suspicion.
I speak my anger into the world,
even though it is still so full of question marks.
I do not try to strangle my guilt. I do not try
to kill the fear or numb the sadness.
There is something more painful than destroying yourself.
(Many things, in fact.) One of them
is watching someone you love destroy themself.
There’s nothing I can do.
This isn’t my battle.
I’m tired of holding the knife.
I won’t do it anymore.
–excerpt from “Anticipatory grief.”
I think that the speaker in the second clip I saw–who was discussing the pain of seeing others not weighed down by the heaviness of the violence and oppression in our world–would probably not direct criticism at the experience of joy. Rather, I believe her contention was with Normalcy. People going about their day to day lives, as if nothing has changed. People choosing to separate themselves from any violence that does not reach out and grab them by the throat. People choosing to close their eyes and not see the evil in front of them.
Normalization, in that sense, I DO believe can be very harmful. This normalcy isn’t about allowing ourselves to feel, and accepting our emotions. It’s about denying our emotions, and blocking out the world around us. It’s about choosing to cover our eyes, and stick our fingers in our ears, and try to ignore what is happening.
Here, again, I still hold both. If you follow my writing, social media, etc., you may know that I often speak about “adaptive dissociation.” I do believe that our nervous systems have a limit to the amount of information they can take in and process. And I do believe that sometimes we need to set a boundary around our own capacity to feel and process certain emotions. However, I hold this belief in adaptive dissociation alongside the belief that disconnecting from our feelings, and from the violence in our larger world, can be incredibly harmful and dehumanizing.
Thinking about holding both is necessarily a commitment to balance. Yes, there are times when we need to disconnect ourself from the flood of emotions, in order to survive and keep going. And yes, disconnecting from the fear and pain is also a disconnection from what makes us human. So, we have to find the balance. What do we connect or disconnect from? How much do we connect or disconnect? Where is the balance between trying to keep living and trying to remain human?
I don’t know the answer. I think the answer is probably unique to every person, and every situation. I also am afraid that someone could take that “everyone is different” argument, and use it to defend a level of disconnection that I would find abhorrent.
When the anonymous comment demands the genocide of Us,
I greet the part of me that knows how to turn the shoulder,
how to numb, and freeze, and hold my heartbeat slow in the midst of chaos.
I squeeze her hand in gratitude and breathe relief into her.
There is nothing I need to unlearn here—no deep stitches of nightmares to pick apart
and reveal the healed flesh underneath.
When the body is on fire grab the bucket before the balm.
We go back to the first instincts.
We know how to stay living.
I grieve the step backward, but I do not punish myself for it.
And trust. I have already found home in my body after it was taken from me.
I will again. And easier this time.
–excerpt from “Sometimes I forget that there are people who want to kill me.”
I could go on a long time talking about the world we are living in, and holding both, and normalization, and oppression, and genocide, and dialectics, and politics, and grief. But instead, I want to return to the main drive that sent me to my laptop to type out this essay: I want to remind you that you are allowed to be human.
You are allowed to feel moments of joy, even as you witness atrocities across the ocean, and in your own back yard. You are allowed to feel grief, no matter what people tell you about the need to close your eyes and keep going. You are allowed to take space, if you need to, but please remember to stay in touch with your humanity. You are allowed to feel furious when you see others feeling joy, amidst so much terror. You are allowed to feel conflicted, if you feel happiness, even amidst so much pain. You are also allowed to feel angry at me, for defending joy in the face of so much heartbreak.
You are allowed to feel. It’s one of the things that makes you human. It’s one of the things that makes Us human.
Everything is blank.
I can’t feel the grief.
I know it’s there. with the fear.
and the echoing scream.
and her terror.
we both covered our eyes.
we both saw no evil,
(because we refused to.
because it would have been too painful.)
I want to hold that comparison
up to my neck,
a blade at my carotid;
a reason to stop existing.
(the same way she held it up for me.)
Sometimes I do.
(apple, tree.)
But I did not bring a child into this world,
only to feed them to the wolves.
And, when I am ready, when it is finally safe,
I will open my eyes.
–excerpt from “Appleseed.”
This blog was originally posted on my Substack on August 14, 2025. The original post can be viewed here. All poems and excerpts included in this blog post were written by me.
