Why Grief Isn't Weakness

I was taught that grief was weakness. So when things happen to me, there was almost a mindset of, like, I'm okay. I'm going to be stronger. I'm going to, you know, just have a stiff upper lip and get through it. Don't think about the losses, but in not thinking about them or grieving them, I think the truth is that those things continue to impact me in much deeper ways than I was able to realize. And it wasn't until our recovery journey for my wife and I that some of those things I could recognize as losses and say I didn't. In these situations, I didn't get the care or support I needed because I live in a fallen world. And I remember asking Dr. Ted Roberts once, I said, you know, what has the capacity to create trauma or brokenness in our lives? And he said, you know, anything that happens to us that's outside of what God intended in the Garden of Eden, because of the way we might interpret our sense of value, worth, or identity from something that happened to us. And if we can see those losses and be able to grieve them, then we're able to move forward, I think, in ways that are really, really powerful.