Offering: February 23, 2025
Destabilizing & maintaining
I have some openings for one-on-one tarot sessions in the coming wees. For more on what sessions entail click here. To book an appointment, click here. For more on my background, process and work with the cards, check out this Q&A I did with Laura Newberry for The Los Angeles Times.
One of the hardest things about losing someone important to you is that the person you’ve lost is often someone you’d turn to for support. Significant loss reveals the extent to which we rely on others to regulate our emotions, and philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe describes the particular dilemma in grief as involving “both emotion dysregulation and a reduced ability to negotiate that dysregulation.”
I finished a second pass of Ratcliffe’s Grief Worlds this week, which I feel great about! Last summer I vowed to get better at finishing the books that I start, and the cold, dark and often solitary Maine winter has definitely been a helpful factor in staying that course.
But my tendency to abandon books part-way through is honestly less about time or energy or anything else than it is about regulating emotions. The things I’ve wanted to read these last years have been increasingly out of my depth, which has brought up a lot; namely feelings of inadequacy, confusion and frustration.
Coming as a surprise to no one I’m sure, avoiding things I want to do that make me anxious does mitigate the distressing feelings but tends to also get and keep me stuck in a rut. What has actually helped when it comes to sticking with difficult books is talking to people who can both relate to the struggle, and understand it as one worth staying with.
In the case of Grief Worlds—which was not an easy read for me, at all—I can say now that it was so worth multiple tries and both passes. Ratcliffe gets at so much of what makes grief so perplexing, but also what makes it so gratifying to try and make sense of.
One of my big takeaways from Grief Worlds is that the course of grief is “shaped by interactions with other people, against the backdrop of a social and cultural context that is—to varying degrees—shared1.” This makes intuitive sense to me, but is fleshed out in useful ways throughout the book.
There’s a great chapter on interpersonal emotion regulation, for instance, of which regulating my feelings about reading Grief Worlds through chatting with friends is a good example. For Ratcliffe, emotion regulation happens more often and more interpersonally than we might think.
This also makes intuitive sense, even though I’ve mostly thought about emotion regulation as something I do for myself. Like taking deep breaths when I’m angry, or practicing yoga to reduce stress, both which strike me as solo endeavors.
In reality, the things we do to regulate our emotions are often heavily entwined with the social world. Ratcliffe gives the example of taking a relaxing bike ride, which relies on others in the sense that it “would not be possible if you constantly doubted the competence or intentions of all drivers in the vicinity.”
We rely on others in all kinds if ways that are both visible and not. And the bike ride example feels especially relevant to those experiences of grief in which one’s trust in others and the world has been undermined by a loss. That person’s capacity for regulating through the social resources they’d otherwise access may be compromised to an extent that will affect their grief process. The ways it does so may not be readily apparent, but will be no less consequential.
For Ratcliffe, narrative can also be a regulating resource in grief. One of the core difficulties in profound grief is the way an established world is rendered unsustainable after a loss, but a revised world doesn’t exist yet.
This creates a unique sort of tension that necessitates a kind of balancing act, which includes both retention and loss as well as revision of life structure. Ratcliffe suggests that narrative can play a role in how this disturbance is negotiated, and coherent life structure restored.
