03/17/2026
Where Do We Go From Here?: Moving Through Grief to Cultivate our Aliveness || By Taylor Arroganté-Reyes, LPCC
When I sat down to write this, I knew I wanted to talk about the psychological work that’s swirling around me as a therapist. More specifically, the work around me as a therapist in 2026 in the United States who works with folks at an intersection of many forms of marginalization. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, clacking, then deleting. Clacking, deleting. Quieting my logic and untangling the thoughts knotting my mind, I tried to connect with my sensations. When I did, I discovered a static humming across my entire body- I felt like I was floating in a sea of white noise. A dampened, deadened sense covered me.
In the midst of unprecedented shifts in our democracy and the shocking realities of our world, there are almost too many things to say to find any way to say it at all. Should I talk about Audre Lorde’s radical self care as an act of resistance? Or, maybe I should talk about cultivating and reclaiming our will to power through community and mutual aid work and organizing. Perhaps I talk about how to navigate getting connected to grassroots organizations that are doing important work to protect people’s rights.
All of those things matter.
And for all of those things, there are many visionaries and organizations out there doing better work to educate and organize us than I possibly could.
So what can I offer you and us (and myself!) as a therapist? What I do know is that I can work with nothingness, I can work with a deadening sense towards life. It’s an existential reality we’ve all been forced to face and I’ve challenged myself and helped my clients to stand in front of it time and time again. More and more, in and out of the therapy room, it seems like this pervasive numbness sits between us and action like a locked vault door we don’t know how to open.
As I sort through all of this, I’m reminded of the inevitable numbness that originates from grief. It is normal, and even expectable that when we experience loss, we might feel completely numb to the world. In this current world, I can see that we are living in a grief stricken, grief-soaked culture. We are individually and collectively grieving over what we’ve already lost, over what is changing, and over the anticipation of what could come. So, we feel stuck. Stuck in a cycle of fear, turning away from ourselves and one another, and paralyzed by inaction, and so on and so on.
Turning loss and grief over in my mind, I am reminded of a quote from Meister Eckhart, a German philosopher, priest, and mystic of the 14th century. He said, “Everything is meant to be lost, so that the soul may stand in unhampered nothingness.”
Woof! Harsh! Difficult. We don’t want to accept that. Of course, we don’t. And yet it is the nature of reality- everyone is born, everyone dies. Every story begins, and every story ends. Loss is the inevitable thread that runs through it all, our faithful companion that travels the span of our lives by our side.
I’m also reminded of the transformative work of grief, captured in a quote by adrienne maree brown- a black, q***r activist, writer and visionary- who writes in their book Emergent Strategy, “Grief is the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life.”
Both of these thinkers allude to the truth that our grief contains an enigmatic, profound power. Stretching back to the origin stories that have informed our world- our myths, our folktales, and all the oral traditions passed down for generations- we can see that loss almost always precedes a journey. A hero’s journey in the classical sense is broken down into three major stages:
I. Departure or Separation: a loss, a tragic change
II. Initiation: the beginning of a journey
III. Return: the integration of the journey into a new life
Take Atalanta, the Greek goddess, for example. As an infant, she was abandoned by her parents because of their desire for a son (departure). She was taken under the wing of a huntress bear and taught to hunt and to be one with the wilderness (initiation). Atalanta became a mythically swift-footed and deadly archer and huntress who famously protected herself from those who would seek to harm her (return).
Grief work happens in the initiation. Like Atalanta, grief work happens in our participation with reality- in the cultivation of who we want to become. Even in the face of loss that feels insurmountable. We must dust ourselves off, dust off one another, hold one another, take each other under our wings, and find who we have become now that the falling rubble has crushed us into a new shape. And we must return to ourselves, and in returning to ourselves hone our skills so we can better protect ourselves and one another from the inevitable ongoing and future suffering we will face together.
David Richo, a jungian psychotherapist, writes about this in his book, How to be an Adult: a Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration: “Whole-hearted engagement with my circumstances releases my irrepressible liveliness.”
When we fully engage with reality- just as it is- even when it is impossibly heartbreaking and terrifying- grief becomes the crucible that transforms us into the people we hope to be. The working through of our grief can become the key that finally unlocks the vault. Engaging with our reality and moving through our grief puts the bow in the hands of an abandoned child and teaches her how to take aim. It can swing wide the door and usher us across the threshold from numbness to irrepressible aliveness and power.
Further Readings:
Grief Belongs in Social Movements. Can We Embrace It?
https://inthesetimes.com/article/freedom-grief-healing-death-liberation-movements
Uses of Anger & Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Two essays on turning grief, anger, and life energy into tools of resistance by Audra Lorde
Finding Refuge by Michelle Cassandra Johnson. Michelle is a black activist, social worker, and yoga instructor, and her book talks about moving through personal and collective grief toward liberation.
About the Author: Taylor Arroganté-Reyes is a Licensed Professional Counselor Candidate and the owner of Congruence Psychotherapy. In individual work, she specializes in existential therapy and parts work. With couples and partner systems, she specializes in consensual non monogamy and non-normative relationship structures. Her work seeks to invite an open-handedness to the ever-unfolding mystery of life. Her practice is grounded in the belief that genuine relational contact between us and within us can heal, change, and liberate— allowing us to become who we hope to be. If you are interested in working with Taylor, please visit https://congruencepsychotherapy.com/ or email her at taylor@congruencepsychotherapy.com.
