Therapists Name What Millions Feel: Grief

What's happening

Therapists across the United States are giving a name to what millions of their clients describe: collective grief, or what clinicians call "ambiguous loss." Unlike grief tied to a single event, this loss has no clear beginning and no resolution. People report mourning a sense of safety in public spaces, trust in institutions, the belief that progress moves steadily forward, and the assumption that politics would not threaten daily life. The grief manifests as chronic sadness, disproportionate anger, exhaustion, hopelessness, and difficulty imagining the future. "Hope that skips over grief tends to be fragile," one therapist wrote. "Hope that grows through grief is more sustainable." The pattern is not partisan. It crosses demographic lines. What unites those experiencing it is the feeling that the country they understood has become unfamiliar while they were still living in it.

What the text says

Psalm 137 is the song of a people grieving in a land that no longer feels like home.

Psalms 137:1By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

Psalms 137:4How can we sing Yahweh's song in a foreign land?

The exiles ask how they can sing the Lord's song in a strange land. The particular anguish of this psalm is that the strangeness is not geographic. It is existential. Everything familiar has been removed, and what remains does not match what was promised.

Scripture's psalms of lament, which make up roughly a third of the Psalter, share a structure: they name the pain, they direct it to God, and they wait. They do not rush to resolution. Psalm 42 captures the raw ache of displacement.

Psalms 42:3My tears have been my food day and night, while they continually ask me, "Where is your God?"

The tears are constant. The question, "Where is your God?", comes from outside and inside simultaneously. Lament in the biblical tradition is not weakness or faithlessness. It is a form of honesty that refuses to pretend things are fine before they are. The psalms insist that grief spoken before God is itself a kind of prayer.

The reflection

The strange land in Psalm 137 was Babylon. For millions of Americans, the strange land is home. The grief therapists describe is not clinical depression. It is the sorrow of watching something you believed in become unrecognizable while you remain inside it. Scripture does not demand that grief resolve quickly. The lament psalms sit in the ache, sometimes for the entire poem. The biblical tradition suggests that the first honest act in a season of loss is to name what has been lost. What comes after that is not guaranteed. But what comes without it is almost always hollow.