I want to tell you something that took me an embarrassingly long time to learn, and I say that as someone with a doctorate in psychology.

We are allowed to feel more than one thing at a time.

I know. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. And yet most of us were never actually taught this. Not in school, not in our families, not in the cultural scripts we absorbed about how emotions are supposed to work. We were taught that feelings were singular and sequential. You are sad. Then you are angry. Then you are okay. One thing at a time, moving in a direction, ideally toward something more manageable than where you started.

It was a supervisor early in my clinical training who first introduced me to the concept of both/and. She was teaching me how to hold complexity with clients, how to help them understand that two seemingly opposite things could be true at the same time, and how to apply that same thinking to myself as I conceptualized the people I was working with. I remember sitting with that idea and realizing that I had never actually been given permission to think that way. Even in my own grief I had assumed I could only feel one way at a time. That the feelings were supposed to take turns.

They do not take turns. They show up together. All of them, at once, in the same body, asking to be held simultaneously. And learning to do that, to actually allow the complexity rather than flattening it into something simpler, is some of the most important work there is.

Why Emotional Contradiction Is the Norm, Not the Exception

Here is what grief actually looks like when it is honest. You love someone and you are also furious at them for leaving. You are devastated by a loss and you are also quietly, guiltily relieved. You miss a relationship and you also know it needed to end. You grieve a job that was also damaging you. You love a person whose death also freed you from something heavy.

None of those are unusual grief experiences. They are extraordinarily common. What is unusual is having someone name them out loud, give them language, and tell you that all of it belongs.

The either/or framework we were handed tells us that grief should resolve into a single, legible emotion. Sad. Angry. Accepting. It treats contradiction as confusion, as something to be sorted out rather than held. And so grievers spend enormous energy trying to figure out which feeling is the real one, which one they are allowed to have, which one would make sense to the people around them.

The both/and framework asks a completely different question. Not which feeling is true, but how do we hold all the feelings that are true at the same time. That shift sounds small. It is not small. It changes the entire experience of being in grief because it stops asking you to edit yourself into something more digestible and starts making room for the full complexity of what is actually happening.

Bonanno’s research on grief trajectories helps us understand why this matters clinically. Grievers who are able to hold emotional complexity, who can oscillate between difficult emotions without needing to resolve them prematurely, tend to integrate their losses more fully over time. The pressure to resolve grief into a single clean feeling does not accelerate healing. It delays it, because it asks the griever to abandon parts of their experience before those parts have been fully witnessed.

The Pressure to Perform Appropriate Grief

Most grievers know, often without being told explicitly, which emotions are acceptable in the room they are in.

The widow who laughs at her husband’s funeral because someone told the story about the thing he did that one time and it was genuinely funny, and then spends the rest of the service managing her guilt about having laughed. The adult child who feels relief when a parent with a long illness finally dies, and then cannot say that out loud to anyone because relief is not on the approved list of grief emotions. The person who is angry, really genuinely furious, at the person who died, and who keeps that anger quiet because we do not speak ill of the dead and grief is supposed to look like sadness.

These are performances. And they cost something. Every time a griever edits their emotional experience to fit what the room can hold, they are doing the work of managing other people’s discomfort at the expense of their own authentic grief process. That is exhausting. And over time, it teaches the griever that certain parts of their experience are not safe to have, which means those parts go unprocessed, unwitnessed, and underground.

The grief that gets performed is the grief that gets acknowledged. The grief that is hidden because it doesn’t fit the script accumulates quietly and surfaces later in ways that are harder to recognize and harder to address. Naming this is not about encouraging grievers to perform their complexity for an audience. It is about removing the internal pressure to edit. About giving permission for all of it to be real, even if only to yourself.

What Both/And Actually Looks Like

Both/and is not a technique. It is an orientation. A way of approaching your own emotional experience that makes room for contradiction without needing to resolve it.

It sounds like: I am devastated that she is gone and I am grateful that her suffering ended. Both are true.

It sounds like: I loved this job and it was also slowly breaking me. Both are true.

It sounds like: I miss him every day and I am also relieved that the dynamic that hurt me is no longer present in my life. Both are true.

It sounds like: I am proud of my child for leaving and I am also grieving who we were to each other when they were here. Both are true.

It sounds like: I wanted this relationship to end and I am also grieving the future I imagined inside of it. Both are true.

What makes both/and hard is that it requires us to tolerate the discomfort of not resolving the contradiction. We want things to be simple. We want to know which feeling to trust, which one is the right one, which one we should follow. Both/and asks us to sit with the fact that we do not have to choose. That multiple truths can coexist. And if that feels uncomfortable, which it often does, that discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that there is work to do inside it.

I continue to work on this myself. Distress tolerance around holding more than one thing is not a skill you develop once and then have forever. It is a practice. Some days I am better at it than others. Some losses make it harder than others. What helps me is remembering that the discomfort of holding complexity is almost always more bearable than the alternative, which is flattening a real and complicated experience into something simpler than it actually is.

What It Looks Like When Complexity Is Honored Versus Shut Down

When complexity is shut down, it looks like a grief support group where someone says they feel relieved and the room goes quiet and someone quickly changes the subject. It looks like a therapist who moves too fast past the anger because sadness is easier to hold. It looks like a family system where one person is designated the emotional one and everyone else is expected to be fine. It looks like a friend who responds to every complicated grief feeling with a silver lining because the complexity is activating something in them that they do not have the capacity to sit with.

When complexity is honored, it looks like a clinician who says tell me more about the relief without any register of judgment. It looks like a friend who responds to the both/and with yes, both of those things make complete sense. It looks like a family that can sit in a room together and not need everyone to be feeling the same thing at the same time. It looks like a griever who can say out loud, to themselves or to someone else, I feel six things right now and I am not going to make myself choose just one.

The difference between those two experiences is not subtle. Grievers feel it immediately. They know when the room can hold them and when it cannot. They know when their complexity is welcome and when it is being managed. And they adjust accordingly, either opening up or closing down, based on what the room communicates it can handle.

Building the capacity to honor complexity is one of the most important things we can do, as clinicians, as friends, as partners, as family members. It does not require the right words. It requires the willingness to stay present with something that does not resolve neatly and to resist the urge to make it simpler than it is.

The Permission You Might Not Have Been Given

Here is what I want you to take from this.

You are allowed to feel more than one thing. You are allowed to love someone and be angry at them. To grieve a loss and feel relieved by it. To miss something and also know you are better without it. To be grateful and devastated at the same time. To hold the joy and the grief simultaneously without either one canceling the other out.

None of those contradictions mean you are confused or broken or grieving wrong. They mean you are human. They mean your grief is honest. And honest grief, in all its complexity, is the only kind that actually integrates.

Both things are true. They always were. You just might not have had someone tell you that until now.

References

Bonanno, G. A. (2009). The other side of sadness: What the new science of bereavement tells us about life after loss. Basic Books.

Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224.

Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). Meaning reconstruction and the experience of loss. American Psychological Association.

Worden, J. W. (2009). Grief counseling and grief therapy: A handbook for the mental health practitioner (4th ed.). Springer Publishing.

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