United Through Grief

Awareness, Blog, Communication, Inspiration, Letters, Support

January 25, 2026

I’m not here to talk politics. I am here to talk about the collective fear and grief in this country after the second federal shooting of a U.S. citizen.
 
Something has shifted. Not loudly. Not cleanly. But palpably.
 
You can feel it in conversations that trail off. In the way people are checking their surroundings more often. In the tightness in the chest that doesn’t seem to belong to just one moment or one headline. This is not outrage alone. This is not debate. This is grief layered with fear, and it’s spreading quietly through nervous systems across the country.
 
As a psychologist, I want to name something important: when violence repeats, especially at the hands of systems meant to protect, the human psyche does not process each incident separately. Our brains stack them. Our bodies remember. The second loss does not arrive alone. It drags the first with it, and often many more before that. What people are responding to right now is not just what happened recently. They are responding to a growing sense that safety is conditional, unpredictable, and fragile.
 
That realization is destabilizing.
 
 
Grief is not only about death. It is also about the loss of assumed safety. The loss of trust. The loss of the quiet belief that if you follow the rules, keep your head down, and live your life – you will be okay. When that belief cracks, fear rushes in to fill the gap. Not dramatic fear. Existential fear. The kind that lives under the skin and shows up as irritability, exhaustion, numbness, or a constant low-level alertness.
 
Many people don’t recognize this as grief because no one they know personally has died. But grief doesn’t require proximity. It requires identification. It requires the moment when the brain whispers, “That could have been me. That could have been someone I love.” When that whisper becomes a chorus, collective grief is born.
 
What we’re seeing now is compounded grief. It’s grief without time to metabolize. Before the body can settle from the first shock, another one arrives. This overwhelms our capacity to process. So people argue. Or shut down. Or scroll endlessly. Or feel angry without knowing exactly why. These are not character flaws. These are stress responses.
 
Fear often disguises itself as certainty. As hardened opinions. As shouting. As retreat. Underneath all of it is a very old human question: “Am I safe?” When that question has no clear answer, the nervous system stays activated. You can’t think clearly in that state. You can’t feel grounded. You can’t grieve properly.
 
I see this pattern with clients again and again. We are a culture that expects grief to be private, linear, and brief. But grief doesn’t work that way. It leaks into grocery stores, workplaces, relationships, and sleep. It shows up in bodies before it ever becomes language. And when we don’t name it, it doesn’t disappear. It just finds louder ways to express itself.
 
What people need right now is not to be told how to think. They need permission to feel what is already there. To acknowledge that something feels wrong, unsettling, heavy. To say, “I’m scared,” without being shamed for it. To say, “I’m grieving,” even if they can’t point to a single, personal loss.
 
We cannot regulate a collective nervous system by pretending everything is fine or by demanding people move on. Healing does not come from dismissal. It comes from presence. From slowing down enough to notice what our bodies are holding. From listening without immediately correcting or debating. From recognizing that fear and grief are signals, not failures.
 
This moment is asking something of us. Not politically. Humanly.
 
It’s asking us to admit that repeated loss erodes trust. That uncertainty is exhausting. That grief shared is still grief, even when it’s messy and uncomfortable.
 
We are not broken for feeling this way. We are responding exactly as humans do when safety feels unstable. The work now is not to harden, but to stay conscious. To breathe. To connect. To grieve what is being lost in real time.
 
Naming it doesn’t make it worse. Naming it gives us back a measure of control.
 
And right now, naming our collective grief is an act of care.



Samantha Ruth LLC in Colorado has officially closed.
All business can be directed to Griefhab via sam@griefhab.org


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