Why is grieving not like experiencing or working with other major emotions? Which fresh, new perspective can you take towards the people who are working and living within your community to build a global one? How can resources be reallocated to bring big dreams to fruition?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks about grief in politics and society with journalist Sarah Jaffe.

Podcast Sponsor: Headway















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Meet Sarah Jaffe















Sarah Jaffe is a journalist, author, and social commentator whose work interrogates power, labor, and justice in everyday life. Her writings have appeared in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, and more. She is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone and Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, with From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire forthcoming.

Visit Sarah’s website and connect on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

In This Podcast



* “You can’t get an A in grieving”

* Building community 

* Sarah’s advice to private practitioners 



“You can’t get an A in grieving”



It turns out you can’t get an A in grief [or grieving], and you can’t make it happen on a faster timeline, and you can’t sort of work at it, at all. That is the through-line between [my] two books … I was fascinated by how this thing isn’t work. (Sarah Jaffe)



With grief, there is no ‘work’ per se that needs to be done, and in this way grief is a painfully unique feeling. It cannot be approached in the same deconstructive, proactive way that other emotions sometimes can be approached. 

“Doing the work” does not lessen the intenstity of the pain like “doing the work” can do with other human experiences in therapy, such as anger. Grief has its own timeline, its own methods, and it is immoved by your attempts to control it. 



I found that [doing the work] was a completely useless framework when dealing with grief. It would come when it felt like it – it still does, seven years later. You can’t experience it on your timeline, but also if you don’t make space for it to arrive when it does, it’ll kick your ass in all sorts of really intensely physica...