Look at the page on Anxiety; notice how anxiety is a signal emotion telling us that there are feelings beneath that we have been avoiding. Overwhelming events, especially from before an age of understanding, generate reactive intolerable emotions that a younger mind cannot experience. Those emotions are kept out of awareness but are expressed physically by digestive problems, muscle contraction, unpleasant sensations, and sleep disturbances. It's as though we had gone into shock and never emerged, ''sleepwalking'' through life, getting by but not feeling alive. So, the ''quick-fix techniques'', [NLP, EFT, EMDR], can rapidly desensitize to the old fears and, along with medication, provide symptom relief. The origin of the symptom often remains unaddressed and avoided. Life's challenges, the process of maturing, the movement towards acceptance is incomplete. We don't get out of growing up without paying the grief. We can avoid growing up by holding grudges, distracting and medicating, but ultimately the cost of growing up is preferable to the cost of staying in shock and refusing to accept the truth of what life has brought.

When we ''wake up'', emerge from shock, begin to feel alive again, the first feeling to greet us is usually grief.

 So why bother? Waking up to life as it is brings the capacity to feel all the emotions, not just the grief, but joy, satisfaction, excitement, curiosity, suspense, intrigue, romance, passion, intensity, masculinity, femininity, ambition, bittersweet, and any other emotion that makes life worthwhile.

 Many people would gladly prefer to resolve their anxiety, depression, insomnia, hopelessness by some method that quickly bypasses the need to grieve. Grief is an experience which we would fear and gladly avoid. Our consumerism culture promotes and sells the avoidance of difficult emotions by providing an array of distractions. We enjoy the illusion that life should be all fun and resent the lessons of loss and impermanence. If you think about it, life gives us many blessings and gifts, and by the time we die, we have to give them all back. We might be able to take the lessons, experiences and memories with us into the afterlife, but that is mainly a matter of faith. Essentially, we give back everything we are given by life. Young or old, whatever we acquire or enjoy, we will be grieving at some point. Lastly, we grieve life itself as we die.