Grief

With less extreme reactions, the answer often lies in our culture's inability to deal with grief. People in our society have a difficult time dealing with another person's pain and grief, whatever the source, and tend to avoid or minimize it rather than acknowledge it. We are trained to avoid other people's grief, to look away from pain, to deny illness and death, and leave people to deal with these things in private. Sharing another person's pain is simply not a skill many of us have developed or are comfortable with, and grief is still taboo in our society. Grieving death is hard enough; grieving anything less than a death is often seen as indulgent, self-involved, and neurotic.