Avoid “Premature Consolation”

Don’t tell people to just “get over it”

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

A couple of weeks ago I came across my new favorite coupling of words: “premature consolation”. The context was an interview of poet Gregory Orr by Krista Tippett. Their focus was on the ways that language shapes meaning, especially in trauma and grief. Orr’s background is that when he was only a boy of 12, he shot and killed his brother in a…