Sacramento therapist says Kings grief is OK. Here’s how to process your emotions
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The Sacramento Kings’ spectacular ascent to the Western Conference Finals crashed to a halt Sunday in a 120-100 loss to the Golden State Warriors. The capital city, along with fans across the region, have fallen into collective mourning.
That, said Midtown-based therapist Linda Rolufs, is perfectly natural.
“Grief is a response to the loss of something important,” Rolufs said. “When I work with clients who are grieving, what I always talk about is, grief is a natural process. … We know how to grieve, if we just let ourselves feel what we’re feeling. And our feelings kind of come in waves.”
Shock. Anger. Hopelessness. All these emotions are coursing through Kings fans as they (we hope) make their way toward acceptance of the facts: They finally made it to the playoffs, and they lost in the first round.
It hurts because the Kings are more than just a sports team; for many fans, they are an integral part of life. Rachel Awabdeh, 23, one of four siblings in a Kings superfan family, said it feels as if the Awabdehs know all the players personally.
“When any of them get injured, we talk about them like they’re family members in the hospital,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh my god, they need a transplant? I can give him my hamstring.’”
Fandom, Rolufs said, “becomes your group and your tribe. It has a sense of belonging, and it can become a part of someone’s identity.”
And identifying with an underdog team, the therapist said, can feed back into a deeper sense of grief after a tough loss.
“There’s a high, high emotional investment in a particular outcome, right?” said Rolufs, who works in the practice Love Heal Grow. “And there’s the anticipation: It’s been so long.”
Victory tantalizingly close
Fans have been envisioning since 2006 what it would be like for the team to be good again. Rolufs said that this season, with a playoffs victory tantalizingly close, those visions grew even clearer.
“The anticipation of how awesome it’s going to be, how awesome it’s going to feel if they win, and what that moment is going to be like, and the celebrating what that’s going to be like and how proud everyone’s going to feel. … When that outcome is not realized, then that is going to be a significant loss, that is going to be a disappointment — the loss of that outcome that people have been investing in very heavily.”
In contrast with many types of grief, however, misery about the Kings has a bright side.
There’s always next season
“In the West and our culture, we don’t talk about emotions very much,” Rolufs said. “We don’t like to talk about emotions, and particularly grief, because people become uncomfortable. They don’t know what to do, they don’t know how to help. … When it comes to sports and sports losses, people are in it together; you’re having that shared experience of that loss. So that can be validating and healing.”
The key to dealing with grief is to let yourself feel your feelings: “Validate it,” she said. “This is a loss. And so with any loss, we’re going to go through a grieving process until we get through it. And then we can accept that, ‘OK, this is not what I wanted, but I’m OK. And we’re going to be OK.’”
Luckily, with this type of loss, there’s always next season. And while Rolufs doesn’t follow the team, she made a comment that any Kings fan could tell you, whether they’ve been to therapy yet or not:
“Life has painful events in it. Painful situations are a part of life.”
This story was originally published May 1, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
