Grief and Loss
I recently attended the funeral of a friend who died a few weeks before his 30th birthday. The entire day was an experience of many mixed emotions. It was a sad, messy, confusing, frustrating, joyful, exhausting, and tense day.
I have worked with a variety of people who have experienced grief and loss in their life. Sometimes people meet with me and in the first session express that they want a space to “process grief” or work through a loss that they “haven’t dealt with”. Other times I’ve worked with people presenting with concerns in other areas of their life, and they’ve come to discover an underlying experience of grief or loss of something or someone that they haven’t realised has been impacting them.
When working with clients who present with grief and loss, I often find it helpful to remind them of the following things:
Grief can be wide-ranging
When we think of grief and loss, we often think of the death of a person, usually someone close to us. But experiences of grief and loss can occur following a wide range of events – including the death of a celebrity of world-figure, the serious illness or physical decline of someone we know, the death of a pet, the termination or change of a job, the end of relationship or marriage, the progression of children into adulthood, a loss of physical or mental wellbeing (especially fertility), major life transitions including parenthood and retirement, and when giving up unhealthy habits (such as substance use, or disordered eating).
All of these events represent a change from one way of life, or one experience of life, to another. They are often irreversible, and represent a future that is unknown or significantly different to the future we had perhaps imagined.
2. Avoid pathologising grief
The thoughts, feelings, and behaviours that follow a loss are not ‘pathological’. That is, they are not a disorder. Whilst experiences of grief can look and feel like depression (and perhaps can develop into a depressive episode or disorder), it is expected and even healthy to experience grief.
Having said that…
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3. There’s no ‘normal’
A common question I get asked is “is this normal?”. Is this normal for me to feeling this way, for this long, about this…? Is it normal for me to not be feeling like this, in this way, about this? There is no ‘manual’ for grief, and no prescribed or regular way to process something like loss that is often incredibly confusing and painful.
It can be really helpful here to acknowledge that each individual, each family, and each community or culture has different rituals and process of grief. I’ve worked with people who, when someone has died, wore black to a funeral and cried for days, and others who wore colours to a celebration of life service and laughed. I’ve worked with families who talk of deceased person often and who still celebrate their birthdays, and other families who are unable to speak of that person again. Some cultures and religions have set periods of mourning; other cultures have expectations for people to ‘move on’. Some people take days to process grief, others take years.
4. Models of Grief
Perhaps the most famous psychological framework on grief was proposed by Kubler-Ross, and her ‘5 Stages’ - including denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. What I find helpful about this model is that it normalises the range of feelings that might accompany a loss – particularly anger or denial, which can feel uncomfortable or incongruent. However, my experience in working with people with grief and loss is that we can often ‘cycle through’ or ‘bounce around’ all five of those feelings, and move back into denial or anger or depression, even after seemingly reaching acceptance.
Another model of grief I like to explain to clients is Worden’s ‘tasks of grief’ or the ‘TEAR Model’. It suggests that the tasks of grief are to (1) accept the reality of the loss, (2) experience the pain off the loss, (3) adjust to the new environment without the lost ____ and (4) reinvest in the new reality. This model sometimes provides us with a bit more information about where we might be getting ‘stuck’ in the grief process, and what we can be doing to work through the grief.
Overall, it is often most helpful to be self-compassionate rather than self-critical about the way we are (or someone around us is) managing grief. Creating spaces of awareness for what we are feeling, why we might be feeling that way, and allowing those feelings to occur can be a helpful place to start your grief process.
