Grief and Bereavement
Bowlby’s work showed that humans depend for their survival on their ability to attach and form relationships. Temporary detachment from our attachment figures can cause strong reactions and permanent detachment causes grief reactions. When someone dies, we begin the process we call grief. After someone’s death, a process of adaptation and adjustment begins. It is important to say here that grief is a normal reaction to overwhelming loss.
So, let’s debunk some myths.
- There are stages or phases of grief and everyone goes through the same stages in the same order, don’t they?
The stages and phases give a very general indication of some of the landmarks in the grief process. They may be helpful for someone grieving to see that there are commonalities. However, every grief process is unique. Everyone has a unique journey but also one person has a unique journey with each bereavement they have. The phases are not experienced by everyone, some grievers move between phases, miss out phases, never experience any of them, return to them, stay longer in phases than other people or through other bereavements. I sometimes say to clients that grief is like finding your way through a forest, in the dark with no map. You will trip over tree roots, fall down holes, be injured and despairing. You might think you have been this way before, but you haven’t. You are finding your way through the forest and if you have tripped over that root, you won’t do that particular root again, every step in the process is one step further.
- Grief lasts about a year, doesn’t it? You’ll feel better after you have got through a year.
Each grief process is unique. Some people may start to feel better after a year. Some find the second year harder, particularly if most of the first year has been spent in numbness and disbelief. It can look as if people are doing ok and coping well and then the reality hits and their world falls apart.
- Grief is mostly about feelings of deep sadness, isn’t it?
There are a huge range of emotions associated with grief, some of which are a huge shock to people when they experience their first major bereavement. It can feel as if there is something terribly wrong, as if you’re “going mad”. All of these feelings (and more) are completely normal in grief: numbness, shock, fear, anxiety (sometimes fear of own death or other close people dying), sadness, helplessness, anger (often catching you by surprise and directed at the most unexpected things), worthlessness, shame, guilt, yearning, tiredness, exhaustion, jealousy, relief, emancipation and a sense of things (and self) feeling unreal.
There can also be behavioural changes, sleep disturbances, appetite disturbances, absent mindedness (the brain is consumed by the loss), vivid dreams and nightmares, weeping, hyperactivity, treasuring objects, and avoidance behaviours.
Physical manifestations include stomach issues, tight chest and throat, breathlessness, lack of energy, dry mouth, oversensitivity to noise, aches, and pains. The physical pain can take people by surprise as it can be very intense. Many clients have told me it feels as if their heart is literally breaking.
Cognitively, disbelief, confusion and preoccupation are common. Also common, although often not talked about are the frequent experiences people may call “strange” or “weird”. We may feel a strong sense of presence, feel the dead person nearby, see or hear them. For some these are hallucinations for whatever reason, for others they take on a spiritual dimension. What I do know is that as a therapist, I am frequently the only person they have dared to tell. People are worried that something is seriously wrong with them. I can tell them that in my experience, these experiences are extremely common, but rarely talked about.
- It’s best to just put a brave face on it and get on with life, isn’t it? Don’t wallow, fake it til you make it.
This seems to be a peculiarly “British” way of dealing with grief, but it really does not go away any faster if you ignore it. You do not have to be strong. You do not have to compare yourself to anyone. If you do not process the grief, chances are it will stay with you and affect your life in many ways. I have seen clients decades after a bereavement who at the time of the death, locked their grief away in a box and threw away the key. For years it may have been leaking out of the box and affecting them and one day something happens that means they need to go back and do the grieving that was not done at the time.
This does not mean you shouldn’t get on with your life. Every grief journey reaches a point where the griever is following two paths simultaneously, one is the heart wrenching grief and the other is a form of restoration of their life, of working out their new reality. Imagine being attached to a piece of elastic being pulled from one path to the other. That’s why you may be feeling ok one moment, suddenly you feel guilty for feeling ok or a song comes on the radio, or a photo catches your eye and the elastic pulls you right back into the rawest grief.
For some people, throwing themselves into work or socialising gives them a little “brain space” away from the grief. They are still grieving. For others, work or socialising is unthinkable. We process grief differently and that is ok.
It is worth adding something here about grieving children. They need to see adults grieve to give them permission to grieve. It can feel natural to not let our children see us upset and parents often put a brave face on it until the children are asleep. If you are grieving, chances are so are your children. If they do not see your grief, how do they know that what they are feeling is ok and normal? How can they talk to you about it, if you are pretending everything is ok when they don’t feel as if everything is ok? One of my most vivid memories from childhood is sitting on my dad’s knee, aged 6, with my sister, aged 4 on his other knee and the three of us crying. My mum was in hospital having given birth to my baby brother who had lived just a day. It was the first (and last) time I have ever seen my dad cry and it’s a memory filled with love and deep connection, of acknowledgment that this was supposed to hurt and that it was ok to show it.
- You are over your grief when you stop thinking about and remembering the dead person.
It used to be thought that the goal in grief was to separate completely from the dead person so that you no longer had them in your life. Now it is clear that most of us take continuing bonds with that person through our lives and that this is completely healthy. It changes over time to allow us to remember that person with love rather than sadness, but undoubtedly our relationship with them continues.
- It is easier if you were expecting someone to die or if they were old, isn’t it?
This is an interesting one. It appears to make little difference to the grief process even if you were expecting it. Maybe that is because we expect it to feel differently if we feel we started to grieve before the death. However, the grieving we do before a death (anticipatory grief) is different and we start the new grief after the death.
As for grief being easier if someone is old when they die, that too is not necessarily the case although it does help the acceptance process and the search for meaning and reasons. Certainly, the death of a child or young person is incomprehensible to us and there are far more aspects to the grieving process in this case.
- In time you get over grief and it shrinks and disappears.
For some people this is exactly how it feels but for others it is not. You may feel you do not ever want it to disappear completely as this feels disloyal. Tonkin’s theory of grief suggests that our grief stays the same size. At first it is all consuming but gradually our lives grow around it and it is no longer the dominant factor in our life.
I hope you have found something useful and perhaps reassuring in this blog. Death is a difficult topic for all of us and it is hard to think about or talk about. Grief is a normal process, but it’s hard, exhausting, often relentless and full of unexpected emotions and thoughts.
Warm wishes,
Alyson