My thoughts on grief

I’ve been thinking about what the death or the loss of someone does to our relationship with them.

So my first thought or noticing is how, in death, that person can become wholly good or bad; how the temptation is to swing to one extreme to the other because it makes the loss less complicated or somehow easier to bear. I said easier but not by any means easy. This is what is called splitting and it protects us from more complicated difficult feelings around loss; basically, the complexity of loss.

If we can ascribe one kind of meaning to their life or our relationship with them, it’s a bit more straightforward than holding multiple realities and experiences of them at once.

So, someone has died and it really hurts because that person was a beautiful person and we had a beautiful relationship – is one really simple example.

Or the opposite, that person is nothing to me in life, and all I feel in the death is I did in Life; so… resentment or fury or hate.

What happens when we can’t get to the bottom of who or what that person was? We have to sit with the ambiguity, the complexity and sometimes that is just too much.

Another thing I’ve been asking myself is what happens when there was no real subject-to-subject relationship with that person; that person was an objectification or a representation of values, morals, systems and structures. If you never truly know someone, how can you have true person to person grief? But still there is a feeling that something has been lost. Whether that is in the hopes and dreams that that person represented or the horror and shadow.

I have lots of questions and nothing shows up as a clear answer but what I’m going with is that grief will be a further expression of our relationship with them and an extension of that.

So whatever you feel, have your permission to feel it, but also allow others to have their own experience, too, even if it may be different to your own.

Is grief an illness or a condition? No, it’s a process.

I recently discovered that grief was entered into the DSM-5 as a disorder in March this year as ‘prolonged grief disorder’ defined as a loss that happened more than 6-12 months ago and additionally, the individual must have experienced at least three of the following symptoms nearly every day for the last month or longer:

-Disrupted identity
-A feeling of disbelief about the death
-Avoiding reminders that the individual has passed
-Intense emotional pain directly related to the loss
-Trouble getting back to normal life
-Numbness
-Feeling that life is meaningless
-Loneliness and detachment from others

As such clinicians could diagnose grief, medicate it and ta-da 🤗 big 💰 to big pharmas…

I was alarmed 😱

(The DSM-5 is the big book aka manual of mental disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association that clinicians use for diagnosis)

But aside from the semi-political rant, my concern is a human one. Grief is a completely natural process, like many expressions of our humanness, it is a completely reasonable response to a loss of human connectedness, sometimes simple, sometimes complex. Grief doesn’t need a diagnosis and it doesn’t follow a timeline, it needs holding, expressing, honouring. This will look like sadness, rage, blankness, confusion, loneliness, frustration and more….in any given order at any given time. For those that know #elizabethkublerross #sevenstagesofgrief it’s important to remember that the 7 stages are not sequential.

Your grief will be completely unique to you.

You’re at wherever you’re at. 🤍