Challenging What We Know About Grief

“You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.”

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Normal is relative.

“I should be over it by now, right? Like, I should have moved on?” “When should I be over it?” “I am still unable to look at their pictures. It’s been a year.” I hear statements and questions like these so often when discussing grief. Trying to define what normal is in any scenario is unfair. I often use the frustratingly simplistic response to any question of normalcy: normal is relative. And when a client comes in after a loss or during a loss, I usually spend time discussing what healthy grief can look like. But is it really as simple as asking what healthy grief looks like? Short answer, no.  

I remember being asked in grad school what healthy grief would look like after a parent loses a child. A dear colleague made a comment in our small groups that day that even if they are still in bed, unable to function a year later, it can be normal. I challenged this person’s concept of healthy grieving with my limited experience of personal grief and even less experience with client’s moving through a loss. I explained that it can’t be healthy to be unable to function that long after. But I spent time with their perspective. This person experienced more loss in a one-year period than I have experienced my entire life. My knowledge of grief from a therapist’s perspective involved a few years of undergrad where black and white definitions are given of everything and where we were taught that normal is definable. What I forced myself to do was listen to this person who actually experienced terrible and sudden loss where their entire world was brought into question. And in my listening, I heard what I needed to hear. That it was not my job to define normal or healthy grief.

…We often carry the losses with us throughout our lives.

Grief is not static, and it is hardly definable.  I had to question everything I knew about grief and realized that moving on doesn’t always happen, nor does it need to. I learned to use the phrase ‘moving forward with’ to remember that we often carry the losses with us throughout our lives. And I learned that grief is not always experienced from just death, but from so many types of loss.

I want to say it again. Grief. Is. Not. Static. Grief being a wave that comes and goes is such a perfect metaphor to how we often experience it. Rarely does grief come and then leave forever once time has done its job. The Five Stages of Grief is a myth. How over-simplistic to think that we experience the perfect order of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. And while we are discussing the watered down, ‘researched’, and well-known beliefs about grief, let’s remember that time does not heal all wounds. If left to its own devices, grief will be like a wound that was never cleaned and allowed to heal. So, then what is truth, and what is accurate when discussing grief?

First, let no one tell you how long to grieve (especially not inexperienced grad school students who think they have the right to define a time because of the books they have read so far). Each person will process through grief differently so trying to define a timeline is impossible. It’s understandable that you will want to know how long you will feel the pain so deeply, but there will be no answer to give. When we try to give an answer, it generally is to create comfort for ourselves rather than actually to provide a pathway towards processing grief.

Second, grief is so amazingly and frustratingly dynamic. The truth to the five stages of grief is that you have a possibility of experiencing these all in one moment after a loss. Emotions will come and go with anniversaries of the loss, as memories are triggered or as new events occur that bring up what was taken in the past.

There are no wrong emotions.

Third, please, forget the phrase ‘moving on’ or ‘letting go’. If we learn to move forward with grief, we learn to accept that it will always be a part of us. From there, we form a different relationship with it.

Finally, let’s learn to drop the euphemistic phrases that accompany a loss when feeling the discomfort of someone else’s grief. If we learn to speak to people in a way that empowers them to experience grief as they feel they need to, we create an accepting environment for grief. Grief doesn’t then become something we feel we have to do in the privacy, away from others so that we do not feel we are in error because we didn’t immediately feel healed when someone tells us, “everything happens for a reason”. As with any and all emotions, they are absolutely okay to feel. There are no wrong emotions. And so with grief, I stress the importance of careful consideration in how we talk about it. Words do matter.

In short, experience of grief cannot be and should not be simplified. It is and will continue to be a dynamic experience that is distinct to each person in what they experience and for how long. And I am thankful to have a colleague and friend that shared a bit into their own experience with grief so that I could learn to challenge my perceptions.