General Approaches to Grief
Grief is this big general word for the deep sadness and all the resulting reactions that can follow from the loss of someone or something significant. Previously, a highly popular idea on processing grief was Kubler-Ross, which outlined 5 stages (denial, isolation, anger, bargaining, depression), and was widely accepted as the gold standard on how to process grief —before any studies were done to prove this is how people move through grief. The idea was that people will go through these five stages in order to complete feeling grief. It is now disproven and, if you think about it, no one person means the same to everyone that is impacted by their passing. Each individual can have overlapping, yet uniquely their own, experiences and reactions to a person’s passing. So, some of these stages may come up while others don’t, or maybe not in the same order. It’s appealing to think there could be a set of steps that we can go through to get it over with, to have this reassurance that there is some order to follow while we feel sucked into the chaos of grief. However, just because there isn’t a specific set of steps, doesn’t mean there aren’t broader trends that can help us move through grief.
More modern perspectives have shifted from what people should experience to reach resolution and more towards how people adapt. It’s less of a checklist and more of a flexible process, much like a tree that develops a wound doesn’t suddenly, one day, no longer have that wound, but grows around it. One of these ways of integrating loss is called the Dual Process Model, consisting of two phases: the processing loss phase and the restoration phase. The idea behind this model is that people go in and out of processing loss by going about their everyday lives.
In the processing loss phase we’re adjusting to someone being gone. Our brains are really good at pattern making, and when the pattern that someone makes in our lives is no longer there, a pain can spring up, signalling something that matters to us is missing or gone. For example, if you have a weekly time you saw someone who passed, it can become a contrast point when that day comes around and you feel like you should be seeing that person, but you can’t anymore, which triggers grief. Or, something simply reminds you of them, whether it be a feeling, place, or thing. Even if estranged, the consistency is that for better or worse that person is someone that had existed as whatever attachment figure in our lives for however long and now they are gone. It could be a trigger point for unresolved business and reintegrating what it means for that person who harmed us to now be gone —the living relationship may have already been dead in a sense, and yet someone physically dying is still a transformation in that relationship.
Alternatively, the restoration phase is engaging with the everyday things that aren’t solely tied to the ways this person or being was in our lives. Or, it can be engaging with things that require our attention in such a way that we aren’t as aware in that moment of them being gone. For example, doing a task or going to work. In this way, grief gets broken up, and over time, as we find ways to meaningfully adapt our lives to integrate changes that come from losing them, the processing phase becomes less and less consuming. What was “I can’t image ever existing without this person” can become "I’m still able to exist” or “I can miss this person and appreciate still existing.”
Of course, the restoration phase can become complicated when the loss of that person causes other compounding losses. It’s one thing to lose someone, it’s another thing to have to deal with the fallout of what space they leave behind and how we have to pick up the pieces afterwards. Like, having to move because you can no longer care for the home you made together on your own. Or, relationship dynamics fall apart because this person was maintaining a role in or buffering conflict between yourself and others that now have to confront each other in a new way.
Overall, I mention the Dual Process Model less to say “just keep moving and you’ll be okay,” and more to say that some part of grief is time; enough for the brain to understand the person is gone, to make new or reconnect with old experiences related to losing this person; and that it is perfectly normal to go in and out of grieving someone.
A complimentary approach is continued bonds. Someone can be physically gone, yet the relationship we had with them remains. We can choose to cut it off there or continue to live out our lives with consideration and intentional integration of that relationship. Continued bonds can look like so many things, whether that is continuing to do something that you learned to value from the being you lost, and savouring this gift you still have from them as a way to appreciate how they are still in your life; visiting a grave or making your own memorial to speak with them when you wish they could have been there for a milestone (knowing what they would likely say so you can still access experiencing their company); or incorporating a belonging of theirs into your life to have as a material reminder of what you have with them. Just because someone is gone, doesn’t mean we lose everything we ever experienced with them. Those experiences are stored in our nervous system and we can re-access them or turn them into new meaning.
Now, if the person you lost is someone who was harmful, continued bonds doesn’t have to mean that all the hate and harm they gave us has to be what lives on in our nervous system either. There is trauma and reprocessing work that we can be done to shift distressing experiences inside our bodies. The whole concept of continued bonds is simply that over a course of a relationship with someone, we’ve absorbed experiences from being in relationship and we can continue to work on what they gave us after they are gone. So in this sense, you don’t need to have closure with them before they die to find peace in where your relationship left off —or worry about fully losing them forever if you find the idea of never seeing them again unbearable.
As we process the loss of someone, we may also begin to develop an understanding for how it’s impacting us and make new significance for our lives. That doesn’t mean we have to create some positive spin. A tragedy is a tragedy. When I say make meaning of someone’s loss, what I mean is losing someone, something, or a pet that is important to us is meaningful. It matters, and we can use that meaning to develop a deeper understanding of ourselves and what we need to move through that loss. When we get to understand what trends are showing up in our grief, we can start to care for them.
It may be having to change our sense of what we value in our lives to create new meaning and security. I am someone who in their early 30s lost a vast majority of my biological family members to death. The effect that has had on me is having to adapt towards a lot of acceptance for death, and re-frame my sense of purpose in living. Now, if you’re someone who feels like all they can experience is suffering from a history of long and complicated relationship grief, it’s so understandable if these generalized perspectives sound like toxic positivity or completely out of reach. You may be dealing with complicated grief. I have been there, and it is something I continue to work on because old wounds can be activated by new strains. Yet, through the pursuit of growth, I do see these difficulties shifting when they do reoccur.
I have many clients where some time has passed, a month to a year, and they’re going through a stressor that is similar to a past experience, yet they can note how it would have been experienced differently if they were in an earlier time in their life. Maybe it’s less distress, or it doesn’t last as long, it doesn’t escalate because of the tools they now have, or it just feels like a totally different experience to what would have once been very crushing for them.
A sign of grief becoming complicated is when coping becomes rigid, distress levels are unsustainable, and prolonged to a point where it feels like this is your new normal. In the Western world, complicated grief is defined by over a year of debilitating grief. Things that can complicate grief is the loss of someone where there is a lot of fall-out and ongoing grief from a passing, or secondary reactions of shame, regret or guilt blocking you from finding relief. Or, maybe a lifetime of losses that become merged into other losses, creating a compounding effect, confusing one loss with another and complicating how we cope with managing this new loss. In these circumstances, trauma therapy can be particularly helpful to develop strategies for managing distress and reprocessing tools to develop safety in your nervous system.
Trauma therapy can look like differentiating current responses from parts of ourselves that are responding from a past loss. It can be reprocessing traumatic events to bring down distress levels through tools like EMDR. It can look like eliciting parts of ourselves that experienced a painful experience and responding to that part with the care we didn’t get before to bring down the reactive distress. In later posts I’ll write more about these approaches to better explain trauma work. In the meantime, if you would like to better understand how I may work with your grief, you can book a free consultation here.
