You're Not Grieving Wrong

There is no such thing as five stages of grief. Not in the way most of us were taught, anyway.

The stages featured on greeting cards and in well-meaning advice were never intended for people who are grieving. They were developed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. In the 1960s, she spent time with patients who were dying and observed them come to terms with their death. Her work was advanced for its time since it enabled doctors to see their patients from a more holistic perspective, as humans with an inner life.

Somewhere along the way, the culture borrowed those stages and flattened them into a checklist. It presented the process of grief as a corridor that you walk down from the room of denial to the room of acceptance. And if your grief did not follow this route, it was suggested that you were handling it incorrectly.

If you are afraid of the grief itself, of how much it hurts, of the way it grips your chest or takes your breath, then remember that these are waves of emotion traveling through your body. The wave does not remain at its highest point; it goes up, reaches its crest, passes over, and then collects once more. The level of intensity you are experiencing at this moment is not something you will live forever. It is merely the way in which grief travels through the body.

Grief moves in waves.

There are days that drag you down and other days on which you can breathe and even laugh; both kinds of days form part of the process of grieving.

Researchers who study grief have found that this back-and-forth process is part of healing. Being able to function or feel happy does not mean you have forgotten the person or stopped grieving. In fact, laughing or enjoying a moment is a natural part of this oscillation process.

For much of the last century, a culture built around productivity taught us that “healthy grief” meant letting go quickly and getting back to work. That idea is recent, and quite narrow. Older and wiser traditions never asked us to stop communing with the people we lost. They kept speaking to them, kept setting a place for them, kept the relationship alive in daily life.

The bond doesn't come to an end when a person dies; instead, it continues and gradually takes on a different shape. You might keep their voice with you, hear their humor come out of your mouth, cook their recipe on their birthday, or feel their strength when facing a difficult situation. Perhaps you pick up a sense of them through how you practice your values or attune to them in a place they used to love. However it arrives, that connection is not something to grieve your way out of. It is something to carry forward and integrate into the life you are still living.

For the majority of human history people have grieved as a community. If part of what you feel is how alone you are in this, it is your heart understanding that a loss of this kind was intended to be shared by more than just one pair of hands. At times this involves letting the people who care about you see how much you are suffering, even if you have become good at seeming “all right”. Being seen by someone, even if it is only one person, is one of the oldest forms of medicine.

If you are grieving someone you love, you do not have to do it alone. The waves of grief can be understood. There are real skills for meeting its intensity as you process and reconstruct your life.

As a therapist who focuses on grief and loss, I would be glad to meet with you. Schedule a free consultation to learn more.