“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri
Looking back at the posts so far I realized that I jumped in with different elements of grief without discussing what grief is. I take for granted that everyone knows the basics of grief without acknowledging that before I started this journey there was so much I didn't know about grief and there is still so much for me to learn.
How do we even begin to break down such a complex topic as grief? In order to begin to understand grief we have to know how it is defined. I have seen grief defined many different ways, but they all boil down to grief is the emotional response to loss. This definition is where the simplicity begins and ends.
How would we define a loss? For most of us when we think of grief we instantly think of death, but that is only one type of loss. We also experience many other types of losses. Loss of relationships, jobs, homes, future hopes and dreams, safety, fertility, our health, and so much more. The degree we grieve each of these losses is based on how attached we are to them. For example a woman who never wanted children may grieve her lost fertility less than a woman who was actively trying to become pregnant. For me I grieved and continue to grieve the death of my first love R.S. far harder than I grieved the death of my estranged grandmother. On one level grief is a deeply personal experience that is largely based on the individual and their attachments, but grief is also a social construct as well.
Kenneth Doka (2002) has done a great deal of research into the social aspects of grief. Without going too deeply into his work here he contends that our grief responses are based on our social rules. In general the Western perspective is that it is acceptable to grieve the death of family and close friends, but with limits on time and expression. We expect people to show emotion at funerals, but then to control their emotions. We expect people and ourselves to get over our grief and move on as quickly as possible.
Our society does not accept or acknowledge with the same weight all of our other losses and grief. We understand and may feel sympathy when someone experiences a loss, but we do not acknowledge their right to grieve and process the same way we do when a death occurs. Since this is the message our society gives us we often feed it back to ourselves. When we feel grief creeping in we chastise ourselves and ignore our feelings. In my own experience I was so trained by my society that I couldn't even recognize my feelings as being grief and I am a trained counselor! I would just explain I felt
"off" or "sad" and then my inner talk was "suck it up!" The problem was no matter how hard I tried to just get over it I couldn't. Until I acknowledged the grief and chose to walk with it I was helpless.
The first step to walking with grief is to listen to it and stop trying to push it away and ignore it. We wouldn't push away joy or happiness or laughter so we would we push away grief? All are valid emotions that are part of our experiences. We learn and grow from both joy and sadness. Grief is here to teach us. To help us grow and learn and reach even greater depths of love and appreciation. Grief is not the enemy. Grief is a guide that wants to help us walk into our new selves after loss if only we choose to let it.
Reference
Doka, K. J. (2002). Disenfranchised grief: New Directions, Challenges, and strategies for practice. Research Press.
Comments