There is a lot to talk about in this topic, so the blog is very long. Allow several minutes to read it, or read it in stages.
All people have a major thing in common. We give meaning to everything in life.
We organise events into a narrative, or story, that allows us to form a sense of continuity and meaning in our lives.
Grief is no different.
We assign meaning to losses and these meanings impact the course of our bereavement.
Assumptions about the nature of life, love, suffering, human vulnerabilities and death inform a lot of the meaning we give to life. We source these assumptions mainly from our culture and our life experiences.
One Story: The Assumption They Were The Only One Who Loved Me
One thing I see a lot in my work is where a person loses someone they love and feels rejected by others in the period after the loss.
Maybe that has been your experience? In which case you may relate to the story that forms where the person who died is the only one who loved you.
As a result of this story you may push others away because of your hurt.
Loss Hurts
Loss hurts BUT memories and what the one you loved has left behind will continue and can help you find a meaningful, productive and hopeful path forward.
So much of loss can involve deep despair and it is impossible to express that loss in words, especially early on in your grief.
It is during this time you may find it hard for your story to be heard.
Putting Your Story Together
You may not have a story that makes sense, even to you. You may not be able to put your story into words. You may need to talk about events before you can put together a story that makes sense.
Maybe those close to you are hurting too and aren’t able to hear your story.
Maybe friends are too busy to hear your story.
Grief groups can be helpful but they only work if others in the group are able to listen and not impose their own agenda on your telling of the story.
This is where a counsellor who specialises in grief can be helpful. I am such a counsellor, and my interest is in hearing your story and allowing you to tell it. I know how important that story is.
Questions To Explore During Your Time of Grief
Some questions that can be helpful to consider are:
• What should I do with this sense of meaninglessness?
• What did my loved one’s life mean?
• What did I learn from them?
• How should I make good use of all the love they gave me?
History Of Beliefs Around Grief
At the end of the nineteenth century, when modern psychological theory was born, it was believed that grief had an end point.
The theory stated that to grieve properly you had to sever attachment to the one who died. Continuing to have an emotional bond with the person was considered pathological!
By the 1940s the time limit of 4-6 weeks was suggested as the correct length of time to grieve!
This is where the belief that you had to ‘get over’ grief and get over it quickly came about.
Many people tell me they encounter others who suggest that now the funeral is over it is time to be over the death! The harm caused by that belief is significant.
It is now known that the brain has to make major changes to its neural networks after the loss of a loved one and that takes months.
Missing My Mother
When my mother was alive she used to ring me every week. I lived overseas and was very isolated with no one to share events in my life with. My mother was that person I talked to.
Then she was dead and there were no weekly catch ups. Things happened in my life and there was no one to share those events with. I missed her.
I mentioned this to my brothers and the response was that I obviously needed to see someone because what I was experiencing wasn’t normal. Of course they were wrong, but at the time I didn’t know that.
More Recent Understanding Of Grief
By the 1980s beliefs around grief had expanded the grieving time to two years. Attachment to the dead was seen as being important. There was emotional energy in the relationship and it was believed you had to withdraw that energy and pour it into other people instead.
This slowly transformed to an understanding that memorialising the person instead of withdrawing emotional energy was actually what was needed.
It was still believed that people would “recover” and go back to normal.
How Grief Is Understood Today
There have been great advances in grief understanding since then and the word “recovery” has been replaced by words such as adaptation, re-integration, management, coping or transformation.
Recovery is considered to portray grief as something minor and fails to acknowledge the importance of loss and something that is not repairable.
The main understanding today is that you “don’t get over” grief.
Life never returns to how it was. Part of working through your grief involves learning how to adjust to the new reality without the one you love.
Ways You May React To The Death Of A Loved One
Grief reactions and responses typically involve:
• emotional distress,
• depressed mood,
• confusion,
• difficulty sleeping,
• forgetfulness,
• crying a lot,
• feeling a range of emotions, seemingly with no control over them,
• loss of interest in forming new relationships and goals,
• disruption of sense of self, worldview and life narrative.
Problems can arise when, over a long period of time:
• it is hard to accept the loss,
• there is preoccupation with the deceased,
• loss of identity and role in life
• and loss of purpose and goals for the future.
This is a situation where counselling interventions are required.
Grief Is Not Full Time
When you are grieving, you don’t spend every waking moment engaged in grief. In the initial period when you are likely to feel numb it is more likely you will be preoccupied with what has happened, but over the next few days you will start to spend time living.
You do take time away from grief. Your brain can’t manage if you don’t. You also need to live. You need to eat, drink, sleep, shower, care for others and so on.
You do need time to grieve, but you also need time to:
• learn the new reality
• develop new roles in your life
• develop a new identity without your loved one
• develop new relationships both to your loved one and those around you.
It is important to also understand that grief is not just something within you, it is also something that is between you and other people around you:
It involves:
• your world view and changes you may need to make to it,
• reconstructing meaning in your life
• forming a continuing bond with your loved one
• reconstructing your identity
• making positive changes in your life as you adjust to your grief.
Meaning Making
There are two aspects to making meaning of loss. These are:
• Assimilating the loss into the assumptions you made about life before your loss and the self narrative you had. This approach allows you to maintain a sense of continuation with your life before the one you loved died.
• Accommodate to the loss by dealing with previous assumptions about life by reorganising, expanding, or replacing them. This will often result in positive changes and personal growth that allow you to continue with life.
To do this three things need to happen:
- Sense making – you need to make sense of your life now,
- Benefit finding – you need to find a benefit either in the death of the person or your growth as a result of that loss. You may find you grow in your knowledge and sense of competence in your life, you gain valuable perspectives about life, develop stronger relationships with others and establish valuable connections.
- Identity change – It has been known for thousands of years that pain leads to growth. After the initial disorganisation of grief you go through a long period of growth alternating with the pain of loss. As the pain of loss becomes more bearable you continue to grow.
What Grief Involves
Grief involves you allowing yourself to feel the pain and all the emotions associated with your loss. Then you will start to reorganise your life and develop a new identity. In the process you will change your worldview to incorporate your experience of grief. You will rebuild yourself and develop a new narrative (story) of your life that includes the grief experience.
This is meaning making.
The type of meaning you make will include the culture of your society and family and how these two cultures understand death. There are different ways of expressing grief, different rituals around mourning, different ideas about what is normal and how to relate to the one who has died. This will have a major impact on how you make meaning of the death of your loved one.
Your outlook on life will also have a deep influence. If you are someone who tends to see the positives in life you are more likely to look for the positives in your experience. This doesn’t mean you won’t experience any pain, but it does mean you will seek to find positive meaning in your grief.
Ultimately, how you view grief will depend on your outlook on life, how your family perceives death and how your culture conceptualises grief.
Why Meaning Making?
When your losses challenge or even shatter the meaning you have given to your life you search for new meaning. Making meaning of their loss is how you understand and make sense of their loss. During this process you will reconstruct that meaning through making sense of what has happened, seeking to find a benefit in your new reality, and identifying the way you have changed.
Strategies to Make Meaning
One of the main ways to make meaning is through storytelling. This is why it is important to have someone to tell your story to. This is where seeing a counsellor can be helpful.
As you tell your story of loss again, and again. As you remember details and share them, even adding them into the overall narrative, you start to gain a sense of the loss of that person.
Your story may be about things you would love to tell the one who is gone.
Your story may be about things that didn’t happen, but you wish had. Or it may be about things that did happen that are now causing pain.
In your story you may be able to find an understanding about the things your loved one did.
The story may involve gaining permission to grieve. This is particularly important if you were not allowed to show emotion to your loved one in their life.
It may also involve an exploration about what death is and how you and the one you loved felt about death. You may even tell a story about whether you believed the death was preventable.
It is important to remember that not all meanings are positive. Some people include a lot of regret in their story. They may believe something could have been done to prevent the death.
Over time, even those less positive meanings can be incorporated in a large, more positive meaning. That doesn’t mean all deaths are positive. It is hard to see a positive in death due to murder, or an accident for example. But it is possible to see positives in what you were able to do after death. Maybe being able to honour their life in some way can be the positive that came out of their death.
Who Am I Now The One I Love Is Dead?
When you love someone your identity includes that person. When that person dies part of your identity is challenged.
You exist as a person in a relationship. But if the other person in that relationship is dead then who are you now?
You may have been a partner, child, parent, friend to the one who died. Now they are dead, who are you? What is your identity now?
Your life had plans, hopes and dreams that included your loved one. What is your life now without them?
Telling your story, over and over helps to put your loss in order and start making sense of it. You can celebrate who they were, cherish the memories you have of them, and feel grateful for what you gained from that relationship.
You also can express the negatives about losing that person. In fact that is what you will most likely spend the early part of acute grief focusing on. As time goes on the time spent on the negatives will become less and you will switch to celebrating their life, cherishing the memories you have of them and living your life to honour them.
Over time you can learn to understand yourself better and form an understanding about who you are. This is an important aspect of grieving.
The Importance Of Your Story
Part of being human involves constructing stories about your life.
Your stories will most likely include things that were important to you. They can be negative things and positive things.
All those stories contain meanings. It may not be obvious when you construct them, but telling others can help you to identify those meanings.
The stories you tell around grieving are not simply stories about the death, they are also stories that affirm life, everlasting love and consolation. Also contained in those stories are the pain, anguish and the often daunting challenges you faced in grief.
Recognising what you have been through and survived is valuable for you in recognising who you are and assists you to make further meaning about the loss of your loved one.
Can I Help?
If you would like to talk to me about how I can help you with your grief, telling your story and finding meaning in your experience please contact me on 0409396608 or nan@plentifullifecounselling.com.au
If you would like to learn more, I write a regular newsletter with helpful information, tips, information on courses, and the occasional freebie. At the moment I have a free mindfulness meditation for anyone who signs up to my newsletter. This meditation offers a way to safely explore your feelings and learn to be okay with them. If you would like to subscribe please click on the link here: http://eepurl.com/g8Jpiz