What is GRIEF?
The experience of grief is unique to every person, every loss, every regret, every unfulfilled longing. It is deeply personal and universal.
Dictionary definitions of grief fall short of encompassing the full spectrum of grief. In broader terms, grief is the normal response to loss. We can grieve for a person, a relationship, a version of ourselves, a phase of life (youth!), a job, or a house, the land we call home, our non-human companions, etc. We can also grieve for the suffering of others.
GRIEF is a facet of LOVE.
According to NARM, the purpose of grief is to connect us to our hearts. It shows us the way toward love and what we value most. It inspires us to honor the memory of what/who was lost. It challenges us to re-evaluate our beliefs. We may experience a sort of identity crisis as we learn to live on with the loss.
We only grieve what we have loved. Even if it feels more complicated than that.
The Grief Process
Much has been said about the process or phases of grief (eg. Kubler-Ross and others) that may or may not be helpful to someone who is actually grieving. Most folks agree that it’s never quite that linear and sequential. We can rapidly cycle through or jump around these phases in an attempt to escape and/or eventually hold the pain of loss.
Acute grief is unpredictable, it wants what it wants. It can feel desperate and wild, or like a suffocating weight, or totally numb. We can be fine for days or even months and then gutted, all of a sudden when we catch a whiff of a familiar scent. It can make us want to scream, or cry, or vomit, or stare into space or all of these. We may become irritable and have difficulty focusing. Often grief is accompanied by some anger, at the world, at a higher power, at the person who is gone, and significantly, ourselves…for things left unsaid or repair never made, ways we weren’t the best friend/son/daughter/partner, etc.
The DSM has a diagnosis for complicated grief, or acute grief from a loss that lingers longer than is “typical” and with intense feelings of yearning, significant distress or impairment, avoidance of reminders of the loss, meaninglessness or numbness. I’m inclined to believe that most grief is complicated.
Anger is one of the things that can complicate grief. It’s not so much that the anger itself complicates the grief, but rather our relationship to the anger. Here’s one example, we might shame ourselves for feeling angry with the person we’ve lost. We might tell ourselves that we are dishonoring or disloyal to them. This complication is an inner conflict between honoring the lost or honoring the truth of our own experience. This is especially common when we lose a parent.
Other examples of things that can complicate grief are a sudden/traumatic loss, guilt, being left with overwhelming life circumstances as a result of the loss (caregiving, financial, legal, etc.), and pre-existing emotional/nervous system dysregulation.
Primary vs. Default Grief
In NARM we hold the distinction between primary and default emotions. The two emotions we are mainly concerned with when working with developmental trauma are grief and anger. We can all have primary anger and default anger, primary grief and default grief. Confusingly, we can experience all of them simultaneously. I’ve written a lot on anger and its essential energy and clarity, you can find that here.
Primary emotions are ephemeral, and connect us to ourselves and our aliveness. They carry vital information about our lives and what’s important. They have a natural cycle of completion when we allow ourselves to take in their messages.
Default emotions serve to protect us from connection to self and the information carried by primary emotions. They serve to maintain and reinforce the strategies of disconnection that helped us survive the heartbreaks of our young lives.
Default grief tends to protect (disconnect) us from our own anger and agency. It feels hopeless and bottomless. Sometimes we call this depression. Some of us learn early on that we are helpless and that anger is not safe (or it doesn’t help). There are many ways this message can be communicated and received, but ultimately the feeling is that you are powerless to get your needs met so you might as well give up. While this heartbreak was a reality in childhood (we really were powerless), we have more resources and capacity as adults, whether or not we’re onto that.
Default anger protects us from the heartbreak of our unmet needs. The messages we received were that sadness, tenderness and vulnerability were not ok or safe and that we were alone there. Anger and aggression were more reliable ways to get our needs met in these families. As adults, feeling grief can feel threatening. You might feel weak or exposed or (depending on how vulnerability was punished) like it makes you a target.
Support for Grief
All of this to say that grief is central to our humanity. Sorting out our emotional landscape can be wild and wooly territory, especially if you’re trying to do it alone. I urge you to reach out for support if you’re experiencing grief that is overwhelming or confusing. There are many options for both group and individual support, I’d be happy to chat about it. Also, please share this page with someone you care about who is struggling with grief.
With love and care,
Melissa
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