The Journey of Grief

Article submitted by Dr. James D. Hargis.

When we hear the word grief or bereavement, we usually think in terms of death and dying. Throughout life however, we experience smaller loses that can also produce a grief response. Those loses can be anything from the moving away of a childhood friend, the loss of a job or role we had in life, or selling the house where we grew up. All these loses can cause us to feel grief, and though the intensity can vary, understanding this grief process can greatly enhance our emotional awareness and health in our daily lives.

Webster's New World Dictionary defines grief as the emotional suffering experienced during loss and bereavement as the ongoing process of that loss. Webster's understanding however, does not include any sense of healing. The passage of time can help, but regardless of the old proverb, time does not heal all wounds. Remember Miss. Havisham in Dickens' Great Expectations? She never took off her wedding dress, though she was left at the alter years before.

The emotions one can experience are many and varied and can include denial, fear, anger, guilt, loss of patterns of conduct, emptiness, reactive depression and various physical responses, such as headaches, insomnia, intestinal disorders, and disruption of sleep patterns, to name but a few.

Grief Work
"Men at some time are masters of their fate.
The fault dear Brutes, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
Julius Caesar, 1: 2

The only way out of grief is through it. We grieve because we care. The loss experienced indicates an attachment of caring has been broken and the undertaking of grief work is the process of healing, not just existing. Basically, grief work acknowledges the deep feelings triggered by the loss and allows for their expression. This sounds somewhat frightening, but a good metaphor is to see grief work as the cleaning of a wound before it is stitched. Many choose not to undertake this work because it is painful to relive the situation, or one wants to maintain control, or has difficulty expressing feelings, or faces religious prohibitions against this expression as a lack of faith, or there is a lack of external encouragement. Feelings are neither good nor bad in themselves but normal human reactions to loss. The following elements encompass this grief work.

• Facing the pain: Denial is relinquished reality accepted.
• Emotional Expression: Tears, talking to friends, a therapist, using a support group and journal writing can all be excellent outlets for expression.
• Letting go: As one wrestles with the varied emotions, freedom from bondage of the focus of grief begins to occur.
• Establishing new patterns of conduct: Life begins to return to predictable patterns which eventually will feel normal, realizing normal will never be the same before the loss.

The process of grief work is a sense of reconciliation in which a belief system significantly challenged or altered by loss is restored, although the restoration may be quite different from the original. Remember, grief is unpredictable and spiral, not time orientated or linear.