Understanding Grief and Loss
Understanding Grief and Loss
Written by Morgan McCoy, Coastal Center for Collaborative Health blog writer
When you hear the terms grief and loss often what comes to mind is the death of a loved one. While this is a specific and very painful experience there are other forms of grief and loss as well. You may experience feelings of grief and loss while going through a divorce or the end of a relationship, estrangement from family, transitioning into a new phase of life, moving to a new place, or receiving a medical diagnosis. According to grief expert David Kessler, “the worst loss is always your loss.” Comparing your losses to others is common but isn’t beneficial to anyone’s healing, your own personal experiences with loss will always carry the most pain and weight for you. While the theories below have a focus on the death of a loved one, they can be transferrable to any experience with grief and loss.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler have created a framework for supporting people through recognizing and normalizing common experiences during the grief process. While these stages often aren’t linear or simple, this framework may provide some comfort to you as you navigate what can be an isolating and overwhelming experience.
Stages of Grief:
Denial helps protect you in handling overwhelming emotions that can come from a loss. You are in shock and holding onto the reality that you prefer or once new.
Anger is the stage where you may feel angry about a loss and start to confront reality more. It’s important to feel and express in safe ways.
Bargaining after a loss can feel like guilt and wondering if there’s ways you could have prevented the loss. Bargaining can come from a need for control or sense of false hope.
Depression can happen when we accept the loss and are open to the grief. It can feel hopeless and lonely and is normal and natural in the grief process.
Acceptance is when you come to terms with the loss and learn to live within your new reality.
Finding Meaning is when you remember the person or thing you lost with more love than pain and start rebuilding your life post loss.
For more information around these stages of grief you may be interested in the books: On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss and Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief.
Bowlby’s Attachment Theory of Grief
Bowlby’s attachment theory believes that you have a need to attach to your caregivers as a child for survival and guidance, and grief occurs when you could not access these people that you needed to care for you emotionally, physically, and psychologically. As an adult you ended up learning and internalizing how to relate to others based off the relationship patterns formed as a child. This can help explain how and why people grieve differently.
If you had a caregiver who was inconsistent this may have led to an anxious attachment style where you were uncertain and anxious about whether your needs would be met, this could create a reaction to grief where negative feelings last longer and feelings of anger are present. People with this attachment style have a hard time letting go and coping with loss.
An avoidant attachment style has the potential to be formed when you had a caregiver who was unavailable or rejecting and you learned to be alone to self soothe. Avoidant attachment during grief and loss can result in you suppressing painful feelings and being less vocal to others about the loss.
A disorganized attachment style can be formed when a caregiver acted as both a source of fear and comfort for you as a child making relationships confusing for you as an adult. You may have been abused as a child with this attachment style. If you have disorganized attachment, you may have a hard time dealing with loss because you never resolved earlier losses and never was able to develop consistent ways of coping.
Secure attachment is formed when an attachment figure mirrored your emotions, made you feel safe and could interpret your needs. People with secure attachment have the protective factors to help them experience post-traumatic growth and resiliency through grief and loss.
According to Bowlby there are four natural stages of mourning which include:
Numbing is the stage when the loss does not feel real, and you can’t accept it as real. Another way to describe this experience is being in shock.
Yearning is the stage when you focus on memories of the person so much that it can leave you feeling emotionally worn out.
Disorganization is the stage when you you’ve accepted the loss but feel hopelessness and anger. It can feel like nothing will ever get better. It can be hard to find motivation or complete tasks in this stage.
Reorganization is the recovery stage of grief. You’re able to plan, set goals and establish new ways of living. You don’t forget the grief, but the pain lessens.
For more information on Bowlby’s attachment theory click here
Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement
According to Margaret Stoebe and Henk Schut there are two important parts to grieving, one is loss-oriented and the other is restoration oriented.
Loss oriented includes the processing of the loss of the person in the forms of remembering, reminiscing, and feeling sadness and loss.
Restoration oriented is about the rebuilding that happens after loss. This can include meeting new people, doing new things and distracting yourself from your grief.
It can be natural and normal to go back and forth in confronting a loss and avoiding it and experiencing your grief in smaller more manageable amounts. There can be shame associated with not diving into your grief bravely headfirst, this theory provides compassion and understanding that grief can come in waves and rebuilding can co-exist concurrently with grief rather than in ordered stages.
For more information on the dual process model click here.
Seeking Support
While grief and loss are a universal experience ironically grief is rarely discussed in our society, and it can feel taboo and come with feelings of shame and awkwardness. An important part of grief and loss can be being witnessed, validated, and supported in it so you don’t feel even more isolated in your grief. A way to get some support in going through loss is grief counseling with an individual therapist or in a group.
For help finding a mental health provider click here.