A few weeks back my husband, Dr. Roger Doss, and I gave a continuing education workshop for about 100 professionals in the mental health field. The topic was grief. Because Roger and I enjoy presenting workshops in an interactive style, we started this one by asking the participants to write down–anonymously–their greatest losses. We asked them to be very brief, putting life changing moments into a sentence or two that they then handed back to us.
The results were moving and profound. Never think mental health professionals have had perfect lives and don’t know how you feel. There is no such thing as a perfect life.
When we gathered the responses we received a range of situations that told of deep, distressing, painful losses. Everything from the somewhat standard losses–“my grandmother died”–to the situations that most likely made the news–“my husband killed our infant child”. This being said, grief never feels standard when it’s yours.
Lots of different situations brings grief. Death of a loved one. Divorce or relationship break-up. Aging or the loss of one’s health. A close friend who decides not to be your friend anymore or even the loss of a community, the break down of a church or a group of friends–all this can prompt great feelings of loss.
We’ve all heard about the Stages of Grief and the order in which individuals deal with the emotions of loss, but this order is truly different for different people. Some people skip some steps altogether. Loss is a unique experience and there is no standard response. Some people cry openly; some rail angrily. Some are silent and stoic. Don’t think these different ways of responding to loss means that individuals don’t feel genuine pain.
It’s very important to respect the experience and allow individuals to react in their own ways, in their own time.
This variance, however, makes it very awkward to know what to say to a grieving person. Compassionate individuals can struggle to know how to be with grieved persons. The loss experience can bring sadness, anger, relief and guilt. Crippling guilt, actually, which comes mostly from our understandable desire to control the events impacting us (“I should have done something…”) to a largely irrational self-blame. Sometimes our regrets fuel guilt. And who doesn’t have regrets?
Loss brings change. Sometimes big change. Whether this loss means finding a new place to live or work after a relationship ends or if the grieved person faces big changes in his financial situation now that he’s a single wage earner, these changes impact lives beyond our missing the person who’s gone. Insult to injury. Sadness and stress seems piled on. Sometimes life definitions must be changed–from married person to divorced person, from a wife to a widow. This can be unsettling on so many levels.
And then what? How do you move on? Do you move on? Is it wrong to move on?
Sometimes creating a new life seems awkward and we struggle with not accepting we have to go on without the lost person. Sometimes we’ve forgotten how to function without them in our lives. When relationships end through divorce or death, some individuals jump into other relationships, not wanting to deal with everything that comes with being alone. I’ve known individuals to marry again only months after the death of a much-loved spouse. Some people try to deal with loss through avoidance or denial.
Individuals can even start living very different kinds of lives. They make massive changes, jumping out of airplanes, changing careers, divorcing their spouses or dying their hair pink. Loss affects us profoundly. We have a tendency to be blown away by this kind of experience, having never thought we’d be without this person or this role.
From the outside, others may have an urge to make the grieving individual face the situation. We can want to conduct interventions…. We need to think about this carefully and only voice our concerns when the grieved is considering dangerous choices. In intervening, we run the risk of insisting they grieve on our time schedule, in our ways, rather than theirs.
Whether you’re dealing with loss and grief or attempting to be with someone you care for who’s facing this, you might want to talk to a professional. Not because we have magic answers, but because we’re trained to listen, to give you space and not to judge.
Because when you’re grieving, you need to be kind to yourself…and it’s not always easy to know what that means.