Someone once said that grief lacks a language. It is difficult to give words to this life altering, devasting, and complex experience. To further complicate things, many of the societal constructs for understanding grief do not adequately reflect the experience of people grieving a profound loss. This can leave many of us feeling isolated, vulnerable, and misunderstood. We come to learn who we can and cannot trust with our true thoughts and feelings. As a result, we may internalize grief and hide our experiences from others. This can greatly reduce our support system of family and friends to only a few individuals, if any.
There are a number of societal misconceptions about grief that perpetuate this situation. Some of these include: 1) Grief happens in stages or phases and rolls out in a predictable way. 2) Grief is a minor disruption, is time-limited, and will pass if we wait long enough. 3) We must “get over” our grief and “move on” from our loss. 4) Grief that is too intense or lasts too long is abnormal. These myths about grief often lead people to believe their experience is not valid and that they are not grieving in the right way. It causes people to feel like something is wrong with them, especially as they are receiving these mixed messages from family and friends.
These misconceptions are based on a fundamental mischaracterization of the experience of grief after a profound loss. The reality is that grief is dynamic and complex. It cannot be captured by stage, phase, or other prescriptive models. Simply stated, grief is messy, and unpredictable, with many ebbs and flows. Grief is not a minor disruption and time-limited, grief is extremely disruptive and enduring. Grief is personal and contextual. The duration, intensity, and experience of grief are unique to each person. In this way, grief challenges our identity, relationships, beliefs, and assumptions about the world and our role in it. We do not “get over grief” or “move on” from our loss.
Grief is not a problem to fix; it is a reality we experience and live. Grief is not a choice. What we do with ourselves in the midst of our pain, often is. Someone once said that grief is hard work. This looks different at various points after our loss. In the early days of grief, sometimes this work is just experiencing our grief, breathing, and holding on. There is no right or wrong way to grieve. There are, however, choices we might make as we move further along in our grief that help us to carry our grief in different ways.
Just as we grieve in different ways, we also cope in different ways. Leaning into our own personal agency and making healthy choices for ourselves even in our pain is, indeed, hard work. Our grief and the way we cope with our grief transforms us, changes us, and many of us find that we have landed in a new place that looks very different from the life we once had. If you are unsure if you are “doing grief the right way,” I hope that you will take comfort and be validated in the debunking of these societal myths about grief. Be patient with yourself as you experience your grief, do the hard work of coping, one day at a time, give your grief a language.
When you feel like giving up, don’t. Breathe, hold on, find your community of support, tell someone your story, keep trying new things, write about it, talk about it, get outside in nature, forgive others, forgive yourself, believe, question, and find your own unique way of coping. Finally, wherever you may be in your grief, please remember that you are not alone, you are among friends here with your TCF family. We are The Compassionate Friends; we need not walk alone. For more on Giving Grief and Healthy Coping a Language, click on this link to view the recent webinar on this topic.
Use the chapter locator to find out information about chapters in your area. Locate a Chapter by selecting your state and zip code.
