The Psychology of Grief

Richard Gross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351615129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What is happening emotionally when we grieve for a loved one? Is there a 'right' way to grieve? What effect does grief have on how we see ourselves?

The Psychology of Grief is a humane and intelligent account that highlights the wide range of responses we have to losing a loved one and explores how psychologists have sought to explain this experience. From Freud's pioneering psychoanalysis to discredited ideas that we must pass through 'stages' of grief, the book examines the social and cultural normsthat frame or limit our understanding of the grieving process, as well as looking at the language we use to describe it.

Everyone, at some point in their lives, experiences bereavement and The Psychology of Grief will help readers understand both their own and others' feelings of grief that accompany it.

1

Loss, bereavement, and grief

What do they mean?

Introduction

It was while running the basic training course for Cruse Bereavement Care a few years ago that the idea of writing a book on grief first occurred to me. That course explores the nature of grief, how it’s experienced, the different forms it can take, and beliefs and attitudes regarding what’s ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ grief. It also considers social and cultural attitudes to death and grief, as well as major theories of grief, which attempt to describe and explain why grief occurs and what its purpose is.

One major limitation of theories is that they involve generalisations, that is, they’re meant to apply to everyone equally. But it soon became evident to me when working with bereaved people that everyone’s grief is unique to them: generalisations may provide a framework, but real people don’t fit neatly into theoretical boxes and patterns.

From my own experience of ‘losing’ people close to me, I would suggest that part of the uniqueness of everyone’s grief is that we never know how another’s death will affect us until it happens! What (certain) theories predict will be our likely reaction, and the reality of that reaction, are often worlds apart: it may not be until a person’s death that we begin to appreciate the true nature of our relationship with him or her. We might grieve for the relationship we thought we had, or the one we wished we’d had, rather than the one we actually had. Just as relationships are complex, so can be grief.

In this and the following six chapters, I try to sample both personal experiences and theoretical accounts of grief; they are both valid in their different ways. But I think that before you begin reading, you should accept the guiding principle that there’s no single ‘correct’ way to grieve, which includes not being able to put a time limit on the grieving process: sometimes, grief may continue for a lifetime, because we continue to love the person we have lost. While death and taxes have famously been cited as the only certainties in life, we could add grief to that list. The link between death and grief is love (sometimes ‘attachment’): we grieve for those we loved who have died.

‘I’m sorry for your loss’

‘I’m sorry for your loss’ has become a familiar and an almost clichéd acknowledgement in Western countries (especially the U.S. and U.K.) of the death of someone who was emotionally significant to the person being addressed. If we try to ‘unpack’ the statement, we’ll identify a number of key terms – and assumptions – that recur throughout this book. (You might like to have a go at doing this yourself.)

I recognise that X has died (is deceased) and I know that s/he was an important person in your life. Bereavement is probably the most difficult experience that any of us has to go through in our lives and you will inevitably go through a process of grieving for X. This is going to be tough, but it’s a necessary part of your attempt to come to terms with X’s death in order to be able to move on with your life.

So, what has this ‘unpacking’ revealed?

Bereavement refers to the loss, through death, of someone to whom we were very close emotionally (‘attached’) or who, in some other way, played an important part in our lives (‘loved one’ or ‘significant other’). Grief refers to the way we respond to bereavement. As we shall see, it can take many different forms, but we assume that, in some form or another, grief is inevitable. Grief is commonly defined as a universal reaction to bereavement (i.e. observed in all cultures and throughout human history), involving bodily/physical, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual experiences and expressed in a wide range of observable behaviours. These experiences and behaviours are described in detail in Chapter 2.

Not only is grief inevitable, but we need to grieve: this is our way (‘nature’s way’?) of helping us come to terms and accept that our loved one has died. Together, the inevitability and necessity of grief point to the concept of ‘grief work’ (i.e. the process by which we detach ourselves emotionally from the deceased in order to form new attachments/relationships and get on with the rest of our lives).

Primary and secondary loss

In the above ‘unpacking’ example, ‘loss’ is being used metaphorically (i.e. in a non-literal way): when someone dies, we haven’t ‘lost’ them in the way we may lose (usually, more accurately, ‘mislay’) our keys or mobile phone (in fact, we don’t usually play any part – active or passive – in their death). Using ‘loss’ for ‘death’ is not just metaphorical but also euphemistic: while ‘dead’ is ‘forever’, ‘lost’ at least implies the possibility of ‘being found’. In other words, ‘loss’ is much ‘softer’, much ‘kinder’ than ‘death’, a gentler, more ‘caring’ way of acknowledging what’s actually happened.

The loss in ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ is also primary: it refers to who has died and involves both a physical loss (the deceased person is no longer physically, literally ‘there’) and a relational loss (the breaking of the relationship or attachment [emotional tie] with that person).¹ Importantly, this display of sympathy makes no acknowledgement – even unconsciously/implicitly – of the (often multiple) secondary losses brought about by the primary loss. These refer to what has been lost: the consequences or fall-out of the loved one’s death. For example, losing a husband or wife instantly deprives you of the status of ‘married person’: you become a widow/widower, a new, undesirable identity by which society (re-)defines you. Less explicitly and ‘officially’ is the changed identity that comes with the death of your second parent: many older adults bereaved in this way describe themselves as having become an orphan. (The effects of the death of different relatives – or ‘kinship’ – are discussed in Chapter 5.)

Traditionally at least, a widow may lose the financial security she enjoyed while married; again traditionally, widowers may find themselves deprived of the person who performed various practical tasks for them (such as cooking and washing). These and other consequences of bereavement are essentially practical: they relate to tangible features of everyday life, which, in principle, someone else can easily take over. But they also have psychological significance: they derive their meaning through forming part of the ongoing relationship between the partners.

Even more psychologically and emotionally relevant are the symbolic consequences: the loss of one’s dreams, hopes, or faith.² Implicitly, and/or explicitly, every attachment is future-orientated: there are shared hopes and expectations regarding what lies ahead for the relationship. The death of one of them immediately and fundamentally shatters these hopes and plans.

Such shattering of dreams is seen even more poignantly when the primary loss involves the loss of a child. Most people, in Western countries at least, consider the death of a child as the most ‘agonising and distressing source of grief’.³ Again:

The loss of a child will always be painful, for it is in some way a loss of part of the self… . In any society, the death of a young child seems to represent some failure of family or society and some loss of hope.⁴

Whether the death occurs pre-natally, at the time of birth, or when the child is still a baby, the parents’ hopes and dreams for the life of their child will be destroyed. This applies also with older children or adolescents/young adults. In all cases, the future itself seems to have been destroyed (again, see Chapter 5).

Questioning one’s religious faith – and perhaps even abandoning it (at least temporarily) – may be another major secondary loss (‘How could there be a God if He allowed this to happen?’). It’s precisely at times like this that people’s faith would normally serve as a great source of comfort, so for a bereaved person to question it demonstrates the impact that grief can have.

One theory of grief that puts secondary losses at the heart of the experience of grief is psychosocial transition theory (PSTT).⁵ When a loved one dies, everything that we previously took for granted about our lives (our assumptive world or ‘normality’) is shattered: we have to construct a ‘new normal’ in which the deceased plays no part. (PSTT is one of several theories of grief discussed in Chapter 3.)

Are there different kinds of grief?

How others perceive and relate to widowed individuals can affect the bereaved person’s self-perception (their identity). If the new social status is a more negative one, then the new identity will also be more negative. This is just one example of how bereavement is a social phenomenon: it always, inevitably, takes place within a particular social context. If grief represents the individual’s attempt to come to terms with his/her bereavement, then this is likely to be influenced by widely-shared beliefs and expectations regarding (a) its expression and (b) its duration. Regarding (a), ‘common sense’ understanding of grief regards it as ‘normal’ that bereaved people will be at the very least noticeably upset, and as regards (b) this overt grief (as well as the more private, inner grief) will last for, say, 12 months (up to the first anniversary of the death). Bereaved people are often told (at various intervals, often before the first anniversary) that they should be ‘over it by now’.

What this means is that if someone fails to display any obvious signs of grief, or if their overt grief lasts more than, say, 12 months, they might be judged as behaving ‘abnormally’ (‘I’m worried about X; her grief isn’t normal’). In fact, these informal, common-sense beliefs correspond to two forms of complicated grief that have been investigated scientifically by psychiatrists and psychologists, namely (i) absent (minimal, inhibited, or delayed) grief and (ii) chronic grief, respectively.⁶ (Complicated grief is discussed in Chapter 6.)

Disenfranchised grief

Another important demonstration of the impact of social norms on individuals’ response to bereavement comes in the form of disenfranchised grief. At its simplest, disenfranchised grief (DG) is grief that’s not recognised by others as ‘legitimate’ or ‘reasonable’. It refers to a situation where a loss isn’t openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned, or publicly shared.⁷

Certain types of losses (e.g. divorce, parental deaths, pet loss), relationships (e.g. lovers, ex-partners/spouses, gay/lesbian partners/spouses), grievers (e.g. the very old, very young, people with learning disabilities), and circumstances of the death (e.g. AIDS, suicide, alcohol, or drug abuse) may all be thought of as disenfranchised (see Chapter 4).

In some of these examples, individuals have to conceal their grief from others in order to conceal the relationship whose loss has triggered it. An extreme example would be where the deceased was loved ‘from afar’ (by someone s/he might not even have known). In all these cases, the bereaved individual would be regarded as ‘having no right’ to grieve in the eyes of others (‘society’).

DG could be thought of as comprising two components: (i) it is ‘unrecognised’ grief (e.g. ‘it didn’t occur to me that a lesbian would respond in the same way as a heterosexual partner/spouse to death of a partner’); and (ii) ‘stigmatised’ grief (e.g. ‘if homosexual relationships are ‘unnatural’, then their grief cannot be ‘natural’ either’).

Intuitive and ins...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Loss, bereavement, and grief: what do they mean?
• 2 The experience and nature of grief: what is it like?
• 3 Trying to explain grief: what is it for?
• 4 Grief as a socio-cultural phenomenon: how should we grieve?
• 5 Grief and our relationship to the deceased: who has died?
• 6 When does grief become complicated?
• 7 The positive side of grief: post-traumatic growth
• Further resources
• Notes
• References