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Key points
- Grief is commonly misunderstood despite the fact that every person experiences grief of some kind.
- Grief should not be task-oriented but instead seen as a process to be moved through.
- Grievers should be allowed to grieve at their own pace and in their own way.
- Those grieving are under no obligation to make the best of the situation.
Despite its prevalence, grief continues to be deeply misunderstood. It has become codified, rigid, and narrow. Instead of a broad, uncertain experience that is deeply individualized, mourners often internalize beliefs about how they should experience their own grieving process. The truth about grief is far gentler. Here are six tough but comforting truths about grief.
1. Grief is not something you solve. It is something you go through. So often, grief is treated both by mourners and by loved ones as a problem to solve. As Megan Devine writes in her book It’s OK Not to Be OK, “Grief is not a problem to be solved; it’s an experience to be carried. The work here is to find—and receive—support and comfort that helps you live with your reality. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.”
It is our job, she explains, to learn “the difference between solving pain and tending to pain.” Still, too many people view grief as a task to accomplish so that you can get back to everyday life. But this pressure to feel better and get back to the way things were only exerts pressure without actually helping the griever be with their pain.
2. Grief is not only a response to death. It is a response to loss. Grief manifests in our lives for all sorts of reasons. Lost friendships, relationships, identities, jobs, and stability can all trigger a grief response. We have artificially restricted the definition to fit its most commonly used manifestation. In doing so, we fail to give one another the space to mourn difficult experiences that trigger a profound sense of loss.
3. Grief has no defined timeline. This year, the DSM-5-TR (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) came out with a new diagnosis: prolonged grief disorder. It states that a person who is in a severe state of grief for longer than a year now falls under the definition of prolonged grief.
While this new diagnosis benefits many by offering them greater access to insurance-covered mental health services, some also argue that it dictates a timeline for those in mourning. It does not serve us to decide after 365 days that somebody's grief is suddenly unhealthy and requires fixing.
4. Grief has no prescribed stages. While Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief created a handy framework for understanding what can happen while grieving, it has taken on outsized importance. These stages have come to be seen as a definitive roadmap for how a person should grieve. With tidy arrows pointing from one experience to the next, those mourners are left to wonder if something is wrong when their experience is nowhere near as predictable, prescribed, or tidy as the five steps prescribe.
Let’s take this framework and others and tweak how we see them; they are descriptive, not prescriptive. They describe some people’s experience and offer language to describe that experience. They are not a mandate or even a description of normalcy.
5. Those who grieve never “go back.” So often, the goal of grievers is to return to a pre-loss state. But any significant life event, positive or negative, will alter a person. We do not go back. We cope, we mourn, we celebrate, we grow, we pause, and we keep moving. But we do not go back.
6. Those who grieve do not have to find a silver lining. It helps some people to find the bright side of a loss. It helps some people feel comfort. But for others, the pressure to say “at least…” after a significant loss augments the pain and puts undue pressure on the person to grieve better. It is OK not to have a silver lining or a bright side. Sometimes, bad things happen and it is OK to spend time learning to live in that reality rather than finding ways to make that reality feel less bad.
What Do These Have in Common?
These truths create a far messier picture of grief. They speak to the fact that every person's experience, timeline, and conclusions will be different. They offer the space to move at one's own pace, feel whatever one needs to feel, and not perform grief for others to make them feel better. By dispelling these myths, we allow for a gentler model for moving through the world with our pain.
Facebook image: fizkes/Shutterstock
References
Devine, M. (2018). It's Ok that you're Not Ok: Meeting grief and loss in a culture that doesn't understand. Sounds True.
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787
