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Key points
- Grief is a complex process that never truly ends.
- Masked grief can slow down the process of healing from loss.
- Grief’s blurry boundaries necessitate a grieving process that allows each individual space to recover in the way that best meets their needs.
Grief is a complex process that never truly ends. It’s a marathon journey of learning to live around the enormous holes that loss leaves behind, and, despite our efforts to identify healthy ways of coping with grief, experts tend to agree that expecting it to go away is not realistic.
No Wrong Way to Manage Grief
There is no “correct” way to manage grief. It ebbs and flows, and its victims find themselves faced with the need to learn an entire new way of living. For some, the initial shock never truly wears off, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to come to grips with how someone so integral to their existence can suddenly just be gone. Others move through the different waves of grief briskly, only to find themselves mired in despair at the most unexpected trigger.
Grief is the cost of loving someone, and the price we are willing to pay fluctuates wildly. Some people want nothing to do with grief, but others seem to welcome it as a replacement for the person now missing from their lives. Grief has an uncanny way of reminding us life has stopped in its tracks at the very instant we are forced to recognize how quickly life simultaneously marches on. The dissonance between these two realizations can cause significant distress and impair functioning at nearly every level.
Masked Grief
Though research is now clear that every individual will work through grief on their own timetable, and there is no “quick fix” to avoid the pain associated with grieving, it’s crucial to recognize instances when grief can be masked. In the short term, masking grief is a survival skill, albeit an unhealthy one, that allows a space to just focus on surviving and accomplishing the mundane, day-to-day drudgery that’s still required even after losing someone central to your life.
In the long run, masked grief is significantly detrimental. It keeps its victims in a kind of limbo between staying in the past and moving forward, and the emotional toll of that experience can be devastating— not to mention the physical suffering that often goes along with chronic grieving.
Initially, masked grief can be overlooked and acknowledged as a survival mechanism while those grieving focus on putting one foot in front of the other. As time wears on, however, masked grief needs to be uncovered to avoid its long-range harmful impacts. Taking the step of honest self-reflection to determine whether you’re suffering from masked grief is essential on the pathway to healing, and there are several markers that can indicate you may not be addressing your grief in the healthiest way:
1. Your emotions are unpredictable and waver uncontrollably. This is common during the first aftershocks of loss, but, as time goes on, you should see some stabilization in your feelings. It should become less common to react to small situations with over-the-top emotions, and, eventually, you’ll recognize a wider range of feelings returning to your emotional repertoire.
If you find yourself feeling empty, blunted, and numb, with frenzied periods of time in between when your emotions change on a dime, with little warning, it may be time to take a step back. Unpredictability may be common in the beginning stages of grief, but, ultimately, it should decrease as you work through the pain.
Are bland situations triggering an overreaction? Do you feel like a ticking time bomb but unable to pinpoint why, exactly? If you’re months, or even years, out of an initial loss and still struggling to anticipate your emotional reactions to different situations, it could very well be a sign that grief is eating away at your insides, stealing your ability to reconstruct meaning in your life.
2. Your physical health is steadily declining. Grief has tremendous impacts, and not all are emotional or mental—physical changes are a common side effect as well. Gastrointestinal issues, sleep deprivation, and even anxiety attacks can all play a serious role in recovering from a significant loss.
Though the physical effects of grief are well established, they should start to resolve as you move forward to navigate a different life. If you find your health continuing to suffer down the road, with no known physical cause to pinpoint, it’s possible that grief is the culprit.
3. You have lost the ability to create new meaning. Grief turns your world upside down, whisks away everything that is known and familiar, and leaves behind an immense void. The pressure to fill that void starts shortly after the initial loss, after the shock starts to wear off and support systems go back to their own lives—when the person grieving is suddenly left to their own devices to find a way through the mess.
The depression that can accompany this time tends to rob you of joy, and the thought of creating a new, different life around the void of grief easily overwhelms. As life goes on, however, the steps toward creating meaning become less weighted down—but for those whose grief is masked, this phase can seem to drag on forever.
If, after adequate time has passed, you feel unable to find joy in familiar places and activities and are struggling with no desire to find new rituals or hobbies, it could potentially be attributed to masked grief. Grief lurking in the shadows is a thief, robbing not just your past but also your future if left unresolved.
The Fluidity of Grief
Research is clear that grief’s boundaries are blurry, necessitating a grieving process that allows each individual space to recover in the way that best meets their needs. There is no prescription for healing from grief.
The importance of viewing grief as fluid and ongoing is critical to recovery from loss. There will never be a time when that momentous loss escapes you. There will never be a time when grief fully retracts its claws. But there will be a time when life learns to grow around the hole left behind.
