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In my recent article, "Four Types of Grief Nobody Told You About," I detailed the prevalence of grief in the more common losses that we experience and argued for the importance of appropriately describing and treating that experience as grief.
And while life’s losses provoke a grief response, many will find themselves also counterintuitively experiencing a sense of loss during moments of joy and growth. When people experience growth and transition, moments that garner pride, excitement, and a sense of accomplishment, a sense of loss can creep in. I call these moments the “grief of growth.”
Examples include:
- An excited graduating high school student grieves the loss of familiarity, innocence, and kinship.
- A thrilled couple getting married each grieves the lost freedom, flexibility, and possibilities of single life.
- A pregnant woman grieves the lost freedom, movement, and flexibility that accompanies the new responsibility.
- An immigrant to a new country, glad to have access to a new home, grieves the loss of kinship, national identity, and ease of living in one’s home country.
- A person switching into a more prestigious job may grieve the lost freedom and ease of less responsibility.
The grief of growth is characteristic of big moments of developmental transition, the moments when a person moves from one stage of life to the next. A high schooler becomes a college student, an immigrant becomes a resident, an individual becomes a spouse, a couple becomes parents. All of these moments, brimming with a sense of joy and progress and often the culmination of months or years of preparation, nevertheless necessitate shedding beloved parts of the self. Individuals, couples, and families adopt new lifestyles, new routines, new locations, and new priorities. The high school graduate relinquishes the comforts of high school and their status as a senior to become a freshman again upon beginning college. The couple looks back fondly at the possibilities inherent in being available to meet new romantic partners and the freedom from responsibility to another. A pregnant woman thinks of the sacrifices inherent in parenthood and the lost freedom of movement and flexibility. The immigrant mourns the lost affiliation with fellow countrymen, forging toward a new place in search of new opportunities. The newly-promoted worker may look back on a less stressful past and realize the sacrifices inherent in career growth. Loss is a part of growth, a transition from known into the unknown.
Parental Joy and Grief
Parents watching their children go through growth and transitions may similarly experience a sense of loss, even as they cheer on their child and encourage their development. Watching a child grow means watching them become increasingly more independent, and thus physically and emotionally separating from parents. Watching a child progress through school may bring a sense of time moving too fast. A parent may feel a keen sense of loss when their child gets married, because with the marriage, the parent feels a greater chasm between parent and child, with the spouse replacing them in the emotional hierarchy. An adult child moving away from home may garner feelings of pride and a mournful acknowledgment of lost proximity. A child having a child may simultaneously trigger the immense joy that impending grandparenthood brings with the sudden awareness of aging and the implications of moving into a generational group of grandparents. Grief and joy, pride and loss, happening side by side.
But I Shouldn’t Feel That Way
Compounding the sense of loss, many may feel they do not deserve or are not entitled to their feelings. Accepting that happy occasions can also bring feelings of loss can be hard to comprehend. They may tell themselves that mourning the past means they must certainly regret the decision. Not so. Grief and regret are not the same experience. A person can honor the past with sadness and loss and feel confident that the choice was correct. A person can feel both confident that they made the correct decision in accordance with their long-term best interests and sad at what gets left behind.
The confusion around loss in the face of happy occasions may also be compounded by the response of friends and family who may struggle to understand why the person is experiencing feelings of loss at all. Met with a lack of empathy, a person may feel guilt, shame, and isolation around their grief, driving them to tamp down their feelings or hide them from loved ones.
The Truth About Emotions
Grief is a natural response to forward movement. It is a reflective tool to honor the past and the fact that a stage of life was beloved while acknowledging that the future is scary and uncertain. So what can a person do when they feel grief in a moment of joy and growth? They can honor the messy reality of human emotions. They can understand that celebration and sadness often go hand-in-hand and accept that those seemingly contradictory emotions are a normal part of a complex reality. Like any grief response, they can allow themselves the process of moving through it with self-compassion and gentleness. They can allow themselves to grieve.
Facebook image: Vladislav Lazutin/Shutterstock
