The Grief Experience
Today I’m presenting some of the ways used to describe the emotional process of grief – “The Grief Experience”.
Sections
The tools I present below have helped a lot as I walked the path of grief and eventually healed from my first big loss – the one that made me aware that grief comes from many sources, not only the ones we know from movies.
When some event causes us to lose something dear to us we experience grief. The death of loved ones is the most obvious of these, yet grief is the psychological result of loss.
Grief comes in varying severity depending on the size of the loss.
Grief is everywhere, and we can care for ourselves in better ways when we begin to make peace with it. We can overcome its debilitating effect by better-understanding what is actually happening inside of us when the waves of grief smash us.
Models and Frameworks
Psychologists, and therapists use models and frameworks, to label and simplify complex emotional processes and scenarios. You and I can use these to comfort ourselves and quickly understand the Grief Experience.
The models I’m presenting today appeared in my life in order of the least useful, to the most. I hope they help you too.
- “Stage Theory” – The Five Stages of Grief
- Grief and Loss Curve
- Vibrations
1. “Stage Theory” – The Five Stages of Grief
The Five Stages of Grief, sometimes called the “DABDA model” is this:
- denial
- anger
- bargaining
- depression
- acceptance
This list comes from a gross over-simplification of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s model. The “five stages” refer to the process by which terminally-ill patients will come to accept the imminent fulfillment of their own destiny.
It’s been adopted by our culture as an overarching truth but its relevance for those of us not currently facing our mortality is questionable. Decades of research show that we don’t experience grief in stages.
So, what are some useful alternatives to the inadequate and outdated “Stage Theory”?
2. Grief and Loss Curve
To expand Stage Theory, Dr Colin Murray Parkes (OBE, MD, FRCPsyche, DL) of the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement developed the Grief and Loss Curve which represented as a U-shape.
Starting on the left and finishing on the right, the U-Shaped curve represents the landmarks that each emotion is going toward – the hurt, the loneliness, or the adjustment.
The words on the Curve are like towns on a map. You can visit them in any order and as many times as needed to complete your Grief Journey, and you’ll go to every single one eventually. This image shows it well:
3. Vibrations
I’m not sure where this came from. It might stem from the idea of grief coming in Waves. It’s more visual, and helps us understand the Grief Experience as it occurs over the long-term.
When a cymbal is hit with a drum stick, we hear the initial CRASH very loudly – like the initial jarring of the event that triggered the grief. Watch in the video below – the cymbal is shaken, it’s shape completely warped as it swings between the extremes of its pivot on the stand, much like our minds and bodies are contorted by a loss.
The sound slowly fades as the movement energy dissipates, but if you put your ear right on the cymbal you hear that it rings far longer than what can be heard when standing even a metre away.
Let’s look at another example – a water droplet in slow motion:
Think of your life in terms of these two videos; in the beginning things are calm. At some point something happened that rocked us out of our beautiful ignorance.
Think of it in terms of these videos. Imagine your lifetime begins at the start of each video, long before the stick is swung toward the cymbal, or before the water droplet falls. Then imagine your life ends at the end of the video. This is similar to the waves of grief which are created by the single event and vibrate and ripple continuously for the rest of your life.
Grief from one loss continues for the rest of our lives, but it loses intensity as each day passes.
How do we use them?
What had the most impact for me was combining the U-Shape, and the idea of Vibrations.
Grief is a long process which takes as long as it will take. We don’t get skip to the ‘healed’ stage with grief, we continue to be ‘healing’, ‘recovering’, or ‘accepting’.
The emotional cycles we move through during the totality of each Grief Experience is uniquely our own for our unique loss – there are no set stages, our mind takes us through the wilderness until we find acceptance. For every time we feel engulfed grief’s talons for that individual loss, less time is needed to recover from it and find our equilibrium again.
Over time we can establish control over ourselves through self-kindness and self-work. Distracting ourselves from the pain only prolongs progress, so it’s important to to allow yourself to grieve.
What can I do right now?
We can’t go around the grieving process. We must go through it.
The simplest thing you can do in the beginning is to breathe deeply, then repeat this seemingly trivial phrase and focus on its words:
“This too, shall pass.”
Sources:
- https://www.ekrfoundation.org/5-stages-of-grief/5-stages-grief/
- https://www.grief.org.au/Conference/Event_Details/Speaker_Bios/Colin_Parkes.aspx
- https://federation.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/5493/tip_sheet_grief.pdf
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_too_shall_pass