Grief is an emotional reaction to a major loss. Losing a loved one is one of life’s great heartbreaks and people respond to it in many ways.
A wide range of feelings may be common including shock, numbness, sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety and fear, says Emer Hennelly, a Galway based psychotherapist and counsellor who specialises in grief recovery.
“Grief and loss bring up many emotions in people from anger, sadness, despondency and despair. A person’s entire mindset can be completely changed and it’s almost as if they are going around in a daze.
“People associate grief and loss with death but there are many different types of loss from relationship breakdown, job loss, parents separating, loss of health, pet loss and many more. Individuals will often carry accumulated grief from various periods in their life which can be crippling.”
The most common symptom of grief seems to be a feeling of “being out of it”, she says. A significant loss can have a major effect on people’s capacity to think, feel and participate in life.
“Grieving people often seem to be slower to respond to even the simplest of questions and to be baffled by tasks that are normally routine. If you have experienced a major emotional loss of any kind there is a high probability that your ability to concentrate on day to day activities may be severely limited.
Faintest idea
“You may have an idea, walk to the next room to act on it, and when you get there, realise that you haven’t got the faintest idea what it was you had intended to do. This is a normally occurring phenomenon. Recognise that your entire being, emotional, physical, and spiritual, is focused on the loss that just occurred.”
If possible avoid driving and working with tools that require concentration and mental co-ordination, she advises.
“An incredibly high percentage of serious and fatal auto accidents befall grieving people. For those of you who are near and dear to friends who have recently experienced a painful loss of any kind, you must recognise that the inability to concentrate is the single most common of all responses to loss. Do not berate. Do not scold. Do not have an opinion or judgment. Remember your friend is on another planet - the planet grief. Their entire being is trying to make sense out of something incredibly painful.”
Grieving is a very personal experience, she explains. There is no set pattern or timeframe for the process. She disputes the theory that there are common stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - as illustrated by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying in 1969.
Ms Hennelly strongly believes that it is “potentially dangerous” to apply stages to grief as it affects people in many different ways. Grief will vary depending on the nature of the death and also on the type of relationship one had with the person who has passed away.
Stuck in grief
“It’s not to say that individuals won’t feel any of those emotions but I don’t believe there are stages and to imply that there are may leave an individual stuck in their grief. It it is very important for therapists and medical professionals to hear what a client is telling you rather than having your own agenda.
“The word ‘stage’ implies that time is a component. The suggestion to grievers that they’re in a stage of denial or disbelief can freeze them into inaction. They may bury their feelings waiting for time to make that stage pass.”
People experience grief “in their own way”, she says. It will vary depending on the nature of the relationship one had with the person who has has passed on.
“Children in the same household may have a very different relationship with a parent or parents to their siblings. I have had clients come to me after the death of an elderly parent but they have ended up dealing with the grief of a divorce or relationship break up from years before which was having more of an effect on them than they realised. I have seen this time and time again.”
Difficult relationship
What are the best ways of dealing with grief? Being honest about your feelings and emotions, she says.
“People may have had a difficult relationship with a person that has passed on. As we all know there are positive and negative aspects to all relationships. It is very important for a person who has had a difficult relationship with the person who has passed on to be able to express this without feeling guilty. This is why in grief recovery we look at the positive and negative aspects of the relationship and we encourage people to be very honest with themselves about this as clients often tend to enshrine or bedevil the people who have passed on.”
Men tend to differ from women in the way they deal with grief, she outlines. Men try to make sense of their grief. However, knowledge or intellectual awareness does not resolve the “emotional incompleteness” caused by loss.
“An incredible amount of our time is consumed in undoing the damage done by mixing intellect and emotions. We all know people who understand exactly what happened to them and how it happened and why it happened and who did it to them. Many of those people are in constant pain, still incomplete with the losses represented by those events and those people.
“It is, by far, the most stubborn belief to shake, that if I can just understand I will be free, that I will be able to make new choices. Yet understanding is only awareness, it is not completion. Most of us were socialised to look for answers in our intellect and for most problems the intellect does contain the solutions. Emotional incompleteness is not resolved in the intellect.”
Lack of knowledge
How important is it not to bury grief or try to push the pain and loss to the back of our minds? She points out that lack of knowledge [about the role of grieving] and an accompanying inability to grieve and complete unfinished emotions can lead to a build-up of “emotional dirt” around the heart. This can cause us to limit or restrict interactions with people which require an open, loving approach.
“The essential key to recovery is action. Not the activities of ‘keeping busy,’ but the clearly defined actions of discovering and completing unfinished and uncommunicated emotions that clog our hearts.”
She says watching a child grieve and not knowing what to do to help is a profoundly difficult experience for parents, teachers, and carers. There are many life experiences that can produce feelings of grief in a child, from the death of a relative or a divorce in the family to more everyday experiences such as moving to a new neighbourhood or losing a prized possession.
“Giving children the space and time to talk about their feelings is important. If you do not they may bury those feelings and shut down which may cause huge problems later. We tend to buy things for children to make them feel better or replace possessions or pets when all they actually need is to be heard and given the space to grieve.”
People who lose a loved one to suicide or sudden death can face many conflicting emotions. Ms Hennelly says, for example, while the death of an elderly parent is painful people are often “complete” with loved ones.
“That is to say that we have communicated our feelings about them, to them. We believe that they knew how we felt and that we were understood. When we experience suicide or sudden death we may be overwhelmed with conflicting feelings, we may feel disoriented and confused, and we may feel robbed of one last chance to say ‘I love you’ and ‘goodbye’. After the death we usually remember some things that we wish we’d had a chance to say. We need to discover those unsaid things and say them. We are almost always incomplete when we lose a person close to us through sudden death or suicide.”
