What is grief really?

The grief of losing a loved one, either through death or separation, or that dream career might be hard to understand unless you’ve experienced it firsthand. When clients come into the office to talk about their grief, it’s often hard for them to put how they’re feeling into words.

My personal definition, having experience grief myself, is that it weighs on you. It’s an affliction of the mind and body, where you feel as if your whole world has changed, yet that same world keeps moving and evolving. And that may leave us feeling discombobulated, in a state of shock and/or not feeling like ourselves.

Let’s get clear on what grief really means.

And, let’s start with the dictionary definition of grief, just to orient ourselves. Merriam-Webster cites grief first as, “deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement” and as, “a cause of such suffering”.

In her book Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown identifies three key elements to grief: loss (the realization of a profound absence of someone or something in your life), longing (an intense ache or desire for something that is missing or for the way things used to be), and feeling lost (a disorienting sense of confusion or discombobulation around how to move through the world after your foundation of shifted) (pg. 88).

Most people have heard of the stages of grief, theorized by Swiss American psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in the 1969 book On Death and Dying. Those stages include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In a book published after her death, and co-authored with biographer and writer David Kessler, Kübler-Ross amended these stages, noting that they don’t necessarily happen sequentially, but likely blend or happen on a spectrum, and they do not only pertain to death.

I do believe that we have a much better understanding of the types of grief, as well as what grief may look like due to our collective experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic. In fact, the phrase collective grief is now in our pop-psychology lexicon.

Collective grief refers to how we grieve as a society when major world events change our outlook or the world as we once knew it. There’s also anticipatory grief, where we expect something to happen (the death of a loved one after a long illness or we are initiating the end of a relationship).

For now, let’s sit with what grief means to us. What is your definition of grief? And how has it shown up for you in your body? Are you able to talk about grief with a supportive friend or loved one?

More to come on some different types of grief. Stay tuned.