Key thoughts
- Grief isn’t reserved for bereavement. Any significant loss (a dismissal, the end of a relationship, moving abroad, or even losing your sense of control in a certain situation) can trigger a grief response.
- Coming apart when grieving is often a necessary part of the process. It does not mean you’re failing at it.
- There’s no single right way to grieve, and definitely not five neat, delineated stages.
When we are grieving or around someone who is, most of us simply avoid bringing it up.
We’ll easily ask someone how their weekend was, but we’ll find it intrusive or indiscreet to ask how they’re dealing with grief. Grief simply isn’t something that’s commonly talked about.
And while it is very important to recognise the gravity of grief, it is also worth realising that it is one of the most universal human experiences there is.
Grief is bigger than bereavement
When most of us talk about grief, we think of bereavement. And that is an extremely important and incredibly significant example of grief but it isn’t the only one.
Grief, at its core, is a sense of immense loss.
So when we have extreme responses to the loss of something other than a person who has passed, it is also grief, and most importantly, we are allowed to respond strongly to this situation.
And loss shows up more often than we assume.
It can come through losing a job, moving countries, breaking up… or simply losing control of a situation. If something is taken away, if it mattered a lot to start with, we may experience grief: a significant loss that feels like our life is changing in a way we can’t control, that feels lesser, smaller, and like something’s missing that we can’t fix.
Why coming apart is part of the process
Grief has a way of dismantling us.
Picture a house. A brick comes out of the wall, and there’s no other brick that fits in that spot. To make the house truly stable again, you may need to rebuild the entire wall. You can’t just leave the hole there, and other temporary solutions just delay the inevitable.
In some ways, coming apart is a genuinely important part of grief: you take the bricks apart in order to rebuild.
Processing grief includes realising that you have not lost everything. Part of being able to sit with grief is knowing that you and the world around you still exists, and you still have things to do. So coming apart can be a way to put back together a version of yourself, one that helps you engage with the world, without the thing you list.
Note: there’s a real difference between coming apart (which is often a necessary part of grief) and breaking apart without ever putting yourself back together, which can lead to significant mental health issues.
What helps when someone is grieving
Capacity, autonomy and choice are a huge factors in the process of healing, growing, evolving, and feeling like yourself again. Which raises the question: how do you help someone who’s grieving?
Checking in with an “are you OK?” is caring, but it’s not common for people to easily share, just because they have been asked a question. Leaving it entirely open for someone else to fill the gap doesn’t work, because one of the premises underlying grief is that the person feels that there is no way to solve their issue, so why would they bring it up. Not to mention the social fears around judgement.
Sometimes, it can actually help to be more concrete. Not to become a bulldozer or a brick wall, but to be clear, strong and stable.
Sometimes that means taking things off someone’s hands so they have more space to actually have feelings. Sometimes it means offering specific choices: “Here are a few things we need to organise. Would you like to do one of them? Does one of them matter to you?”
In grief (and this is one way to consider whether it’s grief rather than sadness, unhappiness or disappointment), the capacity to think clearly is often impacted. The logic behind why you do something don’t necessarily line up. You think you’re doing something for a particular reason, and then partway through, you notice you feel something completely different.
That looseness in your thinking can be a sign you’re grieving, compared to those moments where you may feel quite clear and decisive after a loss: “I lost my job, I’m going to do this, this, and this, and start applying”. You might stil be sad or disappointed, but it’s less like you are grieving, because grief tends to put your emotions in the driver’s seat instead of your brain. Though this may also turn out to be a coping mechanism and grief might still be brewing underneath.
Grief, my friend
Partnering with grief isn’t only about how we support others… It’s also about how we relate to our own.
Here’s a different way to look at it: think of grief as a friend. That might sound strange, but let us explain.
Good friends are people you share times with – the good, the bad and sometimes the ugly. You may disagree with your friends, have debates and fights, and often not understand them. You can have friends you don’t see for three, six, twelve months, seven years… and then they pop back into your life, and you go, “oh, hello, you’re still here.” But often, despite all of these challenges, we stay friends.
The friendship continues, but the relationship evolves, because I’ve changed, or you’ve changed, because things have happened to us, and between us.
Grief works the same way. It’s an ongoing relationship that comes and goes. And most importantly, that matures over time.
This partly explains why the Kubler-Ross “Five stages of grief” doesn’t quite work, and has been adapted into a number of different models. There are not five clear, definite stages in every grief experience. The model does define five emotions that are good examples of feelings that can occur in grief. And when grieving, you move back and forth between many emotions. Some last a long time. Others not so much. It isn’t a straight line from one to the next.
It’s all okay
Grief is a complex process, full of contradictions, coming apart and putting back together, falling into it and finding your way back to being and doing.
But underneath all of it, the message is simple: it’s all okay.
Grief, like a friend, will keep showing up, keep changing shape, and keep asking to be felt and listened to.
This is exactly what our Grief Connection approach is built for: a space to explore what we call the Fine Layers of Grief, so that this thing called grief can become a little less scary, and a little easier to share.
If any of this resonates, we’d love to help you explore it further.
Book a consultation with Renee to find out more about the Grief Connection workshops we offer.
Continue the conversation
If this blog resonates with you, we invite you to listen to the podcast episode where Renee talks about what grief is in greater depth.
🎧 Watch the full episode on YouTube here.
FAQs
No. Bereavement is an extremely important and significant example of grief, but it isn’t the only one. Grief is better understood as a response to immense loss (which can include the end of a relationship, a job loss, a move abroad, losing a pet, or even losing a sense of control over your own life…)
Because there are not five stages. The model recognises five emotions that are good examples of what grief can feel like. And people move back and forth between many emotions rather than progressing through them in linear order. Some last a long time, some pass quickly, and losses that lead to grief can overlap and stack rather than resolve neatly one at a time.
Grief creates a kind of hazy fog that can make it hard for things to get through to you. Strong, physical, sensory experiences (such as a comfort food or a smell you love) can cut through that fog and pull you back into the present moment.
eNayble’s Grief Connection approach is a performance based, human, sometimes funny and always optimistic space to get to know this thing called grief; exploring what we call the Fine Layers of Grief, so it can feel less scary and easier to share, whether you’re navigating it personally or supporting a team or organisation through it.
