How We Grieve and Why It's Different for Everyone

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and earlier this week, Amber opened a discussion on grief during the holidays. In our podcast, I shared a few things my family did to lessen the sadness of missing a loved-one during important family holidays, while Christen talked about working through a holiday, and Amber shared her personal experience with holiday grief on the blog. Dealing with grief is such an important topic that I wanted to dig a little deeper -- I want to continue the conversation about how people grieve and how we can help each other through the tough times.

Let us start by talking about what grief is, and how we experience it. Many people think that grief and mourning are the same thing, but they are not. Mourning is the outward actions that we take when we have a loss; grief is the internal thoughts and feelings we experience. Likewise, people often mistakenly attribute Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 5 Stages of Death and Dying to the stages of grief, but in fact, her research was about people dealing with their own deaths. According to psychologist and author Dr. J. William Worden, there really are no “stages” of grief because grief is not linear. His model is a set of “tasks” that a grieving person works through to find the way back to some level of function and normalcy. These tasks can occur in any order, or even concurrently. Sometimes, in the process of grieving, a person will go back to one or more tasks repeatedly. The tasks are:

The most important factor in this process is time, and there is no specific timeline for grief. Every person’s response to it is different and quite subjective. But the idea is to work our way back to a level of function as we move forward. Charles Jacob, a psychologist and teacher at Sacred Heart University, says, “Eventually, we just start trending back to normal.” He says that the real key is to get through the pain and then to derive meaning from all of it that “doesn’t leave us feeling completely hopeless.”

One of the best things, besides time, to help with grief is to share it. Experts agree that talking with friends and family, and telling stories about our loved ones is beneficial. It can even be helpful to talk to strangers, thus the growth of online grief support groups and the trend of pop-up “grief cafes,” where participants join a group of strangers over coffee, cake, and, of course, lots of talk about death.

WebMD’s “19 tips for coping with holiday stress and depression” includes tips like:

• Make realistic expectations for the holiday season.
• If you are lonely, try volunteering some time to help others.
• Limit your drinking, since excessive drinking will only increase your feelings of depression.
• Try something new. Celebrate the holidays in a new way.
• Spend time with supportive and caring people or contact a long-lost friend or relative and spread some holiday cheer.

One group that has an especially difficult time with death and grieving is children. Kids of different ages deal with grief differently, and it is often done in spurts because their brains simply cannot tolerate more. Moreover, children will continue to grieve in different ways as they age and mature, continuing into their 20’s when their brains are fully developed. Mila Ruiz Tecala, LICSW, Center of Loss and Grief in Washington, D. C., tells us that when “children are not helped to grieve at every stage of their development, they experience cumulative losses.” Unresolved grief has been shown to create a higher risk of depression, unemployment, smoking, over-eating, lack of appetite, and risky behavior, and has links to immune disorders, hypertension, cardiac events, and cancer.

No matter the age of the child, the experts agree that it is important to make sure they know that it is acceptable to show emotions and talk about the person who died, and that it is okay to be sad.

To help children during the holidays:

If you have more tips on dealing with grief, we’d love to hear about it. Please join us as we continue this conversation in the Facebook group.

Thanks for sharing!

For more information about grief cafes, please visit the following websites:

• https://deathcafe.com
• https://www.thegoodgrieftrust.org/need-know-info/from-us-to-you/pop-up-good-grief-cafes/
• https://www.thegoodgrieftrust.org