Dealing with grief is a natural, but difficult, part of life. Unfortunately, there are some widespread myths that can make the process even more difficult. We explore a couple of these below:

Myth #1:

You will progress through stages of grief in a linear fashion.

Reality:

You may be familiar with the stages of grief model proposed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, in which individuals move from denial to anger to bargaining and on to depression until they finally arrive at acceptance. The model was actually proposed to explain the grieving process for hospice patients coping with their own diagnosis, though it was expanded to cover various types of grief.

But it turns out that the stages of grief model doesn’t work all that well in those other contexts.

For one thing, grief tends to be non-linear and to show up differently for different people.

Also, the stage model seems to suggest that grief operates like a checklist:

-pick up dry cleaning;

-attend the HOA meeting;

– complete the bargaining stage.

We’re just not built like that. 

It’s actually normal for grief to reawaken with new losses or at new stages of life

Grief does not usually resolve in the sense that it goes away completely, never to be heard from again. When you face a new loss, you do so with the weight and history of all of your previous losses.

Myth # 2:

I “shouldn’t” feel this bad about this loss.

Reality:

When other people or societal norms seem to dismiss your pain and grief, you may feel invalidated and have a harder time coping.

This is disenfranchised grief, as you may remember. And to address disenfranchised grief, first I encourage you not to dismiss your feelings. You have the right to them. You feel what you feel and your feelings cannot be wrong. Hold space for your grief even if it feels like nobody else is. 

Nobody is giving out prizes for the worst loss. We all know that, but you may sometimes find yourself denying your feelings or wondering if you have the right to feel them. Acknowledging and feeling your grief in no way diminishes your compassion for the grief of others. As a side note, I can tell you that there’s plenty of sadness to go around and we don’t need to fight over it. 

When something bad happens, it’s okay to feel bad. We don’t have to rush in to push those feelings away or wonder whether it’s okay to feel our feelings.

Myth #3:

I can’t deal with this right now.

Reality:

The longer we avoid feeling our natural feelings, the more distressed we become. When we face our feelings, we can begin to resolve them. 

Think of a storage closet in your home. You find an old hockey stick that you’re not sure what to do with so you stick it in the closet. That coat you haven’t worn in 3 years but might wear next winter? Stick it in the closet. The newspaper clippings you haven’t gotten around to reading? In the closet. And on and on.

Eventually of course, your closet can’t hold anymore. You go to put the next thing in and everything comes tumbling out.

Our emotional storage is also limited. I’m not talking here about temporarily compartmentalizing so you can get through your shift, your day, or other external stressor. It is an important skill to be able to put a pin in our emotions and continue to function. The trouble comes when we find we never get around to processing those feelings and we keep stuffing them and stuffing them and stuffing them until we simply can’t manage anymore.

And when we’re at that point we may find ourselves afraid of being overwhelmed by emotion. We just want to slam the closet shut. But we will not experience high-intensity emotion on and on without ceasing. If we acknowledge it and process it, our emotional tension will also dissipate.

This is what adaptive coping tools do for us. They allow us to experience our emotions without being swamped by them. 

Concluding Thoughts:

Grief is a natural and healthy emotion. Whether your grief comes from loss of a loved one, loss of health or opportunity, break-up of a relationship, death of a patient, or some other cause, your recovery will be smoother if you acknowledge and accept your feelings and allow your grieving process to unfold in the way that’s right for you.