Grief. What it is and what it’s not.

You will not fully heal, however you will be able to mourn and you will be able to move on.

Grief is powerful, it is something we all experience some time in our life, and it has the potential to change how we function every day in the world. Surprisingly (or not) a lot of what we think about grief is incorrect.

let me explain so you don’t add to your suffering with false expectation’s. For starters, there’s theses Five Stages of Grief method you might’ve heart about:

Denial Bargaining Anger Depression Acceptance

This commonly referenced Five stages model of grief was developed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in the 1960’s. On the surface, it suggests that we all grieve in the same linear way. But that’s a huge foundational flaw here. Kubler-Ross created this model to explain how terminally ill people come to terms with their impending death. Not every death or emotion around it is ever the same.

Kubler-Ross’s work has been widely taken out of context and injected into modern society’s collective mind. This is dangerous because we are all different and we will never experience death in the same way as another person.

When a person experience’s a loss and grieves differently than the model suggests they should, they become more destressed. Worry seeps in about failing to conform to the ‘normal’ process, and questions like what’s wrong with me? pile into the their already emotional load.

We have all suffered loss and we have all grieved. I discovered through my losses that grief isn’t linear; and it doesn’t necessarily end. I use to believe that you could start grieving at any of the stages and cycle through them in any pattern. That you could reach the acceptance stage, stay there for years, then move onto the depression stage for a few months, then maybe swing back to acceptance.

After the last four years and having gone through two very painful losses, I’ve realized that this isn’t true either. The fact is that there’s no way to predict how a person will grieve. They might experience all five stages or none at all. I’m still grieving.

My advise? Refer to the five stages model as a loose guideline and let the grief happen and please avoid over-identifying with any stage while grieving, it won’t help.

Time does not heal all wounds.

Its not about how much time passes but more about what we do with that time. I’m currently watching Shrinking on Apple TV. Jason Segel plays an unconventional therapist and dad mourning his wife’s untimely death. He’s blocking his pain out with alcohol, drugs, and promiscuity, and he can’t understand what his colleagues mean when they say he hasn’t begun to grieve yet. The answer? He’s been numbing and avoiding his pain. His way of coping. Despite a year having passed since his wife passed away, his wound hasn’t started to heal because he hasn’t done anything to start the process, he’s in too much pain and he’s blocking the process from happening.

When you are ready to start grieving the process can take many forms. Some people benefit most from talking to a mental health professional. This one I can relate to, Talk Therapy has helped my healing, it has given me a better understanding of why I feel the way I feel, and allowing myself to be kind to myself in those moments when I miss my loved ones. Other’s might reckon best with their feelings by being in nature, volunteering, journaling, spending time with loved ones, or turning to spirituality.

Whatever your mode of grieving, the foundations of this work remains the same: you must allow yourself to feel your feelings, they are all valid. You must speak compassionately to yourself and you have to acknowledge moments of suffering and you must distract yourself when you need to.

There’s a difference between ‘in’ your feelings and being ‘with’ your feelings, and the grief process requires both sets of theses. Being in your feelings means that you’re operating from a place of sadness, guilt, anger, loneliness etc. You’re allowing the emotions in and you’re allowing yourself to feel them. Being with your feelings is important in order to continue to function in the world. It means that you are acknowledging that you feel sad and carrying that pain, that emotion alongside you. You’re consciously allowing other life tasks and emotions to occupy the forefront of your mind, meaning that you are meeting other life’s responsibilities and you’re able to feel lighter emotions.

Ultimately, the idea of healing is a false promise.

You’re not going to heal, not fully. Grief doesn’t stop, but it does become more tolerable when you actively process your pain. Its really difficult to sit with emotional pain, but its necessary for you to to start healing. No one wants to be sad for ever. Emotions don’t go away when they’re ignored, they just get louder.

There is a difference between grief and mourning. From talking to my family and friends, there are a lot of people that don’t know what they’re feeling at any given moment, and many don’t know what an emotion is. Its important to recognize that grief is not an emotion. Its more like a state of being, a process, as I’ve been referring to it here.

Grief is emotion-adjacent. The thoughts and feelings you embody while processing your loss collectively constitute grief. it may be helpful to think of it as an umbrella term for what you’re going through internally.

Mourning, however, is external. Its what you do with your grief, and it can look different for everyone. There are so many different ways a person might mourn independently, and there is no limit on time for this. What I do, is that I think about something I liked to do with my loved one and dedicate time to mindfully engage in that activity. I think of something that brings up joyful memories of our time together. I go there and allow myself to feel the range of emotions that arise. Whatever those emotions are, sadness, anger, hurt, guilt, etc, I allow them in. You don’t have to do anything with them, just acknowledge them. I know from experience how difficult this is. When I do this, I am at my most vulnerable and I’m scared. I also know that everything will be okay.

The answer?

So, how do you mourn and move on? Well there is no right or wrong way to grieve or mourn. There are no rules in this domain, and how a person engages in theses processes is largely unpredictable. There is however one broad truth: to ‘move on’ doesn’t mean that you stop grieving or mourning. Neither process ever truly stops. Moving on for me means you have actively engaged in grieving and mourning to the point where some healing has taken place. The pain however stays, but its less intense, because you’ve made space for it, and it moves from living in the foreground to living in the background. You have a scar there now rather than a gaping wound, and you move forward with that scar.

For me, to mourn and move on is to be human and to love.