It’s not just about death…

Why we could all benefit from acknowledging the grief in our lives.

Loss is universal, so grief is universal. It’s part of being human, and yet grief, and all the myriad of emotions that can come with it, can feel so uncomfortable that we often don’t want to admit that it’s there, or don’t even realise it’s there. Sometimes we can dismiss our feelings of grief because we feel that others must have it worse than us – we don’t allow ourselves to feel it because nobody has actually died, or the person that died wasn’t an “important” relation, like a parent or a romantic partner. Truth is, grief can be felt wherever we have lost something or someone – because it’s loss of life as you knew it. You had a vision of how life was going to be, and now you’re grieving the fact that life will no longer be like this.

Grief can be felt wherever we have lost something or someone – because it’s loss of life as you knew it.

So sorry folks, you’ll be holding some grief somewhere, whatever’s happened to you. This is not to minimise the heart-wrenching, bodily pain that can be experienced when a loved one dies (although comparing grief can be completely unhelpful, depending on your relationship with your loved one, death can bring a grief that nobody prepared you for). What I’m suggesting is that we should be careful not to minimise the other losses in our lives, as this unexplored grief can be impacting us without us knowing it. Sometimes we need to acknowledge the losses and how they make us feel, and recognise the impact that experiencing multiple losses can have on us. Grief will always be with us – it is not a case of noticing it so that we can get rid of it or “get over it”. As Megan Devine so eloquently writes, “Grief is not a problem to be solved; it’s an experience to be carried.” However, by acknowledging these losses, rather than dismissing or ignoring them and then wondering why we’re feeling the way we do, we can carry them more successfully and they don’t feel quite as painful.

So what kind of losses are we talking about then? Well, I could write an entire book on this! But I won’t… at least not here… As I said, grief can be experienced whenever our life is changed – the life we were used to, or the life we thought we were going to have, is no longer in our grasp – but here are just some examples:

When you've grown together for so long, it can be really hard to grow apart @Jules Lowe Counselling

An important relationship has broken down

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been together, whether you made it “Facebook official” or not, or whether you were married for thirty years, a break-up of any kind can bring with it a whole dollop of grief: you had hope that the relationship might last in the future, and now that future and life as you know it has changed. With it can come shame, especially in the case of divorce, which still seems to hold such a stigma in our society. We risk putting the blame on ourselves, thinking we could have done something differently, rather than seeing it for the complex thing that it is. It’s especially hard because unlike bereavement, that person isn’t gone forever, so we can believe that there is a slight chance that we could get that person back. And we’re not just talking about romantic relationships – friendship loss can also be extremely painful for all the reasons above.

Awareness of attachment styles can help, as can taking time to shine a light on any shame that you may be holding, and understanding where this could have come from. I find many clients going through a relationship breakup will follow the waves of the Dual Process Model, some weeks focusing on building a new way of living, with all the hope but also secondary losses that this can bring, and other weeks returning to the loss orientation, where grief and sadness dominate.

Let them grow - the sky is the limit @Jules Lowe Counselling

Your child is growing up

This feels like a topical one, with the start of the academic year being so recent. The start of the school year marks the passing of time, and often we cannot quite believe how quickly it’s passing by. Whether it’s starting school, starting High School, or your child leaving home for good, the life transition that your child goes through can have a significant impact on your own life – again, life as you knew it will never quite be the same. It’s likely that you’re used to having them at home, it’s been part of your daily routine, and now this daily routine will be changed forever. An awareness of your own attachment style can really help here, as can an awareness that if you are able to provide a secure base for them, even if you don’t feel they “need” you as much as they used to, you can feel safe in the knowledge that they can take risks because they know you’ll be there to go back to.

Something so precious can be so hard to lose @Jules Lowe Counselling

You are unable to have a child, or haven’t yet, and would like to

Infertility and secondary infertility (when you’ve had one child but then find it difficult to conceive again) can be an area of loss so often overlooked, and made even more painful as a result. Again, so much of this is about experiencing the loss of what you thought the future would look like, and when you are trying to conceive every month can bring with it a little bout of grief. So many people suffer in silence, often as a result of shame – so much of the language seems to be about “failure” and “inability” to conceive, which understandably makes us feel like we are doing something wrong. One of the biggest things to remember here is that the antidote to this shame is love and compassion – there is power in letting these emotions out, exploring them and being kind and compassionate to ourselves.

A change in season of any kind can have an enormous impact on our lives @Jules Lowe Counselling

You’ve left school/uni/a job or you’ve retired

We experience so many endings in our lives, some are by choice and some are not. Even if we are looking forward to the ending and know that it’s for the best, with it will also come the grief again that life as you know it will never be the same. Leaving school or uni can be particularly hard when we’ve spent our lives in academia, always having at least an idea about what our next steps might be, and then we get spewed out and suddenly have to make our own decisions. As we get older, so many of us define ourselves by our jobs. When our career ends, so too can our sense of identity and self-esteem. Not only this, but our relationships with others can change – sometimes because we are spending more or less time with them than we’re used to – and all of this can be tricky to navigate without acknowledging it and fully exploring it.

Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. Growth is possible, even if it doesn't feel like it right now. @Jules Lowe Counselling

With any kind of loss, there will probably come with it a loss of identity to some degree. Who you were before cannot continue, and you may find yourself asking yourself, for instance, “Who am I now that I’m not a husband?” or “Who am I now I’m not the mother of a toddler?” The question I’d pose to you is “Who do you want to be?” Loss is change, and change can be uncomfortable, but it can also be full of hope for the future. It may not be the future that you planned, and it can feel restricting and painful to have that choice taken away from you, but you can have a choice on which new paths and new futures to choose. There are so many forms of loss – so many more than I’ve mentioned here – so you can start to see how many losses any one person can experience in their life. However, by acknowledging each loss, exploring the feelings surrounding it and giving them space and compassion, you have a chance to carry it with you in a much more meaningful way. And you know where I am if you need a non-judgmental, empathetic and safe space – I’ll sit with you in that pain and we can navigate that unfamiliar future together.

Devine, M. (2017) It’s OK that you’re not OK. Sounds True.