When Your Kind of Grief Doesn’t Come with a Sympathy Card
A core truth I espouse in my therapy practice is that there is no one right way to grieve. Often this comes up around what feelings are present, how long you have those feelings, and how you process your grief. But it also applies to why; meaning, there is no one right reason to grieve.
Here is the reality: whenever something dies, there is grief. And grief is more than mourning a death. We can grieve the loss of someone who is very much alive, or the loss of a job, a relationship, a dream, an identity, etc. It could be anything of significance to you, and no one else gets to say whether your loss is worthy of grief.
And yet.
In the midst of wrenching loss, many of us get the message from our culture or from those around us that we’re doing it wrong. That we’re too sensitive. That we shouldn’t be feeling grief over this experience we’re facing. Ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief are both ways that social and cultural expectations add complexity to our grief experiences.
Ambiguous loss is a term coined by Dr. Pauline Boss in the 1970s, initially to describe the vagueness, confusion, and suffering experienced by families of soldiers who were prisoners of war or missing in action. They had no answers, no closure, no confirmation as to whether their loved one was even alive. With time and further scholarship, ambiguous loss has come to represent two kinds of loss without a death per se:
Where someone is “physically absent but psychologically present,” perhaps as the result of incarceration, divorce, abandonment, family estrangement, missing person, etc.
Also the inverse, where someone is “physically present but psychologically absent,” mostly due to medical conditions like dementia, brain injury, severe mental illness, coma or waking vegetative state, but also in cases of emotional neglect or parents who are extremely walled-off to their children
If we don’t have permission or give ourselves permission to grieve the loss of someone who is still alive but in some way gone from us, then these experiences of ambiguous loss trap the grief inside us, never fully expressing itself or resolving.
Disenfranchised grief, named by Dr. Kenneth Doka in 1989, refers to grief that is not recognized, sanctioned, or validated by others close to you or by society at large. There are so many examples of these “wrong” kinds of grief that it seems the only scenario left is the most narrow “acceptable” reason for grief. But we know that real life is filled with all kinds of losses:
Invisible losses, such as pregnancy loss, abortion, or infertility
Stigmatized losses, such as death by suicide, overdose, or certain accidents
Deaths that “aren’t that significant,” like a co-worker, ex-partner, pet death or disappearance, certain friends or community members, even celebrities or public/parasocial figures
Non-death losses, for example job loss, divorce, moving, new parenthood (loss of an old identity), loss of religious faith, onset of a medical condition and loss of health or ability, becoming an empty-nester, loss of membership and belonging in a particular community, or loss of an idea, such as a plan or dream for yourself and your life
When our grief is not seen and honored by others, we experience a secondary loss: the loss of support when we need it most. Piled on top of our grief, we can end up feeling loneliness, shame, and perhaps self-mistrust, wondering whether we “should” feel what we’re feeling.
If something has died for you, you deserve to grieve. And if you are grieving, you have a good reason. I believe you, and I would be honored to help hold and process your grief. If you could use some support in this heavy season of your life, please feel free to reach out.