Ten years ago today, my mother passed away. Grief isn’t something we plan or prepare for, so when it comes it’s often unexpected—even if someone’s death is expected due to a terminal illness. I’ve been looking back at my own grief journey, and studying the most common things about grief that cause people to get stuck and what helps them get unstuck. I’m excited to share those tips with you today. This is the first part in a series on grief. The next few episodes will include an episode sharing my experience of my mother passing away, an episode interviewing my siblings about their various grief experiences and an episode about what to say and what not to say to people experiencing grief.
On the podcast you’ll learn:
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One-Minute Wisdom
Each week I carefully craft a short perspective shift or tool that you can read in about a minute or two. You can sign up here.
Follow me on Instagram: @theexpatmomcoach
Ten years ago today, my mother passed away. Grief isn’t something we plan or prepare for, so when it comes it’s often unexpected—even if someone’s death is expected due to a terminal illness. I’ve been looking back at my own grief journey, and studying the most common things about grief that cause people to get stuck and what helps them get unstuck. I’m excited to share those tips with you today. This is the first part in a series on grief. The next few episodes will include an episode sharing my experience of my mother passing away, an episode interviewing my siblings about their various grief experiences and an episode about what to say and what not to say to people experiencing grief.
On the podcast you’ll learn:
Free Mini-Coaching Session
Sign-up for a free 30-min. mini-coaching session.
Schedule
One-Minute Wisdom
Each week I carefully craft a short perspective shift or tool that you can read in about a minute or two. You can sign up here.
Follow me on Instagram: @theexpatmomcoach
Episode #63 Grief 1: Navigating Grief
Losing My Mother
This is a significant week for me. It is the anniversary of my mother’s passing. 10 years ago we lost her to Ovarian cancer. As I have been reflecting on that experience I wanted to do a podcast series on grief. Grief is something we don’t necessarily learn about in school. No one gives us lessons on it at home either. It’s something that shows up in our lives—often unexpectedly and it can wreak havoc on our lives, especially if we don’t understand it and have tool to help.
This week on the podcast I want to address what grief is and offer some useful frameworks we might use to understand it. On the day of my mother’s passing, I’ll release the second podcast in the series which is my grief experience after losing my mother. The third episode will be an interview with my siblings. Each of us will share a bit about our own grief journeys over the past 10 years. You will hear our similarities and differences in coping with this experiences. Each person deals with loss so differently. We’ll have an episode about re-constructing your new life and identity after loss as well as an episode about what not to say to someone who is grieving. I hope it will be a useful series. :). It’s a heavier topic, but I think one where our mental and emotional health can get stuck.
One-Minute Wisdom
What is Grief?
Let’s start with the Definition of Grief. Grief is the response to loss—particularly to the loss of someone or something that was important to us. Grief includes thoughts, feelings and actions.
We often think about grief as associated with a loved one passing away. However grief is simply the experience of adjusting to loss and change of any type. Common experiences of loss besides death include; a move, a divorce, learning you cannot have children, being done having children, being an empty nester, losing a job, retirement, a re-marriage, a friend moving away and many more. Essentially grief is the experience of any loss.
In our expat lifestyle, we experience loss frequently. Maybe not losing people we love per-se, but losing friends who move away, changing jobs, countries, hobbies etc. For a more specific look at some of these dynamics of navigating loss as an expat that is NOT related to a loved one passing away, check out episodes 34-36 which explain the process of adjusting to transition in expat life. In addition you might check out episode #2 where I share some of my own experiences, struggles and best practices from moving more times than I can count and dealing with transition.
This particular podcast will focus on grief from the loss of someone you love. Though many of the principles and ideas will be relevant to other types of loss as well. And, if you haven’t lost someone, it can also help you support and understand someone who is losing or who has lost someone.
I first want to point out that grief is different in every scenario. There are several factor’s that impact how we experience grief.
1. Our relationship to the person impacts our experience with grief. For example, losing a spouse is not the same as losing a parent. Losing a child is very different than losing a grandmother. In addition how close we are to the person, how much a part of our day-to-day life they were often informs part of the impact we may feel. and the way we feel about the relationship is important too. Losing someone you had unresolved feelings or issues with is different than losing someone you were at peace with.
2.Whether or not the death was expected or unexpected makes a difference. Losing someone in an unexpected way such a car crash or accident is very different than someone who has a terminal illness. It impacts how long you have to prepare and process and if you got to say good-bye. Losing someone through suicide or homicide can be particularly complicated.
3. Our emotional health and life situation at the time. If we are feeling more vulnerable emotionally, we may have a different experience than if we are at a more stable time. And if we’ve had past experiences with grief, when we experience new grief, it can bridge back to old grief.
4. Other people’s reactions can also impact our grief. If other’s are expecting you to respond a certain way it might impact you. In addition looking at what else is going on in your life might have a big impact.
5. Age and Personality can also make a difference in how we think about, feel about, and respond to grief.
One podcast couldn’t begin to offer tools for every type of situation or loss.
I think it’s important to start with a basic description of common experiences.
While everyone experiences grief differently, there are many common feelings, thoughts and even behaviors that seem to be common for many people.
Common thoughts include; this is unfair, how will I cope, I should have done more of _____, remembering conversations, good memories and bad ones.
Common emotions associated with loss are shock, denial, fear, pain, guilt, anger, depression, relief, sadness, regret, freedom, yearning, gratitude, peace.
Common behaviors include; ruminating, sleeping more or inability to sleep, avoiding others or avoiding being alone depending on the person, avoid reminders or obsess over them, eating less or more, being reckless, looking at photos, distracting yourself with being busy.
Because grief can be an intense experience for many people. In order to understand what’s happening and make sense of it, several people have attempted to create models or stages to help us understand grief.
Stages of Grief?
The most popular and one of the oldest models about grief was created by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief. She suggested that the stages of grief include denial , anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think it’s important to point out that her work was primarily in helping people who had a terminal diagnosis come to accept their situation and make peace with dying. This is a very different process than losing a loved one.
For some the stages of grief can be useful, in that it may give some context to the feeling we are feeling. The stages of grief can help us be prepared for certain emotions and common experiences. And it can help us see that this intensity of feelings won’t last forever.
Problems with the Stages of Grief Framework
However, there are some downsides to applying this grief framework to someone who is grieving the loss of a loved one. Because, as we discussed— every situation and person is different and because this research was never intended for people in grief over other’s passing—not all of these stages of grief that Ross mentioned happen to everyone, and the stages we do experiences aren’t accomplished in a sequential fashion per-se.
Adopting this framework of stages of loss can cause us to feel there are stages we should be progressing through. The fact is that grief is messy. It’s all over the place and there isn’t necessarily a step-wise progression to it.
When think we “should” or “shouldn’t” be feeling something we may judge ourselves and think we aren’t where we should be in the process we’ve decided to adopt. We may think we’re behind or too far ahead or that we’ve slipped backwards in grieving depending on what we’re feeling.
The framework also creates a sense of constant comparison and “shoulds” about the grieving process. Grief is already such a cocktail of emotions—often heavy emotions. When we have expectations of what or how we should be feeling we add additional and unnecessary layers negative emotion to the grief. And that can make the grief even more difficult to navigate.
This model can also cause a false hope that things will be better, done, over when we make it through all the stages. While the intensity of emotions do tend to lessen over time, expecting that greif will be done, can create more disappointment when it doesn’t happen.
I would like to suggest a different approach to grief—and a few alternative models that may help us approach grief in a more useful way. I hope one or some of them will be helpful.
A Different Approach to Grief
A different way to approach grief is that it is just thoughts and feelings about someone passing away whether it is immediately after or many years after. This approach to grief is much more flexible at accomodating different circumstances, different feelings and emotions and removing a regimented way to grieve.
Emotions are not necessarily linear, cyclical or comprehensive. They are just feelings and thoughts. We may feel some and not others.….there are not necessarily stages need to work through……however, it is important to be aware of what we’re feeling and be willing to process through them.
I found it fascinating in my research that depression and shock can actually be really important and useful emotions in the grief process. They offer a buffering or a dulling of the pain that might otherwise be too overwhelming to experience.
I love the Wave model of grief. It shows a graph with intensity of emotion as the vertical side of the graph and time on the horizontal side of the graph. It shows big vertical waves very close together at the right after the loss. Emotions are often very intense at first. Studies suggest the peak time of grief is often around 6 months. (However, every person and situation will be different). As time goes one, the graph shows the waves getting smaller and less frequent. In other words, as time passes, our feelings of grief don’t go away, but they do become less intense and less frequent over time—often they can be triggered by anniversaries, holidays, sensory things, unexpected reminders.
There isn’t a “right” way to grieve, and there isn’t a required timeline. For many people things begin to feel a bit lighter after about a year. Even at this point it is very normal to continue to feel grief at times. Psychiatrists call those whom experience prolonged grief constantly for many years, “Prolonged Grief,” or “Complex Bereavement Disorder.” As expected—this type of grief is much more common for someone who has experienced traumatic loss such as loss by suicide, homicide, the loss of a child, sudden or violent circumstances. Understanding this can help us give ourselves a little grace as we navigate our own grief journey.
Tasks of Grief
While I don’t believe stages of grief are necessarily a useful construct, I do love the idea of different tasks we want to eventually achieve as we transition to a change in our life. Whether we like it or not, the loss of someone we love means a different life.
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We aren’t just losing the person themselves. We are losing a shared life, things you did for each other, future hopes and dreams. Often a significant loss can shake up your world view and even shift your own perception of your identity.
J.W. Worden created the TEAR model. In his book, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner. he describes 4 tasks necessary to move forward through grief.
These tasks are specific things you can work on in order to adjust to a different life without this person. While stages compare us to an experience we can’t control. Tasks on the other hand are something active we can engage in to help ourselves transition to a new life, new roles, new perspectives, and a new identity.
These tasks take time, and can’t be accomplished the day after someone passes. Different people will have different timelines for these tasks. However when we are grieving we can be aware that these are important tasks to achieve. Rather than wondering if we’re feeling the right thing. We can instead ask ourselves if we feel ready to take on the next task. This can help us move forward as we’re ready and not wonder or worry if we’re grieving correctly.
Let me share the 4 tasks Worden identified.
Tasks of Grief—Tear Model
T-To accept the reality of the loss
This may sound obvious, but actually even when we know intellectually that someone has died, it takes time for our heart to catch up with our mind. I remember when my mom died, I knew intellectually that she had passed away. But I had this habit of writing things down on sticky notes to tell her when we talked. My brain automatically kept writing them. But when I went to pick up the phone, I remembered—she wouldn’t be there. It took a bit for my mind and heart to sink up. I knew I had actually accepted my mom’s death when I stopped writing sticky notes with things to tell my mom.
This tendency to ignore the reality of the loss can be subtle. For example, it might come in downplaying the importance of the relationship, or in minimizing the impact of the loss. It can feel like the person is just on a long vacation.
It helps when we don’t judge ourselves for this and we don’t put a timeline on acceptance. Giving yourself some patience while you adjust the the change. I like Newton’s law of motion. An object in motion stays in motion until and equal and opposite force acts on it. We develop normal ways of thinking operating and interacting that include the other person. At first our initial responses may continue to be the same as they were before the person died. We go to call them, or think to say something to them, but they aren’t there. That equal and opposite force can be a few things. It can be the absence itself. When we have enough experiences where we start down a path to interact and remember they aren’t there—the brain realizes that isn’t a useful reaction. The disappointment and lack of dopamine from obtaining the desired interaction acts as an opposing force.
However, when your brain catches itself and recognizes they aren’t there—-you can help move yourself along on task one, by allowing yourself to feel the disappointment, surprise, sadness, lonliness of the moment rather than fostering the story that they will come back, this is a bad dream or that you just can’t deal with it right now. Being honest with yourself and your emotions is important. Fostering the story can create a fantasy that suspends your progress.
And that leads us to the second task of grieving.
E-Experience the pain of the loss
When we think about the heavy emotions associated with grief I think most of us wouldn’t want to touch them with a 10 foot pole if we had a choice. I love the quote, “Grief is the cost of loving.” It helps me see grief from a different angle. Rather than thinking about how heavy and uncomfortable grief is, what if we looked at is as evidence of our deep love and gratitude for the tremendous gift of this person in our lives. The only way out of grief is through. If we repress the feelings, or pretend they aren’t there, those feelings of grief will wait.
If we don’t feel it in the beginning, it may wait for us. It can wait years if needed. Often children do not experience as intense grief at the time because they haven’t developed the intellectual capacity to process something. It can show up later in other ways in their lives.
Let me be clear. Feeling intense feelings and repressing them, is very different from not feeling anything at all. We can’t force ourselves to feel something we don’t feel. We don’t have to artificially manufacture feelings we don’t have. If we don’t feel saddness or guilt about someone’s passing—it may be a tremendous blessing. However, we do want to be aware that sometimes those feelings may pop up in other places like habits—overeating, overdrinking, overshopping, overnetflixing, overworking, overreacting and others. If you notice these types of behaviors—it may be that you have unknowingly repressed your feelings of grief and they are manifesting in a habit such as these.
If we aren’t seeing habits like that forming, it may be that we are fine and we’ve grieved sufficiently. It may also mean that we will be able to navigate that grief at a different time when we have the time and the ability. Life has a wonderful way of triggering old problems so we can deal with them.
If you do feel feelings, processing the pain can look very different for each person. It can mean expressing your experience either in writing or telling someone else. For example it could mean writing a journal, sharing your story with a friend. Putting words to experiences helps us understand them better. Sometimes it can mean being creative. When my mother died, my aunt made birdhouses out of scrap wood and metal and other items around her cabin. She said the chopping, sawing, and cutting and forming them into something beautiful were very therapeutic.
I find another way that is helpful to process is to take inventory of your life—make a before and after chart pointing out how things are different now than they were then. Sometimes this allows us to really identify what exactly it is that we are losing.
Processing emotion
The most powerful skill and tool for navigating grief in the early stages is the ability to process your emotions. If you listen to this podcast, you know I’m a huge advocate of learning how to feel your feelings. I explain the process more specifically on episode 4. If you haven’t listened to that episode, consider listening to that as an important tandem episode to this one.
In short—processing emotion does NOT mean you talk more about it necessarily. Emotions are neurotransmitters triggered by our thoughts—literally by sentences in the brain. These neurotransmitters create a physical sensation in our body. Processing feelings means getting out of your head and into your body—it means noticing what sensations you are feeling….give examples. Most emotions only take about 90 seconds to process. They may be uncomfortable, but they won’t hurt you. Learning to process your emotions is transformational—it means that you realize you can handle any feeling. We spend so much of our time and our life avoiding feelings—especially feelings of fear or stress, or guilt or humiliation etc. When we realize we can handle these feelings and they are not going to hurt us, we can begin to live a much fuller and more peaceful life because we stop avoiding and resisting emotion. With grief, processing means we don’t prolong or delay difficult feelings.
And you have permission to grieve and take a break and distract yourself when you need a break. Sometimes we simply cannot walk around holding the heavy pain all the time. Sometimes we need to distract ourselves for a bit and come back later.
A-Adjust to the new environment without the person
When someone dies our world changes. If we lived with the person, our environment and day to day experience may be drastically different. I remember simple things like making meals were a big difference for my Dad when my mom passed away. One family who lost a child as a teen watched their teen’s friends go through important milestones without their child. For my family, holidays and reunions and births of my children were all different. The roles and experiences we had been used to were different. It has taken time to understand, process, adjust and change to deal with this new environment and identity. For example, I remember our first Christmas after my mom died, my sisters and I all were trying to figure out who would shop, who would cook, who would clean, which traditions we would do etc.
In addition our identities are often closely tied with loved ones. When a loved one dies, we have to re-evaluate who we are and who we want to be in this new reality.
The task of this step involves deliberately re-defining who we want be in our “new” life, and figuring out how to cope and live in the absence of the other person. I remember one day my dad went to the store and bought 2-3 sets of place mats as a symbol of taking back the kitchen.
R-Reinvest in the new reality.
There are two pieces to this step. The first is to find an appropriate, ongoing connection in our emotional lives with the person who has died. Although the person is physically gone, we continue to have a relationship with the person in our minds. Whether it is someone who we love or who we despite, if we have thoughts about that person we continue to have a relationship. So it is important to evaluate what relationship we are choosing and how we will navigate and even nurture the relationship. Often finding rituals to remember our loved one can help us find meaningful things our brain can count on to think about and celebrate the person we lost.
As we form a more solid connection with our loved one in this it can allow us to simultaneously continue living.
Summary
This was a lot of information to take in. I hope you found something in one of the models or ideas that resonates for you in your particular grief situation.
In summary we discussed some of the different factors that go into determining a grief experience. We discussed that there is no one right way to grieve or no steps or stages to grief. Grief is simply the reaction we have to loss. It often comes with a common set of feelings, thoughts and behaviors—but each person’s experience will be different and on a different timeline. Trying to force our experience to match a particular model can add more negative emotion to an already challenging time.
We discussed some models that may be helpful in conceptualizing grief, including the wave idea where emotions come intensely and quickly at first and over time become less intense and less frequent. Finally we discussed Worden’s model of four tasks that can help us move through our grief.
TEAR
T-To accept the reality of the loss
E-Experience the pain of the loss
A-Adjust to a new environment without the person
R-Remember your loved one and Reinvest in a new reality
Expat Exit Strategy
Have you lost someone you love recently?
Take a piece of paper and make 3 columns. On the first column write “thoughts”, on the second column write “feelings” and on the third column write “actions.” Take a minute and list out some of your experiences of loss in these categories. Getting things out of your mind and onto paper and can often be very enlightening. And give yourself grace. Know that anything you are thinking or feeling is normal and okay. Of course we don’t want to put all actions in that category. But thoughts and feelings are always allowed.
Coaching
Worden, JW Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner.