What is grief (really)?
This can be a tough question to answer!
What’s the definition of grief?
In my simplest terms, grief is the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual experience we have after loss.
To break it down: It means that grief impacts us on each level of our being.
Mental: It impacts our brains and how we process things. It has impacts on our cognitive functioning, our mental energy, and our mental health.
Physical: It impacts our physical energy levels, different parts of our bodies, our physical health.
Emotional: It impacts the depth and expression of your emotions, our ability to express emotions at all, and it can bring up new emotions that you’ve never felt.
Spiritual: It impacts our understanding of our spiritual beliefs, it causes us to call on us spiritual guides, and more.
Grief can present as:
Emotional behavior
Physical changes
Behavioral changes
All of this makes up a full body, full being experience we have after loss: it’s the collection of those four areas of our life and how we experience existing after losing something.
Though the majority of my work focuses on death-related grief, note that grief can be experienced because of loss of a job, a partner, an opportunity, a right, a sense of safety, a friendship, a pet, a title, a community, and more.
Why do we focus on the 5 stages of grief from Elisabeth Kubler-Ross?
There are a few historical issues that have led us to these misconceptions about grief, and a lack of understanding about how it works. One of the things that we have to learn was that grief doesn’t only have to do with death, as well as the fact that grief can take on many forms.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross spent a lot of time with people who were dying, to try and give them a voice, to observe their experience, and to report on that for people like us. Unfortunately, labeling them as stages, and attaching them to the sick and dying meant that people had a really narrow interpretation of grief.
In her later years, Kubler-Ross wrote that she regretted writing the stages the way that she did, that people mistook them as being both linear and universal. Based on what she observed while working with patients given terminal diagnoses, Kubler-Ross identified five common experiences, not five required experiences. Her stages, whether applied to the dying or those left living, were meant to normalize and validate what someone might experience in the swirl of insanity that is loss and death and grief.