Grief Part 1

Grief. Sigh, this is a heavy one. I am not going to go over the common knowledge stuff like the stages of grief, you’re welcome to look those up on your own. I’m going to get into more of the deep workings of grief. Just like for any other emotion that is caused by an environmental stressor, in this case loss, we can all experience grief differently, it is pretty personal. We also experience varying levels of grief through our life, meaning that we can have mild grief when we leave a place (like moving/changing a job), or more intense grief when we lose a pet, or break up with a person. Then more immense grief when someone we deeply love dies (pet or person). In addition to levels of severity we can feel personal grief: losing a part of ourselves, intrapersonal grief: losing someone outside of ourselves, and global grief, feeling the loss of distant others/strangers or grieving for a social change/loss. It’s not our job to judge another’s emotional right, we can experience various levels of grief in diverse ways. ⠀
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Complicated grief tends to mean that we are experiencing various levels of grief which can be compounding, it can also reflect the complicated emotions we feel when grieving. For example when Dr. Ford publicly shared her trauma experience earlier this year, I found myself grieving for her, for her loss of safety, for having to experience and re-experience this violating act. That it didn’t stop the nomination. For others it may have been depressing, or scary. For me it was a global (i.e. distant) loss, since I have never met her but came to hear her story. A grief that was compounded by losing two in-laws just a few months before. This created some feelings of complicated grief for me. ⠀
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Complicated grief can also mean having conflicting feelings towards the loss. A break-up can create these feelings. Perhaps you are happy for the change but sad and grieving the relationship or the loss of that person in your life. Being able to acknowledge the complexity of our grief is an important part of processing it.
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Think of times you have felt these various levels of grief? What was your grief reaction? (more on this next post)

***Originally Posted April 24th 2019 on LVLHolistic’s Instagram page as a collaborative presentation regarding mental health and nutrition***