Happy new episode day, friends! MC here. One of the most infuriating things about living in a grief-phobic culture is that we pretend that grief - you know, that thing that literally every single one of us is going to have to face more than once in our lives - is not important enough to learn about.
Did you know that thanatology is a whole entire field of study? I bet you didn’t. It’s the study of dying, death, loss and grief and you can get a whole ass PhD in it. Is there anything else on earth that effects us so universally that we don’t talk about? We all have hearts. Wouldn’t it be weird to not know that you could get a degree in cardiology? Yes, it would be.
Here’s the thing about studying something: it demystifies it. Makes it less overwhelming. The word study comes from the Latin studium which means “zeal, painstaking application.” When we look at something with zeal, with painstaking application, we make sense of it. We trace its edges. We make it palatable, understandable. What we don’t study, we don’t understand. We might know it, but we don’t understand it.
I didn’t learn about the models of grief when I started dating a terminally ill boy at 14. I didn’t learn about them in high school or college. I didn’t learn about them until graduate school, which happened to be while my parents were dying. And the only reason I learned about them was because for some strange reason I had decided to study grief. To be completely honest with you if I hadn’t been studying grief, I’m really not sure that I would have survived those losses. Knowing that grief was a real thing, a thing that people wrote about and talked about and studied, a thing that could be mapped out and conceptualized probably saved my life.
So. You probably didn’t learn about grief types or models. Maybe you heard someone talking about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on Oprah or saw a social media post about the stages of grief. But that’s not enough and that’s also why we’re here. To give you more.
Here are some of the most commonly referenced grief models. These are just different perspectives and approaches to grief. You might resonate with them, you might not. I suggest that you approach them cafeteria-style - glance through them all and take what looks good.
Grief models:
Freud: Mourning involves searching for a lost attachment. To heal, the ego needs to accept the reality of the loss and disengage the energy from the lost ‘object.’ Once this is done and the ego can attach to a new object, mourning is complete.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler: There are six distinct stages of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance, and most recently, Finding Meaning. Little known fact: these stages were initially developed out of Kübler-Ross’ work with terminally ill patients. The most common misconception is that one must more through these phases in order, or that if you haven’t felt one of the stages, you aren’t grieving ‘correctly.’
John Bowlby: Grief is triggered by the loss of any attachment figure. The nature of the grief depends on the nature of the attachment. There are four stages to grief: Shock & Numbness, Yearning & Searching, Disorganization & Despair, Reorganization. Bowlby is best known for his work on attachment and is one of the reasons that we have an understanding of attachment styles.
Therese Rando: Six R’s of Mourning -
1) Recognize the loss
2) React to the separation
3) Recollect & Re-experience
4) Relinquish old attachments
5) Readjust to the new world without forgetting the old world
6) Reinvest emotional energy
William Worden: 4 Tasks of Grief -
1) To accept the reality of the loss
2) To work through the pain of the grief
3) To adjust to the environment without the deceased
4) To emotionally relocate the deceased and move on with life.
Strobe & Schutt: People experience grief as an oscillation between loss-oriented and restoration-oriented responses.
Loss-oriented responses are:
grief work, intrusion of grief, breaking bonds, denial, etc.
Restoration-oriented responses are:
attending to life challenges, doing new things, distraction from grief, avoidance of grief, new roles/identities/relationships.
The balance between these two helps us find the balance between the reality of what has been lost and how to re-engage with life after loss.
Mancini & Bonanno: Their refreshing research was aimed to look at the toll grief takes on people. What they found was really encouraging: most people respond very well to loss (despite what we might think), and in fact loss is something that enables us to strengthen our resilience. This is more true for people who have support in their grief processes and can be tracked culturally as well.
Kessler: David Kessler worked with Kübler-Ross but also has contributed his own important work to the field. One of my favorite things is that he articulates the six needs of the grieving -
1) To have your pain witnessed
2) To express your feelings
3) To release the burden of guilt
4) To be free of old wounds
5) To integrate the pain and love
6) To find meaning in life after loss.
Because we are us, we laughed a lot in this episode and sang the “apples and bananas song.” You know the one.
We’d love to hear from you! What pieces of these grief models resonated the most with you? Did you have any realizations as you were listening?
Want to share your grief stories? We’d love to hear from you
Message us here or at keepgriefweird@gmail.com, and tag us on Instagram @keepgriefweird and use our hashtag- #keepgriefweird to share your weird griefy things!
Share this post