Grief is not an emotion, it’s an experience.
(This is a passage from the book I’m writing. It’s from the chapter on why the heck everyone is still stuck in grief).
I don’t like the way people traditionally talk about grief. The meaning is all wrong.
Firstly it is spoken about as if it was an emotion. It isn’t. It’s an experience. And an experience that can embody any and every emotion. There is nothing at all that can’t be experienced within grief. There are no stages and no small set of expected emotions. You may well have gone through mostly emotions you expected, but I’m sure you’ve also had feelings and experiences you didn’t expect, that have surprised you. And what I can assure you is that you are not the only one. You are very far from the only one. You are not the exception.
The usual narrative about 5 stages and only certain emotions being expected (like sadness and anger) has led to a situation where many people feel ashamed, feeling like they are grieiving wrong and that they themselves are actually wrong….and hide their experience from others.
Part of this is the common social beliefs that I have talked about…like that if we love we grieve (i.e. feel sad), and that grief (i.e. sadness) is the price we pay for love. Therefore only sadness is appropriate (and lots of it).
So what you may not realise….or perhaps you have….is that for MANY this is not how it goes.
There are people who simply don’t feel very acute pain or sadness. Many who don’t feel as bad as they thought they would. Now sometimes, if it’s early on, this could be an early numbness….but not always. Sometime it’s simply that they’re processing the experience differently.
THAT’S what grief is. Not an expression or measure of love or anything like that. It’s simply YOUR emotional experience after the death and your processing of it. And that’s not to downplay how it feels. It can be an incredibly powerful and overwhelming emotional experience. But that is what it is nonetheless. And this experience can be different for everyone. It also isn’t dependent on who died, how they died, when they died. I have spoken to so many people who experienced far less than what they expected. And others who experienced far more than what they expected.
This is why I often hear from people who are feeling worried and ashamed that they aren’t grieving “enough”. They aren’t feeling as much as they expected and instead of understanding that this is simply how they are processing it and is perfectly normal, because of the social rhetoric on grief, they fear that there are uncaring or unloving, or that there is something wrong with them. I often hear from people in this situation – worried, ashamed, concerned what others will think…..and wanting me to reassure them that there isn’t something terribly wrong with them. This type of experience is quite common. You may not have heard of it from many people simply because these people tend not to share this with others, fear judgement and that their love for the person will be called into question.
There is another type of experience I hear a lot about too. And this is people who have a joyful, peaceful, or very spiritual experience. Though these aren’t the most common experiences…but they also aren’t rare. These people may have a very uplifting or enlightening spiritual encounter or experience. Or it may simply be that they are left feeling light after the death, with a lot of clarity.
Now these experiences you may never have heard of. Not because no one you know has experienced this…but because they are unlikely to share. In a society where grief is considered our measure of love or even what our love has turned into, imagine admitting to others that you had little or no pain and that indeed you feel peaceful or joyful after a death! That is too challenging for most.
It is such a pity, because the experiences I have described above aren’t at all abnormal and would benefit our society so much to hear the full range of experiences and understand that it doesn’t mean a thing about love and that every experience is normal.
Kristie
xx
