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Facing Unresolved Grief
Why Recovering Pain is Good for You
Janice did not shed a single tear when her father died. In fact, she was the rock of strength everyone clung to: she made sure everyone was taken cared of, she arranged the funeral service and even attended to all the paperwork like signing the death certificate and making insurance claims.
Five years later, Janice found herself in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Her husband was involved in a minor vehicular accident and it triggered an intense reaction from her -- a rather exaggerated reaction compared to what the situation warrants (no one was even scratched in the said accident). Suddenly Janice was experiencing uncontrollable crying spells, loss of interest in work and sleep disorders. No friend or family can console Janice out of the melancholy she found herself into.
What Janice is experiencing five years after her father's death is unresolved grief surfacing. Her reaction to the accident is extreme because it's not the only thing she is reacting to. She is reacting to a loss that she did not allow herself to face before.
How is this possible?
Losing a loved one is inevitably painful. In fact, the death of someone special is arguably the worst thing one can experience in this life. With physical death come other losses -- the loss of dreams, possibilities and opportunities. The people we grieve were parts of our life and it is difficult to face the reality that we will never spend time or touch them again. More so, if our relationship with them was particularly complicated, we are not just left with the pain of loss but also the pain of guilt, unspoken anger or unfulfilled need.
Therefore, it is understandable that some of us defend ourselves from the hurt that comes with bereavement. We try to distract ourselves, make light of the situation or like Janice, we become official busybodies to numb ourselves from the onslaught of emotion.
This is a defense mechanism called repression -- we try to bury feelings that we cannot handle. But the thing with repressed emotion is that it doesn't stay repressed for long. Feelings do not go away unless we acknowledge, accept and own them; they just simmer beneath the surface. In fact, shutting out pain makes us shut ourselves out of so many things in this life. We may not be aware that we are overly protecting ourselves as we relate with others. All it would take is a trigger -- in Janice's case the fear of losing another loved one -- for grief to surface.
The only way to deal with grief is to let it run its course. Remember that grieving is normal -- we feel pain because we have lost something dear to us. In fact, going through grief means that we recognize that someone is a part of us and that things will never be quite the same. There is no shame in needing to go through grieving. It is a way to heal, a way to move on.
Stages of Loss
The late Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote about the stages of loss people go through in her 1969 book Death and Dying. According to her, those who experience grief go through five predictable stages. They are:
1. Denial: In the first stage of loss, we tell ourselves that the loss is not happening, couldn't be true or is not as painful. Sometimes we deny by making a joke about things or by distracting ourselves.
2. Anger: As we gradually come to accept the reality of a loss, we might become angry. We may ask "Why me?" or "Why him (or her)?" We rebel at the unfairness and randomness of it all. Some of us dealing with grief get angry with ourselves, at the person who died, at those around us and even at God.
3. Bargaining: We may also try to negotiate our way out of the pain. "I will do anything to bring him back" or "If you take this pain away, I will start to do this and that..." Bargaining is a way of trying to regain personal control over something that cannot be controlled. At times it is productive, particularly when the bargaining results in proactive change. There are times though when we are negotiating an impossibility. The latter can get us stuck in the grieving stage for long.
4. Sadness/Depression: And lastly before acceptance, we go through sadness and even depression. Sadness connotes release of all denying defenses and finally accepting the loss -- and feeling the appropriate emotion that comes with it. It is said that only when we let sadness run its course can we move towards finally accepting that which is gone.
5. Acceptance: Lastly is acceptance. For some, acceptance takes the form of resignation -- a surrender that we cannot really do anything about loss and we just learn to live without our deceased loved one. The better kind of acceptance though is integration -- letting go, saying goodbye and finding meaning with the fact that they have become a part of our lives. If one lives life in faith, then acceptance also means trust in the Lord's plan for the departed and those they left behind.
Kubler-Ross clarified that the stages are not always chronological: we can go to anger and then back to denial again. Not everyone go through all these five stages too -- some can go immediately to sadness and acceptance without passing through the first three -- but most experience at least two of the stages. The duration of the whole process and the length of "stuckness" in one stage depend on the individual and his or her readiness.