Navigating Grief Workbook: Evidence-Based Exercises to Move through Grief and Heal

PART I

AN INTRODUCTION TO GRIEF AND GRIEVING

Despite the perception that grief should be a brief period of sadness after a loss, it rarely ever is. It isn’t as simple as crying at a funeral or after the end of a relationship and then moving on unaffected. It is also more than just the emotional response to losing the people and things we cherish. Grief is a multidimensional process. Beyond feelings, our reactions to loss include physical, psychological, behavioral, philosophical, spiritual, social, and cultural manifestations. Grief affects each domain to different degrees and intensities across our lifespan and for each loss we suffer.

There isn’t a specific symptom or a healing timeline, because how we experience grief and subsequently mourn is wholly unique. Given this multidimensional, unpredictable impact, grief can feel destabilizing and overwhelming. But take heart, the two chapters in part 1 will introduce you to grief and the grieving process. I hope the information empowers you with knowledge and validation when you need something solid and hopeful to hold onto. You’ll learn that grief touches us just as it needs to, showing us who and what is important and how to live with that focus.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Grief

Western culture tends to be grief averse. Rarely are people comfortable hearing about your grief or seeing you mourn. For most, it often feels safer to avoid reminders that heartbreak happens and will affect us all. Plus, others’ grief makes us feel helpless: What do we say or do, or not say and do, to and for the griever? Grief is often avoided in family interactions, the workplace, and social circles. Unless, of course, someone is taking too long or is stuck. Yet, we often see grief in the media; movie scenes or news footage of tragedy are often raw and shocking. Taken together, the message society shares is that grief is ruinous and yet should be overcome within days or weeks.

In this chapter, I provide a holistic depiction of grief and mourning so you can have an accurate understanding, informed by evidenced-based wisdom, of the ruin and the restoration. I will address common misconceptions and misgivings, so you can release unnecessary fear and tension about how grief may affect you. You can then move into, through, and out of acute grief with less resistance, stress, and fear. This will add some ease and confidence to your grief journey. You may even find that your grief becomes the most comforting part of your post-loss life. Let’s go find out.

Jenn’s Story

Jenn and her husband, Jason, had a fairytale beginning. They shared a natural connection that quickly led to falling in love and marriage. Together, they handled the tasks of working, maintaining their home, and raising their three children. However, with time, their relationship hollowed as their focus moved to the needs of work and life. Eventually, they concluded that it would be best for everyone if they amicably ended the marriage.

At first, Jenn’s heartache felt ambiguous, like she shouldn’t grieve—after all, Jason was still physically present and an active co-parent. Yet, she realized she needed to mourn the loss of her marriage. She felt overwhelmed by the multitude of secondary losses that came with the divorce, such as no longer having Jason’s presence in and help around the house, the easy sense of safety, the companionship of her best friend and lover, and financial security. Her greatest sense of loss, however, involved their children, due to split custody. Jenn mourned not having the children at home every day and on some holidays. She also grieved not providing her kids with the kind of stable home she and Jason had originally planned.

To help cope with her grief, stress, and anxiety, navigate the changes in her caregiving roles, and maintain the emotional capacity to help her children adjust, Jenn met with a therapist and enrolled her children in divorce support groups. Her sense of annihilation began to ease as she worked through the losses, found the courage to step into the future she didn’t expect or hope for, and identified purpose and meaning in her new life.

Defining the Indefinable

Grief is more than suffering the loss of someone or something meaningful to you. The pain of grief can disrupt many areas of life: personal identity, roles and responsibilities, physical health, work interests or productivity, social interactions, philosophical perspectives, faith, and more. The more significant your loss, the greater your grief will be. It’s an ever-changing kaleidoscope of feelings, physical sensations, and perceptions that can flare up when you experience certain interpersonal interactions, situations, dates, places, memories, and expectations. It’s a state of being that permeates every area of life: your sense of self, safety, connection, capacity, trust, purpose, meaning, and more. As such, grief isn’t something that can be defined in terms that always apply. It changes in expression, intensity, course, and duration. It is different for each person and each loss.

Because your grief is unique to you and what you’re mourning, there isn’t a right or wrong way to move through it. There is no such thing as normal grief. You are the expert on what your path to healing looks like and when you may need additional support. Those needs may change as you move along or bounce around the spectrum of responses to grief. That spectrum includes how quickly or slowly you feel ready to sit with and process your reactions, as well as how mild or intense your grief feels. Whatever your experience, you can trust that your timeline, thoughts, feelings, and needs are common, expected, and just right for your grief journey.

The Things We Mourn

Because grief is the reaction to any heartfelt loss, it becomes a part of our lives in countless ways. We grieve lost relationships through death, divorce, breakups, and changes in circumstances (like a colleague quitting or a classmate transferring). We mourn the changes in health status and death of our beloved pets and companion animals (even if not everyone is as understanding or sympathetic about our nonhuman loss). We grieve during life transitions—both those hoped for (like retiring, becoming an empty nester, or moving) and dreaded (such as declining health, financial instability, or job loss). We mourn the loss of what is personally and socially normal, such as the end of a favorite television series, changes in work or school, social distancing requirements, feeling safe in public spaces, and even the closure of our favorite restaurants. And we grieve changes in our abilities, identities, roles, and plans. The things we grieve can be as small as the store not having our favorite ice cream in stock and as big as multiple losses in a short amount of time—and all of them are worthy of our attention and compassion.

Seemingly insignificant losses may not truly be inconsequential. A fresh loss can reconnect us with a more extensive or longstanding one, dredging up and refreshing pain from the past. When the ice cream is out of stock, its absence may feel like you don’t have access to a helpful source of comfort, which could reconnect you with missing a deceased parent and wishing they were alive to comfort you today. That’s why it is imperative to honor and explore all hurts, no matter how small.

What Purpose Does Grief Serve?

Grief, although unpleasant, has evolutionarily adaptive underpinnings. It promotes physiological, cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral reactions that help us adapt and survive post-loss.

The sadness we feel in grief motivates us to reestablish the lost relationship in a different way. With the loss, our sense of self and safety are threatened. We feel alone and vulnerable to threats. Thus, we seek out who or what we’ve lost in memories, during day-to-day experiences, and through reviewing (sometimes even ruminating about) expected plans, and we engage in grief-driven behaviors to draw support or safety in those vulnerable times. Crying, for example, can elicit compassion from and company with others. Funerals—literal gatherings of a supportive community around loss—strengthen social ties and protection. Even withdrawing from socializing facilitates the time and space necessary for mourning. These grief-driven behaviors are, at their core, survival tactics, as they protect us while we recover from our loss.

Grief is also a form of learning that improves our ability to adapt post-loss. We must learn ways to function and exist without the expected or desired people and things in our lives. Grief also serves to organize our ways of understanding; it establishes sections, or bookends of experiences, of life before and life after loss. It contextualizes our lives, needs, and goals. Thus, grief’s purpose is to elicit mourning so that our brains can