Loss is an inevitable part of life that every person on the planet will experience. It can take many forms, whether it’s losing a family member, a partner, a friend or maybe even your youth. Grief is an extremely powerful and difficult process to navigate that can truly reshape life as you know it.
According to the mental health charity MIND, bereavement is the experience of losing someone important to us, whilst grief is the process and range of emotions we go through when we experience a loss. In other words, bereavement means living with the loss, and grief is the pain that you feel.
It’s important to recognise that everybody deals with grief differently; it is a unique process, so much so that two people who have experienced the same loss will not experience the loss the same. Grief is a very human experience.
This article aims to outline why grief rocks our world as well as how people find a new meaning to a new life without their loved one.
How Loss Dismantles Our World:
A psychologist named Ronnie Janoff-Bulman coined a theory called the shattered assumptions theory. Janoff-Bulman theorises that as we go through life, we learn about the world and create rules. These rules might look like:
- The world is mostly safe
- The world makes sense and is somewhat predictable
- Life is mostly fair
- We are able to cope with life’s troubles fairly well
When we experience something hugely traumatic, such as loss, these assumptions can be “shattered”, leaving us feeling like our sense of the world has been dismantled.
Picture this: a man loses their friend after a tragic, unexpected health event. Previously, he may have perceived the world to be predictable. Maybe there’s a sense of “why him?”, highlighting the sense of unfairness that he feels, which is a complete contrast to his assumption that life is mostly fair.
This is partly why grief is so painful. It shakes our entire perspective on the world. By slowly reconstructing our perceptions on the world, we can begin to make new meaning to our lives. People may develop new life missions that are relevant to their loved ones’ passions or fight for causes relevant to their passing. These are examples of how we construct this new meaning,and our lives might not look the same as before.
How Do We Survive Grief?
Anyone who has ever been bereaved might ask themselves, “how am I going to get through life without my loved one?”. The dual process model explains how we survive such a difficult and traumatic time. Developed by Stroebe and Schut, the model outlines that the grieving process is not linear and swings between two “modes”
Loss mode – here we are fixated on the loss itself, this might look like going through old photos, thinking of memories with the person, talking about them, feeling sad about the loss etc.
Restoration mode – here we focus on adapting to changes in life. This can look like taking over the duties that the person who passed used to handle, re-engaging with hobbies, and trying to return to work and other key parts of our daily lives.
Both modes are as vital as one another, and switching between the two is key; spending time in restoration mode can feel like an avoidance of the grief, whilst the opposite can feel like you are drowning in the grief.
Flicking between both modes allows you a good balance of moving through life whilst also attending to your emotional needs. This process can feel chaotic and messy, but it is a normal part of adjusting to a new world. Just like Tonkin (1996) stated, we do not grow out of grief, we grow around it.
For example, a man who lost his partner may spend his time looking through their partner’s old possessions, noticing the smell of their fragrances on their clothing and being upset as all the memories replay in their head. He may be learning new skills that he didn’t have to learn before because his partner dealt with those household tasks, such as cooking for the kids or managing the household finances, whilst spending time engaging with hobbies such as watching sports on the television.
Grief Is Not Weakness
To conclude, grief is not a sign of weakness and not something to “fix”. It is a normal response to what can feel like an abnormal event in the context of everything we believe about the world being shattered. No one grieves the same, and there is no time frame for grief.
Allowing yourself space to experience both the sadness of the loss, and the restorative processes of grief, allows you to make a new sense of meaning in the world. This meaning isn’t the same as before, but is still meaningful and fulfilling.
