Grieving

Grief is an emotion of intense sadness resulting from loss. It is a response to pain, injury, tragedy or deprivation in the person’s world, not a sadness from largely internal causes such as depression. Grief, the noun form, designates the emotion; grieving, the verb, form, the process. We shall use the verb, since grieving is a progressive emotional process that in its normal form is time-limited, purposive, goal-directed and restoratively healing. We shall explore its stages, tasks and meaning.

The Stages of Grief

John Bowlby, an English psychiatrist who studied children separated from their mothers during wartime, observed three primary stages of loss—protest, disorganization, reorganization. These have been paraphrased and elaborated by many others, for example, “shock, suffering, recovery” or “shock, numbness, struggle between fantasy and reality, breakthrough or mourning, selective recollection connected with stabbing pain, and finally, acceptance of loss and the reaffirmation of life itself” (Oates, pp. 36-50). We shall use the three stages of shock, regression and adaptation.

Shock. The immediate impact of a major loss—death, divorce, accident or illness—is a state of numbness, distancing, disbelief, emotional outcry, then curiosity. One wants to know what has actually happened. With a death, the three questions are “What was the cause?” “How deep was the suffering?” and “Could it have been avoided?” During shock, the concern of friends, the rituals of community and the public memorials for the person lost assist the bereaved in maintaining balance. The grieving feel a loss of reality, a degree of depersonalization and often an increase in exhaustion, irritability, suspicion or anxiety.

Regression. With the loss of someone and the severing of relationship with the person lost or dead, the grieving person is thrown back upon the self, on its defenses and coping skills. Regression is a return to the basic core of the self to find resources for healing within. It is an adaptive regression in service of the ego (the acronym is ARISE), which occurs on three levels: (1) return to childhood feelings of abandonment, helplessness and crying; (2) return to a childhood frame of reference of marked withdrawal, self-centeredness and self-absorption; (3) return to a childhood fear with magical thinking, superstition, primitive fears of punishment and matching fantasies of omnipotence (“I could have averted the tragedy if I had only . . .”). Anger, guilt, blame, scapegoating, paranoid fears, doubts, loss of faith, primitive religiosity, either/or judgments, obsessive preoccupations, deification or demonization of the one lost, anxiety and self-devaluation all flood the grieving person in cycles, which gradually spiral forward. The backward movement is necessary for the task of forging ahead through the loss. Regression is crouching in order to leap forward in gradual adaptation.

Adaptation. Step by step, the grieving person gives up the regressive forms and substitutes adaptive behaviors. As the loss is owned, the person lets go—of the other, the loss, the pain—and steps into the future. The broken internal world is healed; the broken person begins to feel whole, like a person again. Coping with grief does not take a continuous course. Rather, there are days of coping followed by days of unreality.

The Tasks of Grieving

The work that must be done in grieving is progressive, yet cyclical. One must (1) rehearse the sadness to set the frozen grief in motion; (2) express the unacceptable feelings in order to own the injury and open it to the light; (3) sort out the life agenda by working through the emotional chaos, the ambivalent feelings and the conflicting thoughts and attitudes; (4) come to terms with reality—the reality of the loss, the reality of the new situation and its possibilities; and (5) choose life by facing the future, reframing the loss, internalizing the learnings and recovering hope. In fulfilling these tasks, one accepts the reality of the loss, experiences the pain, adjusts to a radically changed environment and reinvests one’s life energy.

The Meaning of Grieving

According to Dorothy Soelle, “We must view with suspicion all theology that is prepain” (from a public address, New York, 1986). The experience of grieving challenges the comfortable theologies of safety and security in the protecting hands of a Divine Parent who protects us from all grief and loss. Several key learnings will gradually surface. First, suffering is not only the result of evil and sin; it is also part of creation. Life is composed of both joy and pain, gift and grief, gain and loss, birth and death. There is gladness and sadness throughout all creation. Second, God is our help, not our escape. God walks with us through pain rather than waltzes us out of it. The God of our Lord Jesus Christ is the God whom Christ revealed to us. This is a God who is nailed to a cross in radical identification with both creatures and creation and is vulnerable to suffering in an apparent weakness that confronts violence with righteousness, suffering with sacrificial love. Third, our grief, our suffering, our pain, matters to God, matters to those who are Christ’s presence (his body), matters before our own inner judge, who seeks integrity within. Our pain is significant, is meaningful, is a part of the redemptive acceptance of life and its struggles, is a means of experiencing grace in our everyday existence.

» See also: Death

» See also: Emotions

References and Resources

K. Mitchell and H. Anderson, All Our Losses, All Our Griefs (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982); R. Neale, The Art of Dying (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); W. E. Oates, Pastoral Care and Counseling in Grief and Separation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976); G. Westberg, Good Grief (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1962).

—David Augsburger