In the Self-Attunement Circle I shared some deep dive explorations of common feelings. Grief has been on my mind as the Summer turns to Autumn and I wanted to share this one more widely.
The image above is by the fabulous Diversity Doodles. Shared with permission.
This felt heavy to write. Look after yourself as you read it.
My own relationship with grief
I don’t believe that our culture gives enough weight to how energetically demanding and heavy a grief process can be. Or to the wide range of experiences that lead to grief.
We have all inevitably been through loss and experienced grief in many forms. I want to talk about two stories from my own life.
Baby loss
The first is related to baby loss – please skip ahead if needed to keep yourself safe.
In our first year of marriage my husband and I went through two early miscarriages and two unsuccessful rounds of IVF. It was an extremely hard time to go through.
Our first miscarriage happened on our honeymoon. It was early enough that we had only told a handful of family and friends that I was pregnant, which meant that when we got home and everyone was asking how our honeymoon went I really struggled to know how to answer. A light-hearted question that expects a happy or funny answer didn’t seem like the right moment to bring up something that felt so heavy.
I particularly found it difficult that the accepted time to announce a pregnancy is at 12 weeks, when the risk of miscarriage drops significantly. For some people I’m sure that is the right decision – not everyone wants to grieve publicly. But for me it felt like it both cut off from a support system, and meant I wasn’t aware of how common miscarriage is (around 1 in 5 known pregnancies end in miscarriage) so I wasn’t really prepared for that eventuality.
This societal rule to me highlights an unspoken “rule” in our society that grief is to be kept private and out of sight, except in very specific circumstances.
I wrote my first ever blog post that year – sharing our story of living with the uncertainty of infertility, and I was blown away by how many people got in touch to say they were going through something similar. So much unseen grief, and there was so much comfort to be found in connection through that grief when it was offered.
You can read the full story here >> https://unjumbled.me/the-story-of-our-baby-losses/
It wasn’t until a few years later – when my daughter was 2 or 3 – that I realised I hadn’t processed what happened to us as baby loss. Four times that year an embryo existed, but either didn’t implant at all, or stopped growing soon after. As we were going through it, they felt like events that had happened to us. But later, as I was getting more in touch with my feelings, I realised there was also a deep grief there for the loss of four potential members of our family.
My autism diagnosis
I absolutely went through a grieving process when I realised I was autistic.
- The loss of potential that I was ever going to “get over my anxiety and have loads of energy”
- The loss of the past I might have had, had I known this about myself soon
- The loss of the more positive self-image I might have had
- The loss of the energy I have to put into learning about myself now
- The loss of all the energy I’ve used over my lifetime keeping my feelings hidden
- The loss of the future I might have now, if neurodivergence wasn’t part of my life.
What is grief?
The Grief Recovery Institute define grief as “the normal and natural reaction to loss of any kind”.
It’s not a single feeling, but rather an experience that contains many conflicting emotions.
Brené Brown draws out three elements that mark an experience as grief:
Loss
Death, or the tangible loss of a person or thing, are easier to recognise. But loss shows up in many less obvious ways. The loss of an imagined future, of a belief you hold about the world, yourself or someone else.
The loss of a job or relationship, even in happy circumstances. Really any big change in life results in the loss of what went before. And that can absolutely be experienced as grief, even if the change appears to be a very positive one.
Longing
“An involuntary yearning for wholeness, for understanding, for meaning”.
I’m going to quote Brené Brown directly here: “Longing is a vital and important part of grief, yet many of us feel we need to keep our longings to ourselves for fear we will be misunderstood, perceived as engaging in magical or unrealistic thinking, or lacking in fortitude and resilience”.
Feeling lost
I’m quoting Brené Brown directly here too as its a powerful statement: “grief requires us to reorient every part of our physical, emotional, and social worlds”
There is grief in the loss of an imagined future, a belief you hold about the world, yourself or someone else
Discerning grief
How grief feels is intensely personal, and different for everyone. If you’ve experienced a loss of any kind and are finding that moving through the world is harder than usual, it could well be a sign that you are going through grief.
Famously, there is a model of five stages of grief (shock and numbness, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – plus meaning making was added as a sixth stage more recently). The model itself acknowledges that these stages can happen in any order – you might bounce between them multiple times – and that not everyone will move through every stage.
General consensus now is that this is too simplistic a model, and grief can feel like all of those stages and more. There’s no right way to feel or act after a loss. Two people going through the same loss are likely to experience it very differently.
The pain of grief can be compounded by not being recognised by the people around us. This can happen outside of our awareness – especially when we don’t realise ourselves that we’re grieving. Or additional pain can be layered on top when this lack of recognition is more obvious.
Disenfranchised grief describes this additional pain felt when a loss is not “openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly supported”.
What to do with grief
The actions that grief points to have a different quality from other feelings. In some ways it can feel like there’s nowhere for the grief to go – the loss can’t be reversed. What we’re longing for will remain out of reach.
There are still actions we can take despite that.
William Worden describes four tasks of mourning.
They are not in any particular order – they can happen concurrently and move at different paces. They can take years, or even longer, to work through. And we will never fully leave the grieving process behind. We are forever changed by each loss – this is what it means to be human.
To accept the reality of the loss
Beginning to acknowledge the loss, in the way you speak and act, through rituals like funerals, and “gradually recognising the emotional significance of the loss”.
To process the emotions associated with the loss
Allowing space for processing in any way that works for you – talking, journaling, crying, dancing, drawing, listening to music, creative processes…
To remember, and incorporate what was lost moving forward
I read somewhere that the grief felt for a lost loved one becomes your new relationship with that person. For losses that are more complex this step is more about integrating the loss into our own story and making meaning from that.
To adjust to the new world
Alongside the feelings work, there is the practical work of learning how to move through the world with the knowledge of the loss. Sometimes this will be very practical, and sometimes it will be an internal process involving shifts in identify, role and worldview.
The pain of grief can be compounded by not being recognised by the people around us
The power of ritual
Rituals can be big and communal – like funerals. Or small and private – like lighting a candle at home.
A ritual tells the brain that this is something outside of usual day to day life, and gives it a signal that this is a time to deeply connect to and process feeling.
Francis Weller defines ritual as “any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation.”
For bigger losses now in my own life, I find ways to create rituals around them – some that I do once as a way to deeply process emotion, some that I do regularly to integrate a loss into my everyday loss. Rituals are a great way of communicating to our subconscious that “this is important”.
Examples of grieving in practice
A grieving process could look like a billion different things. Like the feelings themselves, it will be an intensely individual process.
I’m sharing some of my grieving process here from the two losses I mentioned earlier, to give you some tangible examples.
How I grieved our baby losses
When I realised I hadn’t full grieved our baby losses, I did a few things. Music is often my go to for connecting to my feelings, so I made myself a playlist of songs that spoke to that particular loss. I spent a lot of time just listening to those songs, letting myself “dance” and cry as much as I felt like I needed to. I still listen to them sometimes now, as a way of connecting to that part of my story.
I journaled about each of the losses, to tell the story – short though they were – of each loss.
I asked my husband to join me in creating a ritual to honour them, and we did that in our flat one evening after our daughter had gone to sleep during a covid lockdown. We lit one candle for each loss, and I told the story of each of them. Then I read out a piece of writing that resonated with me, and my husband chose a hymn to sing. We’ve been together for 12 years now, and that evening is one of my most treasured memories of our relationship.
I talk about all our losses with my daughter now, so she knows they are part of our family story. I bought special baubles for our Christmas tree, and I love having that moment each year of putting the baubles up and taking a moment to remember them.
How I grieved my autism diagnosis
I used journalling a LOT to process when I realised I might be autistic. And then later on, when I was in a group space similar to this one, I took the opportunity to process a little more. I went through my journals from the time between realising I was autistic and getting my diagnosis, pulled out all the different questions I asked myself during that time, and made them into a kind of poem to share with the group.
You can read it here >> https://unjumbled.me/questions-i-asked-myself-on-realising-i-might-be-autistic/
I sought out other neurodivergent people and stories, in real life, podcasts, social media, books, TV and film – to keep on learning more and making sense of my life.
I found the assessment process exhausting, and gave myself lots of time to rest during that time – often binge-watching TV programmes with autistic characters.
I adjusted to this new information about myself, learning how to look after myself better (this is, and always will be a work in progress). I started to peel away some of the layers of masking and shame about who I was, using tools including journalling, music, guided meditations, conversations, tapping, dancing…
I’ve found meaning in the work that I do. Transmuting my own pain and loss into resources and support for other people going through their own similar journeys. I got immeasurable value through this process from other people who had shared their stories, and that inspired me to share my own. As well as sharing other ways I make sense of the world like the self-attunement cycle!
We will never fully leave the grieving process behind. We are forever changed by each loss – this is what it means to be human
Resources
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller is an absolutely gorgeous book with a focus on the power of ritual
The Grief Recovery Handbook, by John James and Russel Friedman
Unlocking Us podcast. David Kessler and Brené on Grief and Finding Meaning
If it feels safe to do so, consider this an invitation to reflect on your own losses. Consider where grief might be showing up in your own life, and any ways you might be able to make a little more space for it.