08/13/2025
The experience of grief is unique to every person, every loss, every regret, every unfulfilled longing. It is deeply personal and universal.
Dictionary definitions of grief fall short of encompassing the full spectrum of grief. In broader terms, grief is the normal response to loss. We can grieve for a person, a relationship, a version of ourselves, a phase of life (youth!), a job, or a house, the land we call home, our non-human companions, etc. We can also grieve for the suffering of others.
GRIEF is a facet of LOVE.
According to NARM, the purpose of grief is to connect us to our hearts. It shows us the way toward love and what we value most. It inspires us to honor the memory of what/who was lost. It challenges us to re-evaluate our beliefs. We may experience a sort of identity crisis as we learn to live on with the loss.
We only grieve what we have loved. Even if it feels more complicated than that.
The Grief Process
Much has been said about the process or phases of grief (eg. Kubler-Ross and others) that may or may not be helpful to someone who is actually grieving. Most folks agree that it’s never quite that linear and sequential. We can rapidly cycle through or jump around these phases in an attempt to escape and/or eventually hold the pain of loss.
Acute grief is unpredictable, it wants what it wants. It can feel desperate and wild, or like a suffocating weight, or totally numb. We can be fine for days or even months and then gutted, all of a sudden when we catch a whiff of a familiar scent. It can make us want to scream, or cry, or vomit, or stare into space or all of these. We may become irritable and have difficulty focusing. Often grief is accompanied by some anger, at the world, at a higher power, at the person who is gone, and significantly, ourselves…for things left unsaid or repair never made, ways we weren’t the best friend/son/daughter/partner, etc.
The DSM has a diagnosis for complicated grief, or acute grief from a loss that lingers longer than is “typical” and with intense feelings of yearning, significant distress or impairment, avoidance of reminders of the loss, meaninglessness or numbness. I’m inclined to believe that most grief is complicated.
Anger is one of the things that can complicate grief. It’s not so much that the anger itself complicates the grief, but rather our relationship to the anger. Here’s one example, we might shame ourselves for feeling angry with the person we’ve lost. We might tell ourselves that we are dishonoring or disloyal to them. This complication is an inner conflict between honoring the lost or honoring the truth of our own experience. This is especially common when we lose a parent.
Other examples of things that can complicate grief are a sudden/traumatic loss, guilt, being left with overwhelming life circumstances as a result of the loss (caregiving, financial, legal, etc.), and pre-existing emotional/nervous system dysregulation.
Read the full article below.
What is GRIEF?
