Grief Is Not Only About Death
One of the most common things I hear on a first call is an apology. <em>“I know this isn't as bad as losing someone,”</em> people say. <em>“I feel silly even calling.”</em>
Please hear me: you do not have to earn your grief. There is no minimum threshold of suffering to qualify.
A working definition
Grief is the normal and natural reaction to any change in a familiar pattern of behavior. Read that again, because it is doing a lot of work. It does not say death. It does not say tragedy. It says change in a familiar pattern.
Which means the Grief Recovery Method addresses more than forty different kinds of loss. Here are some of the ones I see most often:
- The death of a person or a beloved pet
- Divorce, separation, or the end of a long friendship
- Miscarriage, infertility, and the loss of a child at any age
- A diagnosis, a surgery, or a permanent change in your health
- Financial hardship, bankruptcy, the loss of a home
- Losing a job — or being forced to leave one you loved
- Emotional, spiritual or physical abuse
- Estrangement, or the ongoing ache of a prodigal child
- Moving away from a place, a church, or a community
- The loss of concepts: security, trust, respect, identity, hope
That last one deserves its own paragraph. Some of the heaviest grief I have ever carried was not for a person at all. It was for trust — for a version of the world I believed in before I found out otherwise. There is no funeral for that. No one brings a casserole. And so it goes unnamed, and unnamed grief does not go anywhere.
Loss that is never named is loss that is never finished.
Why we minimize our own losses
Most of us learned to rank our pain. Someone always has it worse, so we tell ourselves to be grateful and move along. It feels like humility. It functions like a lid on a pot.
Comparing your loss to someone else's does not lighten it. It just teaches you to stop talking about it — and that is exactly how grief gets stuck. The griever who says “I'm fine” for eleven years is not fine. They are fluent.
The good news
Because the method works on the relationship rather than on the category of loss, it does not matter whether you are grieving a husband or a house fire. The process is the same. I have walked widows and laid-off engineers through the identical seven steps, and both arrived at the same place: able to look at what happened without being flattened by it.
So if you have been sitting on something you decided was “not bad enough” to bring to anyone — bring it. Fifteen minutes, no cost. Let's find out together what you have been carrying.
Iola Burnsed is a faith-based Certified Grief Recovery Method Specialist in Palm Coast, Florida, serving clients in person and by Zoom. Read her story or book a free 15-minute Discovery Call.