The Grief Framework
Have We Been Missing The Point Of Grief?
When someone dies, we're often given a familiar map.
The Five Stages of Grief.
Denial.
Anger.
Bargaining.
Depression.
Acceptance.
It's recognizable because most of us have heard it at some point.
There is something useful about having a map when you're in unfamiliar territory or even familiar but unbalanced territory.
But what if there's a limitation to this particular map?
It describes what can happen to you when you experience loss.
It doesn't necessarily teach you what to do with that experience or what that experience will do with you.
The First Wave: Shock Replaces Denial
In the framework I was trained in, the first experience after significant loss isn't understood primarily as denial.
It's understood as shock.
At this stage, the mind isn't even capable of denial. When presented with life altering information it's more of a freeze than a decision to not accept the information.
Your mind isn't refusing to believe what happened.
It's simply not in a state where it can function at that level.
The mind and the entire human system has been overwhelmed.
You can't think.
You can't organize.
You can't make ordinary decisions.
You may not even recognize yourself or the world around you.
And rather than treating this as something that needs to be corrected so you can get back to functioning, the framework recognizes non-function as an appropriate response to shock.
There's nothing wrong with you.
Something enormous has happened.
Your system knows it.
So instead of asking how to get out of the denial stage, we recognize that shock gives us a period of grace.
It requires of us:
A period of nothingness.
Time to stop.
To be still.
Time to allow the first wave to reach the shore.
It's important to note that even when loss is expected, there can be a period of shock.
The Second Wave: Absorb
Eventually, the shock begins to recede. The first wave goes back out to the ocean, leaving you ashore.
The news is isn't new anymore. The cushion that shock provides is no longer necessary.
This isn't acceptance. This is integration. It's where reality meets the nervous system and it can be unbearably painful.
And if you're normal, you want to feel anything but the bone scraping, hollowed out emptiness of loss.
This is where our instinct to escape can become very strong.
We want to feel better.
We want to be distracted.
We want to return to work.
We want to be surrounded by people.
We want to sleep.
We want the pain to stop.
This is where Grief Training asks you for something you don't feel like you can give....
Turn toward it.
You don't turn into the winds of pain for reasons of nobility or to extract sympathy. That's victimhood behavior and that's not what we're after.
What we're after is non-resistance - the very thing your body is designed to protect you from...is the fire you want to walk into.
Voluntarily.
Bravely.
And maybe only for minutes at a time, but walk you will.
Why?
Because resisting the experience of grief requires energy.
And grief already has enough of you.
The training is to become increasingly non-resistant to the experiences that pain and grief are bringing to you.
Allow yourself to know the loss.
Allow your body to absorb the pain.
If you want to know what courage feels like...this is one way to find out.
There is a profound difference between suffering and resisting suffering.
The first is a natural part of the grief experience.
The second can become a lifelong pattern.
The work isn't to make grief smaller.
It's to stop making it larger and longer lasting through resistance.
Six Months Is Not a Deadline
In the framework we spend six months making this practice a priority. It comes before making yourself, "get back to normal." It comes before trying to make sense of everything or anything.
For six months the mandate is this before anything else:
Turn toward the pain.
Walk into it.
Drop all resistance, or as much as you can stand in the moment, (hint: it's almost always more than you thought you could stand).
Absorb it. It comes with information you'll need later on.
Does this mean you won't feel the anger, bargaining, or depression stages in the western model of grief?
Probably not.
But once you allow yourself to move through this grief framework, you might discover those stages to be very short lived and eventually irrelevant.
This is very different from the Western idea of moving through a dark tunnel until, eventually, you emerge back into something resembling your old life.
Because here's the problem with that idea:
While mechanically, or practically your life might look the same or similar on the outside, you won't be the same person living it.
And that is one of the hallmarks of the grief experience.
The Third Wave: Reconstruction
You would think that loss and the ensuing pain might be the most challenging parts of the grief process. And that once the pain ends or subsides, so too does the suffering.
But there's a part where many people struggle even longer and in less visible ways.
When someone dies, the arithmetic of your life changes.
A mother who has lost a child doesn't become the mother of the same number of living children she had before.
A woman whose husband has died doesn't become the wife she was before.
Someone who loses their last living parent occupies a different place in the generations of their family.
The structure has changed.
And so have you. This is where many people find themselves in a sort of limbo - when they try to fit an emerging identity into an old structure.
There's friction. Something doesn't fit. They don't feel like they fit.
This is where I think the Western model can leave a significant gap.
Acceptance can sound like:
"I accept that this happened."
And that's important.
But do they accept who they now must become?
That's an entirely different question at a level that extends far beyond a period of grief. It lasts a lifetime.
Because grief isn't simply an emotional experience you eventually recover from.
It is an identity transformation.
You are being asked to learn how to inhabit a life that did not exist before.
A different mother.
A different wife.
A different daughter.
A different family member.
Perhaps even a different human being altogether.
The Training
The framework isn't asking:
How quickly can I get over this?
It is asking:
What does this experience require of me?
It changes the orientation of grief completely.
Instead of trying to return to the person you were before the loss, of trying to fit your newly oriented self back into the life you had "before," ....you begin learning what is required of you to make a fulfilling and robust life despite the absence of a large piece of the old version of your life.
That is not "moving on."
Or forgetting, or leaving someone behind, or even letting go.
It is reconstructing yourself around a new reality and possibly even new requirements.
And there is something profoundly empowering about that.
Because suddenly, grief isn't something that is simply happening to you.
It becomes something that asks something of you.
It may require a different level of responsibility. It might require that you begin looking at yourself differently.
This is where grief training becomes a particularly potent form of permission. You don't have to be the same person on the far end of grief as you were before it.
That alone can be enormously liberating. And it can remove much of the confusion about what someone can feel like as they try to fit the newly exposed version of themselves into a life that no longer feels like them.
Humans are designed to take on all the experiences that life brings us. Those experiences will necessarily change us. They're supposed to. It's not always fun. But there is, as far as I can tell, always meaning buried within.
Grief is one of those not-so-fun experiences and if we live long enough, we can't escape it. But when we follow a framework that provides meaning to the experience, the suffering isn't avoided, but it can become shorter lived and provide fruits on the other side.
Until next week,
Patricia
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