Grief

Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on mourning were based on loss being wider than just death. He suggested it was linked to any loss eg. “country, liberty or an ideal”. He realised that mourning something is not an illness but a process to work through.

As the grandfather of psychotherapy, this may allow us permission to mourn all our losses, like having your car stolen, losing your job, death of a pet, the end of a good book or boxset. They all had meaning in our life and have left a gap.

The grieving is something we all need to process during the course of our lives, on multiple occasions. Most people are familiar with the Five Stages of Grief from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1969), which are:

Denial (shock/numbness);
Anger (at the person/object or self);
Bargaining (the what ifs, if only, pain and despair, thoughts why them not me etc);
Depression (in terms of emptiness and what is the point); and
Acceptance (not necessarily being alright with the outcome but making peace and living with it).

You don’t need to go through these stages in this order, and you can spend different amounts of time in each one, but you might recognise these feelings in your own experiences of loss.

Society can be quite harsh of people grieving. They forget and go back to their reality and the immediate care and attention wanes. Some people will avoid the topic all together as they don’t know what to say and it is uncomfortable for them. Others get impatient and say unhelpful things like “it’s been 6 months now; you should be over it”. Each loss is unique and it will take as long as it takes.

Another part of suffering grief, is that not only are you grieving for the current situation, but it reminds you of all the other losses you have suffered. This might make the “weight” of this loss feel disproportionate to the outside world, but very real to you.

I prefer Dr Tonkin’s Model of Grief below. I think it helps to know that you will not be the same person after suffering a loss, how could you be, something precious is not with you anymore. So instead of striving to get back to the “old you”, whatever that might mean, why not try thinking about it as learning and growing from the experience. Never forgetting but somehow making peace with life and moving forward positively.

Dr. Lois Tonkin’s "Growing Around Grief" model (1996)

“Mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal and so on”

Freud, S,. 1984. 11. On metapsychology the theory of psychoanalysis. Pelican. pg 252

https://themindsjournal.com/kubler-ross-model-grief/