Grief & Loss: What is Normal?

Well, it is true that when you feel grief, it is far from ‘normal’ and for a while, most people who have grieved would say they didn’t know whether they would ever feel ‘normal’ again.

Grief is a feeling and we usually associate it with losing someone through death, but grief can be experienced through other types of loss such as a relationship or perhaps a way of living due to illness. Grief is also something we can experience for something we wanted or needed, but never had, like a secure and loving parental relationship for example or perhaps a miscarriage. As you can see grief covers a huge range of experiences.

‘Bereavement’ is the term used for the event that happens to us, the loss, we FEEL grief and then we mourn, mourning is what we DO, our reaction to the loss, if you like. How we mourn and what we feel during loss is very individual and there is no ‘normal’ way although there is a journey or pathway all bereaved people move along to acceptance but each of those journeys are unique. The stages we have to go through are the same for all of us but we may stay at certain stages of the process for a longer or a shorter time than someone else and this could be weeks, months or even years .

So, if there is no ‘normal’ way to grieve, how do we know if what we are experiencing is ok, the truth is whatever you feel is ok. Many people who are struggling after a loss ask the question, ‘when will I get over the loss and stop grieving and be able to move on with my life’? In fact, the feeling of loss and grief, is not something you ‘get over and move on’ like ticking a box, grief stays with you but you learn to build a life around it and with it, and yes it does get easier with time. People also ask, how long will it take, and again, no-one can answer that question, everyone works through grief in their own way and at their own pace.

I found the TONKINS MODEL really helps to explain how you live with grief and learn to live a fulfilled life again, let me explain.

I want you to picture a fried egg, yolk in the middle perfectly round and the white surrounding it, which has an irregular pattern. Now, when you look at the white you can see that in some places the distance of the edge from the yolk varies all the way around going in and out. The outside edge represents your life with all it’s twists and turns. So now imagine that the yolk is your grief, always there not getting smaller not going away but a constant forever. Now the white represents your life around the grief and when the distance from the edge is shorter this is when you feel closer to your feelings of grief, like on the anniversary of the loss or a birthday, Christmas perhaps when you miss them more. But you can also see areas of white which are wider and the edge is further from the yolk and this is you getting on with normal things in life and the feelings of grief and loss are further away. This pattern continues but with time the occasions that you are closer to the grief get easier and you are not so upset and you can remember without so much sadness. So, you see we never lose the grief but we build a life with it and we find a new normal way of living which is fulfilled in a different way.

There is something I want to share about losing someone through death, something I heard recently at a funeral, the phrase which really stuck with me was ‘without love, there is no grief’. This is so true, if we allow ourselves to experience love for someone, to lose them will always mean pain and grief. I thought about this and although the pain is so hard, my feeling, and it is only my feeling, is that most people would rather have experienced some sort of love or connection and risk the feelings of loss if it happens than to have not felt something for someone at all. Human beings do need human connections of some sort, of course, there are some people who do like their own company, I do understand that. However, it has been proven that our mental well being suffers without human interactions, so life is more fulfilled if we make good connections and take the risk!

Whatever loss you are feeling seeing a counsellor to talk about your feelings can really help you work through the grief process. A therapist can help you to identify where you might be stuck in the process and help you to move to the next stage with support and compassion and above all time.