Transforming Grief

Posted: December 24, 2024

Changes including difficulty maintaining mental focus, compromised emotional regulation, lethargy, unexpected waves of intense sadness or conflictual relationships may sometimes be related to unspoken grief.

Research shows that unaddressed losses that may go back to early life experiences or those that have remained unacknowledged, unvalidated or stigmatized by social norms, can have long lasting impacts on physical and psychological health.

While research and clinical observations reveal specific factors that hinder the adaptive processing of loss leading to what the literature refers to as complicated grief, there are nuances that uniquely belong to each person.

Complicated grief seems to be always present, sometimes faint and some other times, hitting you like a tsunami, without warnings and no matter how much time have passed.

Many caregivers, parents and adults impacted by early parental death may seek therapy to work on what they perceive as depression, anxiety or maladaptive relational patterns without necessarily being aware of the link between grief and current challenges.

Studies have shown that suppressing grief-related symptoms can have profound effects on physical health, particularly increasing the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Prolonged grief has been linked to higher levels of inflammation and dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which can contribute to hypertension and heart disease (Lutz et al., 2021).

Many individuals experiencing grief report difficulties with memory and decreased intellectual capacities, often feeling mentally "foggy" or struggling to concentrate (O'Connor et al., 2008). These experiences can be part of the grieving process and are not meant to last if adaptive processing is taking place.

It can feel like an exhausting cycle to work hard to push the pain away, then feel "ambushed" and defeated by intense disturbance that seems to come out of the blue.

As long as the blocks to processing aren't discovered and addressed, experiences of intense yearning, deep sorrow, rage, fatigue, compromised memory and cognitive functions may keep causing pain and loss of hope. Assumptions from self and/or others that you "should be over it by now" can keep adding insult to injury.

Locating Hope in the Landscape of Grief

There are therapeutic tools to uncover why time, avoidance or distractions were not enough to “take care of it”.

Step by step, losses including the loss of loved humans, loved pets, place of origin (displacement), roles, physical abilities, vitality, limb(s), occupations, relationships and communities can be held in life affirming ways.

In the therapy room, it's been awe inspiring to witness how grief becomes an experience that reveals the immensity of connection, meaning and what truly matters. Reintegrating grief instead of surviving or suppressing the pain, can involve reprocessing the trauma associated with the loss so that the grief can "be free" to find a clear path towards healing and constructing life affirming meanings.

Different therapeutic modalities can be helpful when working with grief , including and not limited to mindfulness based interventions, EMDR, somatic therapy and internal family systems. It's crucial to address grief within a culturally responsive framework.

Not all losses require professional support. Many resources including, spiritual and social support can be enough in many cases until healing takes its natural course. If none of what you consider as helpful resources or skills helped, or if trying to rely on what was historically helpful actually makes things feel worse, then consulting with a professional can be the next step.

When the nature of the loss combined with the history and current stressors make it harder to connect with the innate capacity to find a healing pathway, there are regenerative therapeutic tools to support graceful growth.

References

Lutz, J., et al. (2021). Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7849176/

O'Connor, M. F., et al. (2008). Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2575022/