4 Types of Grief No One Told You About
Does it ever feel like you're grieving even when nobody has died?
Posted April 17, 2019 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
The word grief has come to be understood solely as a reaction to a death. But that narrow understanding fails to encompass the range of human experiences that create and trigger grief. Here are four types of grief that we experience which have nothing to do with death:
1. Loss of identity: A lost role or affiliation.
Whenever a person loses a primary identity, they mourn a lost sense of self. They’re tasked with grieving who they thought they were and eventually creating a new story that integrates the loss into their personal narrative. In some instances, the identity feels stolen, as in the cases of the person who feels blindsided by a divorce and the breast cancer survivor. For those individuals, the grief may feel compounded by the lack of control they had in the decision. Others choose to shed an identity, as in the case of switching careers or leaving a religious community. Though this may sound easier, those individuals may feel their grief compounded by the ambivalence of choosing to leave something they will also mourn. They may feel less entitled to their grief and the lost sense of self because the decision was self-imposed.
2. Loss of safety: The lost sense of physical, emotional, and mental well-being.
On a basic level, we expect to feel safe in our homes, our communities, and our relationships. The lost sense of safety, be it physical (after a break-in) or emotional (after an affair), can make a person’s world feel distinctly unsafe. Symptoms of lost safety may include a sense of hypervigilance even in the absence of danger or numbness. For many, especially those suffering from post- traumatic stress disorder, numbness and hypervigilance occur intermittently. For survivors of trauma, violence, and instability, that feeling of internal safety may feel hard to restore, even if circumstances stabilize. In addition to healing from the trauma, the individual is tasked with grieving the lost sense of safety and learning to rebuild it.
3. Loss of autonomy: The lost ability to manage one’s own life and affairs.
This type of grief cuts to the core of every person’s need to manage their body and their life. Loss of autonomy triggers grief over the lost sense of control and the struggle to maintain a sense of self. In cases of illness and disability, lost autonomy (and often lost identity) marks every step they take. New forms of decline invite grief for their lost independence and ability to function. A person suffering from a profound financial setback may experience this same feeling of loss, manifested as feeling their options shrinking, along with a sense of failure or despair. They are tasked with grieving those losses and reconceptualizing who they are in the face of these limitations.
4. Loss of dreams or expectations: Dealing with hopes and dreams going unfulfilled.
This type of grief is characterized by a deep sense of disorientation. Most of us walk around with a vision of how our lives will play out and how we expect the world to operate. When life events violate our expectations, a person can experience a deep sense of grief and unfairness. An individual or couple struggling to conceive and the student who struggles to make their way in the world may experience a sense of failure that compounds the grief process. They may find themselves comparing their process and outcomes to others. Unexpected political shifts can lead to a lost sense of the assumptive reality and the sense of stability from believing they understand how the world operates.
Restoring the word "grief" to its proper place
Loss of identity, safety, autonomy, and expectations are all losses the warrant a sense of grief. Grief and mourning as a framework can help each of us work through a moment or chapter of chaos with the gentleness we give a mourner. The mourner receives compassion and is entitled to anger , sadness, numbness, disorientation, and nonlinear healing. The word grief both accurately characterizes the internal reality of the process and legitimizes and concretizes the process to ourselves and others.
While many experience the setbacks and tragedies of life with grief and mourning, many feel they are not entitled to the word.
So I give you permission.
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Sarah Epstein, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, seeing therapy clients in Maryland, DC, Texas, and Pennsylvania.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.