Flavors of Grief
We have tried to invent several different terms to describe the normal — though not necessarily healthy — grief reactions people have in response to certain events. Here are some of them.
- Bereavement: Bereavement is the state of loss, while grief is the response to loss.
- Mourning: A societally-dictated grief response that includes manners, rituals, and customary attitudes, as well as a “time limit” on grief’s appropriateness.
- Disenfranchised grief: According to Wikipedia, “grief that is not acknowledged by society.” Wikipedia cites abortion and miscarriage, the loss of a pet, and losing one’s home — specifically in the case of children who are moved from one location to another — as “nontraditional” grief.
Also, “Even widely recognized forms of grief can become disenfranchised when well-meaning friends and family attempt to set a time limit on a bereaved person’s right to grieve.” We might include R here, who finds my continued grief over the demise of a relationship outrageous and who has encouraged me to “set a date.” We might also include the time I told R my pet rat’s ashes were “somewhere in my kitchen.” (You should have seen her face.)
- “Gaslighting”: When, societally, we make somebody else “feel crazy” or doubt themselves for wanting to feel or express certain emotions or opinions.
- Anticipatory grief: According to Wikipedia, “a grief reaction that occurs before an impending loss.” This often appears in coping with terminal sickness. Also,
Grief happening prior to a loss presents a compounding issue of isolation because of a lack of social acceptance. Anticipatory grief doesn’t usually take the place of post-loss grief: there is not a fixed amount of grief to be experienced, so grief experienced before the loss does not necessarily reduce grief after the death.
- Complicated grief: “Heightened” mourning that reduces the mourner’s capacity for functionality, lasting longer than a few months.
- Resilience (George Bonanno): A “trajectory of grief” in which an otherwise normal person, in “otherwise normal circumstances,” experiences a “highly disruptive event” and is able to “maintain stable, healthy levels of psychological and physical functioning” and “the capacity for… positive emotions.” Because “resilience” conflicts with the Stages of Grief model, many therapists “consider the absence of grief a pathology to be feared.”
- Postponement of grief: The first phase of mourning, according to John Bowlby, is a “numbness” that may be “interrupted by outbursts of extremely intense distress.” He believed that if grief were instead released in its “full strength” it would “overwhelm the ego.”
- Delayed grief (George Bonanno): A grief reaction (or, sometimes, a “trajectory”) that is also “postponed.” In this case, “adjustment seems normal,” according to Bonanno, “but then distress and symptoms increase months later.” It is often triggered by some other event. “Delayed grief” is often a characteristic of “unresolved grief.” There is also such a thing as “delayed trauma.”
- “Coping ugly”: According to Bonanno, this is any grief response outside of the norm — for instance, laughing when one is expected to cry.
