In a session yesterday, a client wondered whether the emotional distance he has been feeling recently from the group of friends he has belonged to for some twenty years might be a process of grief. It was a very interesting question, and it began a process of reflection and of recognising his own path and development, and how these might be connected with that particular feeling.
We have learned to think of grief as the psychological consequence of a physical death. Life, however, is full of small and large losses, or processes that mobilise feelings of grief. The loss of a job or of a career as we imagined it, the end of a relationship and of the shared history built within it, the loss of parts of ourselves or of habits, are some of the losses that are not recognised as such and yet stir feelings equivalent to grief in us. Even moving house, or children growing up and leaving home, or the loss of health, or of a future as we imagined it, can be existential losses. In all these cases anxieties are mobilised inside us that we often do not recognise, since — unlike a physical death, which happens clearly in front of us — here it is experienced only internally. Reality has changed only for us, and no one else can perceive what we feel.
Our brain cannot easily distinguish biological death from symbolic death. Corresponding feelings of anger, denial, sadness and emptiness are mobilised in both cases, and it has been observed that stressful events such as being made redundant can provoke extensive secretion of cortisol (the stress hormone), just as the loss of a loved one does. The pain of rejection, or of losing a role, has also been found to activate the same brain regions as physical pain and grief, as recorded through brain imaging.
Pauline Boss introduced the term ambiguous loss to describe grief that has not been recognised and has not been worked through, remaining frozen inside us. One form of this grief is the physical absence but psychological presence of a person — for example, when someone disappears, or after a separation. A second form concerns grief related to physical presence alongside the psychological absence of the person, as happens in cases of dementia, chronic severe mental illness or addiction, where the person is present but we do not feel them to be. The person we knew has been lost and has become someone else.
There are also the griefs we are not allowed to feel and express, as happens where there was a secret relationship with someone who has died. It is as though the person has no right to mourn, and this makes working it through much harder.
If our self is a collection of different sides and roles that we build over the course of life, then in losing significant roles — daughter, son, spouse — we also lose a way we had learned to exist. That is where the existential emptiness emerges, because something as we knew it ceases to exist and we no longer know how to be. Finally, as Yalom stresses, even every choice we make in life is a loss of all the other possible scenarios we might have lived.
Treating all these life experiences as small losses helps us stand differently in life. Without working through the feelings that emerge in this process, we cannot grow whole, without the past pulling at us with every memory of it. When what is stirred is not expressed and not worked through, it stays inside us and accumulates, one layer on another, forming a chronic and tangled mass of unknown material that we carry without knowing it. Life is a continuous experience of loss and birth, and authentic existence requires us to be connected with both processes. Only through contact with the small deaths and separations can we bear to look more closely at the sun (the title of Yalom’s book, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death).
References:
Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death. Jossey-Bass/Wiley.
