Grieving: How it Happens and How we Move Through it

Grief is a tricky beast. It’s a complicated topic and I certainly don’t pretend to have it all figured out. Below, I will outline different types of grief and then get into the different models of grief. 

 According to Francis Weller’s, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, there are five gates to grief. They are as follows:

1. Everything we love, we will lose: This is the painful truth which is that everything is a gift and nothing lasts. 
2. The places that have not known love: This basically boils down to shame and the parts of ourselves that we shun. Not sure how this causes grief. Think about it. The parts of us that we deny essentially die. 
3. The sorrows of the world: This is a communal loss over things like extinction of species, habitat loss, etc.
4. What we expected and did not receive: This pertains to things we may not have even realized that we lost. This could be receiving love as an adult that you didn’t receive as a child, for example.
5. Ancestral grief: This is what I’d like to refer to as generational grief. What this means is that this is the grief passed down by those before us.  

Now that we understand how we can step into the world of grief, how do we typically process it? There are a few different schools of thought on this and this is by no means an exhaustive list of those schools of thought:

1. Kubler Ross’s Five Stage Model
2. Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning
3. Dual Process Model

Kubler Ross’s Five Stage Model

This is your classic, most well known model of grief processing out there. Its stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These stages aren’t processed in a linear order nor are any of them a mandatory element of grieving. 

Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning

This is more a task-based framework, as it sounds. These tasks below don’t have to be done in any particular order and one can move between tasks freely. In this model, one must ….

1. Accept the reality of the loss.
2. Work through the pain of grief.
3. Adjust to an environment in which the deceased is missing.
4. Find an enduring connection with the deceased while moving forward. 

Dual Process Model

This model suggest that people move between two types of coping:

1. Loss-oriented: this focuses on the grief itself, such as expressing emotions
2. Restoration-oriented:: this focuses on adapting to life without the deceased

Grief is certainly not linear as I hope was evidenced by this article. If you’re grieving right now, I’m deeply sorry from the bottom of my heart. Your pain is recognized and you’re not alone. 

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