Types of Grief

I am going to be discussing the various types of grief and in subsequent blogs will discuss coping with grief. I will share my own moments of life when I had a loss and how I navigated it. I hope this will help you identify in yourself and others what type of grief you or they are dealing with. I hope when I discuss ways to cope you will find some way to navigate your own grief in a healthy way, and help others do the same.

Normal grief is usually the type of grief that you have when let’s say someone has been ill and passes, or as in my mother’s case someone elderly, almost 100 years old passes away. Let’s say a person you were very close to growing up and later on lost touch, and heard of something happening to them or their family you have some level of grief. As much as I had had psychic dreams for two years of mom leaving when she died I couldn’t look at a picture of her the first year, gave away everything pretty much that was hers, though stuff she knitted I put away and did look at until recently it still hit hard. I realized she was free of pain, of all the things that had been slowly destroying her and am at peace with her passing. Grief is normal when you lose someone that in some way is or was a major part of your life. With time it heals, it gets easier to accept that they are no longer with us in the physical sense.

Complicated grief is the type of grief that worsens over time and that can be a situation where the person maybe has some form of guilt that they have not been able to resolve, even if it’s misplaced. If the person was partying, didn’t see the phone call to rush home because the person was dying, so they don’t make it in time to say goodbye. If there is lots of unresolved guilt or even anger at the person dying that isn’t resolved it can get stronger and stronger so the grieving never ends.

Traumatic grief is when you lose someone in a situation such as was the case with 9/11 or a mugging, a crime, or the person has a sudden massive heart attack and there was no prior indication of anything wrong, or serious. When it is sudden the spirit and soul have not had time to prepare to process it, so they may get stuck in that grief and become bitter, something we are seeing with a certain ex royal being played out on the world stage. Most of us when we have an event to go to, have to do a public presentation prepare, so if someone came to you that evening and said get dressed we are going to a gala, or you are going to be giving a two hour presentation on some not so simple subject, we would be in a bit of panic. When loss happens suddenly and in a way that is dramatic, hard to immediately process, that inability to do so can cripple a person.

Chronic grief and that may come about then someone has a chronic health issue. I have fibromyalgia and I grieve even now at times the person I was before the fibromyalgia. When you have a chronic issue that you have limited control over, that has perhaps changed who you were there are the five stages of grief initially, but there is also this ongoing and periodically sharp grieving for what you used to be able to do that maybe now you can’t or not in the way you used to be able to. This kind of situation you have to work at seeing the glass half full at times because the situation can make it seem as though the glass is totally empty or you can be focused only on the empty part of the glass. I can tell you that even in a situation of chronic health issues there is a ray of light, one just has to find it. For me it’s kany-wellness, my artistic endeavors, and my faith.

Namaste