Bipolar 2 From Inside and Out

Posts tagged ‘grief’

The Varieties of Grief

Loss and grief affect us all. If you’re lucky enough that they haven’t yet, they’re coming. You won’t know when or why or how, but they’re unavoidable. There’s no way to prepare for them, either. Loss and grief rock your emotional balance and your mental health.

You’ve no doubt heard of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Death and Dying—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. (Some people say there are seven stages, including the usual five plus shock and guilt.) The stages apply to other kinds of grief besides death and dying.

The thing is, not everyone experiences grief in the same way. You may not experience all five (or seven) of the stages or not in the order they’re usually presented. You might skip anger, for example, or begin with depression. It depends on the type of loss you’re experiencing and your psychological makeup. If you suffer from clinical depression, for example, it’s easy to get stuck in that stage of grieving a loss. If you have anger management issues, you might experience that before you get to denial, or you might skip over bargaining.

Nor is there a time limit on grief. The experts say that six months to a year is a “normal” time for grief to last. Obviously, this is not hard and fast. If it takes you two years or more to return to full functioning, that’s how long it takes. No one should push you to “get over it” in what they consider to be an acceptable length of time (but they probably will).

That said, there is a condition called Prolonged Grief Disorder. When grief lasts for years and interferes with your daily life and functioning, you may be suffering from it. If this is the case, you should consider getting professional help.

Grief enters your life in any number of ways, and not always ones you expect. Here are some of the common and less common ones.

Death

Death is what you usually think of when you consider grief and loss. This is usually the death of a loved one, but it can even be caused by the death of a public figure such as John F. Kennedy or someone you look up to and admire even if they’re not a family member or close friend. Even the death of a beloved pet can lead to very real grief that often is not understood by others.

Loss

There are kinds of loss other than death. If you work at your dream job and the company suddenly goes under or you are let go, you can feel grief and go through the same stages of grief as someone who experiences a death. You might be in denial, for example, or experience a period of bargaining or anger. Losing your home to financial reversals or a natural disaster is another example.

Health

If your health deteriorates severely, you can experience grief or a sense of loss over the things you used to be able to do. If you lose a limb, for example, or are paralyzed by disease or accident, you can feel grief over your new situation and again, denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. Even normal aging and the loss of abilities that often accompany it can cause you grief.

Relationships

The death of a relationship can also cause grief. Whether it’s by divorce, estrangement, or abandonment, you suffer because of the loss. You could obsess over the good times you spent together or be troubled by memories of the relationship when you least expect them, such as when you encounter a reminder of the person.

Ambiguous Grief

Ambiguous grief occurs when the outcome of a situation is unknown. A missing child is an obvious example. You don’t know whether they’re still alive or whether they’ve been abducted and killed. You bounce between hope and despair. You may be angry at God for allowing the situation or at the police for not solving the case quickly. If you have a loved one who is homeless and experiencing a serious brain illness, you may not know where they are or if they’re safe. You imagine the worst. You could blame yourself, even if it’s not logical. Bargaining is one typical response, a case of the “if only’s.”

There are support groups for many kinds of grief, such as for the bereaved, crime victims, or those with a family member in hospice. (This could be called anticipatory grief.) Other kinds of grief, such as grief over the loss of a job, home, or friend, usually don’t have any kind of support group. Friends and family members may try to offer support, but that’s not the same as a group with a mental health professional as a facilitator. Being with other people who have also experienced a particular variety of loss or grief can be a profound relief or lead to healing and acceptance. At the least, it’s a safe, nonjudgmental space where you can process your feelings.

Grief is deeply personal. Although there are commonalities to the experience, there is no one blueprint for grief. What you experience is in some ways unique to your situation. Length and depth of grieving can’t be quantified or predicted.

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Mental Health

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Grief and Depression

A number of years ago, I saw a TV show in which the main character was grieving the death of a friend. The other characters decided that he was grieving for too long and concocted a plan to distract him from his grief.

I was pissed off. What the man needed was time, not distraction. And how long he took to process his grief was not up to his friends. Grief takes as long as it takes, and it’s a different amount of time for different people.

Mostly we think of the death of a person when we think about grief. But that’s not the only occasion when grief comes to us. The death of a friendship can bring grief. I have lost friends to circumstances other than death, and I still miss them and find myself thinking, “Oh, Kim would like that,” or “I need to talk this over with Hal,” then remember that they’re no longer in my life. I do grieve the loss of those relationships, the ones I know will never be mended.

One can even grieve the loss of a beloved pet. There are those who say, “It’s just an animal. You can get another one.” But that’s not the case. I had my cat Louise for over 20 years from the time she was a tiny bit of fluff to when she took her last breath resting on my lap. I have since gotten – and loved – other cats, but none can truly replace my beloved companion. I grieved for her and still do. My grief is less intense and not always with me now, but I can’t say it’s gone, not the way Louise is gone. I still dream about her and find myself calling our other cats by her name.

Even the loss of a possession can trigger grief. “Oh, it’s just a thing that you can replace,” you may hear. But think about a wedding ring that was given 40 years ago. Yes, we replaced it, but it had been the repository of that long-ago wedding day and all the years since. A new band of gold didn’t have the emotional weight that the original carried.

Among the worst of all losses is the death of a dream. Poet Langston Hughes said it with these simple words:

Hold fast to dreams 
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

So why am I writing this for a blog on mental health? Because grief is also a mental health issue. Grief and depression are not the same thing, though one can easily bleed over into the other. Like grief, depression has no timeline. Like depression, grief can ambush you suddenly, when you are least expecting it. You will get through it, or learn to bear it, and you will do so in your own time, or with help.

Both grief and depression evoke feelings of hopelessness, numbness, and loneliness. And both are eased somewhat by the loving presence of friends and family. While it’s true that no one who has not lost a child, for example, can know the exact shade of grief and eternity of pain that brings, anyone who has experienced a different form of loss and grief can be there to hold your hand, provide a shoulder to rest against, cry with you. That doesn’t make it better, except that it kind of does. Being alone in your grief is itself another kind of grief. But you don’t have to be. There are grief counselors, just as there are therapists for mood disorders, and they can help you process the memories you bear with you and the pain you feel on every birthday or holiday.

As with mental illness, no one should tell you that grief is something you have to get over or that you should be over it in a certain amount of time or that you’re expressing your grief in the wrong way. We all experience grief at some point in our lives, but the exact boundaries of it differ from person to person. Those boundaries need to be respected.

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Mental Health

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Growing May Take a While

I saw a meme the other day that said, “Grow through what you go through.” I thought to myself, “This is going to take a while.”

Now, I’m not saying that the meme promotes a bad idea. I just mean that it’s not as easy as the meme makes it sound. Memes are like that. They encapsulate a difficult and painful process into a succinct platitude that never captures the reality of what it purports to express.

It is certainly possible to grow because of bad experiences that you have gone through, and I have surely done this. But it hasn’t been quick or easy. Not that it is for anyone, but especially not for people with serious mental illnesses.

Bipolar disorder, and bipolar depression in particular, often leads one to recall and obsess about the very things one would most like to forget. (Of course, this happens with unipolar depression, too.) It’s like having a recorder in your head that replays the most painful, embarrassing, humiliating, or devastating events in your life. And there is no “off” button or even a “pause.”

Getting through something is not the same as getting over something. And growing through something is something else again. It takes as long as it takes. There is no way to rush it or to speed it up.

Take grief, to choose an example that most people with and without mental disorders are familiar with. I saw a TV show once in which various characters were concerned that the hero had not “gotten over” the death of a friend as quickly as they thought he should. I remember thinking, “That’s stupid. There’s no arbitrary limit on how long a person should grieve.” I know that in days past, a mourning period of a year was customary, with restrictions on dress and activities. That’s stupid too. It may take a few months or a year or the rest of your life, depending on how close you were to the deceased and the circumstances of her or his death.

Deaths don’t have to be physical, either. The death of a relationship can be just as soul-searing, as traumatic, as a literal death. It’s still a loss and one that you may have put your whole heart and soul into.

Of course, it’s great if you can grow through the experience. It’s possible to acquire a new depth of spirit when you go through something traumatic. You can emerge stronger and more resilient and more compassionate because of the experience. I think that’s what the meme was talking about.

But if the trauma – the death or separation or other experience – is fraught with pain as well as grief, then growing through it can be even harder and take even longer. A son whose abusive mother dies has feelings that can hardly be expressed, a jumble of emotions that’s almost impossible to articulate, much less grow through. The end of a relationship with a gaslighter may evoke relief as well as grief, conflicting emotions that can impede growth. These and other situations can call up memories and feelings that one wants to escape, not dwell on. But processing them seems perhaps the only way of growing through them.

That process cannot be rushed. It may take years of bad dreams and flashbacks – at least it did for me – as well, perhaps, as a period of therapy that, like grief, takes as long as it takes to make progress in growing through whatever happened. From outside the situation, it may seem like the person is wallowing in the pain or grief. But on the inside, the process of growing may be occurring at a rate that you can’t see or understand.

In other words, if a person has been through a trauma, don’t expect him or her to “get over it” on what you think is a proper timescale. Some plants, like dandelions, grow incredibly rapidly. Others, like oaks, grow incredibly slowly. For each, it takes as long as it takes.

 

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