Grief is Not a Disorder
Today is National Grief Awareness Day. In our “emotion phobic” and “mourning avoidant” culture, I think we all need more awareness about grief.
What is grief anyway?
Grief is an internal response to loss.
Grief is the normal response to loss.
Grief is love’s response to loss. 1
The poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay was no stranger to grief.
Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world which I find myself walking around in the daytime and falling in at night. I miss you like hell. 2
Her expression of grief shows how deeply she was grieving. Imagine if someone responded to her with phrases like these: “just carry on,” “buck up,” “keep yourself busy, and soon you notice there is no longer a glaring hole in your world.”
Imagine if she was encouraged not to speak of her grief, or write about it.
Sadly, our society does that to those who grieve much too often. In fact, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM-5) now has a new diagnosis: PGD or Prolonged Grief Disorder. 3
According to the DSM, PGD is characterized by daily, intense yearning for the person who died and/or a preoccupation with thoughts or memories of this person. Three additional symptoms from the following array are also required: identity confusion, disbelief, avoidance of reminders of the death, intense emotional pain, difficulty engaging with others and with life, emotional numbness, feelings that life is meaningless, and intense loneliness.4
Dr. Alan Wolfelt, an author, educator, and grief counselor disagrees with this new diagnosis, and I agree with him.
Grief is normal. Emotional and spiritual .upheaval after great loss is to be expected.
In May of 2010, I lost my beautiful thirty-four year old daughter Julie to suicide.
For more than a week after her death, our family was ensconced in the love and safety of each other at another daughter’s home while we went through the earliest days of shock while we also made arrangements for her funeral. And then we returned to our upended lives to try to figure out how to go on living.
I did not yet know the wisdom of Dr. Wolfelt’s words
To live well, one must grieve well.
The first thing I did was visit a new to me therapist. Her first advice: “Feel all the feelings.” This was a new concept to me in the closed family system in which I was raised. I was taught to deny, to inhibit, and to judge feelings as good or bad, but I was never told that I could feel them all without judgement. Her words were freeing words to me.
Learning how to practice this freeing advice did not come as easily.
For the first three months, I grieved openly and freely because of the love and support of my dear husband who quite literally sat shiva with me. He sat beside me as I cried, as I raged, as I tried to understand, as I wrote long journal entries, and as I tried to make sense of something that would never make sense.
Nearly a year later, the physical effects of grieving began to show up in my body. Fourteen months after my daughter’s death, I wrote in my journal:
I never had any idea grief would be such a long process. I thought I’d be in a much better place by now…Perhaps this winter and spring when I was working, I was only denying my grief. Perhaps I picked myself up, took on an obligation, and plowed through life like I always have. Perhaps I failed to feel my emotions. (Were they even there?) While I may have pushed through other trials in life; grief is not going to allow me to do that.
Then, in large letters I wrote a new learning about grief on the opposite journal page.
I could have been diagnosed with PGD at that point. I was grieving deeply, and been doing so over over a year.
My hair was falling out in hands full at this point. For the first time in my life, I was having full blown panic attacks. I was also suffering from arrhythmia. The pain throughout my body was unbearable at time. My doctors chalked it up to grief and stress and did not do further testing to see if there might be other things going on.
My immune system was attacking my hair. My doctor actually asked me if I was plucking my eyebrows when they fell out over night. The response of my doctors was: you need to be on anti-anxiety drugs, anti-depressants. You need to get ahold of yourself. Your hair will come back after a bit. Shock caused it to fall out.”
My hair didn’t come back. Shock may have speeded up my condition, but it did not cause it.
I was repeatedly asked, “Are you in therapy?”
Yes, I was. I was in therapy and my therapist, also a LPN, said I was not depressed. She said I was grieving, and she said I was grieving as well as could be expected.
She did not believe grief was a disorder. She thought I should switch doctors. So I did.
I found new doctors. I found out in time why my hair was falling out. I had a rare form of alopecia. And I found out I had a arrhythmia because I had tachy-brady syndrome.
I also picked up a book called, “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion. Joan Didion famously said, “We write to discover what we are thinking.” Writing had helped me immensely with my grief, but I discovered by reading her book, that reading also helps me discover what I am thinking. I read to find human connection. I read to find reassurance. I read to discover I am not alone.
I picked up that book of Didion’s because I thought I was losing my mind, and yet I also felt those feelings were absolutely normal given what I was personally going through.
With her words, I discovered all I was experiencing physically, cognitively, emotionally, socially, and spiritually was to be expected.
I didn’t want to numb my feelings and emotions. That is why I refused to be medicated. I had my therapist’s full support on that. Others, may be clinically depressed, but I was not.
In my journal, I recorded quotes from Didion where she said grief has the power “to derange the mind.” She also says we mourn for ourselves as much as for the one we lost. We mourn for a time that is gone and can never be again. We mourn for who we were then and for who the one we lost was then.
Grief brings chaos.
Grief also brings change.
Grief has the power to transform the griever.
Grief is like a long, winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.5
There are so many misconceptions about grief. Today, I have written about the misconception that grief is to be avoided, dosed, or ignored if one is to ever “get over it.”
Grief is not a disorder.
Grief is not to be avoided.
Healing comes from mourning.
Comfort comes from the community of others who surround us as we grieve.
Healing from grief is fundamentally a spiritual journey.
In 2019, my husband and I had the opportunity to go Israel where we visited the Mount of Beatitudes. I have found that it is true that grief caused me to “enter the dark night of the soul.” Everything in my life was turned upside down and backwards. I also learned the truth about the main paradox of grief:
you must make friends with the darkness before you can enter the light.
I learned I was comforted as I mourned. Mourning is a blessing brought into our lives because we loved someone deeply before we lost that person to death. Love is a blessing, and so is mourning that loved one.
I’m so grateful for those who companioned me, walked with me, sat with me, listened to me while I have been on my own grief journey. I’m grateful for the guides who have shown me the way.
Just days after my daughter’s death a close friend and colleague called to speak to me about what to expect in the days to come. She told me there might be times when grief felt like I would die from it. I did feel that. She told me that if I felt like I was losing my mind. She said that feeling was normal. She talked about appetite, and how it would wax and wane. Essentially, she was the first guide on my journey. I had no idea what grief felt like, I only knew that I felt like I was drowning. Thank goodness for friends who come along beside us in healthy and helpful ways when we are grieving!
I hope I have brought some new awareness to others about grief with this post.
If you know someone who is grieving, please feel free to share this post if you found it helpful.
Again, grief is not a disorder.
Grief is a gift - the gift of love and attachment.
Dr. Alan Wolfelt
Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Grief is Not a Disorder, My Position on the New ‘Prolonged Grief Disorder’ Diagnostic Category in the DSM,” a publication by Dr. Alan Wolfelt. Copies of this article can be found at his website: Center for Loss.
Ibid.
A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis
Thank you, Sally. I lost both parents within a year. Their illness, her Alzheimer’s, COVID policies, and all the practical fallout surrounding their lives took their toll on me in the form of atrial fib. Only one doctor saw me as a whole person and recognized the signs of stress. Your admonition to feel all the emotions will help me, I think. I haven’t done that yet. You have been an encouragement.
Oh my goodness Sally, you have so much to give others and you do so very beautifully and generously. So sorry for all you have walked through. Thank you so much for walking alongside us in this way, your words and insights and empathy are a gift. ❤️ xxxxx