A blueprint for grieving

April 25, 2023 8:48 PM

I need to learn how to grieve. It's been particularly tricky to find grief resources as someone whose loss *isn't* a death -- a lot of grief resources seem to assume you're bereaved. Can you recommend an interactive workbook, YouTube (or whatever platform) video series, computer game, tabletop game, or something else interactive that will help me engage actively and creatively with my grief, instead of ignoring, stagnating, or squashing?
posted by cnidaria to Health & Fitness (14 answers total)

Best answer: I don't have any comprehensive resources, but one, tiny, left-field, interactive & creative process for blocked grief, when you can't cry etc, is:
Fill a small bowl with water and a bunch of salt.
Name what you are grieving - maybe while mixing the water and salt with your fingers.
Then, use two fingers, and *trace* from your eyelids down your cheeks with the salty water. Like they are tears.


I know this sounds ridiculous, but I would say don't knock it till you've tried it.
There's something about the very real and tactile feeling of tears or 'crying', even though it's not your actual tears, that seems to help the emotion rise, and... pass through.
Very cathartic.

Just continue until you feel 'done'.
posted by Elysum at 9:04 PM on April 25, 2023 [7 favorites]

Take a look at "It's OK that You are not OK". I've heard good things about and based on my brief skim of the sample pages from Amazon it seems more open to the possibility that grief and loss might not be related to death.
posted by metahawk at 9:24 PM on April 25, 2023

Check out the Grief Recovery Method, which is a workbook with a workshop. It specifically addresses the many forms of loss and grief, even things that you welcome (like retirement or other good, exciting changes) but that still create complicated emotions.

It also seemed especially geared toward people who have multiple unresolved grief events.

I think it's exactly what you're looking for. If you can find someone leading a workshop, definitely go.

I just looked at their website to track down a link to finding a group and it looks a little scammy. Despite that, it is legit. I was also able to work out a discount with the instructor.

I would also recommend finding a support group if possible. Community with other people who are experiencing grief (especially if it's the same or similar loss/event) is a really supportive way to work through it.

[Also, you do not have to be in crisis to call a hotline. You can just call for resources or to chat.]

I am sorry for the difficult time you're experiencing. I hope healing and hope find you soon.
posted by meemzi at 11:31 PM on April 25, 2023

Some terms you may find useful when searching for resources is “disenfranchised grief” or “ambiguous grief.”
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 11:58 PM on April 25, 2023 [3 favorites]

A resource that works for you may be hard to find because, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross aside, people experience grief in myriad individual ways. My advice would be to let yourself be yourself.
posted by tmdonahue at 5:37 AM on April 26, 2023

Take a look at "It's OK that You are not OK". I've heard good things about and based on my brief skim of the sample pages from Amazon it seems more open to the possibility that grief and loss might not be related to death.

I've read this book and it is very much about grief after losing someone through death. It's a great book and I'd highly recommend if someone is looking for non traditional ways of grieving death, but it may not be what the OP is looking for.

Try Googling the term "disenfranchised grief" which deals with grief from a loss that isn't necessarily about death.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:54 AM on April 26, 2023

Best answer: You might like the book What's Your Grief?, which is very explicit about the many possible causes of grief, including but in no way limited to death. It's set up as a series of lists, and it has a whole list of reasons why it's so hard to grieve non-death losses, as well as other helpful lists and infographics. It's not exactly a workbook/guided journal but it does include some prompts for how to metabolize loss of all kinds. I think it would be validating at minimum.
posted by babelfish at 6:27 AM on April 26, 2023

Response by poster: Thanks everyone for all these ideas.

And just to clarify: my grief is less along the lines of losing a person (which it sounds like what ambiguous grief is? Losing a person without death? Although that's a useful concept to know, too!) and more similar to something like someone grieving a limb amputation. But I'm not an amputee specifically, so it's been confusing looking for resources.
posted by cnidaria at 8:08 AM on April 26, 2023

Best answer: Cole Imperi coined the term "shadowloss" to help describe this phenomenon. She has a tedx talk and blog posts here and from a quick google, it looks like there are some other pieces of media out there that reference it also.
posted by moogs at 8:31 AM on April 26, 2023

I think a lot of the concepts you're looking for are wrapped in the body of work around trauma. The thing that you go through after a trauma to come to terms with it is generally known as processing, which includes mourning losses of opportunity, the death or hinderance of dreams or goals, all the pain we suffer around forced change (and unforced - a lot of choices in life mean giving up one path to take the other).

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has a lot of concepts around processing and all the steps between The Thing and Accepting The Thing in ways that let you move past it without denying the reality of it. ACT Made Simple might be a good starting point.

In the case of medical diagnosis-related (or a difficult divorce, or some other Adverse Life Event that has changed your future from what you expected) trauma, I think Finding Life Beyond Trauma: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Heal from Post-Traumatic Stress and Trauma-Related Problems and/or Overcoming Trauma and PTSD: A Workbook Integrating Skills from ACT, DBT, and CBT would at least put tools in your toolbox.


As an aside so hopefully nobody else recommends it, Kubler-Ross's "five stages" are the five stages of dying, as in what people experience after their own terminal diagnosis, and is meant to facilitate a pretty tight timeline. They are not about grief for others or things and they have toxic'd up the grief roadmap in basically unrepairable ways, to the point that people die from it because they think they are broken and heartless for not Grieving Correctly. She never meant to cause that kind of harm, and did some extraordinary good around the acknowledgement of anger as something other than a trash or wrong emotion, as well as the concept of "acceptance" of one's impending death as healthy rather than delusional or "giving up", and it has created some meaningful science around palliative care methodology. It just really screwed up our understanding of all the other kinds of grief as long-term and highly variable experiences.

(Also before recommendations, The Body Keeps The Score is considered a fairly flawed work now in the trauma world, and is itself quite traumatic to consume if you are not dealing with serious childhood or adult violence-related trauma, and triggering if you are, and not really good for diagnostic/medical or other Life Event trauma. I wouldn't recommend my other go-to, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, either, in those cases either.)
posted by Lyn Never at 11:36 AM on April 26, 2023

How to Survive the Loss of a Love
by Peter McWilliams, Harold H. Bloomfield, Melba Colgrove

This book is about all loss--death of a career, death of a friendship, etc. It was not a very stylish book--I remember it being hokey with all sorts of different fonts and formatting. But, I also remember finding it comforting.

Good luck.
posted by rhonzo at 1:43 PM on April 26, 2023

Response by poster: Lyn Never -- thanks for that aside on Kubler Ross! My (terrible, awful, no-good) EAP therapist recommended that I read "Death and Dying" (after, um, she made a "squirrel" joke about my ADHD at the first appointment, and at the second appointment told me I wasn't grieving correctly and was "stuck in the denial stage" so... yeah. Sometimes no therapist -- or a YouTube or book therapist -- is better than a shitty real-life therapist, amirite?). She also recommended I watch some terrible fictional movies about people losing their spouses as a way to engage with my grief (I have never been married and I was clear that dealing with resources focused on the death of a spouse as The Canonical, Universally Comprehensible Grief Situation just makes me feel othered/invisible).

I was just... kind of flabbergasted by the whole out-of-tune, clueless interaction, sigh. So it's validating to have you confirm that book is about stages of *dying* specifically, and is inappropriate for my own grief.

The idea of "acceptance" in particular for my situation is very fraught. Yeah, my body is permanently different. But there's also lots of work I can do and progress I can make to gain physical abilities I want to have. I'm already back to deadlifting heavy weights, working on adaptive barbell squats, open water swimming in sub 50F water, doing kung fu, doing yoga, learning how run again (with much frustration and wailing and gnashing of teeth, but still learning), working on my jumping, etc. People who see I'm disabled and want me to "accept my limitations" (like my therapist) seem to think I should be sitting on my ass all day? But what I'm actually doing is using a combination of cleverness, tenacity, openness to experimentation, and outside support to make adaptations work and return in a healthy way to my preferred extremely active lifestyle.

Thus my (shitty) EAP therapist suggests my very active lifestyle means I'm in "denial", rather than it meaning I'm putting my prosthetic-orthotic device to its correct fucking use. And yeah, my device is amazing and gives me so much freedom and pain-free movement. But I also need to grieve my permanent loss of weightbearing ankle function (and the whirlwind of other health losses and difficulties I've been through in the past 6 years). Both things can be true.
posted by cnidaria at 10:41 AM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh my god, I am so horrified on your behalf. I am sorry you have been/are going through that kind of awful treatment.

I think you might be misunderstanding the core concepts of ACT, maybe not surprising given the awful attitudes you're dealing with, but the "acceptance" part is more about a somewhat unflinching look at the trauma or source of pain, and then using techniques to literally make more room for it to exist in your narrative so that it causes less emotional pressure. Here is a manual from the VA for using ACT in group therapy for PTSD, as an example. ACT is actually maybe a little aggressive about getting in the face of your pain - like I would not necessarily hand a book on this to someone who has freshly lost a spouse or child - but I think that's actually extra useful in a situation where people around you (over whom you have no control, which is also part of the exercises you might go through) want to invent limitations on you that have little to nothing to do with the actual sources of your emotional pain points. I think it should be combined with some softer, not so rah-rah techniques (and that's how it's also combined in most trauma therapy), but don't avoid it because you're afraid it's going to tell you that you should stay home.
posted by Lyn Never at 2:09 PM on April 27, 2023

This article may get at what you are looking for:

We would call these losses living losses, and most of them would fit into the category of nonfinite loss. Nonfinite losses are those loss experiences that are enduring in nature, usually precipitated by a negative life event or episode that retains a physical and/or psychological presence in an ongoing manner (Bruce & Schultz, 2002). Some forms of nonfinite loss may be less clearly defined in onset, but they tend to be identified by a sense of ongoing uncertainty and repeated adjustment or accommodation. Some nonfinite losses begin as finite events, but their aftereffects will be experienced for the rest of an individual’s life. This is the case with Patricia and James, as the stroke itself was a finite event; the ongoing needs for care as well as the uncertainty and complete change in their relationship and lifestyle represent the nonfinite aspects of this loss experience. There are three main factors that separate nonfinite loss experiences from the experience of a death-related loss:

• The loss (and grief) is continuous and ongoing, although it may follow a specific event, such as an accident or diagnosis.
• The loss prevents normal developmental expectations from being met in some aspect of life, and the inability to meet these expectations may be because of physical, cognitive, social, emotional, or spiritual losses.
• The inclusion of intangible losses, such as the loss of one’s hopes or ideals related to what a person believes should have been, could have been, or might have been (Schultz & Harris, 2011).

The cardinal features of the experience of nonfinite losses include:

• There is ongoing uncertainty regarding what will happen next.
• There is often a sense of disconnection from the mainstream and what is generally viewed as “normal” in human experience.
• The magnitude of the loss is frequently unrecognized or not acknowledged by others.
• There is an ongoing sense of helplessness and powerlessness associated with the loss (Schultz & Harris, 2011).

posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 7:30 PM on April 29, 2023 [1 favorite]