ABOUT GRIEF

What is Grief?

Grief is an involuntary reaction to loss that every person experiences sometime in his or her life. A grieving person undergoes significant and noticeable changes in their mental, emotional, physical and spiritual states.

Though grief reactions vary greatly in intensity, grieving is always associated with suffering. It is universally described as a pain that inhabits the mind and the body. Sometimes the pain is manageable, other times it seems intolerable. Sometimes the pain comes in a wave, other times a person can feel completely immersed in it.

Most cultures have established rituals to help comfort the grieving, and the passage of time is often offered as a dependable and inevitable “cure”. However, not everyone completes the mourning process successfully. If professional help is not utilized, lasting mental, emotional and physical disorders may result.

For a variety of reasons, grief-related problems are overlooked, ignored or even misdiagnosed within today’s fast-paced health care system. However, a properly educated health care practitioner can provide the personalized care, immediate comfort and continuing support needed to aid the grief stricken individual.

What makes grief unique?

As mentioned, grief involves changes in a person’s emotional, mental, spiritual and physical (somatic) states. Each person experiences grief differently from others and one’s own grief related responses will vary over the course of a lifetime. However, a common thread that helps describe grief is: the sum of these involuntary reactions to a loss creates a definite disharmony within the individual. The resulting condition, called grief, ranges from being mildly unsettling to intensely painful. The severity of the grief depends on a variety of factors.

What makes grief unique? As stated, grief is a multi-faceted reaction. In addition to its mental and physical components, grief entails complex emotional changes. In contrast to simpler human conditions that might revolve around only one major emotion, grief entails many emotions that seem to overlap and intertwine. Rapid mood swings are commonly reported by the grieving. Grief also usually entails changes to one’s spiritual state, especially if it is triggered by a death. Often a grieving individual’s spiritual convictions will oscillate over the course of the grieving process.

All these changes: mental, physical, emotional and spiritual, mix together to create a unique human condition that is hard to categorize. Sometimes one facet of the grief experience percolates to the surface and it might appear to be the predominant grief-related trait (or symptom) but it’s usually not fully descriptive of the individual’s entire grief related experience. Grief is definitely a hard concept to explain using words; though once experienced, one easily grasps the meaning of the word.

We all experience loss in our lives, therefore we all experience grief. It can be stated that since our lives revolve around change, and each change (however minute or all encompassing) by definition involves a loss of some sort; our lives are full of events that provoke grief. This statement is true. Everyone does experience a range of involuntary responses to change on a daily basis (i.e., a person’s body and mind are constantly reacting to the surrounding environment and external events).

These responses do have the potential to be debilitating (i.e. they can prevent or impair an optimal level of functioning). Fortunately, most people successfully integrate these reactions into their lives. They are able to exert a level of “damage control” over their minds and bodies and thus prevent permanent harm.

Yet not all of us cope successfully with the multifaceted changes we undergo. When grief causes lasting emotional, mental, spiritual and physical disorders it is beneficial to employ the services of a grief counselor to assist with the healing process. A fully trained and experienced grief counselor can not only relieve the suffering associated with grief; he or she can teach self-care techniques that can be applied throughout an individual’s life. In other words, the grief counselor can help an individual transform an unpleasant, unavoidable experience into a less painful, manageable one. In addition, the personal insight gained during counseling can impart valuable and lasting knowledge.

What is Degriefing?

Degriefing® is a body/mind process based in the premise that “grief is the most available, untapped, emotional resource for personal transformation”. It integrates the use of both traditional and integrative therapeutic modalities. Grief is the body’s response to loss: any loss.

Fresh grief can stimulate the feelings of previous unresolved grief. Loss is a common experience that every person encounters during his or her lifetime. A grieving person can undergo both significant and subtle changes impacting their physical, emotional, mental and spiritual states. It is necessary to understand the effect that grief has on existing conditions.

Symptoms of distress can be part of simple or complex, fresh or unresolved grief. A variety of somatic complaints can be experienced: fatigue, insomnia, pain, gastrointestinal symptoms, chest pressure, palpitations, stomach pains, headaches, backaches, panic attacks, increased anxiety or depression amongst others. If medicine is to treat the root causes rather than mask the symptoms of these potentially serious medical complaints; thorough evaluation is required to identify and differentiate the roots from the manifestations of actual illness.

Grief related problems are often unrecognized and remain unaddressed by today’s quick-fix health care system. The well trained counselor can provide: supportive verbal communication techniques, nurturing emotional attention, make recommendations and provide referrals for the appropriate integrative therapies (supporting the implementation of important somatic treatments), and embody the personal presence needed to assist clients in coping with grief in a healthy self-supporting way.

The premise of the Degriefing Process is simple. Grief creates a state of physical and mental disharmony. The body and mind are inextricably linked. Therefore, health care techniques that attempt to alleviate the effects of grief must include both physical and mental treatments. Including somatic treatments along with appropriate verbal counseling will greatly promote the healing process. In addition, educating an individual about grief and teaching him or her practical self-care techniques can minimize the potential for developing serious, long term disorders when that individual invariably experiences grief again.

Unlike many existing treatment regimes, the Degriefing Process employs both verbal and physical techniques to relieve an individual’s emotional distress, mental anguish and physical discomfort.

Integrative Grief Therapy

In addition to raw emotional pain, grieving individuals resonate physical sorrow as well. A qualitative study examining the nurse-patient relationship has identified the contagion of physical distress or ‘compathy’ as a significant but otherwise neglected phenomenon. Compathy occurs when one person observes another person suffering a disease or injury and experiences in one’s physical body a similar or related distress (Morse & Mitcham, 1997). Although this particular somatic aspect has yet to be incorporated into the common protocol for caregiver overload, Integrative Grief Therapy (IGT) provides direction for its inclusion. 

“Integrative Grief Therapy (IGT) provides direction.  IGT’s degriefing procedures utilize integrative therapies that enable caregivers to take primary responsibility for themselves in order to be ultimately responsible to their clients….teaching new coping skills for ongoing caregiver stress.”

Loss lives in our bodies. Our minds hear information and our bodies, the barometers of our feelings, register the information in our tissues or soma, (physical self). The imprinted emotional impact of loss exists, as retrievable data in our bodies. 

Stephen Levine, author of Who Dies? taught me that “we can only be truly available to companion another’s grief to the extent we know our own”. While being “there for and with the other”, our body mirrors and mimics the experience of the other’s body. This is honoring the principle of ‘somatic resonance’ and empathic communion re-stimulated losses that live in our bodies. The issues are in the tissues.. 

The body does not know how to lie. The Body is the barometer of our being, our truth. Working well with the bereaved requires that we practice conscious self- care. Transforming accumulated embodied personal, professional and global grief can be accomplished by engaging in specifically selected somatic activities. 

We can prevent bereavement overload, compassion fatigue and burnout by diminishing the ravages of Compathy by locating and then alleviating held grief related pain .