A special welcome to anyone who is new to The Grieving Room. We meet every Monday evening. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are "mourning" is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you. Share whatever you need to share. We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
When Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s book On Death and Dying was published in 1969, it not only broke the discussion barrier for many people facing loss and grief; it also brought the psychology of loss into the nascent self-help sections of the country’s bookstores. Many of us have read this pinnacle work and through it have been able to quantify what is at times an almost mystical experience. And while Kubler-Ross wrote the book originally as an observation of people who were in the process of dying, she later applied her ideas to situations of loss of many kinds. More below.
Most of us here are familiar with Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—and have plotted our own meandering courses across some of life’s darker griefscapes. Some of you may even be like me, suffering from intractable sadness that makes life seem a little, or very much like, a waking nightmare. With each new grief we become further sundered from the joy we may have known as children before we lost anyone or anything important. Anti-depressants have been a great help for me and I hope for any of you who have needed some extra help coping with your grief. Without them I would have long ago given up. Thankfully for most people however, the process of grieving is gotten through, the loss is accepted, and life eventually goes on.
It was in thinking about the way we grieve that two articles on the Web recently caught my eye, both reviewing Dr. George Bonnano’s new book, The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss. In the first article, http://www.nytimes.com/... Dr. Bonanno, a professor of psychology at Columbia University, maintains that Kubler-Ross’s findings were too clinical and that the emotional states of bereaved people are actually much more simple, personal, and much less measurable. For example, a widow who marries soon after the loss of her spouse may appear cold-hearted but in fact may have processed her grief very quickly and be ready to move on. The article’s author, Dr. Abigail Zuger M.D., says
Why isn’t that widow shedding at least one little tear? How could the boyfriend be off at the ballgame like that? What is wrong with that bizarrely cheerful orphaned child? Surely they all need therapy. Not so, Dr. Bonanno maintains. In contrast to the grim slog of Freudian grief work, the natural sadness that actually follows a death is not a thick soup of tears and depression. People can be sad at times, fine at other times. The level of fluctuation is "nothing short of spectacular"; the prevalence of joy is "striking." Over all, we are hard-wired to move on, helped by innate mechanisms that may seem maladaptive or abnormal but are actually quite common and effective.
In a second article, an interview on Zocalo, Bonanno says that there really hasn’t been much research into grief since Kubler-Ross’s work, which is surprising given that we are such a self-concerned society. In this article, http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/... Bonanno states that before his research, Kubler-Ross’s five stages and Freud’s grief-work model were the touchstones for grief psychology. And again, he reiterates that the five stages are not behaviors he sees very much in his own research. He says
...But we really see nothing like that. Most people get over loss fairly quickly. That doesn’t mean they don’t suffer—most suffer in an intense way, and intense sadness does its job in a few days or weeks. I don’t mean to imply that people have a few bouts of sadness then they’re done, but they do most of it right away. There may be lingering sadness for years, but regaining the ability to get on with your life—that happens pretty quickly. It makes sense because of how we’re wired for survival...
Bonanno says that primates don’t mope around for months after loss because "they would perish", meaning that the group would leave them behind and they would starve or be predated. Further, this survival wiring is a tool that allows us to have, as Dr. Zuger paraphrases,
the ability to smile through the worst of it. Humans are inherently drawn to comfort sad people, but can seldom tolerate more than a few minutes in the presence of the seriously depressed. The fact that the bereaved can shake it off periodically means that people will willingly stay with them, protecting them from a spiral of self-involved solitude.
Bonanno talks about this resilience as a measure of recovery from loss, which most marks the point at which we rejoin life in our ability to work and concentrate, interact and be "emotionally available to other people" again. He says that "resilient people can do it in a few weeks and do it consistently over time."
To put Bonanno’s observations into perspective with my own grieving process, I am now able to understand why, as someone without family or many friends, it is so easy to start down that spiral and why it is important for my self-preservation to make the effort not to. It is also instantly apparent that with successfully-treated depression I am more able to step away from the sadness and (perhaps with some fear and reluctance) join life. I certainly want to read The Other Side of Sadness to see whether it contradicts or coincides with my own experiences.
Have any of you present tonight read Dr. Bonanno’s book? In your own journeys through loss, did you feel as if you were going through Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief or has it been/was it different for you? How resilient do you feel now?