Let’s start with the basics. As a therapist that focuses on grief counseling, I think it’s important to define some of the terms we often hear. The first being: how do we define grief? As I was gathering information to write this, I noticed, although this word kept popping up, there wasn’t a lot of content that clearly defined the term. This seems problematic on several levels but we can save that for another post!
To get things moving, here are some definitions I was able to find:
“Grief is everything we think and feel inside after someone we love dies or leaves or something we are attached to goes away. In other words, grief is the instinctive human response to loss.”
- Dr. Alan Wolfelt, death educator, author, and grief counselor
“Grief is the anguish experienced after significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person.”
– American Psychological Association
“Grief is often thought of as a process that includes many emotions, rather than a singular emotion…in my research, three foundational elements of grief emerged from the data: loss, longing, and feeling lost.”
– Brené Brown, “Atlas of the Heart”
“Grief is an ongoing and evolving experience involving cognitive, emotional, physical, and behavioral responses to a loss. Responses may be related to the object of loss, secondary losses and stressors, the self, others, and the world (i.e., beliefs about safety, security, worldview, etc.).”
– What’s Your Grief website, Eleanor Haley & Litsa Williams
While we’re at it, it feels important to also define the word “loss”, which is used throughout these definitions. There are some more evident types of loss, like death of a loved one or the end of a relationship (i.e., separation, divorce, a breakup). There are also some really nuanced types of loss, like the loss of sense of safety, the loss of what we thought we knew, or the loss of what we didn’t have. Grief is unique and is going to vary for each person. What someone defines as a loss and what or who someone feels they are losing, is highly personal and unique.
Although we can experience grief as a response to any type of loss (again, subjectively defined!), here we will mostly be focusing on the grief experienced by those navigating the death of a loved one.
At this point, I’m hopeful you have a working definition of grief. I encourage you to try to write your own definition and also explore what you would put into the category of loss. Another hope is that you are beginning to notice some themes: this thing is tough to define, hard to talk about because it’s tough to define, varies from person to person, and even requires further definition within the definition! This isn’t a place with all the answers but it is a space intended to honor the complexity of grief and loss.
