Busting 5 Major Myths About Grief

5 minute read

With the election results in and the “most wonderful” time of the year around the corner (ahem holidays), you may be finding yourself currently riding or soon surfing a wave of grief. 

So I thought I’d do a little myth busting around the complexity of grief and hopefully normalize your experience of grief. Okay here we go…

Have you ever experienced a heart-wrenching loss and heard something along the lines of:

• “Why are you still so angry about it?”
• “Well if you’re not crying about it, you must not be that sad anymore.”
• “You’ve got to be strong.” 
• “You’ll get over it with time.”

There are a lot of misconceptions about grief—the “right” way to grieve, how one day it will be over, what it “should” look like, what it “should” feel like, how loyal we need to be to our grief in order to be a “good” person…to name a few.

It can be confusing and overwhelming to take on so many instructions during such a raw, vulnerable, primal, and overwhelming time.

Grief Defined

Before we dive into the topic of grief, let’s first define it. According to the American Psychological Association, grief is the “anguish experienced after significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person.” Grief is a natural response. 

I also want to point out that we can experience grief outside of a loved one dying. For example, we grieve when we go through a break up or divorce, when a loved one is deported or is incarcerated, or when a child goes off to college (examples of the person being psychologically present but physically absent). We can also grieve when a loved one has an Alzheimer’s or dementia diagnosis, when they’re depressed and feel cut off from us, or when they’re in the throes of addiction (examples of someone being physically present but psychologically absent). These types of more intangible, less definitive losses are called ambiguous loss.

Lastly we can experience grief around other losses in life too, like the loss of a job, the loss of our routines (like the pandemic), the loss of our ability to connect (also like the pandemic)….lots of loss and grief in the pandemic…

Okay so now that we have a clearer idea of what grief means, lets deconstruct some myths around it.

Grief Myth #1: You progress through grief in a linear, consecutive way.

False! Many people think that their grief should neatly follow the specific chain reaction of “denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance” due to the work of Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her books On Death and Dying and On Grief and Grieving. 

However, her co-author to On Grief and Grieving, David Kessler, notes that he and Kübler-Ross stated that the five stages are “not prescriptive, they’re descriptive, and they only describe general patterns.” So it’s more useful to think of “the stages” as common experiences with grief rather than boxes to progressively check off. 

We now think of grief as waves in the ocean, big waves and small waves, hitting us sometimes with prediction and a lot of times out of nowhere. The ache comes and goes. Perhaps the ache feels more severe some days and less severe others. 

Perhaps the ache is filled with “denial” one day, depression another day, bargaining a month later, anger a year later, and then some denial swells up again years later.

Grief is a non-linear process.

Myth #2: Grieving means you’re sad all of the time.

Not true. Another helpful image to address the complexity and non linear manner of grief is to think of grief as a tangled ball of yarn. Each thread represents different emotions that can be a part of grief and pulled up from the rest of the yarn ball at any time. 

The threads can be fear, sadness, relief, regret, frustration, loneliness, love, dread, apathy, longing, resentment, abandonment, hope, etc. One or more threads can be pulled up at any point in time. It does not just have to be “denial” for a certain length of time or “sadness” for another length of time. The various emotions of grief comes and goes like the weather or a wave coming and moving through. 

Grief often shows us what or who is important to us and what/who we care about. Perhaps our grief is a sign that we are feeling, caring humans having a very natural response to loss. 

(Side note: we’re not the only animal species who grieve. Other social, tight-knit groups of animals like whales, chimpanzees, elephants, and giraffes also grieve the loss of their loved ones. Point being–we’re hard wired to grieve. It is natural for our social species.)

Grief is a complex, tangled ball of emotions.

Grief is a natural response to loss.

Myth #3: With time, your grief will go away.

Nope. According to The Center for Prolonged Grief, grief does not fully go away, but our relationship to the grief changes.

This gets back to the grief not being linear thing. Maybe you do reach a point in your grief journey that feels like acceptance and integration. 

It can feel so good in our bodies and hearts to feel that sense of peace, but most likely that feeling won’t fully stay forever—the wave of grief will probably wash up and over us again when something jogs our memory of who or what we lost. 

Maybe it’s a certain model of car that our loved one drove that we now find ourselves driving behind on a routine trip to the grocery store. Maybe it’s someone we’re walking behind who has a familiar scent to who we lost. Maybe it’s the deceased’s birthday or an anniversary, or really any holiday. 

The grief can swell up again; however, often how we experience and express the grief changes over time.

Grief and grieving changes over time.

Grief does not have a time limit. 

Myth #4: There is a “right” way to grieve. 

Wrong. Everyone grieves in a unique way; our grief is simply primal and original to us. Maybe we want to discuss our emotions, talk about the loved one we lost, or perhaps we prefer moments of solitude. How we grieve is informed by our culture, religion, spirituality, race, and gender norms. 

Imposing expectations around what grief “should” look like and sound like can invoke feelings of shame in ourselves and further cut us off from expressing the grief. 

If we believe grief should look a certain way, we can start to judge how one grieves. “They’re not crying as much as me, I guess they didn’t love him as much as I did.” When we’re judging someone’s grief, we’re isolating them in their grief and if we’re grieving at the same time, we become isolated in our grief too.

It’s best for us to be patient with ourselves and the ups and downs that will come our way when we or someone else is grieving.

“Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint.” —David Kessler, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief

Myth #5: If I avoid the grief, then it will go away.

Tempting, but no.

The important thing with grief is to acknowledge the ache of grief rather than sweep it under the rug. Trying to avoid or suppress our grief can lead to depression (depressing emotions), numbing behaviors, angry outbursts, physical illness, loneliness, and/or isolation. 

Though we all grieve differently, we share a need for needing our grief to be seen—not for someone to cheer us up, but for someone to sit in the mud of grief with us. We need to witness our own grief and allow it to be witnessed by others. Grieving is a way for us to connect with trusted others. Grief expert, David Kessler, notes that when we don’t avoid grief or try to fix it, and we just allow it to be with us, that is when the healing happens. 

We need to sit in the mud with our grief.

Our grief needs to be seen.

Feeling overwhelmed by grief?

Know you’re not alone. Losing a loved one is one of the most stressful experiences we can have as humans. Reach out to me via my “Connect” page and let’s see if we could be a good fit in sitting in the mud of grief together.

With care,
Chrissy