How do we know grief?

Willow Blooms #004- Wandering in the fog

Feb 25, 2024

Walking with Grief- how close dare we go?

Some of you might not want to come with me as I explore this topic, and that is a good thing to notice. Place your hand on your heart, and see what it says about coming along. You are welcome to join me, and welcome too to step away if that is your need. Honour what you need and take care of yourself in whatever way is right for you. You can always return if it ever feels ok to take your own walk.

I found this quote and image, and couldn’t find the source, so I share with the hope that I have credited the creators correctly as it stands at the bottom of the image.

Ok? For those accompanying me as I walk, these are my mind’s wanderings. Let’s go gently…

As a clinical psychologist I think I know a bit about grief.

I realised after writing that statement that I had two very different types of knowing and I wanted to explore them both. So I wrote an essay, following my wandering mind. Since writing the essay, I have been thrown headlong into grief. Reading it back now from this different perspective, contemplating putting my writing out into the world, I saw sterility in it, and a chasm between the words on the page and the experience in my body. I suddenly felt entirely incapable of conveying anything close to what it is to be in the company of grief. To feel more than a little dead, constantly reminded of the love I have lost by the most innocuous, unexpected things. Catching myself as I go to perform routines that were my day to day, but are no longer required. The little sounds I had no idea seemed a part of my being, filled with silence. This is the immediate aftermath of death. The holes peppered all over your being. The shock. The denial. Your mind bargaining that perhaps when you look again, the loved one will be there. The sadness when they are not. And the longing. You know it perhaps, and perhaps slightly differently, because you will have walked in this lonely place of grief too.

I wanted to to take my writing, rip it up and start again. How dare I suggest that I knew anything about grief, when I was not living and bearing this pain? But I haven’t. Partly because it’s on the screen, and partly because I am incapable of writing anything more honest to post this weekend. Instead, I have chosen to honour my two-weeks ago self who wrote what she wrote, with good intentions. I have chosen to share her genuine, true-at-the-time musings on grief. I have chosen to do so because it powerfully shows the difference between two types of knowing that I was thinking about. It is something I feel sure I will come back to in more detail, the difference between theory and experience, science and art, objectivity and living in it, an intellectual knowing, and the rawness of knowing inescapably in your body.

Be gentle with yourself as we walk. Be gentle with the part of me who wondered freely on an idea as if it weren’t quite real. The analytical me, stepping around a topic she knew she was soon going to have to face, trying to find sure footing, planning a safe route, as if on the edge of a vast canyon, vultures circling overhead. This, I think is also one of the challenges of writing as a clinical psychologist. My training has made my default position one of compassionate distance, leading with a curious mind, holding back the heart, when it might want to wail, or soothe, and cuddle. Always nudging a part of me behind the curtains, like the great wizard of Oz. I did not just want a great mind to meet me in my grief, I wanted a hug, and connection with those who really got it, and really got me, and knew how fiercely I had loved. Perhaps I’ll be able to write a different piece another time, with a foot in the living grief perspective, and perhaps not. I see the conflict in this. It made me wonder what others want and need at times of grief, and how well we meet those needs in our communities and services.

With all that said, back to the essay.

Ways of knowing

The first knowing is of grief as a shape that has edges and parts. A thing that I can describe and know intellectually.

Then there is another type of knowing, that floats alongside and is far more difficult to write about. This grief perhaps also has parts, but of a different, more diffuse and fluid nature, with no clear or discernible shape. It is like a fog of emotion, pain, gratitude, memories, stories, thoughts, ambivalence, that we stumble through as it descends, breathes, and has life of its own.

The second type of grief arrived as a shadow over my door this week, not quite here, but coming. I found myself writing an essay on the topic, as if looking to my protector part for support in the first type of knowing. I went with it, and this is the result.

Grief is a thing with a shape- the theory

As a clinical psychologist, the subject of grief was a feature of my training. Whilst the dominant idea seems to be of stages or phases, there are many theories and models of grief which might resonate differently with people.

For example, Lois Tonkin’s model suggests that grief can be all encompassing, but over time life grows around the loss. Tonkin suggests that grief loses some of its potency, either because the loss becomes smaller, or other aspects of an individual’s life become larger. This suggests that the direction of change is one-way, getting smaller over time, whilst my experience is that grief has periods of both waxing and waning. It is not one-directional, nor does it have a definite end point.

Other models focus on the loss of the person and the relationship (whether this be with a person, and animal or a thing, like a job or house). They highlight the importance of enduring bonds, where although something or someone has been lost, the relationship with the person / animal etc. remains important. This suggests there is no end point to reach, but rather a transition and change in the nature and form of the relationship.

The possibility of there being an end point to grief is interesting to me, not something I recognise. I have therefore always been slightly confused by the word bandied about in popular culture-

CLOSURE

In this word, I hear an implicit assumption of a tidy end point as a desirable or adaptive outcome, with any painful feelings resolved. I think I first came across the term in the classic Friends episode. The character Rachel, in the early stages of a breakup from boyfriend Ross, gets rather drunk during a rebound date, and leaves a slurred message on Ross’ answerphone, declaring-

‘I am over you. I am over you. And that my friend is what they call closure.’

She finishes with what she thinks is a flourish, dropping the (borrowed) phone into the ice bucket. It’s a classic Friends scene, and the comedy is that the viewer can see Rachel is very drunk, and very much not over Ross. We know that she will wake up with a sore head and regret, nothing like the emotional or cognitive closure to the relationship she hoped for, and we laugh gently at her naivety. She will never be over Ross. Indeed, the programme feeds on the question of whether closure can be achieved. Rachel and Ross’ ongoing feelings for each other provide great viewing for many more series!

In subsequent years ‘closure’ seems to have entered the cultural consciousness, as if accepted as a psychological term, whilst never being a concept I have heard in my training or work as a clinical psychologist. This made me curious. The concept has always lacked face validity for me. Closure implies a process of encircling our experiences, tying off all feelings so that they are contained. It sounds logical, but doesn’t fit with what feels true to me, and has not yet been my experience of loss. The terms acceptance and integration feel more applicable. These are active processes that do not necessarily require an end to the feelings and thoughts accompanying with loss, but more of the living with, and relating to, which change over time.

Mindful that I was going off my assumptions, I looked the term up. Not in an academic journal but through the quick source of Wikipedia. Closure was defined as ‘an individual's desire for a clear, firm answer or peaceful resolution to a question or problem to avert ambiguity’ (Kruglanski, et al, 1996). I read that Kruglanski and colleagues developed a measure of closure: the Need for Closure Scale (NFCS), scoring people on a continuum of needing closure and cognitive certainty, or ambiguity. People can occupy any point on the continuum.

I wonder if you have a sense of where you might fall?

Perhaps my lack of resonance with the term closure indicates that I have a preference for the ambiguity, and non-closure end of the scale! I wonder whether the researchers conceptualised this as a static or fluid preference, and if the latter, in what situations we occupy different positions. The Wikipedia page doesn’t say, but goes on to consider some of the implications of the positions on the spectrum. Closure, it says, is motivated by urgency and permanence. It is easy to see how favourable these would be in a culture demanding quick decisions and simple solutions that can be generalised across contexts. And one perhaps wanting us to hurry up and complete our grief. The promise of a clear, firm answer or peaceful resolution is attractive, and it is understandable that this might enter the narrative of loss and grief.

With the caveat that I have not read the source articles, Wikipedia offers possible reasons for people’s preference. One example makes me think of that ‘La la la la la’ feeling I can sometimes experience when I hear or anticipate hearing a response that I do not like or do not want! I push it out of my mind, and the topic remains open to other, preferred possibilities. Thus, non-closure perhaps stops us from experiencing reality as it is, temporarily or permanently. You might be able to identify this in yourself at times. We can neglect the raw and painful aspects of our experience, perhaps by focussing on the cognitive routes through grief. It can be adaptive, but you can probably see how this might also become problematic.

Towards the end of the Wikipedia page there is reference to the Friends episode term "closure". It is described as the outcome of an experience which, by virtue of its completion, demonstrates a therapeutic value. Given that different things have therapeutic value for different people, I remain unclear what closure means in practice!

What a fascinating rabbit hole, my mind took me down, but we are a very long way from the other knowing of grief. I wonder if it will tolerate me wandering a little closer…

Grief is a foggy place - engaging with the fog

As a clinical psychologist it is often my job to support people in or through their grief, although we do not always have a clear way of doing this (See Clinical Psychologist Sally Rigg’s recent YouTube video on grief and Long Covid for an interesting perspective on this).

I learned techniques for supporting children and adults, often experientially. My lecturers and trainers always took great care, encouraging us also to attend to our minds and bodies, and to take responsibility for what we could manage, leaving, or not completing an exercise if that’s what we needed. In doing this we recognised grief, and suffering that often comes with it, as universal, albeit deeply personal in its nature and expression. Any scars we bear from past or current losses are not always visible, and can be unexpectedly brought to the surface.

I have a powerful memory of an workshop where we were asked to imagine a tree covered in leaves. We were invited to imagine that we were a leaf, falling from the tree, and to write a letter to the tree, expressing our loss. There were no additional suggestions, so we projected whatever meaning was most resonant. In a later session focussed on working with children the workshop involved colouring pencils and drawing petaled flowers. We also created a salt jar, filled with different layers of salt that we had coloured by rubbing chalk across it. Each colour represented a different aspect of a lost loved one. We each chose what colours to use, and what each represented. Later, only I knew the significance of that strange jar of coloured salt sitting in my study. In doing these practices we learned ways to support people to give grief shape, attach words or stories, in ways that were manageable and meaningful to them.

So, prepared with a smattering of theory and practical tools, I came to know grief through my clinical practice with others. I hope that the support I offered was helpful to these individuals, mindful that there is so much more to what helps us through the pain of grief than therapy in a clinic.

Universal fog- it may be dark, but we can hold hands within in

Who has not experienced the pain of grief? Some may be caught in its grip, others with the worst of it over, and others, like me, anticipating its arrival. Relational support might come from family, friends, or professionals, offering space to talk, kindness, a shoulder to cry on, practical help, time, adjustments to expectations. Sometimes it includes advice, which can be helpful or unhelpful. These are often bolstered with the tranquilising qualities of food, drink, drugs, sport, work, sex, or a new hobby. Sometimes a holding space, offering numbness until we have the emotional resources to manage more, and sometimes a place we can get stuck.

It is painful to process feelings associated with grief and running a thousand miles away to avoid it is a natural instinct. We surely all do it at times, but the difficult parts of grief will keep on knocking at our door until we are ready to be with it. This is where the poets can be full of wisdom and powerfully healing words that name the unnameable.

Appreciation of the arts

I believe it was Craig Newnes, another Clinical Psychologist, who made an impassioned speech in a lecture early in my clinical psychology training over 20 years ago. He reminded a room of us, eager to learn the secrets of the profession, that no matter what supposed scientific expertise was bestowed by a Doctorate, the poets, painters, songwriters and musicians had been thinking and teaching us about the human condition for centuries before. Furthermore, he said that these artists often did better at getting to the heart and soul of the human experience than we ever would with our theories and therapies. Many of us knew the truth in this, and it is something I think of often!

Art allows distance. It allows us to look at a thing, and to consider it, and our response, and our own experience in relation to it. We can feel seen, and see ourselves. Art can also allow us to step right into these experiences in our bodies, and out of our heads. Standing back and looking at grief from an impassioned perspective can be helpful to bring shape to something foggy and nebulous. This is what the tree to leaf writing, and salt jar described earlier, can help achieve. Art can also take us closer, into the fog of grief, and amongst the confusion and pain that it brings. It shows us that someone else has been in this difficult place, deeply knows it, and has survived. In this, although we all have to walk our own path through our own grief, we know others have done it too, and come out the other side.

I think of grief as being like a wound. To begin with the cut is raw and painful, it bleeds. The blood hardens into scab which protects the wound, but remains delicate and tender for a while. The skin might break open and scab over a few times, but gradually the skin grows around and beneath the scab and it falls away. At the site of the new skin, there is often a scar. Over time, there is healing, but there is also a mark. The body is forever changed, always holds a reminder. Art is a bit like viewing other people’s scars and seeing the beauty and strength in them, and perhaps then in ourselves.

Many times the support in times of grief comes from loved ones or being in nature, and other times we may turn to medication or therapy, particularly when prolonged grief impacts our ability to function, or we get stuck. For others solace comes from a poetry book, or in a writing group where they create their own medicine with their words, or it comes through the act of painting or sewing. What if we created spaces where the sharp edges of the world were softened for a while by an afternoon sitting alongside each other in silence as we each read? Maybe we might find healing in a cat café, or playing board games or making Lego together. How else can art and creativity offer safe connections and support us to heal?

There seem to have been many losses and griefs for us all over recent years, and I wonder how much time and space we have had to heal in our fast paced lives. My wondering path has left me with many questions as the shadows of grief remain. What helps us to feel rooted in our own grief? What might we need to feel safe enough to engage in the most difficult feelings? What solace can we gain from the poets, and compassionate psychologist? I am thankful for the poets who help us give shape to our experiences as we walk the more difficult paths in life. Nikita and Clare’s poems conceptualise grief in ways that I recognise. There is not closure, but ‘everything’ comes back, and they ‘did not die’. Perhaps knowledge of the two types of grief, offers more containment to what can be an overwhelming experience.

I’m not ready to contemplate this beautiful soul leaving, but I certainly do not want to spend whatever time we have left numbing out.

Willow Blooms

How do we know grief?

Willow Blooms #004- Wandering in the fog

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