What Grief Can Teach Us

Mourning, Bereavement, and What Comes After Loss.

As National Grief Awareness Day draws to a close, I find myself thinking about grief, bereavement, mourning, and the many forms of loss that bring people into psychotherapy.

We most readily associate grief with the death of someone we love, but bereavement is only one form of mourning. We grieve relationships, friendships, jobs, homes, lost opportunities, and children growing older. We may grieve changing bodies, lost abilities, abandoned ambitions, communities that disappear, languages that are forgotten, and versions of ourselves we once imagined we would become. Grief exists at the macro and the micro, the conscious and unconscious, the unmistakable and the almost imperceptible.

Grief can be excruciating. It can leave us angry, depressed, disoriented, lonely, or diminished. Bereavement can make a familiar world suddenly feel strange and upside down. And yet grief can also be generative. Something is lost, and the mind begins trying to find a new form for what remains in the wake of that loss. Bereavement can be, in this sense, as profoundly creative a process as it is painful. Mourning seems to ask something of the psyche. When an important person, relationship, possibility, or way of living disappears, our inner world has to reorganize itself around an absence. Sometimes something new emerges from that reorganization.

It may be a novel, a poem, a piece of music, or even a scientific or intellectual idea—examples abound. Joan Didion transformed the bewilderment of bereavement into The Year of Magical Thinking; Julian Barnes explored the loss of his wife in Levels of Life; Edvard Munch returned again and again to the death of his sister in paintings such as The Sick Child; and Nick Cave's Ghosteen emerged in the years following the death of his teenage son. Even Freud's systematic self-analysis, which helped give rise to The Interpretation of Dreams and some of the ideas that would shape psychoanalysis and modern psychotherapy, was profoundly catalyzed by the death of his father.

More often, however, what emerges is something much quieter: increased compassion for another person's suffering, a new relationship to one's history, a desire to learn a language, a different understanding of one's parents, or simply a greater capacity to remain beside another human being when there is nothing that can be done to take the pain away. Much of what we call coping with grief may involve this gradual process of finding a new relationship to what has been lost.

Grief, Trauma, and Psychotherapy

Much of contemporary psychotherapy has appropriately focused on trauma, and grief and trauma often interlock in intricate ways. Sometimes a loss itself is traumatic. Sometimes trauma complicates our ability to mourn. Sometimes grief emerges years after a traumatic event when a person finally has enough safety to recognize what was lost. And sometimes what we mourn is not only what happened to us, but what could not happen because of the trauma.

I don't find it particularly useful to ask whether something is really trauma or really grief. Often it is both. Grief after trauma, relationship loss, bereavement, and major life transitions can all take very different forms. For some people, grief changes gradually over time; for others, prolonged or complicated grief can continue to disrupt daily life and relationships long after a loss.

But I increasingly find that the gravitational pull of much of my work returns to mourning: How do we continue living when something essential is no longer available to us? And what happens to our relationship with what has been lost?

The psychoanalyst Hans Loewald offered one of my favorite images for this process. He described how the “ghosts of the unconscious” might, through analysis—or psychotherapy—eventually be “laid and led to rest as ancestors” (Loewald, 1980, p. 249).

I love the distinction. A ghost haunts the present as though the past were still happening. An ancestor belongs to the past but continues to live within us. Something has been transformed—not erased, forgotten, or gotten over, but given a different place in our inner world.

Finding a New Place for What Has Been Lost

At Chicago Talk Therapy, we provide psychotherapy and grief counseling for people experiencing bereavement, trauma, relationship loss, major life transitions, and the many less obvious forms of mourning that can initially be difficult even to name.

Sometimes someone comes to therapy knowing exactly what they are grieving. At other times, grief reveals itself slowly. It may appear as depression, anger, anxiety, nostalgia, a recurring dream, a repeated relationship pattern, or simply a persistent sense that one's life isn't quite the life it was supposed to be. Part of psychotherapy for grief and loss is giving these experiences somewhere to go.

I sometimes think of the therapist's role in mourning as being something like a midwife. We cannot tell the psyche what the loss should mean, and we certainly cannot make the loss disappear. But we can accompany another person while something slowly reorganizes—helping experiences that may have felt unbearable, fragmented, or impossible to put into words become thinkable and speakable.

Grief therapy and bereavement counseling are not necessarily about “moving on” from what has been lost. Through talking, remembering, dreaming, feeling, and thinking together, a different relationship to what has been lost can gradually emerge. In Loewald's beautiful formulation, the ghost can begin to become an ancestor.

Grief remains grief. But mourning can sometimes allow what we have lost to participate in what we are still becoming.

Reference

Loewald, H. W. (1980). On the therapeutic action of psycho-analysis. In Papers on psychoanalysis (pp. 221–256). Yale University Press. (Original work published 1960)

Todd Frugia | MA, MFA, LCPC, Psychotherapist, Practice Supervisor