Grief & Loss

 
Uprooted Rising - Kristine Alyce Photography in Monterey Bay, California

Types of Grief & Loss

  • Death Loss

  • Non-Death Loss: A person can grieve the loss of anything significant to their physical, psychological, spiritual and interpersonal lives.

  • Secondary Loss: After experiencing a devastating loss, there is often a ripple effect of subsequent losses. The primary loss causes such significant shifts and fractures that there is a domino effect of losses.

  • Cumulative Loss: Refers to the experience of suffering new loss before you have the chance to grieve the first loss, or suffering multiple losses in quick succession.

  • Non-finite Loss: From childhood, people form ideas about how they think and hope their lives will turn out. People imagine, make choices, and work towards the future they think they want and, in some cases, need. But many things are out of one’s control and they may experience this loss as they struggle with trying to achieve their hopes and dreams when life falls short of their expectations.

  • Ambiguous Loss: When someone or something profoundly changes or disappears and a person feels torn between hope things will return to normal and the looming sense that the life they knew is fading away. There is no certainty or finite loss.

  • Anticipatory Grief: Grief that occurs before a potential loss. Circumstances where death is a real possibility might lead to starting to grieve the loss.

  • Disenfranchised/Stigmatized Grief: When a person feels denied the right to grieve by family, friends, community members, or society as a whole. The grieving person isn’t receiving the support or validation they need. The impact of disenfranchised grief is that the person experiencing it feels alienated, invalidated, ashamed, weak etc.

 
 
Uprooted Rising - Kristine Alyce Photography in Monterey Bay, California

Examples of Grief & Living Loss

  • Death of a loved one

  • Memory loss

  • Hearing loss

  • Vision loss

  • Loss of independence

  • Social isolation

  • Loss of a pet

  • Loss of a career

  • Primary and secondary Infertility

  • Miscarriage

  • Divorce

  • Estrangement

  • Financial security

  • Death of a dream

  • Chronic pain

  • Addiction

  • Abandonment

  • Adoption

  • Terminal diagnosis

  • Childhood trauma

  • Abuse

  • Empty nest

  • Natural disasters

  • Menopause

  • Faith

  • Intimacy

  • Infidelity

  • Retirement

  • Abortion

  • Disappearance

  • War

  • Support system

  • Legal issues

  • Global Pandemic/Covid-19

Uprooted Rising - Kristine Alyce Photography in Monterey Bay, California

Examples of Goals after Loss

  • Supporting thoughts, emotions, and mindfulness

  • Increasing organization and productivity

  • Completing critical tasks

  • Long term financial planning

  • Cultivating loving relationships

  • Seeking fun and pleasure/travel

  • Launching a meaningful career

  • Volunteering/helping others

  • Implementing community engagement/connection

  • Writing a book/memoir as a therapeutic process

  • Understanding grief in terms of love and loss

  • Awakening to spiritual possibilities

  • Reducing stress and anxiety through mind and body techniques

  • Intentionally forgiving and letting go as an act of self-love

  • Finding meaning in post-traumatic growth

  • Building a new normal

  • Believing resilience can be learned

  • Being empowered as a sensitive or empathetic person

  • Incorporating creative activities/hobbies that bring a sense of belonging and connectedness

  • Achieving new physical fitness goals

  • Improving physical health/weight management

  • Practicing self-love with compassion

  • Rediscovering and redefining what joy and balance means

  • Creating rituals for remembrance of life

  • Evaluating your support system

  • Allowing joy when grieving

  • Creating new routines

  • Supporting partner in differing grief

  • Accepting life is impermanent

Grief and loss are universal human experiences. It changes you. It takes courage to intentionally uproot yourself after loss, honoring your grief and building your new normal that leads to a fulfilling existence without being overwhelmed by suffering. Grief cannot be fixed, but carried and integrated into your new life. Little by little, life alongside grief will find new passages. By integrating neuroscience, you will benefit from brain-based grief coaching in both death losses and living losses using tools and exercises. You will intentionally live forward with creating new joy, renewing your life while you carry your grief.

Trauma permanently changes us. This is the big scary truth about trauma: there is no such thing as "getting over it." The five stages of grief model [denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance] marks universal stages in learning to accept loss, but the reality is in fact much bigger: a major life disruption leaves a new normal in its wake, There is no "back to the old me." You are different now, full stop.

This is not a wholly negative thing. Healing from trauma can also mean finding new strength and joy. The goal of healing is not papering-over of changes in an effort to preserve or present things as normal. It is to acknowledge and wear your new life - warts, wisdom and all - with courage.

— Katherine Woodlwiss