by Lynn Harnack, LPC 5/20/2019
Grief shows up in so many different ways, when I think of grief I think of loss, I think of the death of something or someone. I think of life being different from here on out, I think of sadness or sorrow, it could be a way for things to become stuck if we don’t use helpful coping skills.
After being in private practice for 6 years I have learned many things, however one that keeps coming up for me is that grief happens every day and if I don’t stop and slow down my grief <s>can</s> <b>will</b> become stuck. I believe the same things happens for my clients and that is why they come in, maybe it looks like unexplainable depression, an eating disorder, anxiety with panic attacks, fear, trauma or behavior that no longer serves.
It doesn’t matter what we call it, down in the root of it all it seems to me, to be grief. By this I mean grief of a childhood that was never what they wanted it to be or what should have been grief of a friendship that has changed a loss of a romantic relationship, or a death of a loved one. Now, all of this can make us sad, look at life differently, want to stay in bed for a bit, but that is not what I am talking about, it is when grief becomes stuck is when life becomes problematic.
In the thesaurus it says that complex can also be full of twists and turns or multifaceted. When you can no longer integrate what has happened and you can no longer live in the present because of twists and turns grief gets stuck. For instance, let’s say you have a troubling childhood, then a couple of break ups happen, then a grandparent dies, then you lose a job, and then you wonder why you can no longer trust anything or anyone. I would say this is complex grief and if you don’t get help you could start to cope in a maladaptive way.
After studying with Dr. Alan Wolfelt at the Center for Loss & Life Transition, I believe that in order to work with today’s grief we must start with yesterday’s grief. In other words, we must start with the first loss in order to move forward. To most, this might sound like a daunting task; however, in my experience and according to science, he is right. We are complex humans with dense and rich lives. Our bodies do not forget, even when we try to make ourselves forget, our psyche doesn’t. As Rick Warren says, “We are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it.”
