Grief
3 Outcomes of Any Loss
All losses, however big or small, have both challenges and dangers.
Posted September 28, 2019 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Loss. We usually associate loss with relationships — a death, a divorce. But loss can often more varied, more subtle, more complex than that: the loss of a job, of a dream, literally a physical part of yourself, such as a mastectomy, a war injury. The loss of an image, such as the shift in your view of your marriage when you find out your partner has been having an affair.
All losses have impact, but obviously all losses are not created equally. A canceled date that you’ve been looking forward to all week is a loss, but will have less effect than, say, a breakup after three months of dating; and three months of dating will pale compared to the end of a 30 years marriage. Similarly, the rejection from a job that you were mildly interested in will feel differently than the one that you were dying for and felt assured that you would get.
But still… a loss is a loss no matter how big or small. Here are three effects of any loss:
1. Grief
We all know about the five stages of grief — denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance. But we rarely march through them in order; they can be jumbled, the pace varying. For that canceled date, we may move through some or all of these stages quickly — What, she canceled? Why didn’t she let me know sooner? Maybe we can meet later; I’m disappointed; It’s okay, we can reschedule for Friday. Done in five minutes. But for bigger losses, the emotional rollercoaster can take weeks, months, years.
There are two common misconceptions about grief: One is that grief is merely another word for depression. They are different, though depression is part of the mix, and if you’re already depressed, it can add to the pain. Depression is commonly a flattening of emotion, a why-bother attitude, and can often bring with it a sense of being trapped and a giving up. Grief is the loss of an attachment, of connection. It obviously can be an attachment to another individual, but also our connection to our self-image, our work identity, etc.
This brings us to the other misconception: that the presence of grief is tied to the quality of the relationship. It’s not. If you finally leave an abusive relationship, you may have an immediate sense of relief, but then grief is likely to set in. Children who were abused by parents still miss them once they are out of the home. Even if you complained about your job every day for the 25 years you did it, you’re likely to still feel a huge hole in your life once you retire. The grief comes from the loss of attachment regardless of the quality.
Dangers
The dangers of moving through grief are generally two. One is that you essentially don’t psychologically move. You may march ahead, you say good riddance, you tell yourself that this is no big deal, or you become distracted by other responsibilities — planning for a funeral, dealing with an estate, pulled away by a crisis at work. When this happens, you push grief down, it goes underground, and it likely will come back to haunt you later — when you have another loss, when the emotional dust has settled and you suddenly find yourself obsessing, distracted, or angry. You haven’t given yourself the emotional space and processing that you need.
Or you do move but then get bogged down in your grief. You seem stuck; months go by and seem to be emotionally in the same place. Sometimes it's because you’re grieving not only the seemingly immediate one but other losses as well. They may be other unresolved losses from the past, or other, more subtle losses, such as the loss of identity or other relationships that you’re not fully aware of. Or your grief is being fueled by our second outcome of loss.
2. Creating an explanation
When dealing with loss — the firing from a job, the learning about the affair, the death of a close friend, the being told of a fatal diagnosis — we often and naturally obsess for days, weeks, months. Why? Because we are mentally scrambling to find some explanation for what has happened. Why me, why now? We look back over our past and replay it through this new lens, looking for clues that tell us what we may have missed, what we maybe should have done differently. The goal here is to come up with an explanation that makes sense to us, that helps us unite our previous image of our past with the current reality.
Dangers
The danger here is because your explanation is not only running through your emotional filter, it is also running through your self-image, your personality, which can contaminate and bog down the process. This is where those who tend to be self-critical can fall into blaming themselves for whatever happened — the reason for the affair was because I didn’t consent to sex enough, because I nagged too much. Here we find children, who when asked why they believe their parents divorced, blame themselves — because I didn’t do my homework, because I didn’t clean up my room.
At the other end are those, because of personality, blame others: I was fired from my job because my boss had it in for me, because my partner was a narcissist. The danger with each of these extremes is that they are extremes — likely reality lies somewhere in the middle, but the middle is lost. These faulty explanations become fueled by the third outcome.
3. Deciding how to avoid more losses
We are built for survival. If you accidentally burn yourself on a stove or have a car accident, however minor it may be, you likely are more cautious around the stove and when driving for some time after. We are hypervigilant to avoid experiencing the same trauma again.
The same happens with loss; we make some decision about what we need to do to avoid experiencing this pain again. After the canceled date, you may decide it’s a good idea to confirm any future dates the day before to avoid the sudden disappointment again. If you’ve felt burned on a series of online dating experiences you may decide to pull your profiles for a few months and regroup.
But for bigger losses, what preventive measures we decide we need to take may be bigger and subtler. If your partner had an affair, you may decide that men can’t be trusted. If you lost your job, you decide that you need to keep your mouth shut and never speak up about what bothers you. Similarly, the child struggling with divorcing parents decides that he always has to keep his room obsessively tidy. You’re moving towards the over-reaction, the overkill.
Dangers
And that’s the danger of significant losses. The toll they take is not just in terms of grief, but in skewing your view of yourself and world. The child whose parent dies decides that she needs to become emotionally self-sufficient. The devastating divorce creates a moral to the story that you shouldn’t get close to someone again, or never back down and compromise. Or you take it a step further and decide that you don’t deserve to ever be happy again.
These "nevers" become powerful and limiting. Like the explanations, the middle ground is lost. And because they are subtle and often subconscious, they spill out over the wide landscape of our lives and seriously affect our place in the world and relationships. If you are left with only your distorted view of you and the world, the lessons you take away are distorted as well. Rather than benefitting from the lessons learned, they only add your worldview, potentially making further losses not more manageable, but less.
What to do
If you find yourself falling into any of these dangers — not grieving but marching ahead, getting bogged down in some emotional state, overreacting and swinging too far in the direction of self-blame, anger towards others, behaviorally closing yourself off or not caring what you do, you need help to process your loss. Here is where talking things through with a good, clear-headed friend can make a difference, or talking with a therapist.
The take-aways are several: That grief is grief, however small the situation. That the process of grief will run its own course and can be healing if we are open to it, aware of it, and give it time. That we need to be careful about the story we wind up telling ourselves, and that it is always a good idea to get outside input as a reality check. And that we need support and patience, and be alert to ways our lives can become derailed.
Losses are a natural part of being human, of being who we are. With eyes wide open, we can choose their meaning… and learn from them.
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