The death of someone important in our lives brings a lot of changes to our life. Grief is the response to all these changes. As we adapt to all these changes, grief settles down and finds a place in our life. It’s in the background and stops dominating and disrupting our lives.
There are various models and theories of grief that help us to make sense of this grief experience and help us to navigate our changed worlds. What all these models have in common is the need for us to accept the reality and finality of our loss. Grief models also talk about the need for us to restore our capacity for wellbeing in a world without our person.
The goal isn’t to ‘get over’ your grief, or to get closure. We don’t resolve or recover from grief. These terms suggest some return to normalcy, yet we know people are forever changed by their experience of grief. The goal is to navigate this changed world, tackling new challenges and reconnecting to our values and those things that interest us.
Below is a summary of the main models of grieving with links to further information if you want to learn more.
Dual Process Model of bereavement
The dual processing model of bereavement identifies healthy grieving as a process that involves alternating between focusing on your loss to focusing on the changing roles and responsibilities and other major changes that you will need to navigate because of your loss.
The goal is to ensure you move between these two focus areas over time. It is the act of shifting your focus that helps to process and move through grief. This means, allowing yourself to experience the emotional pain of your loss, whilst managing your emotions so that you can also focus on and see a promising future.
You can do this by allowing yourself to engage with and explore your grief. Below are some tips that might help this exploration:
- Engage in active emotional coping. This might involve venting and expressing how you are feeling (to yourself and others). It might mean engaging emotional support from others. It might mean drawing on your sense of humour to get you through dark days.
- Telling the story of the death. This can help dissipate the pain, help to process the loss experience and reinforces that your loss mattered.
- Connect with memories of the person who has died. Look at your photos. Reminisce with others.
- Learn to live with reminders that trigger grief.
- Engage in problem focused coping. This might mean actively attending to life changes that has arisen because of the death or making new plans for the future.
- Creating new traditions. Doing new things. Forming new relationships.
The team at What Your Grief have summarised this model in more detail in this article if you want to learn more.
Worden’s Tasks of Mourning
Worden suggests there are four tasks that that people can work through to help the grieving process.
Task 1: To accept the reality of the loss
Task 2: To work through the pain of grief
Task 3: To adjust to an environment in which the deceased is missing
Task 4: To find an enduring connection with the deceased while embarking on a new life.
For Worden these tasks are not linear and there is no specific order.
In this approach, grieving requires us to adjust to a world without our person who died. This might mean adjusting to the impact of this loss on our own sense of self and considering who are we now.
Healthy grieving means finding a way to remember who we have lost whilst embarking on the rest of our own journey through life. It is about seeing a promising future, seeing beyond what you have lost to get a glimpse of what life still has to offer.
In this article from the team at What’s Your Grief, you can read more detail about William Worden’s Tasks of Mourning.
Maintaining continuing bonds
Just because somebody has left this earth, does not mean our connection to them must end. Maintaining a bond with the person who died is a normal aspect of bereavement. We don’t need to ‘let them go’ – we can continue to preserve a place, space, and position for them in our lives.
In this video about continuing bonds we learn that despite our person no longer being with us in the flesh, we can still have a relationship with them in a new and developing way.
We can do this by:
- Talking about the person who died. Recall positive memories of time spent together.
- Developing rituals that support memories and keeping their spirit present.
- Speaking to them as if they were still here. Sharing your thoughts and feelings with them and anticipating how they would respond to you, can help to feel connected and reassured that they continue to guide you.
In this blog from Griefline, they offer 10 further tips for continuing the bond with the person who died.
Meaning making
When a loss hits us, we not only mourn that loss but also the beliefs and assumptions of what life should be. Our core beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world we live in, are often shaken.
After loss, your belief system needs to heal and regroup. This can mean re-affirming or reconstructing a world of meaning that has been challenged by death.
There are different ways we can engage in meaning making:
- Connecting with our faith.
- Honouring the loss by establishing ways to ensure that the person who died is remembered.
- Commitment to a meaningful purpose in life.
- Benefit finding – finding consolation or lessons learned from the loss, for example a greater appreciation for life or clarification of values and what matters most.
Restoring well-being
Healthy grieving means turning the focus towards you and focusing on your well-being. It’s about re-establishing and strengthening our relationships. It means reconnecting to our own values and interests and moving forward in a meaningful way. It might mean restoring a sense of competence to meet important, and often new, challenges.
PERMA model of well-being
A popular model of well-being has been developed by Martin Seligman. Seligman suggests that there are five dimensions of psychological well-being and that by tending to each element, individuals can improve their overall sense of happiness, fulfilment, and well-being.
Coping after caring
One of the biggest changes for carers who cared for their person before they died, is adjusting to a life without the role of caring. This article and checklist from carerhelp explores some of the challenges carers may face and offers practical tips for carers on things you can do to look after yourself when your caring role comes to an end.
Dealing with anniversaries and milestones
Because death is permanent, loss and grief too are permanent parts of our lives. The shape and form of this grief changes over time and it is very common for people to experience a resurgence of their feelings of grief during anniversaries, significant events and milestones. This article from Grief Australia on dealing with grief, anniversaries, and significant events, describes how when we are bereaved the calendar of our life is forever altered, divided into the time before and after the death. The article explores how certain times in our life may trigger a grief response and how to plan for these times.