Healing Unrecognized Loss and Grief

Nothing feels more lonely than unacknowledged pain!

When Grief is Disenfranchised

• Disability:

People of physical disability, learning disability, or mental disability inevitably experience a great sense of loss of normalcy. The ease and full capacity taken for granted by regular people are a dream lost or taken away from them. In addition to the need of retraining for better functioning, their loss needs to be acknowledged; the anger and frustration need to be worked through.



Some grief are cyclical and recurrent

• Parents of a child with disability:

This is not only the loss of a dream child, and the burden of taking care of the child's special needs, but it is also an on-going loss that others often do not understand.

The parents are repeatedly reminded of what their child could have been when seeing others' child advance in life.

Their grief is cyclical and recurrent.



• Divorce or loss of a close relationship:

The pain of losing an intimate companionship is often unrecognized or minimized. The grievers often hear comments such as "You deserve someone better; it is time to move on." The comments might have some truth in it, but the pain of the loss was never fully acknowledged.


• Infertility:

The loss of dream to have a child of your own. Couples who are struggling with infertility often experience a sense of isolation because others often minimize the kind of loss. This good intention to console you could feel discounting.


• Miscarriage:

The loss of the child who was never born can be as devastating as losing a loved one. Parents often form emotional attachment to a child even during pregnancy. The loss is often unexpected and it can feel as something going out of control. Grieving of the loss needs to be done properly before future pregnancy takes place.


• A family member having Alzheimer's Disease:

Although the inflicted family member is still alive, he/she is never the same, or will ever be mentally present any more. You are losing the close relationship with the inflicted person, and you might also need to take on the caretaking task for the person over a long stretch of time. The relationship loss is compounded by the financial and caretaking burden.



Multiple losses can blow us away like a storm

• Multiple losses or serial losses:

When several losses happen over a short period of time, this could create a trauma for the person. The person may not have completed the grieving for the previous loss, and is now having to face the devastating reality of a new loss.

Unfortunately, the support system may not understand the severity of the trauma for the person and not rally the support accordingly.


• Giving a child up for adoption:

A birth mother who gives her child up for adoption often experience on-going intense grief through various cycles of the child's life, such as birthday, seeing other child of similar age graduating or getting married.


• Children of adoption:

Children who were adopted often experience the grief of losing a idealized dream of an natural parent-child relationship that is idealized. The question of self-worth can come to be a question when these children wonder why they are given up in the first place.


• Abortion:

Although most women who choose to terminate their pregnancy experience a sense of relief, others, especially those who terminate because of a fetal anomaly, experience grief at the death of their child.


• Adult children of alcoholics or victims of child abuse:


What are shared in these people is the loss of innocence, the loss of basic trust, a sense of shame, and the sense of emotional invisibility. The pain of this loss is greater than what is being understood.


• The death of a pet:



The emotional connection to a pet cannot be minimized

The loss of an intimate animal companion can be emotionally desperate for a child, a single person, or an elderly person.

But this loss is often minimized as insignificant and is consoled by the suggestion of just getting another one for replacement.


• Suicide, murder, violent death, death by a drug overdose, or sudden death:

The gravity of loss involved with this type of tragedy is often not publicly acknowledged perhaps because their social network believes that it is better to keep such dark subjects off the topics of conversation. This avoidance strategy of the social world only leaves the mourners feel isolated and unentitled to process their feelings.


• Children's grief:

Children can experience disenfranchised grief when adult think that these children do not understand loss and therefore must not be able to experience grief. Unacknowledged loss like this can impact the children emotional balance.

The Secondary Loss of Unrecognized Grief

The price of unresolved grief may be anger, anxiety, depression...

• we lose our spontaneity;
• we lose our emotional presence;
• our controlled emotions may emerge in a different forms as
  • anxiety;
    
  • depression;
    
  • anger;
    
  • addiction;
    
  • or somatic problems.
    
    

Grief Support is Your Birth Right

You will come through as a renewed person

• more energy to love;
• more ability to treasure your relationship present and future;
• more ability to create meaning and purpose in your choices.