When grief gets a little stuck - How to Understand and Support Yourself Through Complicated Grief
Sometimes grief doesn’t move the way you expect it to. Maybe you feel like you should be farther along, or you wonder why certain parts of your grief keep returning again and again, unchanged.
Grief is always complex. It is not linear or predictable. But there are times when grief doesn’t simply feel messy and painful but it feels stuck. As though parts of the mourning process have been stalled, or never fully had the space to unfold in the first place. Grievers might describe it this way: I can function, but I don’t feel alive. It still feels unreal, even after all this time. I keep circling the same thoughts and feelings, unable to experience any change.
This is what Dr. Alan Wolfelt refers to as complicated grief. It’s important to note that it doesn’t mean that you’ve been grieving wrong or that you now have a disorder (like the DSM-5 prolonged grief disorder). Dr. Wolfelt describes complicated grief as normal grief that has become complicated by circumstances that interfere with the natural process of mourning.
Why Does Grief Gets Stuck?
Grief gets stuck when its natural movement is interrupted by anything that makes mourning unsafe, unsupported, or impossible to fully experience. When we don’t have space to feel the loss, when we’re expected to stay composed, when pain is minimized or discouraged, when the death was sudden or traumatic, or when life demands survival before sorrow can be tended, grief doesn’t disappear, it gets detoured. Instead of moving through the process of mourning, it circles around, digs in, or diverts into avoidance and distraction. Know that you are not weak or wrong for experiencing stuckness.
Sometimes, grief is just complicated and requires a little more support.
What Complicated Grief Looks Like
In his work, Dr. Alan Wolfelt uses the metaphor of the wilderness of grief, a vast, unpredictable terrain that each mourner must learn to navigate. When grief becomes complicated our path has become obstructed, stalled, or diverted in ways that make mourning harder. In this landscape, grief may wander off the trail, become encamped, reach an impasse, or be delayed altogether. These are the four broad categories Wolfelt uses to describe complicated grief. They are not neat or mutually exclusive, but they can help you recognize where your own grief may have encountered natural obstacles along the way.
1. Unembarked Grief
Unembarked grief is grief that never really began. It’s grief that waits at the starting line and has never had the space and time to be expressed through mourning. Maybe your loss happened when you were very young and no one recognized your need to mourn. Or maybe you have suffered many losses over a short time, never having enough time to dedicated to processing, feeling and mourning any of them. Grief that is never given time, space and expression will stay and wait. Time does not, in fact, heal all when it comes to grief.
2. Impasse Grief
Here, grief feels like it has hit a wall.What is a normal part of the grieving process such as anger, guilt or denial doesn’t seem to move and soften over time (as you do the work of mourning). Instead, it hardens and becomes like an obstacle that prevents you from experiencing movement in your grief. You might feel like you’re circling the same feelings or ruminating over the same thoughts without moving deeper into understanding and integration.
3. Off-Trail Grief
Off-trail grief is what happens when grief is sidestepped. Rather than being felt and expressed, the work of mourning is replaced by patterns of avoidance like overworking, staying constantly busy, numbing out, intellectualizing, caretaking everyone else, or becoming preoccupied with something that keeps the grief at arm’s length. The energy of mourning gets redirected into behaviors that keep us from encountering the loss itself.
4. Encamped Grief
When grief becomes encamped, it’s like setting up a long-term residence in the pain of loss. The grief doesn’t shift or soften; instead, it becomes an all-encompassing emotional environment. People in this state may stay preoccupied with the person who died as a way of holding them close, but it can also keep life from expanding around grief.
How to support yourself
Supporting yourself through complicated grief begins with returning to the work of mourning, gently and intentionally. Dr. Alan Wolfelt teaches that grief begins to move again when we are supported in meeting the six needs of mourning:
Acknowledging the reality of the death
Allowing ourselves to feel the pain of the loss
Remembering the person who died
Developing a new sense of identity
Finding meaning
Receiving ongoing support from others
When grief has become complicated, the task is to slow down and notice which of these needs have been lacking care and attention. With time, permission, and often, with compassionate support, tending to these needs allows grief to soften and to be integrated into a life that can be good and meaningful again.
Let me know if this was helpful to you!
Love,
Marie