Complicated grief: how therapy helped quell my nightmares two decades after my father’s sudden death
- Grief is natural after losing a loved one, but sometimes it can last longer than expected, or crop up many years later
- The author experienced this 20 years after her father died in a car crash, and visiting a therapist gave her peace
Grieving the loss of a loved one is never simple – it can’t be. But it can be tougher for some people than others for lots of reasons. It will always be much harder to accept the death of a child that turns the order of life on its head than the loss of a grandparent. The circumstances of death – whether it was quick and painless, or long and debilitating – can also have an impact.
In her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described five stages of grief: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Since then, others have suggested that the stages should be referred to as states, since a grieving person may not experience all of them, and in no particular order. Other states have been put forward, including shock and testing, which usually come before acceptance, and reverie and revival – in which the memory of the lost one is elevated and cherished while the rest of life goes on.
Grief isn’t linear: you may be unable to function one day and the next you might manage to laugh at lunch with friends. And it manifests in a million different ways in a million different people. Grief is messy, even when it’s anticipated, even when you understood you were going to lose a loved one.
While grieving is difficult, it is a normal and natural reaction to loss, says Dr Andrew Stock, clinical psychologist and president of the Psychotherapy Society of Hong Kong. We’re all going to die, so we accept death, reluctantly, as a constant in our ever changing world. But we need a name, an added descriptor to use, when grief unfolds in a less healthy way, he says.
In psychiatry, the clinical term used to identify complicated grief is persistent complex bereavement disorder, assigned to those who are significantly and functionally impaired by prolonged grief symptoms. How would you know, though, if somebody was suffering from complicated grief?
