Taking the Journey of Grief - Step 3

G4 Emotions

The most common way to “understand” grief is to think of it in terms of stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) developed from the research of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. While useful, stages miss much of the personal significance that is present in grief. Stages may prepare us for what is probable (which means not everyone will follow the same path), but they do not help “me” understand or process that pain of “my grief.”

In this study we will focus more on story and journey than stages. These concepts are meant to capture more of the personal, messy, and non-sequential nature of grief. Grief changes the way we view life, interact with people, the meaning we attach to things, our levels of trust or security, and our sense of identity. When people or things that we love and rely on can be removed from our life, we can begin to question everything.

This changes the way we commonly classify grief. Grief is more than an emotional struggle (like depression, anxiety, guilt, etc..). Grief contains so many changing emotions that the experience itself has to be more than an emotion. Grief is more foundationally a struggle of identity. Who am I now? How has my loss changed me? How will I relate to other people? What is different about me and what is the same? Notice how Winston Smith describes one element of the story-change that occurs during the grief of a divorce.

“Your marriage gave you a roadmap for the future. Your life seemed predictable (p. 6).” Winston Smith in Divorce Recovery: Growing and Healing God’s Way

As you seek to understand the impact of your grief in this chapter, the discussion will focus upon how different factors can influence the meaning you place on your grief. In chapter four we will examine common ways these factors can be tailored into a destructive story—one that is emotionally or relationally crippling and makes God seem mean, powerless, or irrelevant. In chapter six we will examine how the Gospel gives healthy meaning to your grief without minimizing its pain.

It is here we will begin to introduce a phrase that will capture much of our objective in this study: clean grief. With this language we are comparing grief with a physical injury comparable to a cut. We cannot make such a wound heal, but we can keep it from becoming infected and, thereby, assist the natural, God-ordained healing process. The “infections” that can come with grief are the destructive interpretations we place on the experience. In this chapter we will begin to ask the kind of questions from which we make these interpretations.

“Understand”: It is important to clarify what “understanding the impact of my suffering” does and does not mean at this point. Understanding will not mean knowing “why” you experienced this loss. It does mean that you can see the number of ways that this loss is affecting you, grasp how those influences are connected with your loss, and continue to trust God as you see how He will bring comfort and redemption in the midst of your grief.

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