Grieving: Acknowledgement
Acknowledgment
Greetings, Henry here. I’ve been talking about the stages of dealing with a grief or a crisis. The first two stages I talked about were those of Shock (which we perceive as overwhelming), and Denial (where we attempt to avoid reality). Now we come to the third stage: that of acknowledgment.
Grief is one of the most painful experiences we can have. It is normal and natural that we are immobilized by shock at first and then retreat into denial to escape from the pain until we have rallied our resources to deal with it. The stage of acknowledgment is when we begin to seriously deal with our grief. What is this stage like?
When we begin to acknowledge the pain of our loss we are subject to renewed stress. We have to give up our existing structures. Now we have to admit that a loved one has died, our investments have evaporated, we are ill, the house is burned, our marriage is over, our relationship is finished, etc. The reason we have to give up our existing structures is that our experience of reality shifts. Facts impose themselves. We’ve all seen this lately with the hurricane victims returning to New Orleans and seeing their houses destroyed. We have pain in our body, an empty investment portfolio, have to attend funerals and wakes, deal with the silence in our house, deal with being alone again, etc.
Our emotional experience is that we suffer a situational depression with its deep sense of loneliness, sadness, abandonment, loss, and hurt. We feel apathetic or often bitter. This is the most painful of the four stages of grief and loss. We have all the experiences and feelings of deep mourning of sadness, loss, hurt, anger etc. There is a return of high anxiety.
The way we think about things is disrupted. Our defenses which, up until now, we used to protect ourselves from the pain of our loss break down. We have a sense of disorganization which, over time, begins to be reorganized in terms of our new reality.
If we have been ill, there is a gradual slowing of our improvement until no new change is experienced.
The other fact to note is that these stages are not separate. We awaken feelings that we can survive this loss, and then we open a drawer and find a memento of the lost person and are plunged again into acknowledgment with its mourning. In the same way we go to bed feeling terrible and awaken again defended against the pain and feeling that: “I can make it. It isn’t so bad.” Then, of course, soon our defenses crumble again.
This is the most painful step in dealing with personal crisis. There’s no short cut in dealing with it. It doesn’t take grief away to know the stages of grief but it does help to know that when we’re in deep mourning that it is a normal experience. It will pass. We’ll heal, although nothing will ever be the same again.