I attended a conference once where one of the presenters said that when people undergo a major change in their lives they experience something very similar to grief. ‘Similar?’, I thought to myself. ‘No, it is more than similar, it is identical; it is grief’. Grief is our reaction to loss, not just our reaction to bereavement. This sounds a very straightforward statement to make, and yet I regularly encounter situations involving significant losses other than death where the people involved are not taking account of grief at all – even though I am sure they would do so if a death had occurred.
This is what I mean by the invisibility of grief. There are so many situations in which it is a significant factor and yet will often receive little or no consideration. I have come across social care workers who have been involved in settling older people into a residential setting (when increasing infirmity has necessitated giving up their home) who have given no thought to the grief the person concerned is likely to be experiencing. Similarly I have worked with child care staff who have not considered the grief involved in experiences of child abuse, a phenomenon characterised by many losses at many levels. Thankfully, I have also met many people who are well tuned in to loss and grief issues and respond very supportively and sensitively. However, it is the proportion of caring professionals who do not do so that causes me some degree of consternation.
I am not blaming or criticising such staff. If they have not had training on such issues and/or suitable guidance through supervision, then they cannot be criticised for not being aware of what they are not addressing.
Similar concerns occur in the wider workplace and not just in the caring professions. For example, employees may be given compassionate leave and, in some organisations at least, a very supportive response at a time of bereavement. However, if their loss is not death related, they may receive little or no support – even though losses unconnected with death can often be more impactful than a bereavement. For example, a worker whose spouse has been sent to prison may experience a stronger grief reaction than a worker whose grandparent has died (especially if they were not particularly close to their grandparent).
Kenneth Doka’s work on disenfranchised grief (Doka, 1989) has proven influential. A disenfranchised loss is one that is not recognised or socially sanctioned and does not therefore trigger off the type of social support people normal receive at the time of a significant loss. He identified three main forms of disenfranchisement: (i) the relationship is disenfranchised; for example, someone in a secret same-sex relationship – that is, one that is not ‘out’ – whose partner dies may receive little or no support if the person who has died is perceived as a flatmate or a lodger; (ii) the loss itself is disenfranchised; for example, a death by suicide may evoke less support than a less stigmatised cause of death; (iii) the griever is disenfranchised; for example, it is often assumed that people with learning disabilities do not grieve or that older people ‘get used to grief’. Corr (1998) added a fourth form when he made the important point that workplace losses can also be disenfranchised, as so many organisations are not geared up towards dealing with such matters (see Thompson, 2009).
We can also add a fifth form of disenfranchisement, namely losses that are not death related: divorce, homelessness, abuse, redundancy, becoming disabled or chronically sick, being a victim of a crime and/or violence and the myriad other losses that are part and parcel of life. Anything we put our heart into can lead to grief when we lose what we have made that emotional investment in. Grief is therefore a much wider concept than a response to death.
So, in the people professions – whether the caring professions or management and human resource practice across all sectors – we need to be attuned to issues of loss and grief and not fall into the sadly all-too-common trap of missing the significance of grief in situations where no actual death has occurred.
I have worked with many groups over the years (students at universities and practitioners and managers on training courses) where we have looked closely at just how significant a factor grief is in people’s problems – especially where that grief has not been acknowledged and given the attention it deserves. The result every time was a group of people who went away much better prepared for tuning in to loss issues. Such groups were also generally much more aware of how certain apparently inexplicable aspects of the situations they had been dealing with were now much more explicable.
Dr Neil Thompson is an independent writer, educator and adviser. He is the author of Grief and its Challenges (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and has also produced a DVD on working with loss (www.avenuelearningcentre.co.uk). His website is at www.neilthompson.info.
Written by Neil Thompson, PhD
SJS Contributor
This post was originally published @ http://www.neilthompson.info/?p=136&option=com_wordpress&Itemid=125 and has been syndicated with permission of the author.
References
Corr, C. (1998) ‘Enhancing the Concept of Disenfranchised Grief’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the association for Death Education and Counseling, Chocago, IL, March.
Doka, K.J. (ed.) (1989) Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow, Lexington, MA, Lexington Books.
Doka, K.J. (ed.) (2002) Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges and Strategies for Practice, Champaign, IL, Research Press.
Thompson, N. (2009) Loss, Grief and Trauma in the Workplace, Amityville, NY, Baywood.
Sources:
Our authors want to hear from you! Click to leave a comment
Related Posts
Neil – you have articulated in a clear manner what would cause me to be wordy and sometimes murky in educating / validating to Alzheimer’s patients family members about what they are experiencing as their loved ones continue staging. (See, what I just wrote is a perfect example! LOL)
Your article not only provided me with something to share with others, it’s also a mirror for me. It helps me to acknowledge that I’m grieving the loss of my career, and validates some of the feelings I have regarding the life changing event that has brought me this point.
I pride myself on focusing on/ looking for, and identifying the positives of any challenging situation – but in doing so I haven’t allowed myself to grieve.
Thank you for reminding me that it is healthy and important to grieve what others cannot always understand, and for challenging me to do some (difficult) soul searching.
And, yes, this time I will reach out to my close friends for emotion support and encouragement.
I’m scared, this is going to hurt. But it is the next step that has been staring me in the face that I couldn’t (and, to be honest, didn’t necessarily want to) identify.
Sometimes it’s easier to allow oneself to be stuck and isolated. Even though I know this to be true, I never thought it would happen to me again – 25 years later.
Thanks Lynn, glad to hear it has helped. It is no coincidence that I called my book Grief and its Challenges, as grief is one of the most challenging experiences we are likely to encounter. So when people don’t recognise grief as grief (because there was no death involved), it can be even more challenging.
Neil
Reading your article was a relief, only not in time for me…..I have been a local authority social worker for 21 years and had an unblemished career with the same LA for that time. A year ago my life changed radically and suddenly with a number of incidents, the most serious being the sudden and unexpected demise of my marriage and the discovery that my husband had been living a secret life for the entirety of our relationship. At the time this happened I was recovering from a head injury suffered when I had a riding accident as well as having changed my role from LAC social work (where I had been for 7 years) to an R&A team with people I did not know. I went into melt down and had what I now know to be a reaction to PTSD. I lost a huge amount of weight in a very short space of time and was not sleeping but also acting very irrationally and irresponsibly and, I would say, bizarrely. My employers reaction was to distance me from the team and their support and I had little in the way of supervision and eventually my behaviour was used to call my professionalism into question. Nearly a year later I am on a managing performance programme and have a final warning on my record which will be there for a year. I decided to get representation through an employment lawyer and I am glad I did as this seemed to save my job. I am, however, so embittered by what has happened on top of the grief that I still feel for the loss of my life as I knew it.
Sorry to hear this Nikki, but what you say sadly doesn’t surprise me. Grief is a key part of so many problems people experience but rarely recognised as such.
Excellent article. It still amazes me that despite being in the helping profession of social work I failed to recognize the grief I wasn’t acknowleging over my failed marriage of 21 years. Went through the separation and the divorce and struggled emotionally until recognition of my experience as one of grief. That was the beginning in helping me understand and heal.
Thank you for such excellent insight into disenfranchised grief. I hope and pray it helps others to begin their own healing journey with this identification.
Great insight, it sneaks up on us in ways we cannot imagine!
Thank you Angela. One of the things I have tried to emphasise in my work is that if people recognise they are grieving they may be able to deal with it without professional intervention. However, if they do not recognise it as grief and others do not help them to do so, all sorts of complications can arise.
Really insightful article, thank-you. It is also interesting to see the comments of professional social workers, often adept at seeing the impact of loss and grief on others, but do not always recognise it when it happens to them. It is unfortunately very easy to get caught in a belief system that professionals cannot be effected by loss and grief. Why? Because we have a level of professional, academic and experiential understanding of loss? The reality is all to hard hitting and we have to be gentle on ourselves in order to afford the same courtesy to others. Thank-you again for the article.
Thanks Paula, I think you’re right.