Frome Valley Osteopaths

Grief is a pretty universal experience, the only thing guaranteed in life is death, and I don’t mean that in a morbid way, it just is… Death, although as a society we are understandably terrified of it, is just the balance to life.

Now just because something is extremely normal doesn’t mean the feelings around it are comfortable, but it does mean that the intense emotional reactions or numbing are all extremely normal too, although not talked about. In the UK grief seems to be met with a level of stoicism and an expectation to ‘grieve well’ that I am not sure really serves us and our bodies well.

Common symptoms of grief include: Digestive problems and weight changes. Pain, discomfort or illness. Sleep Problems. Difficulty with daily activities due to fatigue or anxiety.

If we are lucky, we experience grief as the result of loosing a loved one, when that person has lived a full life. It is easier (in my experience) to come to terms with loss, when the person is older, when death feels in the natural order of things. Again this is not to say at all that it isn’t deeply painful and doesn’t have a huge impact on our lives, it is just a more normal, accepted experience that is easier to come to terms with. Unexpected, traumatic, ‘out of order’ death adds layers of distress that can understandably make the grieving process more complicated and distressing.

There are stages of grief that sound very neat and linear. However, grief is far from a neat and linear process, some of these stages may be skipped or we may go back and forth between them. The normal experiences around grief include: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Something I have come to realise as a result of working with people at all stages of life, is that grief happens far more often than just a result of bereavement. As a practitioner the physical impact, on my patients, of grief, is huge, the common symptoms of grief are things that show in clinic often. We are also supporting people through changes in their lives that may involve periods of grief. Sometimes highlighting to people that they may be grieving can really be helpful, they may be able to adjust how they show up for themselves and not be so resistant to their current difficult experience.

So when else might grief show up… on a small scale, anytime our expectation of something, wasn’t the reality of it. We are grieving our idea of what something would be and the feelings around this can be complicated. It is why acceptance of life as it is, in the reality, is so important.

On a bigger scale and something that people around us are experiencing all the time if we are open to noticing… Infertility and miscarriage, these are huge, they are around us everywhere. The language we use around ‘when you are parents’, rather than ‘if you are parents’, can be very insensitive. Also, the expectation that everyone will be, and should be, a parent can be very painful for people who are often quietly grieving an imagined future with a child/foetus they have lost, or who are grieving the idea that there will be children in their future. The dominant experience of wanting children and being able to have them, is not the only experience. Supporting people through these phases of life means hearing their perspective and believing them. Also hugely validating how horrifically painful it is to understand that the future you wanted may not happen.

Another experience of grief I see in clinic often, is related to menopause, some people don’t find this a particular challenge and are accepting of the changes that happen. For some people, in a typically ageist society, this transition into a later stage of life can be very jarring and difficult, alongside the often painful and uncomfortable physical symptoms. This difficulty may be related to losing fertile years, the ‘who am i now’ question. It may be related to accepting getting older and the physical changes that can happen as a result of that. It can make people question their worth, their place in the world. It can be a grieving process. It is then often, a liberating experience, to question those things and then be able to let them go, to settle into the next stage a bit more free of expectation maybe… Holding people while they ask these questions, while they grieve a future they thought they’d had or they grieve a youth they no longer have, can be beautiful and helpful for people. 

The next thing about grief I would like to mention, that I see in clinic, is related to health. A person may find out they have cancer, they may find out in their twenties or thirties that they have a life long degenerative condition like rheumatoid arthritis. This often massive shift in how this person sees their future can be hugely challenging for them to hold and process. Family often want it to just be OK, practitioners or friends are often the people there that leave space for all of the feeling around it. The distress, the fear, the realistic uncertainty. We can bring people back from catastrophising and we can be there in the muddle with them and give them a space to feel it all. Particularly with life long conditions there can be a huge period of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, before there can be acceptance and moving forward with a positive, autonomous, outlook. 

There are often massive experiences of grief around divorce and family breakdown. These are hugely difficult times with all sorts of complicated dynamics to manage. The imagined future is no longer possible and the adjustment around this can take lots of time and often a reorganisation of who we are and how we see ourselves.

So grief is universal, it can be sneaky. My own of experience of grief has had my brain doing all kinds of gymnastics to make our loss be ok, to make it make sense, it has convinced me of all sorts about myself and the experience so I haven’t had to/been able to, feel the intensity of what we have lost. Sometimes grief is just horrendous and it doesn’t make sense. 

We don’t need to fix it for anyone, people are amazing and our general inclination towards life means that most people come out of the other side of grief, however deep and dark, with deeper understanding of life and themselves. Most often we just need to be with people in their grief, manage our own discomfort and accept peoples experience. There are of course times where people get significantly stuck and then talking therapies, seeing your GP etc can be brilliant, but we don’t need to pathologise a deeply challenging but deeply human and normal experience. 

Practitioners keep an eye out for patients who are grieving, maybe suggest that’s what might be happening, naming an experience can be hugely helpful. Know that it will show up in their bodies. Everyone else, when did you last grieve? did you know that’s what it was? what helped? 

Look after each other, get in touch if you’d like some help. 

Lauren Manning BSc Hons Ost.