How I work with grief and loss
Loss and grief are part of human life where grief is the natural and normal response to the loss in all its totality including its physical, emotional, cognitive, behavioural and spiritual manifestations. However, death is taboo for many Western cultures where we are forced to carry our sorrow in isolation and where the lack of courtesy and compassion surrounding grief is astonishing.
I witnessed this with my 77-year-old client Ella* who grieved for the loss of her partner, Alan. Within a few months of his passing, she was told by friends and family “you weren’t even married to him, so get over it”.
As a psychotherapist, I journeyed with Ella through her grief during the cold, UK winter months. Process Oriented Psychology calls this companioning. POP is a philosophy couched in Jungian psychology, physics and eastern medicine. It is a deep exploration of the holistic human being: the three-fold view (body-soul-spirit) interconnecting with the subtle bodies (physical, etheric, astral and "I") and their thinking and feeling aspects.
It’s a process that brings different tools and perspectives to help us with the different and altered states of consciousness as experienced in grief, loss, death and dying. This approach is about being with grief and deepens our connection with soul. It helps us make sense of a world turned upside down.
Weller allows a deeper journey
Another holistic approach to grief and loss is Francis Weller’s who in his “Wild Edge of Sorrow” sets out Five Gates of Grieving. This allows a deeper journey into the grieving process. Each of these five doorways into the communal halls of grief helps us understand the many ways that loss touches our hearts and souls.
The first gate “Everything we love, we will lose” is the sorrow we experience following the loss of someone or something we love. This is the gate that is well known in the Western world and is visible in Ella’s overwhelming sadness and distress.
The second gate is our grief untouched by love. Our shame. Those split off parts of ourselves that we see as defective. Where we pull back from the world and avoid all contact. I can see this in Ella feeling alone; not wanting to venture out and be with people as it’s “too painful”. This aloneness is couched in shame and is the split off part of herself. Much of her grief comes from this place and diminishes her soul life.
The third gate is when we recognise the losses of the world around us. It is when our soul notices the daily diminishing of species, the environment and cultures. Ella no longer has a travel partner. Nor does she see Alan’s children.
The fourth gate is the sense of loss of our birth right: our relationship with the earth. The loss of a safe and nurturing village “container”. The loss of rituals that hold us in our grief and healing. We are shaped for closeness to community and nature. But we face emptiness and unconscious disappointment when this doesn’t happen. As was Ella’s experience.
The fifth gate is ancestral grief. Much of this grief we carry in our beings in silence. A sadness that we can’t identify. This may be something in the family history, a wounding that occurred to a grandparent, or some experience of abandonment that resides in the psychic history of the lineage.
Again, we saw this in Ella’s experience with her mother’s grief and Ella’s abandonment by her mother and her village. Weller’s perspective of grief is about connection and consciousness in community, to the earth and the soul.
Holistic approaches are less rigid
These holistic approaches are far less theoretical, and rigid compared to the linear models of more Western approaches to death and dying as found in just say Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s approach. My experience of grief in the Western world following the death of my own father when I was 23 years old was loneliness. Ella experienced coldness of her community, and the uncaring medical model of the hospital and doctors who gave her little answers.
I can see from clients and my own experience with grief, loss, death and dying that there is a real yearning for meaning and understanding of a loved one’s passing. And the need as a bereaved person to be comforted and supported in what is a multi-layered and complex process unique to each human being.
*Not her real name.
The full article can be read on LinkedIn.
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