For many people, when they hear about grief it’s usually regarding a loss of some sort. The death of a loved one, the loss of a career, or something else quite painful they no longer have. These can be devastating and we don’t really heal from the experience.
We grow around it.
But there is also another type of grief. The grief we experience with the loss of a dream. This is Ambiguous Grief.
It is the pain we feel when life did not go the way we had hoped. The career we loved and sacrificed a lot for that never became reality, or did become reality and then was not at all what we thought it was. The discovery of being unable to have children. Even if we weren’t sure we wanted to have kids, the loss of the possibility can be quite painful. The dream relationship that we gave everything to only to discover the partner wasn’t who we thought they were. The child the parent had was not the gender they hoped for or was not going to follow the path the parent wanted.
These examples are ambiguous grief. It can feel very different because we didn’t have the thing we wanted in the first place. Frequently our society seems to handle this very poorly. I hear all too often from clients how they were told to just get over it, or that we are acting with an entitlement complex for being hurt by this because everyone feels disappointment.
While loss is something everyone will experience at some point, shaming the person doesn’t work. At the same time, we cannot live in a fantasy world or shut our life out from the real world and remain stuck. It can be incredibly damaging, not just to the life we let pass by, but to the others in our lives who need us. You have a responsibility to engage with the life you have, not just the one you wished for.
I realize this can sound incredibly hard, maybe even cold. But so was the loss. And deciding to check out is not really dealing with the grief. We do need to feel the pain and come to terms with it, that’s what processing and healing is.
Ambiguous Grief is a real thing. It can do real damage to a person’s quality of life and how they move forward. It’s important not to play comparisons with one person’s grief to another person’s grief. It’s never an equal level, what may only slightly bother one person could be world-shattering to another. Invalidating or trying to one-up the person suffering generally backfires. If the person is stuck in their dark hole encourage them to seek support, letting them stay stuck isn’t all that helpful either. If the grief is going on for abnormally long time, that person may not be able to get out of it on their own.
Recent Comments