about grief” surface to unendingly irritate, exasperate, manipulate, cajole, bully, and/or persuade us away from our own personal experience and processing of grief (James and Friedman, 2009). This is, however, why grief is such an opportunity for transformation. Because it opens up the possibility for not only recontextualizing your life as it pertains to the lost love object, but also as it pertains to your ongoing relationships.
2.Socially accepted rituals for grieving may hinder and/or complicate unfinished business, if it is experienced as a de-legitimizing, ostracizing, conflictual, and/or meaningless event. While everyone accepts a funeral is the appropriate time and place to express grief (even if your form of expression rubs a few the wrong way), it may be perceived as the only time and place in which it is appropriate, thus compartmentalizing and disqualifying the expression of those feelings in a different context. In the planning of a funeral, family members have to come together to divvy up the responsibilities. Inevitably, someone must be appointed or elected the leader and the rest must follow. More often than not, this is bound to cause conflict, stirring up those long ignored interpersonal dynamics, and for some, leading to feelings of being devalued and ostracized, which negatively impacts the “meaning making” aspect of the public ritual. Additionally, if the ritual or funeral is conducted in a religious manner that differs from the griever’s beliefs, this can detract from the experience as well.
3.The problem with assigning labels to grievers is that the grievers may then develop a sense of identity surrounding the loss, rather than integrate their feelings and move on from it. For example, “survivor” is a term typically used in a context of loss and bereavement, and while it is intellectually accurate it causes the griever to constantly revisit the circumstances of his or her loss. The griever may get caught up in defining himself and his pain, rather than in completing his unfinished business (James and Freidman, 2009). We might also include the word “veteran” in this discussion, as the word basically means “once a soldier always a soldier”; depending upon the solider’s experience of military service, this could encourage an identity forever defined by trauma and warfare, and any attempts to revise that definition to be perceived as disloyal or dishonorable.
Additionally, while loss-specific self-help groups can be advantageous in the short term, in the long term, their infrastructures can become too rigid and potentially ostracizing. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) requires an admission of helplessness and the acceptance of a higher power (Jung, 2001; Maisel and Raeburn, 2008; Matthews and Clark, 1998). But what about the incurable atheist? Grievers are already segregated in our society. Defining identity by circumstance only serves to further isolate them, which impedes long-term solutions.
What happens to us spiritually when we grieve?
James and Friedman (2009) assert there are two distinct possibilities following loss: 1) regardless of the nature of the loss, your spiritual or religious faith is undamaged, or 2) your spiritual or religious faith may be shattered or shaken. On this topic, we must delineate between spirituality and religiosity. Virgina Satir (1988) described spirituality as “a pipeline to universal intelligence and wisdom through our intuition, which can be tapped through meditation, prayer, relaxation, awareness, the development of high self-esteem, and a reverence for life” (p.338). Maisel and Raeburn (2008, p.149) describe spirituality as:
a more honest self-relationship, where the desire to be authentic replaces the idle hope to exert complete control…it means that you move on from an egoistic defensiveness…to an acceptance of the demands of personal responsibility…a leap from pride and isolation to mindfulness and connection to the larger whole.
In other words, spirituality is an existential leap towards taking responsibility for authoring your own life’s narrative, and achieving a sense of meaning by sharing that narrative with others. Religiosity is an adherence to external tenets established by a group ethos and unquestioned tradition. To practice religious adherence without spiritual awareness is to absolve oneself of personal responsibility, and use external constructs as an auxiliary ego: “It’s bad because the Bible says so,” not because you know it to be morally wrong, based on personal principle.
When we experience loss we may question both our religious and spiritual convictions, and find ourselves asking “How?” and “Why?” questions. “How could God let this happen?” “Why me? Why now?” This speaks to a fundamental sense of helplessness and lack of control, in the face of loss. Blaming God and punishing Him/Her by withdrawing a belief in His/Her existence (if it was ever previously present) are common reactions. If you take the existentialist perspective, you are responsible for answering those questions for yourself. You could also consider the same notion in a more religious context: as much as God is an omnipotent force, He/She is also present in each and every one of us. In short, “God helps those who help themselves.”
HOW DOES SPIRITUALITY COMPLICATE UNFINISHED BUSINESS?
In the context of loss, faith and religion can play a protective role in the healthy navigation of grief. For example, in a 1983 study of 92 families who had lost a child, 70 percent of the parents said their religious beliefs gave them comfort at the time of their child’s funeral. A year later, 80 percent of the parents had found strength and solace in their religion, and 40 percent felt their religious commitment was actually stronger after the child’s death (Matthews and Clark, 1998, p.25). But it is in a discerning examination of the word “stronger” that the spiritual complications for unfinished business become apparent. Wolfelt (2003, p.43) points out:
Mistakenly, people may think that with faith, there is no need to mourn. If you buy into this misconception, you will set yourself up to grieve internally but not mourn externally. Having faith does not mean you do not need to mourn. It does mean having the courage to allow yourself to mourn.
While the respondents to the study above may have self-reported a stronger religious commitment, we must take into consideration the degree of personal insight into the underlying mechanisms of their faith: is it truly the result of spiritual integration, or of an exaggerated adherence to external structures in order to avoid internal pain?
When it comes to the benefits of spiritual and religious practices in dealing with grief, grievers and practitioners working with grievers must take into account “spiritual bypassing.” Spiritual bypassing is a tendency to use spiritual and religious practices as a way to bypass or avoid dealing with emotional unfinished business. Welwood (2000) states, “While struggling to find themselves, many people are introduced to spiritual teachings and practices that urge them to give themselves up. As a result, they wind up creating a new “spiritual” identity, which is actually an old dysfunctional identity—based on avoidance of unresolved psychological issues—repackaged in a new disguise” (p.12). In this way, spiritual and religious teachings become a way to rationalize and reinforce old defenses, including and exemplified by the “six myths about grief.”
Key terms and definitions
At this point, it may be useful to examine a few key terms that are used in everyday vernacular, but perhaps are not so clearly understood.
Attachment
Attachment is a deep and enduring emotional bond that connects one person to another across time and space (Ainsworth, 1973; Bowlby, 1969). Attachment theory in psychology originates with the work of John Bowlby, who defined attachment as a lasting psychological connectedness between human beings, which is motivated by a need for physical proximity, includes appraisals of the primary caretaker’s availability, and is intended to stimulate “felt security” (Fonagy, 2001). Wallin (2007,p.1) identified three findings which he felt had “profound and fertile implications” for psychotherapy: 1) attachment relationships are the key context for development, 2) preverbal experience makes up the core of the developing self, and 3) the stance of the self towards experience (a person’s innate predisposition or temperament) predicts attachment security better than the facts of personal history. In this text, a developmental
