All our griefs and losses

LECTURE 2
Rev. Dr. Martin (Chunky) Young

Introduction

This series is about loss: 

               How personal serious losses take place.

               Why we react to loss the way we do.

               How many important forms of loss go unnoticed.

               How can we recover from the impact of loss.

               How can we help other to recover from loss.

Seek to highlight area of loss in life that don’t always appear to resemble loss, but on closer scrutiny are situation where of loss has occurred.

Approach in four ways:

               1)            All material; used comes from pastoral situations.

               2)            Grief is a normal response to loss, not an illness.

               3)            Moving grief out of simply a response to death:

4)            The course and the work that follows, is not only psychologically appropriate, it has strong theological connotations.

Part 1

The origins of Grief

Experiences that evoke grief are both more frequent and more varied than most people imagine.   The death of a person one loves is such an obvious occasion of grief that many people have come to think of it as the only such occasion….the result of that misunderstanding is that many people have experience lengthened suffering from unrecognized grief- (Mitchell & Anderson.).

In every arrival there is a leave taking;

In everyone’s growing up there is a growing old;

In every smile there is a tear;

And in every success there is a loss.

All living is dying and all celebration is mortification - (Henri Nouwen :  A Letter of Consolation.).

Examples of loss and grief that lie under the surface of our everyday lives, not necessarily involving death.  

Moving home.

Moving from a town.

Moving from one school to another

A friend moves to a different school.

Promotion at work leaving a work team behind.

Going on to retirement.

Moving into a retirement village.

Moving in with the children.

A minister leaves the church, the congregation suffer loss.

A mother cannot conceive in a way we think natural.

Still birth.

Miscarriage.

Some mother’s see Caesarean section as a loss.

A teacher loses his hair, pupils mock them.

A singer loses their voice.

Children leave home for the first time.

A child leaves the country.

A divorce breaks up a family and the dynamics of that family.

These are all instances of loss or grief.

It is not necessary, nor wise to limit the terms of grief and grieving to the emotional state and the work that the death of a loved one makes necessary.

Grief is a normal response to all of these and many other events.   The abnormality of grief is usually a consequence of the refusal to grieve or the inability of the grieving person to find those who are willing to care.

Grief is a composition of powerful emotions that confront us whenever we lose someone or something we value.

Grieving is the intentional work grief-stricken people engage in, enabling them to return eventually to full satisfying lives.

I remember talking to someone the other day about Wendy and they said, “Yes, but things just go back to normal afterword.”

That may be true, but I found these words very helpful during my research.   Robert Neimeyer a specialist of Reconstructive Grief suggests;

A person cannot return to a pre-loss level of functioning but learns how to develop a meaning life the deceased loved one, or the thing they have lost.

                                                                                          (Grief Counseling: Grief Therapy 4)

Grief can be avoided but normally at very high cost to the one who refuses to grieve.

Where does the pattern of grief begin?

Part 2

Attachment, Separation and Grief

If we go to the very beginning we begin life as connected beings.   An unborn baby is joined to a mother who provides the nutrients and environment necessary for the development of new life.

The relationship of the foetus to the mother is one of utter dependence a matter of sheer survival of one on the other.

Every human being begins the sojourn of life in the same way.

1)            The very first experience of loss.

The pregnancy ends;… the uterine attachment is broken:… the child is born.

The first experience of separation for every human being is birth!!!

(There are some researchers that claim the turbulence experienced at birth  by being expelled from the womb is the origin of all emotional disturbance???)

The emotional disturbance has never been proved or verified, but, “birth as the first experience of separation” is true for us all.

There is a deep seated paradox; being thrust from the womb is a deep seated shock, but is necessary for independent life.   Just as the connection between mother and child was vital before birth, so the separation is vital for individual human life.

So one can argue;

The genesis of grief lies in the inevitability of both attachment and separation for the sustenance and development of human life.

Why I like that, is that it highlights the necessity of both, grief is an integral part of human development and independence.  It is not an optional extra.

2)            Part two.   The transition.

The biological connection necessary between the foetus and the mother prior to birth continues in social forms throughout life.

At the same time the development of the unique individual continues after separation.

               First from the mother, physically, the foetus is cut

               Second from the mother and others psychologically.

Hence being born is the beginning of an autonomous life, but it is also an experience of loss.

Just as there can be no life without attachment, there can be no attachments without eventual loss.

Grief has its beginnings in the twin necessities of attachment and separation.

There is no life without either attachment or loss.

Hence there is no life without grief.

Stage one.   (Social symbiosis)

Something needs to happen; something needs to change once the child is born.   The child has to now move from intra-uterine dependency to extra-uterine dependency.

During this phase, the infant has no concept of a greater world.   What the infant attempts to do is have every need that was met inside the womb, met on the outside of the womb.   The child cries the mother (care giver is there) the child is hungry, it cries and is fed, the child is cold, it gets wrapped in a blanket.   This three month infant is the world to itself.  And it simply attaches outside aspects that it needs to its world.

From an adult point of view infants at this stage are totally selfish; they have no way of acknowledging or even recognizing the boundary between self and not-self.   What’s more this selfishness evokes no moral disapproval from any sensible adult; it is acceptable because the infant knows no other life yet.   (This becomes very important in any study of grief.)

Psychologists tell us, the experience of loss (any one of those described above) triggers a momentary preoccupation with self that is necessary for psychological survival, just as the infant’s preoccupation with self is vital to its biological survival.

At a moment of significant loss, needs for sustenance and protection amount sharply and in our world are often left unsatisfied; at such a point the grief stricken person may recapitulate to that early infant selfishness to the point that others notice- and instead of help as they would do the infant- they condemn it.

Stage Two. (Psychological birth).

At about the age of three months, the baby begins to see things differently.   The process of separation starts.

It is called “psychological birth” or “Hatching”

This is the process by which the infant moves toward becoming a separate distinct self.

It can happen simply:

The child cries and the mother doesn’t come, or if the mother does come she does not do what is expected.

If nurturers have provided reasonable stability for the child the experience may be relatively smooth.

But, if security is lacking, the infant experiences a disturbance in its fragile evolving self.

This psychological birth or hatching requires a restructuring of one’s entire world and is inevitably accompanied by loss and grief.

Now then, what is important is the process involved. According to Mahler,

The emotional response to such breaking and remaking of a world is not protest, but diminished activity and a low-keyed emotional tone resembling withdrawal.

The process of becoming a separate self is painful, though we value the results.

This experience of separation, essential for the formation of the self, is also the fundamental experience of loss to which all subsequent experiences of loss throughout life will be referred.

Hence it is not surprising to find patterns of selfishness and withdrawal in grief whenever it occurs.

Stage Three (Outside objects inside me.)

There comes a time when the infant begins to make a distinction between “self” and “other.”    The infant begins to distinguish between “Me” and “not-me.”   This makes attachment to other, other than mother possible. 

All of that which is not-me is other; the “other” is then divided into distinguishable objects.   Mother, father, other persons, physical objects. In object relationship theory, all of these “others” are lumped together as “objects.”

Having made the distinction between self and other the infant now demands a firm attachment to the object; “it may not be me-but- it is mine.”

The child then begins to gradually relinquish its hold on an actual object and creates an internal mental image of the object, so that when the actual object is not present the child has the image to hold onto.

In this object theory we call this an “internal construct.”

For this internal construct to be an accurate representation of the object, the object must first itself be present with relative consistency and frequency.   The develop0ement of a lively sense of self depends on having an internal world of reliable images to which the child is attached.

Now as the child begins to move away or separate itself it is very important that the mother or caregiver remain available on a consistent basis.  (Story Garreth Gtown)

If this doesn’t happen its leads to what is called premature …. object loss (not what you are thinking.    This in turn leads to a distorted mental image of the lost object.  (The child knows she has lost something, but cannot picture it clearly because it is not too familiar with what it has lost,) this evokes a sense of disorganization and even disillusion of the self.   (In other words this is a loss, and this loss may well lead to a compromised self-image.)

So, we know that the development, in human beings, of an autonomous self requires the presence of dependable objects, the capacity to make emotional connections and the ability to cope with some object loss.

Now, what is true is that this object relationship is highly individualized and each individual internalizes the world in their own unique way…therefore no two experiences of loss are the same and grief is always personal.

Out of this Worden offers the following caution;

Something that causes me great concern is the failure of clinicians and researchers to recognize the uniqueness of the grief experience.   Even though the mourning tasks apply to all dearth losses, how a person approaches and adapts to these tasks can be quite varied.   A “one-size-fits-all” approach to grief or grief therapy is very limiting.

Hence we can adapt a saying,

Each person’s grief is like all other people’s grief; each person’s grief is like some people’s grief; and each person’s grief is like no other person’s grief.

The individualization takes place because these “object relations” that we develop are internalized as either “positive” or “negative.”

In a child’s mind there is very seldom the understanding that there is both good and bad in all of us.   In a young developing child, something is either all good, or, all bad; as we grow older the oversimplification dissipates but never fully disappears.

Therefore either in childhood or adulthood someone disappears or ceases to love or dies,, those left behind may internalize the lost person as a bad object.    This happens to a child (and most grown men) when the mother refuses the breast or punishes the child or is simply absent for extended periods of time.   This also happens when the person we need is emotionally detached or unresponsive.   The lost object becomes a highly charged internalized “bad” object.   Hence we should not be surprised when the loss of a valued object generates feelings of rejection or anger.    You can’t simply take something that is valued away from someone and expect a passive reaction there may often be feeling of rejection and anger.

A Transitional Object.

For a child, the transitional object softens the terrifying process of separation from mother by providing an object that symbolizes the fusion of the infant and the mother in the midst of their separation.   When the mother knows she will no longer be there 24/7, she offers an object to the child, this strengthens the symbolic fusion.   The teddy bear is often cited as the classic example of the transitional object.   As is the blanket, (Linus from Peanuts Cartoons.)   The child becomes attached to the teddy or the blanket.   The transitional object eases the stress of transition from symbiosis through separation to object constancy and the possibility of attachment.

Now these transitional objects may also provide a similar function for adults who experience traumatic loss.   they help us to preserve the mental organization associated with a good object relation that has been lost.   (Tell story of Garreth furniture and move)

A divorced person will often talk about the hugging of a favorite pillow.   I once had a widow who would not go to sleep unless she was in her late husband’s tee-shirts, eventually she sewed all of his tee-shirts into a duvet cover.

Very often one finds clothes of a loved one who has died still hanging in the wardrobe, a person goes missing and ten years later the room has never changed.   Granny’s ashes are still on the mantel piece because the ashes become the transitional object.

Attachment and Separation:

What we have learned so far is that life is not one flat continuum.   One doesn’t start at one point and slowly or steadily progresses or regress as some would suggest to an ultimate of final destination.   Instead life is a series of “Attachments and Separations.”

The inevitability of these attachments has much to do with grief, and separation is as essential for autonomous life as the earlier attachment is for biological survival.

Attachment lends toward the desire to be loved and cared for, this is fundamental to human nature, in adults as well as children.   This means that our need to be loved and to love never ends and the possibility of loss is present throughout our lives.

If attachment is so much a part of human life and human development ingrained in our human psyche, it also means that when these attachments are threatened we all tend toward “separation anxiety.”   This anxiety will always manifest itself whenever an attachment figure is unaccountably missing.   “Being fired from a job, being retrenched, leaving the family home of forty years, even being promoted leads to separation anxiety.”

Bowlby suggests,

The threat, or the actual occurrence, of loss at any time in human life evokes panic, anxiety, sorrow, and anger in keeping with the attachment. Because attachment id lifelong, so is grief.

Some psychologists argue;

The inability to respond constructively to loss in later life also has its genesis in the child’s experience of separation from the mother figure.

Let me unpack that before you all go shooting me down as I am sure you would like to.

Bowlby argues as follows;

Anyone who has left a young child for any length of time can understand quite well the process Bowlby puts forward.

When a child is left alone, first there is protest; based on the conviction that tears or temper will be effective in bringing mother back.

When the hope of mother’s return fades, there is no more reason to protest.   At that point, the child becomes quiet.   The child continues to yearn for mother’s return, but the dominant emotion is despair.   Eventually, if the separation id protracted enough, the child forgets about mother, becomes detached and unresponsive even when mother returns.   What is important to understand is that this detachment if strong enough can mask a yearning for and anger with the lost person.   Hence in one way or another, protest, despair, and detachment are integral to the process of grieving throughout life.

All of this becomes a mourning process for the child.

Why this is important is because according to Bowdly, this process of mourning in which aggression, the function of which is to achieve reunion, plays a major part.   There is thus a connection between the an individual’s early affectional bonding with parents and his her later capacity to make affectional bonds.   When that initial attachment, bonding is not fully achieved or prematurely 

aborted, attachment always produces anxiety.   Thus the grieving adults demand for the absent person (job, house, friend, car etc.) return and reproach against him, her (object) for leaving are continuous with the child’s protest in the face of loss.

Attachment must not be confused with dependency; dependency happens and is necessary for the young child, as the child grows older dependency gives way to attachment.   A mature person recognizes the difference between dependency and attachment.

When either attachment or loss is distorted, or prematurely done away with, human life is diminished.             

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