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The Grief Experience

Mary Mohs, L.V.N., M.A.
9701 Deer Valley Road
Brentwood, CA 94513

As a person grieves, he or she goes through a wide variety of experiences on different levels: physical, behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual.

Physically, a person may experience:

1. a tightness in the throat or chest
2. an oversensitivity to noise
3. a sense of depersonalization; nothing seems real
4. shortness of breath
5. dry mouth
6. a lack of energy
7. muscles feeling weak
8. a hollowness in the stomach and/or stomach pain
9. heart palpitations
10. an increase of blood pressure

Behaviorally, a person may experience:

1. sleep and appetite disturbances
2. absent-mindedness due to a preoccupation with the loss
3. withdrawal
4. dreams about the person who died
5. putting all pictures of the loved one away
6. avoiding visiting places where the person who died had been in order to avoid remembering (often due to an ambivalent relationship)
7. searching for the loved-one, and calling out to him or her
8. sighing, restlessness, crying, overactivity
9. visiting places the loved-one used to frequent
10. carrying objects that remind him or her of the loved-one
11. wearing the clothes and treasuring objects that belonged to the person who died
12. crying (tears are healing, and can relieve emotional stress)

Cognitively, a person may experience:

1. disbelief--- it takes a long time to grasp the loss on all levels
2. preoccupation--- thinking about the person who died almost constantly at first
3. a sense of the loved-one's presence, with or without visual and/or auditory "hallucinations"
4. thought patterns having to do with sadness and depression (e.g., "I can't live without her"; "It was my fault he died"). It is common for one to say "I don't want to live."

Emotionally, a person may experience:

1. sadness--- missing the person who died
2. anger (often with confusion)--- "He didn't plan to die."; rage-displacement
3. guilt, self-reproach, not being able to do enough for the person (usually around the date/time of his/her death)
4. anxiety--- usually from two sources: fear of not being able to do without the loved one, and a heightened sense of death (one's own and in general)
5. loneliness--- missing the person who died, especially if one lived with him or her
6. shock--- more often occurs with sudden death
7. yearning --- wanting the loved one back
8. relief --- usually when the person dies following a long illness

Spiritually a person may experience:

1. his or her identity shifting--- feelings of emptiness, a void, denseness
2. feeling held or protected; one may notice synchronicities
3. feeling betrayed by and/or angry at God and others (one may decide there is no God)
4. going on a quest to find out where the loved-one has gone, who God is, and what is the meaning of life
5. a deeper personal awareness
6. his or her inner experience becoming more important
7. feeling joy, noticing nature more, and being more in tune with life (even while going through the pain of the loss)
8. relationships becoming more important
9. material possessions feeling less important
10. becoming more service-oriented

The first four categories are revised from William Worden's book, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy

References

Worden, J. (1982). Grief counseling and grief therapy: A handbook for the mental health practitioner. New York: Springer.