The grief we feel after a bereavement is a very personal thing. After we lose someone close to us we experience a whole range of emotions often referred to as the five stages of grief; from extreme sadness to guilt and even anger.
Sometimes, grief can seem overwhelming and we may need support from specialist organisations but, the hope is that, over time, the most intense feelings of grief lessen and it becomes possible for us to live with the loss.
Grief can be very hard to talk about, leaving people feeling isolated and confused about how they are ‘progressing’. The truth is that even people who are moving forward can return to suffering periods of overwhelming emotions from time to time.
For someone grieving, this back-and-forth of emotion can be distressing with the expectation that you should be ‘getting better’ weighing heavily. Bereavement counsellor Lois Tonkin recognised this and has sought to develop a model that will help people to understand their grief better. It is known as ‘growing around grief’.
Tonkin wrote that most theories of grief focus on a series of stages ending with some type of resolution. While most people could see their experience in terms of the stages of the grief model, a significant minority told Tonkin that, although they were moving on in their lives, their pain was sometimes just as bad as ever. “What concerned me was the people I talked to who told me that their grief certainly did not end in the way I thought it should,” she explained.
In one of her workshops, a mother whose child had died years earlier explained to Tonkin the difference between how she thought her grief would be and how it actually was. The woman said that she accepted that at first, her grief was all-consuming, but that she thought that over time it would shrink to become a smaller part of her life. The reality was that it stayed the same and her life grew around it.
The image below is a recent interpretation of the model of grief Tonkin developed from her conversations, created by bereavement charity Cruse to illustrate the idea of ‘growing around grief’. The theory rests on the idea that there will be times when we feel our grief as intensely as when we were first bereaved, but at other times we will be able to feel that we are living in the space outside our grief.
Source: Cruse Bereavement Care
This way of looking at grief doesn’t tell people that their grief will disappear; instead, it suggests that you will never be fully ‘over it’. This is helpful for people that experience times when their grief feels as intense as it did when their loved one first died. It acknowledges the continuation of feelings of grief while giving hope that there will be times when you are able to move forward in other areas of your life.
The ‘growing around grief’ model suggests that over time, your grief will stay much the same, but your life will begin to grow around it. You will have new experiences, meet new people, and begin to find moments of enjoyment.
Tonkin's model of grief is based on research and observation and is intended to provide a helpful understanding of the grieving process. It is not intended to be a one-size-fits-all explanation of grief, and it is not applicable to every person or every situation.
This approach can also help people who feel guilty about getting on with their life as if this was somehow being disloyal to the person who has died. The ‘growing around grief’ model shows how we can still grieve the loss of our loved ones while building a new life around our loss.
