Grief, it's Complicated.....10% of the Time | Susan Delaney | TEDxUCD

Have you heard about the five stages of

grief

and how you have to go through each of them to get closure? Yes, there are not five stages of

grief

, there never was and there is no closure when we talk about grief because death ends a life not a relationship, if you cared about someone in life, they continue to matter to you after their death, we just have to find a different way to relate to that person, and since grief affects us all, it's extraordinary how many misperceptions there are about it. You may have heard some of these: it takes a year to get over grief because you have to go through all the first stages or some deaths are so difficult you would never get over them, you wouldn't be expected to or it sure isn't all grief .

complicated

in its own way and we should not label it well, let's take a look at some of them when we talk about overcoming pain.

I think we're actually talking about having the flu so if you look at that slide and look at the jar on the left if we're the jar you remember the last

time

you had the flu and you're full of flu symptoms you can't think straight you're just a flu walking you wake up one day and it's the worst day of the flu, but chances are that the next day the symptoms will become less and less and the flu symptoms will recede and if we had more balls and jars in a calm progression, in At some point you wouldn't be able to see the symptoms at all and you would be your old self again.

You will return to the fullness of your health. That is a great model for when we talk about the flu but it doesn't work for pain. Pain changes us, transforms us. it changes us forever and you know what is actually a breathing person's worst nightmare, that they would ever forget that person or that person would become invisible, so let's leave aside the idea of ​​​​overcoming the pain, that's not happens. Here's a better way to think about the onset of pain. with the same ball on the left side, but now let's call it pain and say that we are the jar, so it is like a sharp pain, when you first hear that someone has died or when you witness a death, we go into shock because the death is always shocking it is not always surprising some

time

s it is expected but it is always a shock we are destabilized we cannot assimilate it but look what happens in this progression it is not the pain the ball that is changing it is us the bottle changes like this it is actually the Grief works, it is an instinctive healing process, we grow around the pain, we become bigger, almost everyone experiences that acute grief reaction, but as they move forward in their grief journey, they again add to their lives the things that matter. , your job, your friends, your family, your hobbies, your hopes and your dreams, this is how we are programmed in pain, this is how it happens, pain is

complicated

, yes, we experience emotions like depression and anger, but Just as part of a myriad of other emotions, we are likely to experience guilt, remorse, bitterness, relief, sadness, heck. we might feel them all on the same day, that's pain for you and pain certainly doesn't happen linearly, we don't move through our pain that way like when we have the flu, it's more like a figure of eight, people have good days . and on bad days, you can wake up one day and think today isn't so bad.

I can get through today or actually let myself smile or relate to someone or not think about the person who died for a moment only to wake up the next day. and be catapulted back into your pain be ambushed by your pain simply by listening to a song on the radio that reminds you of that person, so while everyone's pain is different, there are commonalities in pain, we move forward in our pain, the trajectory is forward. It will be two steps forward and one step back, but if it moves, that's how we are programmed, so a reasonable metaphor is to think of grief as a train ride: we all get on the train but stop at different stations during different periods of time.

The difference with the grieving process is that there is no end point, there is no closure, you don't get over it, but you adapt to it, that's how we are made as human beings and I wanted to talk to you just for a moment about why we are sorry. . It seems pretty obvious to say that we grieve, we feel helpless when we have lost something we care about, and in fact we are programmed to become attached to people when we are babies, our survival depends on it, but long after we no longer need that physical care. .

We continue to seek out and become attached to the people in our lives. Most healthy adults have about five attachment figures in their lives. I will pause for a moment so you can tell, they are the people, if something big happened in your life today, they are the people you would like to tell if it is something good or bad, they are the people who calm us down, they support us, we look for them. In life, if there are children, we raise them, they are the people we care about, they take care of us and we want to take care of them, but here is something new we know about attachment figures: they actually have a regulatory function in our lives.

We like to be around them, but we actually function better when we are around them. We are our best selves, we know it, we function better psychologically, physiologically and physically, so of course we are going to protest when they disappear from our lives and, my goodness, isn't it a difficult adjustment when we realize that they disappear? have they gone forever? That is the course of grief that asks us to find a way to stay in touch with those people but accept that they are no longer in this world and I think that raises the question of whether we are, if we are so attached to them.

Well, it's interesting that we know that we have a physical immune system that can be strong or weak or can be compromised at times, but it keeps us well in our bodies, so let's say we fracture. We put a cast on our arm to keep it in place and support it, but the cast does not heal the arm, the body heals the arm, yes, the same if our heart is fractured, we have a parallel psychological immune system and if we listen carefully . To Bev, people within the first six months after a death, you will hear this immune system, we call it resilience in bed at work, people will say things like I miss some terribly, but at least he didn't suffer or at least We were able to bring it. home or God needed another angel in heaven we find a narrative that eases our pain that helps us settle into our pain and that's how it moves we have our good days and our bad days in pain what grieving people need from us they need that they will appear in our common Humanity to accompany them, support them and maybe bring some food and we in turn hope that when we breathe someone will show up for us and do the same, but what I really want to talk to you about today are the people who that It doesn't work for people who are frozen in their pain when the pain doesn't move in any way when frozen.

We describe it as complicated grief or sometimes it's called persistent complex grief and I'd like you to say that. I know that's something that's not something made up. Complicated grief is something. We are not talking about the difficulties that each death brings. Of course, every life story has its difficulties. I'm talking here about a very specific complicated grief reaction that falls. outside of that person's cultural and religious norms, not everyone agrees with this, not everyone agrees that we should diagnose grief. I can tell you that grieving people are very aware that if they're stuck in their grief, people say things about them like they're not trying hard enough or maybe they're taking advantage of it a little bit or maybe they're enjoying the attention.

No one would really want to feel what you feel when your grief is stagnant if we went back to the first ball in the jar example that acute pain that first stage of grief this is what complicated grief feels like it becomes chronic some of its characteristics are Unrelenting longing by the person who has died persistent, intrusive thoughts about the person Pains of guilt a belief that this death could have somehow been avoided an inability to participate in life in a productive way no sense that life can have again happy moments what a way to live we see people 5 10 20 or more years after a death who are living these lives of silent desperation frozen in time as if their life ended the day that person died that is no way to live, we see people who haven't left their houses in years or who only leave their houses to go to work and come home and go to bed and stay awake and berate themselves why they didn't make that person go to the doctor before, we see people without joy in their lives, people who don't listen to music because the memories are too painful, who can't go to the beach. because of the connection to that person and I really want people to know that it can be better than that: we don't have to hold on as tightly to our attachment figures after they die because we know we have a chemical connection with them.

We can't disconnect or disconnect from them, that connection is there whether they are alive or not, we just have to think about them to feel that calming influence, of course we would prefer them to be here, we understand, it is no longer an option, but the good The news is that we now have some ideas about how to treat complicated grief, as I said, not everyone agrees with this, but I'm not talking about diagnosing grief. That would be ridiculous. Most people find their own way through grief. Speaking of the 10% of people who get laid, that's a significant minority, do you know this person?

Perhaps you recognize yourself in some of those symptoms? If you do, I'd like you to know it can be better. New protocols have been developed. Columbia University in New York. we are leading this, but there are also new protocols from Australia and a couple of European sites and we have been training therapists on how to deal with complicated grief because we now know, from the trials that have been done, that we need to work in a different way. the supportive advice from these people is not enough, it's a bit like the cast, it's supportive and that's lovely, but it doesn't seem to be enough to get the pain back on track with our train metaphor, it's like the train went off the rails, so it's not a question that the person in the bed needs to try harder we have to get the train back on track if we go back to the idea of ​​the broken arm if you knew that person you would say something like take it easy now until your arm heals , yes, if they showed you your arm and you saw this.

I think you'd be saying that you should really go see someone because it's only going to get worse and you'd be right and that analogy holds true for the broken heart when you get caught. in grief, when your grief is stuck, you need intervention specialists, we know how to treat it. If you know someone who may be experiencing complicated grief, encourage them to seek help. There is no need to live your life in quiet desperation. Really no tribute to someone who died to make us live a life of misery is not the true tribute to someone who dies to make us live well and ultimately, no matter where you stand on the idea of ​​diagnosis in general, I think the only reason why We should diagnose something if it helps cure suffering and in the case of grief that is a good thing because we are the bed, thank you.