The Myth of Grief 'Recovery'

Yes - I am aware of the “grief recovery method”. This post is not a critique of that program but rather an exploration of the idea that recovery from grief is at all possible or even desirable, especially with respect to profound loss.

Sandy Millar

Let’s first establish that grief refers to the often intense mix of physiological, mental, emotional, social and spiritual reactions to loss. To recover is to “return to a normal state of health, mind, or strength”, or to “regain possession or control of something lost”. Taken together, the term grief recovery suggests a return to a previous state; the resumption of a way of being prior to the experience of grief.

In fact most often a journey through deep grief renders us fundamentally altered. We may become unrecognisable to a past understanding of ourselves, often experiencing a fracturing or disassembling of our identity. In walking with grief, our work is not about regaining who we once were, but instead learning to recognise who it is we are to become. A focus on recovery or restoration limits the potential inherent in the experience of profound loss. In this way, it’s not about recovering from grief, it’s about allowing ourselves to be transformed by it.

Loss is debilitating precisely because it denudes us of that which was familiar and known, about ourselves and our lives. And yet life is littered with losses. In the course of a single visit to Earth, we may encounter the loss of possessions, friendships, jobs, cherished pets, relationships, homes, health, roles, money, imagined futures, liberty, and most of the people we know and love. Learning to live with loss is about learning to let go. This is a fundamental task of becoming fully human and a necessary condition for the evolution of our species.

Perhaps as never before, loss seems to be all around us, in the form of environmental degradation, climate devastation, species extinction, political instability, the deprivation of rights, the erosion of social decency, war, violence, pandemia and so on. Hopes of a “return to normal” after the COVID-19 pandemic were clearly misplaced.  We are irrevocably changed by what occurred—individually, communally and globally—whether we choose to recognise this or not.

Loss is an amazing teacher. In part because it so clearly reveals the condition we’re in at the time of the loss, including whether we are harbouring unresolved hurts, unexpressed desires, un-faced fears or even tightly gripped loves. This is also why each person’s grief experience is entirely their own, because the shape of our grief reflects the composition of our being at the time of the loss; across all domains—physiological, emotional, mental, social and spiritual—including the nature of our relationship to that which is now gone.  In this way, loss is a kind of reality check; illuminating our blind spots, our strengths, our oversights, our resilience, our regrets, our courage, our missed opportunities, our sincerity, our unmeet needs and our relationship to pain, discomfort and emotional distress.

Growing around grief involves honouring and integrating the essence of that what has been lost as we find our way forward. It invites us to honestly appraise ourselves in light of the loss and to make conscious choices about who we wish to become as a consequence. If our only response to grief is to recover from it, we risk missing out on its intrinsic benefits, and the opportunities for personal and spiritual growth that profound loss offers may go unrecognized and unfulfilled.

Johaness Plenio