Grief (complicated, disenfranchised, anticipatory)
The response to loss. Complicated or prolonged grief is intense yearning and impairment that does not ease over many months; disenfranchised grief is loss others do not recognise (an ex, a pet, a miscarriage, a job); anticipatory grief begins before an expected loss.
What drives it
Grief reorganises a person's attachments and identity around an absence. Healthy grief oscillates between facing the loss and getting on with life, which is the key to recognising it.
How it shows
Work
Concentration dips, tearfulness at odd triggers, a flat month after a parent dies. After a layoff or sale of a company, founders often grieve without calling it that: irritability, aimlessness, 'I don't know who I am now'. Prolonged grief shows as inability to function long after the loss.
Relationships
Swings between talking about the person and avoiding the subject entirely; anger at those who 'moved on too fast'. Disenfranchised grief often looks like unexplained low mood the person feels they have no right to.
Self
Waves rather than a steady state; yearning; feeling the absence in routines. Being stuck shows as a life organised either entirely around the loss or around never thinking about it.
What tells it apart
Major depression: Grief comes in waves focused on the loss with self-esteem intact; depression is pervasive, includes self-loathing, and does not lift when the person is distracted or remembers good times.
Trauma (big T and small t): Grief centres on yearning and sadness for what was lost; traumatic loss adds intrusive images of how it happened, startle and avoidance of reminders.
Change curve: The change curve is a management model of adapting to organisational change, loosely borrowed from grief stages; real grief does not run in neat order and does not end on schedule.
A test
Ask whether the pain comes in waves tied to the loss and whether the person can still feel moments of warmth and humour; if the low is constant, self-critical and impairing for many months, consider prolonged grief or depression.
Questions to carry
- Between the waves of pain, which moments of warmth or laughter still get through?
- Which loss of mine has nobody else counted as a loss, and how have I carried it?
How strong the research is
moderate. Research supports multiple grief trajectories (most people are resilient) and prolonged grief disorder is now in ICD-11 and DSM-5-TR; the popular five-stage model has little empirical support.
Where it comes from
Erich Lindemann, 1944 (anticipatory grief); Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1969 (stages); Kenneth Doka, 1989 (disenfranchised grief); Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, 1999 (dual process model); George Bonanno, 2004
Sources
- Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917)