Growing around grief (Tonkin)
A picture of grief in which the grief itself does not shrink over time and the life around it grows. The usual image is a ball in a jar: at first the ball fills a small jar, and later it sits in a bigger one, the same size, with more space around it.
What drives it
It speaks to people who dread ‘getting over it’ as a kind of betrayal, because nothing has to get smaller. For identification it helps when a person’s grief is as sharp on the anniversary as in the first year, their days are fuller, and they fear that means something has gone wrong.
How it shows
Work
Back at full pace, a new role, a team that never met the person, and the grief still as sharp when a song comes on in the café at lunch.
Relationships
New friends, a new partner, grandchildren, alongside a grief that hasn’t softened. Being told ‘you’ve moved on’ and finding it both true and false.
Self
Notice whether the pain itself feels smaller, or whether there is more life around it now.
What tells it apart
Grief trajectories and resilience (Bonanno): Trajectory studies measure distress over time and find most people’s distress dropping. Growing around grief is about the felt size of the grief, and a person may function well again and still feel the grief is as big as ever.
Continuing bonds (Klass, Silverman and Nickman): Continuing bonds is about the relationship with the dead person carrying on. Growing around grief is about the size of the pain and the life around it, and the two often sit together.
Prolonged grief disorder (ICD-11, DSM-5-TR): In growing around grief the life around the pain gets bigger. If life has not grown at all, with the same daily yearning a year or more on, prolonged grief may be a closer description.
A test
Ask the person whether the grief feels smaller or their life feels bigger. If the pain feels the same but there is more around it, and that thought brings some relief, the model may fit how they live with the loss.
Questions to carry
- The last time the grief was as sharp as at the start, what else was in that day?
- What has grown in my life that the person never saw?
Go deeper
- Read: The Other Side of Sadness, George A. Bonanno, 2009, revised 2019. Written for readers by a psychologist who has followed bereaved people for years. He questions the idea that grief moves through set stages and argues that most people come through a loss with more resilience than expected. Much of it rests on his own group's studies.
How strong the research is
weak. We found no study testing the model. It appeared as a one-page piece in a practice journal and spread through bereavement charities such as Winston’s Wish, which use it with children. It is a picture for talking about grief and makes no testable claim about how long grief lasts or who it helps.
Where it comes from
Lois Tonkin, Growing around grief: another way of looking at grief and recovery, Bereavement Care 15(1), 1996