In Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice, Kenneth Doka offered a very simple definition of disenfranchised grief as an experience when "survivors are not accorded a right to grieve". Can others really deny us our right to feel sorrow and pain? Can they set limits on our bereavement? The answer is, at least in some cases, yes. It happens all the time.
In Disenfranchised Grief Revisited: Discounting Hope and Love, Dr. Thomas Attig claimed this right entitles a bereaved person to grieve when he or she needs or chooses to, and in the manner in which they choose. In response, others are obligated to honor the right and refrain from interfering in the experiences and efforts of grieving.
It's more than "a matter of indifference to the experiences and efforts of the bereaved. It is more actively negative and destructive as it involves denial of entitlement, interference, and even imposition of sanction. Disenfranchising messages actively discount, dismiss, disapprove, discourage, invalidate, and delegitimize the experiences and efforts of grieving. In this way, the people around the bereaved withhold permission, disallowing, constraining, hindering, and even prohibiting the survivor's mourning."
What Does Disenfranchised Grief Sound Like?
When you are mourning an unrecognized or undervalued loss, you may hear statements like this:
- "When things like this happen, all you can do is give it time and wait it out."
- "Eventually, you’ll get over this."
- "The best thing is to try to put what happened behind you and get back to normal as soon as possible. Try to go on as if nothing has changed."
- "There’s no point in looking for meaning in something like this. Suffering brings us face to face with absurdity. The best thing is to try to forget."
- "Face reality. She is dead. You will have to fill her place with something else."
Sometimes those dealing with grief disenfranchise their own grief with inner talk that sounds like this:
- "Somehow it feels disloyal to laugh or try to be happy. I sometimes feel that I owe it to him to live in sorrow."
- "What can I possibly have to look forward to?"
- "I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that in some ways I seem to have grown from the death of my child."
- "How can I ever let myself love again if it all comes to this?"
When Grief Doesn't Ease
Sometimes it feels as if your bereavement will never end. You feel as if you’d give anything to have the pain go away; to have the long lonely hours between nightfall and dawn pass without heartache. You are not the only grieving person who has longed for some measure of relief.
In the novel, My Sister’s Keeper, author Jodi Picoult wrote, “There should be a statute of limitations on grief. A rule book that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name."
No such rule book exists. Grief counselors and therapists tell us that the length of time it takes anyone to grieve the loss of someone they held dear to them is dependent on the situation, how attached you were to the deceased, how they died, your age and gender. So many variables exist and there’s absolutely no way to predict how long it will take for you to adapt to your loss.
Dealing with Grief
If you Google the word "grief," the search engine will deliver well over 100 million results! That's an unbelievable amount of information about dealing with grief at a time when you may already feel overwhelmed by the smallest of tasks. We are here to help.
The Difference Between Normal and Complicated Grief
Research findings have led experts to come up with many differing categories of grief experiences ranging from normal to complicated. Normal (or uncomplicated) grief has no timeline and encompasses a range of feelings and behaviors common after loss such as bodily distress, guilt, hostility, preoccupation with the image of the deceased, and the inability to function as one had before the loss. All are normal and present us with profound, and seemingly endless, challenges. Yet, Katherine Walsh says, “Over the course of time, with average social support…most individuals will gradually experience a diminishment of these feelings, behaviors, and sensations.”
So, how can you know if your bereavement is no longer within the range of normal? Ms. Walsh goes on to say, “While there is no definitive time period by which this happens if an individual or members of a family continue to experience distress intensely or for a prolonged period—or even unexpectedly years after a loss—they may benefit from treatment for complicated grief.”
