For many decades now, the focus of grief has been on closure, acceptance and moving on. As a result, there has been a hesitancy by many to admit years later that they still have emotional ties to their loved ones who have died. In the 1996, the academic book “Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief” authored by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman was quietly released (Death Education, Aging and Health Care), and it brought a revolutionary stance to grief work. Instead of seeing grief as acceptance and moving on, they “suggested a new paradigm, rooted in the observation of healthy grief that did not resolve by detaching from the deceased, but rather in creating a new relationship with the deceased” (https://whatsyourgrief.com/continuing-bonds-shifting-the-grief-paradigm/). In this blog, I want to explore this new theory and how it adds a helpful relational component to the grief process. Before this understanding of grief arose, the process of grief was often seen as a linear emotional progression from intense grief to a place of more inner peace. Kubler-Ross’ grief model of 5 stages (denial, anger, bargaining, despair and acceptance) or other similar models often were seen in this way. While I think there is some truth to this progressive model of grief, it didn’t take seriously the relationship dynamics behind a person’s bereavement. Here is a 30 second summary of the Continuing Bonds model taken from “What’s Your Grief” website, a website dedicated to grief education. Litsa Williams (Feb, 2014) describes the Continuing Bonds model in this way” “under this model, when your loved one dies, grief isn’t about working through a linear process that ends with ‘acceptance’ or a ‘new life’, where you have moved on or compartmentalized your loved one’s memory. Rather, when a loved one dies you slowly find ways to adjust and redefine your relationship with that person, allowing for a continued bond with that person that will endure, in different ways and to varying degrees, throughout your life. This relationship is not unhealthy, nor does it mean you are not grieving in a normal way. Instead, the continuing bonds theory suggests that this is not only normal and healthy, but that an important part of grief is continuing ties to loved ones in this way. Rather than assuming detachment as a normal grief response, continuing bonds considers natural human attachment even in death” (https://whatsyourgrief.com/continuing-bonds-shifting-the-grief-paradigm/). In discovering this model of grief this spring, it helped me explain something that happened in my family last fall. As some of you might know, my two hemophiliac brothers died from HIV/AIDS, Jamie in 1992 and Kevin in 1997. When Jamie died, my oldest child was 4 years old, my middle child was 8 months old, and my youngest child had yet to born. Five years later when Kevin died, my youngest child was 2 years old. To my surprise, my youngest two children brought to my attention last fall that they were quite bothered by the fact that we, as a family, never talked about my two brothers. To them, it seemed like we, as a family, had purposely swept away the memories of my brothers and kept them from knowing each of them. In response to them, I said that I, as their father, didn’t want them to be negatively impacted by the painful tragedy of my family, and so I had put this painful past in the past. I also believed back then when my brothers died that this was the goal of grief, to get to the place where I could emotionally let go of the pain connected to the loss of my brothers, that is, essentially have no ongoing relationship with my brothers. Upon hearing my children’s desire to know their uncles, I contacted my parents and they were thrilled to have the chance again to share stories about Kevin and Jamie. For our Christmas family gathering last year, my parents brought down the photo albums and I found old family videos and we spent many hours with my three adult children reminiscing about my brothers. Instead of being a time of painful grief, it was a time of remembering and cherishing my brothers through the many memories we had of them. It was a time to reawaken my relationship and my family’s relationship to my brothers. I now wonder how we might have grieved differently over these many years if we had known it was acceptable and normal for us to maintain bonds with my brothers after their deaths. I found it interesting how this summer my parents brought up the idea of doing something special in memory of the brothers. This made me realized that my parents still had a continuing bond with their sons and my brothers despite them being dead so many years. With next year being special death anniversaries, 30 years for Jamie and 25 years for Kevin, we decided to plant a memorial tree fall with a special plaque near their graves last month. With the emergence of the “continuing bonds” theory of grief, I have come to realize that we need to understand Kubler-Ross's framework of grief differently. Instead of seeing grief in terms of emotional stages, we should see grief in terms of shifts that occur in our relationship with our deceased loved one. Lets review Kubler-Ross’s model through this relationship framework. The first aspect of grief within Kubler-Ross’s model is denial. Seen through a relationship lens, this means that the grieving person is denying that their relationship with their loved one is changing. I see this denial in my palliative care chaplaincy work when a family member refuses to accept that their loved one is physically dying. After death, we have to be careful about how we understand this denial stage. I am suspicious many people have been accused of being in denial when in reality they are rejecting our culture’s belief that death means our relationship with our loved one needs to end. This is the belief that the “continuing bonds” model of grief challenges. While we can no longer have a physical-based relationship with our deceased loved one, we can still have a nonphysical relationship with them based on our feelings, thoughts, memories, etc. of them. In fact, it is necessary that we do maintain our “continuing bond” with them for grief work is a relational process with them. Kubler-Ross’s model suggests that eventually, as we spend less time in denying our loved one is physically dying or dead, we begin to spend more time experiencing anger. This anger can have many relational elements to it. One key aspect of anger is that we are angry at God/Life/Death for we don't want our relationship with our loved one to change. This anger may be caused by the painful hole in our psyche left by our loved one’s death, a hole that our loved one filled all our life, the person who always praised us or who was our rock whom we depended on. This anger maybe tied to unfinished business due to unforgiven hurts and or promises left undone. This anger can only be resolved through us maintaining a “continuing bond” with our deceased loved one and working it through. Psychotherapists who use the empty chair technique within the Gestalt theory of counselling are using this contining bond between their client and their deceased loved one as a way for the grieving person to process their anger with them. As we process our anger, and relational shifts happen, Kubler-Ross suggests that we begin to spend time in the bargaining stage of grief. With anticipatory grief (grief before death), we find ourselves bargaining with God or life with the hope that we can change our loved one's future. When we are experiencing bargaining in our grief process after the death of our loved one, bargaining involves us processing our "if only" questions driven by our guilt. "If I had done this, my loved one would never have died." "If I had spend more time with my loved one, he would never have died alone." "How I wish I had never had said those words in anger when we talked last." Again, this bargaining stage is really a relational task, aspects in our relationship with our deceased loved ones that we need to process after their death. After we work through aspects of our guilt, we begin to experience the despair component of grief. I often equate the emotion of powerlessness with this stage of grief. In terms of our relationship with God or Life, we realize that we are powerless over death and how death happens. In terms of relationship with our deceased loved one, we believe we are powerless to change our past relationship with them, and what happened within that relationship. We also believe we cannot change the fact of the painful holes in our lives that had been filled by our loved one because they are no longer physically here. Nor can we insist they do their part in fixing the unfinish business that we have with them. Within our relationships with God/Life and our deceased loved ones, we feel lots of despair due to our beliefs that we are powerlessness to change anything. It is here at this place of despair that the Continuing Bonds theory of grief opens up a way forward in processing our pain with our deceased loved ones. While our loved one is no longer physically here, we still have an active non-physical relationship with them through memories, feelings, thoughts, sensations, etc. Once we see that we still have a relationship with our deceased loved one, we realize that we are no longer powerless to change this relationship. Yes, they are no longer physically with us, but as the Continuing Bond theory of grief attests, they are still with us through a nonphysical relationship, a relationship that has the possibility of change, a relationship that can be healed from the pain within it. As we think about or talk to our deceased loved one, write letters to them, journal about them, or relate to them with the help of a counsellor, our non-physical relationship with them begins to transform. After we have sort through the various relational dynamics connected to the despair stage of grief, Kubler-Ross suggests that we eventually spend more and more time in the place of acceptance. This acceptance is not a sign that our relationship to our deceased loved one has ended. Rather, our non-physical relationship with them has changed so that it carries less and less pain and we are able to relate to them with more love, gratitude, and peacefulness. One way to understand this continuing bond with our loved one in this acceptance state is to compare this relationship to a friendship of someone we have not seen for a long time. When our friend moves away to a new community, we still have a non-phyiscal relationship with them through our thoughts, feelings and memories of them, but these fall into the background. However, once this friend visits us, we find that we can start up right where we left off and continue the rich or complex relationship we had before. I see these continuing bonds with our deceased loved ones working in the same way. Things happen that trigger memories of our loved one and we find ourselves right there again in the present moment relating to our loved one. It may be painful memories, pleasurable memories, or feelings of gratitude. But after a while, the experience of our continuing bond with our loved one fades into the background in the same way our life returns to normal after a good friend heads back to their home. Within Kubler-Ross’s model of grief, problematic grief arises when people become stuck in one of the states of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, or despair. Within the continuing bonds framework of grief, problematic grief is tied to when our relationship with our deceased loved one becomes locked or frozen in time. A healthy relationship with a loved one, while reasonably static, still undergoes change over time. This change happens because our loved one changes or because we change or a change happens in the relationship, like a physical move. Undoubtedly, death is experienced as a big change in a relationship. However, instead of our relationship being based on a connection between two physical beings, it now must shift to a relationship between a human and a nonphysical presence. The temptation in any of the grief stages is that we become stuck here, that is, our continuing bonds with our loved one and God/life become frozen, that is static and thus lose their dynamic nature. For this frozenness to be transformed, it requires relational work to happen between both parties in the relationship, between ourselves and our nonphysical loved ones or God/life. This is why the Continuing Bonds view of grief is so important. It teaches that grief work is relational, not just cognitive or emotional, and that a relational approach is necessary for grief work. With the rise of the Continuing Bonds model of grief, professional grief counsellors now help people explore how they can nurture their relationship with their loved one now that their loved one is dead. Here are some ways Litsa Williams suggests we can continue our relationship with our deceased loved one:
Questions to ponder:
Here are five blogs from the "Whats Your Grief" website that discuss the Continuing Bonds theory of grief. https://whatsyourgrief.com/continuing-bonds-shifting-the-grief-paradigm/ https://whatsyourgrief.com/16-practical-tips-continuing-bonds/ https://whatsyourgrief.com/grief-concept-care-continuing-bonds/ https://whatsyourgrief.com/continuing-bonds-grief-journal-exercise/ https://whatsyourgrief.com/continuing-bonds-would-have-loved-this/ Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
1 Comment
|