Complicated Grief and Useful Labels
Persistent complex bereavement disorder is not an official diagnosis in the DSM-5, but is in the section of “conditions deserving further study.” The symptoms, which also need to be chronic or recurring for more than about a year, are:
-Indefinitely yearning/longing for the deceased or ex
-Preoccupation with the circumstances of the deceased’s death or the circumstances surrounding the end of a relationship
-Intense sorrow and/or distress that does not improve over time.
-Difficulty trusting others
-Depression
-Detachment and/or isolation
-Difficulty pursuing interests or activities
-A desire to join the deceased or the presence of suicidal or self-harming fantasies
-Persistent feelings of loneliness or emptiness
-Impairment in social, occupational or other areas of life
This experience used to be called “complicated grief.”
I feel like this applies to my life since about 2016. I honestly cannot say I have had a whole lot of relief and freedom from grieving, including grief that feels multi-generational and transpersonal, or even global and in regard to the whole energy of being on this planet at this time. I feel like my version of functionality is more having learned to live with grief. I guess there have been flashes, when I am completely alone, out camping somewhere. And falling in love, but that’s a whole other conversation.
Schenck et al. (2016) highlight apparent correlations between attachment style (especially insecure attachment style) and complicated grief, and that makes sense. Of course the therapeutic approach to persistent complicated bereavement disorder is focused on the experience as a pathology, or a problem to be solved, and I am attracted to that approach at this time, since being swallowed whole by sometimes incapacitating sorrow is not the most functional way to live, really. However, I feel like it’s also simply the “new normal” for my emotional set, the baseline for a true philosophy of life, in a lot of ways, which, more about another time. So I think what I am really attracted to is learning the “coping skills” (ugh how I chafe at that phrase) to live richly and productive with complicated grief, rather than solving the problem of complicated grief.
I used to feel that I had mad skills at grieving: I could grieve, and let go, and move on. But at my later stage of life, headed toward 60, especially as I stick to a daily meditation practice and get my ear really close to my own ground, so to speak, I am discovering more and more that I was deceiving myself, and the “letting go and moving on” was often merely distracting myself, finding a shiny new relationship, staying busy, doing a geographical cure, etc. Forgetting instead of healing. And the risk of only forgetting is that one can be reminded.
I mean if “healing from grief” or “letting go and moving forward” is just denial, forgetting, the formation of emotional scars and calluses, etc., then it’s not really letting go and moving forward. (We are only undeceived of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm- TS Eliot). It’s still holding on and carrying forward, but just out of the way, pushed into the shadows. It all just goes under the bed, or in the trunk, or up in the attic, or gets beached, or whatever location metaphor you want to use.
Maybe all grief is complicated, and the blessed for whom it’s just “the grieving process,” and they come out of the other side free and clear and ready to “move on,” are the real anomaly, and the rest of us ordinary, destroyed humans are the complicated grievers.
Also, if there’s complicated grief, maybe there should be other adjectives for grief. Mysterious grief. Annoying as fuck grief. Tiresome to everyone who has to listen to it over and over again grief. Absurd grief. Ecstatic grief. Passive aggressive grief. Living through the loss of every familiar inherited value system and paradigm grief. Total global environmental catastrophe grief.
We tend to chafe at labels, but they can be useful and even healing and liberating. I have a former student, who, at age 29, was only now diagnosed as autistic (delayed or undiagnosed autism is a serious issue regarding young women). It was interesting to observe some people offer condolences on the diagnosis, or even question it, but, for her, the diagnosis and the framework for self-understanding has offered her the first flash of possible freedom and self-understanding that she has had in years. I’ve had a few experiences of finally getting a diagnosis and label and having it be that “aha! moment” of insight. Being diagnosed with persistent depressive disorder back in 2017 provided a certain amount of clarity for me. So now I have another useful label: persistent complex bereavement disorder.
