There’s a lot of information out there on grief. Most of it isn’t great.
I just typed “Grief” into a search engine and the AI Overview spit out: “The 5 Stages of Grief,” “How to Overcome Grief,” and “Things to Avoid While Grieving.”
This bereaved mom and grief counselor is shaking her head.
What’s more upsetting than society reading this information and thinking it’s “normal” is the thought that grievers might actually hold themselves accountable to misinformation.
Let’s go ahead and put three common grief myths to bed, shall we?
GRIEF MYTH 1: Crying is necessary in grief.
I attended numerous support groups after the death of my son, Elliot. I was often (lovingly) told, “don’t hold back,” or, “let it go.” Yep, you guessed it–I was the non-crier. I remember thinking, 1) what the hell am I holding back, and 2) if attending a group with all strangers and talking about dead kids isn’t letting go, then what is? I walked out of many groups wondering if something was wrong with me.
Thank goodness for the work of Ken Doka and Terry Martin.¹ Doka and Martin identified different styles of grieving–instrumental, intuitive, and blended.
I sat in those support groups as (mostly) an instrumental griever–someone who leans more toward cognitive processing of grief. That is, more thinking, and focusing on doing or action. I logically responded to Elliot’s unexpected death, I planned the whole funeral, I listened to other grievers. When I cried, it was usually alone–late at night, in the dark.
Intuitive grievers, as you probably guessed, lean more toward feeling. These grievers tend to be more focused on expressing feelings and exploring emotions openly.
Then, of course, there’s blended…and probably most of us grievers have somewhat of a mix between intuitive and instrumental. I imagine it’s all a bit of a continuum.
My point? It was incredibly validating to learn that there are different styles of grieving and that no one way is “right.” Just because I wasn’t crying didn’t mean I was grieving “wrong.”
GRIEF MYTH 2: There are stages to work through in grief.
In 1969, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote On Death and Dying, which included 5 stages of grief.² And everyone pounced on it.
What a lot of us don’t realize is that Kubler-Ross wrote her research about a person coming to terms with dying. That is, someone grieving their own impending death.
Kubler-Ross put grief on the map and we have her to thank for advancing our discussion on this topic as a whole. But the stage model has been widely debunked as a theoretical approach to grief. There are no stages. Grief is cooked spaghetti thrown up against a wall–non-linear, sticky, and messy.
A more apt way to conceptualize grief is not necessarily what we should grieve, but how we might grieve.
In 1999, Henk Schut and Margaret Stroebe introduced The Dual Process Model of Grief.³ This model doesn’t suggest stages or tasks, but that most grievers experience a regulatory process of two variables: Loss-Oriented Coping and Restoration-Oriented Coping.
For example, most grievers spend time where they sit in their loss, in their grief. Whether that be thinking about the deceased, looking at old pictures of their loved one, talking about their special person, or crying.
Additionally, most grievers spend time where they attend to their present life, in their new reality. Whether that be adapting to role changes, paying the bills, going to work, or brushing teeth and getting dressed.
Stroebe and Schut noted that what matters most is this thing called “oscillation.” A fancy word that basically means grievers go back and forth between sitting in the loss then living life in the present. It’s a balance to do both, but how that looks and on what timetable is ultimately up to the individual griever.
There aren’t stages. There’s grieving and living intermixed.
GRIEF MYTH 3: Grief has a timeline.
Wouldn’t it be great if we knew that, after a certain amount of time, we would be “done” grieving? Sort of like knowing when the NFL season runs or when tax season ends? Laughable, I know.
In reality, grief is convoluted, non-linear, and often unpredictable. Remember that cooked spaghetti against the wall?
It’s been 7 years since my son died. I no longer avoid looking at pictures of him, I can small-smile at them, now. I do not think about him every second of the day (that’s a hard one to admit), but I think of him multiple times each day. I no longer feel a sucker punch to the gut when I hear another kid with his name.
These are overall trends after 7 years. But, on any given day, I can be thrown back into the intense rawness again. That's because grief morphs, changes, moves, waxes and wanes. Cooked spaghetti.
In 1999, Klass and Silverman challenged existing grief models and theories by suggesting that maybe it wasn’t pathological to stay connected to a loved one after death.⁴ Maybe, just maybe, human attachment could continue after death…and it could even be healthy.
Sure, it looks different–the loved one is no longer physically here. But, the love for that special person and the bond still are. Whether that be lighting a candle, creating a shrine, talking to them, writing about them, or feeling their presence—the bond can continue.
If grief and love are flipsides of the coin, it would seem there is no timeline for either.
Love never dies.
Sarah Mayfield, MEd, NCC, CT
Compassionate Bereavement Care Certified Provider
¹Doka, K. J., & Martin, T. L. (2010). Grieving beyond gender: Understanding the ways men and women mourn (Rev. ed.). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
²Kübler-Ross, E. (1970). On death and dying. Collier Books/Macmillan Publishing Co.
³Stroebe M, Schut H. The dual process model of coping with bereavement: rationale and description. Death Stud. 1999 Apr-May;23(3):197-224. doi: 10.1080/074811899201046. PMID: 10848151.
⁴Klass, D., Silverman, P. R., & Nickman, S. L. (Eds.). (1996). Continuing bonds: New understandings of grief. Taylor & Francis.
About Sarah Mayfield
Sarah Mayfield struggled to find informed grief services for her son, Bradley, after the death of his brother, Elliot. Today, Sarah’s passion is supporting bereaved youth and families while promoting grief awareness.
Sarah is a Compassionate Bereavement Care™ Certified Provider, is Certified in Thanatology (Association for Death Education and Counseling) and has been a Nationally Certified Counselor since 2007. She earned both a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Counselor Education from the University of Virginia.
In her previous nine years as an elementary school counselor, Sarah loved reading picture books aloud to classes on the carpet. It was through the students’ reactions to these books that she discovered a passion for an earnest message packaged in a confident, rewarding rhythm. Sarah is also the author of the recently released children's book, This Sure Thing, which is inspired by real events and captures a boy's persistence after the death of his younger brother.
Personally, Sarah finds joy in upcycling forsaken furniture, getting lost in the plants (and weeds) of her yard, dancing unapologetically in the kitchen with her husband and kids, and remembering the motto, “Love never fails.”
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