Silent grief, also known as disenfranchised grief, occurs when individuals feel they need to carry their pain alone and hide their emotions from the people around them. It usually occurs when a person feels others won't be receptive to their pain.
Pushing emotions away. Steering clear of people or situations that will remind you of your grief. Staying busier than usual. Avoiding the normal grieving process.
“Suppressing your emotions, whether it's anger, sadness, grief or frustration, can lead to physical stress on your body. The effect is the same, even if the core emotion differs,” says provisional clinical psychologist Victoria Tarratt.
If you find yourself in the right mental and emotional space to listen to others' grief emotions, embrace the moments of silence and allow yourself to listen more than you speak. Listening more opens the conversation allowing grievers to express themselves in ways they feel comfortable.
Against Grieving in Silence | Rachel Stephenson | TEDxCUNY
What are the symptoms of silent grief?
The loss isn't seen as significant or important to others. The circumstances of the death are denied or questioned. The loss and feelings surrounding it are judged by others. Those suffering from silent grief tend to isolate themselves, compounding the loneliness many feel after losing a loved one.
As a result, many people who repress their emotions don't realize they're doing so. Unfortunately, when you don't allow yourself to pause and feel these emotions, grief often shows up as physical symptoms like an upset stomach, insomnia, anxiety or even panic attacks.
“The imprint of trauma doesn't 'sit' in the verbal, understanding, part of the brain, but in much deeper regions- amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus, brain stem – (similar to the grief response) which are only marginally affected by thinking and cognition.
A friend who's unsupportive of you after you experience a death in the family is usually because your experience hits too close to home for them. Many people are afraid of being around death.
Symptoms of absent grief include no signs or symptoms of grieving whatsoever, irritability, forgetting about the loss, not feeling connected to the loss, and denial. Though absent grief is very common, many people don't know much about it.
What does it mean if someone doesn't cry when someone dies?
There are many reasons why someone might not cry when someone dies. For some, it's simply a matter of personality. They may tend to bottle up their emotions and not express them outwardly. Others may have experienced so much loss in their lives that they've become numb to it.
Just because you don't cry doesn't mean you're not grieving or that you don't care about the person who died. Some people simply don't tend to express their emotions through tears. They might internalize their grief instead. This doesn't mean they aren't grieving, they might just express it differently.
This type of suppression may cause more pain in the long run. "If you suppress or don't allow emotional release through crying, you're more likely to feel sad, hopeless, or isolate yourself completely," says Dr. Nereida Gonzalez-Berrios, a psychiatrist in private practice.
Intense sorrow, pain and rumination over the loss of your loved one. Focus on little else but your loved one's death. Extreme focus on reminders of the loved one or excessive avoidance of reminders. Intense and persistent longing or pining for the deceased.
Masked grief is grief that the person experiencing the grief does not say they have –– or that they mask. This can be common among men, or in society and cultures in which there are rules that dictate how you must act, or appear following the loss of someone close to you.
Dysfunctional grieving represents a failure to follow the predictable course of normal grieving to resolution (Lindemann, 1944). When the process deviates from the norm, the individual becomes overwhelmed and resorts to maladaptive coping.
Avoidance is generally considered an adaptive response to loss, and an integral component of the initial, acute grief response. This avoidance may be of both situations and/or stimuli that are reminders of the loss and avoidance of emotions about the loss.
For a small but significant number of people, grief can cut so deep that getting through a single day seems impossible. They remain in the initial phase of shock and disbelief a year or more after their loss. This is especially true when there are complicating factors surrounding the death.
What is the hardest stage of grief? Depression is usually the longest and most difficult stage of grief. Depression can be a long and difficult stage in the grieving process, but it's also when people feel their deepest sadness.
Intense grief can alter the heart muscle so much that it causes "broken heart syndrome," a form of heart disease with the same symptoms as a heart attack. Stress links the emotional and physical aspects of grief.
This stage is also one of reflection. The dying person often thinks back over their life and revisits old memories.4 They might also be going over the things they regret.
What is the most common response to unresolved grief?
Whatever the circumstances of the loss, the common thread is that the sufferer tries to deny or avoid the normal aspects of their grief. Most often, they tend to hold on to their loved one and refuse to accept the loss.
Psalm 34:18 “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” Psalm 73:26 “My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion forever.” Matthew 5:4 “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.”