There are many different types of loss and each grief experienced will be unique in its own way, regardless if the same loss happens to the same person on repeated occasions or the same loss across multiple people.
Some may find it helpful to label what kind of loss they may be experiencing. This is by no means a complete list but a starting point to begin to understand your own unique journey. You may find you’ve experience some, all, or several at the same time.
Different types of grief:
- Ambiguous: Grief that’s hard to see. When something or someone greatly changes or disappears.
- For example, when a person is still physically with us but is psychologically gone. Commonly seen with dementia, addiction, or traumatic brain injuries.
- Delayed: Grief that is not felt in the moment because our bodies are informing us that it is not yet safe to feel these emotions, or our body has been in survival mode.
- Disenfranchised: Any grief that we feel we cannot openly acknowledge, or we feel denied the right to grieve by others. Either by friends, family, community members or society as a whole.
- Collective/public: When we grieve as a group.
- For example, grieving a public figure.
- Traumatic: combining trauma with the grief responses. This does not necessarily mean that the specific nature of the death is what makes it traumatic (although it can), but more importantly it’s how the event is experienced by the individual.
- Anticipatory: grieving that occurs before the potential loss.
- For example, grieving a loved one diagnosed with a terminal illness.
- Cumulative: experiencing multiple losses within a short period of time or grief that has not been attended to and continues to build.
- Secondary: All the subsequent losses that occur (like a domino effect) after the primary loss. We say secondary, not because these losses are less important or impactful but because they are a result of the primary loss.
- For example, your partner who has died was the primary financial earner within the relationship and now you’re also experiencing loss of income, loss of stability, loss of a support system, etc.
If we think about our recent experiences going through the Covid-19 pandemic and the consequences brought on (e.g. loss of graduations, vacations, weddings, connection, etc.), you may be able to place these losses within several of the categories listed above.
Example of how the grief from the death of a loved one has many secondary losses interconnected.
Exercise: write down the types of grief from the list you’ve experienced or are connecting to. Then write which grief in your life you feel it is connected to and why.
If you’d like to learn more about grief please visit our resource page for additional info, or if you’d like to further explore your own grief, book a session with one of our therapists today.
