As our Founder always says “what we haven’t healed – gets revealed – in every area of our lives”. This week, she shares what it looks like when our unresolved grief accompanies us to work and offers some thoughtful suggestions for how to acknowledge and navigate it with honesty and compassion.
Sara Sweat, MA – Founder & CEO, A Life Curated
Grief isn’t something we naturally equate with the workplace. In fact, I’ll bet you’ve never had a conversation with a colleague about it. But, over the course of our careers, all of us will experience loss or navigate a difficult season. And, as much as we might like it to live in a separate compartment of our lives – far away from the fast paced demands of our professional realm – we humans don’t come in assemblable parts.
The experiences we encounter in one area of our lives are inextricably connected to all the other areas of our lives. The good news? When we grow or strengthen ourselves personally or professionally – both segments of life improve. The bad news?
Your unresolved grief is showing up at work whether you like it or not.
So, let’s take a look at some of the ways unhealed grief might present in the workplace & what you can do about it. But first, a few definitions.
The American Psychological Association defines grief as “the anguish experienced after significant loss”. Mayo Clinic defines it as a “natural reaction to loss”. And, per the Cambridge dictionary, grief is simply “a very great sadness”. With vague and general definitions like these, no wonder it can be difficult to spot.
In my experience, there is no one size fits all definition. Both the feeling and presentation of grief tend to be very personal. The best analogy I can make is that grief is something like childbirth.
When it’s time for a child to be born, nothing can stop it. Women’s bodies do incredible things to accommodate the task. Irreplicable physical and emotional feats, over which we have very little control, take over. And, they work in concert to accommodate the new life that demands its place in the world.
Grief is similar. When something happens – that we did not want to happen, something deep inside us is triggered and a holistic and transformative process to adjust to the loss begins.
It might be the devastating and sudden death of a loved one – or it could be the loss of a job, a pet, a belief system, a home, or a routine. We all underwent a collective grief experience during COVID when our entire way of living altered as we adjusted to the presence of the virus.
While this process of transformation might leave us feeling that tell-tale sign of sadness, in a high performing workplace it’s likely to look like something else.
Numb, Numb Numb, Numb, Numb
Have you ever heard the old adage – “If everything is falling apart at home, you’re probably about to get a promotion at work”? It’s not entirely inaccurate. When things are hard at home, work can feel like an extremely convenient place to hide. And, that’s exactly what some of us in grief tend to do.
Rather than feel the messy, painful, complicated feelings that grief often brings, we throw ourselves into an arena of life where we still feel in control – work. Whether it’s taking those extra business trips where you aren’t really needed, hyperfocusing on projects your colleagues already have under control, or expediting tasks to create artificial deadlines that require more hours, grief can make a workaholic out of almost anyone.
For others, numbing might come in the form of increased use of substances like food, drink, or even screens. Suddenly becoming the colleague who attends every happy hour or volunteers to take clients to lunch every day, or being challenged to get off your computer at any time of day can signal a desire to replace discomfort with distraction.
Anger
Finding it almost impossible to muster empathy for your colleagues when they complain about the little annoyances in their day? Watching yourself type a 4th paragraph of vitriolic prose in response to a client with yet another unrealistic request? Your grief might be showing up as anger.
In the first year of my son’s life, I was so grateful. Mine had been a long and arduous journey to parenthood & I was determined to find joy in the dream realized. But, as I continued to socialize with my childless friends, a troubling trend arose.
They would sit quietly, looking elegant, sipping wine, & talking about their experiences – work, relationships, current events – as we’d always done. Conversely, I hadn’t showered in days, hurt in places I didn’t know existed, & spent most of my time distracted – sputtering sentence fragments at them while a tiny human screamed & coughed in my face.
I didn’t feel sad or distracted or even jealous. What I felt was rage. Deep, seething, “how dare they just sit there living their lives” rage. I had lost all ability to care about their work troubles or how long they had been forced to sit in traffic. I couldn’t hear one more word about the arguments they were having with their partners or the new workout they had tried and failed. They were well rested, showered, and had the ability to regularly complete a thought. And, I was livid about their ease.
But, underneath all that exhausted harshness wasn’t anger at all. It was just me – not yet ready to let go of the life I didn’t realize I would sacrifice & struggling to make my way in my new one. What I was really feeling was grief.
Hyper-vigilance
Sometimes, when the thing we most didn’t want to happen happens, our entire nervous system becomes engaged in protecting us from it ever happening again by employing a form of hyper awareness called hyper-vigilance.
You may be familiar with hyper-vigilance in the context of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) – a serious condition which an estimated one in eleven people will experience in their lifetime. But, for someone whose unresolved grief is showing up as hyper-vigilance at work, it’s much more subtle.
- Do you find yourself obsessing over the details of a project – unable to step away until it’s exactly right?
- Do you give far too much thought and attention to areas of your work that represent relatively low risks?
- Are you catastrophizing problems that have little realistic chance of becoming significant?
- Do you find yourself playing out worst case scenarios instead of listening during meetings & then feeling panicked while trying to cover for what you missed?
- Do you get irrationally annoyed when someone is talking loudly near your desk or neglects to mute their line when their dog is barking during your conference call?
If your responses aren’t congruent to their stimulus, unacknowledged grief might be playing a role.
Detachment
Conversely, grief might be completely exhausting. It can leave our nervous system overwhelmed – which prompts us to shutdown, disconnect, and hold things at arms length until we can find our bearings again.
Developing a detached exterior at work can present in many ways.
- Physical detachment from our colleagues like no longer joining after work events, or an inability to respond to texts or emails in a timely manner
- Using inappropriate humor or challenging statements with colleagues to create the separation we subconsciously crave
- Avoiding or suddenly disliking tasks that require complex thinking or high levels of emotional output
- Changes in our typical work cycle that impact focus or our ability to accomplish complex tasks
- A sense of fear or dread that someone will notice these changes and judge us harshly
Unfortunately, regardless of how our grief presents – we can expect it to be uncomfortable. Grief is messy; it comes in waves and can look different on different days. And, like all types of transformation, it makes us feel less ourselves.
But, the process of grief is for us. Its intentions are good and its outcomes – favorable. And, thankfully, there are things you can do to support it.
Awareness
As my Saturday morning cartoon buddy GI Joe used to say, “Now you know…and knowing is half the battle.” Acknowledging that you are in a grief process is the first step to moving through it.
When we can acknowledge that we are in grief, we can also start to notice how it’s showing up for us on different days. Emotions arise in us as information. When we acknowledge and experience them in healthy ways, their intensity almost always begins to dissipate.
Simply owning and observing your grief process can be helpful in aiding it. Elisabeth Kubler Ross’ definitive works on the subject – books like On Death and Dying and On Grief and Grieving – are a helpful place to begin to develop a language and framework for common stages in the grief process.
Community
You don’t need to share your grief journey with your colleagues. But you should share it with someone. Whether through a formal grief support group, a spiritual advisor, a counselor or coach versed in the grief process, or trusted friend or family member who has been there – talk with someone.
Grief is one of the few universal human experiences. If you live long enough, you are guaranteed to experience it. And, talking about it is enormously normalizing. Humans are wired for connection. When we isolate, we’re asking ourselves to overcome a biological imperative on top of whatever it is we’re going through. Life is hard enough. So, don’t go through it alone.
Allowing
The other day, I saw a meme with two stick people in conversation. One had a colorful crown of flowers surrounding its head. The plainer of the two commented “You’ve changed”. The flower crown replied “We’re supposed to”.
When we suffer a loss, life has changed around us and in the most unrelentingly confrontational of ways, we are forced to change to accommodate it. Because the option to continue living as if the loss didn’t occur – is, quite frankly, off the table. And almost anything we do to resist it, lengthens and intensifies its discomfort.
Loss will change you.
The grief process is there to help.
No one is advocating you have a 5 alarm meltdown in the conference room. But, in the ways you can, allow yourself to feel sad when you’re sad and angry when you’re angry and exhausted when you’re exhausted. Ask for what you need when you need it. Give yourself a moment to catch your breath. I promise, the you that you’re becoming – will thank you.
Movement
Ever wonder why taking a walk when you’re upset helps you calm down? One way our brains like to move through difficult things – is by literally moving through them. Bilateral stimulation is the process by which we engage both hemispheres of the brain in rhythmic and alternating succession. Walking, hiking, biking, swimming – basically anything that requires you to move the left and right sides of your body in turn engages the brain this way.
In the 1980’s, American psychologist Francine Shapiro discovered the link between bilateral stimulation and alleviation of emotional distress. She leveraged what she learned to create one of the preeminent modalities in the treatment of PTSD – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).
The science behind movement and emotional regulation is both well researched and sound. Even 20 minutes a day can do wonders for processing through the uncomfortable emotions and disorganized thoughts that may accompany the grief process. Bonus points if you have the ability to do it outside in the sunshine as adding a little Vitamin D to the mix may help boost natural serotonin receptivity.
Meaning
David Kessler, a contemporary of Elisabeth Kubler Ross, advocate for the grieving, and renowned grief expert in his own right, added to her substantial body of work after suffering the loss of his own teenage son in 2016. His incredibly powerful book Finding Meaning proposes a sixth stage of grief – meaning.
Whatever it is that you’ve lost, electing to find meaning in its absence doesn’t mean you’re ok with having lost it. And, it definitely doesn’t mean you’re over it. But, it does mean you’ve decided not to waste it.
When the death of a beloved family matriarch ushers in a season of renewed connections and enjoyment of family traditions, you’ve created beautiful meaning in your remembrance. When the loss of a job helps you discover a career path that brings joy & fulfillment, you’ve found meaning in the loss. If a broken friendship makes room for friends that are aligned with who you truly are, then meaning has been made.
Anytime you repurpose the pain of your loss to help others struggling in similar ways, the loss was not in vain. And, knowing that something good came from all the hurt…helps.
Whatever our grief process looks like, it’s my hope that the dialogue about how to experience and support each other through it, is freely welcomed in the workplace. We don’t protect each other or our bottom line from uncomfortable experiences by ignoring their existence, but by acknowledging our shared humanity and understanding how to help.
