To best support an individual who is grieving, it is helpful to know common ways that grief affects individuals and what an individual may go through during the grief process.  This will help prevent you from pathologizing reactions that are normal and enable you to reassure individuals who are concerned about their reactions.  It is crucial to keep in mind, though, that people have their own unique grief experience.  In grief, each person is like everyone else in some respects, while at the same time like no one else.  This Integrative Health tool summarizes common grief reactions, duration of grief, and tasks of mourning.

Common Grief Reactions

Grief researcher William Worden has identified grief reactions that are common in acute grief and has placed them in four general categories: feelings, physical sensations, cognitions, and behaviors.¹  All are considered normal unless they continue over a very long period of time or are especially intense.  An individual might have one reaction, several, or many.  Reactions might be very strong for a while and then lessen, or they might not be as strong but last for a long time.

Feelings:

• Sadness
• Anger
• Guilt and self-reproach
• Anxiety
• Loneliness
• Fatigue
• Helplessness
• Shock
• Yearning  (pining for the person, or whatever was lost; thinking “if only” this had not happened)
• Emancipation (Not all feelings are negative.  Sometimes there is a sense of being released when a loss occurs).
• Relief (May especially be felt after someone dies from a lengthy or painful illness or if a relationship with the deceased was a difficult one).
• Numbness—a lack of feeling (Numbness may actually protect one from a flood of feelings all occurring at the same time).