It’s natural and desirable to grieve in the wake of so much death and deprivation. But what is grief? Is it another word for sadness? How do we work through it? And what are we working toward, when we grieve?
The difference between sadness and grief
While related, sadness and grief are functionally quite different.
Sadness is an emotion—and like all emotions we feel it in brief episodes. Moments of truly profound sadness last only minutes at a time. Sadness leads to decreased physiological arousal when we “cry it out.” Crying signals our distress to those around us and elicits their compassion. After the tears, our heart and respiratory rates fall. This allows for some mental clarity that lets the loss sink in and moves us toward a recalibration process. The further we are from the triggering event, the less frequent and intense these episodes of sadness become.
Grief, however, contains many emotions and moods. It is a complex and lengthy process that moves us from a place of loss to a new place where we can find some equilibrium without what we lost. While sadness is about fully acknowledging the loss, the grieving process is about getting beyond it. The bigger the loss, the bigger the hole in our life, the longer we grieve. In grief, we can experience a range of emotions, from shock to anger to fear, in addition to sadness.
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