There are several situations your grief may not be honored or acknowledged. Your best friend dies and you cannot get time off at work approved. A family member dies from suicide and people are uncomfortable to talk with you about your loss. Your miscarriage is treated like a normal occurrence. Loss of a job or a home can be more painful than others understand.
In the 1980s Dr. Ken Doka, a professor of Gerontology and Thanatology, named this hidden grief, Disenfranchised Grief. It is a grief that is not acknowledged by your community or general society. You are left to grieve in isolation, alone in grief. This is problematic because the grief process is eased by talking with trusted others.
When a member of the immediately family dies relatives and friends rally around to support. Flowers, casseroles, cards, phone calls begin to flow. Even months later if you need some time to break away to privately grieve, people understand. Give you space and then hugs on your return. But if this grief is not accepted by others (a mistress dies, within a strict religious family a sibling’s same sex partner dies), or not considered significant to others; you are alone in your pain.
The pain one feels at the loss of a pet is often surprising to the human who lost a loyal, cherished companion. The first couple of days others are sympathetic and share their own stories of loss of a favorite pet. Days later though when the pain remains you may feel embarrassed to share the continuing pain.
When you grieve a loss that you are embarrassed to share for fear of ridicule, a shrug, or the question, “You are not over that yet?” It is time to find a trusted friend to talk to about your feelings of loss.
If there is no way you are going to open up and talk, then find another way to allow yourself to grieve. Your own private ceremony in honor of the lost one. Begin a ritual or set up a small private shrine in the yard. Build a bench, plant a tree. Take some action to honor who you lost.
A simple act to acknowledge your grief may help. A client shared after finding out about the death of an important mentor months after the death, she carried much grief that no one in her present social circle understood. This was a mentor from many years ago, not someone in her present life. One afternoon on a visit to her hometown she bought a dozen of her mentor’s favorite roses. Then visited places she had memories of her mentor, and left a single rose at each significant site.
The heaviness of the grief lifted after that afternoon. The pain of loss remained but the weight of it lifted by the act of creating an event to grieve.
This is the goal of working with disenfranchised grief, bringing it out of the dark and into the light through word or deed. Talk to someone. Or create a ritual to give voice to your pain.