Anticipatory Grief

The response from the past few missives tells me that it can be really helpful to name what’s been happening in our lives in terms like grief and loss.

Here's another aspect of this emotional puzzle you may relate to: anticipatory grief.

Anticipatory grief speaks to our normal emotion and mourning when we know a loss is coming. Although this is often related to the impending death of a person, it relates to other types of loss as well.

What might anticipatory grief look like right now? The worries, concerns and fears around the things we are going to lose, or think we might lose. The things and people we are afraid of losing in the unknowable future.

Anticipatory grief, like invisible loss, is tricky because we can’t see it. By definition, it hasn’t even happened. It's the anxiety and fear around what we could lose. Our anxiety around it potentially happening causes suffering and pain.

• You might know that layoffs are coming and be fairly certain you will lose your job.

• You might have an elderly parent you are concerned will contract Covid and die.

• Maybe you are worried about the future losses in the economy or the suffering still to come as we fight for social justice.

When our grief is prolonged in this way -- pre-grief for things we're worried about losing or know we're going to lose in the future, combined with invisible losses that are hard to see or define, combined with tangible and immediate losses -- it can lead to overwhelm, numbness and emotional shut down.

What can you do?

• Like with all kinds of grief, acknowledging the loss is essential. Here's part of an exercise I do with groups and clients:
  
  Identify a loss you’ve experienced, something you can name (e.g. a person, your job). Then write all of the things you are afraid of losing because of that loss. Not things you have actually lost, but the things you are worried about losing.
  
  You could do the same with an anticipated loss -- name it, then list the ripples of that imagined loss. What else are you afraid of losing if you lost that person or thing?
  

• Identify your grief feelings. We often think of grief as sadness, yet the spectrum of grief emotions can include anger and rage, confusion, insecurity, anxiety, jealousy and so much more. Rather than lumping our feelings into the label of "stress" or "grief," identifying how we feel helps us stay more grounded and present.

It all happens in the body

• Movement and breath practices help us regulate and stay healthy.
  

• So does meditation. Here's one to refresh your senses.
  

• So does rest. Grief can make us physically tired. It's exhausting. You do not need to push through.
  

• Get outside. Take a walk around the block, plan an afternoon by the river, sit in a park with your back against a tree.

Anything that is regulating for you is a regulating practice

• With anticipatory grief, we are worried about the future, a future that isn’t here yet, no matter how likely it is. Remind yourself that right now you are relatively OK.
  

• As discussed with invisible loss, it can be helpful to spend some time with family photos and telling family stories, sharing happy times, as well as hard times that you’ve lived through.
  

• If you find something soothing and restoring, then it's probably a great resource for you. Just keep an eye out for numbing disguised as regulating.

Brava if you followed along on this one! I always love hearing from you -- drop a note anytime and let me know how you are doing.

♥
Michelle

Michelle Marlahan
Where Self Care becomes Soul Care

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