Complicated Grief: Q & A with Dr. M. Katherine Shear

complicated grief is different from ordinary grief from uncomplicated grief because well grief is always very very challenging the world after you lose someone close the world is completely changed and so you do have to navigate a whole new life for yourself really but most people do that they don't lose their grief but they do find a way to have a life that has purpose and meaning in it and the possibility of happiness and that's the grief kind of gets reshaped and interwoven into the life that they're leading that is a happy life still so so people with complicated grief really can't do that they just don't know how to remake their life in a way that has a sense of meaning that has the possibility even if any kind of joy or satisfaction in it and so that's really the difference you complicated grief has some symptoms that are kind of like depression and people get them confused because you're sad when you're depressed and you're sad when you have grief or complicated grief but they're they're really they're pretty different in that complicated grief the person is absolutely able to have positive feelings and they have a lot of positive feelings about the person who died so many positive feelings that all they want is to have that person back whereas someone who's very very sad and depressed doesn't want anything they they really are feeling like the world just doesn't have anything in it that's positive the the symptoms of complicated grief are really in part they're similar to symptoms of acute grief where right after someone dies so there's a lot of yearning and longing even searching for the person who died a lot of sorrow and maybe some other mixed kind of negative emotions and there's a lot of thoughts and memories of the person who died and almost like a sense of disbelief it's not that they don't know that the person died but it's like a feeling like how could this possibly have happened that you have right after someone dies so that's that's part of what complicated grief is and the other part is what we call the complicating symptoms which are a kind of very often sort of second guessing kind of thoughts and if only kind of thoughts that the person is very much thinking that if only I had done something different or somebody had done something different then that person would still be alive so there those kinds of thoughts there's a lot of avoidance behavior or trying to escape from the reality of the loss by focusing a lot on the person who died in the memories of that person so it's either avoiding any kind of reminder of the loss or escaping from the reality by almost almost like pretending the person is still around or daydreaming about when they were around in a kind of dissociated way and in emotions that are continue to be intensely intensely kind of roller-coaster emotions where they're they they just come in these intense waves of sadness your name longing that the person just can't regulate at all we don't yet know exactly why people develop complicated grief we don't have good research data to answer that question but from working with a lot of people we have some ideas about that and and one thing is that women tend to get complicated grief more than men another is that people who have a history of anxiety disorders or depression seem to be more prone to getting complicated grief also people who have complicated grief very often have had troubled relationships with their families with their earliest caregivers they've they've had to kind of struggle through that and that makes them it seems to make them a bit vulnerable to this condition and also people who've lost someone very in a very traumatic way by suicide homicide sudden death early untimely death those kinds of circumstances of the death do seem to raise the the risk of getting complicated grief so the again the rates of complicated grief aren't exactly known but it's roughly roughly around 10% 7 to 10% of bereaved people so you know in the general population probably about half or 60% of the brief of the general population is bereaved and then 7 to 10 percent of them will develop complicated grief so the good news is that the complicated grief really can be treated and that research shows that there is an efficacious treatment for it that basically though it's different than just a general psychotherapy it's not just going and talking and to someone who's listening carefully in kind that's of course important but the treatment really requires focusing on the ways that you can come to terms really with the reality of the loss and also figure out a way to to restore your own life and it this is done using some pretty specific kinds of procedures that are that can be emotionally intense and that also require some kinds of activities that you're going to do between the actual therapy sessions so it's it's an intense period of four months short term limited but intense while it's going on and it's been proven to be efficacious so the main thing is that it's easy to get down on yourself when you when you're grieving and you're grievant your grief isn't really moving anywhere and sometimes people around you can feel can start to feel kind of frustrated because they don't see you coming to terms with this loss and they don't understand why not and so they can get a little harsh and then people sometimes do that to themselves and start to become very self-critical and it's really important that you not do that because this is not something that people have really control over and in fact we know that because we know that we can reliably identify the syndrome of complicated grief and it's now been accepted into the diagnostic systems both internationally and in the u.s. in the DSM if you're familiar with that so we this this is like any other really like a mental disorder in that sense that it's something that needs to be treated and can be treated and it's not because you're a weak person or there's something very wrong with you as a person it's not that at all if you're if you're the person who's supporting the person with complicated grief you might be feeling a little bit frustrated and what's really important is that you try to kind of manage those feelings and understand that this person is not really just wallowing in their grief they're not doing they're not being lazy or not trying hard enough if that's not what it's about it's that they really can't get out of this place and they they do need to get help and they need people that love them by their side and supporting them and being there for them and understanding that they're not themselves right now but that they having faith in them that they they can be but they do need to get some help in order to get to the place where you want them to be and where they can be

Channel: Center for Prolonged Grief

Views: 75,968

Keywords: Katherine Shear, Center for Complicated Grief, centerforcomplicatedgrief, Columbia University (College/University), columbiauniversity, grief and bereavement, coping with death, hospice

Id: aAEfYSOS8W8

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2014