What is complex grief?

There are various ways of thinking about what makes grief complex but no single recognised definition. Complexity reflects the range of factors that feed into our grief and which make it that much harder to understand and process as well as compounding the severity.

Some examples

Complex grief can occur when there are multiple losses, perhaps two or more serious bereavements within a short space of time or a serious bereavement at the same time as another significant loss such as a relationship breakdown. In this situation the feelings associated with each loss reinforce each other and they also inter-relate in a way which confuses our experience of our grief.

A second way of thinking about complexity is where we experience a serious bereavement and our childhood wasn’t as emotionally stable as we would ideally have liked (we might think of this in terms of an insecure attachment). A less stable emotional base brings instability to our experience of grief; we dont know what is influencing us at any one time, our childhood or our loss.

A third example of how grief becomes complex is where we experience a single bereavement but one which is particularly challenging because of the contradictory nature of the emotions we experience. This might be the case where we have lost someone close to us who has taken their own life. Or where we have lost someone but feel ambiguous about the loss such as on the death of an abusive parent.

How to work with complex grief

The first task is to both learn to talk about what is happening for us while also recognising the range of issues that might be involved. This is likely to be harder with complex grief, and to take more time. We will need to go over our day to day experience of our loss multiple times to make sense of it. What comes out first is not necessarily the issue that impacts us the most, it’s what is most accessible in our mind.

We then need to recognise the complex and contradictory nature of our emotional experience. Difficult emotions such as rage, guilt and shame are more likely to be present. Over time these emotions can be allowed to emerge, be integrated into our experience of life and so not dominate us in the way that they may do initially. Specialist support can help with these things.