Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice

Even in the best of cases, grief is hard. It’s harder when society doesn’t allow for your expression of grief. In Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, Challenges, and Strategies for Practice, Kenneth Doka collects perspectives on the concept he first raised. He recognized that grief was blocked, or at least made more difficult, when society didn’t accept that you had the right to grieve.

Right to Grieve

The way we grieve is socially prescribed. We get the opportunity to publicly express our bereavement through the rules that society allows. However, for some, there is no right to grieve. Doka formulated a set of conditions where societies didn’t allow for grief and therefore it was disenfranchised:

The relationship is not recognized – Whether the relationship is a loving gay couple or an extramarital affair, society doesn’t permit public grief when the relationship itself isn’t sanctioned.
The loss is not acknowledged – A mother grieves a miscarriage in private, because, to many, the loss isn’t a loss. She knows that she was carrying another life, but because the baby was never born, society may never accept the miscarriage as a loss.
The griever is excluded – Children and neurodivergent people may be deemed incapable of grief and therefore not allowed the space to grieve.
Circumstances of death – Sometimes, the circumstances of the death provoke anxiety or embarrassment, and therefore grief is denied to those who are impacted.

At the center of disenfranchised grief is the inability for the person to work through their loss in a socially acceptable way. Therefore, in some cases, people are never able to work through their loss.

Loss Types

While disenfranchised grief mostly refers to the loss of death, this isn’t exclusively the case. In some cases, the person may be suffering from a debilitating illness, like dementia or Alzheimer’s, and the result is that the person is no longer themselves – and are therefore lost to the griever. Similarly, when people get healthy, their friends may find that they’re no longer the person they used to be. Whether it is recovering from substance use disorder or it’s getting a divorce after a long struggle to make their marriage work, people aren’t sure that they’ll be the same – and they’re probably right.

In Change or Die, Alan Deutschman explains the impact of changing environments to get better results. The implication is that the new post-recovery person is so different from the pre-recovery person that the people may not like it. They may try to pull the person back into old habits to make themselves more comfortable. Similarly, The Satir Model explains how family systems seek to return to equilibrium. That return is often to try to undo the hard work of the member of the family system who has changed themselves.

Defining Terms

Before getting too far, it’s useful to get on the same page about the terms in use, since some are used rather indiscriminately as synonymous when their distinctions are important.

Bereavement – Loss.
Grief – A response to that loss.
Grief work – The work necessary to move through the pain of the loss.
Mourning – Social and cultural rules governing grief.

Reconstructing Meaning

Though David Kessler wants to lay claim to a sixth stage of grief and explain that it’s a part of the grief process, the idea that finding meaning is important to grief has been around for a long time. (See Finding Meaning.) Building on Kubler-Ross’ work, which loosely describes five stages, the sixth stage of finding meaning seems like a reasonable addition. (See On Death and Dying for Kubler-Ross’ work.) Doka refers to others who have been concerned with finding meaning for a long time. By referencing Neimeyer’s work, he points to work that questions both the sequential nature of Kubler-Ross’ stages and adds the need to address finding meaning. Finding meaning is also a key part of Calhoun and Tedeschi’s work on posttraumatic growth. (See Posttraumatic Growth and Transformed by Trauma for more.)

Folkways and Mores

While folkways are “durable, standardized practices regarded as obligatory in the proper situation, but not absolutely obligatory,” mores are much more serious. It reminds me of the distinction made in How Good People Make Tough Choices between ethical dilemmas and moral temptations. One may not agree with a decision made when confronted with an ethical dilemma, but they can understand it. Failure to stand up to moral temptations results in much less empathy. Mores are more likely to be codified into laws – even if they’re only civil infractions – than folkways.

A young, unwed mother loses her baby to illness, and her church doesn’t support her because of a concern that if they were to support her now, they’d be sanctioning her premarital sexual activity. (Ignoring for a moment that it’s a failure to understand what Jesus said. See Heroic Leadership for more about the kind of people we’re supposed to be.) Because of the stigma associated with being an unwed mother, they believe that grieving isn’t available to her. (See Stigma for more on stigma.)

Their Discomfort

Hiding behind these social mores is often a sense of discomfort that society feels. We don’t talk about death, because it’s uncomfortable. (See The Denial of Death and The Worm at the Core.) We don’t speak of divorce, because it makes us uncomfortable (See Divorce and Anatomy of Love.) When we grieve publicly, I believe it makes people uncomfortable for two key reasons. First, they don’t know how to fix it – because it’s unfixable. Second, they recognize that they’ve denied some of their desire to grieve in current or previous situations, and they silently wish they had the opportunity to.

Option B elevates awareness of how sometimes the circles of grieving can get confused. Those most impacted are being asked to help soothe the feelings of those who were less related – in a way that’s backwards to how it should work. We should be supporting those who have the greatest connections, but it doesn’t always work that way.

Changes

Those who have disenfranchised grief often suffer, because they’ve been left out of the rituals that allow people to make a transition from the past to the future. In The Rites of Passage, Arnold Van Gennep explains how societies use rituals to help people transition. The truth is that after a death, we can’t go back to the way things were before. We need to change. That change is often changing our relationship to the deceased rather than terminating the relationship. It’s now considered healthy to internalize a connection to the other person. (See Handbook of Bereavement.)

No Right Way to Grieve

It’s important to acknowledge that, disenfranchised or not, there is no one way to grieve – and no right way to grieve. Grief is necessarily a personal process that is influenced by social norms – but there is no right way to do it any more than there’s one way to love. (See The Grief Recovery Handbook for more on grieving.)

Fear of Flooding

Many people are afraid of their emotions, that they’ll become flooded and unable to operate. Rather than developing a relationship between reason and emotions, they tightly control their release of emotions so as not to exceed their ability to reign them in. (See The Happiness Hypothesis for why this may be a fool’s errand.) When faced with emotions for the first time – such as after the first serious romantic breakup – many may wonder if they’ll survive this. The powerful emotions can feel overwhelming and can shake us to our core, causing us to ask who we are, what we’ve done, and if we’ll ever find love again. (See The Hope Circuit for more about how to think and The Psychology of Hope for how to create hope as a powerful protector.)

The best thing that we can do for others who are experiencing strong emotions is to create a safe space of allowing. (See The Fearless Organization for safe spaces and How to Be an Adult in Relationships for more allowing.) This safe space can help them learn about their emotions and works against Disenfranchised Grief.