Understanding Instrumental & Intuitive Grieving
It’s that time of year when many of us gather with family and friends, which can feel good and can also feel. . . complicated.
Grief often feels extra challenging during the holiday season, and this can be most obvious when it’s time to bring everyone together. Gathering with loved ones sometimes highlights the ways we experience the same loss in different ways. With that in mind, I’d like to share a framework that may be helpful – the concept of intuitive and instrumental grieving.
Intuitive grieving and instrumental grieving are two grieving patterns identified and developed by psychiatrists Kenneth Doka and Terry Martin.
Intuitive grieving is what commonly comes to mind when we think of how we grieve: processing our feelings, experiencing grief as waves of emotion, and expressing our internal emotions externally through talking, crying, screaming, etc.
But there’s also instrumental grieving, which is a more physical and cognitive style of grieving. This style relies more on thinking and on quiet, internal processing than on expressing emotions. It may lend itself to more internal reflection as well as physical actions in response to grief, such as creating art, fixing things that are broken, or wearing the jewelry of someone who’s died.
Both of these styles of grieving are valid, and it’s not an either/or. You may fall somewhere along the spectrum of these two styles, or you may switch between them. As I’ve said many times before (and you’ll hear me say it many times over), there is one right way to grieve.
Why does it help to understand these different patterns?
If you lean towards intuitive grieving, you may have a bias that the best way to grieve is to talk about it and to cry it out. If the people in your life aren’t sharing their feelings, you may assume that they aren’t feeling and expressing their grief, but that may not always be the case.
If you tend toward more instrumental grieving, you may not understand–or feel overwhelmed by–another person's need to express their emotions, to share, and to connect emotionally around their loss.
As you might imagine, sometimes this can create friction. Conflicts and isolation can occur when people who are experiencing the same loss process their grief in different ways.
What helps?
Pay attention to how you grieve and honor that, while also recognizing that others around you may grieve differently. It can be easy to believe that the people around us aren’t being present to their grief, when it may be simply that they are processing it in a different way. Seek out spaces and practices that support your own ways of grieving, and when you can, make room for others’ expressions of grief as well.
It can also help to talk ahead of time about holiday expectations. Ask questions like, “What do you have in mind for the holiday? How would you like the day to feel? Is there anything specific that you would like to do, or something you’d like to avoid doing?” (Be sure to ask yourself these questions, too!) Understanding everyone’s expectations can help create a holiday that better meets the needs and grieving styles of everyone involved.
However you are present with your grief this season, I hope you’ll take gentle care of yourself.
