Unfuck Your Grief: Using Science to Heal Yourself and Support Others

By Dr. Faith G. Harper

When we lose someone or something close to us—a loved person or animal, a relationship, our health, our dream, our idea of who we are—it hurts. A lot. Grief is both what we experience and how we heal. Dr. Faith Harper, bestselling author of books like Unfuck Your Brain and Unfuck Your Boundaries brings us a counseling and neuroscience perspective on grieving. She explains what is actually happening in our brains and bodies and what we need in order to allow it to happen fully. She also shows us how to identify and treat traumatic grief, the variety of grieving processes we experience, what grief looks like in the long term, when to get professional support, and how to ask the people in our lives for what we need (and to give ourselves the care we need as well). You'll also find solid advice on how (and how not!) to support a grieving person in your life. Wise, a little crass, and gently funny. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
• Release date: Aug 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781648410871

Dr. Faith G. Harper

Dr. Faith G. Harper, LPC-S, ACS, ACN is a bad-ass, funny lady with a PhD. She’s a licensed professional counselor, board supervisor, certified sexologist, and applied clinical nutritionist with a private practice and consulting business in San Antonio, TX. She has been an adjunct professor and a TEDx presenter, and is proud to be a woman of color and uppity intersectional feminist. She is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the book Unf*ck Your Brain and many other popular zines and books on subjects such as anxiety, depression, boundaries and grief. She has been known to publish in academic spaces as well, most recently with a chapter in the book Understanding Indigenous Perspectives. She is available as a public speaker and for corporate and clinical trainings.Subscribe to the Unfuck Your Brain newsletter to get a discount on her books and zines.

Book preview

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Unfuck YOur Grief

Using Science to Heal Yourself and Support Others

© 2022 Faith G Harper, LPC-S, ACS, ACN

© This edition Microcosm Publishing 2022

First edition - 5,000 copies - August 30, 2022

eBook ISBN 9781648410871

A small portion of this work was originally published in 2018 as This is Your Brain on Grief

This is Microcosm #282

Edited by Elly Blue

Illustrated by River Katz

For a catalog, write or visit:

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Portland, OR 97227

https://microcosm.pub/Grief

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Microcosm Publishing is Portland’s most diversified publishing house and distributor with a focus on the colorful, authentic, and empowering. Our books and zines have put your power in your hands since 1996, equipping readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and bookettes about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice. What was once a distro and record label was started by Joe Biel in his bedroom and has become among the oldest independent publishing houses in Portland, OR. We are a politically moderate, centrist publisher in a world that has inched to the right for the past 80 years.

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Contents

Introduction •

Grief First Aid •

what is Grief? •

Causes of Grief •

Types of Grief •

This is your brain (and body) on Grief •

Symptoms of Grief •

Symptoms of Grief in Children •

When Grief Gets Stuck: Prolonged Grief •

Trauma and Grief •

Is It Grief or Depression? Or Can It Be Both? •

Burnout, Stress, and Grief •

Grief and Physical Health •

Your Own Grief and Mourning Process •

The Four Tasks of Grief •

Milestones and Derailers of Healing •

Self-Care Work for Grief •

Therapy and Other Supports For Grief •

Would You Like Me to Ask How You Are Doing Today?

Supporting Loved Ones Who Grieve •

The Platitude Bullshit People Say That Doesn’t Help •

What to Do and Say •

Supporting Grieving Kiddos •

Dear Auntie Faith •

Conclusion •

Grief Resources •

After the Death of a Loved One •

When a Loved One Is Dying •

Supporting a Grieving or Struggling Loved One •

Living With Chronic Illness •

Other Supportive Resources Around Grief Topics

that Tend to Be Ignored •

Resources for Helping Professionals •

Crisis, Terrorism, and Disaster Mental Health Resources •

References •

Introduction

Grief is the fundamental process of learning to live with loss. A relationship lost or fundamentally altered. A letting go of what we expected life to be. In her book How Can I Help? June Cerza Kolf notes the statistic that the number one fear experienced by human beings is the fear of abandonment. C. S. Lewis, in his book in A Grief Observed stated:

No one ever told me that grief is so much like fear.

Grief is a realization of the certainty of abandonment.

We don’t really talk much about grief. It scares us shitless. We fear that discussing it will somehow invoke it. While we know at an intellectual level that abandonment is unavoidable throughout our human existence on the planet, it still knocks us sideways when it happens.

When we discuss grief, our first thought is always of death. But grief is the experience of any kind of loss, any type of abandonment in our lives. Grief can come with the loss of a job, the loss of a relationship (through any means, not just death), or the loss of a way of life we have come to know and expect. We can grieve changes even if they are happy ones. Getting married can be an amazing thing, but we may still grieve the loss of our single days. Becoming an adult is something we all looked forward to, until that moment we had to grieve the freedom of childhood and the ability to hand over decisions to someone else.

Humans have learned to exert so much control over our lives and our environments to the point that it is now our cultural expectation to do so. Possess, control, exert authority and will over our environments. In so many instances we can manage the temperature of our environments. The pain in our bodies. The color of the hair on our heads. Our cultural expectation is to possess and control, although the reality that neither are really possible. We don’t have many systems in place to process that which we can’t control. We pay lip service to the tenacity of the human spirit and our capacity for resilience, but don’t talk about what it takes to get there.

Here’s the trick. All that stoic, stiff-upper-lip nonsense? It’s just that: nonsense. Resilience requires space for sorrow. Grief. Processing. Understanding what the world will be now versus what it was before. And that’s what this book is about. How to move through that process. How to get moving again when it gets sticky. How to support others in their movement. Not fixing anything. Because nothing is broken.

I will talk a lot about death in this book. That is the big and obvious example of grief and is the one we seem the most surrounded by, especially now. It is also the topic the grief research focuses on the most. But that doesn’t mean anything else you may be grieving is less valid and worthy of care. Maybe you are grieving a birth parent you never got to know, your gender not matching your birth assignment, or life in a pain-free body. Maybe you’re grieving the horrific violence we continue to bear witness to day in and day out in our society and our seeming incapacity to make anything better. My hope is that you find something in this book that helps you. And because grief is so personal and specific, the last third of this book is composed of advice columns where I answer questions that folks have sent in about their grieving.

Also, I am looking at grief from the perspective of a therapist trained in helping with grief, clinical researcher, and person who has grieved a lot. I am going to talk about trauma, depression, stress, burnout and those other mental health issues that often coincide with grief, or get confused with grief as well. But that’s not just for my clinician people¹. I keep getting a lot of feedback from my non-clinical readers that this information helps them not just understand themselves but advocate for their own care with their treatment providers. Keep being a tenacious client about your own care.

But no matter your experience, I hope this book helps you find ways to hold your grief for what it is: Another expression of love. A love for something that is lost, but won’t be forgotten.

Grief First Aid

If you’re coming to this book fresh out of a crisis, deeply grieving, here are some basics that I like to share right off the bat. You will see these themes time and again throughout the book. But here they are, simply stated and concrete as pavement for you to copy into your journal, tape to your mirror, turn into a mantra, or whatever you need to do to center yourself and allow yourself the bereavement experience you need right now.

1) Your emotions are real and they are valid. Humans are more feeling creatures than thinking creatures. We feel before we think. This is information from our brains and bodies that we should attend to.

2) Your emotions may be real but they may not always be reality. Our brains and bodies don’t discriminate well, therefore we can sometimes stay on high alert when danger has passed. If we honor those emotional responses, however, rather than fighting them, we are more likely to achieve the healing we desire.

3) Healing takes time. It takes at least several months to reestablish equilibrium after a traumatic event or crisis. Individuals who suffer PTSD often did not have the opportunity to properly heal in those first days, weeks, and months. You may be the only person who gives you permission to take this time for yourself, but that doesn’t mean you are wrong to do so. Time and again I see individuals working through decades old, stuck grief because they had no opportunity for healing.

4) Humans are storytelling creatures. Our fundamental human drives are to eat, sleep, and tell stories. We even tell stories in our sleep . . . we call it dreaming! Part of your healing process may include a need to share your story and find a way to integrate it into your life. Or maybe not. There is plenty of research that shows that people heal without sharing a trauma narrative. They learn skills to manage the intrusion of these stories in their present and future, but they don’t have a need to unpack their stories to move on.

5) Not everything that happens has a greater meaning. And not everything you go through should be trivialized with a brighter perspective. Pretending things are not as bad as they seem does a disservice to your grief and loss experience. And bypasses the work that needs to be done for true healing. Awful and meaningless things happen. We don’t deserve bad things. And bad things are not sent to us to teach us a greater lesson. We may learn a greater lesson or grow from our grief experiences, and those experiences may become part of our healing process. But there was no karmic intent in the crisis itself. Which means you are not a failure if profound revelations are not part of your healing process.

6) As long as you continue to fight for yourself, your healing, and your wellness you are doing this right. Your methods may