Transforming Grief: Finding Strength Amidst Loss
Positive psychology techniques and practices to support you
It’s no wonder that after the loss of my mom 9 years ago (and subsequently grandma, aunt and uncle, the rest of my mom’s family in the last 5 years), that I began to gravitate towards positive psychology.
If you’ve ever gone through some form of grief, then you’ll know it’s an incredibly personal and complex experience and can often seem overwhelming.
But thankfully there’s the field of positive psychology that can give people the tools to help them navigate grief in healthier, more adaptive ways. And anything that can give people more support and tools to lean on in challenging and difficult times like grief and loss, the better, I say!
The field of positive psychology focuses on looking at your character strengths, overall wellbeing and flourishing. It’s not just about being happy. These cornerstones provide a framework for building resilience and meaning during times of grief and loss.
If you’ve never heard of Positive Psychology, it was started by the so-called father of positive psychology, psychologist Martin Seligman in the ‘90s with his PERMA model which stands for: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishments, and it looks at these factors as aspects that contribute to a fulfilling and ‘happy’ life.
The cornerstones of positive psychology are:
Gratitude
Gratitude is about recognizing and appreciating the good aspects of life. This is something I try to do as often as possible with gratitude practices (I used to do a weekly gratitude jar for a few years). I also use the ‘Gratitude’ app (it’s literally just called ‘Gratitude’) to prompt me to be grateful.
Resilience
This is the ability to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties, challenges and all the curveballs life throws your way.
Hope and Optimism
This is about fostering a positive outlook for the future and something I’m trying to cultivate more of. I’m kinda a pessimistic person (thanks mom! Okay, I know pessimism isn’t inherited (at least I don’t think so) but the outlook can definitely be learned).
Meaning and Purpose
This is all about connecting with something larger than oneself - taking a wider perspective about your life and your place in the world.
Strengths and Virtues
This is identifying and building upon personal strengths so that you can overcome those personally challenges with more ease. I recently did the 31 Days of Cultivating Wellbeing on Notes for the month of January - and also in four 4 week compilations). A few of those days were about reflecting on and taking stock of your strengths.
Grief typically follows the loss of someone (or something) important—a loved one, a friend, or even a beloved pet. And it doesn’t just have to be of the human or furry variety. It can also be life circumstances like losing a job, a relationship breakdown or any other downswing in the rollercoaster of life that impacts you.
As you may (or may not) have heard, it’s important to recognize that there is no ‘right’ way to grieve, and the process can take varying forms. There’s also no timeline to grief – you go through it however you go through it and however long that takes.
Even though there are the ubiquitous 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross many years ago, they aren’t sequential stepping stones, or mile markers or a check list to tick off – step one, step 2 etc. People can experience one or more (or all) of these stages at different points and often more than once as grief comes in waves and changes and evolves as time goes by, so it’s not linear by any means.
And while grief is naturally associated with negative emotions, there is also potential for growth, sometimes called post traumatic growth. Positive psychology proposes that the path through grief doesn't only involve managing pain and sadness; it may also be an opportunity for self-discovery, reflection, and transformation. At least that is what I have found, personally. And writing about it has helped me immensely!
How Positive Psychology Can Help in the Grieving Process
I’ll break down those cornerstones I mentioned above and how each can help us move through our grief with more ease.
Building Resilience
Grief can throw us into a tailspin and challenge our sense of stability and strength. But positive psychology teaches that resilience is a skill that can be developed. It’s not something we’re born with, it’s something we learn along the way and can cultivate. By focusing on past instances of overcoming challenges, you can build some self confidence that you can move through this. After all, as that saying goes: the only way out is through. And being more compassionate to ourselves – treating ourselves with kindness, as if we would a dear friend, in these moments of grief and sorrow and loss, can help boost our emotional strength and resilience.
Finding Meaning and Purpose
One of the most profound ways positive psychology can help with grief is through the search for meaning. Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote extensively on how finding purpose during hardship is a crucial element of psychological flexibility and survival. In grief, this might involve reflecting on the life of the lost loved one, what their memory can teach, or how their life has inspired a deeper sense of purpose in your own. Finding meaning in the pain can help make the grief process feel less purposeless and more integrated into our life story as a whole.
Gratitude Amidst Loss
It may seem counterintuitive, but practicing gratitude during grief can significantly impact emotional well-being. While it doesn't erase the pain that we experience when we have suffered a loss of some form, it shifts the focus toward what was positive about the relationship or the experiences shared with the lost person (or situation). A key psychological intervention in positive psychology is keeping a gratitude journal (or perhaps jar, like I did). With regards to loss and grief, you can journal to record memories or qualities you appreciated about the person you’ve lost, which can allow the person’s presence to continue to enrich your life in a meaningful way.
Harnessing Hope and Optimism
Positive psychology emphasizes the power of hope—believing that better days will come. In grief, cultivating hope doesn’t mean denying sadness but rather acknowledging that while pain is present now, it will not last forever. Like the oft quoted phrase: this too shall pass. This optimistic outlook can help individuals to look beyond the current anguish and envision a future that includes healing, growth, and joy once more. It reminds individuals that grief, while a long and difficult journey, is not an endpoint, but a process that leads to transformation.
Leveraging Strengths
A key component of positive psychology is identifying and using one’s character strengths.
If you’re interested you can determine your character strengths by doing an online quiz created by Martin Seligman at the website viacharacter.org.
During grief, reflecting on personal strengths—such as creativity, courage, kindness, or humour—can provide an important emotional tool to cope with the strong, sometimes overwhelming emotions that come with loss. For instance, someone with a strong sense of humor might find moments of laughter in the midst of grief, or someone with great compassion may lean on others for support, while offering comfort in return.
Social Connections and Support
Positive psychology also highlights the importance of strong social connections. This is the ‘relationships’ part of the PERMA model. During grief, the presence of caring friends, family, or support groups can act as an emotional life preserver. Expressing emotions in a safe environment, sharing memories, and feeling understood can aid in processing grief while at the same time giving you a sense of belonging and community, which can allow you to feel supported, giving you strength to deal with and move through your grief.
To make positive psychology a part of the grieving process, individuals can incorporate specific practices such as:
Mindfulness: Staying present and acknowledging feelings without judgment. This can be difficult, but really it’s one of the main ways to help us process all those tumultuous feelings that come with grief. Sitting with our feelings, actually experiencing them rather than pushing them away, which isn’t helpful because it means we aren’t dealing with them and they’ll just keep coming back to bite us.
Strengths identification: If you’ve done the viacharacter.org online quiz and have a better idea of your personal strengths, you can reflect on them and find ways to apply your strengths during the grieving process
Gratitude exercises: This is key for me, personally. There are lots of things you can do as gratitude exercises. You can write down 3 things you’re grateful for on a daily basis, or maybe even write a letter to your loved one telling them the things you’re grateful for about them and your relationship with them. I did this with my mom and it was very cathartic. You can also Google for some ideas of gratitude exercises, or think up your own.
Hope-based thinking: Hope is all about the future, so with this practice you can visualize a future further down the line in your life, beyond your current state of grief. How will you feel in the future? Most likely things won’t feel as difficult as they do in the early days, weeks, months or years of loss. You can also practicing positive affirmations in order to boost feelings of hope and wellbeing.
While grief is undeniably painful and an unpleasant life experience, one that we will all inevitably go through, positive psychology can provide you with valuable tools that can help you cope with loss in a more constructive, meaningful way.
By fostering resilience, finding purpose, practicing gratitude, and nurturing hope, positive psychology can provides pathways through grief that enable you not only to survive but to thrive in the aftermath of loss. As painful as grief can be, it is also an opportunity for growth—something that positive psychology can help unlock, turning sorrow into a foundation for healing and renewal.
What about you —can you relate to this? Have you used any of these tools and practices to help you on your grief journey? If you haven’t, and end up trying any of these techniques and practices, I’d love to hear how they work for you!
And don’t forget to live with a dose of wonder!
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Thank you so much for writing this. I couldn’t agree more, and when the grief hits, I try (often clumsily) to remember it is the cost of love & there is meaning in the pain.