Compassion, Spring 2021

Spring 2021 - Compassion | www.tcf.org.uk 12 Talking about Complicated Grief For most people complex grief is an unknown or misunderstood form of grieving. Although it’s generally referred so as “Complex Grief” or “Persistent Complex Grief”, I like to describe it as “Complicated Grief” as I feel this explains better what it is. Yes, it is grief, but it is grief with additional complications. Grief on its own is bad enough, but when the grief is for the loss of a vulnerable loved one who depended on you to ensure they were loved, safe, healthy and happy in this world, then it’s almost inevitable that this will lead to complicated grief. If you’re dealing with someone deliberately taking your loved one’s life, or they were unequivocally instrumental in their death, that too may lead to complicated grief. Why? Because then you are dealing with a whole raft of emotions and situations on top of the grief you feel. Additional grief complications can be very varied – but here are a few that are common and which you might recognise: • You are also suffering because you feel a decision you made, or did not make, led in some way to their death • You are suffering as you feel that somehow you should have done more to stop whatever happened, from happening • You are caught up in a long legal battle, dragging on for years, during which time you are regularly forced to re-live what happened as evidence • You find yourself and the death of your loved one featured in the media, often without warning that it is going to be featuring that day • You are running (often single-handed) long weary years of a campaign for the people responsible for the death to be held accountable and punished • You are running (often single-handed) long weary years of campaigning to make the public care about what happened and keep the death of your loved one in the public eye • After long years of fighting for an investigation into the death of your loved one, the investigation they run is badly mismanaged and feels like no more than a cover up at best • You keep seeing the same awful thing which happened to your loved one, happening again and again to others, seemingly without change, blame or accountability • You are suffering from a lack of acknowledgement of the value of your loved one and so lack of acknowledgement that it really mattered that they died • You have overwhelming feelings of loss and isolation owing to lack of peer support and opportunity to talk about your loss with empathic people