Book Review: Getting Grief Right

[osprey_archer]

Patrick O'Malley's Getting Grief Right: Finding Your Story of Love in the Sorrow of Loss is actually about the dangers of attempting to grieve "correctly," to fit grief into the one-size-fits-all template of the five stages of grief outlined by Kubler-Ross. O'Malley is a psychologist, and he gets a lot of clients who come in and tell him that since

Comments

[asakiyume]

I feel the same way you do about dietary news and psychological health, but I think what we're victims of in both cases is people wanting to run to extremes with small bits of new knowledge. Often the science itself isn't making huge claims, but the popular press wants to.

But apart from that, scientists have a really bad habit of being unable to see how their own biases affect their results--this is really clear in social sciences, but it's true in other areas too. This isn't to say that we can't trust science but only to say that we have every right to be skeptical about things that provoke that response. Which sounds like a circular sentence, but my point is, there's nothing magical about science that means we have to dismiss our skepticism.

[rachelmanija]

That's my impression as well. I totally agree about the "everything we told you last year is wrong" issue in general. But while this might be local, in my experience therapists don't think grief must last a specific time or have specific stages. I was also specifically taught the opposite in therapist school. "You're doing emotions wrong" is a major issue in the community, but that particular version of it seems to be coming more from the wider culture than from the professionals

[osprey_archer]

O'Malley comments that when he lost his infant son in the eighties, he compared his own grief to the stages that he'd learned in training to become a therapist and found himself lacking, so at least at that point a rigid interpretation of the Kubler-Ross model of grief did have professional weight. But that was decades ago now, so doubtless things have changed since then.

I suppose the real question is "How will the popular press get a hold of this new version of grief therapy and twist it into an unhelpfully simplified version of itself?" Although that might put too much blame on the press and not enough on the public. There is clearly a subset of people who want carbs to be the devil, grief to be neatly linear, and all sorts of other things to be far simpler than they are, and eagerly eat this stuff up when it's published.

[rachelmanija]

Oh, poor guy. Yeah, I bet if therapists were going on Kubler-Ross in the eighties, that would be more than enough time for it to lodge itself into the culture by now

[bunn]

I sometimes feel that science is a little like explorers who come stomping ashore in a strange land going 'AND THAT IS A KANGAROO!' 'I SHALL NAME THIS MOUNTAIN Mt ME!' etc.

And everyone who has been living in that country all along looks mystified and says, well yes, of course people feel grief for a long time. Of course animals feel pain. Of course we learn in varied ways. Of course love is hard to define.

I like science and it's definitely better than the alternative, but sometimes its practitioners can seem rather alien...

[osprey_archer]

I always imagine a scientist wandering around his study, pondering whether or not animals feel pain, so engulfed in his thoughts that he stumbles over his dog, who yelps and retreats to the corner to lick his sore paw and look wounded.

"But how could we tell?" the scientist thinks, steadying himself against a bookcase and gazing into the fire. "How can we ever really know what animals feel?"