Grief and Negative Coping

Coping with Grief / Coping with Grief : Eleanor Haley



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Today, I want to have a no-frills, straightforward discussion about grief and negative coping. People commonly engage in negative coping (c'mon, you know you do), especially people who have experienced the death of a loved one. Although many will eventually find constructive ways to cope with their experiences and emotions, others will become stuck in a cycle of thinking and behavior that is bad for their mental, emotional, and physical health. As it pertains to experiencing the death of a loved one, these behaviors could prevent a person from coping with some or all aspects of their grief.


What is negative coping?

It's tempting (and common) to conceptualize negative coping as specific behaviors that are typically thought of as "bad" or "harmful". These behaviors include things like excessive substance use, isolation, overeating, procrastination, etc. While these behaviors certainly play a role in negative coping, they do not provide a complete understanding of the concept.

Negative coping encompasses any type of behavior employed as a quick fix to regularly avoid painful emotions or situations. These are temporary distractions that reduce emotional pain in the short-term, but provide very little in the way of actual healing.

Negative coping is like emotional aspirin. It numbs the pain temporarily, but the pain reappears once it wears off. Often these patterns of behavior end up making your stress worse because they are unhealthy and require a lot of effort to maintain. Moreover, they prevent you from effectively processing your emotions and experiences, which can lead to a prolonged sense of anxiety and emotional pain.


Why do people engage in negative coping?

Avoidance almost always lies at the heart of negative coping. As we discussed in a previous WYG post on avoidance:

"When we talk about avoidance in regards to grief, we are usually referring to experiential avoidance. Experiential avoidance is an attempt to block out, reduce, or change unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or bodily sensations. These are internal experiences that are perceived to be painful or threatening and might include fears of losing control, being embarrassed, or physical harm and thoughts and feelings including shame, guilt, hopelessness, meaninglessness, separation, isolation, etc."  

Your grief is most likely associated with a wide range of painful emotions and memories. For some, these unpleasant feelings are constrained to thoughts about the loss of their loved one. For others, they extend to worries about life, religion, family, the future, etc. Many of these feelings, anxieties, worries, and apprehensions are the internal manifestations that keep you up at night, while others are brought on out of nowhere by external triggers. On a whole, grief can make you feel like you're spinning out of control and so it feels protective to try and regain control through avoiding painful and threatening emotions.

Actually, in some ways, avoidance can be useful and adaptive. Often times, in order to manage responsibility, function in family and society, and stay generally sane, one has to engage in some degree of avoidance. This is what we call taking a break from your grief, and it's actually a major tenant of the Dual Process Model. This grief theory says that grievers must oscillate between confronting their loss (coping) and avoiding it (seeking respite).

Avoidance becomes maladaptive when it limits the ways in which a griever is able to fill their roles as a spouse, parent, friend, employee, and society member... and when this cycle persists to the detriment of personal healing.


What does negative coping look like?

Negative coping encompasses behaviors that promote avoidance in the following ways:

  1. By numbing the emotions of grief felt on a daily basis or in response to certain situations or memories
  2. By complete avoiding situations, memories, or thoughts in an effort to minimize exposure to unpleasant emotions

It's important to understand that it's not the inherent nature of the behavior that qualifies it as a negative coping mechanism. Rather, it's the way the behavior is being used. Most behaviors exist on a continuum so that they can be either adaptive or maladaptive. By conceptualizing behavior on a continuum, we can see how behaviors typically thought of as "good" can actually be maladaptive, and vice versa. For example:

Working:
work

 

Socializing:

social

 

Parenting:

children

(Note: Variation exists among individuals, families, cultures, religions, etc regarding what is considered 'normal' or 'average' behavior)

When behaviors like these—and others—enable a person to repeatedly and continuously numb and avoid, then the person may be engaging in negative coping. I couldn't even begin to compose a complete list, but some common behaviors include things like:

Again, it may only be when these behaviors are consistently used to avoid and numb that they become problematic.  A behavior should be considered a vehicle for negative coping when it contributes to someone's world becoming more restricted and increasingly complicated, and when it prevents a person from learning how to deal with the painful emotions and experiences related to their grief.


If you want to learn a little more about this topic (or if you are more of an auditory learner), you should listen to our podcast on the continuum of negative coping:

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After writing online articles for What’s Your Grief for over a decade, we finally wrote a tangible, real-life book!

What’s Your Grief? Lists to Help you Through Any Loss is for people experiencing any type of loss. This book discusses some of the most common grief experiences and breaks down psychological concepts to help you understand your thoughts and emotions. It also shares useful coping tools, and helps the reader reflect on their unique relationship with grief and loss.

You can find What’s Your Grief? Lists to Help you Through Any Loss wherever you buy books:

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14 Comments on "Grief and Negative Coping"

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  1. Anonymous Friend  June 3, 2019 at 10:48 pm Reply

    How do you help someone who is grieving in an unhealthy way? I have two friends, who do not know each other, who are turning to obsessive behavior in their grief and I can’t see this ending up anywhere good. I just don’t know how to help other than suggesting that they make a different choice (which is ignored).

    1
  2. Mel  April 5, 2019 at 9:23 pm Reply

    Hi there,

    Im afraid I have handled the passing of my mom with some negative coping strategies. Six months after her death I became very close with a man with MS. At first I was very concerned with helping him find different healing modalities: chiropractor, muscle testing, crystal beds, acupuncture, diets, etc etc etc. Now I am very attached. I do not date him but I am not dating anyone else either. . I am afraid that rather than feel the loss and pain… I am escaping…. avoiding. What do you think?

  3. Chris  March 23, 2019 at 10:34 pm Reply

    Avoidence and shutting yourself away from people is a normal thing and i think a healthy way to grieve if done for a short finite time. When my best friend died i locked myself in my bedroom and only came out to get food for about 7 days, until after his funeral. Going to the funeral was tough but i felt so much better afterwords.

  4. Shirley Whitney  January 14, 2019 at 12:38 pm Reply

    Is there ever a step in the grief process that you just don’t believe the person is dead? I thought I knew most everything about the grief process but I don’t!

  5. mark roberts  October 10, 2018 at 2:19 pm Reply

    it was a very sad day when i lost my father at the supermarket, turns out he was in another isle

  6. Kathleen  July 9, 2017 at 9:58 am Reply

    Very interesting article and pod cast. It gave me a good personal barometer as to where I might be on the maladaptive, adaptive measure for individual instances within my grief. People outside my grief ocassionally judge where I am or should be in the grieving process and actually comment with either an “atta girl” praise or “you’re still there”? attitude. Both types of interactions infuriate me and leave me feeling hateful towards them and confused about myself. I came away from the pod cast with the realization that I need to watch the “fuzzy” negative coping behaviors. Thank you again Eleanor and Litsa. Keep up the good work.

  7. Deborah  July 9, 2017 at 9:33 am Reply

    I have very complicated grief. In a 2 year period I lost my brother, two sisters and a daughter in law. In the last 2 years I lost my Mom and son in law. I’ve decided to go to grief counseling because I’ve been acting out by pushing people away, drinking and isolating myself. It just seems to never end and I wait for the other shoe to drop. I have a good husband. Have two grown children that have both lost spouses and I suffer for them and my 5 grandchildren.

  8. Tracy Russell  October 19, 2015 at 7:35 am Reply

    Hi Breezy,
    I am so very sorry for your losses. I have to say I have found more comfort in this blog than anything else. It’s comforting to know that I’m not going mad and if I was then I’m not alone! I do the same as you – I start to feel like I’m “getting back to normal” then it hits full force and so begins the drinking, meltdowns etc. I do feel like since the day I lost my Dad a piece of my heart broke away.
    Sending you a hug
    Tracy

  9. Breezy  October 18, 2015 at 1:04 pm Reply

    Wow. This is the first time in almost five years that I feel as though someone understands. My husband died on December 31, 2010, and both my parents are gone (only child). My photograph should be right smack dab in the middle of your blog, Tracy, because it describes me to a T. And even though intellectually I know I’m doing all those things, every time I get close to the edge of the big black hole in my heart, I run back to those behaviors. Like being stuck in a ditch lined with warm poo: warm, known, definitely know it stinks, don’t know how to get out. Thank you.

  10. Tracy Russell  October 14, 2015 at 8:43 am Reply

    Brilliant post guys. I can relate to a lot of this. Drinking too much, picking fights with people I care about, isolating myself, throwing myself in to work, keeping myself so busy I am physically and mentally exhausted – the list is endless! The only thing I can say that is even remotely positive is that I am more self aware now. I know why I do these things and I am now doing my best to get on to more of an even keel. This blog has been so helpful and comforting to me this past year. Thank you.

    • Eleanor  October 14, 2015 at 9:54 am Reply

      Tracy,

      I am so glad you feel like you have more insight and control now. I think many of us spiral and hit a low(ish) point before we try and put things back together. Sometimes it feels necessary to destroy everything, before accepting that even if we reconstruct things they will never be something different entirely. Maybe that’s just me though 🙂

      Eleanor

      • Tracy Russell  October 14, 2015 at 10:21 am

        Hi Eleanor,
        That is very true. I have pretty much hit the self destruct button this past year and not cared about anything apart from making sure my Mum is ok (I lost my Dad). I do feel slightly more in control now, although the pain never goes away. Have cut down with the drinking and started seeing close friends again, but as and when I feel I’m able to. I know my limitations but also try to push myself a little bit. I can almost hear Dad saying he’s proud 🙂
        Thanks,
        Tracy

  11. Helen Zz  October 13, 2015 at 6:48 pm Reply

    Shout out for your podcasts! Just discovered them at the weekend. I’m not American, but I’ll borrow a phrase from you, they are “totally awesome” 😉 You get to hear Eleanor and Litsa having a conversation about the topic, it’s not just a readout of the web article (what I thought originally). My journeys to work are transformed listening to them 🙂 🙂

    • Eleanor  October 14, 2015 at 10:13 am Reply

      Helen,

      I’m so glad you found the podcasts and that you like them! Thank you so much for your kind review 🙂 Please let us know if there is ever a topic you’d like to hear discussed!

      Eleanor

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