When You're Grieving Multiple Losses at Once: Navigating Cumulative Grief
You’re in the middle of moving after your divorce when you get the news that one of your parents has died. Six weeks later, you are faced with having to put your beloved dog to sleep. There are some seasons of life when we just keep getting hit with loss after loss. It’s easy to feel beaten down and overwhelmed, and to wonder not only how you’ll get through all this but also what else might be coming your way.
What is Cumulative Grief?
We call experiencing multiple losses cumulative grief. Sometimes people also refer to this as grief overload or bereavement overload, but for our purposes here, I will be calling it cumulative grief. It’s also important to keep in mind that we grieve things other than death, which is one reason why I’m not choosing to use the term bereavement overload. Non-death losses might include divorce or breakup, moving, job loss, loss of identity, etc. Sometimes these additional losses only come because of the first loss. Some examples of this could be having to move out of your home because of your divorce, or the death of a loved one means the end of your role as a caregiver, etc.
Why Grieving Multiple Losses Feels So Different Than Grieving One
One loss can be completely overwhelming and unmooring. Your brain is working overtime to process your loss and the stress and emotion that come along with it. So when we experience multiple losses in a short amount of time (even a few years can count as a short amount of time here), it can feel like you aren’t able to catch your breath. With subsequent losses, your emotional reserve is already depleted, so you don’t have as much to pull from. It can feel harder to handle and shocking to be hit with so many losses in close succession. Often, we find that we are unable to untangle our emotions from one loss to the next, which can contribute to feeling like we can’t catch our breath.
Signs You Might Be Experiencing Cumulative Grief
Experiencing multiple losses within a set timeframe. This could be several losses at once, or spread out over a few years.
Feeling overwhelmed by your losses and how to move forward,
Experiencing a disruption to your normal sleep patterns. This could look like insomnia, having trouble falling back to sleep after waking, or sleeping too much.
Experiencing decision fatigue or being unable to make decisions because you are overwhelmed.
Brain fog, having trouble with concentration or memory.
Emotions feeling all over the place. You might go from feeling numb to intense anger to overwhelming sadness in a short time.
Feeling behind in your work, your life, or even your grief, because loss after loss adds more emotion and the tasks of grieving to your plate.
Why You Can’t Rush or Combine the Grieving Process
It can be tempting to want to just get this grief over with so you don’t have to feel this way any longer. I see this often in my clients who have experienced multiple losses. They will sometimes want to combine losses or work on a few losses at one time. I always advise against this. Each loss deserves its own time, space, and energy to be worked through. You don’t have to grieve them in order, and you might not grieve them all equally, but it’s important that each loss is honored and processed on its own even if they happen in the same season.
What Actually Helps When Grief Keeps Stacking Up
Name each loss individually, even if it’s just briefly. Sometimes our cumulative grief can feel like a big, tangled knot, and identifying the individual losses can be a helpful start to untangling it all.
Recognize that this is a challenging season of your life, and set your expectations for yourself and your ability to function day-to-day with this in mind.
Get support. Cumulative grief is so difficult, and you don’t have to go it alone. Support could be from friends or family, a support group, a therapist, or a grief specialist like me. You can set up a free consultation call with me HERE to see if working together is the right fit for you.
Experiencing multiple losses can be excruciating and can leave us feeling overwhelmed, despairing, and even depressed. Remember that you are not being dramatic or weak to realize you need support. We are not meant to endure losses like this in isolation. Grief needs a witness, and you deserve to have a supportive hand to guide you through this painful season.
