Is Delayed Grief a Real Thing?

If you spend any time at all talking or reading about grief, you soon will be told in no uncertain terms that you absolutely must let your sadness, yearning and other grieving emotions flow freely. If you try to avoid such feelings, you are warned, you will definitely face severe problems down the road. This frightening outcome is usually referred to as “delayed grief.”

As a general rule, when I run across something that everybody believes, I become skeptical. Time and again, I have found that concepts that are uncritically accepted lack supporting evidence and many are, in fact, wrong.

Take identity theft. Many Americans believe it is the nation’s fastest-growing crime. A television news report from 2017 makes that exact claim, and it has plenty of company. However, the number of consumer complaints to the Federal Trade Commission about identity theft actually declined from 2015 to 2016. If it is declining, of course, it can’t be the fastest-growing. Identity theft can be a significant inconvenience, but it doesn’t seem to be getting worse, based on an actual count of complaints.

A Nice-Sounding Theory

Despite this habitual skepticism, at first I didn’t question the warnings about delayed grief. That may be because the concept that you have to “work through” your feelings is very well-established. It goes back to Sigmund Freud and his theories about the hazards of repressing emotion. Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” from which the working through prescription was derived, wields enormous influence among therapists, authors and ordinary bereaved people to this day.

For instance, in the 2007 book, “Finding a Sacred Oasis in Grief: A Resource Manual for Pastoral Care Givers,” by Steven Jeffers and Harold Ivan Smith, the authors state, “However, if one does not make time to ponder and grapple with the mystery of death, the grief is not reconciled and then it becomes delayed grief, at best.” That seems pretty definite.

In 2012, grief guru Tom Zuba wrote, “And for many, these explosive deaths tapped into old, personal, unresolved, unmourned grief. New grief unearths old grief. Always.” This even more definite warning was in a blog post promoting a presentation called “The Truth About Grief.”

Many others, including a lot of presumably well-informed folks, propound this supposed truth. In 2013 an Australian family therapist named Colleen Morris blogged this: “Delayed grief is grief postponed. For instance, a mother might delay her grief to care for her children; however, it is only for a time. Delayed grief eventually will be expressed.”

Warnings about delayed grief and the need to work through grief are practically everywhere.

Belief in delayed grief is widespread in popular culture today, as is shown in a 2017 letter to the UK’s Guardian newspaper about Prince Harry’s reaction to the childhood loss of his mother, Princess Diana. The writer stated: “It is known that this type of bereavement can sometimes result in lasting shock followed by delayed grief years later, yet there is often little or no acknowledgment readily available, never mind any effective support.” At least the Guardian letter writer said delayed grief will only sometimes eventuate, unlike the bleak certainty of other gloom-peddlers.

Warnings about delayed grief and the need to work through grief are practically everywhere. Just today the mail delivered a thoughtful note from the organ donor organization I dealt with after Brady died. It included a brochure titled “When a Teenager Dies” that said, in part, “…”eventually we will need to face our feelings and work through them in order to discover the peace that lies beyond.”

But Wait A Minute…

When I first encountered this viewpoint, I accepted it. Then I started seeing scientific studies that raised questions. The first was titled, “Examining the Delayed Grief Hypothesis Across 5 Years of Bereavement,” and was conducted by a team led by well-known researcher George Bonanno. The 2001 article noted, “Traditional bereavement theories emphasize that it is crucial to work through the emotional meanings of a loss and that the failure to do so typically results in delayed grief symptoms.”

Yet this study found only 3 percent of its subjects showed signs of delayed grief when evaluated for five years at six-month intervals. Bonanno theorized that even this small positive finding was likely due to measurement error. After applying a screen to reduce measurement error, he wrote, “not a single case of delayed symptom elevations was observed.”

Hm.

A 2009 study by Dutch researchers examined how people coped with traumatic experiences when they employed a repressive coping style. Repressing coping is the opposite of working through your emotions. This study found, “A repressive coping style is associated with fewer post-traumatic stress symptoms. post-traumatic stress symptoms.” That sounds like not working through grief could be better than trying to avoid delayed grief.

Double hm.

Looking further, I found evidence undermining the work-through-emotions-or-face-delayed-grief thesis appeared as far back as the 1970s. Then in 1989 an influential paper by Camille Wortman and Roxane Silver called “The myths of coping with loss” brought questions about delayed grief into focus for many researchers. In the decades since, delayed grief has been repeatedly examined and just as often debunked.

Perhaps most influential is a 2004 paper by Bonanno called “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?” This paper, which reinforced doubts about evidence for delayed grief, has been cited 4,433 times in publications by other scholars, according to Google Scholar. That is an exceptionally large number of citations and reflects the breadth of the current scientific consensus against delayed grief.

Why Does Belief in Delayed Grief Persist?

If there is no scientific evidence for it, why are so many people, including experienced counselors as well as ordinary people, so worried about delayed grief? The biggest reason is probably that the warning fits their preconceived ideas about the danger of emotional repression. Freud remains very influential, and this thesis is basically his.

It’s as if you interviewed only people walking into the Super Bowl before concluding that everyone on Earth is a rabid fan of American football.

What about well-trained and widely experienced therapists and counselors who report cases of delayed grief in people who didn’t work through it previously? The problem here is that they are relying on non-representative samples. People who aren’t struggling with grief don’t go to therapy or join support groups. Since clinicians and support group participants only see people who are struggling and want to talk about it, they get the mistaken impression that struggle with grief is universal, talking about it is vital and those who don’t do so are doomed to delayed grief. They don’t see the many people who do fine without working through grief. It’s as if you interviewed only people walking into the Super Bowl before concluding that everyone on Earth is a rabid fan of American football.

Most scientific studies are designed to get more representative samples. Researchers may, for instance, attempt to contact every bereaved person in a certain group, such as parents bereaved by a child’s cancer. Ideally, they try hard, making multiple attempts to contact and recruit a representative sample, including those who wouldn’t go to therapy or attend support groups. Sometimes they offer to pay people to participate.

Research studies still have limits. With few exceptions, their samples are lopsidedly female and white. Almost never can researchers be sure they are looking a perfectly representative sample, simply because not everyone in the target population will participate. Another limitation is that many studies employ self-evaluations by grieving subjects, which may be unreliable.

And what about the bereaved people who think they have personally experienced delayed grief? It’s possible that they really have and represent the rare cases of an uncommon condition. Or they might have confused it with one of the random fluctuations in the grieving process that we all are familiar with. It’s also possible they are experiencing some other psychological emotional upheaval — mid-life crisis? I don’t know — with delayed grief.

So the idea of delayed grief could probably use some additional study. Unfortunately, my search of Google Scholar for delayed grief studies published during the last year turned up no hits. I guess delayed grief is not of much interest to researchers these days.

Many studies using many methods over many years by many researchers published in many peer-reviewed journals have consistently found no evidence for significant risk of delayed grief.

For now, the evidence suggests that delayed grief is nothing to worry about, no matter what you hear from therapists, authors or bereaved grievers. Many studies using many methods over many years by many researchers published in many peer-reviewed journals have consistently found no evidence for significant risk of delayed grief. If you don’t want to work through your grief, it’s probably okay. It likely won’t make you miserable later on.

As always, this is my report of the evidence I’ve been able to uncover. I am not saying that these findings represent unquestionable truth, that there is zero risk of delayed grief, or that anybody who wants to work through grief is making a mistake. Different strokes for different folks. Your mileage may vary. If you’re open to the evidence, you may want to keep this in mind. If not, that’s fine with me.

I hope you get some peace today. And please do like, comment, share and subscribe.