My latest grief hack is to spend a half an hour or so every morning actively grieving, after which I try not to think much about Brady and his death for the rest of the day. This grief dosing approach fulfills my two main objectives when it comes to Brady.

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First, I don’t ever want to forget him or what happened. Neither is likely, to put it mildly. But for some reason I still want to make sure I’m remembering or at least not trying to forget.

Second, I don’t want my memories of him and what happened to be the only things I can think about. I don’t want my son’s death to unavoidably blacken every experience for the rest of my life.

Grief dosing seems to be helping. After a few days of trying it, I find I can grieve wholeheartedly without holding anything back for a while. Then I can put away grief and attend to activities of life without feeling like I’m carrying an unbearable burden.

The upsetting thoughts and feelings generally return at some point in the day. However, when that happens I now find I can think to myself, “I’ve already spent time grieving for Brady today. I’ll spend time grieving Brady tomorrow. Right now, I’m going to live like something other than a suicide dad. I’m just going to live.” Then I push the painful thoughts and memories away and concentrate on what’s in front of me.

When I’ve already taken my dose of grief for the day the guilt seems less powerful. I can push back against the blackness.

The most important factor for me may be the way grief dosing changes my ability to deal with guilt. I feel guilty when I try to push Brady’s memory out of my mind. That makes it hard to do. However, when I’ve already taken my dose of grief for the day the guilt seems less powerful. I can push back against the blackness and see some of life’s beauty. That ain’t nothing.

I am not sure I could have done this not too long ago. My grieving feelings were too powerful to push out of my mind even for a moment. But I’ve gotten stronger or it’s gotten easier and now I can do it. So I devote some time to Brady every day and take the rest of the day for myself and my living loved ones.

Evidence for Grief Dosing

No research study I have found specifically examines the practice of setting aside a certain time of day and length of time for grieving. However, the general concept of grief dosing is referred to fairly often by grief researchers and therapists.

The main entry on this is the 1999 paper by Dutch researchers Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut introducing the dual process model of grief. They say: “This model proposes that adaptive coping is composed of confrontation-avoidance of loss and restoration stressors. It also argues the need for dosage of grieving, that is, the need to take respite from dealing with either of these stressors, as an integral part of adaptive coping.”

That’s pretty definite. An even more definite description of grief dosing comes from a 2013 entry in the Grief Healing blog by Marty Tousley, an experienced grief counselor. In “Finding Crying Time in Grief” she writes:

“You might think about actually setting aside some time just for yourself each day – I call it your crying time – when you allow yourself to give in completely to your grief and feel whatever you need to feel, including feeling sorry for yourself. Others have referred to this as ‘dosing,’ and for many mourners, it can be a very effective tool, as it gives you some sense of control over your grief – or at least when and how you choose to immerse yourself in your feelings of loss — and a way to contain it, too. This way, you can pick the time of day and you can decide how long it will last.”

The consensus seems to be that, despite the lack of much scientific evidence, dosing as a general concept is likely to be helpful for many people.

That is exactly what I’m talking about. It is also what a friend told me her therapist had recommended, which is what got me to try this. My friend lost her 17-year-old son to suicide the same day and in the same way I lost my son. I met her through an online suicide loss survivors group and we have swapped many emails discussing our boys and their deaths and how we’re coping. She has been very helpful and I much appreciated this grief hack from her in particular.

I’ve found a number of other more or less oblique references from clinicians and researchers to grief dosing as a potentially useful grief hack. The consensus seems to be that, despite the lack of much scientific evidence, dosing as a general concept is likely to be helpful for many people.

So how do you do it?

Grief Dosing: The Basics

Again, I’ve found no research studies that would help with questions such as: Does it make any difference how often, such as daily or weekly, I schedule a grieving session? What about the length of the session? An hour? A half-hour? And what exactly do I do when I’m dosing?

Stroebe and Schut say that loss-oriented grieving “typically involves rumination about the deceased, about life together as it had been, and the circumstances and events surrounding the death. It also encompasses yearning for the deceased, looking at old photos, imagining how he would react, or crying about the death of the loved person.”

I’d add that a session of grief dosing probably doesn’t have to be unpleasant. It could consist of recalling happy memories. That’s something I’ve been doing during my grief dosing sessions. I go through videos of Brady scoring soccer goals, capturing single-frame shots and zooming and cropping them. This process puts a smile on my face as I recall my pride and his happiness when he performed well on the soccer field.

A session of grief dosing probably doesn’t have to be unpleasant. It could consist of recalling happy memories.

Tousley, who is herself a bereaved parent, offered other specific suggestions. She wrote: “I encourage you to pick a safe place and time, and do whatever you need to do to bring your feelings to the surface. That could be listening to sad music, watching a sad movie, going through photographs of your beloved, holding a familiar connecting object or article of clothing– whatever puts you in touch with your pain.

“Set aside a specific time frame every day – say twenty minutes, or an hour, or whatever feels right to you – and do your best to stick to it, so that there is a sense of both a beginning and an ending to it. Then let all your pain come to the surface and just go with it – as completely and as fully as you can – until your time is up. Then ‘put it away’ until the next time comes around, when you will know that you have that time to do it all over again.

“Next time a sad feeling threatens to overtake you (at a time or in a place where you don’t feel comfortable giving in to it), you can tell yourself to ‘save’ it until your ‘crying time’ comes around that day, knowing that you have a safe place and time set aside for it – a container to hold it all, that you can take out and put back on a shelf when you are done with it for that day. If you schedule this at the same time every day, you may find yourself looking forward to that time.”

This description of how to do grief dosing feels spot-on to me, with the added observation that I don’t think dosing has to be sad. It’s essentially  how I’ve been doing it and plan to keep doing it.

The Limits of Dosing

In the early days after Brady died, I’d practice a kind of dosing before an event such as a memorial that I felt I would not be able to attend without openly sobbing. Just before I left to attend, I’d purposely think about Brady, look at pictures and so forth, and get a good cry going. That seemed to relieve the tension and I could go to the event and maintain a reasonably together exterior.

I don’t know if at that point in the process I could have done dosing as I’ve done it lately. I am not sure that any amount of dosing would have enabled me to consistently effectively push back at the memories, images, guilt and other feelings that more or less constantly washed over me. So time since loss may be a factor. If your loss is recent and this doesn’t work for you, that may be why.

Time since loss may be a factor. If your loss is recent and this doesn’t work for you, that may be why.

Another thing to keep in mind is that people have different styles of coping, and grief dosing may work better with some than others. For instance, many researchers have noted that grieving men tend to be more restoration-focused and grieving women more loss-focused. So grief dosing might work better for men, because it’s about finding a way to focus less on loss and more on living. Women might feel uncomfortable with the idea of trying to manage or limit grief feelings.

Some research suggests being overly rigid about avoiding grief may be maladaptive. Without doubt, there is a near-consensus that trying to completely avoid ever thinking about the loss is not likely to be helpful and may be harmful. It’s possible that strictly containing grieving feelings to a preset chunk of time, without making allowances for any variation, is not a great idea. A sensible way to approach it is likely to involve being flexible and paying attention to your feelings. If something works, great. If not, you could try something else.

The Dosing Bottom Line

Despite the lack of much evidence on how to do it and what the result is likely to be, the preponderance of informed opinion and anecdote on grief dosing suggests it’s worth considering. As Stroebe and Schut put it: “Confrontation with the reality of loss is the essence of adaptive grieving. It needs to be done, the cognitive business needs to be undertaken, but not relentlessly, and not at the expense of avoiding other tasks that are concomitant with the loss. It needs ‘dosage.’”

I hope this look at grief dosing has given you some ideas about ways you can approach your own grieving to make it less painful, shorter and with a better ultimate outcome. Thanks for reading, liking, commenting, re-posting and following Grief Science. I’m sorry for the losses that brought each of us here, and hope we can all get at least a moment of peace today.