How many ways do we have to describe “pain”? How many to indicate the sorrow for losing someone important?
To face the death of a beloved person is such a complex, holistic and potentially totalizing experience that it can affect physical, emotional, cognitive, behavioral and spiritual areas of the whole self, and still be a nonpathological reaction (Hall, 2014). It is no surprise, therefore, that such a compound process require a greater amount of specificity and precision even in the language used for describing it, at least in English.
Scholars distinguish between the “Grief”, the “Bereavement” and the “Mourning”.
Grief_ Grief describes the primarily affective reaction to the more general perception of loss. It is mainly understood to consist of negative affect but reveals itself to be way more complex. Grief can include responses both on psychological level, such as cognitive and socio-behavioral, and on a physical level. It causes a huge variety of symptoms in individuals, depending on personal differences, culture and duration of grief. Even though the grief reaction can be very painful it is still considered a non-pathological and even necessary reaction to loss (Stroebe, Hansson, Schut, & Stroebe., 2008). Grief responses are the expression of at least one of the following four contents: feelings about the loss and its causes (e.g. guilt), protest or negation (e.g. anger, preoccupation with the deceased), effects of the perception of having been assaulted (e.g. confusion or physical symptoms), actions caused by one of the previous responses (e.g. social withdrawal or drug abuse). Grief is intended to be the combination of passive reactions to the loss on an affective, cognitive, behavioral and social level. It does not consist of active adaptation and reorientation and is therefore just the necessary, but not sufficient condition for accommodating loss healthily (Rando, 1995).
Bereavement_ Bereavement refers to the state of suffering the loss of someone significant (Rando, 1995; Stroebe et al, 2008). Bereavement etymologically shares its roots with the verb to rob. It can thus be understood as being unwillingly deprived through force in an unjust and distressing way. This leads to a feeling of victimization (Andriessen et al, 2017; Rando, 1995).
Mourning_ Mourning refers to the “public display of grief, the social expressions or acts expressive of grief that are shaped by the (often religious) beliefs and practices of a given society or cultural group” (Stroebe et al., 2008, p.5). Therefore, it is also defined as an “action” of expression of grief through cultural conventions or ceremonies (Simpson & Weiner, 1989, pp.19-20). Mourning is the active reorientation in terms of relations with the deceased, the self and the external world. This implies an internal focus on restructuring the emotional investment and relationship with the deceased and its role and a revision of one’s assumptive world, roles and identity, such as an external focus for adapting to the new external world in terms of behavior or reinvestment (Rando, 1995). Because mourning has a sociocultural nature, cross-cultural research is needed to fully understand its expressions given different contexts (Andriessen et al., 2017).
Stroebe and colleagues (2008) underline the difficulty of differentiating grief and mourning since passive reactions and active, socio-culturally influenced adaptations to loss may be highly interdependent. Grief and mourning can or cannot be overlapping in a dimensional, non-linear process from the necessary to a sufficient condition for healthy adaptation to the loss. Grief is thus an element of mourning, which goes on far beyond the presence of grief (Rando, 1995).
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