Complaint and mourning: beyond the stages and phases
Our complaint guides are at war. The established complaints industry is under attack. Labeling their work the “New Science of Grief,” the challengers use empirical studies to demolish the sacred cows of the current paradigm, including the well-known stages, phases, and tasks of grief. Even the iconic Kübler-Ross is under attack. This challenge could have a significant impact on how we grieve. Every year about 2.5 million people die in the United States leaving behind 10 million new mourners. According to empiricists, 8.5 million of these mourners will spontaneously recover from grief: they will not need help. The remaining 1.5 million will experience a “complicated” complaint, which may require medication prescribed by psychiatrists, not complaint counsellors. Consequently, there is no need for the thriving complaint industry that has proliferated in the last forty years. In essence, the challengers advocate a do-nothing (or “laissez faire”) approach to the grievance of the majority of the mourners.
There are two problems with this argument. First, the empirical data is too weak to make any broad generalizations: grievance is too multidimensional and rebellious. Second, empiricists may be right that today’s counselors do not shorten the grievance cycle, but wrongly conclude that “grievance work” is unnecessary. Let me explain.
The “stages and phases” describe the grievance well, but they don’t tell us how to do our grievance work or how to move from one stage to the next. Except for Freud, whose impossible prescription was to break all libidinal links with the deceased, no one details the details of this grievance. As a result, most counselors take a laissez faire approach when it comes to the actual work of grief. In this case, the “invisible hand” seems to be the passage of time. Even Worden’s four basic “mourning tasks” are long-term processes rather than step-by-step tasks. For example, his task to “accept the reality of his loss” is certainly not a detailed prescription for tort work. How are we going to do it? So actually no complaint work. Instead we have a let do grievance and therein lies the problem. Challengers simply formalize this approach, which they explicitly advocate for most mourners.
Because laissez faire does not shorten the complaint cycle, it won’t take much of a challenge to demolish the complaint industry. If that happens, each of us will be left to fend for himself, an unacceptable outcome. Historically, we have always had help with the grieving process. Until recently, most of it came from the world’s great religions. His clergy helped survivors deal with the deep ontological and existential issues that death triggered. They offered entire belief systems that included explanations of death and elaborate descriptions of the afterlife, their antidote to death. To help us grieve effectively, the belief system must provide absolute certainty, which is difficult to achieve in a multicultural society with competing religions offering radically different visions of an afterlife. For example, three quarters of Americans believe in heaven, but only half believe in hell. Unfortunately, once we start picking and choosing, we’re on our own. This lack of certainty may explain the rise of the modern complaints industry. The net is that we need complaint counselors now more than ever. But we also need a theory of tort that is based on tort work. Here’s an example:
After I lost my soul mate, Jeri, I read everything I could find on the tort theory. I found it wanting. To overcome my horrible “outbursts of pain” (the white-hot pain of young grievance) I had to supplement grievance theory with techniques that I improvised on the fly. For example, I devised a simple method for getting rid of bursts of complaints that consisted of three parts: 1) capturing and measuring the daily activity of bursts of complaints, 2) identifying each burst of complaints and assigning them to a “bucket”, and then 3) they deal with the complaint in every bucket. Once I found the source, I was able to “turn off” the grievance by popping it out of existence. It’s an old trick from my computer software days: just track errors. Once it finds the root cause, it fixes it and eliminates the error. I also had to sort and count the bugs. It’s the same with flurries of complaints. It’s “divide and conquer”.
I was able to cobble together a solution based on the grievance work, while in the midst of the debilitating pain of losing my soul mate. I see no reason why grievance theorists shouldn’t come up with their own creative recipes for measurably reducing grievance. If they fail, the empiricists will have won the war; those who grieve will be collateral damage.
