Anticipatory Grief: Concept, Signs, And How To Deal With It?

God Almighty has distinguished man with many feelings that take different forms and appear on man’s features in many cases. The most prominent of which are feelings of love that manifest in family relationships, friendships, and others, feelings of joy that are related to satisfaction, peace, and positive events in life, such as academic and practical successes, as well as feelings of anger that we experience when we are exposed to bad situations, such as injustice or humiliation.

As for feelings of sadness, they are related to unfavorable circumstances and losses, whether material losses or the loss of close people and loved ones, or disappointments resulting from bad events and difficult circumstances. They result in other feelings, such as depression or despair. As we have noticed, each feeling has a specific cause that leads to its emergence. Is it possible for a feeling to arise before the event that causes it?

Yes, this happens often. A person may feel sad before the causative event occurs, and this is called anticipatory grief; This is because sadness precedes the cause.

We can notice anticipatory grief through the signs that appear on the person who feels it. What are these signs, and how can a person deal with anticipatory grief and overcome it?

This is what we will find out in this article.

The concept of anticipatory grief:

It is a natural and common type of grief among people. Despite being one of the most complex human feelings, this grief does not affect a person as a result of a bad situation or event which happened in the past, or  an event taking place in the present, but it is a grief over an expected upcoming end. This means that the mind thinks about the future and imagines the worst, then feelings of tension, anxiety, and sadness about the upcoming loss begin.

For example, when you enter into a new romantic relationship, and despite the enthusiasm at the beginning of the relationship, the end may already be drawn in your mind without a proper basis for it, perhaps due to the negative effects of the previous relationship on you. Feelings of anxiety and tension begin, causing the new relationship to collapse little by little, eventually causing it to end as you expected, but not because your expectation was correct. It's because you contributed to the deterioration of the relationship as a result of your anticipatory grief. 

Causes of anticipatory grief:

Anticipatory grief affects the most emotional people, and the least able to cope with misfortune and pain because they fall more easily into the nets of illusions and imagination. Anticipatory grief is attributed to two things:

Prior experiences with bad ends that a person has gone through in the past, which make them always expect the worst. For example, when a close person falls ill with a serious illness such as cancer, and you witness the difficult stages of treatment before your eyes ,and then witness the death of this person, it may make you think that every cancer sufferer will die even if they undergo treatment, despite the many cases who are cured from cancer everyday.

Likewise with regard to social relationships. For example, a person getting close to you at work in order to obtain useful information to increase their experience or to outdo you may make you believe later that anyone who approaches you at work doesn’t do it out of love but for ulterior motives although this belief may be unjust to many people in life.

Fear may also be the reason for feeling anticipatory grief despite not having bad experiences previously, like the fear of losing loved ones because of the intense love and attachment to them, or the fear of death which makes a person think that they will die if they contracted any disease, regardless of the severity of the disease.

Even sudden changes in life can make a person feel afraid of the future, which leads to anticipatory grief, such as moving to another city due to being forced to. This may make a person think that they can’t fit in or feel happy in the new place, and the same goes for a change of job, or a change of home. 

Signs of anticipatory grief:

Anticipatory grief is similar to the grief that occurs after loss in many signs, and some of the signs that indicate it are as follows:

1. Constant desire to cry:

Due to imagining bad things like the death of someone you love. This makes you cry even though the person is in your life right now.

2. Feeling emotional pressure:

This is what negative emotions such as fear and separation lead to. Also,  because anticipatory grief is based on these feelings, it is normal for an individual to feel emotional pressure.

3. Feeling lonely:

This feeling is experienced by everyone in moments of sadness. Even with the presence of family or many friends or close people by your side, you will still feel very lonely in moments of sadness, and no one will be able to relieve your sadness.

4. Anger and irritability:

The reaction of a person suffering from anticipatory grief is somewhat exaggerated. Due to the stress they are experiencing, they may get angry over the simplest things and even yell.

5. Staying away from social events:

A person with anticipatory grief lives in an atmosphere of sadness that is unjustified to others. When they receive an invitation to attend an event or a celebration, they feel upset and often try to find excuses to justify not attending in order to be right in the eyes of others.

6. Wanting to talk about their grief:

They want to get rid of the negative thoughts in their mind, and this is the point that makes other people discover that this individual is suffering from anticipatory grief.

7. Tension and anxiety:

It is similar to the anxiety that affects a person when waiting for a certain thing to happen, and the tension that results from thinking about how it will happen. For example, we all went through the tension of waiting for the results of the high school exam despite being optimistic about obtaining good results. You can imagine the amount of tension that an individual feels if they are waiting for something bad to happen.

8. Self-flagellation:

It is blaming the self because the person believes that some bad events happen due to their poor estimation and unwise management. They will repeat that with the upcoming experiences and burden themselves with heavy burdens. They do not realize that humans naturally face many problems, and they naturally fail in some relationships even if they have a great deal of awareness and perception.

9. Depression:

This mood disorder results in a loss of interest in all the activities carried out by the individual, loss of passion and enthusiasm towards life, and a lack of joy in any success. The individual then begins to lose desire until they no longer have the will to do any simple daily activity, such as preparing food.

10. Lack of control over emotions:

It is the result of the bad feelings they have all the time and the pressure they are exposed to. We notice that they may collapse over a simple bad situation that does not deserve sadness and crying.

How to deal with anticipatory grief?

After knowing the causes and signs, you can diagnose the condition to tell whether it is anticipatory grief or not. Of course, every psychological condition has a way to deal with it that reduces its severity and helps to overcome it. There are some tips and methods that enable you to deal with anticipatory grief, which are as follows:

1. Stay in the present:

A person cannot prevent themselves from thinking about the future, even if it leads to sadness. This is something that happens without a prior decision. Thinking does not only happen in your free time, as you may think about your future while you finish your backlog or prepare lunch. What you have to do is try to stay in the moment you’re living and be present in it by focusing on what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. By focusing on the five senses, you prevent your mind from going to the future.

2. Don’t deny your feelings:

You may resort to denying them because they are unjustified to others, unlike the sadness that afflicts a person after a disaster. This may make you feel guilty and cause you to deny your feelings, but you have to deal with anticipatory sadness as a normal thing.

3. Think about what you can do:

You have to accept the death or illness of someone you love. This is not something that can be changed, but it is predestined and out of your control, so sadness and worry will not change anything and will only make the matter worse. What you have to do is think about what you can do now like providing help or moral support to the sick person, for example, so that they can face their illness strongly, or think about the things you should avoid so that you do not fail in your relationship or in your current work and fall into the same previous issues again.

4. View anticipatory grief as preparation for the future:

Anticipatory grief can be seen as a kind of preparation for the future. It makes a person imagine their life after the death of a certain person or after their separation, and then this may prompt them to prepare themselves for the change that may occur in their social or practical life.

Some studies found that anticipatory grief is more stressful than grief after a loss. The reason may be that the person was ready for this loss. Therefore, you should spend more time with your loved ones, and you should find everything that makes you feel happy and reduces your sadness, such as entertaining activities or trips that help get rid of negative energy and recharge your energy.

5. Ask for help:

Having someone who understands what you’re going through is essential and can relieve stress. This person could be a life coach, therapist, or someone with the same problem, so you can share how you’re feeling without the other person taking your feelings lightly.

6. Do not succumb to depression:

There are many tips that can help fight depression. The most prominent of these are exercising continuously and staying away from negative people who transmit stress and anxiety of the future to those around them, in addition to maintaining a balanced health system and avoiding drinking alcohol or drugs with narcotic effect in order to forget the pain, as claimed by those who use them.

In conclusion:

Anticipatory grief is very natural and many people live it as a result of repeated disappointments, letdown by others, and failure in many emotional, practical, or social relationships, or as a result of fear of falling into these disappointments and losing loved ones.

But anticipatory grief is like many psychological conditions that can be lived with and treated in a way that mitigates its negative effects on life. One must not deny it, but admit it and count it as a natural matter, and they must think about what they should do at the present time so that the results are not as bad as they expect, or in order to avoid falling into the expected problems.

It is important to have people with whom you can share what you are going through without feeling shame or a need for excuses, such as friends or therapists. This is because their presence in our lives helps not to give in to negative feelings that often lead to depression.