How To Deal With Grief and Trauma

·S18 E185

185 Grief Presumptions: The Assumptions We Make About Loss (Part 3 of 3)

April 20
22 mins

Episode Description

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When someone is visibly grieving, the people around them quickly conclude, usually without adequate evidence. She isn't crying, so she must be coping. He went back to work, so he must be over it. They seem angry, not sad — that can't be grief.

These are presumptions. In Part 3 of this three-part series, Nathalie examines how presumptions about grief operate in real time, in specific moments, and why they cause a different kind of harm from grief myths and preconceptions.

What's covered in this episode

  • The precise definition of a presumption and how it differs from a myth (cultural) and a preconception (personal, pre-existing)
  • Why presumptions feel like observations but function as judgements
  • How presumptions cause harm, both to the person being presumed about, and to the person making them
  • The most common grief presumptions, examined through: what is being assumed, where it comes from, how it lands, and what a more accurate response looks like
  • What supporters can do differently and why the impulse to interpret is so strong

The core distinction across all three episodes 

Myths, preconceptions, and presumptions are related, but they operate at different levels and in different moments.

Grief myths exist in the culture: in the language, the rituals, the policies, the media. They are transmitted without any single person deciding to transmit them. Myths are covered in Part 1.

Preconceptions are the individual's internalised version of those myths: what a person has absorbed over a lifetime, and carries into grief before it happens. They shape what someone expects from their own grief. Preconceptions are covered in Part 2.

Presumptions are what happen in a specific moment: a conclusion drawn about someone else's grief, or one's own, without adequate evidence. Unlike myths and preconceptions, presumptions are active and situational. They happen in the room, in the conversation, at the graveside. Presumptions are what this episode covers.

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