Writing Disenfranchised Grief to Heal
Note to readers:
Taylor Swift recently released her re-recorded album, Speak Now, as she has done for several other past albums. Along with the re-recorded songs, she dropped songs from her “vault” — a collection that didn’t fit on a particular album, wasn’t ready to be publicly available, or didn’t make the cut.
I thought about how many articles I’ve written over the years that are safely within my own “vault.” As I was re-reading some of them, I couldn’t help but feel a little thrill. I remembered writing some of them and how much passion I’d had for the article then. And for some reason or another, it got sidelined to the vault. I found one that stood out and made me want to revive it.
It’s about disenfranchised grief and writing to heal that very particular kind of grief.
• • •
Unfortunately, we are all familiar with grief. Some more than others, but none of us escape this life without losing someone we love and care about. But that’s not the kind of grief we’ll discuss or demonstrate today. Rather, I want to talk about disenfranchised grief because it’s more common than anyone realizes, has a lot of tendrils to other parts of our lives, and yet, no one wants to talk about it.
If you’re unsure what disenfranchised grief¹ is, here’s a quick primer:
“Disenfranchised Grief is when that person(s) experience is when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned or publicly mourned.” — Ken Doka, Grief researcher
Here are just a few disenfranchised grief examples (there are so many!):
Loss of someone due to suicide
Divorce
Infertility or miscarriage
Loss of a job/career
Loss of an identity
Loss of physical health
Loss of someone who becomes incarcerated
Abandonment
Having to move away from your birth country/home/location
Loss of a pet
Loss of health
I’m not sure about you, but even with this itty bitty list, I can relate to the feelings in some of these examples of disenfranchised grief.
Being able to relate to similar emotions but different scenarios is the “secret sauce” of writing fiction to heal. Why? Because it taps into the primal-ness of our core desires, motivations, and wounds while giving us distance from the reality of what actually happened to us.
So let’s put the theory into practice.
The Demo
For this demo, I will choose a false reality from the list above… let’s say divorce.
And let’s say that the predominant emotion surrounding the divorce is grief and anger.
I will start by journaling about my false reality of divorce.
Why are you grieving and angry right now? [Reminder: Divorce]
I’m angry because everything I thought I believed was a lie. His affair was a hit I never saw coming, but that’s not what pisses me off, it’s when I asked, “why” and he just shook his head and said, “I don’t love you anymore.” And it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen — like he KNEW how deep that would cut me and didn’t want to say it. And that made me angrier. Because he may not love me anymore, but I still loved him. And that made me even angrier.
I’m grieving because this man I’ve spent forty years with is throwing it all away. The man I built my life with, had kids with, experienced deaths and births with... and it feels like all of that is being yanked out from under me, and I can hardly breathe. When it sinks in, the hooks clamp into my heart and rip it open. It feels like dying.
Now, let’s devise a fictional scenario that illicit the same base emotions of grief and anger.
For this demo, let’s go with the fictional scenario of losing someone who becomes incarcerated. For me, the grief and anger feel palpable there.
We’ll repeat the journaling exercise but this time, from the POV of the fictional character and scenario.
Why is your character angry right now? [Reminder: Losing someone to incarceration example]
He’d told her he was done with “that” life. The one before her. The life that gave him the cigarette burn on his right shoulder blade. The life that allowed him to be stabbed in the stomach, which he barely survived. He’d cheated death one too many times, and time caught up with him.
She wasn’t angry about the relapse into old behaviors. That, she could understand.
It was the lying, sneaking around, and intentionally putting himself and her at risk. She knew too many of his friend's “girlfriends” who had been caught at the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up dead. She didn’t want to die.
But that’s how it all felt to her now that he was back in prison. She’d have preferred he die to the hell she endured now. No, what made her the angriest was the bone-deep betrayal that she wasn’t worth it enough to stay clean. That she wasn’t worth it to keep safe.
Her heart clenched, thinking of the possibilities they could have had. They were on the right track. Happy. At least, that’s what she thought. She wonders now if she was just too stupid to see the signs. Maybe she got complacent and comfortable and chose not to see the truth? Was she as much to blame?
If you read closely enough, you’ll see a deviation in the second one, especially given that I used the third person for it versus first person in the first one. But when you strip away the extraneous (but important) sentences, we’re left with a very similar “who.”
Both passages illicit the predominant emotion of anger and grief.
Both passages show that the surface-level events aren’t what truly caused the anger — it was an emotional betrayal.
Both passages show losing a significant other
Both passages tell us that despite the external events happening — they both still have emotional ties to the person they lost
See how this works? We’re gently peeling the layers of what we know to be true about ourselves and our realities while working it through with the character.
In both scenarios, the anger isn’t stemming from the surface-level “conflict,” but from the feeling of deep betrayal. When you allow someone into your life in such an intimate way, to be blindsided by things is hard, but hearing the “why” behind the actions is much harder.
The fictional character may be in a completely different scenario than my “false” reality, but they are both dealing with the dominant feeling in similar ways. That’s a sign to run with that emotion as the catalyst for future work.
Let’s recap the progression:
We started with a “false real-life” event (divorce)
We identified the dominant emotions (grief & anger)
We narrowed in on a scenario that felt similar enough to our “real-life” event emotions (incarceration)
We found similarities in our character (the who) to our “real-life” self
So, now what?
Well, now is the fun part! Brainstorming and journaling on how to mix your reality with fictional elements. So here are some questions that I ask my students and clients to use during this brainstorming phase:
How do you want your fictional story to begin?
Do you want to place your character during their emotional upheaval?
Do you want to place your character right before or after the emotional upheaval?
How do you want your fictional story to end?
Does your character get what he/she wants or deserves?
Where do you want your fictional story to take place?
Will it be in the same place or setting where your emotional upheaval took place, or is it somewhere different?
If it’s different — why are you choosing that specific location?
What major events/scenes do you immediately see in your fictional story?
I highly recommend that these differ from your reality but close enough to illicit the same emotions.
Here’s an example of how that looks in practice using the “false reality” and the fictionalized version:
How do you want your fictional story to begin?
I want my character to be in her “normal” state at the start of the story and then have her blind-sided by the news that her husband is going to prison. [Just like being blindsided about the divorce]
How do you want your fictional story to end?
I want my character to realize that while she may always love her husband, she has sacrificed too much for him. She has to let him go if she wants to save herself. [Just like realizing that the divorce is actually a good thing as it now allows for the freedom and growth that wasn’t possible in the marriage]
What major events/scenes do you immediately see in your fictional story?
I see the scene when she gets the news that her husband is going to prison [thinking of the reality of getting served divorce papers]
I see the scene where she confronts her husband about his lies and betrayal [thinking of the reality of discovering the affair and secrets that informed the divorce]
I see a scene where she visits him in prison and has to face the reality of the situation [thinking of the reality of going to see a lawyer who explains the legalities of the divorce process]
I see a scene where she breaks down from the grief she feels about losing a future she thought she had with this man [thinking about the reality of coming home to an empty house and seeing possessions missing or particular possessions that are reminders of the reality]
I see a scene where she’s throwing things at the wall, her anger around the situation mounting. [thinking of the affair and what a betrayal it was]
I see a scene where she gets advice from an ally or friend about how to navigate her emotions and actions around this situation. [thinking of a family member or the layer explaining that this is hard now, but things will get better or change as they’re supposed to]
Debriefing
Do you see how we’ve begun to mold and shape the fictionalized story to meet/match some of the events/emotions of reality? The writing fiction to heal process essentially follows this type of back-and-forth reality to fiction mixing to develop a story that is not the same thing as what you experienced, yet still allows you to explore the core emotions of your reality.
When it comes to writing a full-length writing fiction to heal novel, it’s imperative that this back-and-forth process happens with most elements so that you can derive the most healing aspects from it. Additionally, because fiction is fiction, you can explore aspects that have never or will never be true in real life.
Example: does your anger around your reality scare you? Do you want to do something about it? What about having your character do/say the things you wish you could do/say in real life? How would it feel to write a fictionalized version of everything you can’t and won’t do in reality but can get away with in a novel?
I hope you enjoyed this brief demo of applying the writing fiction to heal method to a real-life (yet false) scenario.
We go more in-depth on how to apply this approach to all the elements in the novel in my book Forged in Fire: Writing Fiction to Heal and the Writing Fiction to Heal Workshop, so if you’re interested in seeing how to integrate ALL the aspects of Writing Fiction to Heal with your novel, check out the book or workshop, today.
