Grief and hard-wiring

Grief according to personality type

It is quite probable that we experience and express grief according to our personality type. There is a lot of wiggle room within the stages of grief and it is possible to experience them differently according to how we perceive the world in general.

There are numerous personality type tests out there: Myers Briggs Personality Types; DISC test; Enneagram test, etc.

I took a personality test in nursing school once that had a result that said I like to take personality tests. Ha. Spot on. I find this stuff fascinating and I could easily geek out over the different personality types and how that plays out in the real world when an actual person jumps off of the page and begins to act in a certain way with very specific traits.

Basically, our personalities boil down to extrovert (getting your energy from others) vs. introvert (getting you energy from within); do you sense things or use intuition; are you more of a thinker (analytical) or do you feel more (emotionally involved); do you judge, or do you perceive. Most people are not so black and white as to always stay in their personality-type box; most will have a lot of gray and even situationally change their normal behavior for a new way of thinking/acting/feeling. Nothing is set in stone unless one is incapable of learning new things.

Grief takes the griever back to their basics. It strips away things one has learned and any growing one has done emotionally and psychologically. It takes one back to their basic wiring and barebones personality traits.

I will use myself as an example. I am an introvert which means that I get my energy from within. I like people but they exhaust me, they suck my energy from me. I recharge by being alone. I am a thinker about situations, problems, quality, risks, etc. but a feeler when it comes to people/relationships. My initial response to any type of grief is denial. I go back to my hard-wiring of internalizing everything, analyzing, not sharing my hurt, and avoiding feeling anything at all costs. “It’s OK, I’m OK.” I certainly didn’t coin the phrase but I claim it as my own when shit goes down. Being strong for those around me has been my role in life and it is how I cope. And I am not faking it. I really do not go immediately to sad, mad, or any actual emotion; I go to being void of them. Call me Cleopatra ‘cause I’m the Queen of de-Nial.

An interesting thing played out at work the other day. I work as an RN at a hospice house; a place for hospice patients to live out there last days because they can’t stay at home for one reason or another. All of the hospice house staff were called to a meeting with senior leadership and it was announced that the hospice house would be closing and they laid out the logistics of that. It was like I was watching grief play out on a screen. All the players were there: anger, sadness, frustration, denial, the whole gamut of emotions. Each employee had their initial reaction.

We, as hospice staff, are very familiar with grief. We wade in the waters of it every day while at work. It is what we do. To remain professional we all put on a certain amount of armor to be able to remain in the moment with patients and their families and to be able to protect ourselves and keep good professional boundaries. When that same seasoned staff was hit with sad news that would mean the death of their jobs and the impact that will have on the community as a whole, it was interesting to see the reactions without any of the barriers.

Let’s say someone looks at the way I grieve or act in the moment when hit by bad news; I may look like I don’t care or that it isn’t important to me, or that I don’t really feel the loss. But if you know my personality and see that I don’t get too excited about much of anything on a day to day basis, I don’t enjoy drama and I am a loner, my initial grief response makes sense. It may or may not be the healthiest but it’s genuine.

Someone who is anxious most of the time, or a worrier, a real people person and involved in everything will have a very different response than I will. They might get to denial but it will be a much different looking path. There will be huge sadness and outward gestures first.

Recognizing that grief will be an extension of your personality may help you realize that your grief process will not look like anyone else’s. It is personal. It is dictated by your unmasked deep-seated traits. You will go through the stages but your progression will look very different for another person’s.