REPOST: Ball in a Box

I've been thinking a lot about two theories on grief that have resonated with me. The first was the Ring Theory, which I shared again yesterday. Today I am reposting a blog post I wrote in May 2019 after seeing this theory on Twitter:

I recently saw a post on Twitter that detailed an analogy that apparently went viral. I had never heard of the analogy and when I read it my mind was blown. It works perfectly. Apparently the original post was inspired by advice the Twitter user (@LaurenHerschel) received from her doctor. 

The theory goes a little like this - when someone close to you dies, the grief is like a ball within a box. Inside the box there is also a pain button. So with nowhere to go inside the box and the grief ball being very large at the onset, it bounces against the pain button almost constantly. The grief ball hits the pain button and you are sad, bereft, overcome with grief. 

But, as time passes, the grief ball shrinks slightly in size. As the ball shrinks, it bounces more freely in the box. The grief ball may bounce dangerously close to the pain button, but doesn't hit it as regularly as when the grief ball was full-sized. 

The catch is that when the grief ball is small, (because it will never be non-existent), it can hit the pain button without warning. No amount of planning or preparation can warn you for when the pain button gets hit... and when it does get pushed, it can feel the same. As if the full-sized grief ball has hit it. The only difference is that it catches the griever off guard. 

In our everyday lives, it is entirely possible that we are interacting with people whose grief ball is bouncing dangerously close to the pain button. How do we ensure we're ready to support when the griever themselves may not be ready for when the pain hits?