Beatha Coaching

Welcome back. In the first of a new series for 2023 I am going to explore grief, and how it might affect the academic journey. I realise this topic may sound out of synch with popular New Year culture, when everything around us is about goal setting and fresh starts (and on that subject, for a more compassionate take on goals and making them work for you, you can now sign up for my ‘pay what you can afford’ workshop on goal setting here). But it was the flooding of social media with the increased seasonal pressures of resolution culture that really prompted this series. In a sector dominated by demands to keep going, do more, and push past targets and milestones, where is the space for disappointment?

The Kübler-Ross Change Curve

In her book, On Death and Dying (1969), Kübler-Ross proposed a model for grief that has subsequently been applied for any kind of significant loss or change. Also sometimes known as the five stages of grief, the change curve actually has more nuance that its popular name suggests, with seven distinct processes highlighted on a curve measured between the axis of ‘morale & competence’ over ‘time’: shock, denial, frustration, depression, experimentation, decision, and integration. As we transition through the processes, over time both our morale and sense of competence increase, and we move toward integrating the experience in a way that provokes new insights and approaches. Without full processing, however, we can become stuck at the lowest part of the curve, in frustration and depression. In these stages we are in survival mode, keeping going but with a reduced ability to rationalise and plan creatively. Seeing new opportunities and finding alternative strategies becomes much more difficult, which in turn can exacerbate our frustration and reduce our mood further. In order to find solutions and set new, achievable goals, we first need to move further along the change curve to a greater level of competency. And the only way to do this is to acknowledge and process the grief.

As the Kübler-Ross model suggests, grief in as much about change as it is about loss, and this makes it very relevant for academia, a sector dominated by unrelenting reactivity to moving targets. When we are forced to continually adjust and bounceback from disappointments, we don’t have time to fully process what these changes mean for us, or to make authentic choices. In the same way, grief is marked by a lack of control: some undesirable outcome has been reached that necessitates us to make changes in our life and mindset that we might not otherwise have planned. Continual loss of control over outcomes can make reaching the experimentation and decision-making stages of the curve much more difficult. This keeps us trapped in reactivity and feeling powerless, a key indicator for burnout.

Grief in academia and higher education

Western culture as a whole remains deeply uncomfortable with the subject and expression of grief. In a workplace culture that valorises (and misuses) convenient words like resilience, very little space or compassion is offered for those who are grieving. The concept of thinking space to process losses and make healthy plans for a new start remains restricted to the spheres of counselling and coaching, which it is often the responsibility of the individual themself to locate and pay for. In a sector like academia, these cultural norms are exacerbated by a repeated cycle of griefs that allows even less space for processing. The constant knockbacks of publication and funding rejections, job applications, inscrutable hiring practices, and a rhetoric of ‘just one more publication’ results in a dynamic of rushing through the initial reactions of shock, denial, and frustration, to get on with the next thing, and the next, and the next… Over time, this repeating pattern, if not resolved by authentic integration and new choices, can leave people stuck in the lowest point of the curve, depression, where apathy or feelings of hopelessness take over.

Academic losses hit at the core of our identity, as well as practical aspects of life stability. Finishing the PhD, for example, while often initially accompanied by feelings of relief, can be profoundly unanchoring, especially for those who don’t transition directly into a different academic role. The lack of job permanency and the fluidity of movement that currently defines early-to-mid-career academic work requires constant adjustments while denying the rootedness in location, community, and support networks that workers in other sectors might take for granted. A rhetoric that has normalised these sacrifices as part of the cost of pursuing an academic career denies the mental and emotional fatigue which constantly cycling through the change curve to find new, flexible solutions can produce in individuals already operating at the peak of intellectual energy expenditure. Those in permanent posts also have a tendency to minimise their struggles, and to feel that such losses should not be publically grieved because so many others ‘have it worse’, again denying the processing that needs to take place for genuine integration, and failing to model a culture in which loss is acknowledged and validated.

This denial of grief within the rhythms of academia is clearly contributing to the mental health crisis that currently afflicts higher education, with reported cases of anxiety, depression, and burnout rising every year. It also adversely affects career progression by negatively impacting our ability to make choices in our own best interest, keeping us instead in reactivity and survival mode. Grief is an uncomfortable and unpleasant experience, particularly where our losses feel deeply tied to our sense of self. This reality in turn encourages avoidance, reducing our willingness to acknowledge our true feelings and to process their implications. Overtime, however, avoidance exacerbates the experience of frustration and hopelessness at the bottom of the change curve, as we become increasingly detached from our personal goals. Discomfort with grief remains standard in academia because challenging and changing the current system would require a complete overhaul of functional norms and the basis by which an academic identity and career is measured. But it is vital that change does happen, even if only at an individual level. To feel and sit with grief, to own the losses, and to move fully along the change curve toward integration and new clarity requires giving a gift of time to ourselves, taking the risk to think and feel differently from the culture we are embedded in.

Over the next weeks I will be exploring grief and its implications in a series of blog posts, including the role of acknowledging loss in setting achievable goals, the importance of anger, supporting struggling colleagues, and the inevitability of bereavement. I will also be touching on this topic in the workshop on 18th January 1-2pm GMT so do join us if this post resonated (you can book here). You can also work with me one-to-one. The advantage of coaching and other therapeutic support is the space to think and feel without taxing our loved ones or sitting in an echo chamber of equally burnt-out colleagues. If you think coaching might be right for you, do get in touch.