When I hear really bad news for the first time, usually my first reaction is to laugh or smile. I’ve never understood why this is.
I was standing in the front of the grocery store in an emergency meeting when I found out that my boss of 3 years, Dave Clarke, had passed away in a tragic scuba accident. His two best friends came in to tell the staff, and I can remember standing there trying not to smile. Same reaction when I heard that my Grandmother was in a really bad car accident.
Has anyone heard of this before? Upon searching for answers, I came across this:
Denial, the first stage of Grief according to the Kübler-Ross model
Denial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.
Could my first response to grief be denial in the form of implying the fact is a joke? Discuss.
