Grief is something that we all experience at some stage in life. It is our internal experience that we must endure when dealing with loss. It can be a very painful and long process. Grief can visit us at any time, perhaps when we lose someone or something that we love, someone or something, that we find it hard to imagine or thought we would never have to imagine living without.
Losing a loved one, whether it be to natural causes or an untimely death, can affect us in many ways, there are no rules to how hard we feel grief or in what form exactly.
There are no subscribed levels of pain that we ‘should’ feel, nor indeed what events we should feel grief from. Some of the areas we can feel grief are:
There is no time limit on grief and very often we can feel that we ‘should’ be moving at a different pace than we are, or we ‘should’ be starting to feel better already, and that other people seem to handle these things better.
It can be hard to do our day-to-day tasks and to function. The grief can seem too much. However, at some stage it will start to lessen, and the grief will start to subside and, although we are changed, life goes on.
When someone whom we know passes away, it can seem like a bond has been severed. However, as many people who have experienced grief will agree to, the bond has not been severed, it has just changed, profoundly, but it is still there (Klass, Silverman and Nickman, 1996).
The tangible bonds are those mementos that are left behind, photographs, belongings, keepsakes and the intangible, memories, emotions, how they changed us etc. It is through these bonds that the relationship keeps going and the bond evolves and changes but is not gone. These can also be applied to a change in circumstance that results in grief.
As part of therapy, we will look at fostering this evolution of the bond, the point of grief is not to forget the deceased or the past but to evolve this bond into a healthy and happy thing.
Many of us have heard of the of the five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance (Kubler – Ross, 1969). The truth is, when experiencing grief, one can feel some or all of these emotions and not necessarily in this order. These emotions can all be experienced in a single day as well as over time.
The truth is, we use a coping mechanism called the dual process model (Stroebe, Henk, 1999), this is where we may be overwhelmed with grief and sadness one day or hour and then cleaning the house the next. It allows us to enjoy moments even in our grief. It is a way our mind protects us from the often, overwhelming pain of loss.
As time goes by these gaps between normal life and the grief get further and further apart. This is a sign of the bond between us and the subject of our grief changing.
In therapy, we will look at and facilitate this bond changing in a caring and person-centred environment. We will explore grief, sadness, the tangible and intangible bonds and process grief in a safe and respectful space.
