About mourning:
Loss and healing: understanding bereavement
The way each of us looks at death and mourning is based on many elements, but the most decisive seems to be the way we look at LIFE itself.
Imagine grief as a series of waves that come together to form a wave-like pattern. This pattern is full of ups and downs that you will have to endure over time. It is very common for the first week after the loss to be very intense and very frequent.
Over time, these feelings decrease in intensity. But there are times when, out of the blue, you can feel that things are very intense again, because a critical point has been reached – we have seen a picture of the lost person, a certain time has passed (maybe a year has passed since that person is no longer there), an important moment in our life has come when the missing person can no longer be present. Once these moments have passed, the mourning may be less intense again.
The mourning period
During the grieving we will go through several stages and we will manage to integrate it into our life story:
The first is denial in which we try to protect ourselves. Usually people may simply deny that the event happened at all, or try to minimize the pain they feel.
Then we are suddenly hit by a great wave of grief – we realize that the event really happened, the person is gone. We go through a series of emotions: anger, fear and sadness. Anger is provoked by thoughts like “why did this happen to me?”; “it’s unfair that it happened”; “others are to blame”, and sadness comes from worrying about how I will cope and what my life will look like afterwards. And the thought that it may happen in the future causes fear.
What to expect when the mourning starts
- Difficulty concentrating
- Lethargy
- Fatigue
- Low motivation
- Anxiety
- Difficulty controlling emotions
The hardest to manage is loneliness. Even when surrounded by friends and family, we can feel lonely. This is normal. Part of acceptance also means adjusting to all the changes in our lives – physically (e.g. donating clothes to our loved one), emotionally (e.g. dealing with guilt emotions) and cognitively (thinking “we haven’t done enough”).
When we feel that there is something that makes us feel negative, we tend to avoid it. Unfortunately avoidance is not a solution even if it helps at first. In the long run, because we allow ourselves to experience all the negative feelings that naturally arise in our souls, the grief will be worse – because we don’t go through all the emotions that come with it.
People around us might put pressure on us to “get on with life”. We too think “I should be better”, “I thought I was stronger”. These thoughts do not help us to navigate through the grieving process towards its end but rather inhibit our feelings, so chances are that the whole grieving process will last even longer.
Psychotherapist’s recommendation
What we as psychotherapists recommend is:
⭐ Let’s not rush the mourning process, let’s take all the time we need
⭐Crying is a form of mourning
⭐ There is no right way to mourn
⭐ There’s no quick way to get rid
⭐ If we had feelings of deep love for the missing person, we cannot expect to grieve a little
A useful exercise is to write to the missing person, to tell them what we have been up to and all the plans we have made together, how the person will always be present in our lives.
“It’s been …. days/weeks/weeks/months since you’ve been gone and I wanted to let you know how I’m doing.”
“If you were here today, I would tell you that ….”
If the bereavement is recent, we may feel like we can’t do anything, not even daily activities. We just want to stay in bed or just in the house, without interacting with other people. This is a perfectly normal reaction. Sometimes getting out of the house and interacting with people “happy with their lives” can be overwhelming.
To get through these days, it can be helpful to have a well-laid plan for the day’s activities to help you get through the day. Doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing. We can turn to things we used to enjoy – going for a walk, chatting to certain people – even if we don’t feel like it now. In this way, we can temporarily distract our thoughts from the pain, at least for the first part of the grieving process, in order to make it as easy as possible to go through the whole grieving process.
Bibliography
- Morris, S. (2018). Overcoming Grief 2nd Edition: A Self-Help Guide Using Cognitive Behavioral Techniques. Hachette UK.
- Brach, T. (2004) Radical acceptance: Embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha. Bantam.
- Jones, K., Methley, A., Boyle, G., Garcia, R., & Vseteckova, J. (2022). A systematic review of the effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy for managing grief experienced by bereaved spouses or partners of adults who had received palliative care. Illness, Crisis & Loss, 30(4), 596-613.
- Foroshani, N. A., & Rakhshan, P. (2022). Effectiveness of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on Long-Term Grief Disorder and Reduction of Distress in Coronary Women Nurses. Psychology of Woman Journal, 3(4), 64-83.
Autor: Psih. Diana Monor
Psychotherapist, PhD in psychology
Clinica Med Anima Iași
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