Grief: A Normal Process for Which There is Help

Grief is often a difficult challenge to get through; this is because people seldom have learned what effects to expect until a time of grieving is upon them. But grief is normal. It is simply the human response to losses that are significant. People who encourage you with pithy phrases such as “do not cry” or “be strong” are approaching grief from the incorrect angle.

When you lose anything special from your life, whether it be a beloved person, the perfect job, a childhood home, or a cherished pet, you will grieve. It is normal and natural. Grief is a natural reaction to the loss of something. Of course, the fact that it is normal makes it no easier on you. It may well be among the most challenging times of your life. But you are not weak, crazy, or not handling matters well.

Grief is the collection of conflicted feelings that are caused by a change in or end of a familiar pattern. So many events can cause grief in a life. They include:

• A spouse’s or close family member’s death
• Divorce
• Loss of trust
• Marital separation
• Personal illness or injury
• Dismissal from a job
• A family member’s health changing
• Changing financial states
• Change in living conditions

Even nominally positive events can cause grief. All it takes is a significant change in the norm for grief to occur. Some of these examples include:

• Marriage
• Pregnancy
• Retirement
• Change to different work type
• Gaining another family member
• Holidays like Christmas
• Vacations

These events are listed in no particular order. Everyone who experiences loss experiences it 100%.

Grief affects the mind and body. In a state known as grief brain, the completion of tasks that are simple or routine can seem overwhelming. Even if you can accomplish them, you may take longer in completing them and be too exhausted afterward to tackle any other chore. Your efficiency may be shattered. And the ways grief affects the body make tasks even more difficult.

Your heart can literally ache. Grief increases inflammation, worsening existing health problems and potentially causing new ones. It batters at the immune system so that you are left depleted, vulnerable to infection. The heartbreak grief causes can raise blood pressure as well as blood clot risk. Very intense grief can cause broken heart syndrome, a heart disease variant that mimics the symptoms of a heart attack.

Grief is universal. There comes a time in everyone’s life when an encounter with grief occurs. Any change that causes an alteration in life as have known it causes grief. Sometimes well-meaning people will encourage you to toughen up, but this is not advice to be followed. Grief is not a weakness. It is not a character flaw. Instead, it is a natural reaction to changes and endings in your life.

Grief is extremely personal. Rather than being linear or neat, it fails to follow schedules or timelines. You might cry, grow angry, feel empty, or withdraw. These reactions are neither unusual nor wrong. Each person grieves in a different fashion. There are some commonalities in grieving, as laid out in the five basic stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But you may not go through all five stages. If you do, you may not experience them in this particular order. Grief is different for everyone. Coping with loss may begin at any stage.

For some, the feelings of loss can be debilitating. They do not improve with the passage of time. This is called complicated grief or persistent complex bereavement disorder. With complicated grief, the painful emotions last so long and are so severe that you find difficulty in resuming your life and recovering from loss. Contact your physician or a professional in mental health if your intense grief gives you problems functioning without improvement at least a year after the alteration in your life that triggered grief.

Sometimes, people suffering from complicated grief consider suicide. Talk to a trusted person if you have thoughts of suicide. If you think these thoughts and feelings may lead you to act on them, call your emergency services number or a suicide hotline number to talk to a trained counsellor. Consider going to griefline.org.au to get reassurance that you are not alone.

Grief counselling, a form of psychotherapy, aims to assist people in coping with the emotional, physical, social, cognitive, and spiritual responses to loss. Grief counsellors believe that each person expresses and experiences grief in ways that are personally unique. These are shaped by your family background, personal values, life experiences, culture, and intrinsic beliefs. Counselling is generally recommended for those who experience difficulties in dealing with a significant loss. It facilitates your expressions of emotion while thinking about the loss. This is true regardless of whether you are feeling sad, angry, anxious, lonely, relieved, guilty, isolated, numb, or confused.

Grief counselling aims to facilitate the overall process of accepting the loss that has been experienced, processing the natural progression of personal feelings that can accompany the different stages of coping with loss. Sessions encompass segments on managing to increase your social and personal resources in order to better cope with grief. The Internet contains a considerable amount of resources. Consider Beyond Blue, headspace, and National Association for Loss and Grief Inc. Or make an appointment with a counsellor today.