How to Deal with Grief
Grief can appear in many forms and move through stages like denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Understanding these emotions and giving yourself time to heal can make the process less overwhelming.
About Grief:
- Its painful, but normal (a part of life)
- Comes in stages and is not a straight line
- Know it can have effects on all aspects of a person (their body, their thoughts, their social and cultural relationships)
- Going through grief does not necessarily mean your depressed, they have different healing process
- Can be very complex topic, thats why its so hard to go through
↳ Only 10-15% of people go through “complex grief”
↳ Not accepting their loved one has died
↳ Only focusing on old memories “living in the past” instead of joining new activities
↳ Uncontrollable emotions
↳ Avoiding situations/people
- Children will have a harder time understanding, which might be frustrating for others who are also going through grief frustrated constantly explaining
- Children are very sensitive to the adult in there lives and how they deal with grief
- Everyone grieves in their own way, what works for you might not work for someone else, so don’t judge
- Totally new emotions, you will feel completely different from your normal self and because these are new feeling usually all your energy is dragged towards those feeling✴✴
- There is no time limit for grief, never feel pressured to “speed up the process”
How to deal with Grief:
The five stages of grief:
- Denial: “This can’t be happening to me”
↳ Self-defense mechanism
↳ Don’t want to accept the upsetting reality
↳ Helps numb the intensity of the situation
- Anger: “Why is this happening? Who is to blame?”
↳ Suppressing or swallowing feelings delays coping and moving forward
↳ Your brain trying to make sense as to what has happened
↳ Helps us feel in control and avoid our helplessness and grief
- Bargaining: “Make this not happen, and in return I will…”
↳ Making deals with yourself or God to help yourself feel better
↳ Want to believe that if we act in particular ways we will feel better
↳ When in pain it can be hard to accept that there is nothing we can do to change things, so people going through grief would start bargaining
- Depression: “I’m too sad to do anything”
↳ We begin to realize and feel the true extent of the death or loss
↳ The depression stage feels like a desire to isolate and feelings of hopelessness
- Acceptance: “I am at peace with everything that happened”
↳ Your emotions will begin to stabilize
↳ Being able to look back at the happy memories with this person and be grateful you even knew them
↳ You are done trying to hide or avoid your emotions