How To Navigate Grief & Loss
Grief and loss, regardless of their size or scope, are experiences we all face as human beings. We may feel shock, anguish, mild annoyance, nihilism, bewilderment, and indecision. The more serious experience of grief can arise from losing a loved one, a pet, or a job among many other things. It can also manifest during times of personal growth when we have to say goodbye to our past selves or let go of old ideas. There is a certain grief that comes with these types of internal changes.
The challenge people often encounter is how they respond to the feelings associated with grief. Some people collapse and lose their sense of purpose or meaning. Others may pretend nothing is wrong, continuously suppressing their emotions, which then emerge unexpectedly. I like to compare grief emotions to water energy. If we don’t express, purify, and release this water energy, we instead bury it. By burying it, the water eventually turns into fire and lava, which is much harder to contain.
So, what are we to do? We need to work with these emotions. We need to express, emote, and live these emotions out. I have a few ideas about navigating grief that I’d like to share with you.
Tip #1: Sit with your feelings. Give yourself the time to actually focus on what you are feeling. It can be tempting to stay busy and fight the negative thoughts in our heads. This suppression of your emotions will only make them heavier. What I recommend is to schedule a time to actually be blue. Allow yourself to feel what you are feeling. Notice what your body is doing. Get comfortable, turn on a sad song, and let the emotions flow, recognizing the great meaning behind the grief. And after some time, we may begin to feel grateful for having had such a meaningful relationship.
Tip #2: Let your body catch up. By allowing ourselves to sit with our feelings, we give our bodies a chance to catch up to the whirlwind of mental energy that can accompany a loss. This will help you feel more centered, even though the loss still hurts. You’ve given your body a chance to process those initial emotions with movement, hormones, chemicals, and the like. I encourage you to engage in some sort of movement activity. Walking is incredibly stabilizing. Until you do this, you won’t be able to restore a sense of clarity to the situation. The bonus is that perhaps, you could turn this moment of great sorrow into a turning point in your own life and discover a new type of lifestyle or hobby.
Tip #3: Have a ritual or process. Instead of becoming passive, defeated, or paralyzed, have a sequence of things you can do. The key is to maintain active engagement with your life, despite all the feelings and thoughts telling you otherwise. Becoming defeated, downtrodden, or taking the ‘doom pill’ as the kids say, will only compound your negative feelings. Use symbols, photos, writing, mantras, prayers, memories, music, and art to honor your loss. The good, the bad, the ugly, the serene. Create the space and acceptance you need to move forward with your life. Use this process as an anchoring point to which you can redirect your negative thoughts. If done meaningfully, thoughtfully, and in a way that resonates with you, this can help the grieving process.
Tip #4: Grief demands a witness. Don’t face it alone. We are relational creatures. That is why grief is an issue in the first place because we value people and the ideas and experiences we share. It may be tempting to want to curl up in a ball and remain locked in your room alone. However, I recommend that as soon as you can, you start to re-engage in your social sphere. Take up your friend’s offer to get out of the house. Allow the loved ones in your life to give you their shoulder. A good friend will absolutely be there to hear you out.
If these options don’t work, for whatever reason, seeing a professional counselor can be valuable. Many clients have shared that speaking to an outside professional third party helps ease their emotions while also bringing them more clarity. It can be helpful to process grief with the privacy offered by counselors. Either way, the aim here is to re-establish a sense of connection with the important people in your life. Experiencing a loss can bring up existential concerns. A counselor or a trusted friend can be an excellent resource during the grieving process.
Grief can be difficult to navigate. In addition to the actual losses suffered, the emotions and thoughts that emerge from grief can be even more challenging than the loss itself. A good way to tell that you have processed your grief is that you can tell the story about the person or thing that was lost, and it doesn’t cause any physical reactions in your body. Give yourself patience and grace. Make sure that you don’t alienate yourself from the people you need most.
I will share with you the grief cycle by Kubler-Ross below. This popular diagram shows the general path of dealing with grief. It is important to note that stages in the cycle don’t have to follow the order laid out. It is common for people to fluctuate between the various stages. The graph depicts a smooth line, but as we know, human living is rarely that smooth and straightforward.
Of course, the deep and complex phenomenon of grief couldn’t be reduced to a blog post, I thank you for reading and I hope you found something helpful!
Spencer Thorn, LPC
