Psychology of Grief and Loss
By Hannah Clonkey
Greif can do unexpected things to you. Losing people suddenly, or even with time to prepare, can have a hold on you. When you lose someone, it can take a long time to recover, yet there are ways to get through the pain you may be feeling. You may be thinking how does this person know so much about loss and why do they think they can help? Well, this is because over the span two years I have lost three of the most important people in my life. I lost two people to cancer in the span of a month and in the year that followed, I also lost my best friend unexpectedly in a car accident. My goal is to use what I learned over those two years to help you through your own experience of loss.
Here are somethings I have learned through the process of grief that I hope will help others through the grieving process. To start, you may have heard about the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. One thing you may not realize about the stages is that these are actually considered a psychological myth. There is no clear recipe for grieving or a specific way to process grief. The next thing I learned is that you can be shaped by the things you have experienced. I have met many people in my life that have experienced some major from of loss in there lives. The common thing we always talk about is how much they changed after losing a person that was close to them. This can be because emotional events can have a large impact on your personality.
In the book The Memory Illusion, Julia Shaw talks about our you-ness and the impact our emotional or traumatic memories can have on our personality. Another thing I learned is that it is okay to show your emotion when going through grief. When you bottle up how you are feeling, it can lead to other things. It can lead to an explosion of emotions and this could happen in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, this can lead to more serious issues like falling into a major depression or never being able to heal from what you are going through. The last and most important thing is that you are not alone in what you are going through. Do not isolate yourself through the grieving processes. The people that are there for you care deeply enough to be in your life forever. They can help show you all the things in your life that are still important, and worth living for, even after going through a major loss.
What you are going through is probably one of the worst moments in your life. Know though that when you make an effort to show emotion and reach out to other people you are allowing yourself to move through the grief. It is okay to talk to people about your emotions, it is okay to show your emotions to the people around you and there are different grief resources like counseling or therapy services if you feel like you need more support. The Mayo Clinic is just one resource to offer grief support services.
Grief can be physically and emotionally draining, but it can also make you strong. It can make you into a new person and it can show you the importance of the people in your life. Most importantly, loss can show you that every moment matters, every laugh, text, phone call, goodbye, every I love you and even the moments you regret; every moment matters. Even when you feel lost and like it will not get better remember that it will. There are so many things you can do to make the grieving process easier, it all starts with talking to someone.
References
Mayo Clinic. (n.d.). Grief Support Programs. https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/locations/mankato/services-and-treatments/hospice/grief-support-programs
Shaw, J. (2016). The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory. Penguin. https://www.drjuliashaw.com/thememoryillusion
Shermer, M. (2008, November 1). Five Fallacies of Grief: Debunking, Psychological Stages. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/five-fallacies-of-grief/
Spayde, J. (2010, November 1). Bottled-Up Emotions. Experience Life: By Life Time. https://experiencelife.com/article/bottled-up-emotions/
Tartakovsky, M. (2016, May 17). The Truth About Grief: The Myth of Its Five Stages. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/five-fallacies-of-grief/