Coping with Grief

By Antonio, Jeffery C., Yaniz

What is Grief?
Grief is a natural response to loss which can affect your emotional, mental, and physical health. Grief can cause you to feel a range of difficult and unexpected emotions but it is a natural reaction to loss. The more significant the loss, the more intense your grief will be as everyone has a different way of dealing with grief. Grief can be caused by a variety of life events such as: divorce and relationship break up, loss of health, losing a job, loss of financial stability, death of a loved one such as a family or friend, death of a pet, a loved one s serious illness, loss of a friendship, loss of safety after a trauma, and catastrophic event such as a natural disaster.
Whatever your loss, it's personal to you, so don't feel ashamed about how you feel, or believe that it s somehow only appropriate to grieve for certain things.

The Grieving Process:
How you grieve depends on many factors such as your personality and coping skills, your life experience, your spiritual beliefs, and how significant the loss was to you. Inevitably, the grieving process takes time and happens gradually, and there is no normal timetable for grieving. There are many myths about the grieving process such as how long it should take, whether crying is appropriate or not, whether moving on is forgetting about the loss, and that the pain will go away faster if you ignore it. Whatever the cause of your grief, what is true is, there are healthy ways to cope with the pain of loss as you move through the stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. But you probably won't experience the stages of grief in a certain order, nor do you have to go through all of them to heal.

Symptoms of Grief:
While loss affects people in different ways, many of us experience the following symptoms when grieving.
Emotional Symptoms: Shock and disbelief, sadness, guilt, fear and worries, anger and resentment.
Physical symptoms: Fatigue, nausea, lowered immunity, weight loss or gain, aches and pains, insomnia

Coping with Grief:

1. Basic Self-Care: take care of your physical health such as eating regularly, hydrating yourself, and healthy activities that you enjoy.
2. Be Gentle: Let go of the timeline and allow the feelings to ebb and flow during your healing process.
3. Be informed: Basic grief education will help you understand what to expect in your grief journey. Being informed can help you prepare for the physical and emotional symptoms.
4. Express Yourself: Allow yourself to talk about the loss and open up to others about how you are feeling.
5. Stay Connected: Spending time around and communicating with others is vital.
6. Seek Outside Help: Dealing with grief is a unique and complicated experience so it can help to have a therapist or counselor and outside support to process your loss.
7. Acknowledge and Remember: With family members and friends acknowledge the loss and share memories and support each other.

How to Help Someone Grieve?

1. Be Present and Accepting: Simply being there for a family or friend and accepting their pace through the grieving process is a supportive action. A big help!
2. Listen: Before giving unsolicited advice, listen without judgment or an agenda. Let the griever talk and process their loss without worrying about your reactions or opinions.
3. Be Respectful But Proactive: Help the griever in small ways recognizing that they may be overwhelmed. For example, doing household chores, sending meals, encouragement, etc.
4. Validate Their Experience: Make the grieving process about them without judgements on how they are coping with the loss.
5. Stay Connected: Be supportive no matter the timeline of the person s grief or where they are in the grieving process.
6. Be Supportive of Remembering: Participate in the cultural or spiritual activities associated with honoring the loss especially during holidays, birthdays, or the anniversary of the loss.

Takeaways

• Grief and loss are a natural but challenging part of life.
• There's a wide range of mind-body experiences when you're dealing with grief.
• Learning how to grieve is an ongoing process rather than a singular event.
• Grief can impact mind-body health and you should seek support for complicated grief.

References:

Dealing with grief: 13 tips to get through a big loss - Healthaid (lemonaidhealth.com)

Coping with Grief and Loss - HelpGuide.org