Grieving the Loss of a Loved One? Hear from a Clinical Psychologist

The most inevitable truth of our existence is the eventuality of its loss. We all go through it, sooner or later. You love someone so deeply that they mean the world to you, and then you lose them. Nothing can really prepare us to deal with a loss so profound. It pains deeply, and that hurt is often hard to put into any simple word. It’s as if a part of the soul is taken forever from you. It is as if you swallowed a huge sense of hollowness, and now anything and everything stops making sense; it’s all empty. This unexplained and deeply painful feeling is the very definition of grief. For a man losing his wife after decades of togetherness, grief is the loss of years of companionship which filled his life with love and care. For a child losing a parent, grief is the loss of a protective shadow that nurtured the very meaning of life. I can go on about the varied ways the anatomy of grief presents itself in all the clients I have seen in my therapy sessions. But despite being so unique, personal and unbearable, grief is the most universal reaction we all have when we experience loss.

It’s essential to process grief healthily. People often assume that, with time, others gradually accept the loss and adapt to a life without a loved one. However, a huge amount of time gone past may not necessarily ensure that one has made room for the loss and is building a meaningful life around it. Sometimes, when pain is not processed adequately, it impacts the quality of life in ways which are debilitating. It’s not uncommon to find people suggesting, “You shouldn’t cry; your tears are weakening other family members. Forget the pain and look at the path ahead of you. Why don’t you put up a stronger face than sit and brood? Keep yourself busy all day so you have less time to brood.” I am sure these words aim to comfort you and help you move forward; however, none adequately process grief. Instead, they only suppress the pain. Sometimes, you will be surprised to see how your own mind wants to protect you by consciously avoiding pain to a great extent.

For instance, burying yourself in office work, taking refuge in substances or heavy medications to numb the mind, or finding distractions in entertainment activities, sleeping and so on. I am sure, for the time being, all of it helps, but deep down, you know, the minute you are going to be back to yourself, the pain will resurface, with maybe a higher intensity than ever before because it was suppressed for so long. Deep down, you would also be exhausted because you were only avoiding pain to help yourself; you never wanted it to worsen with time. Unfortunately, there is an exponential increase in suffering when we avoid pain. As Dr Russ Harris, a renowned Acceptance & Commitment Therapy expert and author of Happiness Trap, writes, “It’s like holding a football underwater. As long as you keep holding it down, it stays beneath the surface. But eventually, your arm gets tired, and the moment you release your grip, the ball leaps straight out of the water.”

But the real question here is, what to do if not avoid pain? Choose to suffer? No, not exactly. Psychologically, healthy grief processing doesn’t subtract grief from your life but helps you to walk toward life by accepting grief as a companion. You are not only driven by grief in life but much more than that. It’s like learning to move with pain rather than away from pain. This article describes some ways of making it possible!

Accept and Allow Your Feelings

Processing grief is essential for not only healing but also knitting your life meaningfully back together. One of the first ways to do this is by simply accepting and allowing the pain rather than fighting against it. Feeling sad for a very long period, not wanting to participate in celebratory events, wanting to be quiet for long hours, and wanting to cry your heart out is all fine and okay. Howsoever happy and strong you were, it’s still okay and acceptable to be weak, vulnerable and sad for some time. That’s the most normal reaction humans have. You don’t have to take an extra responsibility to fix it as soon as you feel that way. Anyone commenting on you being overly sad, being too weak about your grief, or dragging your pain too much needs to be acknowledged but preferably ignored.

No matter how miserable and terrifying your feelings are, they are your feelings, and all of them are valid. As rightly said, grief is the price we pay for love. Your grief shows that you are a human; you have a heart which wants to love and be loved, and hence, it aches when there is a loss of love. Accepting these feelings as a normal reaction to loss may not exactly reduce the pain, but dropping the struggle to fix it may certainly reduce the suffering due to pain. As rightly said -“Pain is inevitable, but suffering is an option.” By dropping your fight to fix the pain and allowing the pain to stay, you choose to reduce the suffering.

Normalize the Grief as a Universal Process

You will realize that sometimes, the emotional storms of varying intensities may keep showing up in processing grief. It’s very normal to, at times, see yourself being able to make sense of what happened to you, but the very next day, you feel ten steps behind as if you never made any progress. Knowing that these psychological reactions are normal and essential to grief processing is important. Only when one goes through it do they come to face reality. Experts have conceptualized grief as having five distinct stages; almost all of us experience them.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1969), a Swiss psychiatrist, proposed in her book “On Death and Dying” the following five stages of grief: Denial (a state of shock, fear, and confusion upon knowing the news), Anger (towards self, family, spiritual/religious faith, medical providers for why it happened), Bargaining (people seek control over whatever they can do now, sometimes negotiating with God and trading one trauma for another), Depression (person accepts that inevitable has happened but is immensely sad, silent, aloof, distant and refusing to talk), and finally Acceptance (recognizing the reality and the person here is no longer protesting against it). People go through these psychological reactions sometimes in a linear way. Still, at times, they vacillate between stages until they finally accept what has happened and integrate the loss into reality. We need to accept these reactions with utmost compassion and care. It is normal; it doesn’t prove that anybody is better or worse than others. We all go through it, and we all eventually accept and integrate into our lives as well.

Coming Back to the Present

Having said that, knowing what helps you when you are very distressed is an essential skill. When we allow all kinds of emotions to enter our minds, it can be quite an overwhelming experience for our minds and bodies, and they respond by activating our basic survival responses – Fight, Flight, Freeze. So just imagine, when the emotional storms are hijacking the mind, rather than fighting with the storm in every direction, it’s a better idea to drop the anchor, i.e. holding on to something which can ground you and bring some stability back till the storm passes by. We call these Drop the Anchor skills. The way to do this is by the ACE technique, where “A” stands for Acknowledging difficult thoughts / emotions / body sensations without fighting against them. “C” stands for Coming back to your physical body – you can do this by engaging in little movements of the body like straightening up the spine, shrugging shoulders, slowly pressing the fingertips together, pushing your feet on the floor or any other body movement which grounds you back in the present. And “E” stands for Engaging in what you are doing, e.g. using your five senses to notice the environment you are in. ACE skills help you stay steady until the overpowering emotions settle a bit more.

Reducing the Impact of Unhelpful Thoughts

When we are in bereavement, our mind is bearing immense pain, and hence, it keeps going over the past and the future thoughts very often. These are called thought ruminations, and some of them are not only intrusive but far too convincing of the reality that we start believing it and acting according to it. Guilt over some past deed is the most common one I have seen, followed by an internal sense of punishment and, hence, leading to the conclusion that “I deserve to suffer” – I really wish I could have understood the urgency at the right time and hurried to the hospital a few minutes ago maybe I would have saved the life, I shouldn’t have believed the medical team and taken the second consultation at another hospital, I should have never fought at the last call, I am such a horrible human being to be so uncaring to the departed soul, I should have never trusted the doctors, let me go over the medical records again and see where I missed.

It’s natural to think about everything that could have been done better. But what also happens in this way of thinking is a vicious cycle of self-blame, and hence, a part of the mind is convinced that you deserve to suffer because you didn’t do enough. The mind soon starts beating you for everything. This loop is very unhelpful in the process of recovery because it never lets you come out of it. I am sure, objectively, there would be steps, processes, and actions that could have been better, but isn’t it easy and unfair to keep blaming our past selves when we already know the future? I am sure those actions in the past were never taken with the idea of causing harm; it was done because maybe it made sense at that moment. When the moment is gone, the mind judges the isolated actions but not exactly the comprehensive context within which you were operating.

And because we don’t objectively process the facts when emotional, and if there are fewer people around us to help us put facts together, the self-blame continues forever. Hence, it’s important to realize that while it’s normal to blame yourself for what happened, not everything was in your hand. Hence, it’s unfair to blame yourself for everything. Whenever such thoughts cross the mind, we need to step back and let them pass rather than engage with them. Getting out of this loop is an essential step for moving forward.

The second thought that often blocks grief processing is the image of a doomed future. Nothing is left for me now; everything is over now. Life will never be happy for me again, and there is no point in restarting. I am sure it’s normal again to be hopeless for a while. Feeding positivity in such moments of sorrow is also equally repulsive. Talking about a great life is not something you would want to think about at that moment. Be inactive and leave everything for a while. But if this way of thinking persists and starts shutting us down, we stop experiencing life or participating in life at all, and we become like a walking corpse ourselves. This thought would prevent you from resetting anything and pave the way for depression soon. Hence, it’s important to allow the thought but recognize the point when it’s dominating you and becomes unhelpful. And if that’s the case, let it come and pass by. Disengaging with unhelpful thoughts reduces suffering.

Restructuring Your Identity Around Pain and Values

One of the important aspects of grief processing is trying to search for meaning in the loss. Dr Victor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and holocaust survivor, in his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning, says, “In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.” Search for meaning is a very personal process that takes time. Sometimes, people draw a large part of meaning from their religion, wishing for moksha which ensures the ultimate freedom of the soul from all the known sufferings. Some find relief in karma theory. Some find comfort in the concept of heaven; for others, feeling like a part of a bigger universe with the journey from one place to another, one life to another gives hope. There is no one way of doing it. This search is long and is often helpful to only a few. Sometimes, even when you find meaning, it still may not be a worthy explanation for the cost of life of the loved one. Hence, a bereavement expert, David Kessler, explains, “Healing occurs not when grief gets smaller, but when life gets bigger”. Therefore, searching for meaning can also be in the direction of why you live. Why are you here? What meaning can you bring to the rest of your life? Finding out these values you want to practice for the rest of your life helps you restructure your identity, reframe your core values as a living human being, and provides a path to walk further on. Hence, it’s worth sitting down with yourself and reexploring the meaning of your life in terms of values you want to be now guided by. Be it care, compassion, connection, or gratitude, it may be something you have never thought of until now but want to integrate into your present life. These values expand the meaning of life and add reasons for living despite grief and loss.

This path embraces guidance for knitting a changed future and continuing to integrate loss into every step of life, for example, finding a ritual of remembering the loved one every day/week/month, conducting a community service, or offering a special prayer for peace of the parted soul. Similarly, creating that one change in life which honors the memory of the loved one, maybe by practicing a value they had, treating others as they did, or simply starting a foundation or project dedicated to them. All of these are healthy ways of weaving your life with grief.

Practicing Self-Compassion During the Process

Lastly, it’s essential to acknowledge that grieving takes a lot of courage from anyone; it’s exhaustive and frustrating at times. Hence, it’s essential to be self-compassionate during the process. Not pushing yourself to do a lot all the time and being self-accepting when you can’t do as much as you planned. That’s the key. It is also essential to offload the burden from your chest, that you are doing the grief processing wrong that it is different and isn’t perfect. Self-acceptance would be needed to know you are as imperfect as anyone in the world and you are allowed to take the path uniquely that matches your pace and persona.

Despite trying your best, if you still end up being very harsh and critical of yourself, imagine a friend sitting on the chair right next to you and trying to process the loss of a loved one. What would you have said? How would you have comforted the person? That’s exactly the approach you need to take for yourself during the process.

Though these are not the only ways of processing grief, it does ensure, to a large extent, that you are doing it healthily. However, despite making your best efforts, there may still be times that you find it hard to pick yourself up. Give yourself the runway of time and effort into the process, and keep reaching out to your support system for the required warmth and comfort to carry yourself towards knitting a meaningful life.

Seeking Professional Support

If, at any point, grief appears like baggage too heavy to lift and too overwhelming to continue walking with, you can consider undergoing psychotherapy for grief processing. Clinical Psychologists are trained to assist people in grief processing and assisting them closely in clearing the roadblocks to healing.