It was just over a year ago that the first known cases of Coronavirus reached Ireland & the UK. Since then there have been over 4 thousand COVID 19 related deaths in Ireland and over 123 thousand deaths in the UK. Globally, there have been over 2.5 million COVID 19 related deaths. If we lit a tea light candle for each of them & laid them in a line it would stretch for around 20 miles or 32 km. That’s a lot of grieving!
With so much pain & sorrow among us, this seems like a good time to think about our experience of grief & bereavement.
When we think about grief & bereavement, we tend to think about the people in our lives that have passed away. Our relationships with those people, whether they were good or bad, can have a great impact on our experience of grief and often in ways that we don’t expect.
Social culture plays a big role, too, with all kinds of religious belief systems influencing how we think of death. There are times when society is very judgemental about our experience of grief. For example, think about the way people sometimes think about suicide, miscarriages, loss of pets or perhaps even losing someone who isn’t well thought of by others. These are just a few of the circumstances in which society seems to react differently to death and this can have consequences for our experience of grief.
Despite this, our experiences of grief & bereavement are felt in all such instances and the way that society views our loss can have a profound affect on our experience of grief.
Death itself is something which comes to us all but we rarely talk about it, and for many it is a taboo subject. Many people are uncomfortable talking about their own inevitable passing or that of another. If we start to break down grief and understand it more clearly we can develop strategies for dealing with it.
In this & the following articles I hope to shed some light on the subject and hopefully bring us some much needed comfort.
Grief is essentially about the loss of something or someone we once valued – Or put another way, something or someone to which we were once attached – And can be experienced about the loss of material things like an item with sentimental value, as well as immaterial things like losing an opportunity or becoming disabled.
So, let’s start off with some basics:
1. There is no scale against which an appropriate level of grief for a specific loss should be determined. Grief is simply your experience – it is what it is. There is no right or wrong here, but there are ideas about what is healthy & what is not. For example, if profound grief is experienced over a long period of time and is having severe consequences for your daily life, it’s time to ask for some help.
2. Generally, counsellors & psychotherapists wouldn’t offer ‘therapy’ in the first few months to a client after losing someone. However, they may offer other forms of support if the loss has been traumatic and you may find this therapeutic. This is because the immediate reaction after losing someone is often very raw & takes a little time for each of us to process & understand how we feel. After a few months, many have already begun to heal naturally. Most professionals recognise this and prefer to allow people’s natural healing process to kick in.
3. People grieve in different ways & over different timescales. There is no right or wrong here, either. It’s not a competition to see who can grieve more, quicker or slower. Getting over the loss of someone quickly doesn’t necessarily indicate that you didn’t care for or love that person. It may be that you are simply more resilient when it comes to great loss. However, taking longer to grieve doesn’t mean that you are any less resilient or cared more, it may just be that your healing process takes a little longer.
Over the next few days & weeks I’ll work through some typical grief reactions and look at how we can work through them so stay tuned if you’ like to hear more on the topic.
If you’d like to talk about this or anything for else for that matter, feel free to give me a call on 0899420568, email help@broadmindstherapy.org, or message me directly via this page. Your message will be handled discretely, and treated as private & confidential. Finally, if you like what you see please ‘like & share’ so we can reach & help as many people as possible. Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Integrative Counselling And Psychotherapy 