Coping with Bereavement in an Active Way
Dealing with bereavement can be helped by the following steps:
- The acceptance in your head of your loss.
- The acceptance in your heart of loss at an emotional level.
- Discovering your new identity; changing your own outer environment to match the inner truth that the one you love is no longer physically within it.
There is another step which you can actively engage in helping your own recovery and healing grief:
- Begin to reinvest in relationships which you have already and in new friendships which match your new identity as well.
When someone you love dies, your own sense of security is shaken.
Support in the initial days of bereavement is essential to help diminish levels of anxiety but what is most important of all, is the long term support. This does not just mean the support you are given, but even more importantly the support you seek out and allow others to give you. And it may sometimes be a mutual sort of support such as a friendship with another who has had a similar loss.
We know that many who are able to rediscover a sense of security, find their new identity and continue with some pleasure in life recover quicker. We know that those who actively seek out relationships with family, old friends and new friends find stability more quickly
The role played by others and perhaps even more importantly the place you allow others to have in your life is vital to recovery. Those who withdraw from family, or are reluctant to re-engage with the lives of their families, often continue to remain in the depth of distressing grief for much longer. There are many past and present reasons why this may happen and the email course covers help for more complicated grief.
Freud was very aware that in some senses mourning is never over; “we find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.”
This will always be true for most people who lose someone close to them but it is also true that mourning is not something that just passively happens to you. You can interact with your own mourning to help its path. In what way you can do this is likely to be affected by your own previous inclination and experience, but it is important to be aware that your own behaviour can help you with your distress or reinforce your grief to repeat itself.
Being determined that nothing will change, engaging in your social life without estimating the change within yourself and making no changes in companionship, can be as self-destructive as withdrawing altogether from your previous relationships. Death bed, or even lifelong instructions by a parent or partner about how to behave after they are gone, can prevent you mourning in a way that works for you. Adherence to someone else’s plan can hinder recovery.
There is an old English tradition that the official period of mourning is a year and a day. Each and every anniversary will have been lived through and the intensity of the first Christmas, first thanksgiving, first workday without the one you miss will have been survived and the obsessive thoughts which come to one on these days will be a little calmer the next year around.
Mourning is an active process in which some self awareness can help you engage with your own forward journey.
The path you choose to help you find out who you are now is not important so long as you feel that your bereavement is lessening in the intensity of distress. Finding ways to realise who you were and who you are now and what is different are important steps.
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