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Getting Through Grief: understanding what it is and how it affects us

Updated: Aug 14, 2023


Usually, these blog posts honor something that takes place for a whole month, but because grief is such a prevalent thing in our lives, I wanted to focus on a specific day in August: August 30, National Grief Awareness Day.

As a counselor, grief is something I’ve learned a lot about– through the lenses of others, through personal experience, through stories I’ve heard, and through learning techniques to help people through grief. It’s important to understand what it is because it’s something that every person, at least once in their life, typically experiences.

It’s also one of the hardest things to experience.

So, what is grief? Grief is “keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss; sharp sorrow; painful regret”. This is a pretty broad definition, when you think about it. Most of the time, people think of grief as something you might experience when a loved one passes away. This is a great example of when grief can occur. But, like the above definition suggests, grief can be beyond that, too.

You can grieve the loss of a pet. You can grieve the end of a relationship. You can grieve what you thought might have been. You can grieve the loss of a job.

Grief is one of those hard things to deal with, too. It takes a toll, and it feels very internal. You might have heard of the stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). Lots of people who grieve pass through these, but not necessarily in a certain order, nor within a certain timeframe. Grief is one of those hard-to-navigate events in life, and sometimes it feels like it might hit out of nowhere, like if you weren’t expecting something like getting fired, or being broken up with, or the passing of a grandparent.

Because grief is so broad, it’s likely that you’ve already experienced it to some extent, and healing from grief isn’t a “what works for one works for everyone” kind of thing because people are all so different. The thing is, though, sometimes people get lost in the idea of feeling sad about something being grief. Or, depression and grief can seem the same.

One LPCC-S/LSW describes the differences well: grief is a feeling that directly correlates to something that happened and a loss, depression oftentimes doesn’t have a direct cause (even though it can) and takes a more biological/chemical take on things. Sadness is a typical response to life events, though long-term sadness can be an adjustment disorder.

Basically, not everyone who is sad is grieving. Not everyone who is depressed is grieving. Not everyone who is grieving is depressed. They’re all similar feelings, but they all vary by the cause, reactions, and length of time being experienced. One of the problems that I see as a “Zillenial” is that a lot of the time, we self-diagnose ourselves through Google, Tiktok, or other social media, and determine we are depressed or grieving, when in reality, we might be experiencing some sadness. Grief and depression are both more intense than sadness, and grief can be even more nuanced because people expect others to “get over” a loss in a short amount of time. In reality, grief can last years (becoming a grief disorder, but right now, we’re focusing on the concept of how the grieving process affects us typically speaking, in the United States with a fairly western focus).

There is no right or wrong way to go about grieving, and everyone responds to different life events differently. For example, one person will enter a period of grief over the loss of their dog, while another may not. Another may not experience grief after the death of a parent, and others might grieve to some extent forever due to the loss. It looks so different on everyone. The typical time for grief to take is between 6 months and 2 years.

That’s a long, long time to be feeling so intensely and so deeply.

And it’s okay that you feel like that for that long. You can’t rush the process of getting through a loss. Some people will want counseling to get through it– this doesn’t mean they’re “weaker” than someone who doesn’t want counseling to get through it. Grief is something that can be shared, but is also incredibly difficult to share because of how individualized it feels.

So, what do you do if you’re in the throes of grief? Because it can lead to depression, it’s important to monitor your symptoms of grief. If you start to think life might not be worth living, or you feel like the world would be better off without you, this is a sign to immediately get help (hospital, mental health clinics, reaching out to a therapist, etc.). People often experience symptoms of depression within the grieving process at some point, and this can be a dangerous time because of intensity of the emotions. It’s also okay to feel this way. It’s a time to reach out to those around you– friends, family, a pet, a therapist, a member of the clergy, whomever you feel can help you in that moment.

An event that causes you to grieve doesn't go away-- we can't go back in time and change the past. So, you probably won't forget what happened, and you might always feel a little bit of an ache when you think about it. The moment of loss itself never actually goes away, but you continue to build your life around it. Slowly, it gets further from directly in front of you. It’s still there, and you still remember the feeling and the loss, but over time, it becomes less and less huge in your line of vision.

That’s how it’s supposed to be.

Lots of people also experience guilt when they begin to grieve less actively, because they worry they might be forgetting about the person/thing that was lost. This, though, isn’t the case. People are made to move on from hard things. People (all people!) are tough and resilient, and sometimes don’t have a choice but to continue continuing on. Just because the thing you lost isn’t your first thought in the morning anymore doesn’t mean you no longer care. It means that you have had the chance to heal, and learn to put your grief in a special place in your heart and mind, where you can look back on the good memories and moments while simultaneously drawing on the sadness you may feel.

Moving on from grief is really the acceptance of the struggle and the process. Recognizing that though you will always feel some elements of the sadness, you will not feel it for the rest of your life at every moment of every day.



If you'd like more resources on grief, here are some links:


2. Coping with Grief (life after loss) by the National Institute of Health

4. 988 (Suicide Prevention Line)

5. Bereavement and Grief by Mental Health America


JB



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