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Friday July 30,2010

Grief takes a holiday

by Sherry Trent

I'm Grieving as Fast as I Can!

Everyone knows that the loss of a loved one can be painful for a very long time. With so much research and so many books written on grief, a few very important points have been constant.

First, everyone's grief process is different. Yes, there are distinct stages of grief (anger, denial, depression, bargaining and acceptance), but you may not follow the pattern exactly. In fact, you may find yourself jumping back and forth between different stages before finally reaching acceptance. When my brother died, I did not even experience any denial, but I did experience the whole range of the remaining stages many times. So remember, you do not need to feel like you're "not doing it right" or compare yourself to someone else's experience. That is too much unnecessary pressure for anyone to shoulder.

Another important point is that each experience of loss is different. For instance, you may be affected by the loss of a sibling very differently than by the loss of a parent. Personally, I have experienced many major losses in my life, and my pattern of grieving has been very different with each one. And the first major loss in your life may be the hardest. But again, your experience is a very individual one.

Getting Through the Holidays

One of the toughest times to weather is the holiday season, especially the first one after the loss of a loved one. At this time, when you are surrounded by those people most important to you, it becomes painfully clear that someone is missing. This is a very pivotal point in the healing process. Not only will your course of action allow you to get through the holidays, but it will affect the way you experience holidays for years to come. First, let me give you some examples (from experience, unfortunately) of different approaches to this difficult holiday period. When the loss is within your family, you may find yourself at the mercy of your family system. Let me explain. If you come from a very loving, open and expressive family, chances are they will deal with the loss in the same manner. If however, you come from a family that is not comfortable expressing feelings directly, you may expect that they will stick to this approach under these most stressful circumstances. And, because grief brings such extremely intense emotions, their reactions will probably be far more extreme than unual. This can make it very difficult to move through the holidays without bad feelings toward the people around you as well as the dreaded holidays themselves.

Let us first look at an example of the latter family. We'll call them the Denial family. Everyone is showing up for the holiday celebration with their best face on. They are going to pretend that nothing has changed. It is important for them to do this, because not doing so would be much too painful. They are not used to expressing painful emotions, so they prefer to