Grieving can be an uncomfortable, painful process.
As we grieve we may experience some or all of the following:
Our bodies can react with:
- Sighing: shallow breathing from holding a tight protective body posture. Requires a compensatory movement to maintain proper blood oxygen balance
- Sense of exhaustion and lack of energy: extreme weakness, experiencing inability to perform basic actions, may sometimes be experienced as apathy or listlessness; can be both surprising and distressing if we are usually very active
- Restless activity: purposeless and repetitive actions done automatically, inability to settle or concentrate
- Body pains: general or localised in particular areas, muscle tension, lump-in--the-throat, hollow in the pit of the stomach, stiff muscles, sore joints, headache. Digestive disorders: over-eating or under-eating; addictive eating and drinking. Problems of elimination: diarrhoea, constipation, frequency or retention of urination.
- Sleep disturbance: insomnia. Difficult in keeping awake during the day, waking early and inability to get to sleep again
- Fearfulness and panic: extreme anxiety attacks. Unreasonable reaction to stimuli, obsessions with security and safety for self and others
We can experience strong emotions:
- Shock: occurs most often in the case of sudden loss
- Numbness: often experienced early in the grieving process; possibly occurs because there are so many feelings to deal with that to allow them all into consciousness would be overwhelming. So we experience numbness as a protection from this flood of feelings
- Sadness: not necessarily manifested by crying, but often is
- Anger: can be one of the most confusing feelings for a grieving person, and as such is at the root of many problems in the grieving process. This anger comes from two sources: (1) from a sense of frustration that there was nothing we could do to prevent the death; (2) from a kind of regressive experience that occurs after the death of someone close (feeling helpless, feeling unable to exist without the person, and then experiencing the anger that goes along with these feelings of anxiety)
- Guilt and self-reproach; usually manifested over something that happened or something that was neglected around the time of the death; most often the guilt is irrational and will mitigate through reality testing
- Relief or sense of freedom: e.g. many people feel relief after the death of a loved one, particularly if the loved one suffered a lengthy or particularly painful illness; however, a sense of guilt often accompanies this sense of relief
- Anxiety: can range from a light sense of insecurity to a strong panic attack; anxiety comes primarily from two sources: (1) we fear that we will not he able to take care of ourselves on our own, and (2) our a of our own mortality heightened by the loss of a loved one
- Helplessness is frequently present in the early stage of a bereavement
- Emotional isolation and distance: lack of warmth, strong feelings of intolerable dislike and the urge to get away from distasteful situations
Our minds can react with:
- Disbelief: e.g.. “It didn’t happen, there must he some mistake. I can’t believe it happened; or “I keep waiting for someone to wake me and tell me I’m dreaming”.
- Yearning: or pining for that which is lost
- Preoccupation: e.g. obsessively thinking about the lost person, how to recover that person or intrusive thoughts and images of how that person died
- Sense of presence: the grieving person may experience the deceased person as somehow in the current area of time and space
- Disturbance of thought; periods of trance-like blanks, automatic behaviour without watchfulness or awareness, inability to perform ordinary mental tasks, finding it difficult to order our thoughts, having difficulty concentrating, or forgetting things
- Absent-minded behaviour: acting in an absent-minded way or doing things that may ultimately cause us inconvenience or harm e.g. driving the car to work and returning home via the bus
- Heightened sensing: visions, hearing voices, musing thoughts which return to images of the past
- Dreams of the lost person: both normal kinds of dreams and distressing dreams or nightmares
We can respond by:
- Socially withdrawing: withdrawing from other people; loss of interest in the outside world
- Avoiding reminders of the lost person: avoiding places or things that trigger painful feelings of grief
- Visiting places or carrying objects that remind us of the of the lost person: this is the opposite of the behaviour that avoids reminders of the lost person; often underlying this behaviour is the fear of losing memories of the lost person
- Treasuring many objects that belonged to the lost person
- Pre-occupation of thinking about what is gone
- Disorganisation of usual patterns of living
- Strong surges and swings of emotion, sadness, anger, fear
- Hostility and irritability in unreasonable proportions
- Guilt, feelings of self reproach, blame and lowered self-esteem
- Behaviour or characteristics mimicking those of the deceased person
- Living seems meaningless, loss of purpose, despair
- Inability to think clearly and make decisions resulting in a dependence on others clinging, fear of aloneness and going insane.
- Sense of incompleteness, something unfinished or impending, hanging over, unsatisfied anticipation
NB: As you review this list, remember that all the above items represent normal grief reactions; there nothing pathologicai about any one of them.
However, reactions that exist for abnormally long periods of time and with excessive intensity may forecast a complicated grief reaction.
