Grief — the emotional flu.
It’s been nearly 12 months since I started psychotherapy and I wanted to reflect back on some of the things I’ve learned in the hopes they’ll be able to help you too. Here are my musings on grief.
Grief is like an emotional flu — inevitable, will affect you differently every time, and heals best with time, rest and self care.
I was 21 when I first suffered the loss of a loved one. It was terrible. Suddenly, this whole new, terrible, painful emotion formed inside of me that I wasn’t really sure what to do with, so I just did what any reasonable person would do and kept it in check. Nobody had ever really talked about death in my family before, because we hadn’t really needed to. I didn’t like this new emotion, and so I didn’t want to talk about it. If I ignored it, maybe it would go away. And it did, for a good few years. Fast forward to 2018 and I lost three more people, two of them in the space of a week. Since then, I’ve lost another three loved ones.
I don’t tell you this for pity or sympathy, I tell you this because it finally made me realise that I was never going to be able to ignore that horrible emotion that had formed way back in 2012 forever. People I loved and cared about died, and every time they did, that emotion grew a bit stronger, stirred a bit harder. Death is one of the only certainties in life, I knew this was going to keep happening. The problem was, I didn’t really know what this emotion was or how to deal with it.
Naturally, this topic came up throughout my time in therapy and I discovered that the emotion that had formed was grief. I’m not sure why, but this was actually a bit of a shock to me. I’m sure you’re sitting reading this saying ‘well, duh!’ but it had just never really occurred to me. I thought grief was that immensely sad period between someones passing and their funeral, not this thing that had lasted for years and years, that morphed between anger, abandonment, sadness, and despair, that bubbled up at the most obscure (and often inconvenient) of times.
The more my therapist and I explored this grief, the more I was able to spot the traits of it in myself and others. I realised that grief as I felt it, was not necessarily grief as you would feel it. It was however, just as valid. The loss of a great uncle may seem trivial to someone who has lost a child, but grief is just so personal that it’s non comparable. I also realised that grief can occur after any loss, not just the loss of a person or pet. While it feels a bit strange to grieve for, say, a situation, a relationship, or a period in time I assure you, it’s perfectly rational. I have learned that you can feel grief for anything you have felt a strong emotional connection with. Once that connection is gone, it can leave a void, and that void can manifest as grief.
One day, while talking through grief with my therapist, I realised it’s just like the flu; We all get it, it affects all of us in different ways, and the quickest way to heal is to just snuggle up in bed, keep your fluids up and ride it out. My brain loves analogies, they help me to make sense of things I don’t know by using things familiar to me. This flu analogy suddenly made the whole grief thing a lot less scary to me. If the best way to process my grief was to just slow down, snuggle up, give myself the time, space and permission to cry, be angry, feel abandoned and hopeless I could do that — and I did. Once I’d exhausted those feelings, I felt so much lighter. Suddenly, that huge emotion that had been living inside of me for all those years wasn’t taking up all the room anymore. I was able to find space to look back at all the happy memories with those people I’d loved and lost. This isn’t to say that I don’t still feel sad or angry that they’re gone — I do, but nowhere near as much. Anyone who has seen the Pixar movie Inside Out will know what I mean when I say it’s like when the joyful yellow memories get tinged with the blue of sadness.
If we take a moment to go back to our flu analogy, I’m sure we’ve all had a time where we’ve felt the onset of the flu, ignored it and powered through, only to be totally wiped out by it later and realise that the whole ordeal has lasted much longer than It would have if you’d just taken the time out to care for yourself and recover properly. Grief can do the exact same and I found that out the hard way. I can hear some of you saying ‘I take cold and flu tablets and they work just fine’. That’s great! If you’re able to find something to ease the symptoms of grief, and it’s working for you and not harming your long term physical or mental health, then carry on! Some of the things I’ve found that work for me are keeping a journal, writing a letter of all the things I wish I’d said, holding a treasured possession of theirs. Another way of avoiding the worst of grief is to maintain good emotional health, whatever that looks like for you. You could take the equivalent of a flu jab by learning to understand what your grief looks like, how it feels, understanding how you personally cope best with it. I actually found that the best way for me to do this was while I wasn’t actively grieving because it gave me the distance I needed to look objectively at what was going on. You could do this alone but please don’t underestimate the power of reaching out to talk to someone, either a friend, family member or mental health professional.
If you, or someone you care about is suffering with grief, please know that you are not alone and that there are many people and organisations out there who can and want to help you. Grief sucks. But it can be an immensely cleansing experience to feel it fully, and I implore you to do so when the time comes.
