In order to make sense of the grieving process, to make the whole messy, bewildering experience more understandable and manageable the therapists assigned a task for the bereaved, which was to disengage from the relationship with the person who had died. Then they described phases that the griever passed through, or tasks that were accomplished as they moved towards the eventual acceptance of their loss and the internalisation of the loved one who had died.
And while is said that there are different stages to grief, different people deal with grief in different ways. No one has to experience all of a particular set of emotions in any set order. You may often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. Don’t forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.
Grief should only become a concern if it doesn’t start to diminish after some months and the grief-stricken person starts to believe that they cannot possibly have any meaningful existence without their deceased loved one.
DENIAL is the first stage of grief. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle. As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you are unknowingly beginning the healing process.
ANGER Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. Underneath anger is pain, your pain. The anger is giving you a structure, a bridge that connect you with the others, is just another indication of the intensity of your love.
BARGAINING We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one restored. We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt.
DEPRESSION When your attention come back to the presence the feelings of emptiness are starting to be overwhelming and the grief is going deep in your life, deeper that you could of ever imagine. The depression is very normal respond in the process of grieving, actually to not experience it would be something strange. To lost someone that you love, to realize that will not come back is depressing.
ACEPTANCE This stage is often confused with reaching some final goal of “Being all right” of what happened. For the most of the people this will not happened. This stage is about accepting the reality like it is, without the loved one and many people are resisting to accept this. They maintain the life like before their loved died. The life has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves. As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies and new experiences.
Critically what more recent writers did was to suggest that mourning was not about relinquishing the bonds with the person who had died but about finding a new and different ways of sustaining them.
Loss and grief are painful subjects but they are part of what it means to be mortal, what it means to be attached to other people and to care for them. There is so true in the words of Colin Murray Parkes:
“The pain of grief is just as much part of life as the joy of love: it is perhaps the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment. To ignore this fact, or to pretend that it is not so, is to put on emotional blinkers which leave us unprepared for the losses that will inevitably occur in our own lives and unprepared to help others cope with losses in theirs”.
Anita Chukaleska, Psychologist, Gestalt Psychotherapist 07. 12. 2020