Grief is something we all end up experiencing at some point in our lives. It can feel vast and overwhelming, like a tidal wave that crashes down upon us. It can feel like it will never end, that we will never reach the bottom of the pain and sadness or that we will never reach the end of the tunnel and once more feel the light. But grief can also feel very different to this, it can feel small and hard like a stone in our heart, or it can be mixed with other emotions, all complicated and tangled. We might feel angry, at life, at the universe or even at the person who is gone. We might feel relief at the end of suffering or of a complicated relationship. We might feel guilty because for a few minutes we didn’t think about our loss and had a genuine moment of laughter. We might feel remorse or regret for the things we said or the things we left unsaid. In whatever form we feel grief it will always be linked to loss, to a change in our lives where something or someone important to us is gone forever.
Loss can take many forms, and we don’t always realise that they can be enough to bring us to grief. When we think about grief and loss often the most obvious connection is losing a person who is important to us either through death or the ending of a relationship. But there are many other kinds of loss that we perhaps don’t give enough importance to in our own lives. We often love our pets deeply; their loss can leave us grieving but also confused and feeling unable to share. Having a job or career cut short by redundancy can quickly lead us to a feeling of losing who we are. An illness or accident can take away the ability to enjoy a physical activity that we loved, a sport or a hobby. This kind of loss can lead us to a similar place. Time itself will rob us of some aspect of who we are, things that were so easy years ago become much more difficult. Sometimes circumstances can interrupt important stages of life, phases through which we would normally grow and develop leading to a loss of that opportunity for growth. All these losses can be devastating in their own way.
We don’t always recognise when we grieve, and this is how it can sometimes look.
John knew that something wasn’t right, he found that he would get very emotional, to the point of weeping, at seemingly strange and unrelated times. Working with his counsellor he realised that he would feel this way when something happened in a TV show, or at other times it seemed to be in response to him reading a book or newspaper article. Together they explored what might link these seemingly separate situations and John realised that they all related to something between a father and a son. As their work progressed John began to talk about his parents’ divorce which happened when he was nine. He hadn’t thought that it had affected him much because he could remember when it was all happening that he did not really feel anything particularly strong, he just got on with life and adapted to the changes. But as he talked about it more with his counsellor, he began to see that his parents’ divorce had a huge impact on him. The immediate family that he had known all his life ended. No one had died, but nonetheless everything changed for him. John began to see that the loss of security, the loss of that family around him was something that he did not know how to process or deal with as a child.
Each of us feels these losses and will express these feelings very differently and most of the time this is okay. Sometimes though we don’t allow ourselves to grieve. It might be too painful, or like John, we might not have the understanding or the language to express how we feel. Our minds are very clever. In these kinds of situations, they will enact a defence against emotional pain in order to allow us to continue and survive. It is in these cases that our grief will stay with us, perhaps hidden away and buried but there all the same. What was once a useful and necessary defence against that emotional pain might over time become a new source of distress for us leaving us emotional, angry or confused.
Are you living with grief right now and looking for someone who will truly be there for you? Or have you lived through loss in the past and now find those hidden emotions bubbling up? Please reach out and book a free introductory call with me to see if we can work through these things together.