Grief and Loss

Grief

Grief is a natural response to loss. It’s the emotional suffering you feel when something or someone you love is taken away. Often, the pain of loss can feel overwhelming. You may experience all kinds of difficult and unexpected emotions, from shock or anger to disbelief, guilt, and profound sadness.

The pain of grief can also disrupt your physical health, making it difficult to sleep, eat, or even think straight. These are normal reactions to loss—and the more significant the loss, the more intense your grief will be.

Symptoms of grief can include shock & disbelief, sadness, guilt, anger, fear, as well as physical symptoms.

 What Can Cause Grief?

Coping with the loss of someone or something you love is one of life’s biggest challenges. You may associate grieving with the death of a loved one—which is often the cause of the most intense type of grief—but the ending of anything that is significant to us can cause grief, including:

  • Divorce or relationship breakup

  • Loss of health

  • Losing a job i.e. being made redundant

  • Loss of financial stability

  • A miscarriage

  • Retirement

  • Death of a pet

  • Loss of a cherished dream

  • A loved one’s serious illness

  • Loss of a friendship

  • Loss of safety after a trauma

  • Selling the family home

Grieving is a highly individual experience; there’s no right or wrong way to grieve. How you grieve depends on many factors, including your personality and coping style, your life experience, your faith, and how significant the loss was to you.

While loss affects people in different ways, many of us experience the following symptoms when we’re grieving. Just remember that almost anything that you experience in the early stages of grief is normal—including feeling like you’re going crazy, feeling like you’re in a bad dream, or questioning your religious or spiritual beliefs.

Emotional Symptoms of Grief

  • SHOCK AND DISBELIEF

    Right after a loss, it can be hard to accept what happened. We enter what we call a state of denial. You may feel numb, have trouble believing that the loss really happened, or even deny the truth. If someone you love has died, you may keep expecting them to show up, even though you know they’re gone.

  • SADNESS

    Profound sadness is probably the most universally experienced symptom of grief. You may have feelings of emptiness, despair, yearning, or deep loneliness. You may also cry a lot or feel emotionally unstable.

  • GUILT

    You may regret or feel guilty about things you did or didn’t say or do. You may also feel guilty about certain feelings (e.g. feeling relieved when the person died after a long, difficult illness). After a death, you may even feel guilty for not doing something to prevent the death, even if there was nothing more you could have done.

  • ANGER

    Even if the loss was nobody’s fault, you may feel angry and resentful. If you lost a loved one, you may be angry with yourself, God, the doctors, or even the person who died for abandoning you. You may feel the need to blame someone for the injustice that was done to you.

  • FEAR

    A significant loss can trigger a host of worries and fears. You may feel anxious, helpless, or insecure. You may even have panic attacks. The death of a loved one can trigger fears about your own mortality, of facing life without that person, or the responsibilities you now face alone.

Physical Symptoms of Grief

We often think of grief as a strictly emotional process, but grief often involves physical problems, including:

  • Fatigue

  • Nausea

  • Lowered immunity

  • Weight loss or weight gain

  • Aches and pains

  • Insomnia

As time passes following a significant loss, such as the death of a loved one, it’s normal for feelings of sadness, numbness, or anger to gradually ease. These and other difficult emotions become less intense as you begin to accept the loss and start to move forward with your life.

However, if you aren’t feeling better over time, or your grief is getting worse, it may be a sign that your grief has developed into a more serious problem, such as complicated grief or major depression.

The sadness of losing someone you love never goes away completely, but it shouldn’t remain centre stage. If the pain of the loss is so constant and severe that it keeps you from resuming your life, you may be suffering from a condition known as complicated grief.

Complicated grief is like being stuck in an intense state of mourning. You may have trouble accepting the death long after it has occurred or be so preoccupied with the person who died that it disrupts your daily routine and undermines your other relationships.

Symptoms of complicated grief include:

  • Intense longing and yearning for your deceased loved one

  • Intrusive thoughts or images of your loved one

  • Denial of the death or sense of disbelief

  • Imagining that your loved one is alive

  • Searching for your deceased loved one in familiar places

  • Avoiding things that remind you of your loved one

  • Extreme anger or bitterness over your loss

  • Feeling that life is empty or meaningless

Left untreated, complicated grief and depression can lead to significant emotional concerns & life-threatening health problems. But therapy can help you heal.

 Contact Us

If you feel you need someone to talk to or are looking to find support please contact me. I will provide you with empathy and a nurturing, secure, respectful, and supportive environment.

If you are experiencing any of these concerns, please click the link below to book an appointment.