On Grief

I want to talk about grief for a few minutes. In my opinion, grief is one of the most difficult human experiences that we have. It makes our brain very chaotic. It feels like it's very out of control. There are five typical stages of grief. Not everybody goes through them. And unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your thought process, they're not linear. So denial is usually the first one. This means you feel numb. You feel disconnected from the event. You feel like it isn't real. The second one is bargaining, feeling like, well, maybe it is real, maybe it isn't real, kind of going back and forth. Maybe if you could only do something right, the person would come back. The next one is anger. It could be anger at another person, a bunch of other people. It could be anger at God, it could be anger itself. It could be anger at the person that left. Sadness is the next one, but it's a deep, gut-wrenching sadness where you literally may feel it in your heart. It may feel like there is no way to move forward. And the last one is acceptance. Now, the problem again with grief, though, is it goes back and forth between all of those. One minute you feel like, okay, I've got this, and then the next minute you feel numb, the next minute you're angry, the next minute you're really, really sad. And that makes it very difficult because it's very unpredictable. So with grief, you have to let it just kind of wash through you. Don't hold on to it. Don't try and dictate it. Don't tell yourself I shouldn't be feeling this way. But do take breaks from it. One of the ways that some people take breaks from grief is they get a box and they put the person or the event that has been causing them grief, and they put that person's name in a box. And they go, okay, mind. I am going to open this in the morning, maybe at noon, maybe in the evening. I'm going to set a timer for 30 minutes or 10 minutes or however long. And I'm going to sit and just let my grief go through me. It might mean being very angry. It might mean feeling numb. It might mean tears. It could be all of them back and forth. But you just let your brain start to recalibrate. When that timer goes off, you shut the box. If you are a religious believer, you can pray over the box. You can ask God to help heal your heart. But then anytime your mind wants to go back to that topic, you tell it, now we will open that box at a specific time. Now, that doesn't work necessarily when you're in very severe grief. But as you start to be able to process the grief, that tends to work for many people. But you can't just be in grief all day. It doesn't work. It exhausts people, and it can be very incapacitating. So give yourself permission to give yourself breaks from grief to be able to take a break and go do something fun. Don't try and manage your feelings when you do feel them. And just be very gentle with yourself. If you're grieving, the last thing you need to be is the person that's being mean to you. I hope this helps. You have the right to heal. And you can heal, but allow your brain enough space to heal. God bless.