Centering Thought: I can admit my grief to myself and identify what I am grieving. Then I can allow myself the act of grieving by doing something to honor it. I know that no emotion lasts forever, not even grief. I give myself permission to acknowledge and experience my loss.
What is my relationship to grief? What are the things or the people that I am grieving?
Answering these questions helps us to …
first get a clearer perspective on our grief as a process — something separate from us, rather than all-consuming and identifying. Once we have some perspective, we can begin to allow the process to unfold, rather than being taken hostage by it. Perspective gives us a measure of control in our lives again, something that’s often missing in extreme grief if we believe it will never pass.
Grief has no definite timeframe, although it does often follow a process. The famed “five stages of grief” written about by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) have been commonly expanded to seven stages (often including guilt, among other emotions). There is no fixed process for how these “stages” occur — nor even a guarantee that each person will experience every stage. They are simply common aspects to the universal human process of grieving.
It’s important to note, too, that grief doesn’t only happen around death. Any loss can trigger grief, whether it’s the loss of an aging or missing pet or a move to another town. Losses can include people, places, animals, jobs, relationships, lifestyles or even our own sense of identity after a diagnosis. We grieve the life we think we were supposed to live or the expectations we once had for ourselves, now that we recognize our limitations.
But we do not have to stay stuck in grief forever. Just like any other form of sadness, just like any other emotion, grief is temporary. It comes and goes. How long it lasts is to a degree outside of our control and to a degree within it (just like with every other emotion): We can choose to make strides toward moving through our grief to contentment. Knowing what brings us joy — even momentary joy — and doing such things will help us to stimulate the positive brain chemistry we need to eventually embrace and overcome our grief, moment to moment.
The bottom line is that grief is a natural human response to deeply felt loss of something or someone deeply loved. And that is more than okay.
We can also be okay with living with deep feelings of loss, or grief, over a time. Accepting our grieving as a process will also do wonders for helping to move us through it. Meanwhile, one thing that never works is trying to deny or suppress our grief. This only compounds it and makes it harder to process. When we honor our grief by doing something (such as holding a funeral for our beloved late pet or writing a eulogy for the self we thought we’d be that also honors all we still can achieve), we choose to embrace our grief and therefore move through it more readily.