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Tips on Coping with the Pain of Grief








Applying the 3-A Coping Framework: Acknowledge, Assess, Assist to address loss is beneficial for monitoring yourself with awareness. Acknowledge the loss; Assess the impact - emotional, physical, behavioral, spiritual; Assisting with strategies in coping and processing the grief.

 

Pain is a common grief reaction to loss. When caught in the heat of a significant loss, a question may arise frequently, one that you may have asked yourself: Will this pain ever end? The answer can be explored from the perspective of time, grief processing, and closure:

 

Time as a Healer: Grief is considered to be a natural reaction to loss that begins with intense reactions at the time of loss and diminishes over time. Actually, grief is more complex. For instance, it may not even manifest at the time of the loss but surface months or years later as a delayed grief reaction. Because the symptoms of grief resemble depression, the grief can get treated as depression and go undetected or not addressed if you are not monitoring with awareness, not acknowledging and assessing. This may even more likely occur in loss situations that are not death related.

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Also, time may not necessarily heal. When the last Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) was revised, there was a new disorder added related to the grieving experience. Prolonged Grief Disorder is a diagnosis made after a substantial length of time has gone by since the loss occurred where the grief has not subsided and there is difficulty coping with activities of daily living. Although, it pathologizes grief from being a natural reaction to loss, it still connects the reaction to the loss context rather than not making that link. In these cases, there is treatment available to assist in coping through the loss. But would the grief end here?

 

Grief Processing: It is understandable that you do not want to actually embrace the grief because grief involves experiencing pain, at times unbearable. If you push the grief away, though, it does not mean it goes away. Pushing grief away does not end it. It is still in there, that grief part just gets tucked away. Although it may appear like it is gone, repressing buries the grief to just resurface again perhaps more intense at a later date as it lingers in the present within the cells of your system.

Although we live in a culture that discourages sadness and distressing emotions, facing the loss applying the 3-A's of Acknowledge, Assess, Assist is a means of processing the grief for better outcomes of coming to terms with it, working with it rather than pushing it away. Assisting by acknowledging the loss and assessing the impact can lead to using assisting grief strategies such as talking it out, journaling, normalizing, self monitoring with self awareness as you adapt to the changes brought on by the loss. Facing the challenge of grief processing is an opportunity for making peace and meaning from the loss. It does take time.


Closure: Many people seek ways of attaining closure believing that is what is required in order to "move on". But closure does not end the grief experience either. You may move forward thinking you are "over it", able to "move on" only to have the grief surface months or years later. Instead of saying "move on" you may want to say "move forward with the grief".


Another way of looking at recovery is that the grief does not necessarily shrink over time after a loss but that your life grows bigger around the grief, hopefully subsiding the pain. Just as grief does not end, neither does life. Hopefully, in moving forward, there are new memories created of life moments to fill space alongside the old memories and enduring grief.


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