Bereavement and Loss

Grieving doesn’t just have to do with the loss of a person. It can involve many different things such as a major change in life such as moving away from somewhere, unfulfilled expectations, losing a job, a divorce or losing a pet to list a few.

• It’s important not to neglect your health during times of grief and that you continue to eat regular and healthy meals and do exercise even if you don’t feel like it.
• It’s also important to get a healthy amount of sleep. Looking after your body can make it easier for you to cope with difficult feelings.
• Spending time with family and friends will allow you to feel supported through these times. You should try to do things that make you feel happy and provide a distraction from the ongoing feeling of grief.
• Focus on the good times with the person you have lost, this may help you to accept your loss and move on.

Grief can cause physical symptoms as well as the more well known emotional responses. It can cause aches in joints, stiffness and headaches. This could be due to the extra amounts of stress hormones produced by the body during grief triggering a continuous fight or flight response as mentioned earlier. This means muscles and joints have to continuously respond to these placing them under stress. It’s important to allow feelings associated with grief to be expressed rather than suppressing them. This not only contributes to a better mental health but also provides physical relief.

We respond to grief through learning to “grow around” it as opposed to it going away. This theory can be illustrated through an analogy. Imagine a circle representing someone’s life. The circle is then shaded in to represent grief taking over and filling every aspect of life. As time goes on, instead of the shaded part representing grief shrinking, it remains the same but life grows around it through new experiences. On some days grief may feel as intense as when the loss had first occurred. However, on other days life may be lived outside the circle. This allows you to move on with other parts of life.

Grief occurs in episodes and can often be triggered by things like places you visit, smells, or sounds which trigger memories of the person that has died.

Grief can be overwhelming and may affect our daily activities and our interactions with others.

• While some people may hide grief, other people may want to open up and talk
• Listen to what they have to say
• Make sure they keep healthy

• You may feel guilty and upset at not being able to grieve over a person in a way that you would’ve liked to or the way you thought they would’ve wanted
• You may have had a difficult relationship with the person
• You already expected it, you may feel relieved because they were suffering from an illness

Some people prefer to be alone and isolate themselves after losing a loved one. Other people prefer to talk about it. Young people say that going to school or college can be really difficult at first. This is normal. 

Grief is believed to have been a natural part of our evolution.

In the past, people needed to make relationships with others in order to survive. These relationships meant that we would go looking for missing members of a group.

In the process of evolving into the social species we are today, we started to form deep attachments to others that we love.