The Waves of Grief
It will knock you down.
Have you ever been hit by a wave and got the wind knocked out of you? Swimming with all your strength in a muffled powerful ocean, you can faintly see and hear life going on above you whilst you desperately try to make your way to the surface again so you can just breathe? Well, this is what it can feel like to grieve.
Grief is the one thing we will all experience, yet it is the one thing we fail as a society to talk about more.
Why is grief so hard? Well, because it is. There are so many ways grief shows up in our lives. Sometimes profoundly obvious and sometimes ingeniously sneaky.
I work with grief a lot in my practice.
And I do not mean just with clients who have experienced the death of a loved one. The definition of grief is ‘to feel great sadness due to loss or regret’. If you are alive and reading this, I feel confident in saying that you have experienced some form for grief in your life.
Take your time, it’s ok.
When we lose someone, or something that we have been connected to. We not only grieve what we have lost, but we also grieve who were when we had it. We grieve the parts of ourselves that are now forever changed. The ending of the story we had in our mind, the ending we planned or hoped for, begins changing in real time. Grief is the process of us adapting to change.
The stages of grief are not linear.
In the process of loss, we jump from one to the other, we may even feel stuck in one stage longer than all the others. There is no right or wrong way to go through this, but we must feel our emotions at each stage, we must flow with the emotional current.
People ask when will things ever be the same?
My answer to that is why should they? Grief doesn’t get better or worse over time, but it does get different, because you are different now. Grief changes you.
Grief can also a catalyst for growth.
Loss makes us think about life, right? You may question “Who am I?”, “What do I want out of this life?”These existential questions can be the spark that re-ignites the fire in our hearts. It can turn the lights back on in our dark world showing us the way forward. Grief can become the minerals in the soil, supporting us to grow again, try again, love again.
Grief is the receipt of a connected experience.
It’s the trade we make for being alive. So, own your grief, honour who or what you have lost and do not be ashamed to mourn that someone or something that has touched you so deeply. Grow with your grief, allow it to inform you how to swim with it. Grief can be lonely so when you can, try to connect with others, allow people to support you and if you feel you are struggling to ride the waves, get in touch with a therapist.