Written by Chuck LeBlanc
Grief shows up in many different places.
It is not only related to death, but also job loss, loneliness, loss in relationships things like that. A lot of us have been isolated for a long time and our social life has disbanded or has transformed in a different way. But grief boils down to loss.
One way that I look at grief is that it boils down to loss and that’s why it’s so intense. The intensity behind the experience of loss is why we have so many emotions about it from anger, sadness, confusion, and at times numbness. Many different emotions will show up throughout the grieving process and it’s different for everyone. The difficulty we have is trying to get a good grasp of the picture grief presents and the process that’s involved for us.
With my clients a tend to use the following analogy to help us understand what grief is all about and what the process is for. It is like you’re the captain of a ship, the ship is your life. So throughout your life, you can go into islands trying out and experiencing different adventures. During this journey, you will inevitably encounter a storm. Now there’s a lot of things you can do on a boat if something goes wrong like if you spring a leak, you can fix it. If you have any navigation issues, you can learn and adapt in different ways and find the best way to bring yourself back on course. There’s a lot of ways you can fix those kinds of problems. But when you encounter a storm, it’s different. You can’t go out there and fix a storm with hammer and nail right? or deflate a whirlwind.
Grief is that storm. Grief is a lot similar to driving a boat through a storm because it’s not something to fix. It’s not something to get over. It’s something to weather. On a boat out at sea you weather a storm you do not fix it. On top of this and depending on the severity of the storm the ship gets marked and changed by that storm. In other words, grief is a process in which you carry that loss differently.
I know that a lot of conversations we have about the death of a loved one or loss society always reacts in such a way as to tell us to “get over it” or “it’s been months why are you still so upset about this?” It’s almost a taboo in our society to talk about profound loss in any way. Grief is not about getting over it, which is similar to saying forgetting, it’s not about forgetting, it’s about carrying it differently. And I think that has a lot to do with how I talk about grief. It’s more like weathering a storm than process as forgetting.
Now listen in therapy we process that grief and weather the storm of emotions flowing through you as you move into a space where you can carry the loss and function in your day-to-day life better. But it starts with working on how you can process it then it moves to how you can carry it. So that a year down the road let’s say, your emotions are not going all over the place. In this sense, once you have processed your grief you are back to driving your boat again, and you can still be sad but it’s not going to guide how your life is going anymore. It’s almost like wearing a heavy coat, at first it seems uncomfortable but after a while, it’s just there, and that’s okay. Dealing with death has a lot to do with coming out the other side of that storm and honoring the loss.
Processing grief is all about honoring the loss knowing
how you are feeling is okay and moving forward with your life.
To connect with one of our counsellors
call 613-701-7574 or email us at info@ksrc.ca
