The article presents in detail the main stages that a person goes through in the process of experiencing grief. The next article will present psychological techniques and techniques that facilitate this process.
Hello,
Dear readers and guests of my blog!
Unfortunately, it happens that in our lives we are faced with very difficult and tragic situations.
One of these is the death of a person close to us and loved one.
The grief that consumes us at this time is barely bearable and requires special attention.
But often the grieving person is left alone, without proper support and help.
And it can be even worse: loved ones, without knowing it, increase his suffering with their advice and incorrect behavior.
This is because many people don’t really know how to help a loved one survive grief without serious consequences and shocks.
And how to psychologically competently support a grieving person.
In addition, many do not know how to overcome grief on their own and find peace in such situations.
With this article I open a series of publications devoted to this topic.
As the title suggests, this post is about the stages of bereavement.
The next two articles will be devoted to how to help yourself and your loved ones overcome this difficult period of life.
They will present exercises and psychological techniques to alleviate mental pain.
First let's determine that...
grief is a very severe suffering, a painful experience of misfortune and misfortune caused by the loss of a loved one or the loss of something valuable and important
Grief is not a fleeting phenomenon. This is a complex and multifaceted psychological process that covers the entire personality of a person and his immediate environment.
Grieving is the process of experiencing grief. It is divided into several stages or phases.
Each of them has its own characteristics and characteristics.
The degree of expression of these signs, as well as the depth of grief and sorrow, largely depend on the characteristics of a person’s personality, on the strength of his character and level of psychological health.
And also from the sensitivity and timely support of others.
Which is often lacking because loved ones do not have the necessary psychological knowledge and skills.
How do you know if you've been grieving for too long?
There is no “normal” period for grieving. The process depends on a number of factors, such as character, age, beliefs and support from others. The type of loss also matters. For example, you're likely to grieve longer and harder over the sudden death of a loved one than over, say, the end of a romantic relationship.
Over time, the sadness will subside. You will begin to feel happiness and joy, which will gradually replace sadness. After a while you will return to your daily life.
Unauthorized grief
In unsanctioned grief, those around the person show aversion to the pain they are experiencing. Sooner or later, others always try to overcome grief at some point, because for a person who has not experienced this suffering, the griever must let go and move on with their life.
However, there are certain situations in which mourning is openly rejected from the very beginning. For example, when a man or woman who was involved in an extramarital affair dies. The lover “has no right” to express his grief. Sometimes it can also refer to the death of a pet. Since it causes a lot of pain, others tend to remove this type of suffering.
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Should you see a psychologist if you lose a loved one?
It is possible to return to normal life by going through the following stages of grief after the death of a loved one:
- Shock and denial.
- Resentment, rage, aggression.
- Guilt.
- Depression.
- Acceptance of loss.
At any of these stages, you will need psychological help after the loss of a loved one.
It may seem to you that you can cope with trouble on your own, but this feeling is deceptive. Often a person tries to “keep face”, suppressing experiences, or, conversely, cannot get out of a depressive state and loses the meaning of life. Mental as well as physical health suffers. In this case, contacting a psychologist is not even a recommendation, but a necessity.
Background
One night my grandfather became ill and I called an ambulance for him. And then the doctors made a terrible diagnosis. My grandfather had terminal cancer. One could try to perform an operation, but he would not survive. His strength quickly left him. We took grandpa home and took care of him. They bought medicines that did not help him, but kept him alive as much as possible.
For a month I watched his suffering, and my heart was torn from pain. This was a big shock for me, from which I could not recover for a whole year.
I knew that grandfather would die, but it is impossible to prepare for this. A person will never come to terms with death, and it will always cause severe pain, no matter how much time is given to say goodbye.
How to help a person survive the death of a loved one: the work of a psychologist
Together with a psychologist, you will consistently work through each painful stage.
Shock and denial
What are you experiencing:
- Refusal to believe that this happened to you, especially if the sad news comes suddenly.
- Fear ingrained in the subconscious prevents us from objectively perceiving reality.
- Acute reactions, excitability, tears, and screaming are likely.
- Attempts to escape from reality, to reduce contact with the surrounding reality to a minimum.
- The decisions made are often meaningless.
- From the outside it looks like the behavior of a person with serious mental disorders. For example, the sufferer behaves as if the deceased loved one is still alive.
Duration of the stage
The duration of the stage is short, since facts gradually become stronger than emotions.
Help from a psychologist
- The specialist asks to describe the loss in as much detail as possible, guides the client, and helps him throw out his emotions.
- The psychologist’s task is to ensure that a person talks about pain and becomes heard.
- Without emotions, he will calmly and clearly tell the client about what happened and provide support.
- Helps to experience awareness without suppression - a violent reaction, crying, screaming. This behavior contributes to the release of accumulated pain that interferes with everyday life.
Resentment, rage, aggressive behavior
What are you experiencing:
- Negativity can accumulate slowly or rapidly. In some way, a defensive reaction: the desire to hurt the enemies because of whom the misfortune happened.
- Aggression directed at others is not the best way to cope with loss; it can cause harm to both you and those around you. This reaction is aimed at achieving temporary relief.
- Sometimes there are attempts to harm oneself, aggression is directed inward.
Help from a psychologist
- Reducing pressure on the psyche, achieving a calmer and freer state.
- At the stage of anger, psychologists use the “cry of pain” technique. When the client talks about his experiences, sensations that he seeks to suppress, he is asked to scream and hit the pillow in order to find a way out for them.
Guilt
What are you experiencing:
- Thoughts about personal guilt in what happened. Fighting with your own destiny, appealing to higher powers with a request to reconsider your attitude towards yourself.
- If the deceased was a conflicted person, you had hostile feelings towards him, now you can begin to idealize him. This also fuels feelings of guilt and makes it difficult to accept the loss. This opinion is formed only because of the desire to “pay off” for a negative attitude.
- Searching for the illusion of salvation, something miraculous. Often - deepening into spiritual practices, regular visits to church or other places of worship.
- The stage of “atonement for guilt” - unusual actions, increased attention to others, active participation in charity, even entering a monastery.
Help from a psychologist
- The psychologist carefully and carefully works with feelings of guilt. In the client’s mind, the idea of the deceased as an ideal, exclusively positive person changes.
- During consultations, you will understand that often the feeling of guilt has no logical or moral basis.
- During the sessions, you quickly realize the event and its irreversibility. A psychologist will help you get rid of constant worries about how things could be different.
Depression
What are you experiencing:
- Understanding that the loss is irrevocable.
- Sorrow. A complete loss of interest in life, family, friends, and daily responsibilities is likely.
- Minimal social activity.
- Irritability.
- There is a high risk of attempting suicide.
Duration
The longest stage.
Help from a psychologist
- The work of a psychologist comes down to restoring faith in the future, motivating new actions, actions that help overcome grief.
- For suicidal tendencies, a psychologist (psychiatrist) can prescribe antidepressants and sedatives.
Acceptance of loss
What are you experiencing:
- Acceptance often comes unexpectedly. You begin to think rationally and soberly again, and can, if necessary, thoughtfully and calmly discuss the problem.
- Grief at this stage has not yet been completely overcome, just a little remains.
Duration
The final stage, which can also drag on if the remaining feeling of grief is not worked through. Full acceptance is achieved in 1-1.5 years.
Help from a psychologist
- The specialist’s task: to help the client return to a standard life routine, to again feel the taste and meaning of life;
- The psychologist tries to redirect attention, help in making new acquaintances and renewing old connections, and speeding up the return to society.
Consultation with a psychologist in Moscow and Balashikha
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Experience as a special emotional phenomenon. (F.E. Vasilyuk). Phases of grief.
1. The initial phase of grief is shock and numbness. "Can't be!"
The characteristic state can last from several seconds to several weeks, on average by the 7-9th day, gradually giving way to a different picture. Numbness is the most noticeable feature of this condition. The mourner is constrained, tense.
A feeling of unreality of what is happening, mental numbness, insensibility, and deafness appears in a person’s consciousness. The perception of external reality becomes dulled, and then in the future, gaps often arise in the memories of this period.
How to explain all these phenomena? Typically, a complex of shock reactions is interpreted as a defensive denial of the fact or meaning of death, protecting the griever from confronting the loss in its entirety at once.
2. The next step on this path - the search phase - is distinguished, according to S. Parkes, who identified it, by an unrealistic desire to return what was lost and a denial not so much of the fact of death as of the permanence of loss. It is difficult to indicate the time boundaries of this period, since it quite gradually replaces the previous phase of shock and then the phenomena characteristic of it continue to occur for a long time in the subsequent phase of acute grief, but on average, the peak of the search phase occurs on the 5-12th day after the news of death.
At this time, it can be difficult for a person to maintain his attention in the outside world; reality is, as it were, covered with a transparent muslin, a veil, through which the sensations of the presence of the deceased often break through: the doorbell rings - the thought flashes: it’s him; his voice - you turn around - strangers’ faces; suddenly on the street: it’s him who enters the telephone booth. Such visions, woven into the context of external impressions, are quite common and natural, but they are frightening, taking them to be signs of impending madness.
Sometimes this appearance of the deceased in the current present occurs in less dramatic forms. P., a 45-year-old man who lost his beloved brother and daughter during the Armenian earthquake, on the 29th day after the tragedy, telling me about his brother, spoke in the past tense with obvious signs of suffering, but when he spoke to his daughter, he smiled and With a sparkle in her eyes, he admired how well she studied (not “studied”), how she was praised, what a helper her mother was. In this case of double grief, the experience of one loss was already at the stage of acute grief, while the other was delayed at the “search” stage.
The existence of the deceased in the consciousness of the mourner differs during this period from the one that pathologically acute cases of shock reveal to us: the shock is unrealistic, the search is unrealistic: there is one being - before death, in which the hedonistic principle reigns supreme over the soul, here - “a kind of double being “ (“I live, as it were, in two planes,” says the mourner), where behind the fabric of reality one can always feel an underlying other existence, breaking through with islands of “meetings” with the deceased. Hope, which constantly gives rise to faith in miracles, strangely coexists with a realistic attitude that habitually guides all the external behavior of the grieving person. Weakened sensitivity to contradiction allows consciousness to live for some time according to two laws that do not interfere with each other’s affairs - in relation to external reality, according to the principle of reality, and in relation to loss, according to the principle of “pleasure”. They get along on the same territory: images of an objectively lost, but subjectively living existence become part of a series of realistic perceptions, thoughts, intentions (“I’ll call her on the phone now”), they become as if they are from this series, and for a second they manage to deceive the realistic an attitude that accepts them as “our own”. These moments and this mechanism constitute the specifics of the “search” phase.
3. Then comes the third phase - acute grief , lasting up to 6-7 weeks from the moment of the tragic event. Otherwise it is called a period of despair, suffering and disorganization and - not very accurately - a period of reactive depression.
Various bodily reactions persist, and at first may even intensify - difficulty shortening breathing: asthenia: muscle weakness, loss of energy, feeling of heaviness of any action; feeling of emptiness in the stomach, tightness in the chest, lump in the throat: increased sensitivity to odors; decreased or unusual increase in appetite, sexual dysfunction, sleep disturbances.
This is the period of greatest suffering, acute mental pain. Many difficult, sometimes strange and frightening feelings and thoughts appear. These are feelings of emptiness and meaninglessness, despair, a feeling of abandonment, loneliness, anger, guilt, fear and anxiety, helplessness. Typical are extraordinary preoccupation with the image of the deceased (according to one patient, he remembered his deceased son up to 800 times a day) and his idealization - emphasizing extraordinary virtues, avoiding memories of bad traits and actions. Grief also leaves its mark on relationships with others. Here there may be a loss of warmth, irritability, and a desire to retire. Daily activities change. It can be difficult for a person to concentrate on what he is doing, it is difficult to complete the task, and complexly organized activities may become completely inaccessible for some time. Sometimes an unconscious identification with the deceased arises, manifested in involuntary imitation of his gait, gestures, and facial expressions.
In the phase of acute grief, the mourner discovers that thousands and thousands of little things are connected in his life with the deceased (“he bought this book”, “he liked this view from the window”, “we watched this film together”) and each of them captivates his consciousness in “there-and-then”, into the depths of the stream of the past, and he has to go through pain in order to return to the surface. The pain goes away if he manages to bring out a grain of sand, a pebble, a shell of memory from the depths and examine them in the light of the present, in the “here-and-now.” He needs to transform the psychological time of absorption, “present in the past,” into “past in the present.”
During a period of acute grief, experiencing it becomes the leading human activity. Let us recall that leading in psychology is that activity that occupies a dominant position in a person’s life and through which his personal development is carried out. For example, a preschooler works, helping his mother, and studies, memorizing letters, but not work and study, but play is his leading activity, in it and through it he can do more, learn better. She is the sphere of his personal growth. For the mourner, grief during this period becomes the leading activity in both senses: it constitutes the main content of all his activity and becomes the sphere of development of his personality. Therefore, the phase of acute grief can be considered critical in relation to the further experience of grief, and sometimes it acquires special significance for the entire life path.
4. The fourth phase of grief is called the phase of “residual shocks and reorganization” ( J. Teitelbaum). At this phase, life returns to its groove, sleep, appetite, and professional activity are restored, and the deceased ceases to be the main focus of life. The experience of grief is no longer a leading activity; it occurs in the form of first frequent, and then increasingly rare individual tremors, such as occur after the main earthquake. Such residual attacks of grief can be as acute as in the previous phase, and against the backdrop of normal existence they can be subjectively perceived as even more acute. The reason for them most often are some dates, traditional events (“New Year for the first time without him,” “spring for the first time without him,” “birthday”) or events of everyday life (“offended, there is no one to complain to,” “in his name the mail has arrived"). The fourth phase, as a rule, lasts for a year: during this time, almost all ordinary life events occur and then begin to repeat themselves. The anniversary of death is the last date in this series. It may be no coincidence that most cultures and religions set aside one year for mourning.
During this period, loss gradually enters life. Man has to cope with many new problems associated with material and social changes, and these practical problems are intertwined with the experience itself. He very often compares his actions with the moral standards of the deceased, with his expectations, with “what he would say.” The mother believes that she does not have the right to take care of her appearance, as before, before her daughter’s death, since the deceased daughter cannot do the same. But gradually more and more memories appear, freed from pain, guilt, resentment, abandonment. Some of these memories become especially valuable and dear, they are sometimes woven into entire stories that are exchanged with loved ones and friends, and are often included in family “mythology.” In a word, the material of the image of the deceased, released by acts of grief, is here subjected to a kind of aesthetic processing. In my attitude towards the deceased, wrote M. M. Bakhtin, “aesthetic moments begin to prevail... (compared to moral and practical ones): the whole of his life is presented to me, freed from moments of the temporary future, goals and obligations. After burial and memorial comes remembrance. I have the whole life of another outside myself, and here the aestheticization of his personality begins: consolidating and completing it in an aesthetically significant image. From the emotional-volitional attitude of remembering the departed, aesthetic categories of the design of the inner person (and the outer one) are essentially born, for only this attitude towards the other has a value approach to the temporary and already completed whole of the external and internal life of a person... Memory is an approach from the point of view of value completeness ; in a certain sense, memory is hopeless, but only it knows how to value, in addition to purpose and meaning, a life that is already complete, completely present” (Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity. P. 94-95).
5. The normal experience of grief that we describe after about a year enters its last phase - “completion ”. Here, the griever sometimes has to overcome some cultural barriers that make the act of completion difficult (for example, the idea that the duration of grief is a measure of our love for the deceased).
The meaning and task of grief in this phase is for the image of the deceased to take its permanent place in the ongoing semantic whole of my life (it can, for example, become a symbol of kindness) and be fixed in the timeless, value dimension of existence
How the sessions work
Work with the client is based on consultations and therapy based on how to survive grief:
- You will talk about your experiences, share your fears and worries.
- The psychologist will listen carefully, ask several questions aimed at solving, understanding the problem, its precise formulation and determining the path to a final solution.
- A specialist will share your experiences and give professional advice and recommendations.
- The duration of the consultation is 50 minutes.
- Confidentiality of the conversation is the most important rule, so all information will remain exclusively between you and the specialist.
Consultation with a psychologist in Moscow and Balashikha
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Chronic grief
Chronic grief occurs when someone is unable to work due to the loss of a loved one. Either way, they refuse to accept what happened. Instead, they focus on preserving the memory of the person who has passed on. They end up paralyzing their lives and constantly maintaining an attitude of pain.
People with depressive tendencies are more likely to fall into this type of grief, which can also turn into a lifestyle. It is characterized by anxiety, sadness and guilt, as well as feelings of powerlessness and disappointment. This type of grief requires professional help.
Delayed grief
This is usually the effect of the absence of grief. Although at first a person tries to ignore his pain, after a while it returns with great force and, perhaps, at the most unexpected moment. Sometimes it may take several years before mourning begins.
It may also be that someone is unable to experience grief at the time they experience a loss due to special conditions. For example, a demanding work commitment or an urgent family situation. Delayed pain appears later and presents some complications since it must now be felt alone.
Inhibited Grief
This type of grief is experienced by people who have great difficulty expressing their feelings. For example, in the case of children who cannot express in words everything that this situation represents. In many cases, adults ignore their pain and do not help them overcome it. Adults simply think that “kids just don’t understand.”
The grieving process is also prohibited in the case of people with some cognitive disabilities. Or in situations such as a father or mother who is trying to stay strong so as not to influence their children. Or simply when someone is very closed off and doesn't have the ability to talk about how they feel. In any case, inhibition is expressed in obsession, constant depression, anxiety, etc.
