Have you experienced loss recently or long time ago? If you answered yes, than you are more than familiar with the numb feeling that comes with it. The utter disbelief that this could happen to you. The injustice of it. The whole lot. You are in too much of a shock to cry straight away, so you don’t but once the reality hits you in the face (and believe me, it’s quite a whack!), the flood gates open up. And you can’t stop crying. It seems to be that crying is all you do. All you are able to do. Just sit there and cry. And when you are all cried out, the numbness creeps in again. And it seems to be moving like this in circles. All of your energy has been suddenly zapped out! You can’t talk, you can’t walk, you can’t hear, you certainly can’t focus!
Of course I am writing this based on my own experience of grief but because my profession allows me to talk to others who experienced loss, I know that these feelings described by me here are not unique to me. We all go through similar experiences. Of course we are all individuals and we all deal with loss our own individual way but there are many similarities between those who lost a loved one.
So, let me ask you a question: How did you heal? How did you get over your grief? What helped you?
Again, based on my own experience of the grieving process, I never thought I could recover from my loss. It felt worse than being punched in the gut! You sort of recover from that pain eventually, but pain of grief seems never ending. I never knew of counselling (none existent in Slovakia), so my way of dealing with it, was to bottle it up. At that time I had a very young child, another on the way, so perfect distraction. Did it help? It helped me to get through the days, months and years, but it didn’t help me to heal, no. My healing journey started many years later. The year I enrolled on a counselling course, the same year I went to therapy, the same year I finally started talking about my loss, about the feelings and emotions deeply buried within. That’s when my healing started.
So, to answer my own question, whether healing is possible, I firmly believe, that it is. Does losing a loved one changes us? Absolutely! Can we be the same people as we were before our loss? That’s a tricky question to answer. I heard many clients telling me: “I’ll never be the same again.” “I’ll always be broken from now on.” Again, we are all individuals, so we take our own individual ways to deal with loss. Some of us pray, some of us meditate, some of us go to therapy and some of us go for long walks. For some, losing a loved one can trigger their own mental health struggles. People can start feeling depressed, suicidal and with no desire to continue living the life that’s been presented to them from now on. And that’s tough!
I recognised myself that talking to a professional can be so healing. To hear someone say that what I felt was normal felt so reassuring. I no longer felt like a failure because I couldn’t just get over it! It felt so freeing to let it all out; and yes cry it all out all over again!
There is no formula for grief. There is no formula for healing. But what there is, is hope. Hope, that one day you’ll be the one saying; I am so glad I did it. I am so glad, that I talked, that I shared my anger, my tears, my disappointment, that I didn’t bottle it up and tried to just get on with it. Because when we talk and tell our stories, we are sharing the weight of our grief. We are no longer required to carry it all by ourselves. There is someone who gets us, someone who is interested in our sorrow. Someone who helps us to heal!
If you liked my blog and are interested to know whether I’d be able to help you with your loss, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Thank you for reading.