Grief

When is it a problem?

All humans experience loss at some time or another in our lives. The experience of loss helps us to know when something important to us is gone. The pain that we experience as a result of that loss reminds us of the value of the person or the thing that has been lost.  We grieve many different things in our lives. We can grieve a loss relationship, a traumatic experience, an addiction, and the death of a friend or loved one and the loss of a job.

Sometimes however grief becomes difficult. Sometimes grief makes it hard for us too return to the things that we enjoyed in our lives. Sometimes grief leads to illnesses like depression and anxiety. Sometimes grief leads to addictive behaviours. This is what we call complicated grief. In rare cases complicated grief can lead to what is being called prolonged grief disorder, a disorder that means that someone is or has been unable to return to the normal activities of life for more than a year after the loss that they experienced. In these situations, the initial grief has activated or triggered something from earlier in our lives, which makes it difficult for us to cope and move forward. This can happen when the death of a person has been sudden and unexpected. This can happen with the death of a child for example. This can happen when we experience the death of a loved one through homicide, drug overdose, and suicide. I have been working for many years with people who suffered these kinds of losses and from my experience the road to recovery is different than normal grief. It takes patience, kindness, and trust to begin to resume normal activities. As always, it takes an environment that is free from judgment that offers people a place to process feelings of guilt, of shame, of resentment, of fear and anxiety.