Healthy Grieving

When you are mourning the loss of a loved one you may experience many deep and chaotic emotions. It will demand a great deal of energy and seem to take much longer than you think it should.  The pathway of grief is a mystery with no two people grieving in exactly the same way. Your grief is as unique as your fingerprint. It is a personal journey.

Whilst your grief journey is uniquely yours here are some helpful suggestions:

• Acknowledge and accept you are grieving, this may mean, for a while, you cannot do what you have been used to doing. Lower your expectations of you.

• Seek to explore and grow in understanding your grief, this will help to normalise what you are experiencing. Grief is a school of learning.

• Give yourself permission to grieve in your own unique way. It is your personal journey. No one else knows what it is like to live in your shoes.

• Share with a trusted friend or counsellor giving yourself space to express honest feelings to aid your recovery.

• Receive comfort, and show empathy by giving away comfort too.

• Grow through the lessons brought about by your loss, using new formed values to make decisions for the present and the future.

• Commit to the chaotic pathway of grief, even if at points it feels too hard, too long, or mysteriously unfamiliar, until you reach better days.

• Learn to trust God, even though you do not understand all that is happening to you. Bringing your cry of lament, mish mash of questions and your life to Him.

• Grief comes unbidden but with valuable lessons. We may never be the same again, yet we can continue in life, out of the saddest upheaval, perhaps wiser, kinder, with appreciation of simplicity, and eventually with a renewed purpose.