Last update: July 02, 2017
When we finish a chapter, a little story ends; when we say goodbye, we write a little ending. Anything we don't finish will continue to chase us and we will keep repeating it until we are able to put a full stop, through a process of mourning, to start over with another page.
Mourning is the emotional adjustment process that follows any loss. A loss that does not necessarily have to coincide with death. Even if it is the event with which the collective unconscious has the strongest association, the loss also refers to separations, work changes or transfers ...
Stages of the grieving process
The different stages proposed by Dr. E. Kluber Ross in mourning are:
- Phase of denial: the person refuses to accept the loss. She can also find herself in a state of shock that prevents her from accepting the beginning of the path that, inevitably, he will have to take.
- Phase of anger: in this phase the person shows frustration and anger towards the circumstances that have caused the loss, of himself, of other people, etc.
- Bargaining phase: we try to find solutions to the loss. If we are talking about the loss of a loved one, this phase of bargaining can include resuming some activity that took place in the company of the deceased person.
- Depression stage: in this phase the loss is experienced through pain, the sadness that arises is dealt with. It is a phase of recollection.
- Acceptance phase: in this phase the person becomes aware of the moment in which he is and of the loss. He accepts and tries to adapt to the environment by matching the pieces he has now.
These stages are not the same for everyone. They must not follow each other in this same order and do not have a specific duration, they are merely indicative. To work with a person who is in the full process of bereavement, it is important to know that at each stage we will find ourselves in front of a person with a different disposition towards bereavement itself. Under this provision, we will make various tools available to you and offer you various activities.
Any process not properly concluded tends to repeat itself, stagnate or regress. All the errors that we see in others and that we have ignored or overlooked without working on them lead us in the same direction. Because we need to feel the pain of loss, because we need to see how we feel, we need to extract the energy that surrounds anger and then integrate it with sadness as an allowable part of ourselves.
If we do not carry out this closing process, we only put patches without really healing the wound that is bleeding and we only superficially plug what is hurting us. Until it reopens again.
Work on pain by giving up suffering
In his book El camino de las lágrimas (The Road of Tears) Jorge Bucay reports the following:
“To suffer is to make pain chronic. It is transforming a moment into a state, it is clinging to the memory of what made us cry, not to stop crying, not to forget, not to give up on it, not to let it go at the cost of one's suffering, a mysterious loyalty with the absent ".
-Jorge Bucay-
The pain you have to feel is a healthy emotion, it is a feeling of healing, it connects us with our inner world and helps us process the loss.. It isolates us and brings us something, since it offers us a time for ourselves.
No emotion in the right measure is dysfunctional, so losses cause sadness, pain, estrangement, anger, etc. They are phases and, when they last longer than necessary or when they hurt or prevent you from moving on with your life for a long time, it is time to ask for help. When sadness turns into depression, anger into unwarranted aggression, withdrawal into personal abandonment or pain in tearing, then something is not right in the healing process, we are not in the right path of tears, we have need to ask for help.
What role do I play in the grieving process?
“The grieving process allows you to find for your loved one the place they deserve among the treasures of your heart. It is to remember him with tenderness and to feel that the time you shared with him or her was a great gift. It is understanding with heart in hand that love does not end with death "
-Jorge Bucay-
Understanding why a phase has ended and knowing how much positive can be obtained from it, what has been done wrong, where it has gone wrong, helps to get to know each other and to know what can be done to improve, what you want to change, what you want to keep or what could have been done better.
The grieving process leads to a special point and head, because it marks the end of a story. It is not a passive process, it requires each of us, our every emotion and action, our every desire and all our strength to move forward. It requires personal work to write a nice ending and start the next chapter with what you have learned and enjoyed.
