Grief and Loss

Grieving is a normal reaction that must be lived by a person who has experienced a loss before returning to normal life. Someone mistakenly considers grief to be a weakness, but this is not the case, without it you cannot regain a sense of balance and fullness of life after a tangible loss.

Grief is a person's reaction to a serious loss. Grief is manifested by strong emotions experienced as a result of loss.

Loss can be:

• Loss of a loved one (death, divorce, moving to another city, separation of children from parents, relocation of a relative or friend to another city).
• Loss of health, working capacity: serious illness, disability.
• The loss of a pet or other object of affection.
• Loss of social status, job loss, including retirement, etc. The following features may be characteristic of the process of normal acute grief:
• An attack of suffering may begin earlier than usual, with reminders of loss, including expressions of sympathy.
• The desire to get rid of painful experiences, which leads to the rejection of contacts that accelerate seizures and mentions of loss.
• Developing feelings of guilt: searching through past events for things that could be done and changed, blaming oneself for inattention and exaggerated self-blame.
• Loss of warmth in relationships with other people (irritation, anger, there is a desire for others not to bother, strained manner of communication).
• Indifference, a feeling that everything has lost its meaning, as if everything was connected with loss.

Help during the period of acute grief generally consists of listening and support. It is necessary to provide an opportunity to express any feelings, perceiving them with sympathy and kindness, so that there is no feeling of loneliness, and experiences, despite the severity, are perceived as natural.

Main tasks:

• Separation of grief work
• help in overcoming addiction to bereavement
• search for new models of interaction.

To accomplish this task, it is very important that:

• the grieving person has accepted the pain of loss;
• Fear, anger, and other feelings have been worked out;
• notice not only strong but also weak reactions (to prevent delayed reactions

But a person does not always go through all the stages of grieving, sometimes he gets stuck on one of them, then grief is considered complicated.