Finding Peace in Sadness: Strategies to Deal with Grief and Loss

By Aubrey Lawrence

It is going to happen to all of us. One day our lives will turn upside down as an unthinkable tragedy strikes. The reality of death and passing never seems quite real until that day when it happens.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kodaja Publishing
• Release date: Jun 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781777275716

Book preview

Introduction

Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, ‘It will be happier.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The grief that comes from losing a loved one is an incredibly difficult experience. It is impossible to fully prepare yourself for the wide range of emotions that grief can inspire, especially because every person experiences grief a little differently. You may find yourself feeling constantly unmotivated, or so worked up with restless energy that you can’t seem to settle down, even at bedtime. You may retreat from the world in a state of shock or denial, or you may feel every emotion so keenly that they become overwhelming. You may also find yourself oscillating between two extreme emotions, swinging back and forth between bursts of energy and periods of depression, or floods of tears and numbness. Part of the reason why grief is so difficult for us to handle is that one of the members of our support network is no longer with us.

The relationships you hold with others are pillars of support and stability that help you weather difficult storms. Losing a family member or close friend introduces uncertainty and fear into your life. You lose not only someone very near to your heart, but also someone who was a supportive and friendly face that could have otherwise helped you process your grief. It can feel like your life raft has been torn away from you, leaving you adrift in turbulent waves that threaten to pull you under. The more you try to struggle back to shore against difficult emotions like sadness and anger, making an attempt to return your life to how it was before you experienced loss, the harder the undertow of grief tries to drag you back out to sea.

Because of how hard you struggle each day just to stay afloat, it can feel like an exercise in futility. You may ask yourself, Will I ever begin to escape the deep sadness I feel? You may also wonder if it is even okay to try to feel better, or if doing so would be failing to honor your loved one. However, it is important to remember that it is perfectly natural to want to find peace after loss. You can do so while still acknowledging your pain and hurt in the wake of a tragedy, and you can always remember your loved one while still making efforts to ease your suffering. After all, do you think your loved one would want you to spend your days in pain, unable to move forward with your life? Just as your loved one would want the best life possible for you after their passing, so too should you desire to find peace in a time of great sadness. When you process your grief in a healthy way, you are not moving on from the person you lost, but instead moving forward while carrying them with you in your heart.

Of course, it can be hard to picture feeling peace when your loss is so fresh, but it is possible nevertheless. Recovery begins with making it through the first few weeks, which are typically the most difficult, and making small steps every day. Even though times are difficult now, they do not need to be so confusing and exhausting forever. It is true that losing a loved one isn’t something you simply ‘fix’ when you address your emotional response, and there will always be some part of you that always misses them. Still, learning to quell the raging emotions inside you and heal some of the heartache you feel is a possibility. By getting a better understanding of your own grief, learning about the most common grief experiences, and seeing how you can take steps to ease difficult emotions, you can start to come to terms with your loss.

Grief isn’t the same for everyone. Some people have more difficulty coping with a loss than others, especially if the person who passed away was very close. The chances of having a more difficult grief experience are also increased if the loss occurred suddenly with no chance to mentally prepare yourself for the possibility. Grief that persists for a long time and that is especially difficult to recover from is referred to as complicated grief, which affects between 10% and 20% of grievers (The Recovery Village, 2020, para. 4). Complicated grief can manifest itself in long periods of listlessness or keyed-up emotions. It can also be applied to situations where grief has been ignored and therefore not fully dealt with, leaving it to rear its head once again later on. If you are having trouble dealing with your loss, you are not alone in your difficulties, but allowing these troubles to persist without taking any steps to improve how you approach your grief can get in the way of the healing process. Finding Peace in Sadness will show you how to keep your grief from developing into complicated grief, or teach you how to more effectively confront your feelings if you are already experiencing complicated grief. No matter what your personal experience with grief is, you can begin to find your way through the most difficult emotions without letting them overwhelm you.

Though grief is most commonly associated with death, many forms of loss can also cause you to experience grief for the person or thing missing from your life. While the loss of a loved one is an especially deep pain and the one that is most directly addressed in this book, the strategies outlined here are useful to manage other sources of loss and grief as well. These include the loss of a job, the end of a relationship, the loss of stability or health, and many others. These can all be surprisingly painful experiences, and the grief you feel is no less valid no matter its source. You can use Finding Peace in Sadness to help you overcome the difficulties that you experience with any type of loss and ease your pathway towards peace.

My time as a registered therapist in Boston has given me insight when it comes to loss, and so have my own personal experiences. I understand firsthand how difficult loss can be to cope with and the extent of how strongly you will feel the flood of emotions that come pouring out of you after a loss. Ten years ago, I lost my husband in a car accident. The loss was devastating, and for a while, I believed that it might be too much for me to bear. However, over time my knowledge as a therapist helped me to build strategies for coping with my pain and starting to get my life to a stable place once again. I reached out for support, addressed my emotional state, and found constructive outlets for self-improvement. The most notable of these outlets for me was walking, a pastime I now routinely engage in both with the bereavement walking group I run and with my two dogs. I want to help others find their way through the difficulties that grief brings, whether that grief comes from the loss of a loved one or from other sources like a divorce or job loss. There are many sources of grief, and learning to properly process each of them through healthy coping mechanisms is important in all circumstances.

Finding Peace in Sadness will help you get a better understanding of what you can expect in the grieving process and how your experiences will change in the days, weeks, and months that follow. You will learn techniques for navigating grief through emotion management and rebuilding your support network. You will develop coping mechanisms for when grief threatens to overwhelm you. You will grieve at your own pace, taking the time to ensure you are doing so in a way that supports your mental and physical health. Most of all, you will start to feel hope returning to you in one of the darkest times in your life—hope for acceptance, peace, and life after loss.

1

The First Small Step—Accepting the Sudden Reality of Grief

It’s hard to know exactly how grief will affect you before you experience it. You may have a number of ideas about how the grieving process will go, based on what you’ve seen others experience or how TV and movies depict grief. However, TV isn’t always the most reliable source of information, and as you will find out, grief is often much harder than it is made out to be. You already expect that you will be sad to lose your loved one, but you probably don’t expect just how hard the sadness will hit you. The depths of sadness many people experience during grief are immobilizing, leaving you unable to do much other than lay in bed.

When our emotions are so strong they keep us from doing much of anything, it’s a frightening experience. Simple actions like cooking a meal or brushing our teeth seem like Herculean tasks that we can’t always bring ourselves to do. It’s common to feel confused, lost, and even hopeless about how we can ever