Understanding Grief – More Than Just A Sad Emotion
Working with a new client is about exploration. Our early conversations are designed to discover where they need support most through counselling. And in a lot of my client cases, the answer is grief.
Losing someone is one of the most difficult things we experience in life. It can have a severe and long-lasting impact, particularly if it is someone close to you.
Grief is a profound emotional response to loss. It can leave us feeling sad, exhausted, confused and longing. Often it feels impossible to work out how to shake that feeling off, bringing worry that it might never go away.
When looking through the Counselling Directory website recently, I discovered a fantastic article on understanding grief, which I want to share here.
The Impact of Grief
Written by Jacqueline Connaughton, the article explores the science behind grief. Where do we being understanding grief Why does it feel like it consumes us, body and soul? Isn’t it just an emotion?
Jacqueline explains how grief is tied to our nervous system. It is an emotion, but it’s also a stress response. And it’s that stress response which can leave you anxious and on edge, and possibly unsure why you feel that way.
She offers some great suggestions to heal your nervous system and move through the grief process, with simple steps for you to try.
My experience, both professional and personal, is that we all experience grief differently, there’s no right or wrong way. Writers and musicians often speak of people having a “broken heart”, but I believe that for some people this is how deep grief feels, and indeed there is some science behind this. It hurts.
Some of my clients have described it as waves of intense feeling, sometime seemingly out of nowhere. Ebbing and flowing, sometimes long after the event. This is ok, its natural and part of your own process and experience, but also, as one client told me, it doesn’t go away, but it “dilutes with time”.
Read Jacqueline’s article by visiting https://www.counselling-directory.org.uk/articles/grief-is-more-than-sadness
(Source: The Counselling Directory)
(Image: Photo by Alex Green from Pexels)
