About Grieving

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

We all experience losses of varying degrees of severity. Any loss - whether it be parting or death of a loved one, divorce, the end of a friendship, business or love relationship, a change of job, a change in the previous way of life, opportunities, the usual idea of oneself and one's qualities, place of residence, even the loss of a loved one, emotionally significant for us things - our psyche must process, burn out

In the modern world of the dominant "positive" there is a tacit (or directly articulated) rejection of complex emotions that do not bring pleasure - sadness, anger, anger, depression. And, meanwhile, grief, which includes the experience of all these feelings, is a necessary process so that the psyche can adapt to new living conditions that have changed as a result of loss, separation, disappointment.

Unfortunately, if the process of mourning is not passed, a person will involuntarily return to old patterns of behavior, which do not give an opportunity to form and live new experiences, discover new ones and develop. Running in a circle - repetitive relationships, similar difficulties, habitual disappointments, attempts to escape from yourself and your feelings, bodily illnesses and depressive episodes - all that are a consequence of unlived grief.

Our psyche works associatively. Any loss activates all the old, unburned losses, giving our soul a chance to do the work of grief, to heal old mental wounds. Therefore, sometimes those around who see a person in tears because of a seemingly trifle - a lost handkerchief or, for example, a fountain pen - wonder how one can get upset about such nonsense ?! However, it is likely that for a grieving person, parting with this little thing through associative connections activated suppressed or forgotten memories, which he himself cannot give verbal expression, and now he feels deep grief, accompanied by shame from the feeling of his own inadequacy. And only in the psychologist's office, with the help of the delicate accompaniment of a specialist, does he have the opportunity to remember that he was holding a handkerchief of a similar color in his hands at the age of eight, when he was not allowed to attend the funeral of his beloved grandmother, with whom a huge number of feelings of the early, half-forgotten childhood periods of his life are connected … And mourn that tenderness, affection, kind, seemingly forever lost feelings that accompanied his affection for his beloved …

William Warden, a psychoanalyst, describing the loss of a significant person, wrote about the main phases of mourning that a person who has experienced a loss goes through in one sequence or another. We live similar stages in the event of the loss of any objects that have an emotional or narcissistic meaning for us, of course, the severity and intensity of experiences will vary depending on the meaning that this loss has for us personally. These are the main phases:

1. A period of numbness, when the psyche is trying with all its might to accumulate resources to accept the fact of loss, while an attempt is made not to face it;

2. The phase of longing, accompanied by an active work of denial, during which a person experiences a strong desire that the departed return, and that the loss did not happen forever;

3. The phase of disorganization, when the lost person is directly confronted with the fact of loss, experiencing severe pain, anger and despair; at this time, its functioning in society becomes complicated, it becomes excessively difficult to perform its usual functions and communicate with people;

4. The phase of reorganization, when a person becomes able to accept the fact of loss and build his life in accordance with new conditions.

According to Warden, the main tasks that the psyche solves during the mourning process are:

I. Acceptance of the reality of loss is a collision with the fact that it will not be possible to return a person or a past relationship, loss is a fact that has happened and, alas, it is forever.

The opposite solution to this problem is disbelief in the reality of loss, which is based on denial (the deceased is seen in the crowd, his voice is "heard", etc.).

Another variant of the pathological solution is denial of the meaning of loss (“I didn’t love him that much,” “he was a lousy father,” “I didn’t get anything from this relationship”), selective forgetting (the inability to remember the face of a person who left, moments of life associated with it), denial of the irreversibility of death (appeal to fortune-tellers, to spiritualism, the belief that the soul of the departed moved into a new acquaintance, an animal, etc.). If at the beginning of the mourning process, certain manifestations of the work of the denial mechanism are normal, as the need for a shocked loss of the psyche to adapt to new knowledge, then if these manifestations last a long enough time or begin to be obsessive or delusional, relatives of the grieving person should seek help from specialists.

The solution of the first task takes time, in this case, the grieving person is helped to move towards acceptance by traditional rituals, such as funerals, commemorations, memories of the one who left, sorting out the things of the deceased, at each of which the psyche conducts the work of mourning.

II. This work takes place in the form of reworking the pain caused by grief, both mental and physical.

During this period, it is important to give the grieving person the opportunity to be in difficult feelings, not to try to distract him from them, to devalue them with the words: “do something to forget”, “everything will pass”, “you will find a new one”, “you are young, you have everything ahead. Living hard feelings in their full volume makes it possible to go through grief. Suppression, rejection of feelings, their denial, as well as denial of the significance of the loss, as well as the feeling of inappropriateness for others because of unbearable experiences overwhelming you are the worst solution for the grieving person. This leads to insensitivity as a pathological solution to the second problem of mourning.

Unfortunately, our psyche is not able to “turn off” feelings selectively - if we give up heavy emotions, suppression spreads to everything - and joyful, happy and pleasant experiences in their entirety become inaccessible to us.

III. Adaptation to life without what has been lost, which is divided into internal and external.

Internal adaptation - the adoption of a new idea of oneself, an image of oneself not as, for example, "M.'s wife" or "an employee of company X.", but about a person whose identity has changed in some aspects, as well as the acceptance of different values and ideas about life. External - adaptation to new roles, tasks to be solved, and which were previously performed by the departed person, were provided automatically in the previous position, etc. This also includes spiritual adaptation - a revision of inner deep beliefs, ideals, convictions that have been shaken by the fact of loss.

The impossibility of solving this problem leads to a failure of adaptation, which may consist in behavior directed against oneself, strengthening the feeling of helplessness, and the impossibility of existing in the changed conditions.

IV. Finding such a place for the one who left, which allows him to recognize his role and significance in the past life of the grieving person, but at the same time does not interfere with building and living a new life.

The solution to this problem is the ability to preserve warm memories of the one who left, to feel gratitude for the experience he has experienced, while retaining the opportunity to invest strength and energy in building new relationships, implementing new projects of one's own destiny.

The incompleteness of this task leads to the existence of non-being, being stuck in the past and the impossibility of fully living one's own life.

All these tasks are not solved in a strict sequence; rather, they are, rather, alternately and cyclically processed, actualizing and solving again and again throughout the entire period of mourning.

Literature:

1. Trutenko N. A. Qualification work "Grief, melancholy and somatization" at the Institute of Psychology and Psychoanalysis at Chistye Prudy

2. Freud Z. "Sadness and melancholy"

3. Warden V. "Understanding the mourning process"