Practical Tools You Can Use in Grief

Are you looking for grief counseling in Greensboro, NC? Until you experience grief, you do not comprehend how exhausting it can be. Grief is brutal at times – not only emotionally, but physically as well. It can overwhelm your nervous system. You may feel that the grief will never end, but one thing I can say is that grief changes as you do your grief work over time.

What is Grief

Grief is a normal reaction to any loss. Dr. Lisa Shulman says the brain interprets grief as emotional trauma. Grief says something mattered you. Maybe it was someone or something, but it mattered and now it is gone. You wonder how you will be able to keep moving forward in life without it.

Before I offer some things you can do, I want to encourage you to pause and notice your grief timeline. Ask yourself if the overwhelm you feel from grief is getting a little better. Perhaps you just had a bad day where it feels as if you are back at square one. If you don’t feel you are gradually improving, I would encourage you to reach out to a coach or therapist who has been trained to work with those in grief. It is important that the person you work with has been through grief training. It’s okay to ask someone about their training before you agree to work with them.

Practical Tools

When you experience grief, it’s important to put words to what you are thinking and feeling. You can write it down through the process of journaling or writing poetry. You can paint, find music that expresses what you are thinking and feeling, or you can reflect as you go for a walk or a hike to name a few.

Your number one job in grief is to feel your feelings as you integrate the loss into the fabric of your life. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but feeling your feelings is what helps you to move through them. But you can’t feel your feelings if you are judging your grief.

How Crying Can Help

People sometimes say they are afraid to cry because they fear they will never stop. The truth is I have never met anyone who never stopped crying, but it can feel like it will never stop. I have talked to people who have long seasons where tears were a part of the journey, but eventually, as they integrated the loss, the tears did stop. They do come back at times, but the intensity and frequency seem to be less. One of the goals of grief work is to grieve with more love than pain. For those who are newly bereaved, crying and intense pain is common as your brain processes the loss and begins to make new internal maps of your world.

And crying also does good things for your body. When you cry, you release hormones like oxytocin which helps to improve your mood and reduce pain. Crying also releases endorphins which help to improve your mood and release stress. Research also shows that our sad tears are shaped differently than our happy tears. So, when you cry, you help your body to feel a little bit better.

Lament

The truth is there is no easy solution to grief. And grief is not a problem to be solved – it’s a process that must be engaged to work through it. For people of faith, lament is a way that you can allow God’s Word to give a voice to your pain. Psalm 88 is a great example of this. If you aren’t familiar with lament, it’s a passionate expression of grief or sorrow poured out to God in prayer. You can even search for Psalms of Lament. Lament keeps your soul oriented toward God and away from the pit of despair. It has a raw quality to it. It is not bright-siding – trying to make the pain less than what it is. It never begins a sentence with at least… Lament acknowledges the struggle to trust and the confusion that we feel when life doesn’t make sense to us. It allows us to hold unimaginable sorrow and deep joy simultaneously. And it doesn’t try to rush us through the process. Lament is a way we can make sense of the pain, confusion, and bewilderment we feel so that when we hit rock bottom, we find that there is solid ground. If you’d like to learn more about lament, you can read Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy.

For those who do not incorporate faith, you can still express your grief and sorrow. Notice what helps you to feel anchored in life. Connect with that while expressing your deep pain and sorrow. Pain is pain regardless of whether you are a person of faith. Loss hurts and it causes us to reflect on life in general and our life specifically. As you reflect, it will be important to reflect on the good and the bad. It can be so easy to allow life’s disappointments to take over and forget the good things.

Grief Needs to be Witnessed

And know that grief needs to be witnessed. We don’t heal in isolation. As humans, we are hard-wired for connection. Connection with safe people is where we thrive. Connection helps us to come back into our window of tolerance, that place where we are resilient in the face of life’s tragedies and hardships.

Reach out to your support system. If you don’t feel like you have a good support system for your grief to be witnessed, you can reach out to Breathe Again Counseling here. We can add you to our waitlist or give you referrals so that you can get the help you need to move forward with your grief.