Grief impacts us in every way: physical, emotional, cognitive, social and spiritual. There is a huge range of normal reactions depending on your loss, your personality, your current situation, and your history. Emotionally, many people initially react to a death with shock and sometimes with numbness. Following that, some of the more common reactions are sadness, loneliness, anger, guilt and fear. Other emotions are perfectly normal and may include difficult emotions, such as

We now know that people can feel a huge range of feelings when grieving. This can include everything, not just sadness, longing and fear, but also numbness, regret, satisfaction, relief, irritation, anger and every other emotion that exists. Some of them can be surprising. All of them are normal. It is normal to primarily feel just one or two feelings and it is just as normal to feel a large mix. It is normal to feel deeply sad most of the time and it is normal not to. It is

There are as many ways to grieve as there are people on earth. In fact there are more because each loss is grieved differently...

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who created the Five Stages of Grief, was a groundbreaker. She didn’t assume that dying people only felt one emotion, despair, as was usual at the time. She talked to dying people and discovered that they had many different emotions and that their emotions changed over time. She then created the Five Stages of Grief and applied it to grieving people as well. Although she added to our knowledge, later research discovered there is much more depth, and muc

Self-care is extremely important during grief. Self-care can increase your resources while grief drains them. What does self-care mean? It is something you do that supports you mentally, physically or emotionally. It is anything that you do that is healthy and feels nurturing to you. Self-care might include exercise, eating well, good sleep habits, not exposing your mind to upsetting things, social connections, helping others, or relaxation such as baths or walks or meditatio

When you lost your loved one, you didn’t just suffer one loss. Each death contains multiple losses to be grieved. You can think of each thing you loved about someone as something you’ve lost and are now grieving. You can also think of each of your future dreams as losses as well. Your grief is a mirror image of all your love and all of your hopes. To help you grieve, it’s important to acknowledge the particular details of what you’ve lost. Your losses might include practical

Writing or thinking about the person you have lost is an important part of grief. Sometimes it is easy to get stuck on the same thoughts over and over in a loop. Some people find that they get caught focusing on the death, rather than the life. Here are some sentence starters that may be useful in helping you connect with the particulars of what you have lost. Your sadness and pain are a mirror reflection of what you loved and lost. By remembering who and what you loved, and

Grief is a natural process and most people make it through without professional help. While things will never be the same as before...

Those parents who have lost a child know that it may be one of the hardest experiences on earth. You will survive this death and go on, although there will always be a clear before and after, much like a soldier who is missing a limb. And, like veterans, you will find that few understand this loss as well as others who have lived through it. While you can expect all of the same physical, emotional and mental effects of grief as anyone, there are also some unique aspects to ex

The death of a partner is many losses in one because a spouse or partner plays so many different roles in our life. One of the biggest...