When Abby’s engagement abruptly ended, the intense emotional pain she experienced interfered with everything in her life. She had problems focusing at work, she had little energy for friends on the weekends, and she was constantly nagged with questions like,
What’s wrong with me?”
Even normal seasons of life bring losses that need to be grieved. Mothers feel a sense of loss when a child first begins going to all-day school. Perhaps you’ve felt loss when you left your hometown to live with your new husband or wife or when you’ve left one career to start another. I felt a sense of loss when my son Kyle left for college, and again when he got married last summer. As I’ve watched my mother and my aunt, who are in their late 80s get more and more fragile and less and less able to do things for themselves, I’ve felt loss.
Whether the loss you experience is the result of a broken relationship, poor choices, or a difficult childhood, the fact is all losses need to be grieved. We can’t make a fresh start in our lives until we first clear out the old.
The problem is grieving requires us to experience the heartache and all the feelings of anger, sadness, disappointment, and resentment that go with it. How much fun is that? Short term, it’s much easier to ignore the pain and try to stuff those feelings or somehow numb them with alcohol or drug overuse or abuse, busyness, overeating, or pornography.
To gain from the pain of loss, it helps to understand that grieving means cooperating with the pain. It can help to know these things:
- Grieving always takes longer than we think it will take.
- Our mental, emotional, and physical resources are depleted.
- Anger is a common reaction to grief.
- Even the most routine tasks are difficult when we are grieving.
- Decision making becomes overwhelming.
- One loss usually brings others. (If you lose your job, you may lose your house, your car, your lifestyle, your routine, or friends who were your coworkers.)
To help yourself or a spouse through a period of grief, remember these things:
- Now is not the time to push yourself, or your spouse, to do anything.
- Ask yourself, or your spouse, “What commitments or activities can I (or they) cut back on or eliminate for awhile?”
- Think how you can reprioritize your life, or help your spouse, to allow time and emotional space for grieving while saving energy for only the most important tasks.
When we practice good grief, we’ll eventually discover those times of anguish gave us the opportunity to experience God’s presence, power, and provision in a whole new way. Long term, we’ll know we have gained good things from our grief when we see these signs:
- You look to your future with a renewed sense of hope.
- You trust God with your life on a deeper level.
- You can identify ways you have been transformed for the better.
- You experience a renewed sense of meaning and purpose.
- You have more courage, sensitivity, or tolerance.
- You have more compassion for others who are going through what you’ve gone through.
* Adapted from “Taking Out Your Emotional Trash: Face Your Feelings and Build Healthy Relationships” by Georgia Shaffer.
