The Long Term Effects After Grieving: Helping You Understand Those Who Have Suffered Loss

A lot of this anger may be hard to express and can often lead to suppression and/or depression. It is important for those who have grieved to go easy on themselves and even more important for those around them to offer their full support. This may not be easy as it is common for depressed people to shut out their true feelings, making communicate difficult.

Guilt

Part of this difficulty may also be due to feelings of guilt. This may come from all kinds of things depending on how the person was lost. For example those lost to suicide may feel guilty that they couldn’t help them, those lost to illness may feel guilty that they didn’t recognise the illness sooner, that maybe they could have stopped it.

It is also common to feel guilty when it comes to sharing your feelings. It is common to believe that friends don’t want to hear your story, that it is a burden to the listener and unfair to unload negative emotions onto friends. It is best to assure the griever that you like to hear them talk about it and thank them for sharing with you.

Unresolved emotions act as toxins to the brain and body

Some grievers choose to deal with loss internally, allowing unresolved thoughts and feelings to be pushed to the side, or to the bottom of the pile. This quickly leads to a build up of repressed negative feelings. This is an incredibly unhealthy process as all negative energies eventually need to be released similar to the way the liver cleans your body of toxins. When built up over time these negative emotions begin to affect the body’s health. Some of these include:

• Slowing down of the bodies metabolism
• Increased stress leading to adrenal fatigue
• Chemical releases in the brain leading to loss of appetite/increased appetite, nervousness, depression and anxiety
• Tiredness, irritation, frustration and irrational behaviour

It is important to help these people by encouraging them to talk about their feelings to ensure that the build up negative emotions is released. Unless dealt with properly, these negative and harmful emotions could go on for years preventing the person from experiencing healthy relationships and cutting them off to open feelings of love, warmth and support.

All of us will all at sometimes in our life experience loss. Death is apart of life as life is apart of us. It is important to remember that there is no one way to go about grieving and that everyone does it differently. A person who has suffered serious loss is forever changed and that it is just as hard to understand them as it is for them to understand themselves. So please be patient with those who have lost. Pain of loss is a healing process and a process that is delicate, long term and forever proposing new learning’s.

There is no manual to coping with loss and it is something that will continually pop up as the grieved learn to bind their old relationships and lives with the new person they have learnt to become.