CNN
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When someone your love diesthe world as you have known it is totally altered.
One way people cope, said psychologist Sherry Cormier, is trying to find some kind of certainty. This need for structure is likely a factor behind the popularity that clung to the “five stages of mourning” more than 50 years ago and still hasn’t waned, said David Kessler, who founded duel.coma resource that aims to help people deal with unfamiliar territory related to pain. Kessler is a co-author.”About mourning and mourning” with the deceased Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.
A Swiss-American psychiatrist and pioneer of dying studies, Kübler-Ross wrote “About death and dying,” he 1969 book in which he proposed the patient-centered pattern of death adjustment, the “Five stages of grief.” Those stages are denial, angernegotiation, depression and acceptance.
“In the actual book, she talked about more than five stages,” Kessler said. “Think in the context of 1969: doctors and hospital staff were not talking about the end of life process. … Elisabeth really hoped ‘On Death and Dying’ would start the conversation.”
Since then, there has been extensive media coverage of the five stages; use in television programs including “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Home”; medical support; and critical Those five stages are what people latched onto, Kessler said.
Bereavement and psychology experts and academics have criticized the framework for not being fully supported by research, which suggests that mourners grieve sequentially or imply a correct way to grieve. But these suggestions were not Kübler-Ross’s intentions, and she stated these caveats on the book’s first page, Kessler said.
Although there is debate among experts about the stages of grief“People who are in the pain of grief just say, ‘Help me,’” Kessler said. Here’s what the five stages of grief are and how you can consider and process them in whatever order you experience them.
There is grace in denial, in the sense that we can’t fully register the total grief, shock and disbelief at our loss in one moment or day, so the grief is spread out over time, Kessler said.
While denial in a literal and dysfunctional sense would be trying to convince yourself that your loved one isn’t dead, the inability to understand loss for a while is healthy, not something to snap out of quickly, she added.
If you’re struggling with overwhelming denial, you can try to stop fighting the reality that’s been thrown at you, said Cormier, who is also a consultant and specialist in grief trauma.
Anger is another natural reaction to loss, whether it’s anger at the cause of death, the deceased, the god of your religion, yourself or the randomness of the universe, Kessler said.
“Anger is the bodyguard of pain. It’s the way we express pain,” she said. “That stage gives people permission to get angry in a healthy way and know it’s not bad.”
Anger “can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first, the pain feels like being lost at sea: not connected to anything,” according to Kessler’s website. “Then you get mad at someone, maybe a person who didn’t make it to the funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now that your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure: your anger towards them.
Beneath the anger can be feelings of hopelessness or helplessness, Cormier said, sometimes triggering guilt and blame that some people use to maintain an illusion of control or express frustration.
“Our minds would always rather feel guilty than powerless,” Kessler said.
Depending on how your loved one died, one way to move past guilt and guilt-related anger is to realize that as horrible as your loss is, it wasn’t done personally, Kessler said.
“The reality is that the mortality rate in families is 100%,” he said. “Everyone is going to die eventually, but our minds just can’t comprehend that.”
Allow yourself to express your anger in healthy ways, Kessler advised, whether it’s “yoga pain”, yelling in your car, using a punching bag, running or other forms of exercise.
Often also stemming from guilt, bargaining after a loss typically involves “if only” statements focused on regretting what you did or didn’t do before the person died, Kessler said.
“We can even negotiate with pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss,” says Kessler’s site. “People often think of stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last minutes or hours as we go in and out of one and then another.
Remember that we live in a world where bad things sometimes happen despite our best efforts, Kessler said.
Depression, or acute sadness, is when the great loss begins to affect your life more deeply. Maybe the sadness feels like it will last forever, or you have withdrawn from life or wonder if life is worth living alone.
Sadness hits people at different times, Cormier said. He has known people who are not distraught for the first year after the loss, but by the third year they are consumed with sadness. Because? Because for a while, some may maintain the illusion that a loved one is on vacation and may be returning, she said.
Often, the deep and eventual sadness “is really an expression of ‘my loved one’s gone and they’re not coming back,'” Cormier said.
But those feelings shouldn’t always be labeled clinical depression, Kessler said. If you think he’s depressed about a death, see a psychiatrist for an evaluation, he advised her.
To cope with sadness, you can also seek support from friends, family, or grief support groups, and regularly practice self careCormier suggested.
Acceptance does not mean that you agree that your loved one is gone. “It simply means that I now accept the new reality of my life. I am a widow, I live alone. I no longer have brothers to call. I no longer have parents to call,” said Cormier, who wrote “Sweet Sorrow: Finding Lasting Wholeness After Grief and Loss” after losing her husband and immediate family.
Acceptance is not the end of the duel either. You may have many little moments of acceptance over time, Kessler said, such as when planning and attending the funeral.
“One of the questions I get asked the most is, ‘When is this duel going to end?’” Kessler added. “Very kindly, I’ll ask, ‘How long is the person going to be dead? Because if the person is going to be dead for a long time, you’re going to be grieving for a long time. It does not mean that you will always afflict yourself with pain. For me, the goal of grief work is to finally remember the person with more love than pain.”
Coming to acceptance means you’re healing, Cormier said. But if you can’t get there, you need to seek professional help. Intense and persistent grief that causes problems and interferes with daily functioning in a way that typical grief does not after a while is known as prolonged grief disorder, according to the American Psychiatric Association. The disorder was added to the revised Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published in March 2022.
To be diagnosed with prolonged grief disorder, the death of a loved one had to have occurred at least a year earlier for adults and at least six months for children and adolescents, according to the association, which publishes the DSM. One symptom is difficulty with reintegration, such as pursuing interests or interacting with friends.
Cormier doesn’t think we’ll ever “get over” grief. Our task is different from moving on: it is learning to integrate the loss into our lives so that we can move forward with a new reality, he added. “It’s a little offensive to mourners to say, ‘Oh, you’ve really moved on.’ No, I don’t think the mourners will go on. We move forward.”
After her son died at 21 almost five years ago, Kessler wanted something beyond acceptance. He had studied the work on meaning of the late neurologist, psychiatrist, and philosopher Dr. Viktor Frankl, and wondered how meaning related to grief, which inspired his book “Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief.”
The meaning didn’t take away Kessler’s pain, but it dulled it, he said.
The meaning is in what we later do or realize as grieving people, Kessler explained. Maybe you recognize the fragility of life, try to change a law or donate money to research so no one dies like your loved one did, or make a change in your life.
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