Coping with Bereavement E-Book

50MINUTES

• Herausgeber: 50Minutes.com
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Health & Wellbeing
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 37

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Find out everything you need to know about dealing with bereavement in just 50 minutes with this straightforward guide.

The loss of a loved one can leave us feeling devastated, isolated and adrift, and in this situation it is often hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. As bereavement affects everyone differently, this guide contains clear, practical advice to allow you to work through your grief at your own pace and adapt to the change in your life.

In just 50 minutes you will be able to:
• Understand the psychological mechanisms behind grief
• Take practical steps to gradually lessen the pain of bereavement
• Support a loved one who is dealing with bereavement

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Leseprobe

Coping with bereavement

Problem: we will all lose a loved one at some point in our lives, and this experience is very painful and difficult to deal with. Whether sudden or not, the absence of a loved one disrupts our day-to-day activities and upsets the balance of our lives. Learning to live with this constant empty space can then seem impossible. How can you respect your grief while still moving forward to rediscover your taste for life? How can you survive bereavement without sinking into despair?Aim: to understand and overcome your grief.FAQs:Is grief work necessary?How long does grief last for?Is it normal to cry all the time?Will the pain go away more quickly if I ignore it?I am smiling again and I have new plans. Should I feel guilty?

Although death comes to us all, it is still a taboo subject in Western society and the idea of it terrifies us. Even hearing it mentioned makes us uncomfortable. What, then, can we say about the death of a loved one, which for many people is a traumatic experience and can seem impossible to move on from? How can we survive the immense pain caused by the loss of a parent, partner, child or friend? Inevitably, all of us have lived through, are currently living through or will live through this difficult experience at some point and will spend a long, painful period mourning. The different phases of grief, including shock, anger, denial, guilt and depression, stir up a whole host of emotions, which are undeniably painful but which are nonetheless necessary if we are to accept the harsh reality.

“I was 24 when my mother died of cancer. It was a huge shock for me and I felt as though I had fallen into a bottomless pit. For a long time, I felt disconnected from reality: nothing mattered to me any more and my life seemed to have no meaning. I was completely numb. Rather than accepting this unbearable reality, I tried to run from it and lived in a fool’s paradise. I started to get better the day a wise person told me that my mother had never left me and that she was living in me.” (Christian, 45)

In 50 minutes, you will understand the mechanisms that start working after bereavement, the practical side of these mechanisms, the importance of being supported by those around you, and some personal approaches you can take to help you in your journey towards acceptance. Finally, you will learn to identify the positive attitudes to adopt and the clichés to avoid when you want to support a loved one who is going through grief or explain death to a child.

What is bereavement?

An intense and universal pain

Bereavement, which comes from the Old English bereafian, meaning “to deprive of, take away by violence, seize, rob”, refers to the period of distress and sadness following the death of a loved one. For us to be bereaved, we must have had a particular attachment to the person who has passed away. Otherwise, we would constantly be bereaved! The psychiatrist and psychotherapist Christophe Fauré also specifies that the intensity of bereavement is not determined by blood ties, but by how attached we were to the person. He further explains that bereavement can sometimes become a problem (although this is rare), for example if the bereaved person has a history of depression or if they had a conflictual relationship with the dead person. In this last case, they may develop a profound feeling of guilt, as they may feel that they unconsciously wished the person’s death on them.

Freud and grief work

In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia”, Sigmund Freud became the first person to develop the concept of grief work. He claimed that this expression results from the loss of a loved one, and also from the loss of an object we are attached to. Grief work can therefore be defined as a long intrapsychic process resulting from the loss of an object a person is attached to. Through grief work, the person gradually manages to detach themselves from the object.