In Your Weeping: How to Cope With Grief

The death of a loved one or a person who is significant to you in some way can be difficult to process and come to terms with. Unfortunately, at one time or another in our lives, death or loss of some kind will find its way into our lives, and it affects people in different ways. Grief can incapacitate you, and make it hard to carry on. This makes being able to handle grief and knowing how to cope with it an important life skill to possess.

What is grief?

Grief can wear many masks, and it shows up in a wide variety of circumstances. Essentially, grief is the psychological and emotional response to loss of various kinds. Grief will often be deeply distressing, resulting in experiences and feelings such as confusion, feeling a deep yearning for what was lost, being overwhelmed with sadness, dwelling in the past when the beloved was present, and even anger concerning that loss.

Grief is often most closely associated with the death of a loved one, but it can result from many other situations. In addition to the loss of a loved one due to death, people experience grief because of experiences such as divorce, the loss of a home, or when a cherished dream is shattered. People can also be grieved when they experience deep betrayal by those whom they trusted implicitly, such as when infidelity happens, or a respected person fails morally.

There is a broad variety of experiences that grieve people such as the above, but grief could also result from other life circumstances such as getting older, losing financial stability or one’s job, losing one’s ability to have children, the end of a really good friendship, or becoming seriously ill and losing one’s good health. Grief doesn’t always set in after the loss has happened; sometimes grieving happens in anticipation of an impending loss.

How Grief Affects a Person

When a person experiences loss, how they make sense of that and how it affects them won’t look the same as what other people go through. Our uniqueness will often mean that we experience and express grief in different ways. However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t some common ways grief affects people and how they respond to it. Some of the ways people experience and express grief are described in the five stages of grief.

The grieving process is often understood using the language that the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross used in her book titled On Death And Dying. Kübler-Ross identified what she perceived as five stages that people go through as they come to terms with loss, whether it’s an impending loss or one that has already happened.

These stages aren’t a straightforward or smooth progression from one to the next, with a prior stage ending and leading to a transition into the next. Additionally, not everyone experiences every stage or experiences it the same way (which raises the question of whether it is even appropriate to refer to them as “stages” in the first place).

However, it can sometimes be a helpful way of setting out some of the more common experiences people have, and the movement that grief often takes in a person’s life.

The five stages of grief are as follows:

Denial

At first, you may deny that the loss has happened or have significant difficulty accepting that the loss is real and that things have changed irrevocably. There may be feelings of shock or numbness as the reality refuses to sink in. Due to denial, a person may act or carry on as though the loss hasn’t happened.

Anger

A grieving person may be an angry person, and that anger might be concealing feelings of fear, helplessness, being overwhelmed, or regret because of the loss. The anger they feel may wind up being directed in different ways, whether it’s anger at no one, at the person who delivered the news, at the surgeon or first responder who was unable to save their loved one, at themselves, or at the Lord.

Bargaining

When a loss occurs, bargaining or trying to reach an agreement with God or the universe to reverse the current circumstances may be a way to deal with the loss. That bargaining or agreement may include making promises or wanting to change behavior to prevent more loss, or it may consist of expressing regret over past actions that might be considered to be responsible for the loss.

Depression

Loss brings about feelings of deep sadness and longing for the loved one or the relationship. Such sadness and longing can be painful, and they can also result in the sense of emotional and mental detachment that often accompanies depression.

Acceptance

Over time, the pain of loss is no longer as intense as it was in the beginning, and one becomes better able to function in their new reality. The grief doesn’t end, but one learns to cope and function in daily life even though they are grieving. With time, one embraces the reality of loss even though it’s painful and one still misses the person, relationship, situation, or cherished dream.

These feelings will come and go, and they will have varying levels of intensity over time. Some people cope well with grief, while others may use unhealthy coping mechanisms such as alcohol or other substances to deal with the pain.

Sometimes people will experience other emotions such as guilt or even relief when loss occurs, perhaps because of a damaged relationship or on account of pain they experienced before the other’s passing.

These various stages of grief aren’t rigid, and you aren’t doing anything wrong if you don’t feel certain things along the way. Grief is a journey that takes many winding turns, and it will look different for everyone. Talking about these stages can be a way to try to make sense of emotions you might experience, and to recognize that those feelings (and others like them) are valid.

How to Cope With Grief in a Healthy Way

Grief ought to be acknowledged when it is present, as not doing so can cause problems down the line. When you don’t give yourself room to grieve and choose to repress your emotions, it can lead to experiencing physical symptoms such as panic attacks, anxiety, stomach aches, or insomnia. Our minds, bodies, and hearts need adequate room and time to process loss.

For a variety of reasons such as feeling pressure to “pick yourself up” and take care of other people, or because one never learned how to face their emotions honestly and process them, people can find themselves avoiding grief. Some people, whether Christian or otherwise, don’t want to sit with the unpleasant and uncomfortable emotions that grief stirs up, and it seems better to avoid it.

Learning how to cope with grief includes allowing yourself room to acknowledge and process the loss. How you do that won’t look the same as what other people do. It means not avoiding or trying to distract yourself – whether through hobbies, self-medicating, or work – from experiencing the emotions grief brings up. You could journal, talk about your loved one and share stories about them, walk their favorite hiking trail, watch their favorite movie, etc.

You can also deal with grief by taking self-care seriously. Grief can disrupt the typical functions of your mind and body, which is why it helps to ensure you’re eating well, getting a good amount of sleep, exercising, and doing the things that help you to relax and relieve stress. Caring for yourself in a time of grief might feel self-indulgent, leading to feelings of guilt, but you’re creating emotional space to address the grief.

Coping with grief might also include having a routine so that you can have things in your life you can control. Routines can also help you to have a sense of regularity in your life. It’s also important that you don’t make big decisions like moving house or getting a new job while you’re still in the early stages of processing your grief. If such decisions need to be made, involve others that you trust to come alongside you.

In that vein, learning how to cope with grief also includes staying connected to your network and having people around who love and support you. Having others around you is a good reminder that you aren’t alone.

You can also find support when you’re grieving by speaking to a therapist or grief counselor to get help with how to cope with grief. These professionals can help you when you’re struggling to make sense of things, or when your grief is interfering with your ability to live your life and begin adjusting to life after loss.