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Follow Us. Contact Us UW Counseling Center Schmitz Hall Phone: Fax: Log-in to the new Student Portal to see your upcoming appointments, fill out forms, sign up for text reminders, and update your personal information like your name and pronouns! Grief is a natural part of our lives, and affects all aspects of our existence.
It can cause us physical pain; and yet bring us to a deeper understanding of the true value and meaning of life.
Grief can be very hard work; taking significant amounts of energy, it is a major force for change in our lives.
We grieve naturally; which to us means it is a natural way for us to grow stronger and more resilient. But that certainly doesn't mean it's a pleasant path to take; no one chooses bereavement—it chooses us. Loss of any kind—whether it's the loss of a treasured piece of jewelry; the end of a marriage or much-needed job—especially the death of a loved one, leaves a hole in our lives.
One that we often don't know how to fill; or even if we want to be made whole again. In her book, Written on the Body , author Jeanette Winterson captured this unwillingness when she wrote, "To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever.
The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
Winterson calls it. But it doesn't put an end to our distress. And there are two sound reasons for the anguish we know as grief. First we grieve simply because we loved. This someone special played an integral role in our life, and we treasured their presence. It takes courage to love a person deeply, because there's a small part of us that knows our time here is finite; loss is an inevitable aspect of all human relationships.
And it takes courage to grieve, when the loss occurs. Second, we grieve for ourselves. No one can tell you what you must feel and when those emotions should stop. What you are feeling is right for you; sorrow, anger, guilt, anxiety, despair, resentment, isolated, yearning, lonely, afraid and even relief.
When it comes to loss, grief is accompanied by mourning. Yet, you need mourning to accept the loss. Losing someone is hard for your brain to process and mourning empowers you to accept and emotionally process the death and loss of your loved one. A funeral is the opportunity to share memories and adapt to your life without that person who meant so much to you, it is a safe time to show your sadness and hurt and invite others to support or mourn with you.
Dependant on your culture or religious affiliations, mourning and funeral rituals will be different. Once an upon a time, wearing black or a mourning armband acknowledged to the world you were recently bereaved and still in a stage of mourning, until that time you choose not to wear black to mark its ending. The ritual of a funeral has a crucial role in supporting people through the mourning steps needed to aid with their own grieving process.
To heal in grief, we must shift our relationship with the person who died from one of physical presence to one of memory, which is hard as you may spend days, weeks or months denying that they have really gone. Read more: Adults can help children cope with death by understanding how they process it. These reward centres in our brain that make us happy together, keep us bonded by making us sad when we are apart.
In this sense, evolutionary biologists have suggested the protest phase of grief lasts long enough for us to search for our loved one, yet is short enough to detach when hope is lost. The despair phase, a form of depression, follows — and may serve to detach us from the one we have lost. It saves us from an energy-draining and fruitless search for them. And in time, emotional detachment allows us to seek a new breeding partner.
It has also been suggested that both protest and despair may function to foster family and tribal cohesion and a sense of shared identity through the act of shared grief. Most people associate grief with losing someone they love, but in reality people can grieve for all sorts of reasons.
In essence, knowing what to expect and feeling secure and stable is important for our survival - so when a loss occurs in our lives, our world shifts and is turned upside down.
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