Grief Psychology
Providing grief resources is among the cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL. Grief over the death of someone we love is part of the price we pay for love. Although a variation of this statement has been attributed to various people, including Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, its true source is unknown.
However, whether this statement was made by someone who has been lost to history or someone who is well-known, the essence of it is valid. Love, loss, and grief go hand-in-hand.
We often don’t start the long road of the grieving process until after our loved ones are cremated, and family members and friends who gathered from far and near to offer us comfort and support have left to go back to their homes and their lives and we find ourselves alone, facing the absence of someone we love.
Grief has well-known physical effects including sleep disruption, fatigue, and weak immunity, which can make us more susceptible to getting every sniffle and cough within arm’s reach, as well as creating permanent damage to organs like the heart and the brain.
Grief also has well-known emotional effects. These can include anger at our loved one for dying and anger that we have been left alone (as well as anger at our friends and family members who have moved back into the normal routines of their lives, while we’re stuck in the middle of grief). Prolonged sorrow, profound sadness, and even chronic depression are also common emotional effects of grief.
However, we may not be aware of or understand the psychological effects of grief. The root of what happens to us at the psychological level is our thinking. We spend more time than we realize thinking subconsciously or unconsciously about things that we are totally unaware of when we’re alert and awake.
Those subconscious and unconscious thoughts are often the basis of our dreams, as they weave themselves into the REM periods of our sleep patterns. Have you ever awakened suddenly from a dream that was a patchwork of things, problems, and people from throughout your life and wondered where in the world all that stuff came from and why it was all together in one place? Those dreams come from all the thinking that we do that we don’t know about on a conscious level.
There are three psychological components of grief, however, that we should be aware of, because how we handle these will be a crucial factor in how well we grieve and how well we move through the grieving process after someone we love has died.
The first psychological component of grief is the recognition of and the feeling of loss. We start this by establishing the relationship of the person who died in our lives: spouse, parent, sibling, child, or grandchild. Then we recount the nature of our relationship with them in terms of what they provided for us that we now no longer have and will never have again in the same way.
The second psychological component of grief is the awareness of change. After we lose someone we love, life is never the same and everything going forward will be a change to something different than it was.
The third psychological component of grief is the realization of how little control we have over what happens in life and in death. This recognition may, at least temporarily, leave us feeling somewhat vulnerable about the present and fearful of the future. Gradually, though, this vulnerability and fear is countered by unexpected strength, endurance, and resilience.
For more information about grief resources and cremation services offered in Tallahassee, FL, including grief resources, our caring and knowledgeable staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations is here to assist you. You can visit our funeral home at 20 S. Duval St., Quincy, FL 32351, or you can call us today at (850) 627-1111.
