In this episode, we take a look at the balance between managing your mental health and dealing with the symptoms of grief.
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Part 1: Presenting the Problem
Grief is something we all go through. In fact, it's something we are all going through right now. When you hear the word grief you likely think about losing someone you love. This is normal as it's the most commonly used form of the word. But grief isn't just about death. It's actually about loss.
Grief: Deep sorrow, especially cause by the death of someone.
Sorrow: a feeling of deep distress caused by loss, disappointment, or other misfortune suffered by oneself or others
So grief is just about loss.
Part 2: Diving Deeper
Let's look at this from two angles:
1. Losing someone you love
2. Losing something important
In this part we will look at navigating the loss of someone you love. In the next episode we'll look at losing something important.
Losing someone you love is hard. The sense of loss is extreme and, even if you are prepared for it, the realization of how complete and final it is can cause a disconnect between how you expect the world to be and how it actually is.
I remember when my dad first died the hardest parts, and still is the hardest parts, were all those little moments where I would suddenly realize that he was in fact gone.
Those moments where I casually thought of a funny thing he said, or remembered a phone call we had, only to realize that it could never happen again.
That disconnect lead to moments of shock that over time started to eat away at my mental health.
This is how grief works. It sits in the background allowing you to feel more or less okay. Okay enough that you maybe even start to feel guilty about how okay you feel. And then one day...bam! Grief strikes and you find yourself collapsed in a ball on the ground crying your eyes out about this person you lossed.
Part 3: The Solution
The short answer is that you need to figure out what works for you when dealing with grief. The longer answer is that everything needs to be okay. Whatever you need in order to get through that pain and deal with it in a healthy way needs to be okay. If you don't feel like going for that run....don't. It's fine. If you don't feel like taking a shower...don't. Give yourself that room.
Because grief is a dark place. It's waking up one day and finding yourself in a dark cave. When you find yourself in a dark cave the process for getting out is going to be messy. You're going to be covered in mud and sweat and tears and scrapes and bruises. But as long as you gain those things with the purpose of moving forward and finding a place of light...then it's okay.
What isn't okay is sitting in the darkness of that cave and purposefully harming yourself with no intention of moving forward. When that starts to happen, when you start to engage in vices like drinking in a way that feels unproductive, you need to find support in the form of therapy or something similar.
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