Everyone knows it and no one can protect themselves from it – sooner or later everyone has to deal with grief at some point. Fortunately, because the often unloved feeling fulfills a meaningful function for us humans. Nevertheless, grief can also make people ill and have serious consequences.
What is grief?
Grief is generally referred to as an emotional state that is accompanied by great sadness, dejection and a deep pain. The person’s zest for life decreases, and if necessary, he withdraws and isolates himself from his environment in order to grieve. The most common cause of grief is the loss of a loved one. Be it through the separation from a partner or the death of a family member, being abandoned by a close person, in whatever form, initially makes us humans fall into deep despair. But why is this so? And in the end, is it perhaps even healthy to grieve?
Function and task
Grief is probably best described as a process that helps our psyche to process what we have experienced. This process is divided by many psychologists into four phases, but they merge into each other and cannot be strictly separated. At first, we humans tend to deny what we have experienced, not wanting to acknowledge it and ignoring reality and pushing it away from us. During this phase, those affected often report a state of shock that is accompanied by numbness and numbness. It is not until the second phase that emotions finally burst forth and seem to practically flood the griever. Anger, despair, grief and fear alternate and not infrequently lead to excessive demands. As a result, this phase can lead to the search for someone to blame and finally to strong feelings of guilt of one’s own. Here, however, there is a danger of losing oneself in guilt and anger instead of allowing and accepting the grief. The latter is absolutely necessary for processing what has been experienced; only in this way can the mourning phase be mastered. In the third phase of the process, the affected person slowly reaches a state in which he accepts what he has experienced and reality catches up with him. Daily life is gradually resumed, but there may be frequent setbacks as reality collides with grief. The mourning process ends with the phase of reorientation. Despite the loss, the mourner sees new goals and perspectives again, which leads to new courage to face life. The loss is ultimately integrated into consciousness and can be stored as an experience. The associated emotions are still felt as burdensome, but at the same time the realization is gained that losses can be endured and survived. The process of mourning is thus an extremely helpful phenomenon of our psyche in order to be able to cope better with severe losses. Unfortunately, however, the grieving process does not work by itself and requires the active cooperation of the person affected in order to truly complete the process. If this does not happen and the mourner remains in one of the stages of grief without moving forward, in many cases serious consequences occur that can eventually only be resolved in pathological grief work.
Illnesses and complaints
On the one hand, people like to repress grief in order not to have to face the painful and unpleasant feelings. On the other hand, we also live in a meritocracy that regularly makes it clear to us that only motivated, mentally balanced and perfectly healthy people are willing to perform. There is seldom room, let alone time, for grief. The pressure from outside to grieve a little faster and to “let it go at some point” leads many affected people to not even get involved in the unpleasant feelings and to distract themselves with work or other things instead. At first, this even seems to work, but pain and sadness cannot be completely suppressed and eventually make their way to the surface. Often, the emotions then manifest themselves in the form of depression, which ultimately forces the affected person to deal with his or her own emotional world and seek professional help to take up the mourning process with support. Here, however, the normal mourning process should not immediately be confused with a full-blown depression; dejection and a temporary loss of the courage to face life are, after all, part of grieving.Unresolved grief can also result in other conditions, such as anxiety and panic attacks, which ultimately determine everyday life. The suppressed feelings can even manifest themselves psychosomatically, for example in the form of persistent nausea, frequent stomachaches or headaches, and constant fatigue and exhaustion. Sufferers also frequently report sleep disturbances and nightmares. Grief can manifest itself in a variety of symptoms, but in any case it should not be ignored but dealt with, no matter how long the grieving process lasts. In general, it can be stated that the mourning process must be individualized and it cannot be predicted how long the affected person “may” suffer or when he or she will have to function again. Depending on the personality and the severity of the loss, the grieving process can vary greatly and cannot be determined in a blanket manner.
