{"id":4901,"date":"2024-01-21T19:22:46","date_gmt":"2024-01-21T17:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mytherapist.gr\/?p=4901"},"modified":"2024-01-21T19:25:23","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T17:25:23","slug":"grief-a-life-ends-not-yours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mytherapist.gr\/en\/mental-health-articles\/grief\/grief-a-life-ends-not-yours\/","title":{"rendered":"Grief - A life ends... Not yours!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We have very familiar images of people who have lost someone very close to them, and the most common ones are people who cry, wear black, and shut themselves off from the outside world, lying in bed, drinking, smoking, and all of those cinematic scenes. But what happens when this pain takes a different form? What might it look like?<\/p>\n

Grief, although associated with mourning, does not always appear in that way. When a person loses someone very close, sometimes the pain is too great to be expressed only through tears, or even to be expressed at all. Whatever form the loss takes, it is still an absence of someone who was present for a long time and then suddenly is not. That change alone is extremely difficult and painful to realize and to live through. The realization that the person who was in our life until yesterday is no longer here is one of the hardest steps, and it may take a long time before someone can manage it.<\/p>\n

After the first shock, there comes a period when life has to go on, and that is when some people struggle the most. It is painful for everyday life to continue as it did before, but with such a major change. Images and habits that once felt ordinary suddenly carry weight, and they may arrive with memories, whether good or bad, and both can hurt because both are tied to the awareness of absence. Even a simple object or a phrase can trigger an association that usually ends in the reminder that our loved one is no longer close to us. It may sound simple or exaggerated, but for a person experiencing such deep pain, it is real and very difficult. The person may keep doing their daily tasks, but the effort required to get through them can feel three times greater, and that can increase the sense of exhaustion. Melancholy is also one of the most characteristic feelings in these situations.<\/p>\n

If we try to understand it, it becomes quite logical that someone in grief would feel tired. This happens because a person spends enormous energy managing their sadness, trying to process the new reality, adapting to it, and also trying, in some way, to maintain the bond they had with the person they loved. This process alone can feel draining, even more so when it is accompanied by a stream of negative thoughts and mixed emotions.<\/p>\n

For example, at first glance the daily routine of a grieving person may not look very different. They wake up, have breakfast, go to work, come back, spend time with people close to them, later do their activities, and then sleep. However, we can also look at it from a deeper angle. When the person wakes up, they are already tired because their sleep is not very restorative due to their psychological state. It may be interrupted, short, or restless, so waking up becomes difficult and requires effort. Breakfast may be hard to swallow because their appetite has changed, so they may eat by forcing themselves. Work may seem to help a little, because it can distract them from the scattered images, memories, and thoughts that appear during the day, but it can also be twice as exhausting. The demands are the same, but the energy to meet them is much lower, so work becomes an additional factor of fatigue. Even time with close people may not feel as good as it did before, because the grieving person cannot fully invest in another bond beyond the one they are trying to keep alive. They may drift away during conversations, or they may not be able to engage emotionally. Finally, when the day ends and they go to sleep, someone might expect it to be easy, because with so much accumulated tiredness they should fall asleep quickly. Yet when they lie down, it is almost certain that, along with the tiredness, different thoughts will start gathering. These thoughts can take the form of heavy longing, guilt, sadness, anxiety, or fear. They can be existential in nature, with questions and worries, or they can be memories that even when pleasant still hurt because they intensify the feeling of loss. They can also be unpleasant, like a fight that now seems meaningless, but realizing that can increase guilt. Or they can be random realizations about what the \"after\" will look like without the loved one.<\/p>\n

In short, even with a simple example we can understand how much such a person hurts and why they become exhausted, if we imagine our own daily life with a voice in the back of our mind telling us, \"someone you loved is no longer in your life,\" and yet we still have to find the courage and strength to keep doing everything we do, while that voice stays there. The hardest part is that over time the pain may not disappear completely, especially if the person was deeply loved, it may simply lessen, and we learn to live with that inner voice that reminds us. With time, what the person is asked to manage is not to erase the pain, because that may not be possible, but to learn to carry it, to tolerate it, and to let it soften enough so they can function in everyday life.\n\nA great help in achieving this is maintaining the bond with the person even after their loss, through remembrance. The images we keep of our loved ones who are no longer alive are a way to stay connected to them, and therefore the pain of loss can ease. After all, we owe it to ourselves, and to those around us, to find the coping mechanisms that help us and to use them, so we can move forward and take the next step, even with slow and heavy steps. Because a loved one\u2019s life may have ended, but ours continues, and we are asked to keep living it, as difficult as that may be, and no matter how much effort it takes to do so. <\/p>\n

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By Erasmus Moro Smyrnaki, psychologist | 17\/05\/2021<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grief, although often associated with mourning, does not always appear in that form. When a person loses someone close to them, the pain is immense...<\/p>","protected":false},"author":236822084,"featured_media":4902,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[766568642,766568661,766568679],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arthra-psychologias","category-synaisthimata","category-penthos"],"acf":{"article-authored-by":""},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/mytherapist.gr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/\u03c0\u03ad\u03bd\u03b8\u03bf\u03c2.jpg","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4911,"url":"https:\/\/mytherapist.gr\/en\/mental-health-articles\/relationships-marriage\/i-take-care-of-myself-i-take-care-of-you\/","url_meta":{"origin":4901,"position":0},"title":"I 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