Bereavement Recovery Strategies

Bereavement is where you come to after the initial shock of hearing about someone’s death. This is when the news and reality of the situation take hold and sink into your emotional experience. A variety of strategies are available to deal with these effects. The most beneficial ones are detailed here.

When first hearing about a death, we often put our hands up in disbelief and say something like: “This can’t be true. This can’t be real. This can’t be happening to me.” That first reaction is always about pushing the reality back. We cannot accept this news in one bite. We need time to absorb and digest this tragic and bewildering event.

As part of the initial shock and confusion we begin asking questions. The more details we can absorb, the more real the event becomes. Our spinning mind begins to settle down with each piece of information. Our regular life, which ran along smoothly, has been knocked off the rails. We are not accustomed to such news.

Having been unaffected by other’s losses, we are literally thrown off track by the loss of our loved one. The reality of death, so often relegated to movies and other folks, has come home to us. What we once considered an alien experience has entered our life with power and intensity. Shock, confusion and dismay are common reactions. After which comes bereavement as we absorb this new reality.

Most of my grieving clients would initially show up in a state of confusion and dismay. They were often still in the stage of unreality, finding it hard to believe that the loss of a loved one has actually happened. They come to therapy because they are bewildered by all these emerging reactions. Their sense of unreality is often accompanied by anxiety, confusion and obsessive thoughts which they can’t control. Some want to be fixed immediately. Like most people, they had little or no experience with this type of loss.

My first task was to ground them in the reality of this recent tragedy. Before anything beneficial could happen they had to accept the loss as real and their resulting feelings as equally valid. Their usual methods of coping with stress were not working, simply because losing a loved one is one of life’s most powerful events. Feelings and emotional reactions resulting from the loss were overwhelming them.

It is no surprise to me that some professionals classify grief and bereavement as an illness, with a beginning, middle and end. But there is no band-aid big enough in anyones medicine cabinet to cover this over. People now realize they need a different kind of professional help. The medical profession, which likes to default to illness, can offer medications for anxiety reduction and sleep aids. As an initial strategy this can be very helpful. But bereavement waits in the wings and thats where the real work takes place.

Bereavement help comes in a variety of forms including medicine, psychiatry, psychology, grief support and grief and loss resources such as books and CDs. A well developed Grief Recovery Book can normalize many of the experiences you may be having, including that sense of despair that tends to come in waves and pushes you into depression. Knowing that these experiences are temporary and do pass can help mitigate their effects.

A good bereavement resource such as a book can help normalize some of these experiences. A fully narrated audio ebook can take you further into the experience of loss and act as a personal counselor for those more difficult days. Our heart, which is wounded, needs more than classic step by step instructions. Our bereavement recovery fares better when such instructions are melded with poetry, storytelling and music and undersocres the fact that bereavement recovery is a feeling experience.

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