What is a Healing from Grief retreat
Call Now 082-442-4779 or email info@pathwaysplettrehab.co.za Need the space to heal? Where do you go? time doesn’t really heal but it sometimes makes the hurt more tolerable. We find that most people, not all, seem to need some time to process a passing of a loved one. For those who have felt the pain of a sudden loss it often is harder to bear and thus begin to deal with. However, there will come a time when you will want to begin living again, you will want to find a life without the grieving and then, that is when we can help you.
The experience of losing something we value is a part of life no one can escape from. Loss has many shapes and forms, it could be a relationship that comes to an end, a loved one dies, a break up comes, children leave or any other sort of transition that brings about a feeling of loss. When a feeling of loss happens, learning to cope is essential to be able to bounce back. When we lose something, we go through a period of grieving process which can generally start with denial and then go to feelings of anger, sadness and then acceptance. Awareness is important to make sure you’re not stuck in any of these stages and that you can process each and move forward.
Stages of Grief
The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order. Our hope is that with these stages comes the knowledge of grief ‘s terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life and loss. At times, people in grief will often report more stages. Just remember your grief is an unique as you are.
There are general stages of Healing from Grief.
Denial is the first of the five stages of Healing from Grief. It helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of healing from grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle. As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you are unknowingly beginning the healing process. You are becoming stronger, and the denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying begin to surface.
Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. You may ask, “Where is God in this? Underneath anger is pain, your pain. It is natural to feel deserted and abandoned, but we live in a society that fears anger. Anger is strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first grief feels like being lost at sea: no connection to anything. Then you get angry at someone, maybe a person who didn’t attend the funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now that your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure – – your anger toward them. The anger becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love.
BARGAINING Before a loss, it seems like you will do anything if only your loved one would be spared. “Please God, ” you bargain, “I will never be angry at my wife again if you’ll just let her live.” After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if I devote the rest of my life to helping others. Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?” We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one restored. We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if only’s” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages in healing from grief as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.
DEPRESSION After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and healing from grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great loss. We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness, wondering, perhaps, if there is any point in going on alone? Why go on at all? Depression after a loss is too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to snap out of. The first question to ask yourself is whether or not the situation you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If healing from grief is a process of recovery, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.
ACCEPTANCE is often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case. Most people don’t ever feel OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. We will never like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves. Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given healing from grief its time.
Beautiful words on Healing from Grief
The Heavenly Father in silence beckons the creation out of a deep sleep each morning and awakens our being to be present, to be alive once again. Sunrise and sunset are a twenty-four-hour ritual depicting life and death. The darkness always gives way to the radiance of day. Living and dying is an unbroken pattern for us all until one fateful day. Then in a flash, the night will become an everlasting light.
When I go away, when my body dies I will awaken from my slumber into the brilliance of a million suns. My human eyes now dark, my spiritual eyes wide awake. No longer hindered by time and space I will live in union and oneness with the God of creation. Don’t feel sad for me when I go away. When this body passes away, my spirit will be forever alive to dwell with God and those who I love and loved me.
Just as I am here, I will also be there. It may look dark to you on this side, but the sun is shining where I am. My spirit is no longer bound up in an old decaying body. I am alive and not a care in the world. The rehearsal is over, and the stage for the play is the glorious light and presence of God. Death has been swallowed up in the resurrection love of God.
Know that I am always with you. You may not see me, but every time you kiss the children I am kissing them just as my father and mother kissed me. Every time you tell someone you love them you love them like my grandfather and grandmother loved my father and mother, and me. When the darkness overwhelms you, know God’s love will restore and make everything new one day. So, when I go away know, I’ll be waiting for you with those who loved me long before you knew me. If you have eyes to see you may see me just beyond the sunset. The sun setting in the radiant western sky grows dim and fades away but never dies. My life came from the spirit of Christ, and my life will return to Christ. When I go away know, I am just beyond the sunset waiting for your arrival in the morning. And remember as the Psalmist says I will take your mourning and turn it into joy!
For more information on healing from grief contact Pathways on 0824424779 or email pathwaysplett@gmail.com
