SWS: Grief Support

Welcome to Sessions with Sammie: Grief. A video programme providing honesty, support & progress guidance direct from Sammie’s heart.
We can experience grief for many different reasons, the most obvious is death of a loved one someone we knew. But we can also go through grief after a relationship or friendship breaks down, if we lose our job or home, or even if we just have a general dissatisfaction with the state of our lives, and we often don’t know when it’s coming. So the question is how do we get through it? How do we see past the mist that causes a foginess and an ever decreasing circle of grief. The best answer I’ve found for firstly myself and then others that I’ve worked with is FACE IT. Don’t hide from it . Allow yourself to feel sad, angry, disappointed, worthless, helpless. Embrace the fact that your life, right now, is not how you thought it would be. It is only by looking at the situation piece by piece, seeing where you can take responsibilty and where you can’t that you can start to see the painful reality and move through it. More often than not in todays society we are expected to have a certain period of time to grieve and then get on with it. This time is usually suggested by those who have little or no understanding as to what we are going through and therefore the expectation to be ‘happy’ is unrealistic. What tends to happen is that we then pretend that we’re fine and bury our feelings. This will work temporarily as those around us support this mindset, with relief, that their lives can then go back to normal. However what they don’t see is the slow deterioration that eats away inside, and then starts to affect all other areas of our lives. For example, a man who is trying to deal with the death of his child, may put on a front to be supportive to his also grieving partner. He may throw himself into his work as a distraction technique, believing that providing a stable home will aid his partners recovery and therefore his own. However what can happen in this situation is that the partner can feel neglected as her partner appears to be wrapped up in work, not easily communicating about their loss. The lack of communication can then have a knock on effect to other areas of their lives, work and family can start to suffer as a result, and so what was initially meant to be supportive and progressive can become even more distructive than the original event. It is obvious to say that of course without education that there is another way then this scenario becomes an all too familiar one.

However if individuals dealing with grief are allowed to honour their feelings, and with courage are permitted to feel the emotions as they come to the surface, we come to realise that it is not a competion on who feels worse or who feels the pain for longer, but more that it is a process with a meaning and a reason that we are meant to go through.

One of the other many benefits to this is that we can then deal with the extremes of grief as they come up over the following days, weeks, months and years.

The thing to remember with grief, if you don’t want it to consume you, is that it never goes away, it merely becomes something else in our life to manage. And part of that management involves tears, anger, joy, disbelief and laughter. We want to help everyone living with grief to acknowledge that it’s better to celebrate what you’ve lived with than forever mourn that which is no longer there.