Take a look at what in your grief might actually NOT be grief….
It’s common that, after a death, ALL pain, challenge, and stress gets called grief. But your life likely wasn’t 100% easy and joyful before that. So whatever you already had going on carries on…and sometimes gets magnified.
I had been on-and-off very depressed for years before my dad died. Probably a decade. In fact just a couple of months before his death I had sat down with my supervisor at work to share this with her, as I was really struggling.
And then all the deaths happened. And guess what…I was very depressed after. But now I put all of my depression and pain and struggle down to my grief. And so did everybody else.
The problem with lumping everything in together and calling it all “grief” is that you become unable to see the separate parts…and do anything about them.
A few years later when I had totally healed my grief…guess what: I was still depressed! It was a separate thing and always had been. Of course it was exacerbated by the deaths….but it was still its own thing that I had to work on seperately. My depression shifted too (a story I’m not even sure I know how to tell…but suffice to say it took work as well).
Take an honest look at your pain and challenge and struggle and see what you might be calling grief but is actually depression and anxiety you already had, or self-love issues that have been magnified, or relationships problems that were already going on (or even that started after the death…but aren’t grief), work stress, or pain around knowing your purpose, etc.
Identify these for the different pieces they are and you can start deciding if/how you want to change them.
What have you been carrying around calling ‘grief’ that maybe isn’t?
Kristie
xx
