3 Things You Need To Know About Conflicting Emotions Around Grief and Loss
Posted on September 09, 2015 by Charmaine Martell, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Grief and Loss can cause confusing and conflicting thoughts and feelings. Here's 3 things you need to know.
1. You are NOT crazy.
-Grief is often accompanied with conflicting thoughts and emotions. You may feel sad and at the same time relieved. You may cry without stopping one minute and have no tears the next. You may loose your temper easily or become so irritated you feel like you can’t even be around one more stupid person. You might have crazy dreams when you go to bed. You might have crazy fantasies when you are awake. You might feel numb. You might feel so much emotion you can hardly contain it. You might feel physical pain. You might feel lost. You might feel set free.
Basically, you can feel anything or nothing and it would be normal. Normal for you because no one grieves in the same way or feels the same things.
2. There’s no such thing as insignificant loss.
-Loss can come in too many forms to list. It affects us all in different ways. There’s no such thing as an insignificant loss because we can’t compare what we feel to what someone else may feel. No one has walked in our shoes. Just because you may feel that your grief isn’t as big (or perhaps shouldn’t be as big) as someone else’s does NOT mean that you don’t feel the pain of the loss at 100% for you. Whatever you loss is, no matter the grief you feel, you are entitled to feel it and you deserve care and compassion.
3. It’s ok to grieve people or events that were negative in your life.
-I’ll give just two examples for this but there are many less than ideal circumstances in our lives that this can apply to.
example one: A “bad” relationship. You feel guilty or ashamed that you grieve the ending of a relationship that maybe wasn’t the best for you to be involved in. We grieve the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behavior. It’s normal to be sad over that. In many relationships there were good times as well as not so good times. There are good points to your ex partner and not so good points. It’s normal and natural to grieve the loss of what was good. It’s also normal and natural to grieve the hopes or dreams you had of the relationship ever getting better.
example two: The death of a less than loved one. Same thing as above. You may feel shamed or guilty for grieving the death of someone who treated you poorly, or who you had become estranged from. You are also grieving the fact that any hopes or dreams of the relationship improving, or at least gaining what you felt you needed from that person such as an apology.
