For some time now, grief has been on my mind. Grief may be tied to the loss of a loved one, but also to any significant loss in a person’s life.

It is natural, at such a time, to go through major changes in our lives and to feel lost, helpless, not knowing where to turn, in contact with different emotions that cause us confusion and make it hard to move on.

I recalled some of the griefs in my own life: the loss of dear, very close people who died (grandparents, godfather, uncles and aunts, friends), moving to another city at an important time, being fired, losing a baby during pregnancy, separation or divorce (relationships that were a reference for me). As I write this, I feel again the emotions of those moments, mainly sadness, anger and fear.

We can deal with these moments in different ways and look at the subject from different perspectives; here is just one facet.

It is important to remember and stress that each person experiences grief in a unique way. Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed, from her studies, five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These stages are not linear; each person takes a specific amount of time in each of them and lives and expresses them in an individual way. To learn more, I recommend reading about the subject and about the author.

I like to analyze these stages from the perspective that, faced with a stressful event, emotions are generated in our body (whether we like it or not, the biochemical movement happens and the body enters a state of protection and combat).

When we come into contact (or not) with these biochemical changes, we seek to name what we are feeling and, from there, we behave in order to handle what is happening, inside and out.

If, faced with a situation of grief, I am actually feeling anger but I call it sadness, my behavior will be to fight or protect myself from the world from a place of sadness, and as a result my action may be inappropriate to the moment and to my real need.

That is why understanding what we are feeling can make a difference in going through grief.

Finding someone who can help us organize feelings, thoughts and all the inner mess that a significant loss causes, finding a safe lap where we can speak and the other can listen and receive us without judgment, having a safe place to express genuinely what I am feeling: this will give us the conditions to understand what is happening inside and out, adopt self-care behaviors consistent with what we really feel at that moment and move on.

We can do this in two ways (combining them is, in my view, the best scenario): the first is to seek professional help, someone who understands the subject (psychotherapist, doctor, among others) and can bring important resources to handle this moment. The second is to surround ourselves with the people we love, allow ourselves to be cared for and held by them, and keep close that support network that overflows with love.

I close this piece with a sentence from a psychotherapist I greatly admire, Richard Erskine (2014): “the resolution of grief [...] involves restoring the individual’s capacity for full internal and interpersonal contact, that is, the ability to say an authentic hello before saying a genuine goodbye” (our translation).