Thread by @bazzapower

Trigger warning: grief

As COVID-19 continues to rise across the world, we are coming at a point where most people have lost someone to it on top of other factors. Grieving is a process that all of us will go through at one point or another. So how do we deal with it?

Losing someone is a very painful experience. How we lose that person also plays a role. The younger someone is, the harder it can hit. Accidents and sudden passing take away lives unexpectedly will also be quite shocking because it doesn’t follow the normal rule of dying old.

There are 5 distinct stages of the grieving process. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most people think that we go through these stages in a linear way and when we reach acceptance, we are considered recovered. However it doesn’t quite work that way.

We can skip stages, go back stages or jump stages. We can be in one stage and change multiple times during a single day or even hour. The complexity of those emotions is very hard to deal with. We also think that there is a timeline to recovery. There isn’t.

Every person will have a different timeline based on a multitude of factors. One of the biggest obstacles to grief is the fact that people will lose patience or judge you if it takes too long or even judge you if they deem it too short as if you didn’t love that person.

However, the length of the grief doesn’t necessarily show the amount of love we had for a person. Prior vulnerabilities and stressors may play a big role as well. When we are already vulnerable or dealing with a lot, the added grief can push us towards a deeper depression.

Is there a way to speed up the process of grieving? The short answer is no, or at least we shouldn’t shorten it. By going through it and feeling those emotions, we make sure that we are not repressing anything that can come back later on to hurt us psychologically.

Even though the pain may be unbearable and we just want to drown it in anything, we have to do our best to refrain from doing so. It is also important to rely on our social circle. They will help us externalize that grief and feeling less alone will be very helpful.

Time is going to be critical. We need to give ourselves time to grief. We can’t control how long it takes us to recover. That time will allow us to make peace with what happened, to feel the anger at the universe having taken away our loved ones and the depression that ensues.

It allows us to accept it and simply remember the memories with the departed loved one. This is a very messy process, but one that can help a lot. Finally, can therapy help with the process of grieving? Yes, in a way and no in another. Therapy will help having in someone listen.

It will help having someone give us that space to grieve and empathy to help us through it. A therapist will help untangle those emotions, validate them and allow you to feel them. But a therapist won’t necessarily speed up that process per say.

However, it can be common for that grief to turn to depression, especially if there are other factors at play. When that happens, this is when it is essential to get treatment in order to recover from the depression as opposed to the initial grief.