Grief is not a disorder!
Grief is NOT pathological, nor is it a disorder of any kind but it can feel that way!
When you’re going through grief, your mind might tell you something is wrong with you, but there isn’t. The real problem is that no one has taught you how to go through grief healthily.
Loss is inevitable, it’s the most basic human experience, but suffering is a choice. When we grievers don’t know what choices we can make, that’s when we stay stuck with the pain. And That’s what happened to me.
When I experienced 2 significant losses in my life, I felt an intense yearning, longing, and preoccupation with my pain. Additionally, grieving the loss of all the broken hopes and dreams about my future left me feeling completely hopeless. The deaths caused me extreme distress and difficulty functioning. I am willing to bet that every one of you reading this have had similar feelings as me when faced with a significant loss in your life. That’s because intense yearning, preoccupation, distress, and difficulty functioning are natural responses to a significant emotional loss like death.
Grief is the normal and natural emotional reaction to loss of any kind. We are wired to feel our full range of emotions, good or bad. We all experience loss and the grief that follows. To say that feeling painful or negative emotions is somehow wrong, harmful, or that a disorder is mislabeling a normal process in life, that’s simply Not True. It’s often deemed by many that grief that lasts longer than 12 months for adults, or six months for children, is an illness and is often treated with medications. I am going to tell you my grief lasted well over 12 months, and I too thought something was wrong with me.
Most of us have heard the intellectual misinformation from well-intentioned people, like “keep busy” or “time heals all wounds.” But when I tried to use these as tools to heal from my emotional pain, I realized they simply didn’t work, leaving me feeling hopeless that I could ever feel anything but a broken heart for the rest of my life. And what’s sad is that many people do live the rest of their lives with a broken heart. What’s incorrect here is that we as grievers are given incorrect tools to heal.
The Grief Recovery Method has helped me, and countless people, recover from the most devastating losses imaginable and have proven that any loss is NOT a life sentence of pain.
If you truly want to heal your heart after significant emotional loss, a first step is to grab your copy of The Grief Recovery Handbook: The Action Program for Moving Beyond Death, Divorce, and Other Losses including Health, Career, and Faith. Please reach out to me for your copy.
