There must be grieving when a loss occurs

Loss is a painful condition that occurs when we lose someone or something.

Grief is the emotional response to loss. Loss can be personal, such as losing a job, income, or freedom.

Loss may also have to do with significant life events such as death of a loved one, divorce, chronic illness, drug addiction, infertility, drought, or tragedies such as 9-11.

No matter the loss, there is a cycle we go through when grieving.

Developed by a Swiss-born psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., it involves five stages: Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Depression, and Acceptance. For more information, visit www.grief.com/the-five-stages-of-grief/.

Everyone grieves differently. It might take one person two years and another two months, and some will die years later with unresolved grief. That is a sad story.

We need to “do our work” after a loss. We need to accept that we are human and that it is okay to cry, talk about it, be very mad, sleep too much, isolate ourselves, yell at the wall, kick the tires, etc.

However we choose to grieve, we need to do it. The only reason we grieve for a long time is that we haven’t done our work.

We either hang onto the loss or we get stuck somewhere in the cycle; both are damaging and unnecessary.

The difficulty with the five stages of loss is that they don’t go 1-2-3-4-5 done.

We can think we are finally at acceptance and the next thing we know we’re really angry or we are so depressed we don’t want to go to work.

Most people get stuck in the stages of anger or depression. Anger is difficult because we can be afraid of what we will do if we express our anger. The rule of anger is simple. We cannot hurt ourselves and we cannot hurt someone else; everything else is negotiable.

When there is loss there must be grieving. We can do it now or do it later.

Or, we can live in a fog, which prevents us from really living.

Life is full of loss and if we don’t learn the stages, and actually work through them, we not only punish ourselves but those we care about.

It is so important to feel the loss, grieve it fully, and then look forward to new beginnings.

Until the next time: Live while you live!

(Jennifer Goble, Ph.D. is a Licensed Professional Coun-selor. Check out her new book and weekly blog at www.jennifergoble.com.)

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