Katie Dixon is a psychotherapist and the owner of Healing in Action Counseling Services LLC. Her areas of specialty include grief, complex relational trauma, self-image and anxiety disorders. Katie's mission is to support clients in identifying and exploring the possibilities that lead to lasting change and a more fulfilling life.
How long does grief last? Grief never ends. It morphs and changes into something less unbearable. How long will you feel this way? Whatever you are feeling at this moment may always find its way back to you. Over time, this feeling may no longer be so unrelenting in its presence and may simply come and go. In time, your sadness may meld into the ability to share a memory without crying. You may even get to a place where you find happiness in remembering something that once caused great distress. You might start to recognize a shift from feeling numb or empty to more engaged in your life once again. Then, in an instant, the experience can revert back to all the feelings you thought were finally behind you.
We want to believe that our pain will subside and that we won't be left feeling terrible forever. The most likely scenario is that over time your experience of grief will feel less intense and less persistent. The loss of a loved one creates a sense of before and after. Your frame of reference becomes what life was like before your loved one died and what your life will be like now that they are gone.
You may have lost someone you could never have imagined living without making their loss all the more difficult to accept. The life you once knew will never be the same and you can not go back to the way it was before. How does one even begin the process of accepting this?
Allow your feelings to be what they are and be patient with yourself
First, you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling. Accept any emotions in their entirety and intensity. Don’t be afraid of how powerful your emotions may feel. We can not sustain the most extreme intensity of an emotion indefinitely. It will subside and you will be left with a more subdued version of the emotion. You may find that the emotion changes or goes away completely once you embrace it with complete acceptance. Visualize your emotions as the ocean in its vastness, power and unpredictability. There is a build-up as a wave forms and crashes onto the shore, then the water calms and flows back out to the sea. You represent the shore and the constant. Your emotions are like the rise and fall of the tide. The tide always washes back out just as your emotions may crash over you and flow back out.
Be patient with yourself. You will have some incredibly rough days. On those days, do less or do nothing. On other days, you may feel ready to take on more. There is no reason to judge yourself or hold yourself to the standard that existed before your loss. Allow your expectations to adjust to what is happening now. Moment to moment and step by step, moving from one day to the next, you will carry on with the business of living. There are undoubtedly items on your to-do list that must be done. You can tend to those first or delegate to others who are able to help. If the “would be nice to get done” items remain unfinished for a while, it will be okay. Take your time and allow yourself to feel whatever comes up without judgment, impatience or placing pressure on yourself.
There are no rules when it comes to grief
You may be familiar with the Five Stages of Grief identified by renowned psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. These stages include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Kübler-Ross originally developed this framework to capture the experience of those facing their own death experience. This model has since been a mainstay in therapeutic approaches for any experience of a major change or transition. It is often referenced when working with individuals mourning the death of a loved one. What is less understood about these stages is that they do necessarily take place in a linear fashion. Grief is often more like dots on a page that may happen at random, without any specific pattern or predictable trajectory. Even when someone has experienced one stage at an early point in their grief process, they may find themselves revisiting the same feeling later. Another common experience people describe is a feeling of being stuck in a particular stage. Conversely, other individuals will acknowledge that they did not go through a particular stage at all. Even less talked about experiences include having emotions people never anticipated and may even feel shame about, such as peace, relief, or resentment about feeling abandoned by their loved one. The nuances of anyone’s particular experience of grief are as unique as that individual. The universality of some aspects of the experience may help to feel less alone. All feelings are valid when it comes to grief. There is no right or wrong way to feel about any aspect of the way you are experiencing grief.
From acceptance to moving forward
From a therapeutic standpoint, it is important and healthy to reach a place of acceptance about your loss at some point. No one gets to dictate that timeline for you. Once you have reached acceptance, you may find yourself revisiting other stages and coming back to acceptance more easily. Acceptance will allow you to face reality, as confusing and excruciating as that reality may be. Acceptance does not equal moving on. From a place of acceptance, you will be ready to move forward little by little. You will carry your grief forward with you as you continue living your life. Despite what we tell ourselves, grief can coexist with joy, making new memories and discovering new versions of yourself.
Release the expectation of moving on. This is a misguided albeit well-intentioned concept that minimizes the importance of what was and will always be a part of your life experience. We don’t move on from people. We move forward in life because life moves forward irrespective of what has happened. Here is another reality to be accepted: your loved one does not want you to suffer. They would want you to live your life as fully as possible, to remember them with love and to forgive them for their shortcomings. Your time together mattered and your memory of them matters. Your life still matters and you are meant to live it. Release any guilt about experiencing moments of joy. Recognize regret as an inextricable part of grief. We might consider regret to be the unofficial sixth stage of grief; it is so universal to loss. Release regret about things you wish you had said or done when your loved one was still here. If you had spent every waking moment with them and did everything perfectly at every moment, you would still be left feeling it wasn’t enough. Transform regret into becoming a version of you who has learned from a painful experience rather than getting stuck in self-punishment. Tell the people who are still here how much they mean to you, spend time with them, take time for yourself, live more boldly than you would have before in what you say and what you do. This honors your loved one’s memory in a profound way and gives you the freedom to keep living.
Your grief remains. It will not leave you. The time you shared with your loved one will always be. If love had not existed there would be no grief. As painful as that may be, there is beauty to be found in knowing that you miss someone whose life mattered to you. Let your grief move forward with you. Make room for joy, novelty, the mundane and all that life is. Don’t be afraid when grief starts to change. This is moving forward. This is acceptance.
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Katie Dixon, Licensed Professional Counselor, Business Owner
Katie Dixon is a Licensed Professional Counselor and the owner of Healing in Action Counseling Services LLC. Through a number of personal and professional experiences, Katie realized that life's most difficult moments can lead to feelings of isolation when connection is often what is most needed. Her mission is to use the power of connection to help her clients heal from painful experiences while navigating their relationships with themselves and others from a place of greater compassion and understanding.
