All our lives we are surrounded by very important people with whom we share stories, moments, emotions, joys, and life; and there is nothing more painful and difficult than facing the death of our loved ones.
It is something for which we are not prepared and much less accustomed to, so it takes us by surprise moving every fiber in our being and taking us out of our center. We know how to share in joy and love with someone else but not how to face their death. That is why we tell you a little more about the 5 stages of grief we go through when we lose someone.
What we talk about when we talk about grief
Grief is the natural process we go through when we suffer the loss of someone important to us. It is the emotional response we have to that loss.But while we may believe that it is our emotions that play a major role in the way we respond and adapt to the situation, our physical, cognitive and behavioral dimensions are also part of grief.
The Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed the model of the 5 phases of grief after her experience working with terminally ill patients and near-death situations. Rather than 5 phases of grief, her contribution was to identify 5 mental states that any person may go through after learning about the death of a loved one in their process of evolution and acceptance of this new situation. of this new situation.
This does not mean that we all go through absolutely the same process, there are those who go through all the stages of grief, there are those who go through only some of them, and not all of us go through the stages of grief in the same order. However, when we know this approach to grief we can see all the nuances that a situation of loss can generate in us.
The 5 stages of grief
If you are facing a loss situation, we know how painful it can be. Perhaps knowing these 5 phases of grief can help you accept and integrate your emotions and what is happening to you at this time.
1. Denial
This is the stage of grief in which, as the name says, we deny the loss, we deny the loss, we deny the loss, we deny the death of that person.. We do it unconsciously as a defense mechanism to avoid the first impact of the news.
This is when phrases such as “no, it can’t be, it’s a mistake, I don’t want to” appear because we really want to convince ourselves that what they are telling us is false, so we want to postpone having to take charge of our emotions and everything that the death of a person we love may entail.
During the denial phase of grief we behave as if we were living a fiction, we play a role in a transitory way so as not to have to assume the sadness and pain that are approaching, but it is a phase that is not very sustainable in time because it is not very sustainable in time because it shocks us. phase is not very sustainable in time because it clashes with the reality we are living we are living, so we end up abandoning this phase of denial faster than we think.
2. Anger or anger
When we have finally managed to accept the death of the person we love so much, we also realize that death is not reversible and that there is nothing more to do to change this irreversible situation, so we comes anger, anger at the death as a result of frustration..
The deep sadness and the reality of the loss at this moment are impossible to avoid so we resent everything and we turn against everything, friends, family, the person who died, even life itself. At this moment anger and rage are the only things that allow you to express your emotions and all the questions that appear in your mind about the why of things, the person and the moment.
3. Negotiation
Another phase of grief is bargaining and it is very similar to denial because it is based on a fiction that we create in order to be better and to escape from all the emotions that reality has to deal with. escape from all the emotions that reality produces in us..
It is that moment (which can happen before or after) in which we try to negotiate the death, to look for a way for it not to happen or to reverse it if it is already a fact. It is a fantasy that we create in which, for a moment, we think that we can do something about it, that we can change death.
These negotiations we normally make with the superior or supernatural beings we believe in, for example, when we make promises to God in exchange for that person not dying. we believe in, for example, when we make promises to God in exchange for that person not dying if this has not already happened. Another example is when in our mind, we go back in time and imagine that everything remains the same, that that special person has not died and that there is no pain; but again reality is there clashing with this fantasy so it passes quickly.
4. Depression
After we have stopped fantasizing about other realities that are not real we come back to the present, to the present moment in which someone died and we are absorbed by a deep sense of emptiness. and we are absorbed by a deep sense of emptiness and sadness.. This phase of grief is called depression.
At this time the sadness and emptiness are so deep that not even the best of fantasies or excuses can take us out of our reality. Unlike other phases of grief, during depression we realize the irreversibility of death and it is very difficult to see any reason to live without that person by our side.
During this stage the sadness seems to have no end, we are closed in on ourselves, we feel tired, without strength, without energy and only sadness, pain and melancholy accompany us, even, it is quite normal that we isolate ourselves a little. Accepting the death of a loved one is painful enough, but at this moment we are also accepting that we have to live a life with the absence of that person.
5. Acceptance
This is when we reconcile ourselves with the idea of continuing to live without that person and where we truly accept their death. It is the last of the phases of mourning and the one that gives us the basis to start again, without saying that this is a happy stage compared to the other phases of mourning.
In fact we could say that it is rather a neutral phase, without intense feelings, in which we learn to live again. we learn to live again. All the emotional discharge and pain are slowly lifting their footprint so we can think better, have a new understanding and ideas of our own that reorganize our mind.
It is a moment where the tiredness of so many emotions slowly gives us back the will to live, where we allow ourselves to feel joy again and return our life to its normality.