5 Fresh Tips to Navigate Grief and Loss with Therapist Megan Irwin
Learning how to navigate grief and loss can be overwhelming, but you’re not alone! Check out these 5 Fresh Tips to help you navigate grief and loss with therapist, Megan Irwin.
Megan is a therapist that focuses primarily on grief recovery, trauma recovery, and navigating big life changes. She believes we all have the right and ability to live a self determined life, free from the pain of our past. She works to bring context to your history, understand your defense mechanisms, and develop new ways for you to respond to distressing thoughts, feelings, and emotions. In sessions together, she will help you stay curious about how and why you respond to stressors the way you do and develop goals together.
You can learn more about Megan Irwin on her Fresh Starts profile.
5 Fresh Tips to help you navigate grief and loss:
There are no stages of grief – you don’t have to hold yourself to this model of grieving if it doesn’t work for you. Disclaimer – if the stages of grief model speaks to you and works for you, go with it. So much of grief work is finding what makes sense to you and going with it. BUT! Many clients I work with are challenged by a stage-wise approach to grief because it appears linear - which grief is not - and doesn’t match with their emotional experience. I like to reframe the stages of grief to the emotions of grief. It fits better for me. When we are the people left behind we can often feel ALL these emotions – anger, bargaining, anxiety, depression, denial, acceptance – in a single day. Sometimes we don’t feel some of them or any of them. If you’re holding yourself to the idea you need to move “through” these stages you can release that. We don’t move through grief, we learn to live with it and discover how to build a life along side it.
Engage in the tasks of mourning. Developed by J. William Woren, this framework seems to fit more naturally to the grieving process for me personally and most of my clients. These tasks occur in no particular order and on no timeline. Often we find we repeat and deepen our work with these tasks as our grief matures. What these look like in early grief can change many years on but you may find you work these tasks many times over. Accept the reality of the loss: you will be doing this in layers, and there is no rush. The reality of the loss will hit you early on, and then again with each milestone and anniversary where your person is not there. Acceptance is the work of a life time. You are not asked to accept in a way that says “I’m ok with this” but rather in a way that says “this has happened.” Process the pain of the grief: Again – LAYERS! Grief is processed cognitively (I know this person is gone) somatically (my body aches to hold this person again) emotionally (I am angry/sad/depressed…because I cannot talk to my person) and for some spiritually. It’s all normal. And despite what culture says, you may be processing this pain for years. Not days, not weeks… not the length of your bereavement leave. You are normal if there are layers to processing the loss. Adjust to a world without the deceased: some of this is practical – adjusting to the logistics of your life without them, much of it is internal – recalibrating your inner world, your sense of safety, your ability to feel connected to joy etc. Reinvest in the future by finding connection between the life that was before and the life you are creating now: as a griever you are standing often on a bridge between what was and what is now. This is the part where you start to make meaning of what has happened. You start to find yourself again. You notice you are still in your life. You integrate some of the lessons…you start to realize you’ve been climbing out of hell on a metal ladder and you realize that has taught you some shit that most people don’t know, but that has given you wisdom you can use.
You don’t owe anyone anything - especially in early grief. You don’t owe your story, your attention, your time.
Make your survival plan for early grief and write it down/share it with the people you trust to show up for you.
Maintain the rituals of mourning over the years: The people around you who are less close to the loss will seem to let it fade. Maybe they are maybe they aren’t – we can’t know how others feel and process. But resist the urge to feel that you need to have moved on and allow yourself to find and practice the rituals of mourning that matter to you. Mark and honor anniversaries – the first holiday, their birthday, their death day, the first time you do a thing without them. These are profound moments… ritualize them and honor them. You can do this as long as you want, as long as it feels natural to you.