Grief is often viewed through a limited scope. We tend to associate it with death and the idea that you grieve after you have lost someone. While this is completely true, grief is infinitely more complicated.
Caregivers often find that grief begins during the caregiving process, especially when loved ones are suffering from a degenerative condition. Just like grief at the end of life, the way that this looks is different for each person.
What You Can Do
There’s often a temptation to push back the feelings of grief. After all, the emotions aren’t comfortable to begin with. They can also be debilitating.
This can be even more significant when you’re a caregiver. You might feel like you don’t have time to grieve. You’re often actively caring for the person in question. How can you possibly grieve at the same time?
In many cases, you can’t. You mightn’t be able to respond to the emotion the moment that it hits you.
This difficulty is something that Linda Fodrini-Johnson highlighted in a recent post concerning progressive dementia, grief and caregiving. She talked about the way that grief often occurs with transitions and how the emotions can sometimes be overwhelming.
Regardless of whether you can process the emotion at the time or not, finding space to feel is important.
As with any type of grief, it’s important to walk through the emotion, not just push it to one side. Burying grief entirely tends to have negative consequences, especially on your mental health.
One important tool is to find someone that you can talk to about the grief. This might be a close friend, a family member or a therapist. Talking about the pain and allowing yourself to feel it is an important part of the healing process.
It’s not a one-time deal either.
You’re likely to experience grief throughout the caregiving process. It will often be associated with specific things that the person you’re caring for cannot do or perhaps with dates.
Even if you don’t get the chance to talk, being aware of the pain and acknowledging it can help.
This is one that I know from experience. I was a caregiver for my husband. There was often grief associated with the parts of the relationship that we couldn’t have. At the time, I felt guilty for the emotions and tended to repress them. Looking back, I realize that what I felt was a form of grief.
My practice of repressing that grief may have been part of the reason that I was almost numb when he did die. It wasn’t until years later that I was truly able to grieve and let go of that pain.
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